Idyllic Days At University

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28920, 13 June 1959, Page 5

Idyllic Days At University

Golf And Golfen

WHEN the Old Carthusians were winning the Halford Hewitt tournament at Deal with such regularity in the thirties, it was often supposed that golf must have? been encouraged at Charterhouse when members of the winning teams were at school there. This, however, was far from the fact. I went there within a few weeks of the red-letter day at North Foreland and for the first year or two one was not even allowed a bicycle. After that there was a chance only of an occasional game during the latter part of the Easter and summer terms (sorry, “quarters”!), and this only the hard way by bicycling four miles each way to the West Surrey course at Enton. Apart from a pre-war match against the school —as a result of which I regret to say that the club was put out of bounds for some years—and more recent visits on foot during the annual starvation-fortnight at Enton Hall nearby, I did not play at West Surrey again till last year. So little can we have played at school that I found that I did not remember the middle part of this delightful course at all. Bliss

Having passed, all unknowing, into what turned out to be the best college in Cambridge, or Oxford either for that matter, namely Clare, I found myself at the beginning of four years of unbounded bliss and delight, the buffer state between the impatient schoolboy and the grown-up responsible for his own fortunes and follies. Studiously attending the lectures at first (B.A.Econ.Cantab.: never mind what class’) I found my thoughts more often .elsewhere. It was a year mercifully when there were a good many places to be filled in the golf team, but an unlimited quantity so it seemed, of freshmen with fearsome reputations to fill them. Only those who have played in the University trials have plumbed the full depths of nervous futility in golf. I managed to get a lift in a friend’s sidecar to Mildenhall—a queer course it seemed: very different from Bedford—and, panicking from the start, got round, I think, in 84. Later I tied in a competition with the captain, Geoffery Illingworth won the play-off by a stroke and was invited to play on the following Saturday against Worplesdon. My opponent, to whom I shall ever be grateful, played execrably. I won by seven and six, and thereafter hardly missed a match for three and a half years—and that is enough about myself. Busy Days To the University golfer life in those days was absolute heaven. I hope it is today, too, but I fancy that noses are kept more closely to the academic grindstone. For the two winter terms we had a match every Saturday and most Sundays, and I have never wavered in my conviction that golf was the game to have played. We became familiar wit) the finest clubs and courses, matching our-

1 selves against some of the lead--1 ing players of the day or against t elders and betters who had earned • distinction in many walks of life, t All were anxious to lend a 1 helping hand, and many an under-) 1 graduate found his future being i • shaped through golfing contacts with his seniors. These friendships last a lifetime and one could have made them at that age through no other game. > To play golf tor the Univer- • sity was, strangely enough, quite' a rigorous business. In my first' t year we travelled mostly by train [ —7.47 a.m. from Cambridge then > across London to catch another at t Waterloo or Victoria, and home . by the last train from Liverpool I street. Thereafter, however, we » went by car—Marshall’s Garage : 6.30 a.m., and as likely as not a I couple of inches of snow on the) . ground: breakfast at the Peahen I r at St. Albans and an hour or r more to drive after that.

Motoring

Often our club opponents expressed astonishment that we should have already motored 90 miles. I remember how surprised I always was at this. Would one ever become so old and decrepit as to think it worthy of comment that one motored 90 miles in an open two-seater for a game of golf?

This was of course, the golden age of motoring. You could get a “runner” for £25 and a really reasonable car for £5O; petrol was Is. 2d. a gallon; and periodic refreshment at the Castle was calculated to convince Mr. Crack, the motor proctor’s principal henchman, that he might well be mistaken in thinking it was your car he had seen racing through the village of Melbourne at half-past eleven on Saturday night. One of my companions was Billy Fiske, who. as the first American to lose his life in the service of the Royal Air Force, is commemorated by a plaque in St. Paul’s. Fiske had a supercharged 4s-litre Bentley and was, I think, the finest and safest driver with whom I ever drove. He neither smoked nor drank, and his eye for speed enabled him for years to hold the world record on the Cresta. It was a poor day when

w*» did not touch 110 m.p.h. on the long straight road to Mildenhall—after which, having covered the nineteen miles in seventeen minutes, he could never underj stand why his putting touch on | the fast and tricky greens left something to be desired. America One evening in 1930 someone suggested: “Why don’t we ail j band together and go to that 'fabulous land of prohibition and plenty, the United States?” Most of us touched our fathers for the necessary £l5O, and Billy Fiske’s father took care of those who could not. For this sum incredibly, we travelled there and back on the old Caronia and played four universities and i twenty clubs in- Philadelphia, I Boston and New York. It was.

"article* from the R “Sunday Times,” which fl is reprinted by arrangetnent, was written by HENRY LONG. HURST, Britain’s foremost writer on golf. It is the second in a series of eight recalling the golf and golfers in his lifetime. of course, a unique education, and not only in golf, for these were the days of gangsters, gin in the locker room and “knock three timep and ask for Charlie.” As captain I had the honour of playing Francis Ouimet at the Country Club, Brookline, where as a boy of nineteen he had made golfing history by beating the English giants. Vardon and Ray, in the play-off for the 1913 U.S. Open. It was the first of many visits to America, and began the .accumulation of such a debt, by way of" warm-hearted hospitality, that no man could hope to repay. Termination

This personal account—written, I may perhaps emphasise, by request—shall close on the eleventh hole at Sandwich, twenty-eight years ago this week. I like to recall that I had completed it with a drive, a brassie and a putt, but the pleasure at winning my single against Oxford was tempered by the sudden realisation that these truly halcyon days, the only grown-up life I had ever known, were over. A great emptiness seemed to loom ahead.

After one or two false starts I joined a small, now defunct golf magazine and three months later James Braid happened to mention to the late Sir Herbert Morgan that a young fellow who Used to play for Cambridge had taken to writing about golf. As a result I was summoned to the office of “Sunday Times” and lived happily ever after.