The Golf Courses of the British Isles. Bernard Darwin
even with the Alps and the Station-master’s Garden. We must begin by hitting a long, straight drive between bunkers on the right and some particularly retentive heather on the left, but that is, comparatively speaking, an easy matter. The second shot is the thing—a full shot right home on to a flat green that crowns the top of a sloping bank. To the right the face of the hill is excavated in a deep and terrible bunker, and a ball ever so slightly sliced will run into that bunker as sure as fate. To the left there is heather extending almost to the edge of the green, and, in avoiding the right-hand bunker, we may very likely die an even more painful death in the heather.
After this glorious hole the eighteenth seems simple enough. Two lusty, straightforward drives, with a big bunker to carry for the second; it is a hole that presents few terrors to the professional, since he always hits his wooden club shots, yet even for him there are some bunkers at the edge of the green which are not to be despised. For humbler people everything connected with the hole is very far from despicable.
Besides the greens, which are big and true and fraught with undulations difficult to gauge, there is one feature which calls for special mention, and that is the deepness of the bunkers. It is part of Mr. Fowler’s ferocity that he does not intend us to run through his bunkers, if he can by any means prevent it, while, when we are in them, he does not mean us to do more than get out with a niblick. Braid can sometimes hit prodigious distances out of them, but then he has been round the course in a score under 70—a thing that no respectable man should do.
Before quitting the heathery courses, we must take a glance at Woking, which is the oldest and still one of the best of them. Indeed, although my judgment may not be strictly an impartial one, I think it is still the pleasantest of all upon which to play, and the golf is undeniably interesting. It does lack something, however, of the bigness of Sunningdale or Walton Heath, which have been laid out on an altogether grander scale. The two-shot holes at Woking do not always require quite two shots. When the ground is at all hard a poorish drive does not do a great deal of harm, and a long one means a comfortable second shot with an iron club. Still, continuous brassey play is not everything: it is apt to grow monotonous, and whatever charge can be made against Woking, I imagine that no just critic would call it dull. The keenest golfer among my acquaintances said to me the other day that, whatever anybody might say, Sandwich and Woking were the two pleasantest places for a game of golf, and though there is no resemblance between the two courses, I think his verdict was a sound one.
Woking has certain, almost unique, distinctions--or disgraces, according to one’s point of view—among golf clubs. It has but one medal day a year, and it possesses no Bogey. Any innocent stranger visiting Woking and enquiring the bogey score for any particular hole will be greeted with a glare of such withering contempt as seriously to impair his day’s pleasure. Another curious, and I think a blessed, circumstance about Woking is that the bunkers, which are many and cunningly disposed, are the work of one benevolent autocrat. Unconscious of their doom, the members disperse for their summer holidays and when they return they find that the most revolutionary things have been done. Upon greens that were formerly flat and easy have sprouted plateaus and domes and hollows. Hillocks have risen as if by magic in the middle of the fairway; ‘floral’ hazards bloom at the side, and bunkers have been dug at that precise spot where members have for years complacently watched their ball come to rest at the end of their finest shots. Even now as I write I believe there is a gigantic project in view at a certain hole, which I would rather die than reveal. All these things happen at the instigation of a very small secret Junta, and after a little grumbling, such as is only right and proper, the members settle down and admit that the alterations are exceedingly ingenious and the course more entertaining than ever. It appears to me to be the ideal way in which to conduct a golf club, but it is an ideal that can very seldom be attained.
WOKING
Looking back to the sixteenth green
Over one of the revolutionary things done at Woking controversy still rages, or rather it no longer continuously rages, but spirts every now and again into flame. This is the famous bunker at the fourth hole, of which the traveller may get a fine view as he is being whirled towards Southampton by the South-Western Railway. This hole was originally a very ordinary ‘drive and a pitch’ hole. You drove straight down a fairly broad strip of turf between heather on the left and the railway line on the right. Then you jumped over a rampart on to a nice big green and there you were. The soul of Mr. Stuart Paton, however, soared far above so lamentably unimaginative a hole, and he set to work upon it. First he removed large portions of the cross-rampart, so that it became possible to play a running instead of a pitching shot from certain positions, and then in the very centre of the fairway, at just the range of a good drive from the tee, he dug a small but formidable bunker. In shape it bore a resemblance to the Principal’s Nose, while in position it was rather like that of the bunker which lies in the middle of the course going to the ninth hole also at St. Andrews. By means of this bunker a clear-cut and distinct problem has to be faced on the tee. We must decide whether to drive safely away to the left, and so have a pitch to play, which is sometimes rather difficult, or whether to take a risk and lay down the ball between the bunker and the railway line. The danger of pushing the ball out a little too much, and so going out of bounds, is considerable, but the reward is considerable also, for an easy running up shot should give us a putt for three.
The number of discussions which I have heard as to this one little bunker would fill a large but not an interesting volume. The form of the discussion is nearly always the same, and is something like this:
A. “You can’t persuade me that it is right to have a bunker bang on the line to the hole, exactly where a good drive should be.”
B. “If there is a bunker there, then that cannot be the line to the hole. Your drive was not a very good one, but a very bad one.”
A. “It was not a bad one. It was a perfect shot—hit in the very middle of the club.”
B. “You should use your own head as well as the club head.”
After this the conversation becomes unfit for publication.
There are also some bunkers situated actually in the putting greens which used to cause annoyance. There is one at the sixth and two at the seventeenth, one of which is affectionately called “Johnny Low,” after that sternest of bunker-makers, who invented it. To these, however, everybody has long been reconciled, and both holes afford good instances of how much can be done in the way of making a player place his tee-shot, by digging a comparatively small bunker in the green.
Another clever and interesting piece of golfing architecture is to be found at the seventh hole. The hole can be reached from the tee with a moderate iron shot, and in former days, so long as one did not slice or pull very egregiously, one could recover from a most indifferent shot by laying a long putt dead on a flat easy green. Now, however, a most ingenious range of mountains has been introduced, which has had the effect of dividing the green into two compartments. If a shot be at all crooked a three is still well within the bounds of possibility, but the approach putt, instead of being easy, has to be made over a series of most perplexing curves. The straight player’s ball, on the other hand, is lying close to the hole, for the hills, which are the enemies of the crooked, are as a rule the allies of the accurate, and have rewarded his virtuous ball with a kick from their friendly slopes. A somewhat similar architectural feat has been tried at the other short hole—the sixteenth, where we have to pitch over a pond—but there, for some reason, it hardly seems to have been so successful.
I am afraid I may have given the idea that Woking has been laid out in a spirit of impish mischief, but such an impression would be an entirely wrong one. There are plenty of opportunities for fine, straightforward hitting, although wild, erratic slogging will nearly always be punished. There are some really beautiful two-shot holes, which are at their best when there is not too much run in the ground. The fifth, for instance, where there is a wonderfully pretty green lying in a semi-circle of trees, and the eighth, a really gorgeous hole when there is any wind against one. Twelve and thirteen again, though not quite so long, are both beautiful holes, and the fourteenth,