Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son. Kevin Cook
strokes had something to celebrate, the pint-sized Robertson often broke 100 and once shot 87. Still, he was not a golfer by trade. No such career existed. So Robertson made and sold golf balls and caddied for the gentlemen of the R&A. As the town’s keenest eye for golf talent, he also set the club members’ handicaps and played matchmaker, pairing them up in fair, interesting or mischievous ways.
Tom worked in Robertson’s golf-ball factory – a grand term for the kitchen in his little stone cottage at the corner of Golf Place and Links Road. The cramped kitchen had a floor of wood planks. A pot kept water boiling over the fire. A sturdy worktable sat under an oil lamp that cast a wan yellow light specked with feather dust. Three men worked here: Allan Robertson, his cousin Lang Willie Robertson, and Tom Morris. Allan and Lang Willie were Tom’s teachers in ball-making, a craft that was equal parts science and upholstery.
To make a feather ball, you start with a wide strip of cowhide. Take a straight razor and cut three thin sections of hide, then soften the sections in water and alum. Trim the largest piece to the shape of an hourglass; this will be the middle of the ball. The other two pieces should be round. They are for the top and bottom. Sew the pieces together with waxed thread, forming a ball with a small hole at one end. Turn the ball inside-out so that the stitches are hidden on the inside. Now you’re ready for the gruntwork.
After boiling enough goosefeathers to fill the standard measuring device – a top hat – pull a thick leather cuff over the hand that will hold the empty ball. Grab a handful of boiled goosedown, soft as warm sand, and use a finger-length poker to push the down through the hole into the ball. Repeat until you need a short, T-shaped iron awl to stuff more and more feathers through that little hole. After twenty minutes of this, the short awl will no longer be of any use. To drive one last handful of down into the jam-packed, unyielding ball, you need to wear a wood-and-leather harness. The harness straps around your chest. It has buckles up the side, a wooden panel in front and a slot. Place the butt end of a long awl into the slot and lean forward with all your weight at the crux of your ribcage, forcing the last feathers through the hole. When the top hat is empty and the ball is finally full, sew the hole shut as fast as you can. The last stage of ball-stuffing was dangerous. If the awl slipped, the ball-maker could break a rib or impale himself. Lang Willie Robertson liked to tell the story about a ball-maker who pushed so hard that his workbench split in two, sending him tumbling forward in a whirl of awls, calipers, paint, waxed thread and knitting needles as the ball bounced away, squirting feathers. As Allan’s cousin and assistant, Lang Willie outranked Tom in the Robertson kitchen, but he never acted superior. Six foot two, with rheumy eyes and whisky breath, he was older than Allan – almost forty. Lang Willie told the new apprentice all about the Robertsons, including a forebear who caddied for decades and ‘died in harness’, dropping dead in a clatter of clubs on the Burn Hole. That caddie left behind a son, David Robertson – Allan’s father, Lang Willie’s uncle – a caddie and golf hustler immortalized in a poem called ‘Golfiana’: ‘Davie, oldest of the cads/Gives half-one to unsuspicious lads/When he might give them two or even more/ And win, perhaps, three matches out of four!’ David Robertson sold golf equipment, too. That sideline came about when a club-maker from Musselburgh grew weary of taking a ship across the Firth of Forth to Kirkaldy, then shouldering his wares and hiking twenty miles to St Andrews. To spare himself the trek, the club-maker hired David Robertson as his salesman in the old town. Both men prospered, and upon his death David left his son, Allan, an estate worth ninety-two pounds, including two pounds’ worth of feathery golf balls.
Allan’s kitchen crew made or repaired an occasional club, but the trade was mainly featheries. The feather ball had been standard since the 1600s. It was expensive – up to two shillings and sixpence each, enough to buy a new driver – because making the thing was so difficult. Even after you stuffed a ball and sewed it shut, there was work to do. You gave it a light knocking with a thin-headed hammer to even out any bumps. You gave it three coats of white paint and a stamp that showed who made it. (Balls from Allan’s kitchen were stamped simply ALLAN.) Then you put the ball aside for two days. As it dried, the feathers inside expanded, pushing the cover to its limit. A feathery might sound soft, but a new one was like hardwood – hard enough to kill a man. Tom knew of two people who had died after being felled by flying golf balls, a schoolboy hit on the head and a grown man struck in the chest.
Feathery balls were so precious that one of Allan’s rivals, the Musselburgh ball-maker Douglas Gourlay, put one in the collection plate at the Episcopal Church in Bruntsfield one Sunday. If you were to find that ball today, you could sell it for thousands of pounds.
A skilled ball-maker could stuff, sew, paint and stamp three balls in a day. An adept could make four. Allowing for misfortune (torn leather, bruised ribs, needle-pricked fingers), three men could make fifty or more featheries in a week, enough for Allan to keep up his household, pay Lang Willie and feed apprentice Tom, who worked for room, board and training. One year Allan Robertson’s kitchen-table factory produced 2,456 balls. All the while Allan barked at Lang Willie and Tom to work harder, faster. Laggards and dullards, he called them. Or worse, Irish laggards and dullards, which only amused Lang Willie and Tom, neither of whom had been much closer to Ireland than the Eden Brae at the end of the links.
Lang Willie, sitting with his endless legs bent under him, made the time pass with jokes, like the one about the caddie who died and found himself back on the links, at the bottom of a ladder that stretched into the clouds. ‘Greetings, my son,’ said St Peter, handing the man a piece of chalk. The saint informed the caddie that as he climbed to heaven he must write his sins on the ladder, one per rung. So up the caddie went. ‘Took the Lord’s name in vain. Step,’ said Lang Willie, narrating the ascent. ‘Impure thoughts. Step,’ he said. ‘Drank to excess. Step. Step. Step. Step.’ This went on until the man was miles above the earth. And then, to his astonishment, he saw another caddie – his own long-dead grandfather – climbing down the ladder out of the clouds. When asked why, his grandfather cried: ‘More chalk!’
Tom learned more than ball-making and old stories in Allan’s house. He learned that a man can have multiple aims. Tom, like his father, was a straight-forward character, striving to serve God and family by working hard, speaking plainly and deceiving no one. But the more he knew of ball-making the more clearly he saw that it took no great skill to stuff and sew golf balls. Why then should the great Robertson have chosen Tom Morris to be his apprentice? They weren’t cousins. Allan had always been cordial to Tom’s father, but the men were not friends. Of all the lads who could use a leg up into a thriving trade, why Tom?
From the week Tom went to live in the Robertson cottage, fifty paces from the links, Allan schooled him in the game as well as the trade: how to grip the club for more control, how to hit shots high or low to suit the weather, how to flip the ball out of sand. On summer evenings when the sun stayed up past ten o’clock, they played match after match of two or three or nine holes, with Allan giving Tom strokes and beating him anyway. There was always a bet. Playing without betting, Allan said, was ‘no’ golf’. After Tom had lost the few pennies Allan had given him that week, they played for plucks – winner gets to keep one of the loser’s clubs. This made no sense, since both of them played with Allan’s clubs, but the boss didn’t mind as long as he won. Tom didn’t mind, either. He welcomed any chance to leave the sweaty kitchen for the great green links. Boss and apprentice spent long hours out there, hours of thunder and wind, much of which came from Allan’s mouth. He loved to sound off on things he had read in the Scotsman and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, from politics and art to the price of good leather. Tom, straining to hear as the wind blew the words down the fairway, gathered that good leather cost too much, that India was a powderkeg, that Lord Palmerston was not to be trusted, and that some mad Englishman had dug up a Grecian Venus that had no arms.
Tom listened harder when the subject was golf. He heard about the weaknesses of gentlemen like Sir David Baird, who might be the R&A’s best ball-striker, but who could not play in rain. Monsieur Messieux, the Frenchman, could hit the ball a mile, but was merde on the putting-green. There were other secrets: an invisible break on the eighth green; a spot to the right of the twelfth green that would kick a ball straight left. Each night, lying on his straw mattress, Tom pictured the golf course in his mind’s eye, as if from above, and imagined different ways