I believe it is a little more than fifty years really. I do not mean to imply that I have been for that length of time actively engaged in the serious pursuit of the golf ball, but I expect that I began to take interest in what I understood as golf about the age of four. At that time my father was at Government House in Devonport, as General in Command of the Western District, and my Uncle Fred, Colonel Hutchinson, used to come there and tell us of some game, the most wonderful in the world, that he had lately learned to play when he was in Scotland, as Adjutant of the Fife Militia. He lived at Wemyss Hall, in Fife, and used to ride over to St. Andrews, breakfasting en route with Mr. Bethune of Blebo, and taking him on along with him, for a round or two rounds.

I used to hear a great deal of talk about this wonderful game, between my father and my uncle, the former having scarcely a more clear-cut idea of what it was like than I myself; but I can well remember his attempting to give some description of it, in my uncle's absence, to a friend, and hearing this remark: "A man knows his own weapon, that he uses in the game, and it is as important to him to have the weapon that he knows as it is to a billiard player to have his own cue. And they use several different kinds of weapon at the game, for strokes of different strength."

All that seems quite credible now; but it hardly seemed possible of belief in the South of England in the early sixties. I even knew what the weapon was called—"a club"—for I often asked my uncle about it, and he tried, with poor success, to make me understand its character; for I tried, in turn, to describe it to one of the orderlies, who was a particular friend of myself (or of my nurse), and he made me what he thought fitted the description. It fitted the name of "club"—for it was much like what the cannibals, in our boys' books, were depicted as using on the heads of their victims; but when I showed it to my uncle he shook his head sadly. It did not appeal to him as having any likeness to the delicate works of Hugh Philp, that master club-maker, with which he was familiar. Still, I did beat a ball about with it, and thus began golf.

When I arrived at the age of five, we went to live at a house called Wellesbourne, in North Devon, about halfway between Bideford and Northam. Westward Ho! in those days did not exist. There was one farmhouse where all the houses of the watering-place now are. The very name belonged only to Charles Kingsley's fine book, and was only taken for the name of the place a year or so later than this. Captain Molesworth, to whom English golf was to owe a big debt, lived at a house called North Down, just at the entry into Bideford, and it was in this house that Charles Kingsley was living while writing Westward Ho! That is the story of how the name came to be given to the place, and Borough House, by Northam, was about half a mile from our Wellesbourne. This Borough House, since restored, is where Mrs. Leigh, with her sons Frank and Amyas, were placed by the novelist.

The Reverend I.H. Gossett was Vicar of Northam, and related to the large family of Moncrieffes, of whom there were several resident then at St. Andrews. About that time one of its members, General Moncrieffe, came on a visit to his relative, the vicar of Northam, and from that chance visit great events grew. For Mr. Gossett, as it was likely he should, led out General Moncrieffe for a walk across that stretch of low-lying common ground known as the Northam, or Appledore, Burrows, to the famous Pebble Ridge and the shores of Bideford Bay; and as they went along and reached the vicinity of those noble sandhills later to be known to golfing fame and to be execrated by golfing tongues as "the Alps," the General observed: "Providence obviously designed this for a golf links."

To a man coming from St. Andrews it was a fact that jumped to the eyes. It was not for a clergyman to stand in the way of a design so providential. Mr. Gossett was a very capable, effective man: he had a family including some athletic sons for whom a game such as described by General Moncrieffe seemed likely to provide just the outlet which their holiday energies would need. He threw himself heartily into the work of getting a few to join together to make the nucleus of a club; but that first of English Golf Clubs, next after—very long after—the fearful antiquity of Blackheath, and absolutely first to play on a seaside links, did not involve all the outlay on green and club-house without which no golf club can respect itself to-day.

Clubs and balls—"gutty" balls, for the feather-cored leather-cased ones had already been superseded—would be sent, as needed, on General Moncrieffe's order, from Tom Morris' shop at St. Andrews, and when that was done all was done that was needed for these little beginnings of the seaside golf of England. The turf grew naturally short, and the commoners' sheep helped to check any exuberance. The course, as designed by those primitive constructors, acting under the advice of General Moncrieffe, started out near the Pebble Ridge, by what is now the tee to the third hole. Those pioneers of the game did not even go to the expense, in the first instance, of a hole cutter. They excised the holes with pocket knives. The putting greens were entirely au naturel, as Nature and the sheep made them. Assuredly there was no need for the making of artificial bunkers. Nature had provided them, and of the best. Besides, were there not always the great sea rushes? It may be remembered that the old golf rules have the significant regulation that the ball shall not be teed "nearer than four club-lengths" to the hole. That indicates both a less sanctity ascribed to putting greens of old and also a less degree of care lavished on teeing grounds. There were no flags, to mark the holes; but the mode was for the first party that went out on any day to indicate, if they could discover it, the position of the hole, for those coming after them, by sticking in a feather of gull or rook picked up by the way. If, as might happen, the hole was not to be discovered, being stamped out or damaged by sheep beyond all recognition as a respectable golf hole, this first party would dig another hole with a knife, and set up the signal feather beside that. In this period of the simple golfing life it goes without the saying that no apology, or substitute even, for a club-house gave shelter to these hardy primitive golfers. The way was to throw down coat, umbrella, or other superfluity beside the last hole. They were safe, for two good reasons—that they were not worth stealing and that there was no one to steal them. And it is to be supposed that in those good old days there was none of the modern "congestion," of which we hear so much. Golfers and their needs, in England at all events, were alike few and simple.

The Club was instituted in 1864; therefore it has now passed its jubilee; but I, unhappily, have to look back upon many of those early years as so many periods of wasted opportunity. That same Uncle Fred who had condemned the club of the cannibal, gave me my first true golf club. Years afterwards an anxious mother asked him, "At what age do you think my little boy should begin golf: I want him to be a very good player?"

"How old is the boy now?" my uncle asked.

"Seven," the mother replied.

"Seven!" he repeated sadly. "Oh, then he has lost three years already!"

I was given a club long before I was seven, but our house was two long miles from the course, and miles are very long for the short legs of seven. There were the fields, but though it is reported of Queen Mary Stuart that she found agreeable solace in playing at golf in "the fields around Seaton house," I did not find golf exhilarating in the fields around Wellesbourne House. But the atmosphere of golf was about the house. The Golf Club prospered, as golfing prosperity was rated in that day of small things. The extraordinary news went abroad that it was now possible to play the game of Scotland on real links turf in this corner of Devon. Men of renown, such as Mr. George Glennie, Mr. Buskin, and many besides came from the ancient club at Blackheath, and stayed for golf at the hotel recently built at that place which had now received its name from Kingsley's book. Sir Robert Hay and Sir Hope Grant, the former one of the finest amateurs of a past day and the latter more distinguished as a soldier than a golfer, came as guests, for golfing purposes, to my father's house. My two brothers, both in the Army and from twelve to nineteen years older than myself, played a few games when home on leave. I was too young to take any part in a match, but not too young to listen to much talk about the game and to look with profound veneration on its great players.