Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son. Kevin Cook
Bayne, the maid.
Five years older than Tom, Nancy was one of four servants in the captain’s house. Along with another maid and a housekeeper who outranked the maids, she scrubbed, polished, dusted and cooked from six in the morning till after dark – all under the stern eye of the captain’s governess. Nancy was no beauty but rather a strong, sensible girl, a ‘pattern girl’ in the popular phrase. She knew her role in society’s pattern and played it with vigour and good humour. She already had a suitor, but when Tom Morris entered the picture the other fellow had no chance. Tom was a favourite of Captain Broughton. He caddied for the captain and sometimes partnered him in foursomes matches. Tom was Nancy’s favourite, too. He had a pleasing enough face, with neatly trimmed whiskers. His boots were almost new, and he took care to kick the dirt off them before he came into the captain’s kitchen. Tom had a jacket with no frays at the sleeve or elbow, and a pocket-watch with a silver chain. He had a kind eye and a bit of a spark to him, asking about Nancy’s day, offering a handshake when he took his leave. She was pleased to note that his hands were more callused than hers.
For Tom, even courtship was affected by golf. One day on the High Hole, he and Captain Broughton were playing a crown-and-shillings game – a crown on the match, a shilling per hole – when Tom found his ball buried in a bunker. He swung twice with no luck.
‘Pick it up,’ the captain said.
Tom said, ‘No, I might hole it.’
‘Ha! If you do, I’ll give you fifty pounds.’
‘Done.’
Tom’s biographer W.W. Tulloch told the story sixty years later. According to Tulloch, Tom ‘had another shot at it, eye on ball and perhaps on the fair Nancy. By some million-to-one chance the ball did actually go into the hole. “That will make a nice nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” said the young fellow.’ But the next day, when the captain brought the money, Tom surprised him by turning it down. There was no debt, he said – he had been joking.
Tom Morris married Nancy Bayne on 21 June 1844. The vows were read by the Reverend Principal Haldane of Holy Trinity church, who had christened baby Tom twenty-three years before. After the vows Captain Broughton, who had given the bride and groom a wedding gift of fifty pounds, led toasts to his favourite caddie and his former maid, who would do her scrubbing, dusting and cooking for Tom Morris from that day on.
Life was moving faster. In a year Nancy was pregnant, though no one in that time and place would use such an indelicate word. People said she was in ‘a family way’, or ‘no longer unwell’, meaning that her monthly flow of blood had ceased.
In the summer of 1846 Nancy reached the last stage of being no longer unwell – her confinement, when her husband was banished to a far room while women from both their families and then at last a midwife clustered around Nancy as she howled in her labour. Soon the midwife showed Tom the glad result: a healthy son. He and Nancy named the baby Thomas Morris Junior and called him Wee Tom.
If the child was meant to be a golfer, he was born at a good time. After Allan Robertson’s grand battle with Willie Dunn, other professionals began making their names in the game. Dunn and his brother Jamie were Musselburgh’s champions. Bob Andrew was Perth’s. Amateur competitions at the R&A and other clubs were still the main events on golf’s calendar, but people had now seen enough of the ‘cracks’, as crack-shot caddies were called, to know that amateur medalists were not in their league. Golf talk revolved around the cracks: who was the best of them? Could Dunn win a rematch against Robertson? Which town could field the best foursomes duo? By the middle of the century bettors from various clubs were risking weighty sums to find out. To their surprise, hundreds and even thousands of ordinary citizens were also excited about this new craze, the professional golf match. Soon a great foursomes match was arranged: a duel between the Dunns of Musselburgh and those two noted sticks from St Andrews, Allan Robertson and Tom Morris.
Sportsmen on both sides of the Forth pooled their cash. Each side came up with £200, which meant that the cracks would play for the staggering sum of £400. It wasn’t the players’ money; they would perform for the benefit of the bettors who put up the stakes. Still, news of the record-setting stakes catalyzed a reaction that fed on itself – more crucial than the prize money was its power to keep people talking about it, to keep the small but growing world of golf abuzz for weeks before the match. This was hype Victorian style. News may have travelled at a walking pace, in weekly newspapers and by word of mouth, but as the match approached it seemed half of Scotland knew about it. The players made bets of their own (they would get a piece of the £400 – ten percent was customary – if they won), and polished their clubs as the first day of play dawned clear and cool. The format was two out of three, with three matches of thirty-six holes each, to be played first at Musselburgh, then at St Andrews and finally on the supposedly neutral links at North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Everyone expected Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn to play stellar golf. Everyone knew that Jamie Dunn, Willie’s identical twin, was nearly his brother’s equal. The question mark was young Morris, who had never played in front of spectators and reporters.
Allan liked to joke about the Dunns: ‘Keep your eye on ’em, or Willie might hit every shot.’ The tall twins often dressed alike, but at Musselburgh they did their opponents and spectators a favour by wearing different ties, Willie’s blue and Jamie’s grey. They went on to play identically well, out-driving the St Andrews duo, alternating shots with dead aim. To the cheers of their home-course supporters, the twins routed Allan and Tom. The day’s scheduled thirty-six holes ended after only twenty-four, the Dunns leading by thirteen holes with twelve to play. It was a bitter defeat for the St Andreans. Matters worsened a week later at St Andrews, where the ballyhooed showdown looked to be a mismatch. Allan kept missing putts – ‘funking’, it was called, meaning choking. Then, late in the day, the twins faltered. Tom led a rally over the last nine holes and he and Allan squeaked by with a victory on the Home Hole. Now the sides were dead even. Had the contest been scored by holes rather than courses, Tom and Allan would have been behind, needing a miracle on the last day. As it was, all they needed was one good afternoon.
On the morning of the final thirty-six holes, a special train carted crowds of so-called ‘golf-fanatics’ to the quirky little North Berwick links below Berwick Law, a dead volcano. At its foot, crowds gathered near the first teeing-ground at the edge of a red sandstone town that had never seen anything like this.
Rain fell in sheets that morning, sluicing into the weedy old quarry beside the first fairway. The torrent peaked just as dozens of Allan and Tom’s supporters were crossing the Forth on the Burntisland Ferry. By the time they reached the course they were clammy and miserable and outnumbered ten to one by the Dunns’ supporters. The rain moved offshore, leaving clean sky and a breeze that blew several spectators’ hats down the fairway. Allan and Tom had the honour, which meant that Allan did. Before teeing off he took a moment to look around at the huge, still-growing crowd around him, a throng that stretched along the fairway almost to the green. There were more than a thousand people watching. So many faces, all silent for one long moment before he sent the ball on its way.
Allan’s drive was straight, but short. Willie Dunn’s drive flew past it. Willie held his driver high at the end of his swing, waving it forward as if to chase the ball farther. The Dunns’ backers cheered and shook their fists. ‘I never saw a match where such vehement party spirit was displayed,’ Tom Peter wrote in his memoir, Reminiscences of Golf. ‘So great was the keenness and anxiety to see whose ball had the best lie, that no sooner were the shots played than off the whole crowd ran, helter-skelter.’
The Dunn twins’ power impressed Peter: ‘They went sweeping over hazards which the St Andrews men had to play short of.’ With twenty-six holes played and eight to go, the Dunns were four holes ahead. Gamblers in the crowd raised their hands and shouted offers: ‘Fifteen to one against Robertson and Morris.’ ‘Twenty to one!’
Allan had been useless all day, hitting crooked drives and funking putts. Tom Peter heard a catcall from the crowd: ‘That wee body in the red jacket canno’ play golf!’ That yell may have been the spur the proud Robertson needed. A minute later he sank his first putt of consequence in more than a week. He and Tom took that