The Golf Courses of the British Isles. Bernard Darwin
my arithmetic, is eleven over an average of four a hole. The record of nearly every other well-known course in the kingdom is under an average of four. To accomplish a score of under 100 at Blackheath is something to be proud of, and in the gutty days, in which I sometimes struggled round the historic course, an average of five a hole was considered, not without reason, quite good enough to win one’s match against highly respectable opponents.
They let us down easily to begin with at Blackheath with quite a short first hole, only a good cleek shot being required to carry a sort of shallow pit that has very poor lying at the bottom of it; so we ought to have one three to reduce the average of the sixes and sevens that are sure to follow. The second and third are longer, but yet not hideously long, and we play them reasonably well, if we do not come into collision with public highways and the posts and rails that guard them. We may possibly have to thread our way through two teams of small boys playing football, and there are almost certain to be a nursery maid or two in the way, or an old gentleman sitting on a seat, blandly unconscious that his position is one fraught with peril to himself and annoyance to us. However, as we are forcibly clad in red coats for a danger-signal and preceded by a fore-caddie, as if we were traction engines, we may with luck and patience do fairly well.
After the third we are confronted with the two long holes, and the piling up of our score begins. It is now some time since I played them, and they are, besides, too long to describe in detail. I have a vision of reaching, after several shots on the flat, a deep hollow on the left, and spending some further time in hacking the ball along its hard and inhospitable turf, finally to emerge on to the flat again and reach the green in a score verging upon double figures. The fifth hole may be described as the same, only not quite so much so, and the round ends with two holes of a somewhat milder character, but neither of them in the least easy. Then off we go over the pit again for our second round, and there is yet another one left to play. To play three rounds over Blackheath on a cold, blustery winter’s day is a man’s task.
It is sad that there was no contemporary chronicler to do for the old golfers of Blackheath what John Nyren of immortal memory did for the cricketers of Hambledon; but the club has not lacked its vates sacer, and in Mr. W.E. Hughes’ book is a store of pleasant and interesting history. Most golfers know the delightful picture of the gentleman in a red coat with blue facings, gold epaulettes and knee-breeches, who stands in so dignified an attitude, his club over his shoulder. It is dedicated to the “Society of Golfers at Blackheath” with “just respect” by their “most humble servant Lemuel Francis Abbott,” and, like the artist, we too salute with just respect a venerable and illustrious society.
WIMBLEDON
On the common
The Royal Wimbledon Club was founded some two hundred and sixty years after the Royal Blackheath, and yet golf is still so young a game in England that the two appear of almost equally hoary antiquity. There is an old-fashioned air about the golf at Wimbledon—an atmosphere of red coats and friendly foursomes made up at luncheon, which is exceedingly pleasant—nor is the actual golf on Wimbledon Common by any means to be despised. It has at least one supreme virtue—that of naturalness; those great clumps of gorse and the deep ravines where the birches grow were put there by the hand of Nature herself, who, if she be not so cunning, is at any rate infinitely more artistic than any golfing architect. When Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote the Badminton volume he wrote of the golf at Wimbledon that it was almost “an insult to the game to dignify it by the name of golf,” adding that he would rather call it a “wonderful substitute for the game within so short a distance of Charing Cross.” It is perhaps a just criticism, but what would Mr. Hutchinson say of the hundred ‘mud-heaps’ that have sprung up within a short distance of Charing Cross since these days? He would probably keep silence lest he should fall a victim to the law of libel and an unsympathetic jury.
Certainly the lies at Wimbledon are not good; they are hard and flinty, and at certain places, in particular the long second hole, they have seemed to me at times almost the worst in the world. But there is this measure of compensation in hard turf, that it always bears some resemblance, however dim and remote, to the ‘real thing’; it is infinitely more inspiriting than the soft and spongy lawns, which may be truer and smoother, but are removed by a far wider gulf from the golf that is golf.
If the Royal Wimbledon golfer dislikes a crowd or a red coat, or if, being a very wicked man or a very busy one, he wishes to play on Sunday, he need nowadays only walk out of the back door of his club-house instead of his front door, and he is on his own private course at Cæsar’s Camp. A wonderful place is this new Wimbledon course, for as soon as we are on it all signs of men, houses and omnibuses, and the other symptoms of a busy suburb disappear as if by magic, and a prospect of glorious solitary woods stretches away into the distance in every direction. Only at one place, where the new course verges on the Common, do we see such a thing as a house, and our friend Charing Cross might be a hundred miles away. Like the egg, the course is good in parts: very good as long as we are among the whins on the hard ground which is the ground of the Common: rather soft and muddy when we are on the meadows lower down. Taking the two courses together, the men of Wimbledon have much to be thankful for.
There is still one London course that assuredly deserves mention, that of Prince’s Golf Club on Mitcham Common. Roads and lamp-posts and, ugliest of all, tramways have not added to its loveliness. But it is still a delightful place, with a good deal of solitary beauty left. There is abundance of gorse here too, but the impression produced is quite different from that at Wimbledon. The ground is flatter, and one can take in a greater stretch at one glance; it is not broken up, as it were, into districts by gullies and ravines, and one misses the pretty birch trees of Wimbledon.
MITCHAM
The seventh green
Courses that are not protected by a ring-fence of privacy are not as a rule notable for the goodness of their greens, since every now and then a cantankerous commoner is apt to drive a waggon across them by way of asserting his rights. At Prince’s, however, they have really beautiful greens, big and rolling and grassy, which are a joy to putt upon, and there is a further distinction between Mitcham and other common courses, that the making of artificial bunkers has been allowed to supplement Nature in an unobtrusive measure.
There are plenty of good two-shot holes where, if we do not quite need the brassey for our second shot, we must yet give the ball a downright, honest hit with some iron club that is not too much lofted.
The first, seventh, fifteenth, and seventeenth—to mention only four—are all good holes, the drive at the fifteenth being rendered the more alarming by a pond which traps a hooked ball. The twelfth hole also has a rather frightening tee-shot over the corner of a garden—a sort of Stationmaster’s Garden in miniature—with the possibility of slicing into what was once a manufactory of explosives.
Mitcham is essentially a course for the leisured golfer. It is comparatively useless to the busy man, since he may not play there on Sunday, and to do so on Saturday is a vexation of spirit. Granted, however, a reasonably dry day in mid-week, and there is certainly no pleasanter golf to be found within so short and easy a journey from London.
CHAPTER III.
KENT AND SUSSEX.
There is always something stirring in a roll of illustrious names, and for the mere sensual pleasure of writing them I set them down in order at the beginning of the chapter—Sandwich, Deal, Prince’s, Littlestone, and Rye, in the counties of Kent and Sussex. Each of the five has devoted adherents who will maintain its merits against the world in heated argument, but there can be little doubt which has the right to come first. It would be showing a sad disrespect to golfing history, very recent history though it be, to begin otherwise than with the links of the