Fifty Years of Golf

I believe it is a little more than fifty years really. I do not mean to imply that I have been for that length of time actively engaged in the serious pursuit of the golf ball,...

There are two outstanding events in golfing history--the bringing of golf to Westward Ho! by General Moncrieffe in 1863, and the bringing of golf to Blackheath by James VI. of S...

My way down to the links, from our house, led right through the village of Northam, wherein Johnnie Allan, the professional, had set up his shop. Now if there is anyone who, bei...

It seems to me that the establishment of the Club at Westward Ho! and the discovery that it was possible to play golf, and the very best of golf, in England, even as in Scotland...

You could not travel about with golf clubs in the seventies without exciting the wonder and almost the suspicions of all who saw such strange things. I am not quite sure that yo...

In the year 1875, I having then arrived at the advanced age of sixteen, and being admitted as a member of the Royal North Devon Golf Club, in the autumn committed the blazing in...

When I went up to Oxford in the Christmas term of 1878 I found that Royal and ancient city sunk in an ignorance that is scarcely credible in regard to all connected with the roy...

The institution of the Inter-University Golf Match was due to the genius (which we will define in this instance as the zeal and enterprise) of one of the very finest putters tha...

It is a singular thing that not a seaside course was designed, or opened for play, in the decade from 1870 to 1880. I, at least, cannot remember nor can find record of any such...

In 1882 I left Oxford, with the intention of reading for the Bar, and actually did go so far as to eat a number of Inner Temple dinners at the extraordinary hour of six o'clock....

I have always had, and always shall retain, a very lively and grateful recollection of the kindness with which all the local members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and other...

Golf had jogged along very comfortably up to this time with its one championship, open to amateurs as to professionals, but never as yet won by an amateur. Then, in the winter o...

In the year 1886 I perpetrated a book on golf. The only excuse to be made for it is that which was offered in another famous instance, that "it was a very little one." It was a...

The first amateur championship, as by law established, was played at St. Andrews, and started for me, as I suppose did most things at that time of life, on the note of comedy. I...

It is not on first sight very obvious how the appointment of a statesman to the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland can have an intimate bearing on the history of the game of golf....

In 1887 we were back, for the amateur championship, on that Hoylake links which was the arena of the preliminary trial trip that Macfie won in 1885. I see that Arthur Molesworth...

In the autumn of 1887 I did a very foolish thing: I went to America. I do not by any means imply that it is not an essential part of a liberal education to visit that great coun...

In 1888 I lost the amateur championship at Prestwick, and I lost it badly. I do not mean by that that I lost it to a bad player. It was Andy Stuart who knocked me out, and for h...

I have not said very much, or not as much as the subject deserves, about Johnny Ball as a golfer; have not attempted any appreciation of his game. He would not, as I have indica...

In 1886 my father took a house at Eastbourne, and I was no longer at Westward Ho! as constantly as before, although a frequent visitor there at the house of Claud Carnegie. He a...

While I was doing some of the writing for this book, Sir Ralph Payne Galway was writing the Shooting volumes, and we were both staying with poor John Penn at his house in Carlto...

In those days Professor Tait used to be a great deal at St. Andrews, in the intervals, which were wide, of his professional duties in Edinburgh. He used to play a round of golf,...

In 1889, having, as aforesaid, exhibited to the Meadowbrook Club, on Long Island, a specimen of what they were good enough to say "might be a very good game for Sundays," I retu...

In 1890 I took rooms in London, near a studio, and begun the serious study of anatomy and sculpture, with the idea of taking up sculpture as a profession. It was an idea which c...

What between trying to be sculptor and succeeding in getting married, I did not pay all the attention that I should have done to golf in the early nineties. Hilton was runner-up...

I have said that a little white-haired boy used to carry my clubs at Westward Ho! in my Oxford days. Also that, a few years later, reappearing as an assistant greenkeeper on the...

Lord Moncrief (then Wellwood) writing in the Badminton Book on Golf, had said that ladies were relegated and restricted to a species of "Jew's quarter" where they were graciousl...

The first architect of the inland courses, when golfers began to learn that inland courses might, in some large measure, give them the game that they wanted, was Tom Dunn. He we...

Whether on account of ill-health, or for what reasons, I do not know, I was not a very sedulous attendant at the championships in the later nineties. The consequence was that I...

In 1891 my brother-in-law, returning from a visit to America, came down to stay and to play golf with me at Ashdown Forest, and brought with him a dozen or two of a new kind of...

Willy Park, always a man of some practical ingenuity, as well as a magnificent golfer, had lately invented and patented a peculiar type of putter. He had also invented, by way o...

Certainly the Royal Liverpool Club has deserved well of the golfing community. It started the amateur championship, and in 1891 or 1892 the idea occurred to some enterprising ge...

One night I was going North by one of the sleeping trains and, having business late in the afternoon in Holborn, did not return to the civilized parts of the town, but dined at...

In the twentieth century I was no longer regarding myself with great seriousness as a likely champion, and it is very certain that I should not have troubled to go to Muirfield...

In 1904, the amateur championship being that year at Sandwich, Frank Penn[8] entertained me for it at Bifrons, near Canterbury, about fifteen miles from the arena of action. He...

The difference in the golfing condition of the America which I had last visited in the early nineties and that to which I went again in 1910, was striking, and not a little amus...

I did not see the finish of the amateur championship of 1905 when Gordon Barry beat Osmond Scott, but I understand what the moral of that match was--that indiarubber handles are...