Over one of the revolutionary things done at Woking controversy still rages, or rather it no longer continuously rages, but spirts every now and again into flame. This is the famous bunker at the fourth hole, of which the traveller may get a fine view as he is being whirled towards Southampton by the South-Western Railway. This hole was originally a very ordinary ‘drive and a pitch’ hole. You drove straight down a fairly broad strip of turf between heather on the left and the railway line on the right. Then you jumped over a rampart on to a nice big green and there you were. The soul of Mr. Stuart Paton, however, soared far above so lamentably unimaginative a hole, and he set to work upon it. First he removed large portions of the cross-rampart, so that it became possible to play a running instead of a pitching shot from certain positions, and then in the very centre of the fairway, at just the range of a good drive from the tee, he dug a small but formidable bunker. In shape it bore a resemblance to the Principal’s Nose, while in position it was rather like that of the bunker which lies in the middle of the course going to the ninth hole also at St. Andrews. By means of this bunker a clear-cut and distinct problem has to be faced on the tee. We must decide whether to drive safely away to the left, and so have a pitch to play, which is sometimes rather difficult, or whether to take a risk and lay down the ball between the bunker and the railway line. The danger of pushing the ball out a little too much, and so going out of bounds, is considerable, but the reward is considerable also, for an easy running up shot should give us a putt for three.

The number of discussions which I have heard as to this one little bunker would fill a large but not an interesting volume. The form of the discussion is nearly always the same, and is something like this:

After this the conversation becomes unfit for publication.

There are also some bunkers situated actually in the putting greens which used to cause annoyance. There is one at the sixth and two at the seventeenth, one of which is affectionately called “Johnny Low,” after that sternest of bunker-makers, who invented it. To these, however, everybody has long been reconciled, and both holes afford good instances of how much can be done in the way of making a player place his tee-shot, by digging a comparatively small bunker in the green.

Another clever and interesting piece of golfing architecture is to be found at the seventh hole. The hole can be reached from the tee with a moderate iron shot, and in former days, so long as one did not slice or pull very egregiously, one could recover from a most indifferent shot by laying a long putt dead on a flat easy green. Now, however, a most ingenious range of mountains has been introduced, which has had the effect of dividing the green into two compartments. If a shot be at all crooked a three is still well within the bounds of possibility, but the approach putt, instead of being easy, has to be made over a series of most perplexing curves. The straight player’s ball, on the other hand, is lying close to the hole, for the hills, which are the enemies of the crooked, are as a rule the allies of the accurate, and have rewarded his virtuous ball with a kick from their friendly slopes. A somewhat similar architectural feat has been tried at the other short hole—the sixteenth, where we have to pitch over a pond—but there, for some reason, it hardly seems to have been so successful.

I am afraid I may have given the idea that Woking has been laid out in a spirit of impish mischief, but such an impression would be an entirely wrong one. There are plenty of opportunities for fine, straightforward hitting, although wild, erratic slogging will nearly always be punished. There are some really beautiful two-shot holes, which are at their best when there is not too much run in the ground. The fifth, for instance, where there is a wonderfully pretty green lying in a semi-circle of trees, and the eighth, a really gorgeous hole when there is any wind against one. Twelve and thirteen again, though not quite so long, are both beautiful holes, and the fourteenth, which brings the golfer right up to the club-house and tempts him to lunch before his time, requires two of the very longest and straightest of hits.

Taking them day in and day out I think the greens at Woking are the best that I know to be found inland—Mid-Surrey excepted. They are often very nearly perfect, and are practically always good. They are not as a rule alarmingly fast, nor so slow as to convert putting into mere hard physical exercise, but of a nice, easy, comfortable pace, that reflects enormous credit on Martin, who is one of the best of green-keepers. I can only end as I began by asserting that there is no more delightful course whereon to play golf.

CHAPTER II.
LONDON COURSES (2).

Now leaving the heather, we must turn to some of the other substances upon which Londoners play their weekly golf. On the course of the Mid-Surrey Golf Club in the Old Deer Park at Richmond there are probably more rounds of golf played throughout the whole year than on any other golf course in the three kingdoms. You may go down to Richmond on any day of the year, on which it is not snowing, and be sure of finding a good many people who have managed to get a day off and are spending it in playing golf. The business of the world presumably goes on in spite of their absence, and indeed the week-day crowd on a golf course points the moral that we are none of us indispensable.

The Mid-Surrey course is in a park, and must therefore be classed among the park courses, but it is hardly typical of its kind. The trees stand for the most part as occasional and isolated sentinels guarding the edges of the rough. We do not drive down whole avenues of them, nor, as on some courses, do they play the part of gigantic goal-posts through which we must direct the ball. The country is more open and more sparsely timbered than the typical park, but, if the big trees only interfere with us now and then, there are several peculiarly odious little spinneys which are almost certain to thrust themselves upon our notice.

The Old Deer Park is a pretty spot, but the course does not at first sight look attractive; its disadvantages may be summed up in two adjectives—‘flat’ and ‘artificial,’ nor do the course’s enemies forget to make the fullest use of them. Flat it is—as flat as a pancake, as may be seen at a glance, and the bunkers, which are now innumerable as the sands of the sea, have been raised one and all by the hand of man. So much is certain, and on such a course there is a limit to our powers of enjoying ourselves; we cannot hope for the exhilaration that is born of sea and sandhills and, in a minor degree, of fir-trees and heath. On the other hand, of the joy that comes from a well-struck brassey shot—a joy that has been sadly diminished on most courses by the rubber-cored ball—we can taste in abundance. The last nine holes in the Old Deer Park repay really long straight play with the wooden clubs almost as well as any nine holes that can be mentioned, wherefore the Mid-Surrey course, if it be not quite ‘the real thing’ itself, provides at least an admirable training ground.

There is but one thing lacking for the player’s perfect education in brassey shots, and that is an occasional bad lie or bad stance; he will constantly be taking his wooden club through the green, but the ball will always be sitting up on a perfect lie and obviously requesting to be hit, while his stance will be of the smoothest and flattest. When he leaves this smooth and shaven Paradise and fights the sea breezes amid hummocks and hollows, he will find that considerably more is asked of him, and may possibly re-echo the dictum of the celebrated Scottish professional, that it is necessary to be a goat in order to stand to his ball, and a goat, moreover, qualified with no uncertain epithet.

In this matter of perfect lies and stances Mid-Surrey is apt to pamper and over-indulge its devotees; and the same may be said of the greens, for they are as near perfection as anything short of a billiard-table could possibly be. Much care and money and a transcendent genius among green-keepers, Peter Lees, have combined to make them a miracle of trueness and smoothness. Some greens that are extraordinarily good, true and easy, yet afford no particular pleasure, since they are too slow and soft; a perfectly true Turkey carpet might lead to the holing of many putts and yet the player would soon long for some barer, harder, more untrue substance. The necessity of hitting our putts very hard covers many little deficiencies in our execution, but it is poor fun compared with the art of stroking the ball up to the hole.

The Mid-Surrey greens are open to none of these reproaches, since they combine perfect trueness with plenty of pace, and we must strike the ball a delicate, subtle blow; the methods of the bludgeon are equally unsuitable and disastrous. There are plenty of little ripples and ridges and hollows in the greens, though few bold slopes, and there is therefore scope for considerable nicety of putting; above all, there is the cheering knowledge that a putt has but to make a good start in life to ensure its turning neither to the right nor to the left and ending a blameless career at the bottom of the hole.

Thus we have perfect lies, stances, and greens, and it is clear that we shall have none but the most futile excuses for our errors. If we hit the ball we ought to do a good score, and, especially on the way out, nothing but our own folly should prevent a long and gratifying sequence of fours; that is to say, we ought to do six fours, two threes at the short holes, and a five, which we may fairly allow ourselves at the second. This green can be reached in two shots; Robson did reach it in two in the News of the World tournament, but to have seen him do it was enough to prevent our own vaulting ambition from o’erleaping itself once and for all. They were indeed two stupendous shots, and if we carry the big cross-bunker safely in two and then play a nice straight run-up on to the green, we shall have done all that can be reasonably expected of us. Of the other holes on the way out the third is perhaps the most engaging, since we must employ our heads as well as our clubs. There is a spinney—a detestably, almost mesmerically attractive spinney—to the left, and if we pull our drive we shall be confronted with a shot wherein the ball must rise abruptly to a considerable height and at the same time traverse a considerable distance. If, however, we have pushed the tee-shot well out to the right, we shall have our reward in a simple approach shot, a steady four and a consciousness of virtue.

As far as the turn, then, we may progress in an average of fours, but we shall be lucky if we do not considerably exceed it on the way home; we shall need a series of lusty second shots and even so shall be none the worse for a wind behind us at all the holes, which is alas! impossible. There is no one hole that stands out particularly from its fellows, but the one we are likely to remember best is the twelfth, not so much for its intrinsic merits, which are considerable, as for a fine cedar tree, which fills us with joy till it has entirely and hopelessly stymied us from the hole.

The bunkers are many and cunningly devised, and there is also rough grass, but the lies in the rough are not very bad, and if we are going to make a mistake we shall be well advised to do it thoroughly; thereby we shall be so crooked as to avoid the bunkers, while brute force and a driving iron may extricate us from the rough with but little loss. This, of course, is not as it should be, but the difficulty is an insuperable one on many inland courses.

Not far off are two nice courses, Sudbrook Park and Ashford Manor, but from Mid-Surrey we will voyage to another park course, the newest of its kind, at Stoke Poges. Stoke Park is a beautiful spot, and there is very good golf to be played there; the club is an interesting one, moreover, as being one of the first and the most ambitious attempts in England at what is called in America a ‘Country Club.’ There are plenty of things to do at Stoke besides playing golf. We may get very hot at lawn tennis or keep comparatively cool at bowls or croquet, or, coolest of all, we may sit on the terrace or in the garden and give ourselves wholly and solely to loafing. The club-house is a gorgeous palace, a dazzling vision of white stone, of steps and terraces and cupolas, with a lake in front and imposing trees in every direction, while over it all broods the great Chief-Justice Coke, looking down benignantly from the top of his pillar and gracefully concealing his astonishment at the changes in the park.

Never was there a better instance of the art of forcibly turning a forest into a golf-course than is to be found at Stoke Poges. The beautiful old park turf was always there, cropped from time immemorial by generations of deer, who little knew what service they were doing to the green-keeper, but in every direction there stretched thick belts of woodland, and yet a golf course was going to be made and opened in less than no time. I saw the place in its pristine state, and the holes, as they were pointed out to me, with an eye of but imperfect faith. Thousands of trees, as it seemed, bore the fatal mark that signified their doom, and yet the thing appeared almost impossible. One hole was particularly impressive. All that was then to be seen was a pretty little brook running innocently between its banks, which were thickly covered with trees, while on one side the ground sloped gently upwards to a path through the woods. It was a spot to conjure up visions of dryads or fairies, “Green jacket, red cap and white owl’s feather”; of anything in the world except a narrow, catchy, slanting green and a half-iron shot. Yet an inspired architect had fixed on it as the site of one of his short holes; the trees were to be cut down, the sloping bank was to be turfed and the brook promoted to the fuller dignity of a burn. I went my way full of admiration—and of doubt.

The turf is good and springy, and where it is intended that the player should get a good lie, he gets an excellent one; where it is intended that he should be in trouble there is likewise no mistake about it. He may lie in a wood, though this is only the penalty for a very heinous crime, and the trees are for the most part kept skilfully in reserve as a second line of defence. He may at one or two holes lie in a lake; and he will often, if he be crooked, lie in a compound of bracken and long grass, which will adequately test his powers of recovery. There are also bunkers, though these, with commendable wisdom, have been put in but sparingly at first, and, at the moment of writing, the foozler’s cup of anguish is not yet filled to the brim.

As is increasingly becoming the fashion with modern courses, there are a good many one-shot holes; there are, to be precise, four, or, if we can drive a quite abnormal distance, we may include the tenth and say there are five. Of these the seventh hole over the brook before mentioned is the best: indeed it is quite one of the most charming of short holes. Its special virtue is to be found in the fact that we have to approach it at a peculiarly diabolical angle, so that the green becomes exceedingly narrow; a slice takes us into the brook, a pull into a road, and, in short, nothing but a good shot will do. Of the other short holes the most superficially terrifying, to those at least who sometimes drive a little lower than the angels, is the sixteenth, where we must stand on a little peninsula that juts out into the lake and carry some hundred or more yards of water.

Of the longer holes, all need sound and straight play, and some are thoroughly interesting. There is perhaps just a tinge of monotony about the sequence of long holes that begin after the eleventh; they are all good holes, but we might reasonably yearn for a little break in the middle. The twelfth is perhaps the best of them, since not only is it narrow, but it has the peculiar quality, granted to some holes, of a terrifying appearance. There is really plenty of room; the trees and the lake to the right are, in fact, a long way off, and ought to be omitted from our calculations but it is hard not to keep one eye on them—and off the ball. The seventeenth is another difficult hole, especially as it comes on us before we have fully recovered from the watery terrors of the sixteenth. There is a fine carry for the second over a stream that runs just in front of the green, and the brave man goes for his four, and haply takes six, while the coward plays his second with an iron and a measure of contemptible prudence, trusting thereby to secure a steady five; let us hope that he hits his pitch off the heel of his club and takes six after all.

Of all the race of park courses, it would scarcely be possible, in point of sheer beauty, to beat Cassiobury Park, near Watford in Hertfordshire. Neither by laying too much emphasis on its beauty do I mean to cast an oblique slur upon the golf itself, a great deal of which is very good. Of course you will not think it good if you hate trees, because there are a great many trees; and you will probably be at least once or twice hopelessly stymied by them in the course of the round. Even the most confirmed tree-hater, however, might find his heart softening, because these particular trees are so very lovely. There are the most glorious avenues, elms and limes and chestnuts and beeches, that stretch across the park, and a fine day at Cassiobury comes within measurable distance of heaven. It is even beautiful on a wet day, and the last day that I spent there was wet, quite beyond the ordinary. I remember it very well from the circumstance of having to wade breast high into drenching nettles after a ball which my wretched partner had put there. This occurred at the third hole—a hole which is rather a remarkable one in itself, and was never more remarkably played than on that occasion.

The green can be reached easily enough with one honest blow, but there is a huge tree immediately to the right of the green, and a still more huge and infinitely more alarming pit immediately under the tee. The pit is very deep and its sides precipitous, and it is altogether a very formidable affair. Our opponents drove off, I remember, and perpetrated an ordinary ‘fluff’ or foozle, which left the ball on grass, it is true, but at the very bottom of the pit.

“Now,” said I to my partner, no doubt foolishly, “here is our chance.” By way of answer he struck the ball violently on some portion of the club that lay far behind the heel. The ball dashed away at a terrific pace in the direction of square leg, came into collision with the branch of a tree some fifty yards off the line, whence it bounded back into the bed of nettles before mentioned. By some miracle the ball was dislodged from the nettles, and joined its fellow at the bottom of the pit. Then began a game the object of which an intelligent foreigner would probably have imagined to be the hitting of the ball up the bank in such a way as it should roll down exactly to the place whence it started. Ultimately, for I must pass over the intervening events, I missed a short putt to win the hole in eight.

If this third hole is the most terrifying to the habitual foozler, the more mature golfer will be a great deal more frightened of the fourth and tenth, which were really very good holes indeed. That drive at the tenth down a pretty glade between the trees is, as far as appearances go at least, one of the narrowest I know, and the second shot is a good one too, though by no means so long as it used to be, with a gutty. After this tenth comes another capital ‘two-shotter,’ which has been made by the expedient of running two poorish holes into one, and in this case two blacks have emphatically made a white, for the second shot over another pit, only a little less disastrous than the first, is excellent.

There are several more long, slashing holes on the way back, and at one of them I recollect that our adversaries in this same adventurous foursome lost their ball within four yards of the tee, and, in spite of the most arduous and unremitting search, had to give up the hole. I must add that the drive was neither a high nor a straight one, and that the grass at the edge of the course, or as I once heard an Irish green-keeper call them, the ‘sidings,’ were distinctly long.

One good point about Cassiobury is the smooth and velvety surface of the green. They are a little slow and easy perhaps, but very true and soothing to putt upon, and have been wonderfully improved of late years. Time was when the very springy park turf seemed determined never to settle down into a good putting substance, but unremitting care and hard work has changed all that. Finally, I ought to add that owing to the taking in of some new land and the abandoning of some of the old holes, the course is practically in a transition stage, and so I must be pardoned if I have used the antiquated numbering of the holes.

Of the courses to be reached from the Baker Street end of London, such as Northwood, Chorleywood, Harewood Downs and Sandy Lodge, Northwood is perhaps the best known, and there we come upon a somewhat different kind of golf; perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a mixture of two different kinds of golf. There are holes among the gorse, and there are holes of a more agricultural character among the hedges and ditches. Regarded in the abstract, gorse-bushes, or, as I ought to call them, whins, are not an ideal hazard. It is often impossible to play the ball out of them, and still more often unwise to make the attempt without a suit of armour, while the local rule, to be found on some courses, that the ball may or even must be lifted and dropped under a penalty is thoroughly unsatisfactory.

If, however, whins are from their nature a bad hazard, they have nevertheless very distinguished sanction. They are to be found on links of undoubted eminence, and were found on many more till they were literally hacked and hewed out of existence by the niblick shots of their infuriated victims. Moreover, say what we will, they are rather entertaining, and the very fact that a serious error will almost ruin us gives a poignancy which is lacking in any but the most desperate of sand-pits; we trifle pleasurably with our terrors and snatch a fearful joy. Certainly there is a great deal of amusement to be extracted from the Northwood whins, and our achievements or disasters among them are those that remain graven on the memory. Yet there is one hole in the county of ditches and hedges (such colossal hedges as those at Northwood were surely never seen before) that leaves as vivid an impression on the mind as the spikiest of gorse can leave elsewhere. This is the eighth, which rejoices, I believe, in the appropriate name of ‘Death or Glory.’ It supplies a standing refutation of the theory that a hole cannot be a good one if it is of that mongrel length known as ‘a drive and a pitch,’ or, as it has been brilliantly though indelicately expressed, ‘a kick and a spit.’

We walk to the very brink of destruction without knowing it, for there is nothing particular to mark the drive; we have but to hit moderately straight, as it appears, over a flat and somewhat muddy space towards a bunker in the distance. Then as we walk up to the ball the full horror of our situation bursts upon us. We have to pitch over a bunker straight in front of the green, but that is mere child’s play, and only the beginning of our task. On the left-hand side, eating its way into the very heart of the green, is another bunker, very deep and shored up by precipitous black timbers, and the very slightest pull on our approach shot will land us in it. The obvious thing to do would appear to be to push our approach out to the right at any cost, but that will not do either, for on a bank on the right hand side grows a perfect thicket of thorn bushes, where there is very snug lying for the ball and great scope for the niblick. It is surprising and rather humiliating to find how difficult it is to play a perfectly ordinary, straightforward mashie pitch, if only there are enough difficulties to strike terror into the soul. Were there more holes like this, the reproach implied in the term ‘a drive and a pitch’ would very soon disappear.

From Liverpool Street Station the municipal golfer of London takes his way either to Chingford, where he plays in a red coat under the auspices of the Corporation, or to Hainault Forest, where the County Council has recently made a playground for him. The best known, however, and probably the best of these Essex courses is Romford, which was for a good many years the home green of the great Braid. Indeed even now ‘J. Braid (Walton Heath)’ looks just a little unfamiliar to me; I still feel as if Romford ought to be the word inside the brackets. I recollect that almost the first time I played at Romford was in an open amateur competition, for which there was a very good and representative entry of London amateurs. I think it shows how much the general standard of amateur golf has gone up, that the winning score was 164 (84 + 80) by Mr. Mure Fergusson. Certainly Mr. Fergusson was not in his best form, but this score was good enough to win, and to win quite comfortably. There was, as far as I can remember, nothing amiss with the weather, and even making every allowance for gutty balls, it does seem extraordinary that so many people should play so supremely ill. It would be far less likely to happen to-day.

Nevertheless Romford is not a course that one would choose for the doing of a low score, for it is neither short nor easy, and is a great deal better golf than it looks. Its appearance is not particularly attractive, because in the first place it is flat, and in the second there are hedges and trees to be seen. Braid himself speaks of it in Nisbet’s Golf Year Book as a “very good park course.” The adjective may well be allowed to pass, but to call it a ‘park’ course conveys a wrong impression, to my mind at least; it is too open for the description to be quite appropriate, though I admit I can think of no better word.

If a course has really good putting greens and demands that the ball should be hit consistently far and straight, then there is a good deal to be said for it, and these virtues must be conceded to Romford. You must hit straight or you will be in a bunker, or ‘tucked up’ behind a tree; you must hit far or you will not get up to the green in the right number of strokes. The fourth and fifth are two as long holes as come consecutively on any course, except Blackheath, and the fifth is an especially good one. Better than either I like the seventh with its narrow tee-shot between the trees and that out of bounds territory that comes creeping in to catch you on the right. It is a hole that, in colloquial language, ‘wants a lot of playing.’

There are really quite a lot more fine holes—the tenth, for instance, with a tremendous carrying second over a pond, and the fourteenth, where the player is fairly hemmed in with trees and hedges, and must drive as straight as an arrow. When Braid was there he accomplished some ridiculous scores in the sixties, but ordinary people will find that anything in the seventies is quite good enough for them, and that many a hole that ought to be done in four will, in fact, be done in five or more. Especially is this the case when the going is at all heavy, for Romford can on occasions be just a little soft and muddy. It is probably, like a great many other inland courses, at its best in spring or autumn, for then the putting greens are really a pleasure to putt upon.

Now we come to the links of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club, which is very justly proud of the fact that it was instituted in 1608. That is indeed a great record, and, as we hack our ball along with a driving mashie out of a hard and flinty lie, narrowly avoiding the slaughter of a passing pedestrian, we feel that we are on hallowed ground. Moreover, though we may speak flippantly of the bad lies and the numerous live hazards on the course, the golf is good golf—far better and more searching than is to be found on many smoothly shaven lawns covered with artificial ramparts. If we desire to test our real sentiments about any particular course, it is no bad plan to imagine that we have to play a match over it against some horribly good opponent—an enemy whom, even in the moment of our most idiotic vanity, we admit to be our superior. Out of this test Blackheath comes well, for I can hardly imagine that anyone would choose to play a match with Braid, for example, over those famous seven holes if he had any other battle-ground open to him.

There are but seven holes; but of those seven, two are of a truly prodigious length, and, to make the matter worse, they are consecutive. Some idea of the length and difficulty of the course may be gleaned from the record score for the twenty-one holes, which constitute a medal round. People have been struggling round since the reign of James I., and the record stands at 95, which, according to 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.

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.

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 Royal St. George’s Golf Club at Sandwich.

For a course that is still comparatively young—the club was instituted in 1887—Sandwich has had more than its share of ups and downs. It was heralded with much blowing of trumpets and without undergoing any period of probation, burst full-fledged into fame. For some time it would have ranked only a degree below blasphemy to have hinted at any imperfection. Then came a time when impious wretches, who had the temerity to think for themselves, began to whisper that there were faults at Sandwich, that it was nothing but a driver’s course, that the whole art of golf did not consist of hitting a ball over a sandhill and then running up to the top to see what had happened on the other side. Gradually the multitude caught up the cry of the few, till nobody, who wished to put forward a claim to a critical faculty, had a good word to say for the course. Then the club began to set its house in order, lengthening here and bunkering there, not without a somewhat bitter controversy between the moderates and the progressives, until the pendulum has begun to swing back, and poor Sandwich is coming to its own again.

Throughout all this controversial warfare one fact has remained unchanged, namely, that, whatever they may think of its precise merits as a test of golf, most golfers unite in liking to play there. The humbler player frankly enjoys hitting over his sandhill largely because of the frequency with which he hits into it: the superior person may despise the sandhill and may be utterly bored with it anywhere else, but he retains a sneaking affection for it at Sandwich. It attracts him in spite of himself and his, as some people think them, tedious views.

Sandwich has a charm that belongs to itself, and I frankly own myself under the spell. The long strip of turf on the way to the seventh hole, that stretches between the sandhills and the sea; a fine spring day, with the larks singing as they seem to sing nowhere else; the sun shining on the waters of Pegwell Bay and lighting up the white cliffs in the distance; this is as nearly my idea of Heaven as is to be attained on any earthly links. “Confound their politics,” one feels disposed to cry, “frustrate their knavish tricks! Why do they want to alter this adorable place? I know they are perfectly right, and I have even agreed with them that this is a blind shot and that an indefensibly bad hole, but what does it all matter? This is perfect bliss.” Of course Sandwich is capable of improvement, and will doubtless be improved; whatever happens, the larks will continue to twitter, the sun will still be shining on Pegwell Bay: the charm can never be gone. It is at any rate very delightful now, and so let us go and play the first hole and enjoy ourselves without being too desperately critical.

One great characteristic—I think it is a beauty—of Sandwich is the extraordinary solitude that surrounds the individual player. We wind about in the dells and hollows among the great hills, alone in the midst of a multitude, and hardly ever realize that there are others playing on the links until we meet them at luncheon. Thus, on the first tee, we may catch a glimpse of somebody playing the last hole, and another couple disappearing over the brow to the second, and that is all; the rest is sandhills and solitude.

And now we must positively cease from our reflections and get off that first tee, with a fine raking shot that shall carry us over the insidious and fatal little hollow called the ‘kitchen.’ If we are clear of it, another good shot will take us home over a deep cross-bunker on to the green, big, smooth, and beautiful, as are all the greens at Sandwich. At the second we have a bunker to carry from the tee—it was sometimes a terrible carry for a gutty—and then a pitch on to a plateau green, the sides whereof slope down steeply into hollows on either side. This shot was once a great bone of contention, and in truth success was formerly somewhat a matter of luck, for the ball pitched on a hog’s back and kicked sometimes straight on to the hole and sometimes to the right or left. Now, however, the hog’s back has been smoothed and flattened, and if we play the proper shot we shall get a four to hearten us up for the drive over the Sahara.

When a name clings to a hole we may be sure that there is something in that hole to stir the pulse, and in fact there are few more absolute joys than a perfectly hit shot that carries the heaving waste of sand which confronts us on the third tee. The shot is a blind one, and we have not the supreme felicity of seeing the ball pitch and run down into the valley to nestle by the flag. We see it for a long time, however, soaring and swooping over the desert, and, when it finally disappears, we have a shrewd notion as to its fate. If the wind be fresh against us, we must play away to the right for safety, and the glorious enjoyment of the hole is gone, but even so a good shot will be repaid, and every yard that we can go to the left may make the difference between a difficult and an easy second.

On the very next tee another bunker of terrible aspect lies before us, this time a towering mountain of sand, and the ball is soon out of sight. However, at the second shot we get a good view of the green, away in the distance perched up on a plateau hard up against a fence. There is rough to the right and a bunker almost in the line to the left, but a good shot will carry it, and, after the ball has vanished for a moment, it will reappear, trickling gently along the plateau to the hole side; it is really a grand two-shot hole.

At the fifth the sandhills begin to close in upon us, but a fair straight drive should land the ball safely in the valley; this hole is now in the melting pot, and is being transformed from a three into a four. We will, therefore, avoid a painful controversy and tee our ball before the famous ‘Maiden.’ Few bunkers have a more infamous reputation than this Maiden, but the new-comer to the Sandwich of to-day will think that she has done little to deserve it. There stands the Maiden, steep, sandy, and terrible, with her face scarred and seamed with black timbers, but alas! we have no longer to drive over her crown: we hardly do more than skirt the fringe of her garment. In old days the tee was right beneath the highest pinnacle, and sheer terror made the shot formidable, but the tee-shots to the fifth endangered the lives of those driving to the sixth, and the tee had to be put far away to the right. The present Maiden is but a shadow of its old self, and the splendour of it has in a great measure departed.

My pen has run away with me over the first six holes, as I knew it would, and there still remain twelve more holes to play. ‘Hades’ will, no doubt, deserve its name if we top our tee-shot, though otherwise it is a reasonably easy three, but the ninth is in reality a far more formidable affair. The hole will doubtless be called the ‘Corsets’ for ever, but the second of these two famous bunkers now plays but an inconsiderable part, for the reformers have moved the green far on and away to the left and, it must be admitted, have made a good hole out of a very bad one.

We may still drive into the first Corset, however, and if we do, Heaven help us! We shall be playing a nightmare game of racquets against its unflinching sides, and the other man will win the hole.

With the turn at Sandwich the nature of the course begins to alter, and in place of doing threes—or perchance sevens—among the hills, we shall be travelling over the flatter ground in a series of steady fives, with, let us hope, an occasional four. There are plenty of good holes—better, perhaps, than some on the way out—but they do not make the same appeal to the imagination, nor are they so characteristic. One, at least, deserves a special word of mention, the fourteenth, or ‘Suez Canal,’ where many and many a second shot has found a watery grave. Those who love the hopes and fears of a lucky-bag will enjoy the seventeenth, where the hole lies in a deep dell with sharply sloping sides. Man can direct the ball into the dell, but only Providence can decide its subsequent fate, and whether it will lie stone dead or a round dozen of yards away is a matter of chance. There is no chance about the last hole, where we must hit two good, long, straight shots; it is a fine finish, and will leave us with happy recollections as we take our way to one or other of the neighbouring courses. We are in the midst of a perfect tangle of courses, since within easy reach are Deal, Prince’s, Kingsdown, and St. Augustine’s, at Ebbsfleet.

The Deal course is little more than a stone’s throw away from Sandwich. It is the same kind of country, the same, or very nearly the same, kind of turf, and yet the general impression produced by it is quite different.

There is this difference to begin with, that it is less remote and solitary. The club-house stands on a high road and the outskirts of the town come creeping out to the edge of the links. Men, women and children, butchers’ and bakers’ carts pass and re-pass along the road: there are live creatures to be seen engaged in other avocations than golfing, and, altogether, as compared with Sandwich, the scene is one of business and bustle. The links themselves are more open: one might almost say more bleak of aspect; there are not so many little secret hollows and valleys between the hills; Deal is altogether less snug (I can think of no better word) than Sandwich.

To say this is to make no comparison of the merits of the two courses, which is an unnecessary and invidious thing to do. It is quite enough to say that the golf at Deal is very good indeed—fine, straight-ahead, long-hitting golf, wherein the fives are likely to be many and the fours few. There are those that contend that it is almost superhumanly difficult, but unless there be a high wind, I think that they exaggerate a little. The difficulty lies in hitting far enough, and not so much in the intrinsic terrors of the holes. If we can hit far enough to carry the hummocky country and attain the region of good lies: if, in short, we are long drivers, we need fear no particularly subtle devilry, but the driving has to be something more than merely decent.