With the speed of the latest laboratory fluid, electricity, the king gave his patronage to the Society of St Andrews Golfers, which got a new name, including two words to remind Royal Perth of its youth: the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. Three summers later, King William sent the club ‘a Gold Medal, with Green Ribband … which His Majesty wishes should be challenged and played for annually’. The Royal & Ancient had taken a step towards its destiny as ruling body of a game that would be played not only on rough town greens but all over the world, and not only for crowns and shillings and the occasional fifty pounds, but for millions.
For the moment, though, golf still belonged to three or four hundred men in hunting jackets. Like the hunt, golf was a pursuit for prosperous fellows who wanted to stretch their muscles a bit before they fell into overstuffed chairs in chandeliered rooms to eat duck, pheasant, mutton and beef and drink claret and gin while they smoked and told stories. As some writers had already noted, the game was an abstract form of the primordial hunt: a pack of men journeys into perilous land, avoiding dangers, tracking first one target and then another, getting home safely by nightfall to gather by the fire.
Golf also shared something important with cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing: it was easy to bet on. Every morning but Sunday the gentleman golfers of St Andrews would meet near the first teeing-ground to arrange their singles and foursomes matches, haggling over odds and strokes given. Starting in the hour before noon they slapped their first shots towards the railway station and marched after them, their caddies following a few respectful steps behind. The caddies were a threadbare lot, boys as young as seven jostling for work beside toothless men of eighty. They called the golfer ‘Mister’ unless he held a still-more-exalted title such as Captain or Major. The occasional golfer of high rank, like the sports-mad Earl of Eglinton, was called ‘M’lord’. Caddies were addressed by their first names, befitting their low rank. They were lucky to get a shilling per round, and lucky if their gentlemen didn’t smack them as well as the ball. A golfer who got bad advice from his caddie, or who detected laziness or cheek in him, was within his rights to backhand the caddie full in the face, or to take a club and whip him with it. Like the vast and growing empire some of them had served in India, Africa or the Holy Land, the men of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club held firm to the belief that they ruled by right with God’s approval. Never mind that revolt was in the air from teeming India to bloody Europe to distant America, or that the land these country gentlemen ruled was literally being turned upside-down, with farmland torn into quarries and mines as the Industrial Revolution gained steam by the hour. Scotland’s gentleman golfers could escape the cities’ sooty air, blast furnaces and hungry rabble by spending the day on the links. If the rest of the world was hurtling forward at breakneck speed, they told themselves, at least the old game was safe from revolution.
They were wrong.
Here is the Royal & Ancient golfer in 1830: dressed in a tan golfing frock, matching breeches, silk-lined waistcoat and red jacket, with a high collar and a black top hat, he crosses muddy North Street on his way to the links. His pink nose, with ruby veins hinting at rivers of claret and gin, wrinkles at the scent of piss and dung. The gutter steams with the emptyings of chanty-pots. Pigs snuffle weeds in the rutted, unpaved street. The golfer dodges horses pulling coaches, donkeys pulling carts, ducks, chickens. Now a cork comes flying through the air, just missing him. The cork, punctured with short nails to give it weight, lands with a plunk. He turns to see who hit it – a boy of eight or nine, trying to hide a cut-down golf club behind his back.
‘Sillybodkins,’ the golfer says. He smiles. He’d played that game himself on this very street, long ago.
Sillybodkins was the pretend golf of boys who cadged broken or discarded clubs and knocked corks up and down St Andrews’ streets, aiming for targets of opportunity: lampposts, doorways, sleeping dogs. Real golf balls were impossibly expensive, but claret and champagne corks were plentiful; a properly weighted cork might carry a hundred yards. It might go further than that if struck by nine-year-old Tom Morris, the sillybodkins king of North Street.
Tom Morris was born in 1821, the year a member of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club bought the town’s links. Ordinary men like John Morris, Tom’s father, were allowed on the course when the R&A men weren’t playing. John got in an occasional round with a second-hand ball, but he had little time for golf. He worked six days a week as a hand-loom weaver, doubling as a postman when the weaving trade went slack. He spent Sundays reading the Bible and shepherding his wife and seven children to morning and afternoon services at the town’s church.
Tom was the family’s second-youngest child. Born in a time when disease killed one in five children by the age of three, he had a life expectancy of forty-one. He ran the streets barefoot but didn’t go hungry. He got enough schooling to read, sign his name and do simple sums, but what he loved was golf and, to his everlasting delight, golf’s holy land was two clouts of a cork from North Street.
In its medieval heyday, St Andrews had been the centre of Scottish Catholicism. The legendary bones of St Andrew, housed in St Andrews Cathedral according to the old story, brought Catholic pilgrims from all over Europe. But after Scotland became a Protestant country in 1560, the town began a long decline. St Andrews’ population fell from a high of about 14,000 in the early 1500s to 2,854 in 1793. In Tom’s youth there were no more than 4,000 souls in a town whose landmarks were the towers of a ruined cathedral, a crumbling castle and the busy links. Many St Andreans still lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs, covered with sod from the links, dried sod that periodically caught fire and burned down three or four houses. Each day a runner jogged eleven miles from nearby Crail, toting the daily mail for Tom’s father and other postmen to distribute. The first regular stagecoach service, going twice a week to Dundee and once a week to Cupar, began when Tom was seven.
As a boy he never expected to roam much past Dundee. He was sure to be a weaver, sitting at a loom all day, and perhaps a part-time postman, too. But Tom’s head was full of golf. He could take dead aim at a lamppost and hit it from ten paces. On the links he moved through the whins and tall grass like a hound, sniffing out lost balls. Each feathery ball was a treasure, even a misshapen, waterlogged one. He would play a few holes in the morning, before the redcoats came out, or at dusk when they were done, or race out between foursomes to hit a ball and chase it to the putting-green.
In 1835, Tom’s schooling ended. He was fourteen. His father lacked the money and social standing to send his sons to university; it was time for Tom to apprentice himself to a tradesman. Through a family connection, John arranged a meeting with Allan Robertson, the golf-ball maker who caddied for R&A worthies and even partnered them in foursomes. A short, bull-necked fellow who sported filigreed waistcoats and bright-coloured caps, Robertson was the first man to parlay caddying, ball-making and playing into something like a fulltime job. If his trade was a bit disreputable, at least it offered steady work. Tom’s mother might fret about her son working for a man who consorted with gamblers, drunkards, cheats and low-livers, but what could she say? Her husband was all for it. John Morris contracted his son to Allan Robertson for a term of four years as apprentice, to be followed by five years as Robertson’s journeyman. On the morning his boyhood ended, fourteen-year-old Tom gathered his few belongings, left his parents’ house and walked a quarter of a mile to a stone cottage that would be his new home.
Allan Robertson would prove easy to know, if not always easy to work for. Loud, cocky, full of mirth and wrath that could switch places in a blink, he was a grinning, muscular elf. Not quite five and a half feet tall, he had mutton-chop side-whiskers, an off-kilter smile and the wrists and arms of a blacksmith. His strength and pickpocket’s