Abstract
During the later nineteenth century golf encouraged a peculiarly ‘modern’ experience of walking. Mark Twain reportedly described golf as ‘a good walk spoiled’, but others justified the hobby because of the opportunities it offered for healthful exercise, socializing and business. Golfers followed routes which made sense only in the context of the game: paths that were not journeys from A to B, or designed as a way to enjoy the scenery. Moreover, golf courses invited golfers to follow their circuits across terrain that was often far removed from ideas of the picturesque or the pleasing prospect. Griffiths shows how the experience of walking a golf course, for women as well as men, helped to establish new patterns of leisure, land use and sociability.
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Notes
- 1.
e.g. Yale Book of Quotations (New Haven, 2006), 782; Robert Harman, Tales from Pinehurst: Stories from the Mecca of American Golf (New York, 2012); John Feinstein, A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour (Boston, New York and London, 1996), ix; James Melville Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Columbia, 2002), vii.
- 2.
Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations identifies figures such as Mark Twain and Winston Churchill as ‘quote magnets’: Fred Shapiro, ‘You Can Quote Them’, Yale Alumni Magazine, 75 (September/October 2011): http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3269/you-can-quote-them.html (accessed 26 August 2015). The Quote Investigator blog examined the origins of the comment and explodes the myth that Twain was responsible: http://www.quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk.html (accessed 26 August 2015).
- 3.
Harry Leon Wilson, The Boss of Little Arcady (Boston, 1905), 367.
- 4.
Horace Hutchinson’s comments on ‘Cricket v. Golf’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, reprinted in Leeds Mercury, 1 April 1890, 1.
- 5.
James P. Lee, Golf in America: A Practical Manual (New York, 1895), 104. He continued: ‘with the diversion, as an incident, of hitting a ball along the ground. From this point of view it lacks interest, vitality and the spirit of contest.’
- 6.
e.g. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, 2001); John K. Walton, ‘The Northern Rambler: Recreational Walking and the Popular Politics of Industrial England, from Peterloo to the 1930s’, Labour History Review, 78(3) (2013), 243–68; Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1993); Melanie Tebbutt, ‘Rambling and Manly Identity in Derbyshire’s Dark Peak’, Historical Journal, 49(4) (2006), 1125–53.
- 7.
Deborah Primrose, ‘The Brutalities of Sol and Neptune’, Hearth and Home, 216 (1895), 281.
- 8.
‘Kept in Town – A Lament’, Punch, 30 August 1890, 100.
- 9.
Early examples include W. T. Linskill, Golf (London, 1891); James Dwight, Golf: A Handbook for Beginners (Boston, [1895?]); H. S. C. Everard, Golf in Theory and Practice: Some Hints to Beginners (London, 1896); Willie Park, Jun., The Game of Golf (London, 1896); H. J. Whigham, How to Play Golf (Chicago, 1897); H. R. Sweny, Keep your Eye on the Ball and your Right Knee Stiff (Albany, 1898); Genevieve Hecker [Mrs Charles T. Stout], Golf for Women (New York, 1904).
- 10.
For example, Bernard Darwin et al, A History of Golf in Britain (London, 1952); Steve Newell, A History of Golf (Stroud, 2004); George B. Kirsch, Golf in America (Urbana and Chicago, 2009); Mark Frost, The Greatest Game Ever Played: Vardon, Ouimet and the Birth of Modern Golf (London, 2002); James R. Hansen, A Difficult Par: Robert Trent Jones Sr. and the Making of Modern Golf (New York, 2014); Kevin Cook, Tommy’s Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf’s Founding Father and Son (London, 2007).
- 11.
For social histories of golf, see Wray Vamplew, ‘Concepts of Capital: An Approach Shot to the History of the British Golf Club before 1914’, Journal of Sport History, 39(1) (2012), 299–331; John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870–1914 (Manchester, 1995); John Lowerson, ‘Golf’, in Tony Mason (ed.), Sport in Britain (Cambridge, 1989), 187–214; Jane George, ‘“Ladies First”?: Establishing a Place for Women Golfers in British Golf Clubs, 1867–1914’, Sport in History, 30(2) (2010), 288–308; Jane George, ‘“An Excellent Means of Combining Fresh Air, Exercise and Society”: Females on the Fairways, 1890–1914’, Sport in History, 29(3) (2009), 333–52; Donald M. Cameron, Social Links: The Golf Boom in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2010).
- 12.
John Lowerson, ‘Golf and the Making of Myths’, in Grant Jarvie and Graham Walker (eds), Scottish Sport in the Making of the Nation: Ninety Minute Patriots? (Leicester, London and New York, 1994), 75–90.
- 13.
Newell, History of Golf, 19.
- 14.
Where the title of a course or club is given followed by a year in brackets, this refers to the official date of its foundation.
- 15.
Studies on the history of golf in this period include Richard Holt, ‘Golf and the English Suburb: Class and Gender in a London Club, c.1890–c.1960’, Sports Historian, 18(1) (1998), 76–89; Roisín Higgins, ‘“The Hallmark of Pluperfect Respectability”: The Early Development of Golf in Irish Society’, Éire–Ireland, 48(1–2) (2013), 15–31.
- 16.
Jane George, Joyce Kay and Wray Vamplew, ‘Women to the Fore: Gender Accommodation and Resistance at the British Golf Club before 1914’, Sporting Traditions, 23(2) (2007), 79.
- 17.
Robert Clark (ed.), Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game (London, 1899), viii.
- 18.
Lee, Golf in America, 33.
- 19.
Quoted in Kirsch, Golf in America, 1.
- 20.
Bernard Darwin, Life is Sweet, Brother (London and Glasgow, 1940), 39.
- 21.
Ibid., 121.
- 22.
Holt, ‘Golf and the English Suburb’, 76–89, at 77.
- 23.
Reprinted in Clark (ed.), Golf, 223.
- 24.
A. MacKenzie, Golf Architecture: Economy in Course Construction and Green Keeping (London, 1920), 118.
- 25.
‘The Value of Cricket, Educational and Hygienic’, Lancet, 139(3590) (1892), 1378. Some medics did, on the other hand, warn against the deleterious effects of golf on psychological well-being, for causing irritation and worry which might outweigh the benefits of exercise in the fresh air: see ‘The Worrying Side of Golf’, Lancet, 173(4456) (1909), 255.
- 26.
Newell, History of Golf, 38.
- 27.
Holt, ‘Golf and the English Suburb’, 80.
- 28.
Andrew Lang, ‘Golf’s Place among Games’, Illustrated London News, 2852 (16 December 1893), 776.
- 29.
P. H. Chavasse and Farncourt Barnes, Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife [London, 1906], quoted in George, ‘“An Excellent Means”’, 333.
- 30.
As the number of women players at a club began to rise, it was common to establish a separate, shorter course for their use, generally with fewer holes to play – though some ladies-only courses also arose from the initiative of women themselves: George, Kay and Vamplew, ‘Women to the Fore’, 79–98.
- 31.
Hecker, Golf for Women, 196–7. In laying out a scheme of holes, she suggested that an ideal 18-hole course for women’s play might be 5,984 yards long (ibid., 203–4)—quite a distance to cover, given that the average length of modern courses played with modern equipment is in the range of 5,000–7,000 yards.
- 32.
Lee, Golf in America, 55.
- 33.
‘The Golfer At Home’, Cornhill Magazine (April 1867), reprinted in Clark (ed.), Golf, 180. Given the need for clothing which suited all weathers, and probably helped by the connection with Scotland, connections were often made between the demands of golf and shooting when it came to what to wear, too — though golf was always a pastime with a far wider social reach than the world of shooting parties and rural sports.
- 34.
Walter J. Travis, Practical Golf (New York and London, 1909), 153.
- 35.
Everard, Golf in Theory and Practice, 147–8.
- 36.
‘Golfer at Home’, 191.
- 37.
The Golfers’ Year-Book (London, 1905), 240.
- 38.
Lee, Golf in America, 96.
- 39.
Darwin, Life is Sweet, 133. He was recalling here the journey from London to Woking.
- 40.
Lee, Golf in America, 101.
- 41.
Horace Hutchinson (ed.), British Golf Links: A Short Account of the Leading Golf Links of the United Kingdom, with Numerous Illustrations and Portraits (London, 1897), 331.
- 42.
Ibid., 202, 153.
- 43.
J. Gordon McPherson, Golf and Golfers, Past and Present (Edinburgh and London, 1891), 61.
- 44.
Linskill, Golf, 6.
- 45.
Endorsements cited in advert for the Leather and Rubber Boot Company, Leeds: ibid., ii.
- 46.
A. H. Findlay, Wright and Ditson’s Guide to American Golf (Boston, 1897), 64.
- 47.
Neil Gordon, The Factory on the Cliff (Stroud, 2012), 11.
- 48.
‘What our Contemporaries are Saying’, Golf Illustrated, 52 (1900), 209, quoting an article in the Indianapolis Sentinel.
- 49.
Donald M. Cameron, Social Links: The Golf Boom in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2010); Roland Quinault, ‘Golf and Edwardian Politics’, in N. B. Harte and Roland Quinault (eds), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F. M. L. Thompson (Manchester, 1996), 191–210.
- 50.
In the photographs for Hutchinson (ed.), British Golf Links, only the illustration for (the rather remote) Machrihanish, on the west coast of Scotland, shows a lone player, and even he still has a caddy in attendance.
- 51.
Everard, Golf in Theory and Practice, 152.
- 52.
On the issue of employing children in this way, see Wray Vamplew, ‘Child Work or Child Labour? The Caddie Question in Edwardian Golf’ (2008): http://www.idrottsforum.org/vamplew/vamplew080423.html (accessed 26 August 2015).
- 53.
Report from the Select Committee on Commons (Inclosure [sic] and Regulation) (London, 1913), 54.
- 54.
Ibid., xiii.
- 55.
Golfers’ Year-Book 1905, 240.
- 56.
The Funny Side of Golf. From the Pages of Punch (London [1909?]), 6, 51, 71, 13.
- 57.
John Lowerson, ‘“Scottish Croquet”: The English Golf Boom, 1880–1914’, History Today, 33(5) (1983), 26.
- 58.
Park, Game of Golf, 168.
- 59.
Horace Hutchinson, Golf. A Complete History of the Game, together with Directions for Selection of Implements, the Rules, and a Glossary of Golf Terms (Philadelphia, 1900), 11.
- 60.
These approaches to landscaping were roundly criticized in Mackenzie, Golf Architecture.
- 61.
Some of the more satisfying examples are the watercolour views by Harry Rountree illustrating Bernard Darwin, The Golf Courses of the British Isles (London, 1910).
- 62.
Hutchinson (ed.), British Golf Links, 279.
- 63.
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company, Golf in California (Chicago, 1900), 14. As well as comparing the Californian courses with Scottish ones, the booklet was at least as concerned to assert their qualities when compared to those on the east coast of America.
- 64.
Mackenzie, Golf Architecture, 35.
- 65.
Hutchinson (ed.), British Golf Links, 155.
- 66.
Lee, Golf in America, 38.
- 67.
Linskill, Golf, 32–3.
- 68.
Findlay, Wright and Ditson’s Guide, 59.
- 69.
Some of the early golf clubs in the US actually overlapped with hunt clubs: see Kirsch, Golf in America, 25.
- 70.
Hutchinson (ed.), British Golf Links, 285.
- 71.
Josiah Newman, The Official Golf Guide for 1900 (Garden City, 1900), 50.
- 72.
Nisbet’s Golf Year-Book, ed. John Low (London, 1910), 397.
- 73.
‘Medal Day at St Andrews’, The Times, 5 October 1874.
- 74.
J. A. C. K., Golf in the Year 2000 or What We Are Coming To (London, 1892), 60–2, 83. The novel’s characters ponder a world still further in the future, suggesting that golf will not have been perfected ‘until you have a machine for walking round the green and swinging the club, while you sit here and manage it’.
- 75.
On the uptake of carts in the USA, see Kirsch, Golf in America, 133–5, which also quotes a comment from Golf magazine in 1962: ‘the golf car [sic] has exploded the once common belief that Americans played golf for exercise. It isn’t the exercise they enjoy, it’s the golf.’ (135).
- 76.
Popular Mechanics, 57(5) (May 1932), 801.
- 77.
There are references to golf being offered solely as a putting game in sanatoria, e.g. William Harvey, ‘Recreation in the Tuberculosis Sanatorium’, British Journal of Tuberculosis, 24(1) (1930), 13.
- 78.
cf. later literature that developed the contemplative playing of golf as a theme, e.g. Michael Murphy, Golf in the Kingdom (Harmondsworth, 1971).
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Griffiths, C.V.J. (2016). ‘A Good Walk Spoiled’? Golfers and the Experience of Landscape during the Late Nineteenth Century. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_8
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