The History of Golf Transcript
A short video by Hugh Trevor
0:05 [Music]
0:13 Thank you.
0:16 Good morning, I’m Archie Baird and I’m
0:19 the proprietor of this small exhibition
0:21 which shows the history of golf and in
0:25 the next half hour I’m going to take you
0:27 around the history and show you the
0:29 development of the game. We begin at the
0:31 beginning and the beginning is not in
0:33 Scotland. The Dutch played a game like
0:35 golf long before we did and there is
0:37 enormous visual evidence to prove it.
0:40 These are all Dutch boys, each one
0:43 holding a golf club. The money they must
0:45 have spent, them up like that as I said
0:48 to the visitors you wouldn't see many
0:50 Scottish boys running about like that.
0:52 The Dutch started the game about 1300
0:57 and continued it until 1700 when it
1:01 totally died out because they couldn't
1:03 make decent clubs, they didn't have the
1:07 right kind of wood to make them.
1:09 The shaft was hazel
1:12 and the head, the head had no hardwood so
1:15 it was a lump of lead.
1:17 There’s a Dutch club head made in about
1:20 1560
1:22 with a bit of hazel still inside it.
1:24 Another one told us because that, that’s
1:26 a big one in the small ones but to put
1:28 it whatever size they were it didn’t
1:31 really matter they weren’t trying to hit
1:32 the ball 300 yards they were scuffling
1:35 it along the ice. To hit
1:38 the target was always a stick there was
1:40 not a hole because if there had been a
1:42 hole then you would have lost your ball.
1:44 And the ball of course in those days was
1:47 the feather ball
1:49 and the feather ball came from Holland
1:51 without a shadow of a doubt
1:53 and we learned how to make the feather
1:55 ball from them and it kept the game
1:57 going until 1850.
2:02 Now this is the most important Dutch
2:06 painting which shows the connection
2:07 between Scottish golf and Dutch golf.
2:11 That’s
2:12 that's Harlem Cathedral. That windmill is
2:15 still standing
2:17 so we knew exactly where these guys are
2:20 playing on the frozen canal and that guy
2:22 and that guy are wearing kilts and the
2:25 Dutch never wore kilts so who are they?
2:28 Well they are wool merchants because we
2:31 can grow sheep in Scotland on the hills.
2:33 Holland is too flat and wet, they can’t
2:36 grow sheep in Holland so our wool merchants
2:39 took the wool to Holland and got a very
2:41 good price for it.
2:44 They’ve also got Scottish clubs because
2:46 we made much better clubs than they did
2:49 and the reason was that the bowmakers
2:53 had just gone out of a job because
2:55 firearms had been invented and the bow
2:57 makers were very skilful workers with
3:00 wood.
3:05 And there’s an early Scottish club, their
3:08 head was beech
3:09 and the shaft was ash
3:11 and to join the two of them you had to
3:13 smash them together like that
3:18 and the grip was sheepskin, so that was a
3:21 typical club in about the 1850s
3:24 and it was much better than the uh the
3:27 Dutch could produce so the game came
3:29 over here and the game was so expensive
3:33 because the feather ball was expensive.
3:36 Now the feather ball was simply a top
3:40 hat full of feathers
3:42 stuffed into a leather skin.
3:44 It took a man all day to make two golf
3:47 balls
3:49 so the but the ball was very expensive
3:51 so when it when the game came to
3:53 Scotland
3:55 it was only the well-to-do people who
3:57 could play and the the poor people carry
4:00 the clubs, they were the caddies. But the
4:02 game went
4:04 on from 1450 to 1850 and by 1850 there’s
4:10 still only
4:12 15 golf courses in the world and they’re
4:15 all here on the East coast of Scotland.
4:19 [Music]
4:24 What happened in 1850?
4:28 They made a ball out of gutta-percha this is a
4:30 tropical gum-like rubber.
4:32 When it’s warm you can mould it, when it’s cold
4:34 it goes hard. Dentists still use it as
4:37 temporary fillings for your teeth. It’s
4:39 very easy to work so all you did was get
4:42 a chunk of gutta-percha, put it in warm
4:45 water,
4:46 roll it in your hands and you had a golf
4:48 ball and then you could pinch it if you
4:51 like. Well, then they found the guttie ball
4:53 would fly better if it had a few hacks
4:55 on it so then they began to mark it with
4:57 a knife or a hammer and then they
4:59 realised it was easier to put the
5:01 marking in the mould. This is a dimpled
5:03 ball with the rim that
5:06 lies between the two bits of mould. It’s
5:09 easily taken off and the ball is
5:12 revealed in its proper shape. I’m
5:15 showing you the difference between the
5:16 feather ball club and the guttie ball club.
5:19 The guttie ball above was more heavier and
5:23 bigger splice and a lot of lead in the
5:27 back and brass on the bottom to save the
5:31 the club from being injured and as you
5:35 can see it's really more like a modern
5:37 rescue club.
5:38 So the clubs became more sophisticated,
5:40 better made. This was a club made by my
5:44 wife’s great uncle Young Willie Park
5:46 and he put the brass plate on the back
5:49 because when they played at Musselburgh
5:51 the first two holes go right
5:54 along the side of the main road and your
5:56 ball might go on the main road and that’s
5:58 old Musselburgh that’s the racecourse
6:00 and this is a huge bunker that was known
6:02 as Pandy which was short for pandemonium
6:06 I could imagine. So the game really
6:09 developed with the guttie ball. How many
6:11 golf courses did we have in 1850?
6:14 18. Right.
6:16 By 1900 there were 2,300 golf courses
6:20 all over the world and that’s what did
6:22 it. Cheap and durable instead of
6:25 expensive and fragile. So everybody began
6:28 to play, people began to carry their own
6:30 clubs
6:31 so the bag was invented and the early
6:34 bags were like bowmans’ quivers.
6:36 Clubs in the guttie ball period got more
6:39 sophisticated but they were there was
6:41 never any marks on them were always
6:43 smooth face and if you find a iron that
6:46 has a smooth face you know it was made
6:49 before 1900.
6:51 Then we come to the rubber core ball
6:53 which was a bouncy ball and therefore
6:55 they began to put markings on the face
6:57 of clubs now some of the markings were
7:00 fairly simple
7:02 and a few lines we gradually got more
7:06 sophisticated and the deeper this kind
7:08 of club which is called The Brick Road.
7:10 Another severe marking that was invented
7:13 was called the waterfall but they were
7:16 immediately made illegal and so they had
7:19 to go back to just ordinary lines or
7:22 dots. The other thing was that they began
7:25 to make the sand irons bigger and bigger
7:27 in the mistaken belief that the bigger
7:30 your sand iron the more likely you were
7:32 to get out of the bunker but it didn't
7:34 work because it had a very sharp edge on
7:36 it but Gene Sarazen solved the problem
7:39 and he put the flange on the club which
7:42 made all the difference to get bounce
7:45 off the sand or off the soil under the
7:47 golf ball.
7:48 Going back to the feather baldy the
7:51 heads were beech and the shafts were ash
7:55 but people gradually found woods that
7:58 were even better. They found there was a
8:00 wonderful American wood called hickory
8:02 and the shafts were all made from
8:04 hickory for many years until the golf
8:08 had expanded to such an extent that the
8:10 hickory became very poor quality
8:13 and instead of a beech they began to use
8:15 persimmon.
8:16 Persimmon is very hard wood, so
8:20 hard you can bore a hole and stick
8:21 a shaft straight into it, you can't do
8:22 that with beech so we get what we call
8:25 socket-headed clubs. This is persimmon in
8:28 its raw state not polished or no lead
8:31 added no brass and it's it's just in its
8:35 natural state and hasn't been polished.
8:38 That's polished and that's got a shaft
8:40 into it.
8:42 The irons became more sophisticated
8:45 the ordinary metal ,it began to be
8:49 stainless.
8:50 The shafts were made finer and finer and
8:54 finally they ran out of hickory and they
8:57 ran out of persimmon so they had to get
8:59 metal
9:00 and there's an aluminium
9:02 driver made in the United States in
9:05 about 1935
9:08 with a steel shaft and this is a British
9:11 club.
9:12 We weren't so good at metals as the
9:15 Americans, they made the steelhead but to
9:18 get the swing weight right they had to
9:19 leave the solel off but I've played with
9:21 that, probably a good wee club.
9:24 People first of all
9:28 when they went from hickory to steel
9:30 they were ashamed to be seen playing
9:32 steel shafts or they painted the shafts.
9:37 These are all clubs made by Gullane club
9:40 makers and we had a lot of club makers
9:42 in the village
9:44 and one of them eventually won the Open
9:47 Championship
9:49 and his name was Jack White
9:51 and he worked in this room this was his
9:54 club making shop and he came in at the
9:58 very end of the hickory period when the
9:59 hickory was getting poorer and poorer
10:01 quality so he went down to the
10:04 Northumberland and there’s a fishing rod
10:06 manufacturer there and he got some split
10:09 cane from the fishing rod manufacturer
10:11 and made shafts out of that for a while
10:13 before metal took over.
10:17 This is a picture of Jack White and
10:19 James Braid outside Muirfield in 1948.
10:24 James Braid is on the left and Jack
10:26 White’s on the right.
10:27 These are unusual clubs and this
10:30 one was made to try and play the ball
10:32 out of water. It didn’t work so they’re
10:34 very rare. This club
10:38 was to play a left-handed or
10:40 right-handed
10:42 this was an American invention
10:45 they thought that because their woods
10:47 went further than their irons if they
10:49 put a bit of wood on their irons that
10:51 would go further it didn’t work really
10:54 these are all various experimental ones
10:57 and there's a nice little
10:59 adjustable club.
11:02 You want to drive or putt that’s
11:05 straight
11:06 you want a wee bit of loft on it
11:09 a bit more loft,
11:15 left-handed.
11:18 It just was oh you press yes right yeah.
11:21 Let’s see, how clever! Good. 1890 yeah 120
11:26 years old.
11:27 I want to tell you why St Andrews
11:29 became important and it was because the
11:33 golfers in Edinburgh played at
11:36 um Musselburgh and at Leith but these
11:39 golf courses well Leith became obsolete
11:43 and Musselburgh would have became overcrowded
11:45 and so the uh well-to-do golfers of
11:49 Edinburgh moved out to the west of the
11:51 city and divided into different clubs
11:53 whereas in St Andrews they always
11:57 stayed in the same place and they began
11:59 to take charge of the rules and the
12:05 administration of golf
12:07 and they became the most important part
12:10 of the
12:11 administration.
12:13 Now that concludes the history of the
12:16 development of golf clubs but now I
12:18 would like to show you some of the uh
12:22 early courses where the game developed.
12:26 This is North Berwick
12:28 um in about
12:30 1890 and that’s the Lord Balfour the
12:33 prime minister at the time and some of
12:35 the notable East Lothian golfers.
12:38 This is an watercolour by John Smart of
12:40 North Berwick done in 1889.
12:43 This is what they call a photo
12:45 gravure and it’s in St Andrews and it
12:48 contains all the great golfers of the
12:49 day.
12:50 JH Taylor playing over the uh burn and
12:54 he won the Open five times.
12:57 Ben Sayers who was the North Berwick
13:00 club maker.
13:02 Tom Morris,
13:04 St Andrews club maker and
13:06 professional. Old Willie Park and Young
13:08 Willie Park and their caddy was known as
13:11 Fiery.
13:12 British Ladies Open, Gullane 1897 and you
13:17 can understand the problems they would
13:18 have on a windy day, keeping their hats
13:20 on and their skirts from blowing up but
13:23 they had hat pins for the hats and they
13:25 had elastic bands to put down around
13:28 their ankles to keep their skirts down.
13:31 This is Gullane first hole looking back
13:34 towards the village and the building in
13:38 the distance is the building we’re in
13:40 now.
13:41 And this is Muirfield Clubhouse in 1896
13:45 and that’s JH Taylor driving off and he
13:49 won the Open five times.
13:51 This is an imaginary picture
13:53 celebrating the opening of Muirfield and
13:55 that’s Mary of Queen of Scots and she
13:57 played golf on the other side of the bay in
14:00 1680. She played six days after her
14:04 husband Darnley had been murdered and
14:06 the following Sunday, John Knox denounced
14:09 her in St Giles Cathedral.
14:10 He said he did not think six days was a
14:14 respectable interval, he thought it
14:17 should have been at least a week.
14:20 That’s one of my wee stories.
14:22 The next thing is you put your name in
14:24 the book please.
14:26 What’s the date? 28th? 28th.
14:32 “So how did all this begin?” Well I was
14:35 very lucky, I married the right woman. I
14:38 married a great granddaughter of this
14:40 gentleman here and he was Willie Park
14:43 Senior and he won the first Open
14:46 Championship at Prestwick in 1860 and
14:50 then two or three more after that and he
14:53 was a club maker and we lived in the
14:57 middle of Edinburgh in a basement flat
14:59 which had been used as an air raid
15:01 shelter during the war and it was very
15:04 scruffy but we could afford to go to the
15:06 land sales and the junk shops to buy our
15:09 furniture and one day I found
15:13 an old golf bag with these long-nosed
15:15 golf clubs sticking out at the top and
15:18 nobody wanted them so I rubbed the dust
15:20 off them and the name that appeared was
15:23 W Park. I said to Sheila these were made
15:25 by your great grandfather, nobody wants
15:28 them so I began to collect them
15:30 and I began to buy early golf books to
15:33 find out who all these club makers were
15:36 and eventually I had so many clubs and
15:38 so many books I got fed up with them and
15:40 my wife gave me a little golf painting
15:42 and that is still my obsession. I’m
15:46 always on the lookout for early golf
15:48 paintings so when I sold my veterinary
15:52 practice in Edinburgh and moved down to
15:54 Aberlady, the Gullane Golf Club
15:57 allowed me to rent this room and set up
15:59 a little exhibition showing the history
16:02 of golf so that's the exhibition and I
16:05 hope you'll come and give me a ring and
16:07 make an appointment and I’ll show you
16:09 over the history of golf.
16:11 Hello this film you’ve been watching was
16:14 made some years ago and during that time
16:16 sad to see Archie passed away
16:19 in 2018. Before he actually died he and
16:22 his wife Sheila came to the relaunch of
16:24 the Heritage of Golf Museum and Sheila
16:27 cut a ribbon to signify the start of a
16:29 new era.
16:30 We are David and Jillian Kirkwood the
16:33 owners of the museum.
16:35 We live in Gullane and we’re great
16:38 friends of Archie.
16:40 The invitation Archie made to come and
16:43 look around the museum still stands our
16:47 phone number is 01620
16:53 842744 or you can find us on our
16:58 website heritageofgolf.com.
17:02 Please phone or email us to make an
17:05 appointment and we would be delighted to
17:08 see you.
17:10 [Music]
17:25 [Music]