The Great English Golf Boom

became very popular in England. This was the first time that the game had really caught on anywhere outside of Scotland. And I think it's such an interesting period because the kind of golf that was played in England ended up being the kind of golf that was played many other places. Now. Obviously, golf is a Scottish invention, but the way we play the game today owes just as much, I think, to how English people took it up in the late eighteen

hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. So let's just go straight to my interview with Michael Morrison. So briefly, Michael, when you say the Great English Golf Boom the title of your book, what are you referring to.

barely detectable for about a quarter of a century. But then in the second quarter of a century, from eighteen ninety to nineteen fourteen, that's when golf really took off in England and it surpassed the number of clubs the number of golfers that were playing golf in Scotland very very quickly into the early eighteen nineties, so very suddenly England became the country in the world where most golf was being played.

happened in England. And the boom that took place in Scotland when golf began to take off in the mid ninety teenth century was a dramatic change also, but it was driven by two quite important events that more or less coincided, and that was the invention of the gutter persho golf poll commonly assuming to be around eighteen forty eight, and about the same time the Scottish railway network was beginning to expand from just a link between Glasgow and

Edinburgh to become a genuine network covering the whole country. And in fact, the largest number of railway stations to open in any given year in the nineteenth century was eighteen forty eight in Scotland. So you had a combination of events and on the back of that we went from around a dozen golf clubs scattered around the east coast of Scotland to thirty thirty four thirty five golf

clubs in by the end of the eighteen fifties. So this was the golf taking off in Scotland, very specifically in Scotland, and I could maybe give you a very quick ills that eighteen fifty nine was one thousand miles of railway track in Scotland. There were thirty four clubs, all of them were in close proximity of a railway station. If you then look at England at exactly the same point in time, there was seven five hundred miles of

railway track in the country. Every town with the population of over seven and a half thousand had a railway station, and there was only two golf clubs in the whole country. That was Blackheath and Old Manchester. Both were formed prior to the railway age. So there was no response in terms of the two factors that drove golf to become a major feature of Scottish life and in fact to become the sport of Scotland, and the same thing didn't happen in England, so there was a substantial delay between

the two. And coming back to your original question, then, was the reason why the great boom in England is important because the characteristics of it were were so different from what happened in Scotland.

shillings a ball. When the guta persher ball, which was this wonderful material which had been discovered in tree gum in Malaysia, could simply be sort of warmed up and rolled into a bowl shape, and it didn't require a great deal of skill at all to create a golf ball, and they sold almost immediately around that time for about

one shilling. So it was a dramatic fall in the cost of the golf ball, which then to the extent that Scott's were familiar with the game, a greater number across the social classes could afford to play it.

to go and have seaside holidays. Leisure time was increasing at this point in time, affordability to take train to take railway trips to the coast became a possibility, and the population was then seeing golf being played, So there was this increasing awareness at the same time as the game was becoming more affordable. So it was a combination of these two factors which were quite significant in the takeof of golf in the mid nineteenth century.

Gullen of course, and of course Andrews. The railway networks of England and Scotland were connected together around about that same point in time, around about eighteen fifty, so for the first time English middle class people could afford and the time frame for getting from London to Edinburgh shrank from the better part of a week on a stagecoach

to ten to twelve hours on a train. So this was a part of the process of initially English people being exposed to this crazy Scottish game called golf.

was played predominantly on Link's Land, not exclusively. There were there were places where Brunsfield and Edinburgh which was basically just Meadland, and also at Perth on the North Inch again that was pasture, but predominantly and of course the best courses were on Link's Land around the coast, which was created as a combination consequence of geological factors and weather patterns that created the June land around particularly on the east side, also on the west side of Scotland.

But but but golf itself took off more on the east side and mostly on the links Land, so that that was very much a distinction, and that golf was seen to be an interesting game played on an undulating surface, with challenging weather conditions in terms of the wind. So it was it was an interesting game to play because there was many factors that were out with the golfers control, but they had to use the skill to get the

ball round and into that small hole. So Scottish golf links land English golf much less so when when the boom began, already golf was moving inland closer to where people lived rather than at the coast. So there wasn't this as I mentioned, there wasn't this strong linkage between the railways where in Scotland people would would travel to the coast to play golf much less so in England there was a preference to play golf closer to home.

Maybe they got more hooked on it and wanted to play it more often.

lynks land was quite well suited to the game. If a modern person looked at at an old Scottish links course, it might take a little while for them to recognize it as a golf course.

that would take place on the links land. It wasn't exclusively for the golfers.

So there was some interest in it in terms of the playing the game there and they it was predominantly played by expatriot Scots who had settled in London, and the club was formed in the eighteenth century somewhere around about the seventeen sixties, I think, and pretty much was expatriot Scott's perhaps with a few English friends taking getting

involved in the game. And it started out as a five hole golf course, subsequently extended to seven and then and then later two more holes in the nineteenth century. And the second club came along in eighteen eighteen, Manchester Golf Club, very small, typically no more than twelve golfers

who were members. Again, they had a small five hole course on some rough heathland just on the periphery of the very rapidly growing industrial city of Manchester, and in fact subsequently the pressures of growth of the city resulted in them leaving that land and moving elsewhere. And by the time we get to the eighteen eighties but very modest set and again expatriate Scotts who were had owned mills and other activities they were involved in in merchants

in Manchester. But it was basically two Scottish golf clubs. So when I think of the beginning of golf in England, it wasn't there. It was where golf was first played by Englishmen, and we have to wait till eighteen sixty four for that to happen, when the club was formed at Westwood ho and became Royal North Devon, and I think over seventy five percent of the initial members were English, and that to me was the starting point. You had Old Morris laid out the course at Westwood Hoe in

eighteen sixty four. It was eighteen holes, only the second golf course to have eighteen holes after at Saint Andrews, and it was on Lynxsland. So there was early character beginning to look like well maybe maybe we're going to see a following on of what happened in Scotland being pursued in England. But as the story rolls through in time, that wasn't the case. It wasn't all about Lengthsland that it wasn't. It wasn't Nessley Coastal either.

Reverend Gossip was the founder of the club. And again it was surely by chance that he had two brothers in law. One was in based in Saint Andrews and the other was in the engineer's Royal Engineers based at Prestwick. So he had two brothers in law who played golf and when he went to visit them, he learned to play.

When he was up in Scotland and found the game fascinating and saw this as an opportunity where he settled as the local vicar down in that corner of Devon and laid out a very informal course until he got enough people interested in the game, and then subsequently they formed this club North Devon, and Old Tom Morris came down to lay out the course, was invited down to lay out the course.

that was it. There was seven golf clubs by eighteen sixty nine. If we rolled it forward another decade to eighteen seventy nine, then but then we only had sixteen golf clubs. So in Scotland by that time we were probably about eighty golf clubs in a country with a population of about one sixth of the population of England. But then it was the eighteen eighties that really saw the By eighteen eighty nine there were one hundred golf clubs,

so things were then beginning to take off. And of those one hundred golf clubs, about forty percent of them were at the coast and sixty percent of them were inland. Most of them were on private land rather than on public land as in Scotland, and almost all the only exception was London. Scottish and Royal Wimbledon played shared a course on Wimbledon Common, but all the other clubs had

their own golf courses. So it was the beginnings of the takeoff of golf in England already were of a quite different character to what we'd seen in terms of development of golf in Scotland.

Great English Golfman, it's from. The cover is based on a cartoon appeared in Punch magazine in eighteen eighty five and it has a large group of English golfers, men, women, children and the elderly marching with their golf clubs up to Scotland and it's called the Golf Stream, and it was the cartoon was sort of signified the fact that golf now was seen as a and was a visible, a visible game amongst English people. And at the same time as english people going north and seeing golf the

first time, a lot of Scots were emigrating south. They were emigrating all over the world in fact, but there was nevertheless a large number of middle class Scots ended up moving south and they had already experienced the golf boom in Scotland. So many of the Scots going south brought their golf clubs with them, and if they settled in various parts of the country then they were important

in getting golf clubs off the ground. These initial clubs in the eighteen eighties, but gradually there was a transition towards more English people getting involved in that process of beginning clubs, and by the late eighteen eighties, the English English people, the new adopters of the game, were more important than the Scots who who who'd moved south, So there was a bit of a transition there in that sense.

In nineteen fourteen. What separated those two phases, and then what was the cause and kind of character of that second part of the boom.

across the country. I mean to give an example, in eighteen eighty nine, there were only two golf clubs in Yorkshire, the largest county in England. But by eighteen ninety three, just a few years later, every county in England had a golf club. So golf spread pretty much everywhere, and it was characterized by this predominantly the clubs being formed.

I think the statistics are of the order of eighty five percent of the clubs formed were formed Inland in relatively rural settings, So it wasn't the case that the clubs were formed at the coast and people who lived in the cities took the train to play golf. That was an occasional thing they did in the summer holidays and at other occasions. But most of these golf clubs were being formed all over the country because people just had got the golf bug, would be the best way

to describe it in the eighteen nineties. But as we got towards the end of the eighteen ninety it looked like it might be petering out. It was flattened. The number of golf clubs being formed was flattening out, and by round about the turn of the century, round about nineteen hundred, there was although it wasn't in decline, there was only a very modest number of clubs being formed each year compared to what we'd seen in the in

the mid eighteen nineties. I mean, if we take eighteen ninety three eighteen ninety four as an example, a new golf club was being formed every four days in England during that those two years. That was the real peak of the boom. By round about nineteen hundred were looking more like a couple of golf clubs every month was

being formed. Run about that turn of the century, there there was also an important event was that there was a war, the Boer War, being fought in South Africa, and a large number of young men went left the country to fight in that war. So I looked at that in some detail to see whether that might have been a contributory factor to the decline or the slower growth rate in golf, But it didn't seem to be.

Golf was still being played all around the country even though there was a war on at the same time, albeit a very distant war.

is the contributing factors to the upsarch. I think that, you know, what you concluded in your book, just to give people a basic idea, is that the downturn around the turn of the century and interest in golf was kind of a natural happening, right. The first kind of enthusiasm for golf, you know, was just tapering off a little bit, right, It couldn't continue at the torrid pace

that it went in the eighteen nineties. But to me, the really interesting stuff is why it was that it upsurged again, because that's almost like that's the super unexpected thing that happened. It would be expected that interest would decline a little bit after you know, a number of years in golf, but then all of a sudden in the early years of the twentieth century it spiked back up again. Why was that?

factor which we can also touch upon. So the three supply side factors were the invention of the Haskell ball, which Carl Haskell Colburn Haskell was in Vore created in about eighteen ninety eight, I believe, and that eventually made its way into England to round about nineteen oh two when in the Amateur Championship and the Open Championship of that year both winners played with the Haskell ball, so

that was a start. The second key feature was the dramatic change in the style of golf courses that were beginning to the transition away from the rather basic, rudimentary courses with bunkers just stretched right across the fairways towards a more strategic game. And there was some of the key architects, and we were now talking about the term

golf architects for the first time. Willie Park Junior, Harry Colet, subsequently Alison McKenzie and Herbert Fowler some of the key figures who were involved in taking golf in a new direction in terms of how it was played. And the third factor on the supply side was the improvement in the quality of the courses. The greenkeeping side, the idea, the concept of agronomy was beginning to appear rather than

just predominantly in the eighteen nineties. These were greenkeepers who came down from Scotland who might have known something about how to prepare a course on links land, but it was completely a new challenge to develop and prepare golf courses to that standard on inland pasture, and it took time and technology and science to enable us to get to the stage where we could lay out courses that

were attractive and appealing to golfers to play. And I think that was underlying it these factors was golf was a difficult game. In the eighteen nineties. We were playing with a Gutta Persha ball on very basic courses, on muddy parkland or pasture, and it was a difficult game. But these three inventions made golf a more interesting and more fun game to play. The Haskell ball meant that they could get the ball up in the air more easily and could hit it further, so that was always

always fun, as we know to this day. The strategic design meant that we were no longer had golf courses that were purely meant to be penal if you hit a bad shot. There were other challenges, but not the challenge that most most golf professionals thought had to be achieved was to get the ball in the air, and hence bunkers were laid across the middle of fairways. So it was a new, more thoughtful game that was emerging.

And again and toutly the quality of the courses being improved, it was a more enjoyable experience to walk around a golf course rather than plow around the muddy field.

were primarily inland. They were not on Link's land anymore. They weren't on this kind of perfectly suited land, and so there needed to be some human intervention to adapt this land to the game. And what this spurred was innovation in agronomy and architecture. Do you think that that theory holds water? Did these things come about really because they started golfers started working with ill suited pieces of land and they had to figure out how to work with this stuff.

think of it nowadays, hunter Comb and Hollinwell. And these particularly the first two, these were the first move in the direction of strategic design and golf courses that looked and played more like links courses, looked the best links courses looked around the country. And Willie Park Jr. Was of course a professional by background, a two time Open champion who had came from Musselborough by background.

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Let's go back to the episode. Willie Park Junior is someone you've identified as extremely important in the history of architecture because of these three courses that came out in nineteen oh one, holl Andwell, Hunter, Come and Sunningdale. What made these courses different from what came before.

hitting being successful, from hitting a shot that's topped. He was starting to consider that bunkers should be to the sides of fairways to catch slices and pools, and also the greens not just to be simple squares and very flat,

but to have undulations and to be much larger. The fact that he was a very good putter was probably one of the reasons why he wanted the challenge of putting to be more part of the game, but that it was with these sort of design features that he was he was formulating at that time that he had the opportunity then to implement first at Sunningdale, where they provided him with sufficient funds to clear a large area of heathland to the west of London Common Common, and

he used a large team of men and horses and machinery to do that, and he cleared away the heather and the and the gorse to create essentially to carve a golf course out of the heathland that existed there. But also importantly he seeded the ground with bents and fescues, the grasses that typically were associated with the links land, and he also put in watering to ensure that the greens could be managed and cut and prepared to a

standard that would have been acceptable at those times. So Sunningdale was very much a start point, followed on very quickly by Huntercombe, which rare amongst golf professionals that Willie Park was actually making enough money that he could afford to with some investors in supporting him, he could afford to actually acquire the land and develop the course at Huntercombe himself. So he did that and very rapidly laid out a very challenging golf course there which was very

much his own. Unfortunately, a few years down the road for other factors, it was less successful and in the end he pretty much lost the money that he had put into it. But Hollingwell was the third of the three, perhaps had less resources initially to develop that one, but nevertheless it was on a very interesting piece of land and his ideas were beginning to take shape there.

So could you give me a picture of what the methods were, what the prevailing methods were to lay out courses on inland properties before Willie Park put out these three impressive projects.

there wasn't much added to what was there. So again, coming back just a bit of statistical fat material here a run about eighty percent of these of these golf courses that were being developed at that time before before nineteen hundred were nine hole courses and they tended to be on a small piece of parkland on the periphery of whichever town near to where the golfers lived, not usually more than thirty five acres of land for nine holes.

So the first steps that the founders took was to try and get as either a local pro of a golf club nearby or bring a Scotsman down to give them some guidance and how they could lay out nine holes on this modest piece of land. Essentially, it was the professional or even the committee on some occasions would just peg out where they saw an appropriate place to put a tea and where to put a green, and

that job could be done in half a day. The tools of the trade were no more than a heavy roller and a lawnmower to cut the grass and to flatten the area where the teas and the greens would be. And of course sheep and sometimes less appealingly cattle were used to keep the fairways sort of sufficiently short for the golfers to play on. But these were muddy conditions, I mean through the winter it would be, it would

be awful conditions. You didn't have the firm turf of the of the Lynx land, so they had to put up with the the relatively poor quality golf courses. And that's all there was in the eighteen nineties in terms of inland golf. It was it was of that character.

feature of these simple nine hole courses. You read when you read the Golfing Annual and some of the other annuals of that time, which gave brief descriptions of these golf courses, the hazards were commonly described as hedges, ditches, and streams rather than and occasionally there's a mention of

an artificial bunker. So they just these working class professionals who were helping to get these golf courses off the ground were just making use of whatever was the natural landscape and the natural habitat to create some sort of challenge for the golfers, but not necessarily one that mirrorred the challenge of playing on linksland.

he did Hunter come a bit quicker than that. But then when some of the other great architects of that year were coming along, like foul Or, he took two years to do Walton Heath. This was on a completely different scale, both financially and the amount of time and investment that went into creating the new strategic design courses.

And so I guess. So my question is, what I've never known is what enabled Willie Park Junior, for instance, to spend so much money and so much time on Sunningdale. Did the model of financing a club change in some essential way around that time? What were the factors that allowed him to spend so much time, so much money, so much labor on creating an inland golf course because this had like never been done before, this was new.

in entirety, whereas at Sunningdale. They spent a bit less on the golf I think about four or five thousand pounds they spent on the golf course. Well, at the same time they spent about seven thousand pounds on building the clubhouse. So this was for affluent gentlemen who wished to play golf, and money wasn't a limiting a limiting factor in what they could do. But it was nevertheless quite inspirational to get Willie Park Jr. To come and

do it. I mean he'd only was only beginning to make his name as a golf course architect at that time. He'd developed a small number of other courses in England, but not many, so it was quite it was quite a step to get him involved.

transfer of information around the country. Gradually, some of these golf courses, even at the lower end of the of the scale, began to consider in a more rudimentary way, having a layout which had a more strategic intent rather than just the penal form that had been put in place in the eighteen nineties.

growing very rapidly. So yeah, the situation where in about eighteen sixty, I think there was something of the order of four hundred thousand people in Great Britain paying taxes, which meant earning over one hundred and fifty pounds a year. Roughly. By nineteen eleven, one point two million people were in that same category. So there was the middle classes were a growing percentage of the population and becoming better off. So that was one factor. The other thing was there

was quite a widespread of costs of joining clubs. The Sunningdale's and the hunter Combs and the Walton Heath and about fifty or so others were very much the elite clubs where you might have to spend the term they used to use guineas rather than pounds, which is just one pound and one shilling, But you might have to spend ten pounds to join, another ten pounds perannum as

your annual subscription. But there were many clubs across the country where you didn't have to pay a joining fee and it might only cost you one guinea to play golf. So there was quite a quite a spread. It wasn't simply that. It wasn't simply the case that golf for everyone was becoming more expensive.

male it was a rich man's game. But when you look at the when you actually look at the clubs that were formed during that period, and you see that there was a very wide disparity in the cost of playing between the very modest clubs in the rural settings and the number of golfers who were taking up the game. It's just isn't simply possible that it was purely a rich man's game, and because those number of clubs just couldn't possibly have taken off if it was limited to

the upper middle classes. And also in addition to that, women took up the game in big numbers in England in this period, more so than in Scotland. To some degree. It became when the Ladies Golfing Union was formed in eighteen ninety three, that was a starting point that triggered interest amongst women across the country and playing the game, and the number of women playing golf grew dramatically through particularly in the Edwardian period, to the extent that by

nineteen fourteen. My estimates that I've made in my book, about one in every four of the golfers in England at that time was a woman, So and the participation and membership of women in golf clubs was an important feature. Almost all golf clubs in England were mixed, and this is quite surprising because again typically they're viewed as being

sort of male male domains. Albeit women didn't have the same full rights of voting at agms, and they had their own rooms to have tea rather than shared rooms with the men in the club. But nevertheless, there was many women who took up the game, and many young women as well. Young un married women were quite a significant significant proportion of the women who took up the game. So there's a lot of interesting social strands to this story of how golf boomed in England.

this period that you wrote about. It's part of it, but it's not the entire picture.

being played. And so there's this perception that people have I've seen these grand clubhouses and wonderful golf courses, whereas probably still seventy five eighty percent of them were much more modest, much less cost and still golf was being participated in by a wider cross section of people around the country, both men and women.

of them failed. By nineteen fourteen, less than one hundred and fifty of those golf clubs that have been formed since eighteen sixty four failed. So and then we look to where we are today. Inevitably, clubs were lost, particularly during the Two World Wars where the land was given up for agriculture or just golf courses went into beans.

But today there are seven hundred and eighty clubs in England who can put their foundation date as before the First World War, and that makes up about forty five percent of all the clubs that exist in England today.

So they're tremendously resilient organizations. They're still with us. And perhaps that's one of the great appeal of our game of golf, is that you can walk in the footsteps of your forefathers on the same land and play golf in broadly the same conditions that they played when they were playing it two three generations before.

on nine and eighteen whole courses. If you look at early sky courses, you know they have five holes, they have seven holes, they have you know, fourteen holes, whereas in England it was more the trend to make a nine hole course with the intention of maybe adding another nine later on. It became more regimented the way courses began to be built inland, on parkland in England, where architecture was done on them, where agronomic science was applied

to them. All of these things are things that happened elsewhere as golf moved to other places in the world. So is it an exaggeration to say that the Great English Golf Boom was kind of a foundational moment for golf, maybe even as much as the Scottish invention of the game was, Because the character of the game in England became so much The character of the game everywhere else afterwards.

it didn't happen for every club. There was the expansion from nine to eighteen holes, and another feature of English golf which perhaps distinguished it from Scottish. The early days of Scottish golf, which was predominantly played in a match play format, handicaps were really just a negotiation with regards to how much money would be better on the game, whereas in England we moved towards stroke play competitions. There was much more interest in what score you could obtain

at the end of a round. This was not part of the Scottish tradition at all. So again another feature which you might add into your combination of inland golf courses being designed as distinct from just what you get with the natural land, and the way in which golf was being played, all those factors I think, say you know, say the English golf was a very important part of that step and that process towards the modern golf we play in contemporary times.

plus postage. Unfortunately, the postage is somewhat somewhat more expensive to get it across the Atlantic, so it's probably closer to fifty six pounds for the book to be to be sold to Americans and North Americans.