FROM THE LINKS

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 November 1923, Page 8

FROM THE LINKS

SANDY HERD STORIES. Long years ago when the word “golf” meant nothing to most Englishmen, a little bare-footed Scottish lad played the game with his boy friends in the streets of the grey old city of St. Andrews. For clubs they had “shinty” sticks cut from a neighbouring plantation. Their “balls” were the rounded tops of discarded champagne corks, gathered from a refuse heap behind the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, and they inserted screw-nails in them to give them weight. Looking back on that boyish device now—says Sandy Herd in “My Golfing Life”—l smile to think that we wee laddies were the real pioneers of the cored ball. We called our cork ‘bals’ with their screw-nail cores, “sollybodkins.” Real balls were hard to come by, but Herd had an uncle who worked on the railway line, and so retrieved some lost ones. He was also fortunate in having a mother who would mend his clubs with glue made by melting down old gutties. He was able to repay her when he came home from his first professional job at Portrush, and tumbled forty shining sovereigns into her lap. The good lady lifted her hands and gasped at the coins in blank astonishment. “Laddie!” she ex-

claimed, when her speech came back. “Laddie, I never have seen so much money in the hale o’ my life.” Which is quite believeable, for Sandy’s father was a working man earning no more than about twenty-five shillings a week. Young Herd himself was apprenticed first to a baker and afterwards to a plasterer, but his soul was in golf, and on an average he got the sack about once a week —for being on the links in his master’s time. Plastering, however, taught him one trick that he laughs at the mere recollection of even after all these years. He used to make a plaster replica of the old-fashioned gutta ball then in use. You could not tell the sham ball from the real. Then he would get some caddie to tee up for a golfer with one of his plaster dummies. The ball flew off in dust on being swiped, and Sandy watched from a safe distance angry old, gentlemen chase caddies about the links for playing the tricks on them, vowing vengeance on their heads with a club. They were a quaint, queer lot, these old-time caddies, with a gift of dry humour and an outspokenness that was apt to be disconcerting at times. To one of them, a certain Ben Sayers, there came a rather bumptious member of the aristocracy to ask what start he should give a man he was playing against next day. “He is the worst player in the :

world, you know, Sayers,” said the aristocrat. “Maybe,” replied Ben, “but I don’t think you can give him a start at aR.” Sandy has travelled far since those days. He has won the Open Championship once and just missed winning it at least on one other occasion. Not long ago he was honoured by being asked to give lessons to Ilie Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. Herd pointed out to the Prince that he would need to keep his stomach in, and the Prince laughingly replied: “I never thought I should be treated for the stomach by a golf specialist.” While the Prince could laugh away a bad shot, the Duke was a severe critic of his own play, Herd declares in “My Golfing Life’ (Chapman and Hall). “Big Crawford,” of North Berwick though only a caddie, was a wonderful personality. He stood 6ft 4in in height. He it was who sent the jujube cough lozenge) story round the world. Crawford was caddying for Mr. Balfour (now Earl Balfour), and a fair-sized crowd followed. It was bitterly cold and an elderly gentleman kept sneezing and coughing. Crawford looked hard at him, each time, and at last he could stand it no longer. “Has anybody got a jujube in his pooch tae give that man?” he shouted.

Crawford was always very outspoken. A duffer who tore up the turf at every shot appealed to him when his ball settled in a cuppy lie, asking “What shall I take here?” “Oh, gie it a dad wi’ the bag,” said Crawford. Another player for whom Crawford was caddying asked what club he should take at a certain shot. "Your iron,” said Crawford. “If I hit it,” the player said, “I’ll get too far.” “Aye, but ye’ll no’ hit it,” re- ( •marked' Crawford, sarcastically. ■Crawford was a living refutation of the libel that Scotsmen have no sense of humour.

The touch of personal intimacy between caddie and master is illustrated by the story of Fiery, the Musselburgh caddie. Once the player for whom he regularly caddied gravely considered a shot. He played it, and being a good one Fiery beamed as he remarked. “That’ll dae me line.” “Golf’s nae laughin’ matter,” Fiery once said to Herd, seeing him smiling. “Nae champion was ever freevilous.”