Hello, and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison and today's episode is brought to you by rap Sodo. So let's talk about the rap Sodo Mobile Launch Monitor. This thing represents a major evolution in personal launch monitors. It's very portable. The case is about the size of your rangefinder case and you can take it with you to the driving range, connect it to your smartphone, and it provides instant data about your shot distance, clubhead, speed,
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Rapsodo Mobile Launch Monitor. So go to rapsodo dot com. That's r ap sd dot com, slash Frida Egg, use the code Frida Egg at checkout and get pro level launch data in the palm of your hand. I think I need to do a bit more of a fleshed out intro here than we usually do. So Bob Crosby, my guest today, is a golf historian currently working on a book about John Lowe. Lowe was one of the most influential figures in golf from the eighteen nineties to
the nineteen twenties. He was a writer, a golf course designer, a golf course critic, and a major force on the RNA rules Committee. He was basically everywhere. And Bob has actually been on this podcast before to discuss John Lowe.
We did an episode towards the end of twenty nineteen, and then another one that was part of the History of the golf Ball series that we did last year, and so if you've listened to those episodes, you'll know that what makes Bob's work about John low so great is that he gives a sense of not only who low was and what he did, but also of the overall picture of the debates around golf in that period, debates about rules, about technology, and about golf courses. And
we're still essentially having the same debates today. So I thought Bob would be a great person to talk to about the early history of royal Saint George's Golf Club, which, as you probably know, is going to host the twenty twenty one Open Championship next week. Early in its life, in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, Royal Saint George's looked a lot different than it does now, and it was pretty controversial. The course became part of
these intense golf world debates that Bob Crosby writes about. Now, neither Bob nor I has looked super closely into the architectural history of the course. We know the basics, but I'm sure you could find a more detailed account of that elsewhere. Our basic intention here was to each of us do a little research on our own, then come together and discuss it. So this is really kind of a collaboration between me and Bob more than an interview.
We just wanted to team up and tell a story about Royal Saint George's in its early days, talk about where the course started, how it was truly a product of its time, and then why it evolved into what it is today. All Right, let's get to it. Here's Bob Crosby and me on Royal Saint George's. I miss a green.
For example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball in a fried egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida egg Frida egg, Brian egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course.
The original architect behind Royal Saint George's was a gentleman by the name of doctor Laidlaw Purvis. Bob, could you tell me what you know about Purvis?
Purvis was a prominent doctor in London. I want to say he was an i ear nose and throat doctor who made some breakthroughs and treatments of various kinds. Purbos grew up in Scotland and learned to play golf in Scotland, and he was a fairly accomplished golfer. From his home base in London, he decided to build his own golf course, formed the Royal Saint George's Club, and part of what he wanted to do there was a very distinct idea about how hazards on a golf course ought to work,
and that's what he built there. He built one of the early and one of the most classic Victorian golf courses in the world at the time, although there were others that were to a lesser degree quote Victorian, but Royalt George has always stood out among everyone at the time, as at least in its early iterations, as a classic Victorian golf course for a lot of reasons. One was the prevalence of cross hazards. Some of those were water,
some were most rabunkers, some were just rough areas. But it was thought to be at the time one of the most challenging golf courses in the world.
And a lot of people will be surprised to hear that, given the current form of the course doesn't look much like how it's described early in its life. It was built in eighteen eighty seven, eighteen eighty eight, and it evolved tremendously over the next forty years or so, and
then indeed after that. But before we get into some of the specifics of Royal Saint George's architectural history, which is very interesting when you say Victorian golf architecture, when you talk about the Victorian kind of philosophy of golf course design, what generally do you mean.
The theory of Victorian golf architecture was a well articulated, sophisticated theory of how a golf course ought to be designed. I think the clearest expression of that was made by Horace Hutchinson. It was in eighteen ninety in one of the Golfing annuals. The key concept in Victorian golf architecture is whole distance. The notion is that holes should be built at such a distance that it requires two well
executed shots. In the case of what we would call to day par fours, it would take two well executed shots to get to the green. If you didn't execute either one of those shots well, you would not be able to reach the green. Hence the importance of distance. The problem they had to deal with, though, was before fairways were irrigated, people could hit top shots that would roll out as far as a good shot and they could reach the green even though one of their shy
was terrible. So the solution that they came up with was cross hazards to catch top shots. And that was really the genesis of the proliferation. And I'm using proliferation understates how often cross hazards were used in Victorian golf courses. But that's where they came from. On the flip side of that is that any well hit ball, more or less straight would engage no hazards whatsoever. Fairways were very wide.
There were very few wing bunkers around greens, on the theory that all good shots should be warded and all bad shots should be punished. Bunkers around greens were set away from the greens, sometimes twenty thirty yards, on the theory that a good shot should have at least come close to the green and should be left alone. A bad shot that misses the green by some wide margin ought to be stuck in a bunker. It's the theory
of golf architecture that's bathed in concerns about equity. Every shot deserves a certain sort of outcome depending on the quality of the shot. That was the theory that Hutchinson laid out. It's one that was followed by with remarkable
amount of unanimity by everybody at the time. Literally thousands of golf courses were built, mostly in England but also in America during the eighteen nineties and into the first decade of the twentieth century following those precepts, and that it was so convincing to so many people for so long is a testament to the influence of a Victorian moralistic worldview. In other words, every aspect of your life in Victorian England had a moral component, and golf was
no exception. All shots in golf, good or bad, should deserve their outcomes. It's a theory of golf architecture that actually still has many adherents. It hasn't entirely gone away. Oakmont was built as a Victorian golf course and it still is. I mean, the whole notion that any bad shot, phones would say deserves eternal punishment is a very Victorian idea. I would note in passing that Oakmond is one of the few great courses in America that has had no progeny.
For that reason, I suspect, But yes, it was the theory of golf architecture that was very much of its age, of its time.
So to give a more specific idea of what this might have looked like when someone thought through the principles of Victorian golf architecture point by point, we actually have a portion of an article from Laidlaw Purvis, the designer of Royal Saint George's from I believe eighteen ninety and he gives fourteen design principles. I won't read all of them, but I'll go to a couple of them just to give an idea of how kind of far he pushed this philosophy. So Umber five is that holes should be
one or more drives in length. This means there are no short par threes, as we call them now. In other words, the shortest holes should be as long as a good driver drives the ball.
A critical piece of the theory, the groundwork on which the rest of the theory is built, that you need to hit full shots well.
And furthermore, I get the sense and correct me if I'm wrong that there are a few holes at the original Royal St. George's that were one drive in length, and at that time that would have been what you know, one hundred and seventy one hundred and eighty yards or something like that. But Purvis seems to have gone to an effort to make sure that there weren't many holes where a good player would drive the ball well and
then have a short approach. He was trying to find holes where you would drive the ball well and then your approach would be another drive. Basically, another long shot, And so he was trying to find lengths of holes where if it wasn't one drive, then it was two drives, and if it wasn't two drives, then it was three drives. He wasn't looking for those in between distances.
A critical component of Victorian golf architecture was exactly that, multiples of full shots on various holes. And let me just add it occurred to me when I was doing some work on this, well, well, if that was true, why did they like Saint Andrews so much? And it turns out the reason they liked Saint Andrews so much is they thought it was among the links courses, the one that had the most holes of the correct distance.
Right.
It wasn't the funky bunkers on the road hole, it wasn't Strathbunker, it wasn't all the things we now love about Saint Andrews. It was that the whole links, with some exceptions, were the right length. That's why it was a great golf course.
And it was long for the day, it was the longest.
It was longest of all the links courses in the open road of at the time. Yeah.
Yeah, if you see Horace Hutchinson right out Saint Andrews in the early eighteen nineties in his book called Famous British Links. It goes by a few different titles and went through a few different editions, but it's a book that's available on Google Books. Anybody can read it. That is the way, That is exactly the way that he talks about Saint Andrews. This is a nice long course.
You know, you have to hit two full drives to get to most of the holes, and you know, more full drives to get to some of the other holes. And he's just noticing things about the old course that we no longer notice or think are important. Of course, things have changed because of technology. But his objection to the old course in that book, in fact, is all what he calls the banks and brays, in other words, the undulations of the course, which is one of those
things now that we love about it. And so it is. The Links courses were their models, but for totally different reasons.
Exactly, yeah, exactly. I mean you read those pages and you start yelling at Horace. You say, Horace, you're missing the best part of this golf course. What do you think.
Yes, we mentioned Horace Hutchinson a few times. Maybe we should maybe we should explain briefly who he is.
Horace Horace Hutchinson was one of the major figures in golf in the last couple decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. He was a prominent golfer, but he wrote prolifically and was one of the spokesman for Victorian type golf architecture. But he wrote on all sorts of topics, and he appeared frequently in magazines and
wrote several books. Interesting speaking of Victorian architecture, he wrote a book called The Golfer's Progress, which was based on The Pilgrim's Progress, which was the most popular book in the nineteenth century other than the Bible. And it's the story of a fellow who goes through various tribulations to reach golf Mecca. Not unlike the Pilgrim's Progress, where I think his name is Silas goes through various tests to
reach a higher level of virtue in Christianity. I mean, it's just imbued with religious concepts, and Victorian golf architecture is also is similarly imbued.
Yeah, makes it makes golf in a game a moralistic.
Enterprise, deeply moralistic.
Yess So a few other excerpts from Laylaw Purvis's design principles. He goes on to say that safe lies should be obtainable by all classes of drivers, but all should have hazards to negotiate to obtain these lies. And when he says all, he means every time you get a good lie, you should have to negotiate a hazard. You're getting the sense I think here of how repetitious these courses could be.
You know, there are certain standard lengths, and every shot should be subject to many of the same hazards and challenges. There should be a hazard. This is number eight. There should be a hazard from every tee, the carrying of which gives an advantage cross bunkers.
Cross bunkers. Every shot needs to be an airborne, presumably well hit shot to carry the cross bunkers. Part though, of the theory of Victorian architecture is that if you do that, you're in pretty good shape. You've got a wide open fairway, fairly flat terrain, and you should have you know, obviously you're in a good position to hit your next quote full shot. John Lowe had a great description of those golf courses. He called them gardens of inaccuracy.
In other words, if you could carry the bunkers, you could hit it pretty much anywhere. The fairways on those courses were typically extremely wide. I'm talking sixty to ninety yards wide in a lot of cases. But the key test for everybody was whole length number one and number to carry the bunkers and if you or the hazards sometimes it was water. If you could do those two things, you really shouldn't engage the golf course that much. It was just a matter of executing shots.
Yeah. And one of the things that I think we're starting to get close to right here in this philosophy is how easy these courses suddenly become for good players. Right if you're a player who's able to get the ball lofted, then you know these courses might become somewhat boring.
They commit what we today consider the high send of golf architecture, which is their easiest for the good player, and they're the hardest for the bad player. Part of the revolution of strategic golf architecture, maybe fifteen or so years later, is they reverse that that good architecture should be the most challenging for the better players, and should be easier for weaker players if they so elect to play the golf course, you know, in a conservative way.
So, just to give a couple of more samples from these design principles, Number ten is when any hazard is carried again, lies should be obtained again. You see this kind of mechanistic. If you carry the hazard, you should get a good lie. There's a perfect sort of rigid fairness to every shot. Number twelve is there should be a bunker in front of every green which cannot be avoided without the loss of distance and risk in front of every green.
It yes, I mean we chuckled, and I think he lived up to the motto. But I would let me just note that the that the original maidenhole the sixth in its original iteration. It's all gone now, But in the original iteration you had to carry a thirty or forty foot dune. This is a part three thirty to forty foot dune. Beyond that was a slit bunker. So he lived up to his motto. This is this is a green that although you had to carry a sixty ft forty foot dune, you still had to carry a
bunker in front of the green. It was a terrifying hole. You can still get a sense of it by going at to real Saint George's and the angle of the shot now is different, but you can sort of get a feel for what the way it used to have been.
Basically, you can stand in the middle of the fifth fair way right exactly and looked toward where the sixth green currently is. Right you go straight over the tallest dune in that area of the course and that's what the Maiden Hole used to be. And it was a world famous hole, but it only lasted for twenty years about.
Can I give you a quick story about the origins of the name. Absolutely, the name was was got from a medieval torture device called the iron maiden, and it was a device that they put on people's heads, I think, and they would basically ratchet it down until it got tighter and tighter and tighter, and you told whatever you are confessed, whatever religious sin you needed to confess. But it was it was a medieval torture.
Device, and so that was the that was the tended effect of the golf.
Hole, and it was good.
The golf course was meant to be a torture TSK yes, right, and there were a number in the original Royal Saint George's there were a number of other one shot holes, these one drive holes right around one hundred and eighty to two hundred yards that carried these big hazards dunes or big waste areas and were blind from the tee, and all of those have been changed or eliminated in the current version of the course.
There was a Sahara bunker that's gone. There's a big bunker. Then the third or fourth hole you still have to carry.
The fourth hole, there's a big bunker you have to carry off the tee. The third hole was used to be the Sahara hole. That's no longer.
That's no longer there. And then you still have to carry there's a par five in the back what is it, fifteen fourteen the Suez you have to carry, which is basically a muddy creek in front of the green.
Right.
But most of most eighty five percent of them were gone.
So there's some vestiges of those old carry hazards, but they're not really a big part of the course anymore. And they were certainly a huge part of the course early on, and a reason why it was respected and feared early on. So the final design principal number fourteen from Purvis kind of sums up a lot of it.
He says, a typical hole is one having a hazard from the tee requiring a fair shot to carry it, a hazard for the shot through the green, the carrying of which hazard makes the player, and a drive into the putting green carrying the hazard in front of it. Where each of these shots is properly played, a good lie should be obtained. That's pretty much it. A carry hazard off the tee, a carry hazard on the approach. If you make the carry, you should have a good outcome.
Whether the original Royal Saint George's really lived up to this, I don't know. We can talk about that. I think the wildness of the terrain sort of got in the way of these principles being perfectly embodied by the course. But certainly there was an attempt to put these hazards in the way of players on a consistent I have.
Seen some drawings of what must have been close to the original golf course, and it did live up to those ideas. It was just replete with crossbunkers that just lacerated the golf course. All over the place. Now, all those they tended to be tamed down. It must have been a miserable golf course for a bogie golfer to play, who literally or almost literally every hole would have feared and trembled about being able to carry whatever the drive cross hazard was, and whatever the cross hazard was in
front of the green. It couldn't have been fun to play for a weaker golfer.
So, now that we've gotten an idea of the Victorian philosophy of golf architecture, how does this philosophy contrast with that of John Lowe and the strategic school? Could you get just give me a kind of a primer for what the strategic school is in opposition to the Victorian mindset.
Let me come at that with a story about the old course in circa nineteen well eighteen ninety nine, and then they added some bunkers, and then they added more bunkers in nineteen oh four over the winner of four to five. John Lowe was involved in both of those. He was on the rules committee at the time and also for part of that time on the Green committee.
There were proposals at the time because a lot of the gorse to the right side of the outward nine had been trampled down and died, and which made the right side of the outgoing holes very, very wide. So there was a feeling at the time that we need they needed to narrow those holes. One of the proposals was classically Victorian, let's just build a lot of cross bunkers, and there were a lot of people that thought, well,
of course, that's what we do. I like to think, although the record is spotty, I like to think that my man low was the one that stood in front of that train and said, no, we're going to build some bunkers on the sides of those holes, exactly where you would want a perfect drive to land. And that's what they did. Over the course of two rounds of
changes in nineteen hundred and then later No. Four oh five, they built fifteen or sixteen new bunkers which were still there along the right side of the outward holes, mostly on two, three and four. They were extraordinarily controversial. First of all, they weren't cross bunkers, and second, as I mentioned the second ago, they were right where you wanted to hit you drive, What were you thinking? What were
you thinking? And Lowe's response was well, a good player will skirt the bunkers, but that's the best way into the green, and so he'll take that risk. If he pulls it off, great, If he doesn't, he's going to be hammered. But the whole idea of building cross hazards around there was it apparently was rejected out of hand. I didn't I don't know of any discussion of the topic. But it relates back to Lowe's idea that the Victorian golf courses were gardens of inaccuracy and he wanted to
present a challenges to the better golfer. And I think he worked out in a sort of a stumbling way, the idea that you know, we want to challenge the better golfer, We're going to do that on the old course.
He carried that over to Woking, which was his home course in London, and presto Chainjo, his friend Harry Colet sees what's going on, likes it, a bunch of other younger architects, and a new school of architecture was born, and with remarkable rapidity, I mean remarkable rapidity, Victorian ideas about how a golf course ought to be designed disappear with almost as much rapidity, the courses themselves start to disappear.
They start to be rebuilt fairly quickly. Now, part of that was the Haskell ball had come along, which required virtually every course in Britain to be lengthened. But that alone wouldn't explain why they redesigned and repurposed bunkers and other hazards. I mean, there was a complete change in how they looked, how those courses looked, and how they played. And it wasn't just a matter of moving teas back. It was a whole new system of bunkering and other hazards.
And that had to do with low cult and other younger Edwardians revolting as other Edwardians were in other contexts against the moralistic universe of their Victorian forefathers.
To give an idea of how quickly this shift you're talking about happened, the Haskell ball was introduced in the early nineteen hundreds and it went much farther than the previous got a purch a ball much farther, instantly changed how the game of golf was played. I believe it was around nineteen oh three nineteen oh four that the powers that be in the game really started realizing what was happening, and the courses would need to be changed.
A little earlier than that, but go ahead.
A little earlier. Yeah, so what would be what would be a better date?
The gut approach of ball? I mean, excuse me. The haskeball was introduced in late to Britain. At least it came to America earlier because it was an American invention. But it was introduced in Britain first in late nineteen oh one. Right, Okay, The RNA indicates early on it's in the next year, says we're going to we have to do something about this is too long, and then they back off in nineteen oh three. But by nineteen oh three oh four, the the debates are ferocious about
the ball. You're generally right in a sense that by three oh four, when it's clear the RNA is not going to ban it, and they completely chickened out on that, everybody said, well that we've got to do something about our golf courses.
And so that's why you see golf courses starting to change around nineteen oh four, nineteen oh five, nineteen oh six, and through the end of the decade. And it seems like when it came time to make these course changes, not only were they lengthened, but many of the courses were changed philosophically. The old cross hazards were taken away and strategic bunkering, sometimes done by the likes of Harry Colt,
was installed. You see this at many many courses in England and Scotland, and it is a remarkable thing because it was just in again the early nineteen hundreds that John Lowe went to Woking and made those changes to the holes there that kind of transformed their strategic character, and that idea just proved to be very contagious.
Quick story if I can sure. Woking was designed originally by Willie Dunn as a classic Victorian golf course replete with cross hazards everywhere. Lowe and Stuart Payton, his buddy at Woking, said this isn't working. They reposition a lot of bunkers. They build a famous center line bunker on the fourth hole. Huge controversy among the members. They can't believe that he's putting bunkers where people wanted to put
their best drives. Huge controversy. Tom Simpson is at the time a young solicitor in London, and drives out to Woking to see where all the fuss is about, walks around the golf course with a couple of members who expressed their outrage about the work that Low had done at Woking, goes back and decides that day that golf architecture is so interesting. I want to become a golf architect.
Leaves his legal practice and starts out as in the business of designing golf courses because of what he took to be a really interesting intellectual breakthrough at Woking.
And became one of the most interesting architects and writers of the era. I think that Americans underrate Tom Simpson or don't know enough about Tom Simpson. I believe our friends in Britain and Europe know more about him. But he was a fascinating and brilliant.
Figure, fascinating figure, he really got it and I couldn't agree more. He didn't do any courses in the States, which is part of the problem, right, And he didn't do actually all that many courses in Britain. He did a lot more in France and in Europe. More. Fontain, by the way, is the best day of golf anyone
could possibly ask for. His best course in France. But Tom Simpson got it early on, and not only did he get it, he decided to change his life almost on the spot when he saw what was going on at Woking.
All right, so we've got a sense of where the philosophy of golf architecture ends up going in the first decade of the twentieth century. But going back for a minute to the original iteration of Royal Saint George's, which was built in the late eighteen eighties, you know this is there are so many interesting things about this course. I've been looking into it a little bit over the past few days, and so I'm by no means an
expert on its early history. I'm sure the club histories do a better job of accounting for how the course evolved in its early decades. But you've talked a little bit about it. The early maps indicate that this was very much an attempt to embody the Victorian philosophy of golf course design. You had these carry hazards, you had these standard whole lengths, and it was all meant to be a test of golf in the way that the Victorians thought tests of golf should be. But I wanted
to add one more wrinkle here. It's something I discovered in an article from the Golfing Annual. Here's how an anonymous author describes Royal Saint George's in its very early days. Right this the course was just a year or two old at this point. This author says, a tall red flag is placed at the spot beyond which a scratch player ought to play his tee shot and shows the line of the bunker which should be carried from the
tee by a well struck ball. For those who doubt their ability to carry the tea bunkers, a tall blue flag shows the spot for which the ball should be played. To arrive at this the refuge, a hazard must be negotiated, and generally another hazard must be crossed from it. Okay, so there's this little place that they called the refuge. If you can't make the carry off the tee, go
ahead and play for the refuge. But it's kind of tricky to get there, and then you have another hazard to carry from the refuge, and there's a tall blue flag that marks the spot. There By, carrying the scratch bunker from the tee, a great advantage is gained, as in most instances, the player who has sought the refuge cannot reach the green in the same number of strokes
as he who has successfully negotiated the far bunker. Okay, so we've got the red flag in the in the ideal landing zone, we've got the blue flag marking the refuge for the cowardly players, and then the putting greens are shown in all cases by tall white flags and the holes by short ones of the same color. And so once again you have a tall white flag marking the spot where the green is, and then you have
the regular flag for the hole. So you're I'm just imagining this as a kind of grid right where you have these different points and literally you're being shown by flags where to play your ball. It doesn't get much more prescriptive than that.
You don't see that anymore, and people would almost laugh at it, I suppose, but that was I didn't know. That's new to me. But that was totally in character
for Purvis. He was a very very strong character. Saw at the same time he was writing that to establish a British Golf Union that would usurp the RNA's role in rules administration, and it would be basically a golf union that he or courses in England would control extremely powerful force in the game that it took the Scots almost a decade or more to figure out how to
respond to to shift the subject slightly. There was this huge split between the conservative Scottish golfing contingent and the English progressives, and Purpos was one of those progressives, which, I have a better way to play golf. The Scottish game is sort of a primitive, provincial game. We here in England know better and we're going to show you how to do it.
And when we say a Scottish conservative golfer, maybe traditionalist would be the word. Whereas the Victorian English of the period, you know, in all domains of society, we're very interested in progress, very future oriented as opposed to past oriented. Right, there was a real idea that they were going to perfect society, that it was possible to perfect society, and
they were currently engaged in that project. And this sense, you know, suffused a lot of society at the time, and it certainly made its way into golf, where this group of Victorian primarily English golfers were saying, we can figure out a way to perfect this game, we can make progress. You know, we're smarter than people were in the past, and so we're going to make it better.
And Purvis was really trying that at Royal Saint George's with these innovations with the flags and just trying to make the game perfect.
To understand Purvis is to just to get a window on the Victorian mindset in the sense that he brought to golf the same zeal Victorian reformers brought to cleaning up the sanitation systems in London and straightening old medieval streets in Lon, in building hospitals and establishing police forces, in other words, in rationalizing what had been a sort of a helter skelter mess in London and in other cities in England at the time. They brought that same
zeal to golf. They were going to straighten it out, they were going to fix it, and they knew how to fix it. There's an underlying hint that I won't get into of. They used similar arguments to justify some of the English imperialism at the time. We're going to bring civilization to India or Ireland or Kenya or whatever. And they viewed Scotland as a backwater in the same sense we're going to fix your sport, and they had no doubt they could do it right. None.
That said, there were definitely some figures in this next generation of golfers who pushed back against Victorian golfers who liked Royal Saint George's. Bernard Darwin was particularly affectionate of the course, and I think that he recognized its flaws while at the same time, in spite of himself enjoying playing there. And here's what he says about it in his book, The Golf Courses of the British os, which is the greatest I think is the greatest golf travel
book ever. Would you agree with that?
It's wonderful. It repays rereading.
Go ahead, so he says, this is nineteen ten, right, this is nineteen ten. Yeah, so this is moving forward a good bit. We're kind of going backwards and forwards in time. Here he says, 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 sand hills 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 indefensively bad hole. But what does it 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. I think that's a wonderful description
of loving a course that you know is flawed. And it seems that what Darwin loved about Royal Saint George's was the piece of land, which is an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of lynx Land, and it strikes me that Purvis was trying to make this kind of mechanical course, this perfectly fair course, but he was working with one of the most unruly pieces of land that you could find in England, right, and so it seems like the land was resisting him at every turn, and yet he chose
to put the course there. But the charm of the land and the wildness of it, and the unfairness that crazy terrain introduces to the game was always there in spite of the efforts of the designer to mute those unruly characteristics.
Yeah, I mean, there's just so much he could have done. I mean because of the land, the land he was working from, and it is just a gorgeous spot. It's whatever you feel about the golf course, A day at Sandwich is just like no other. It's just fantastic. But getting back to the Darwin piece, I've often wondered if Darwin wasn't writing to his good friend Low because Low didn't like Royal.
St George What did what did John say about Royal Saint George's.
It was only in passing and he objected to the carry features. He said it too much of that and he just didn't think it was interesting. In fact, he didn't want to have it as an open rotor course. He thought the open road of courses should be limited to what he took to be more traditional linxy type courses like Saint Andrew's. Obviously pressed week at the time, Hoylake he was a big fan of. But I wonder if Darwin wasn't sticking low in the ribs with that a little bit.
Well, it's almost like the current debate about Tory Pines. I'm not saying that Royal Saint George's is really anything like Tory Pines, but the structure of the debate is really similar, where there's a group of people who insist on pointing out the design shortcomings of Tory Pines. But then there's another group that comes back and say and says, yeah, okay, like it's not the best design course in the world, But how about that piece of land, What a wonderful
piece of land, what a wonderful place to be. And then also how about the great championships that have been played there. They've always been dramatic and fun to watch, and so what are we complaining about? And it was so similar with Royal Saint George's where the Open Championships that were played there were generally, especially the first one in eighteen ninety four, were very well regarded. We're thought to be good championships where a good test of golf
was administered. And then furthermore, what a great place to spend an afternoon or an evening or a morning. It is so similar in so many ways to how we talk about Tory Pines now.
Yeah, lunch at Ross Saint George's after a morning round and then you're heading off for an afternoon round is just wonderful, just wonderful.
What are your thoughts about the course as it stands today.
I played it eight nine years ago, so my memory is somewhat dimm but I loved it. A great time there, it was it was a beautiful day. I didn't play particularly well, but it didn't matter. On great courses, how you play is pretty much irrelevant. I think it's going to be a great test.
Did you see any lingering indications of the course's origins as this kind of ultimate test case for Victorian design or has that pretty much gone away from the course?
You know, the only the only part I saw that jump out of me was the Suez Canal hole. Carrying that water, that little body of water matters on your second shot in the par five, you know the current maiden, you still have to carry a little hole, a little hill. I mean I enjoyed the course at the time. To be honest with you, I didn't appreciate its significance in the history of golf architecture, and I wasn't paying attention as I probably should have been.
Well, it is this sort of interesting example of a course that started firmly rooted, maybe as firmly rooted as it possibly could have been, in one philosophy of golf architecture, and eventually gradually over the years, got brought back to another philosophy. You know, it just shows how debates about golf course architecture worked in that period, Right, There was a real give and take. People were very invested in arguing about golf course architecture and the consequences of it
of that debate were pretty easy to see. Changes were made to these courses, and so there were there were real stakes, right, and so you know who won the argument. I suppose that's too simple of a phrase to use because these arguments are ongoing, but it really mattered who was most persuasive.
It mattered to them passionately because they viewed the arguments where we ran in parallel, arguments about golf courses and argument it's about rules, really ran in parallel into the eighteen nineties, into the next, into the twentieth century. But it mattered. It mattered to them deeply because it mattered the golf course determined the kind of game golf would be, and that's why it mattered so much to them. People don't appreciate how much of the history of golf is
oppositional in that sense. It is not just a story of great champions following great champions and great rounds of golf, and all that beneath the surface were very serious arguments that articulate. Smart men took deeply seriously because they viewed their debates as instrumental in shaping the future of the game. And that's why Lowe felt so strongly about Royal Saint George's. Conversely, that's why Blaide law Purvis himself felt so strongly about
Saint George's. He was trying to make a statement about where golf ought to go, among other things, and he ran into opposition of different sorts, but that sort of opposition that's sort of the tug of war back and forth between different conceptions about golf and how it ought to be played. Ideally, it was a thread that goes all through the early years of golf. One of the biggest, most consequential events in golf that has talked about almost
never is golf's huge popularity. It's exploding popularity in England starting about eighteen eighty because the English brought to the game a different conception of how it ought to be played, and that set off a chain of arguments that went on at least into the nineteen thirties. Arguably, I think it's still going on, but the love of the game had huge consequences for how it played out over the next one hundred years.
Then the English can that they could improve the game, that they had a better idea of how golf could be played, and they're really determined efforts to bring that philosophy into being in the courses they built and in the rules that they attempted to establish, and that it seems like that created that was the seed that sort of created this lively back and forth that we see in the eighteen nineties and the early nineteen hundreds. But
certainly this is ongoing now. I mean, you know, we've talked previously about how discourse about golf has degraded since this period. You know, this was a high point of discussion of golf. Writers defended their positions eloquently, wrote about the game beautifully in a way that we just don't do anymore. But aside from the fact that the quality of the debate has declined significantly since this period, do you see this fight kind of ongoing in discussion of the game today.
I see it all the time. I think there's a modern assumption that golf is pretty much what it is, although people have trouble nailing down exactly what it is means. There is for that reason, I think a reluctance to get into debates today over foundational issues. I think in the eighteen nineties into the nineteen hundreds, that was exactly what they were arguing about, and they knew it, and they were passionate about that, and in that sense, the rules in golf architecture were sort of bound up in
the same ball of wax. I think that they're basic tensions between those progressives like Purvis and traditionalists like Low Cold and other people that favored the older Scottish game. Those tensions track through the history of the game into our time. You know, there are debates today about, for example, when a ball moves when you address it. They've changed the rule about that. That debate could have been taken out of the debates over the rules in nineteen hundred.
You know, do we do a separate factual finding about whether he intended to move it? Or do we just if you've addressed the ball. There's the penalty that sort of thing. Low would have been on the side the traditionalist side, purpose would have been on the side of the list of a factual finding about intent. They play out in golf architecture in similar ways, and arguments about what makes for a good hole what makes for a
bad hole. Tom Doak stirred that pot with his Confidential Guide to Golf Courses ten or fifteen or twenty years ago. That pot is still being stirred in golf sites like Golf Love Atlas and other places, so they're still going on. I mean, I think you can argue that the beginnings of modern golf can be traced to three events that happened over about eighteen months. One was the promulgation of the first uniform code by the RNA after a big fight over whether we should have a British Golf union.
That happened in late eighteen ninety nine, essentially nineteen hundred. John Lowe a year later articulates for the first time the basic principles of strategic golf architecture and sets off a firestorm. Three months later, the Haskell ball appears in Britain and that sets up a firestorm. Arguably all three of those debates, rules, golf, architecture and balls, those debates are still going on. They've changed character, they're different vocabularies,
different players, some more articulate than others. But the basic issues still haunt the game, I don't know, haunts the right word, are still at the heart of the game. But over that remarkable eighteen month two year period, everything falls into place that sets up the debates we've had since, and it was just well. Saint George's was part of that. He was part of the architecture debate, but Purbos was at the time actually more famous for his views on
the rules. He had a very strict sort of equity, reasonable rules, simple rules based on a couple of equitable ideas, and ran headlong into RNA on that and then the ball. So it was a remarkably fertile moment in the game that historians I don't think have fully appreciated because they tend to get focused on Harry Varden's great victories. Here they are Jade Taylors or whatever it was, and it was deeply opposition, deeply they fought like cats and dogs.
I think that's a good place to finish up. Bob, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it and hope you enjoy that open.
Thanks, delightful, thank you.
Before we go, I want to give a quick shout out to Lee Patterson, who tracked down some of the primary sources that Bob Crosby and I mentioned in this episode. Lee finds a lot of cool golf related stuff in old newspapers and magazines, so I'd recommend giving him a
follow on Twitter at Golf Chronicle. One more thing to accompany this episode, we made a post on the Friday dot com that features a variety of materials on Royal Saint George's We've got vintage photos, We've got excerpts from contemporary articles, and best of all, we've got some additional thoughts from Bob about how Victorian golf architecture is often misunderstood as primitive or rudimentary, when in fact it was based on a very sophisticated theory, a very intentional theory.
As always, really interesting stuff from Bob. All right, we should be back soon with an open Championship preview podcast, so I see you then, and thanks for listening