The Romance of Hoylake M R. BERNARD DARW IN has said
that for him Euston will always be the most romantic of railway stations, because it sets him on the road to Hoylake. To radiate romance sufficient to cast a glamour even over so practical a place as Euston Station is an achievement perhaps not unworthy of closer examina- tion. On the principle that truth is stranger than fiction, the best way of discovering the romantic qualities sur- rounding a personality or place is to get at the facts, and the facts in this case are that at Hoylake were started two highly momentous things—the Amateur Golf Championship and the Irish Question. The Amateur Championship, and also the annual inter- national match between England and Scotland, were originated by the Royal Liverpool Golf Club and first played over its links at Hoylake in 1885. As for the Irish Question, that—in the form in which we knew it in our time—may be said to have had its beginning on the day that William of Orange embarked an army from the Hoylake beach for the invasion of Ireland in 1690, to crush the rebellion that had risen in favour of James II. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that William of Orange was the first notability to be bunkered at Hoylake, for on arrival there he found his approach to the sea-shore hampered by a belt of high sand dunes, and not until he had discovered a gap in the hills was he able to get his men and transport down to the waiting ships. It is along a portion of The King's Gap that the majority of. the spectators will pass to the Hoylake links to follow this year's Amateur Championship. "Most of the army encamped about a week at Neston," writes King William's Chaplain, an eye-witness of the embarkation, "and then on Thursday the 8th August about 6 o'clock in the morning His Grace Duke Schomberg, General of all Their Majesties' Forces, Count Solona, General of Foot, and several great Officers more, with not 10,000 foot and horse embarked at Hoylake for Ireland. The winds being cross they lay there till Monday the 12th, when at four in the morning, the wind being S.S.E. and S.E., the Bonaventure ' Frigate fired a gun and put his light to the topmost shrouds, that being the signal for sailing. There were also between eighty and ninety vessels more who were all under sail at six o'clock." Yet it is not in the more serious preoccupations of Royalty, but rather in the Royal and Ancient Game, and also in the Sport of Kings, that the romance of Hoylake is largely to be found. It is less than sixty years ago that Hoylake was still combining horse-racing with its golf, and the present long first, fifteenth and sixteenth holes of the Royal Liverpool links once formed part of a race- course which with the Liverpool public of that day came only second in popularity to the Grand National course at Aintree. The original professional's shop at Hoylake was housed in a loose box, and it was occupied by Jack Morris, a nephew of the "grand old man of golf," Tom Morris; of St. Andrews. As a link with the past, when golfers wore top hats and played with leather balls stuffed with feathers, Jack Morris is surely a romantic figure. He tells me that the hand-made leather balls were difficult to shape and that the top hats of the period fulfilled more than a mere decorative function, as it was usually in a top hat that the feathers were measured—a hatful to a ball. Jack Morris is now close upon eighty, and has been elected an honorary life member of the Royal Liverpool Club, whose . professional he has been for well over half a century. In the heyday of his career as a player he had as a caddie a stiffly built little fellow to whom Morris always explained the finer arts of the game as they went round together. To-day that caddie is the five times Open Champion, J. H. Taylor, whose son played for Oxford in the inter-Varsity match at Hoylake • this spring, an event at which Jack Morris assisted as starter.
But success at golf has not in every instance gone to the player who began to learn early, or even to the player who adopted to the game a becoming air of seriousness and concentration. We find in the history of Hoylake personalities such as the wonderful Charles Hutchings and the gay and gallant Freddie Tait. Hutchings, a past captain of the Royal Liverpool, had not touched a golf club till he was thirty-three, and he was fifty-three and a grandfather when he found himself opposing S. H. Fry in the Amateur final at Hoylake in 1902. At the end of the morning round Hutchings was eight up, and after luncheon some of his fellow-members, certain that the match would soon be finished, took a chair out to carry their champion back in triumph. But Fry rallied and the chair had to be lugged from green to green. At the turn Hutchings's lead was reduced to five up, and he only won by halving the last hole, to the tremendous relief of the weary and embarrassed enthusiasts carrying the chair. Two years before he was killed in the charge of the Black Watch at Koodoosberg Drift, F. G. Tait secured the Amateur title at Hoylake. On the eve of the final he gathered his friends around him in the club-house and spent a con- vivial night. In the small hours he took up his bagpipes and, playing a wild Scottish battle air, marched out of the club and through the streets of Hoylake to his lodgings. Punctual to the time of starting, he was on the first tee in perfect condition to triumph in the final. To my own mind, however, the most pleasing story about Hoylake concerns Arnaud Massey, the French professional. On the afternoon that Massey carried off the Open Championship at Hoylake, twenty years ago, he received a telegram informing him that he had become the father of a daughter. To commemorate that great day Massey christened the baby Hoylake. I would like to be able to round off this article by announcing that Mlle. Hoylake Massey is now engaged to a young and handsome Hoylakian, or something equally romantic, but as I have absolutely no information of this kind, I must leave the matter as it stands.
STANLEY SALVIDGE.
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