Early Golf Clubs And Balls

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001 by Robert G. Gowland

FORE!

A version of the Royal and Ancient Game, as golf is officially known, appears to have been played in Britain as early as the fourteenth century (see P1. IV), but it developed into its recognizable form in Scotland probably in the middle of the sixteenth century. The "royal" element of the name comes from the fact that many of the kings and some of the queens of Scotland [1] enjoyed the game and spent a great deal of money buying equipment and wagering on matches. For example, in February 1503 the lord high treasurer for Scotland recorded that James TV (r. 1488-1513) had purchased "golf clubs and balls and wagered at golf with the Earl of Bothwell." [2] In the early eighteenth century the game came to America, where it was popular among the well-to-do of Scots descent. The 1729 inventory of the estate of William Burnet (1688-1 729), royal governor of New York and New Jersey, and later of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, includes ten golf clubs, including one iron, valued at [pound]2 and seven dozen balls valu ed at [pounds]4 4s. [3] The estate of Andrew Johnstone, who died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1764 included "twelve gouf sticks and balls." [4]

The earliest record of golf clubs and balls being exported from Scotland to the colonies in sufficient quantities to warrant notice in the official port records was in 1743. On May 12 of that year the ship Magdalene set sail from Leith, Scotland, for Charleston, carrying Scots shirts, salt, eight dozen golf clubs, and three gross of golf balls. [5] In 1786 the South Carolina Golf Club, the first American golf club, or society, was established in Charleston. [6] A notice in the Charleston City Gazette, or, the Daily Advertiser on September 24, 1790, recorded that "the annual meeting of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held on Wednesday 29th instant at Williams Coffee House at two o'clock," and similar notices appeared yearly until 1799. The game continued to be played in the United States into the early nineteenth century, but then for some reason waned in popularity It seems hardly to have been played at all in the United States from about 1812 until the 1880s, when several golf clubs sprang up: Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the Tuxedo Club in Tuxedo Park, New York; Foxburg Club in Pennsylvania; and the Dorset Field Club in Vermont. In the succeeding decades the game's popularity mushroomed.

A golfer, or goffer as he was known, played with a group of clubs, mostly woods and perhaps an iron or two. The shape and style of clubs changed very little from earliest times until the mid-nineteenth century. Wooden clubs were usually made by specialist joiners who also made other sporting equipment, such as the longbows used in archery William St. Clair (or Sinclair) of Roslin, a champion archer was also a famous golfer. The portrait of him in Plate V not only gives details of his club but also of the usual golfing attire, including the kid gloves with the fingertips cutoff, presumably for a better feel while taking a stroke.

A golfer's wooden clubs, used to play off the grassy "fair going" (or fairway), usually included a play club, or driver, for teeing off; various so-called spoons, which were shaped to give different lofts to the ball; and a putter, used on smooth turf near the hole. One historian has calculated that wooden clubs lasted for only about twelve rounds, [7] with spoons breaking most often. Wooden clubs required two properties: a head sufficiently hard to withstand successive hits on the ball and a springy or whippy, shaft. These two properties do not coexist in any native British timber, so it was customary to splice a hard head onto a whippy shaft. European hazel (Corylus avellana), which was generally used for woven fence panels or as infill in the timber framing of medieval buildings, was favored for shafts certainly by the late seventeenth century. Coppiced, it produced tall straight shoots one inch or so in diameter in five to seven years. By the early eighteenth century ash (Fraxinus excelsior) was used more often; and in the mid-eighteenth century, hickory (Carya) began to be exported to Scotland from North America, probably from the area that became Tennessee, for use as the shafts of wooden clubs. Shafts could be ripped by handsaw from one-inch planks cut with a pit saw, or they were sometimes split from a billet with a froe, or wedge. The four corners of square-section shafts were planed to produce eight corners, which in turn were planed to sixteen, thirty-two, or even sixty-four. Final smoothing was sometimes done with a file, judging by file marks on some surviving shafts, although smoothing was also done with broken bottle glass or dried fish skin (such as that of dogfish or small rays), followed by rubbing with Dutch rush (Equisitum hyemale), a low-growing plant with stems that contain significant amounts of silica.

The heads were generally made from hawthorn (Crataegus), a common hedgerow plant that grows to a maximum trunk diameter of five or six inches if allowed to mature. An approximately six-inch length of trunk with an oblique branch at one end could be split in half to produce a head requiring only final shaping. The split side branch formed the neck of the club, which was spliced and glued to the shaft and then bound with pitched thread to waterproof the joint. The head was shaped with a bow saw, then rasped, filed, and smoothed like the shaft. Lead was poured into a V-shaped notch cut into the heel to weight the head so that it would give greater momentum to the struck ball. A quarter-inch-deep strip of ram's horn was pegged to a recess in the front of the sole to protect the head from striking the turf (see Pls. lb and VIIIa). The club was finished with a grip made by winding cloth selvage (in Scotland called listing) over a layer of pitch around the top of the start, with the ends of the cloth held in place by nails. Judging by the darkening of the surfaces of extant early woods, the clubs were likely given a final a protective finishing coat of linseed oil. By the late eighteenth century red keel--usually white lead paint colored with red oxide--was applied to the heads both as decoration and as a preservative (see P1. VII). Also about this time, makers began to stamp their names on clubs, among then Robert Neilson of Leith, Simon Cossar of Leith (see P1. VI), and James McEwan of Bruntsfield (see Pls. VIIIa and VIIIb).