Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son. Kevin Cook
them to synchronize their clocks. By 1855 all of England, Scotland and Wales followed Greenwich Mean Time, or ‘railway time’, transmitted by telegraph in periodic updates from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still there were some things the machine age could not change, like a nobleman’s power to stop a train with his bare hands. To Fairlie’s great amusement, his friend the Earl of Eglinton, who owned half the region, had the right to flag down any train that passed through his lands. The earl would walk out from Eglinton Castle to the railway, lift his hand and create an unscheduled stop on the Ayr-Glasgow line. He rode free of charge and named his destination by saying, ‘Stop here.’ Sometimes he hopped off within hailing distance of a Prestwick caddie or, better yet, his man Fairlie and the new greenkeeper.
Fairlie would wave and shout hello to the man he called ‘Lord E!’ Tom would turn and see a man in spotless white breeches and a cape, dark hair spilling to his shoulders. Archibald Montgomerie, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, was western Scotland’s leading sportsman. His stable of racehorses featured Flying Dutchman, winner of the 1849 Derby at Epsom. Eglinton raced greyhounds and sponsored archery, curling and lawn-bowling clubs. Tall and almost pretty with his heroic hair parted in the middle, he could have played Sir Lancelot in a pageant – or tested the knight in a joust.
‘Hullo, Jof,’ said Eglinton, using J.O. Fairlie’s nickname, ‘And Tom Morris!’
‘M’lord,’ said Tom, doffing his cap.
The smiling earl was always full of questions about the course. How good would it be? When could they hold a first-rate event on it? Fairlie explained Tom’s latest plans to build a prodigious first hole, to trick the eye at the second, to move a green or two or three and possibly shoot several hundred sheep. Tom was happy to let Fairlie do the talking. He was not certain how to speak or even stand in the presence of this Eton-educated noble who lived in a castle. Would it be improper to turn his back on the earl? Should he keep his shadow off Eglinton’s boots? Fairlie wasn’t shy around Eglinton, thumping the earl’s noble shoulder and speaking of horses and hounds, club dues, prospective members – Mister this and Sir that – and the upcoming season. Eglinton nodded enthusiastically. ‘Jolly good! Well done, well done.’
Fairlie said Prestwick’s links would give the earl more honour than ‘the Mudbath of ’39’. Mention of the Mudbath made them both laugh. One day Fairlie told Tom the story:
In 1839 the world went mad for medieval nostalgia. There were pageants, parades and minstrel shows in every corner of the empire, but the Camelot craze found its greatest proponent in Eglinton Castle. There the earl, who could trace his lineage twenty-four generations back to the wellsprings of chivalry, decided to stage an event that would make history live again, and on 29 August 1839, nearly 5,000 spectators came from all over Scotland and England to witness the chivalric spectacle of the century. Thirteen armoured knights on armoured steeds paraded from the castle to a newly built arena to re-enact the jousts of old. One of the knights was Napoleon III, prince of France. Another was James Ogilvie Fairlie, bedecked in a suit of armour that had cost him £400. The parade of knights and their retinues stretched for half a mile. As it neared the arena, the skies opened. A downpour turned the castle grounds to fast-flowing mud. Spectators tumbled under skidding, kicking horses; squires ran for dear life; knights dropped their lances, tumbled into the mud and lay there like turtles, weighed down by their armour. The great medieval tournament was a debacle that cost Eglinton £40,000.
‘Forty thousand pounds!’ said Fairlie, waving his cigar. Such a fortune would pay Tom’s salary for a thousand years. At least Fairlie got some good out of it. He won the rescheduled joust as well as the favour of the tournament’s Queen of Beauty, who went on to become Mrs James Ogilvie Fairlie.
Tom, ever the agreeable partner, would nod and smile while the earl and colonel laughed. Then it was back to business. ‘Carry on, Tom,’ said Eglinton.
Tom Morris was born to carry on. Determined to spend the club’s money wisely, he would pioneer a handful of greenkeeping techniques, including several that were widely imitated and one that became universal.
Many of Prestwick’s bunkers had walls that were crumbling, falling inward. Tom could have shored them up with sod, but that would have been expensive. Railway ties, however, cost nothing. The Glasgow and South Western Railway that ran past the course left old railway ties in a heap beside the railway station; they were rubbish to everyone but Tom. He carted them away and used them to bulwark his bunkers, creating a shot that was new to the game, the near-miss that caromed crazily to parts unknown.
He shored up bunkers and dug new ones. He scythed heather, trimmed greens and cut neat-edged holes in the greens. By the end of his first year in Prestwick the course was a fair challenge for Tom’s own game, but equally fair to Mr Sampson McInnes, a Prestwick member who was odds-on to leave any shot in his own shadow, and to the earl, who seldom finished twelve holes in fewer than eighty strokes. Tom gave the links’ landmarks colourful names: the dunes were called Alps and Himalayas; a patch of trouble was known as Purgatory; a sand pit was called Pandemonium. Some of the names were traditional, others he coined himself. He promoted them all with a wink, a smile and endless repetition. And, at the tenth hole, he made a discovery that changed greenkeeping forever. The putting-green there had been in worse shape than the Hole o’ Shell green at St Andrews. Tom moved the green to a new spot a few yards away – back-breaking work that took weeks. One day he spilled a wheelbarrow full of sand on the putting-green. When spring came he found hundreds of yellow-green shoots of grass sprouting on the sandy part of the green, while other spots lay bare. He filled his handkerchief with sand from a bunker, sprinkled the bare spots and kept returning to the bunker until the whole green was dusted with sand. Club members complained: did the tenth hole have a putting-green or a bunker with a hole in it? But the greenkeeper carried the day: by summer that putting-green was as smooth as a billiard table. Tom Morris had introduced top-dressing, a way to cultivate greens that golf-course workers still employ. From then on his refrain was ‘More sand!’ When golfers grumbled, Tom said, ‘Tut-tut, sand’s the life of a green, like meat to a man.’
As the course shaped up he settled into his other duties as golf professional. Tom caddied for Fairlie, Eglinton and other gentlemen. He taught lessons. He played rounds with club members, a chore that earned him three shillings per round. Tom also had the delicate task of handicapping the club members. Over several months he took each of them out on the links and observed each man’s swing, making notes in a cloth-bound book. Then he posted the members’ handicaps. Even Fairlie was handicapped fairly, which was all the colonel expected, knowing that Tom wouldn’t fudge a stroke to save his soul. But other club men were miffed. ‘Who is this caddie,’ they asked, ‘to rank a gentleman?’ Tom’s cause was aided by Eglinton, whose stabby putter was as deadly as Lancelot’s lance – deadly to his score. After the earl accepted an unflattering double-figure handicap with his usual what-a-fine-day-to-be-me smile, the others accepted theirs as well.
Soon the keenness of Tom’s eye was apparent to all. Matches stayed tight to the end; he knew the golfers’ skills better than they did. By the end of his first year, club men were congratulating Fairlie for recruiting this greenkeeper. Some went so far as to shake Tom’s hand.
The first autumn meeting of the Prestwick Golf Club was a feast for the palate and the eye. There were platters of meat, fish and duck; gallons of claret, gin and champagne; garlands of flowers; hours of singing and dancing. Fairlie wore a tartan cravat that cascaded down his chin, posing a hazard to his soup. He and the other club members sported brass-buttoned suits. Their jewelled ladies wore gowns festooned with silk ribbons and bows. Tom, dressed in his best Sunday tweed, stood at the festivities’ edge where a hired man belonged. After midnight the last of the food gave way to drink and more merry drink, with toasts and speeches lulling the moon into its cradle behind the Isle of Arran. At last the Earl of Eglinton stood up. Silverware tap-tapped on wine glasses; the ballroom went quiet. The earl’s gaze swept the room and found Tom.
Nodding towards the links outside, Eglinton announced that the course, their course, was ‘a wonder of our new golfing age’. To applause and calls of ‘Hear hear’, he raised his glass. His hand was smooth and pink, his teeth as white as perfect health.
‘To Tom Morris,’