In 1886 my father took a house at Eastbourne, and I was no longer at Westward Ho! as constantly as before, although a frequent visitor there at the house of Claud Carnegie. He and I used to have many matches on terms that are rather to be commended as a means for bringing together two players of different handicaps. We used to play level, but I had to give him five shillings before starting and at the end he paid me back a shilling for every hole that I was up. It came, of course, to the same thing as giving five holes up, but it is rather a more amusing way of stating these odds. The five shillings puts me in mind of a very much more gambling match that was played about that time, when I was at Hoylake. There was at that date a very festive company of Edinburgh golfers going about the various links under the leadership of old Mr. Robert Clark, who edited the great book on golf. There was Sir Walter Simpson, who also wrote a great golf book and was the son of the doctor who discovered the blessed uses of chloroform, Hall Blyth, Valentine Haggard, Cathcart, Jack Innes, and a few more—all, I fear, except Hall Blyth, gone over to the majority.[4] Five of these warriors started out one day at Hoylake to play a five-ball match, for a fiver a hole, and—this was the prudent stipulation of Mr. Robert Clark, in his ancient wisdom—they were to settle up at the end of each hole. The man who happened to fall into bad trouble would thus have to part with four fivers on the putting green, so it must have needed a well-filled notebook to make a man sure of living through to the finish without bankruptcy. I had suggested that a six-ball match would be really more fun than a five-ball, and that I was willing to make the sixth; but the well-meant suggestion was not taken in good part. I forget the ultimate result of the encounter.

Naturally I was at Eastbourne a good deal, as I had no other home than my father's, and I arrived just at the time of the first laying out of the original nine-hole course there. Mayhewe was the most active of its originators, and he and I planned it together. It implies no reflection on the designers of the later eighteen-hole course to say that the old nine-holes were better than any of the later developments. It is a very different problem laying out nine, and laying out eighteen holes on almost the same circumscribed piece of ground; for the later additions to the area do not amount to a great deal.

It is amazing to me now to think how ignorant we were in those days of the proper treatment of inland putting greens. We could plan the rest of the course well enough. But the great idea was to keep on rolling and rolling and rolling—the heavier the roller the better—until we had the surface just round the hole so slick that if there was any gradient at all the ball would not stay near the hole even if you placed it there by hand. There was (there still is) a green called "Paradise"—and no green was ever named more aptly according to the classic principle of lucus a non lucendo. If you were below the hole, and below it on this green you were sure to be, because the ball would not rest above, you might putt up to the hole, and if you missed the hole the ball would come trickling down to you again, and so you might go on putting "till the cows came home." By which time there might probably be a little dew which possibly might allow your ball to come to rest in the hole's vicinity. But long before that you would have come to the conclusion that golf, on Paradise green, was not a good game. One device used to be to cut some jagged raw edges to stick out on the ball's surface, before driving off the tee for this hole. Thus jagged, the ball would not fly properly, but it was better to lose a shot, owing to this jaggedness, through the green, than to lose twenty on the putting green. On the rough edges of its scars the ball would come to rest even in Paradise.

However, this is a picture of that green at its most grievous worst. It was not always thus, and on the whole the course, with its drives over a great chalk pit and over the corners of one or two high woods, gave us great fun and was not a bad test of golf. Peter Paxton was the professional, a humorous little fellow and a wonderful putter on those tricky greens. I remember, when he sent us his credentials, he added the comment "and, Sir, I drink nothing stronger than cold water." I liked the "cold," as if he feared that water with the chill off might go to his head. He grew braver later.

This course at Eastbourne, be it understood, was technically of the "inland" kind, though at the seaside. It was of the chalk-down soil; and it was among the first of the new supply of inland courses which the ever spreading vogue of golf demanded. Still we looked on these inland greens as giving us at best only a poor substitute for the real game. We had yet to learn of what inland soil, cleverly treated with an eye to golf, might be capable. The only inland Club which was at this time of any weight in the general golfing councils was the Royal Wimbledon, which had seceded from the London Scottish, building itself a club-house at the opposite end of the common. Some of the golfing leaders of the day, such as Henry Lamb and Purves and others, made this their headquarters, and there they were already hatching schemes which were ultimately to lead to all that great development of golf in the East Neuk, so to say, of Kent, and at first were to take form in the St. George's Club and links, at Sandwich. Purves, with characteristic, energy, was scouring the coast of England in these years, looking for links as by Nature provided, and it was here, at this point, that he had his great success. Of course there was much palaver and indecision, as well as prolonged negotiations with the landowner—or his trustees, seeing that Lord Guildford was then a minor—before any real move could be made; but when it was made it meant a very great deal for London golfers and gave an immense drive forward to the already fast booming boom of English golf. In 1886 Mr. Du Maurier, the Punch artist, was at St. Andrews, already, as I remember, in large goggles and having trouble with his eyes, and he then drew a picture of "the Golf Stream," as he called it—a succession of pilgrims of all sorts, sexes and sizes, making their way to St. Andrews. Will it be believed that this was the first golfing picture in Punch; that it was the very first mention, as I think, of golf in a comic paper? What would Punch do to-day, we may ask with wonder and dismay, if all the humorous opportunities which golf gives its artists and its writers were withdrawn from them? They would feel impoverished indeed. A year or two later, when I was editing the Badminton Book on Golf, Mr. Harry Furniss showed me a letter he had just received from Mr. Frank Burnand, then staying at Westward Ho! and then editing Punch. Harry Furniss was, and is, a golfer; Frank Burnand was not. "I think you would like this place," wrote the author of Happy Thoughts—"there are fine golfing sands (sic) here." Therein he expressed an even happier thought than he knew, for Westward Ho! at that moment happened to be suffering from a considerable drought, and a heavy gale had scattered the dry sand far and wide out of the bunkers, so that "golfing sands" gave rather an apt description.

The Badminton Library of Sport was then coming out, volume by volume, and delighting all to whom Sports and Pastimes made appeal. I do not wish to bring too great discredit on a very eminent firm of publishers, but it is a fact, sad as it is true, that when I first waited on them, obedient to their summons, in Paternoster Row, and they broached to me the subject of a golf book in their series, they made the very shocking suggestion that it should be included in the same volume with other Scottish sports, such as skating, curling and perhaps tossing the caber. They did not know, they said, when I met them with some mild expostulation, whether the game was "of sufficient importance to carry a volume to itself." I must do them the justice to say that they quickly saw and repented of their error, and I believe that ultimately the golf volume did better than any other in all that popular series.

While I was doing some of the writing for this book, Sir Ralph Payne Galway was writing the Shooting volumes, and we were both staying with poor John Penn at his house in Carlton House Terrace. One night John Penn asked Mr. Purdey, the gun-maker, to dinner, to talk guns with Sir Ralph; and these two sat long over the dessert, after the rest of us had left the table, talking of loads and bores and so on. The next morning, while we were at breakfast, a four-wheeler drove up to the door, and Sir Ralph, looking out, said in dismay, "By Jove, John, I believe that under the influence of your champagne I must have ordered a whole 'bus load of guns from Purdey." We looked out, and the four-wheeler was filled, from roof to floor, with guns. It appeared, however, that they were not all on order, but had merely been sent round by Mr. Purdey for inspection. This, however, is not golf; nor was Sir Ralph then, I think, a golfer, in spite of the good service he has since rendered to the dynamics of the golf stroke and in spite of the excellence of the "P.G." ball.

[4] Re-reading this, in 1919, even Hall Blyth's name has to be added to those that have gone.