Fifty Years of GolfHutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
History
Fifty Years of Golf
Hutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
Golf
What I am trying to show for the moment is not only a gallery of great
players in the past, but also the way in which the game was brought home
to us at Westward Ho! how golf gradually spread in England and gathered
in players, more Clubs being started, and for how much the influence of
Westward Ho! and its golfers--of that most enterprising of all of them,
in particular, the old Mole--counted in the diffusion of knowledge of
the game. We were still, of course, far from the era when a man could go
about travelling in England without causing quite a sensation among
those who saw his clubs. The Englishman, as a rule, believed golf, if he
had heard of it at all, to be a game that was played on horseback. And
about that time, I being then sixteen years of age, so that the year
would be 1875, there happened what made a bigger impression upon me than
any event that has ever occurred since--I won the bronze scratch medal
annually given by the club for competition by boys under eighteen years
of age. Having a year to spare, of the age limit, I possibly might have
won it again the next year also, but by that time I had done even
greater things. I thought comparatively little of that second medal;
but, as for that first, I gazed at it as if it were the Koh-i-noor, and
certainly should not have valued it as highly if it had been. I can get
some of that glamour back by gazing at it now, but it is only a rather
faint reflection. Still, it gives far more comfort than the view of any
other trophy that I ever won in later years, and I am grateful to the
burglar who took all my gold medals some years back that he regarded
this thing of bronze as beneath his notice. Arthur Molesworth must just
have crossed the age limit which put him out of the play for this boys'
medal; but there were a number of boys there at that date, in the
holidays--Brownes, Burns, Roddy and Hugh Owen--there was quite a big
competition. It is very sad to think how many of them are dead--Herbert
Burn, the best player of the lot, among them. But Charlie (now Colonel
and M.P.--he went into the Royals) was quite of the scratch class at his
best. But still the leaders of the golf were older men: Henry Lamb, Dr.
Purves, George Glennie, Mr. Buskin, Mr. Adamson, Colonel Kennard, Sir
Robert Hay, Tom Oliphant. And I am sure there are a great number of good
men whom I have forgotten. My Uncle Fred was only a little behind the
best of them, but he had by this time given up his house at Westward Ho!
and was living abroad, so he only came down occasionally. There was a
small local contingent of very zealous golfers, men who never missed
their two rounds every week-day--we had no Sunday golf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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