CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
A Word on the Organization of the Book as Four Volumes
Volume Two: Napanee Golfers and Their Courses to 1906
Of Earlier Courses and Golfers
1890s Golf in Napanee
The Golf Links of Camp Le Nid
An 1890s Eastern Ontario Golf Boom
Playing Golf before Forming a Club
Early Ardent Votaries of the Ancient Game in Napanee
Biographies
The Other Lawyer
The Brothers-In-Law
Other Men of the Cloth
The Bankers
The Doctors
The Merchants, the Manufacturers, and the Miscellaneous
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Seven Candidates for Votaries of the Early Years
The Most Likely Golf Grounds
The Cartwright Factor
Stephen Gibson
Approaching the Cartwright Estate
Dates with History
Mowing the Early Golf Course
How to build a Golf Course in 1897
A Curious Napanee Incident
The Clubhouse
A Club Shed
Mary Vrooman
Stories Told by a Club Shed
The Location of the Five Holes of the 1897-1906 Golf Course
The First Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
Two More Golfers on the 1897-1906 Course
The Fifth Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
The Fourth Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
The Layout of the 1897-1906 Course
Five Holes Played as Nine
Conclusion
Appendix: The 1897-1906 Golf Course on a Contemporary Satellite Map
Foreword
This book remains a work in progress.
I circulated the first edition among members, friends, and supporters of the Napanee Golf and Country Club. I did so first and foremost because it is about something we all love: the Napanee golf course.
But I also wanted to invite people who read this book and find the subject interesting to ask themselves whether they might have a piece of information about the Napanee golf course – a fact, an anecdote, a rumour, a photograph of some part of the golf course, an old publication from the club, or even an old scorecard--that they could pass along to me. Information about the golf course that lies in the background of a photograph, for instance, even if it is only a photograph of a trophy presentation or of a group of friends playing golf, or information that emerges from a story about the past, may help to fill out the picture of the history of the design of the golf course that I sketch below.
The second edition of Volume One is archived at the Orillia Public Library. So I similarly invite anyone from Orillia (where Fred Rickwood concluded his career as a golf professional in the early 1940s) who might have information about him to pass it along to me. People able and willing to share a memory of him will contribute to the remembering that he deserves.
Feel free to email me: dchilds@uottawa.ca
More information about either the Napanee golf course or the man who designed it will make for a better third edition.
Donald J. Childs
Acknowledgements
My brother Bob Childs has done wonders with computer technology on my behalf, especially with regard to old photographs. His love of Napanee Golf and Country Club probably exceeds my own, and it certainly inspired me in my work on this book.
Milt Rose’s enthusiasm for the history of the golf course, particularly as shown by his willingness to listen to my recitation of facts and figures that emerged as I first worked on this book, was also an encouragement to me.
Napanee Golf and Country Club’s Golf Course Superintendent Paul Wilson has generously provided me with helpful information that he has gathered from his work on the course over the years.
I appreciated Rick Gerow’s willingness to tell me about the construction of various parts of the golf course in the 1980s and 1990s, even though we were playing golf at the time and he was in the process of winning the Super Senior Golf Championship.
Similarly, Bing Sanford cheerfully and helpfully identified features of the Rickwood course for me when we played a round of golf together. It was always a pleasure to be in his company.
Mike Stockfish read an early draft of the book and offered encouragement and useful advice, for which I thank him.
When I requested information from the Orillia Public Library about an item on Fred Rickwood, the response of Amy Lambertsen, who runs the library’s Local History Room, was immediate, helpful, and generous. What a wonderful librarian!
Lisa Lawlis, Archivist at the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives, was thoroughly efficient, encouraging, and supportive through all the many hours of her time that I monopolized. What a wonderful archivist!
Jane Lovell, a member of the Adolphustown-Fredericksburgh Heritage Society, researches and writes about local history. She has a special interest in the Herrington family and Camp Le Nid and generously corrected errors in and contributed information to the second and third volumes of this book. Jane works tirelessly in promoting the preservation of local history and the dissemination of knowledge about it. I am very appreciative of her contributions to this project.
Margaret McLaren, a golf historian with a main focus on the Rivermead Golf Club, kindly informed me of Fred Rickwood’s work at the Belleville Golf Club and supplied newspaper clippings about it. I thank her for this important contribution.
I thank Sandy Gougeon, a granddaughter of Bill Brazier, for kindly correcting several inaccuracies in my account of Brazier’s life and for helpfully supplying further information about and photographs of her grandfather.
I also thank Karen Hewson, Executive Director of the Stanley Thompson Society, and Lorne Rubenstein, Canadian golf journalist and golf writer without peer, for encouraging words in support of my research on Fred Rickwood.
Dr. T.J. Childs was extraordinarily helpful in discovering information, documents, and photographs about a large number of the people whose stories are highlighted in this book. His genealogical skills are extraordinary.
Vera Childs donated funds to provide access to important rare photographs that were essential to my telling of the story of the earliest development of golf in Napanee. I thank her for her generous support of this project.
I am grateful to Janet Childs for her patience and forbearance during my work researching and writing this book, and I am especially grateful for her hard work in preparing this book for publication.
Perhaps most important to a book like this, however, is the pioneering work on the collection and interpretation of local archival information about the golf course by Art and Cathy Hunter, and their band of fellow researchers, published as Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 (2010). To contribute to what they started is a pleasure and a privilege.
Preface
If you Google the name “Fred Rickwood,” your search will yield little beyond the fact that he participated in a number of Canadian Open and Canadian PGA golf championships in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The search might also reveal an image of his grave marker in Toronto’s Prospect Cemetery.
Figure 1 Fred Rickwood grave marker, Prospect Cemetery, St Clair Avenue, Toronto.
The gravestone tells us little about Fred Rickwood. Apart from his name, date of death, and age, he is identified only as Company Quarter Master Sergeant Fred Rickwood of the 26th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
So much is missing.
There is not even a date of birth, and so perhaps it is not surprising that the age given is wrong.
Most importantly, there is nothing about his life in Canadian golf, which is a great shame, for golf was the main reason for his Canadian life.
This book is an attempt to honour Fred Rickwood by remembering his life in early Canadian golf, particularly with reference to his design of the Napanee golf course.
The greatest legacies that golf course architects leave golfers are their golf courses – the ones that endure as times change and continue to engage the interest of golfers as each new golfing generation emerges. In Nova Scotia and Ontario, several of Rickwood’s golf courses remain in play, hosting many thousands of rounds of golf each year. The oldest of his golf courses is 110 years old; the youngest, a spritely ninety.
Long may Fred Rickwood’s legacy golf courses last – especially that of the Napanee Golf and Country Club!
Introduction
In an article celebrating Napanee Golf and Country Club’s emergence into a third century since its opening in 1897, Flagstick magazine observes that “There is no designer of record for Napanee. Much like the historic courses of the United Kingdom, its nine holes (but ten greens and with eighteen separate tee locations) were crafted gradually – with renovations taken upon by the membership when it has been deemed necessary” (8 June 2007).
To say that there is no designer of record for the Napanee golf course is true enough, as far as it goes. Yet the absence of a designer of record is not a matter of a missing designer, but rather a matter of missing records. Or more accurately yet, it is a matter of not inspecting the existing records closely enough.
For closer inspection of the records reveals that there was indeed an identifiable designer of the Napanee Golf and Country Club’s course, that his work dates from what is known as “the Golden Age” of North American golf course design, and that his golf course design mentor was the greatest of all Canadian golf course architects: the legendary Stanley Thompson.
In Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 (2010), Art and Cathy Hunter reproduce two 1927 articles from local newspapers that draw attention to a visit to the Napanee Golf and Country Club that summer by a pair of golf professionals, one of whom would exert a fundamental and continuing influence on the playing of golf in Napanee.
The Hunters draw attention to the following item in the Napanee Beaver (10 June 1927):
GOLF MATCH
The match played here Wednesday afternoon was a very interesting game and was followed by a large crowd of spectators. Bill Brazier, British Professional of Toronto, was paired with George Faulkner, a young amateur from Belleville Country Club, against Fred Rickwood, British Professional of Toronto, and W. Kerr, Professional at the Cataraqui Golf Club. On the first round Brazier and Faulkner were two up and held the same lead during the second round. Brazier made a score of 76, for the 18 holes, which is good, considering that the greens are not in a fit condition for putting. He plays a very steady game and seldom got in any difficulty. His partner, George Faulkner, got in trouble several times on the first round, but played a 39 in the second round and if he continues, he should soon be heard of in the Canadian Championship matches.
Rickwood had 40 for each round and had three penalties. He played a very sporting game and took chances rather than playing safe, which of course pleased the spectators. He made some great recoveries after getting in difficulties. Kerr could not seem to get going in the first round, and the course did not seem to be to his liking, taking a 47 the first round. However, he improved in the second round and made a 39. Final scores, Brazier 76, Faulkner 84, Rickwood 80, and Kerr 86. After the game Brazier gave a very excellent demonstration of how a ball should be driven with the different kinds of iron and wooden clubs and apparently could make the ball do anything he wished. Both Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood have been very busy giving lessons to the local members, and all are delighted with their work. Brazier's two lectures have been most instructive to golfers. Rickwood, besides being a good instructor, is an expert in laying out courses and building greens, and has during his stay, laid out a new green and practically completed it.
The Management of the Club were very fortunate in securing their services, and it is to be hoped they will return in the near future, as there are many who have not had the chance to obtain lessons from them.
The Hunters also note the following piece a few days later in The Napanee Express (14 June 1927):
GOLF WEEK
Last week the Napanee Golf and Country Club staged an interesting and profitable week for its members. Messrs. Bill Brazier and Fred Rickwood, two well-known professional golfers, spent the week at the course, giving lessons to those asking for them, and repairing and selling clubs and advising the members on any golf matters at request. On Monday Mr. Brazier, who is a wonderfully fine golfer and a splendid teacher, gave a lecture on wooden clubs, and on Wednesday evening an exceedingly interesting lecture on iron clubs. On Wednesday afternoon Messrs. Faulkner, of Belleville, and Kerr, of Kingston, played an exhibition game with Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood. Eighteen holes were played, … Brazier and Faulkner ... winning the match. The golfers who attended the game were treated to a fine exhibition…. Mr. Rickwood, who has had years of experience in laying out golf courses, has prepared a plan for the improvement of
the Napanee course, and while here laid out and completed a new number one green. Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood will return here in August to lay out further improvements in the course. Both gentlemen were delighted with the Napanee course, stating that the fairways were the best in Ontario, and with improvement to the greens the course will be one of the very best nine-hole courses in Ontario. A large number of the Napanee enthusiasts received instruction from the professionals, keeping their time fully occupied during their stay.
Who was this Fred Rickwood? Who was this Bill Brazier? And how did they come to be barnstorming the province on a fix-your-swing, fix-your-clubs, fix-your-course mission?
In particular, what can we learn about this “course-whisperer” Fred Rickwood and how he had accumulated “years of experience in laying out golf courses”? What might it have been in his “years of experience” that led the management of the Napanee Golf and Country Club to commission him, rather than another golf course architect, to present plans for the improvement of its golf course?
We note that the one newspaper indicates on June 10th that it was “to be hoped they will return in the near future,” whereas just four days later we read in the other newspaper that “they will return here in August to lay out further improvements in the course.”
Their return was to be in the very near future, indeed! And their plans for that return went from vague to certain in just four days. Their June visit must have impressed the golf club. What was it that convinced club management to let course designer Fred Rickwood lay out a new and improved course that August?
These questions are important for lovers of the Napanee Golf and Country Club, for the present routing of the golf course is largely due to his work late in the summer and early in the fall of 1927. Five of his 1927 greens are still used at the Napanee golf course, and on holes where his original greens have been replaced, his fairways and tee boxes are still in use.
So here is our missing designer of record: Fred Rickwood.
A Word on the Organization of the Book as Four Volumes
This book, A Forgotten Life in Canadian Golf: Remembering Fred Rickwood and the Making of the Napanee Golf Course, is presented in four volumes.
Volume One, The Course of Fred Rickwood’s Life: From Ilkley to Orillia, presents the biography of this Canadian golf pioneer.
Volume Two, Napanee Golfers and their Courses to 1906, provides biographies of the earliest known golfers in Napanee, discusses the golfing grounds where golf was first played in the area, and discusses the first golf course laid out in 1897 and used down to 1906.
Volume Three, The 1907 New Course and Four of Its Players, discusses the first nine-hole golf course laid out for the Napanee Golf Club, presents photographs of the 1907 design, and presents biographies of the four golfers who appear in the photographs in question.
Volume Four, Blending Penal and Strategic Design at Napanee, reviews the architectural principles that Rickwood learned from mentors like Stanley Thompson and analyzes in Rickwood’s design practices at Napanee his implementation of principles associated with the 1910-37 period of golf course construction that Geoff Shackleford calls The Golden Age of Golf Design (Sleeping Bear Press 1999).
Volume Two: Napanee Golfers and Their Courses to 1906
Of Earlier Courses and Golfers
Before proceeding to an analysis of the architectural principles that Fred Rickwood put into practice in his 1927 re-design of the Napanee golf course (which occurs in Volume Four), I consider the design history of the golf course that came down to him.
A full appreciation of what Rickwood did with the land on which Napanee golfers had played for thirty years before his arrival requires a review of what had been done with that land by golf course designers before him.
We often think of a golf course metaphorically as the architect’s painting: the land of Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township was Rickwood’s canvas; the golf course that he built is his painting upon that canvas. But in terms of re-designing an existing golf course (as opposed to building one from scratch), rather than thinking of the architect as painting over an earlier work and thereby completely effacing it, we should perhaps change the metaphor. A re-designed golf course is more like a palimpsest. The latter is writing material, such as a piece of papyrus or a piece of paper, on which the original writing has been rubbed out to make way for new writing, but on which traces of the original writing remain evident. Just as we can see under the present writing on a piece of paper the impression left by an earlier hand, so we can see within re-designed golf course the marks of earlier designs.
And so in Volumes Two and Three of this book, I conduct an architectural review of the early golf courses on which the Napanee Golf Club played until 1927.
In doing so, I also tell the stories of many of the men and women who first played golf on the land that is still occupied by today’s Napanee Golf and Country Club.
In undertaking this simultaneous study of the courses that Napanee golfers played and of the people who played these courses, I operate on the assumption that there have been just three “new” golf courses on the grounds of the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
The first is taken to date from 1897, when the Napanee Golf Club was founded.
The second golf course dates from 1907. In this year occurs the first of only two newspaper references ever to a “new course” in Napanee: we read on 3 May 1907 that “The Napanee Golf Club’s new course was opened for play” (Hunters p. 8).
The third and final golf course dates from 1927, upon completion of the re-design by Fred Rickwood at the end of that year. We find the first reference to this post-Rickwood golf course as the “new course” in a newspaper report about an event played during the following summer: “the annual tournament for the district cup was held at the new course of the Napanee Golf and Country Club” (Napanee Beaver, 3 July 1928).
Of course changes to the golf course over the years since 1927 have produced a new tee box here and a new green there. But these changes were occasional and incremental. At no point after 1927 was the golf course entirely remodelled. That is, at no point after Rickwood’s re-design of the nine holes of the golf course at the Napanee Golf and Country club was there ever again a “new course.”
Today, we still play Fred Rickwood’s golf course.
But what of the first golf course in Napanee? What do we know of it?
Does the beginning of golf in Napanee correspond to the official founding of the Napanee Golf Club in 1897? Or was golf perhaps played in the area for several years before this? When was it that a few people in the Napanee community first discovered their mutual love of the game? Where was it that they first began hitting golf balls toward sticks planted here and there on common lands or pastures? Who were these early golfers, and what were their contributions to the beginning of golf history in Napanee?
I address these questions in Napanee Golfers and Their Courses to 1906, Volume Two of A Forgotten Life in Canadian Golf: Remembering Fred Rickwood and the Making of the Napanee Golf Course.
1890's Golf in Napanee
Fred Rickwood was asked to plan improvements for a nine-hole golf course, but the Napanee golf course had not always had nine holes. Art and Cathy Hunter say that it began as no more than a five-hole course in 1897.
Although the Napanee Golf Club was founded in 1897, it may be that golf was played on the land that would become the club’s golf course even before then – perhaps as early as 1890.
Figure 2 Walter Stevens Herrington (1860-1947), Victoria College, University of Toronto, Law Class of 1883.
Charles Beale meant to celebrate the ancient legacy of golf in Napanee in an article in the Napanee Beaver called “’Granddaddy’ Course Turns 116” (18 April 2013), but he missed an opportunity to extend our understanding of that legacy by not carefully reading Walter S. Herrington’s A History of the County of Lennox and Addington (Macmillan: Toronto, 1913). He writes that “W.S. Herrington, in describing recreation in Napanee …, may not have been a golfer, for he emphasized cricket, softball and curling to the exclusion of golf, which has been a sport here since 1897.” Unfortunately, what Beale says is mostly incorrect.
Walter S. Herrington was passionate about golf. He played the game for fifty years and also built at least one golf course. He not only mentions golf fondly in The History of the County of Lennox & Addington; he also dates the beginning of golf in Napanee to a time several years before 1897.
Herrington was a stereotypically Victorian gentleman in the energy, enthusiasm, and earnestness with which he dedicated himself to his job, his family, and the welfare of his community, and he was something of a “renaissance man” in terms of the range of his interests and abilities.
He was born in Ameliasburgh in 1860, lived and worked in Napanee as of the opening of his law office there in 1886 after his graduation from the University of Toronto, married a local Napanee woman in 1890, became a Queen’s Council/King’s Council, became the senior member of an important local law firm, was Master of the Masonic Lodge of Napanee for eight years and then Grand Master of the Ontario Lodge, ran a Shakespeare reading club in town for 25 years, and gave lectures and slide shows throughout Eastern Ontario on historical topics and contemporary events. He was an author who wrote more than a dozen books, mostly on Canadian history, with a special focus on the history of the County of Lennox and Addington.
In his History of Lennox & Addington County, published in 1913, Herrington drew attention to the long history of golf in Napanee and made clear his affection for this game. Note his slightly arch language about the game of golf and his description of the passion motivating the local people who played it (including himself), as opposed to his more restrained prose about other sports, where there is no mention of the players’ love for these games:
Napanee has always been ambitious in the matter of sports. At the present time the Curling Club, although labouring under a great disadvantage in having a very inferior rink, has more than held its own against Belleville, Brockville, and Kingston, and has to its credit more trophies than any other club in the Eastern League…. For many years the Napanee Hockey Club scored many brilliant victories against the neighbouring towns and cities, but has been unable to maintain its record through the want of a rink. The Collegiate Institute football teams have captured all the cups that have come within their reach, and baseball has had its intermittent periods of popularity, and whenever a team has been put in the field it has made a fair showing. For over twenty years the ancient game of golf has had a few ardent votaries, whose annual defeats have not quenched their love for the sport. (251)
Herrington signed his Preface to this book on 1 July 1913. Since this was the last piece of writing to be added to the book, we know that all the other writing in the book preceded this date. And so we know that he actually wrote the words about golf – declaring that golf had been played in Napanee “for over twenty years” – earlier than July 1st of 1913.
A little bit of elementary mathematics produces a surprising piece of information: the year 1913, minus “over twenty years,” equals a starting date for golf in Napanee of no later than 1892. It may even have been a few years earlier.
Information in this paragraph about the timeline for the development of curling in Napanee relative to the development of golf also supports the conclusion that golf began in Napanee before 1897. Herrington says that “the Curling Club …. was organized about twenty years ago by Dr. [Julien Donald] Bissonnette and the late W. A. Bellhouse” (251). Herrington points back to 1893 (1913 minus “about twenty years” equals about 1893) as the year when the curling club was organized. As we shall see below, Walter Arthur Bellhouse arrived in town sometime in 1893 to serve as the manager of the Merchants Bank. So Herrington seems to be accurate in his use of the phrase “about twenty years ago” when dating the beginning of the Curling Club.
Figure 3 Walter Arthur Bellhouse circa 1902. He moved from the Merchants Bank in Brampton to the Merchants Bank in Napanee in 1893.
The curling club moved into what Herrington called its “very inferior rink” in January of 1897, as a lease housed in the Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives shows. Herrington’s name is the first of forty names listed on the lease. The readiness-to-hand of forty men to sign the lease for the indoor curling club in January of 1897 seems to confirm that that there had been organized curling in Napanee for some time before curling moved indoors that year. There is also a cheque made out to Bellhouse for curling club dues in the same archives dated December of 1896. So the work by club members to arrange the lease for the rink must have been completed earlier in 1896, if not before.
It seems that this indoor curling club was a descendent of an earlier outdoor curling club. The Napanee Curling Club’s website today indicates that before it moved indoors, “Napanee curling began in the 1890s on the Napanee River.”
How long any such outdoor curling club had operated before moving indoors in 1896-97 is not clear, but we have some reason to be confident that as a historian Herrington is being careful with his dating of events: curling seems to have been organized “about twenty years ago” – that is, around 1893.
So Herrington’s suggestion about the relative origins of curling and golf in Napanee – he suggests that whereas a curling club had been formed “about twenty years ago,” golf had been played for “over twenty years” – also points to a start for golf before 1893.
Just as curling was played somewhat informally on the Napanee River before it was moved indoors, so it seems likely that golf was played on fields around Napanee before a lease was signed for the Cartwright property, apparently in 1897. Indeed, the formal creation – that is, legal incorporation – of a golf club (as opposed to a group of friends occasionally playing golf on local pastures) may have been a requirement for securing a lease on the Cartwright land. Just as the rink owner wanted the signatures of members of an official curling club on the rink lease, so the Napanee agent for the Cartwright estate may have wanted the signatures of the members of an official golf club on the lease for Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh.
One might have suspected, by the affectionate way he writes about golfers and the game of golf in general, and by the way he pokes fun at the losing tradition amongst Napanee players in particular, that Herrington himself was one of the lovers of the game who ineluctably suffered annually the slings and arrows of golfing misfortune in the early years of golf in Napanee.
And so he was.
Yet he was never to be one of the golf club’s top golfers. He was not nearly as good as Bellhouse, for instance, who was one of the six Napanee golfers who travelled to play a match in Kingston in 1905, and who was one of the eight players who qualified to play off in match play for the club championship in July of 1907 (Bellhouse was ultimately not able participate in the club championship match-play competition, however, and was replaced at the last moment by an alternate). Although his wife and children are mentioned in the local newspapers in connection with the golf club over the first three decades of the existence of the Napanee Golf Club, there is no mention of W.S. Herrington as a golfer until 1939. By then, he was seventy-nine years old, and the golf club had been re-constituted as the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
Yet if we look at two photographs from the early days, we find evidence that he was a significant figure in the early life of the Napanee Golf Club. Two photographs of the meal hosted by the Napanee Golf Club in connection with its match against Picton Golf Club in 1908 suggest that Herrington probably played in that match.
Figure 4 Left to right: John Wesley Robinson, Dr. Raymond Alonzo Leonard, Walter Stevens Herrington, Walter Arthur Bellhouse, and George Ernest Hall (?) holding the golf club. Photograph dates from 1908. Detail from photograph N-00657. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
In one photograph, he is grouped with team stalwarts Arthur Walter Bellhouse, Dr. Raymond Alonzo Leonard, and John Wesley Robinson, all three of whom played in the first recorded match played by the Napanee Golf Club men’s team (against the Kingston Golf Club in 1905).
Figure 5 Herrington at head of table on extreme right. Bellhouse sits in front of the clubhouse window, wearing a large hat with black band. Photograph dates from 1908.
In the other photograph of this event, he is seated at a table that includes these three golfers, as well as a number of other team members. Note that Herrington is at the head of the table.
In the long run, however, Herrington figured prominently in just one competition at Napanee Golf and Country Club – and did so rather late in his golfing career.
Figure 6 Walter S. Herrington at the University of Toronto in 1943, sixty years after his graduation.
Although he is not mentioned in newspaper reports of intramural or extramural club competitions for more than thirty years, Herrington presumably maintained a playing membership at the Napanee Golf Club during the intervening years. In his eightieth year, for instance, he had become a non-playing associate member of the Napanee Golf and Country Club, for a newspaper item in 1939 reports that he came out of golf retirement to play in the golf club’s putting competition that summer: “The Napanee Golf and Country Club on Wednesday afternoon …was the scene of numerous golfing and social activities. The weather was ideal and though it was a rather warm day, a refreshing breeze, and the shade of the many trees, made the place very comfortable…. A large number of associate members, both ladies and men, were present for the supper and a very delicious meal was enjoyed amidst delightful surroundings. After supper, twilight putting competitions were held for both the ladies and men, and created a great deal of interest. One of the most interesting features of these games was the winning of the putting prize for men associate members by Mr. W. S. Herrington, who has not been playing golf in recent years” (Napanee Express 27 June 1939, cited in Hunters 46).
It seems that until “recent years,” Herrington had indeed been playing golf at the Napanee Golf Club.
Despite scant evidence of his play at the Napanee Golf Club apart from this 1939 newspaper reference and the 1908 photograph of club members, Herrington was undoubtedly one of the ancient game’s earliest and most ardent of votaries in Napanee in the 1890s. The evidence in support of this assertion is to be found not in the immediate vicinity of Napanee, however, but rather in fields nearer to Adolphustown, where Herrington built his own golf course.
He referred to it in a local newspaper as “the Golf Links” of Camp Le Nid
The Golf Links of Camp Le Nid
Herrington was the leader of a band of colleagues who retreated to Camp Le Nid for summer vacations. Le Nid Point was on the Bay of Quinte farm lands of the Ruttan family, whose United Empire Loyalist ancestor Peter Ruttan had arrived there in the 1780s. Camp Le Nid was the site of these summer vacations from 1886 to 1946 (the year before Herrington died).
Members brought golf clubs to the camp at least by the mid-1890s, and probably even earlier.
So we can be sure that residents of Napanee were familiar with the sight of golf clubs being carried through the downtown area well before the Napanee Golf Club was established, for all club members arrived in Napanee by train in the 1880s and 1890s and then travelled by boat from the Napanee docks to Le Nid point.
Camp Le Nid was organized in 1886 by Herrington and five other young men as a mid-summer retreat for fellow graduates of Victoria College, now located at the University of Toronto but then at Cobourg, where they had all earned their law degrees in the mid-1880s. The annual vacations at Camp Le Nid were to allow Herrington’s fellow graduates across Canada and the United States (and one other who came from South Africa!) to rough it in the bush, living in tents, and learning to know each other “as we are,” as Herrington later wrote (Reveries of Camp Le Nid, 1908). The campers’ motto was “Sans souci, sans cérémonie, sans peur, et sans reproche”: without worry, without ceremony, without fear, and without reproach (Dominion Illustrated, Vol vii no 168 [19 September 1991], p. 267).
To have made golf part of the experience of roughing it in the Canadian bush is a sure sign that one was an ardent votary of the ancient game. Mind you, not many play golf without some degree of worry, ceremony, fear, and reproach.
We find the first reference to golf at the camp in Herrington’s account in the Napanee Express of 1897 of the opening of the camp that summer. By then, the club had been in existence for ten years. In 1891, there were nineteen members of the club; by 1908 the membership had been capped at fifty. The 1897 article indicates that fifteen members are expected at camp that summer. Herrington says that club members have arrived, or will shortly arrive, from Baltimore, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Oshawa. It seems that at this point, just two members of the club are from Napanee: Herrington and a man named Morley Wilson, the son of the member of the House of Commons for Lennox.
Figure 7 Herrington (left) and Uriah Morley Wilson in a 1902 photograph of the Napanee Curling Club.
On the day of the camp’s opening, they all leave Napanee “per steam yacht Jessie Forward” for Ruttan’s Point. Herrington writes, “After a pleasant sail down the river and bay we arrived at Ruttan’s Point at 5 p.m. and before dark had our tents pitched and our baggage under shelter.” The baggage included golf clubs: “The Golf links, as usual, are the main source of attraction for the sporting members of camp” (30 July 1897).
Herrington’s phrase “as usual” deserves attention.
I would argue that since upon arrival at camp in 1897, the Le Nid golf links were the main source of attraction “as usual,” then we can infer that the golf links must have dated from at least 1895. According to the way we use the English language, if the golf links had dated only from the previous year (1896), then Herrington would not have said that they were the main source of attraction “as usual.” Instead, he would have said that they were the main source of attraction “once more,” or perhaps “as they were last year.”
For behaviour to be described as “usual,” it must have happened more than twice. So the golf links had to have been the main source of attraction for at least two summers for Herrington to have said that the fact of this attraction had become “usual” in 1897.
I do not believe that this analysis reads too much into the language used by a lawyer and author, whose vocation and avocation both depended on accurate use of words. We can confidently infer from Herrington’s language that the golf course had been in existence since at least the summer of 1895.
It is perhaps possible, if Herrington thought of Camp Le Nid as part of the greater Napanee area, that he was alluding to golf at Camp Le Nid when he wrote that by 1913 golf had been played in Napanee for “over twenty years.” If so, we could date the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid from the early 1890s. But since Herrington was a historian who was generally very aware of and respectful of the distinct histories and cultures of the many communities within the County of Lennox and Addington, and since he was writing in the paragraph in question about the history of sport in the town of Napanee in particular, it seems unlikely that he would have conflated the Le Nid area west of Adolphustown with Napanee.
Herrington was certainly proud of the golf activities at Camp Le Nid. See the carefully organized photograph below of Herrington posing in front of his tent sometime in the late 1890s. He looks like a Civil War general, holding a golf club in place of a sword. At his feet are two other of golf’s ardent votaries: they look like twin attendants – faithful caddies taking the place of faithful lieutenants.
Figure 8 Herrington (standing), with two unidentified golfing companions, at Camp Le Nid in the late 1890s. Photograph N10992 Courtesy of county of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The earliest photographs of the “Le Nid Golf Links” show that the golf course was of a rudimentary character. The Hunters suggest that such was the case for the first golf course at Napanee: “The original course consisted of no more than five holes, cutting across our existing number three, four and five holes. It was probably not much more than a pasture, with the only ‘mowing’ of the fairways done by grazing cattle or sheep. The greens would have been ‘built’ simply by cutting an area with a mechanical mower” (p. 6).
According to the Hunters, it would not have taken long to make such a rudimentary golf course: “If there was open acreage, be it park, farmland or parade ground, reasonably accessible, it could be turned into a course in a day or two by a few would-be golfers. Tees and greens were prepared with a hand mower and a roller. The holes that were dug out of the greens were of an appropriate size, but likely bigger than the current 4¼ inch. Sticks, not flags, were used to mark the hole” (p. 4).
As at Napanee, the first Golf Links of Camp Le Nid may have comprised fewer than nine holes. Such was often the case for the first golf courses built in Canada in the nineteenth century. Golf was first played in Brantford around 1870 over just four holes. Golf was first played in Halifax in the mid-1870s over a few holes on open ground near the citadel. Golf was first played in Perth over three holes on a farm at the edge of town. Golf was first played in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1897 on a course with five holes. The same is true of dozens of other communities across Canada and the United States.
The location of Camp Le Nid at the end of Le Nid Point is visible on a 1954 aerial photograph.
Figure 9 1954 aerial photograph of Le Nid Point in the Bay of Quinte between Perch Cove and Bass Cove.
The tents (later replaced by cabins) were pitched at the very tip of the point, at the end of several of Ruttan’s cleared fields. Woods separated these fields from Ruttan’s farmhouse and farm buildings, affording the campers complete privacy for activities sans souci, sans cérémonie, sans peur, et sans reproche.
We have photographs showing at least three golf holes of the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid. In the first photograph, taken on one of the “Visitors Days” at the camp (when the exclusively male camp members entertained women and children at camp), we see a woman posing with golf club in hand as though she is about to tee off. She holds the golf club incorrectly, hands reversed on the grip from the position they should be in, and hands widely separated (as though she were preparing to make a back-handed shot with a hockey stick). One presumes that she is a novice at golf.
Figure 10 The first tee at the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid in the late 1890s. Photograph N-02720 Courtesy of the Lennox and Addington County Museum and Archives.
In the foreground is a child watching the woman. Behind her, holding his own golf club, is a camp member (who may have been the man in the photograph above sitting on the ground to Herrington’s right). Note on the left side of the photograph a small stake in the ground with a piece of cloth attached to it. This type of flag was how the teeing grounds were marked at the golf links of Camp Le Nid.
This tee was right at the edge of the campgrounds. One presumes that there would have been a putting green nearby whereby golfers would be brought back to the campground at the conclusion of their round of golf.
The second photograph shows a teeing ground on another hole.
The field here is elevated well above the cove that appears in the background – the base of the trees along the golf course shoreline disappearing well below the fairway. I take this body of water to be Perch Cove, since the far shoreline appears to be nearer to Point Le Nid than the shoreline visible in the photograph of another golf hole in Figure 15 below, the shoreline across Perch Cove being about 800 meters from Point Le Nid and the shoreline across Bass Cove being about 1200 meters from Point Le Nid.
Figure 11 The teeing ground of another hole at the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid. Photograph N-11016 Courtesy of the Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The golfers have apparently walked at least the length of one field from the campground, which is close to the water level at the end of Le Nid Point.
Notice the stake with cloth attached to it, hammered into the field to mark the teeing ground. Note also the paper protruding from the pocket of the golfer who swings his club: it is possible that the members had actually printed scorecards for the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid.
Those who are amused by the rudimentary nature of the teeing grounds at the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid may be shocked by the truly primitive nature of the putting greens and the extraordinary objects used to mark the location of the golf hole.
Figure 12 Putting green at the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid from the 1890s. Photograph N-02691 Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The putting green is about three feet in diameter. Its grass is trimmed short relative to the grass of the fair green (today called the fairway). The hole at the centre of the green is marked by a pole about two feet in height, to which is fixed a rectangular piece of wood, measuring about four inches by ten inches.
To judge by the primitive nature of this apparently quite typical late nineteenth-century golf course, one might conclude that early Lennox and Addington golfers required something of the pioneering spirit of their United Empire Loyalist forbears: the willingness to make-do with a shanty until a proper house was built emerged in golfing descendants as willingness to make-do with a pasture until a proper golf course was built.
The putting green that we have just inspected was part of a third golf hole that we must analyze.
This golf hole seems to have been located in the field parallel to the field beside Perch Cove in which the two men stand ready to tee-off in the photograph above. The field beside Perch Cove is to the left of the line of trees that we see below forming the left border of the field in which the man putts. The green here was at the end of the field seen here closest to the campground. This hole’s teeing ground was presumably toward the opposite end of this field – the end of the field running up against a fence, at which another field begins and runs up to the woods in the far distance. On the far side of the woods were farmer Ruttan’s other cleared fields, his farm buildings, and his farmhouse. The land slopes from the high point of the woods all the way down to the campground. The tee for the hole on which the man putts may have been near the man in the background just visible over the putting man’s shoulder.
Figure 13 Play on this part of the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid makes its way back downhill toward the campground. Photograph N02961 Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Play here seems to have proceeded from the far fence down to the putting green in the foreground. It is possible that there are two golf holes shown here, and that the man visible over the shoulder of the golfer who putts in the foreground is completing play at the putting green of the immediately preceding golf hole.
If there were in fact two golf holes running from the top to the bottom of this field, then we can see that the golf holes were short and undistinguished by any visible hazards.
Such was the case with many early golf courses in North America. The photograph below from 1899 shows several golf holes at the Swannanoa Country Club in Asheville, North Carolina – a golf course also laid out in a farmer’s fields.
Figure 14 An 1899 photograph of the fifth hole at Swannanoa Country Club in Asheville, North Carolina.
Note that the woman in the foreground, attended by her caddie, tees off on the sixth hole, having just completed play up the hill to the fifth hole, marked by the flag behind her. At the bottom of the hill, a man, also attended by a caddie, prepares to strike his tee shot on the fifth hole, having just completed the fourth hole, marked by the flag behind him. Left of him, we see other players on other holes marked by other flags.
The golf holes at Swannanoa were short, marked by short flags, routed close together in a farmer’s field. We could mistake the scene for visitor’s day at Camp Le Nid in the late 1890s.
The photograph below shows members of Camp Le Nid playing the golf course in a seven-some! On the far right side of the photograph, half-way up, we can see what I take to be Bass Cove and the far shore shore 1200 meters across from Point Le Nid. The men are in the same field as the two men in the previous photograph. In this photograph, the second man from the left and the third man from the left are the same two men that we saw in the previous photograph. (They are dressed just as they were in the previous photograph, too, suggesting that these two photographs may have been taken on the same day.) The green on which they putt is the same green as seen in the previous photograph.
Figure 15 Seven members of Camp Le Nid putt out on the green of a golf hole along the shoreline of Bass Cove. Photograph N11070 Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Golf holes tended to be very short on the rudimentary golf courses built in North America in the last third of the nineteenth century. At Saint John, New Brunswick, for instance, “The original course was a five-hole layout with the longest hole being 200 yards.” Note that even when “The course quickly became overcrowded and in 1901 was extended to a 9-hole layout of about 2,000 yards,” the average length of holes was still less than 225 yards (https://www.riversidecountryclub.ca/news/a-brief-history-of-the-riverside-country-club). Note that golf holes of 200-225 yards were deemed appropriate fourshot holes in days of yore.
So it is not surprising to learn that as early as 1897 Herrington and his golf-mad band of Le Nid campers somehow routed a short, 14-hole golf course through the four fields that farmer Ruttan allowed them to use. The fourteen holes must have been very short, indeed, for the length of the open fields available to camp members was no more than 600 yards (or 550 meters), and the holes must also have been narrow, for the width of the fields altogether at their widest point near the woods was no more than 400 yards (or 360 meters). Furthermore, the land narrowed progressively from the woods down to the tip of the point where the camp was located. Note also that he fields were divided by “tree fences,” which meant that there was never more than about 200 yards (or 180 meters) of space through which a golf shot might be directed without being blocked by trees.
Figure 16 A 1954 aerial image of the four fields available for use as the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid.
We learn of the 14-hole layout from an August update in the Napanee Express after its earlier July article (quoted above) about the opening of the 1897 camp season: “The golf championship rests between Mr. Herrington, of Napanee, and His Honor Judge Ingram of Baltimore, each having covered the links (14 holes) in 67 strokes” (13 August 1897).
So Napanee’s own Renaissance man, Walter Stevens Herrington, was not just a designer of the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid, but also joint Club Champion of 1897!
Had the man no limits?!
The newspaper also notes that “Several excellent photographs of camp life have been secured this year. These will be bound in albums and preserved by the members as souvenirs of the summer’s outing” (13 August 1897). We might suspect that the photographs of the golf course above were among these photographs “secured” in 1897. If so, we might wonder whether the photograph of the “sevensome” records the climactic moment of the club championship that summer: the final putts on the fourteenth hole.
Camp Le Nid expert Jane Lovell suggests that the golf course layout evident in the photographs above “would likely have been only temporarily established”: “I suspect the ‘course’ was laid out whenever … Camp attendees wanted to play” (email to the author, 9 January 2020). She observes that in souvenir booklets from 1932 and 1934 (presumably similar to the 1897 souvenir albums mentioned above in the Napanee Express), photographs “show strokes being taken from the lane entrance at the tree fence (centre of the field) and along the lane towards camp. Another shot is of a putt in the middle of the forest(!)” (email to author, 9 January 2020).
In its various configurations, the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid remained in play for over fifty years, abandoned only when the camp itself was abandoned in 1947, in consequence of the death of camp leader Herrington at the beginning of that year.
The question for us to consider now is whether, in the early 1890s, before the formal founding of the Napanee Golf Club in 1897, Herrington and his fellow Napanee golfers had made something similar to the perpetually provisional Golf Links of Camp Le Nid nearer to the town of Napanee – near enough for them to have walked to their golf grounds, not just with clubs in hand, but also with a bag full of pennants and poles for marking teeing grounds and holes.
An 1890s Eastern Ontario Golf Boom
The development of golf grounds in Napanee and at Camp Le Nid in the 1890s was part of an 1890s golf boom in Canada in general. And it was also part of a local 1890s golf boom in Eastern Ontario in particular.
American tourists spending summer vacations in the Thousand Islands stimulated the development of golf courses at a number of resorts, and in turn showed a willingness to travel further afield in Eastern Ontario in order to play other golf courses.
Of course the Kingston Golf Club had been in existence since 1886, although it had disbanded in 1888 and was subsequently reorganized in 1891. The Kingston Club was successful in its second iteration in part because of this booming of the game in the United States in the 1890s and the subsequent increase in play at the Kingston Golf Club’s Barriefield links by American tourists visiting the Thousand Islands during the summers. In fact, these visits by relatively wealthy Americans led the club to undertake extensive renovations in 1897 so that the golf course would meet the standards of these golf-savvy tourists. (Recall that Digby Golf Club in Nova Scotia would hire Fred Rickwood after World War I out of the same desire to make its golf course sophisticated enough to interest American tourists.)
In the Kingston hinterland, simultaneously, there was increasing interest in making golf locally accessible to the professional and merchant classes of various small towns. Since the automobile was not yet widely available, the almost universal strategy was to build a golf ground on the edge of the town – either within walking distance of residential areas, or along the local railway track where a stop at the golf links could be added. (Most such golf courses were swallowed up by the development of land around towns as they grew, but golf courses in Napanee and Perth – each dating from the 1890s – are exceptions to this rule: they remain just where they always were because a river kept the town development away from them.)
In addition to the formation of the Napanee Golf Club in 1897, I recently discovered that later in the same year, an advertisement appeared in the Napanee Express announcing that “A golf club has been organized at Picton” (8 October 1897).
Around the same time, there were also new golf courses being built to the east of Picton, Napanee, and Kingston throughout the Thousand Islands. Resort owners were determined that their guests should not have to leave their hotels and journey to Kingston to play golf. The Daily Whig reported in 1898 that “Golf is the coming game among the islands. Round Island has fine links” (11 July 1898).
Figure 17 The Frontenac Island Hotel as renovated circa 1900 and the 2, 423-yard nine-hole golf course that was built around it.
The same newspaper had news of another golf course newly opened just a year later: “Golf is booming at Thousand Islands resorts. There are flourishing clubs at Alexandria Bay and Round Island Park” (Daily Whig, 2 August 1899).
Playing Golf before Forming a Club
In the late 1800s in Canada and the United States, it was usually the case that a few people in a town or city who possessed golf clubs would plant sticks in a farmer’s field and play golf over a rudimentary course just like the one at Camp Le Nid. No great labour was required to make a teeing ground on such a course: a flag was stuck in the ground where it was relatively level. No great labour was required to make a putting green on such a course: a hole was dug in the ground where it was relatively level and a stick put in it. On such a golf course, neither tees nor putting greens were permanent. They might be changed from year to year as golfers saw fit. Even the direction of the fairways might change from year to year.
In communities where a few ardent votaries of the ancient game pursued golf in this way, only after interest in golf established itself solidly amongst several more players would a formal golf club be formed and the business of laying out a relatively permanent golf course be undertaken.
In Brantford, for instance, the first golf club was organized in 1879. Yet George Maclean Rose writes in A Cyclopedia of Canadian Biography that when Alexander Robertson was appointed the manager of Brantford’s branch of the British Bank of North America, he “introduced that excellent game into Ontario in 1872” (p. 663). Furthermore, the Brantford Golf Club says that two other employees of the bank began to play golf regularly in Brantford a few years before that: “The Bank of British North America was an important institution of business in the early 1870s. Not only did it provide a financial centre, but it also provided the town with two employees who played the first golf in Brantford. On the common ground of Vinegar Hill …, James E. Darling and James Cran, after rustling up a few clubs, played around a 4-hole course…. Soon, Darling and Cran were joined by others, including Alexander Robertson, manager of the British Bank of North America…. But not until 1879 was a golf club formally organized” (Brantford Golf and Country Club: 1879-1979, compiled by L. Rubenstein and J. Briggs, privately printed in 1979, pp. 5-6). In the Branford Courier of January 8th, 1879, the newspaper reporter, who was obviously unfamiliar with the game, wrote “A golf club (whatever that may mean) has been organized in this city …. They will play Wednesdays and Fridays.”
The same story can be told of the introduction of golf to communities big and small all across North America in the late 1800s. James Darling, himself, when he noticed the first issue of Canadian Golfer magazine in 1915, which was published in Brantford, immediately wrote to the editor Reville about his old habit of introducing golf to communities in which he lived in those days: “I went to Brantford in 1871 and left there in the fall of 1873, and it was very shortly before leaving that Mr. Robertson and I determined to get some clubs and try introduce golf to Brantford…. I only played a few times and Mr. Robertson was never able to come out with me…. After leaving Brantford I went to Halifax and had a few games there with Mr. J.B. Forgan …. We made a few holes around a large pond on a common near the citadel” (Canadian Golfer [July 1915], vol i no 3, p. 188).
The story in Perth was similar, according to the Perth Courier (1960): “In the 1890’s Capt. Roderick Matheson, manager of a local bank, was transferred to Montreal and while in Montreal was introduced to the game of golf at the Royal Montreal Golf Club. Upon his return to Perth, Capt. Matheson decided that his friends might enjoy this new form of recreation, so he invited them to come up to his farm on the banks of the Tay River to try their hand at the game…. The pioneer golfers who accompanied Capt. Matheson were as follows: Charles Stone, T.A. Code, John Code, Judge Scott, W.P. McEwen and Senator MacLaren. From these seven men the Links O’Tay was born.” The first golf course on Matheson’s farm consisted of just three holes.
Something of this sort must have occurred in Napanee, and it must have been the same sort of people – young lawyers, bankers, doctors, merchants, and land owners – who first acquired a knowledge of the game and then the implements with which it was played. It was presumably to such early enthusiasts that Herrington referred when he wrote in 1913 that “For over twenty years the ancient game of golf has had a few ardent votaries” in Napanee (p. 251).
Darling allows us to imagine the response of Napanee residents in the early 1890s to the site of Herrington and his out-of-town friends strolling through the town centre with golf clubs in hand on the way to the docks where they would board steam yachts to take them to Camp Le Nid. On his way from Brantford to Halifax in 1873, Darling found that his golf clubs made him a curious figure: “I remember, going down the St. Lawrence on my way to Halifax, the many inquiries as to what my clubs were for. We had to change to a small steamer to run the rapids, and, having no cabin for this part of the trip, I was carrying my clubs in my hands. The boat was full of American tourists, and the strange clubs, especially the irons, seemed to excite their curiosity” (p. 189).
Once the strange implements with which the game of golf was played appeared in a community, curiosity about the game was always stimulated among any who saw them, and a determination to try the game was usually stimulated amongst the leading sportsmen of the town.
Early Ardent Votaries of the Ancient Game in Napanee
Who might have been Herrington’s confederates in the first games of golf in Napanee and in the laying out of Napanee’s first rudimentary golf course?
I suspect that we will find the likeliest candidates among the earliest members of the Napanee Golf Club.
Given his devotion to golf at Camp Le Nid several years before the establishment of the Napanee Golf Club in 1897, Herrington must have been one of the prime movers behind the organization of the Napanee club, but at least some amongst the early 1890s ardent votaries that he mentions must have had a role alongside him in this venture.
In the following pages, I survey what can be discovered about the people named in the newspapers as being members of the Napanee Golf Club before World War I. Presumably we will find among these people some who might have been the early ardent votaries of the ancient game to whom Herrington refers.
Surveying the newspaper reports of activities at the Napanee Golf Club before World War I as reproduced in the Hunter’s book, I identify about two dozen men and one woman who played in the golf club’s weekly tournaments and/or the golf club’s competitions with other golf clubs such as Picton and Kingston. The people thereby identified probably constitute an almost comprehensive list of the male membership of the golf club before World War I. The Hunters point out that according to Fraser’s International Golf Yearbook for 1925-26, the Napanee Golf Club had a membership of sixty (p. 16). We might guess that at least thirty of these members were men, and that spouses of these men would have made up a good number of the rest. The total membership before the war, when golf was much less well-known as a sport, and so much less popular, will have been considerably less than sixty. So the more than two dozen men identified in this book as early golfers at the Napanee Golf Club, along with their spouses, probably made up most of the total membership in the years of newspaper reports from 1905 to 1914.
A photograph from 1908 shows many of these early club members. It is a photograph of men and women who participated in a celebration of a match played between the Napanee Golf Club and the Picton Golf Club.
In the sections that follow, I identify most of the players in this 1908 photograph. Furthermore, I provide brief biographies of these players and every other player that I find named in the newspaper as having been a member of the Napanee Golf Club before the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914.
It turns out that a majority of these people arrived in Napanee or took up the game of golf at some point after the golf club was formed in 1897, so they are not candidates for recognition as potential early 1890s ardent votaries golfing alongside Herrington then. But there are several golfers discussed below who may well have played golf with Herrington in Napanee before there was even an official golf club or a proper golf course.
Figure 18 This photograph was taken in 1908 at the original clubhouse in connection with a match between the men's golf teams of Napanee and Picton. I have identified twelve of the twenty men in this photograph. They were all members of the Napanee Golf Club at the time. I suspect that the other eight men yet to be identified were also members of the Napanee Golf Club and that the photograph comprises members of the Napanee Golf Club only. Biographies of these golfers, as well as others, are offered in the sections that follow. Photograph N-00657 Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Biographies
The following sections present biographies of the earliest members of the Napanee Golf Club named in the Napanee newspapers before World War I broke out in the summer of 1914.
The biographies are grouped in terms of occupation. The early members of the golf club were middleclass people: lawyers, doctors, church ministers, businessmen, merchants, factory owners, bankers, stock brokers, and so on. Many of them knew each other professionally. Many of them knew each other through politics. Many of them knew each other through church. Many of them served together on Town Council, County Council, the Board of Education, and so on. Many of them served together on societies dedicated to the study of history, children’s aid, temperance, literature, and so on. Many of them were masons in the Grand Lodge, the Oddfellows, United Empire Loyalist organizations, and so on. Many of them were related to each other, whether by birth, or by marriage, or both.
They all had money, and so they could afford what was still a rich man’s game.
The Other Lawyer
Thomas B. German, born on a farm in Tyendinaga Township on January 16th, 1849, was a lawyer like Herrington (but eleven years older than him). And like fellow lawyer Herrington, German was obsessed with the game of golf. As a letter published in the Napanee Guide in 1995 noted, he even played golf on Sundays in the years before 1910, when to do so on the Lord’s Day was seen by many as a sin. Jessie (Dibb) Hall wrote: “My father was Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene Church, and one Sunday afternoon, was driving with his horse and buggy, past the Golf Course on his way to see a sick parishioner. Mr. Tom German, a bachelor lawyer member, was putting on the green, near the road, and seeing my father, he put his golf club up his trouser leg, not wanting to be seen playing on Sunday. My father had a good laugh over that” (Jessie [Dibb] Hall, Letter to the Editor, Napanee Guide [1995], cited in Hunters, p. 7).
Figure 19 Greatly enlarged detail from 1908 photograph of club members. This may be Tom German.
Reverend Dibb laughed at Tom German’s shoving of his putter up his trouser leg, but many another Christian minister would have taken the matter more seriously. In the early 1900s, the Lord’s Day Alliance was putting pressure on Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier to pass legislation to protect Sundays as a day of rest, and one of the big targets of the Alliance was golf. In the Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Oscar Douglas Skelton writes that Laurier agreed in 1906 to legislate on the matter because “slackening religious faith, continental immigrants, United States Sunday newspapers, [and] golf and country clubs were making inroads upon the quiet Sabbath of earlier years” (Toronto: S.B. Gundy, 1921, vol ii, p. 247). A few years earlier, the Kingston Whig Standard carried a story announcing that “The police of Yonkers, N.Y., have arrested Benjamin Adams, a member of the board of education of that place, on the charge of playing golf on Sunday” (4 June 1901. P. 1). So perhaps lawyer German was wise to be discreet about his apparent transgression.
German played in club competitions from the early 1900s right through to the 1930s. He was a good golfer. He won the Daly Cup in 1913, 1914, and 1916. He also regularly represented the Napanee Golf Club in matches against local golf clubs in Picton and Kingston before and after World War One. Ship passenger lists of the era even show him travelling to Scotland and back in the summer of 1913: since he had no relatives or business interests there, I like to think that he had gone to Scotland to play golf in the land of the game’s birth.
Before and after the war, he served on the Board of Governors of the Napanee Golf Club. He served on the Green Committee. He served as Secretary-Treasurer. As such, in the early 1920s, he wrote to golf magazines in Canada and the United States to provide information about the golf course. At the same time, he was effectively the caddy master, in charge of inspecting caddy applications and issuing nontransferable permits to the young boys who passed muster. One of those who received a caddy permit from him was a young boy named Fred Bentley. (Natalie Hartin wrote in the Napanee Beaver that “The ‘grand old guy of golf’ at N.G.C.C., Fred Bentley, started playing golf in 1915 …. He was a caddy for seven years and first played … with a wooden club, a tree limb with a piece of metal on the end” – which is just how young caddy Harry Vardon had first played golf a generation earlier on the island of Jersey [13 October 1976]).
At age seventy-four, German was part of the Napanee Golf Club team that travelled to Gananoque for a match against the golf club there. The next year, when the Bay of Quinte Golf League was established to compete for the Quinte Cup, German was a part of the Napanee Golf Club team. A year later, in 1925, when seventy-six years old, he played in the contest against Picton at the Napanee Golf Club, and his match drew a large gallery of spectators out to the final green when word reached the clubhouse that German’s match was tied with one hole to play. The newspaper reported as follows: “For many years friendly games of golf have been played between the members of the Picton Golf Club and our local club. On Wednesday afternoon of this week an exceptionally pleasant time was enjoyed when fifteen players from Picton came down to play over the local course. Several old friends played together, as they have done on previous occasions, and a particular feature was the contest between Dr. Knight, of Picton, and Mr. T. B. German, of Napanee, two veterans of the game in this district. Their match was a tie at the seventeenth hole, and on the eighteenth green Mr. German had the advantage of one stroke, but before such a large gallery from the club house he was short on a 15-inch putt, which enabled Dr. Knight to tie for the hole and match” (Napanee Beaver, 26 June 1925). Fortunately, Napanee was already three games up in the match, and so German’s nervous finish did not cost Napanee the victory. (Note that Dr. Knight’s refusal to concede German’s fifteen-inch putt was not necessarily an instance of poor sportsmanship, since conceding putts – which is now a universal convention – was then frowned upon by British golfing authorities as an American practice for speeding up the pace of the game – a practice that the British did not regard as consistent with the spirit of the game.)
German played on Napanee’s Quinte Cup teams long enough to have become a seventy-eight year-old team-mate of twenty-two year-old Fred Bentley in the 1927 match between the Napanee Golf and Country Club and the Cataraqui Golf Club.
Figure 20 German's pond appears near the 1227-98 sixth green on a 1954 aerial photograph (greatly enlarged).
The same year, as an active and energetic seventy-eight year-old member of the Green Committee, German took the lead in building the 1927 version of what would become the sixth green (which lasted until 1998), digging a hole so deep near the present sixth green in order to get soil to build up his own green that he produced a pond that generations of local children would play in. (This pond is visible on a 1954 aerial photograph of the golf course.) And in 1930, just several months short of his eighty-second birthday, German darn near “shot his age” (adjusted for nine holes) on the new Rickwood course at Napanee: “A very interesting golf item comes to us from the local club. Last week when Mr. T. B. German was playing over the course …, he holed out on the ninth green with his forty-second stroke, completing a remarkably good round as our course presents lots of difficulties at this season of the year.
Mr. German has long been an enthusiastic golfer and from this performance it is evident that he is living up to his past records” (Napanee Beaver 9 July 1930). Note that he would have shot his score of 42 with hickory-shafted golf clubs.
German had graduated from his legal studies at Osgoode Hall in 1890, but he was not called to the bar by the Law Society of Upper Canada until 1896. He had not even begun his study of the law until his late thirties. Before that, he had worked on the family farm in Tyendinaga for many years. In the mid-1880s, he served on the County Council of Lennox & Addington as Deputy Reeve for North Fredericksburgh. He moved to Napanee in 1892 to work as a lawyer. His office was at 60 John Street in a house that was also his home. On the same street was Herrington’s law office. In June of 1892, German applied to be appointed Clerk of the County Council of Lennox and Addington, and was duly appointed to the position. Eventually he expanded his business and opened a Loan Company, which was run out of the same building on John Street. He lived in the same building that was his home and office from then until his death in 1937.
Like the other professionals in the town, he joined the local Masonic Lodge. He was a member of the Odd Fellows. He also became active in the Boy Scout movement, eventually being appointed to the executive committee of the Boy Scout Association of Canada by 1923, when the committee met in Ottawa to organize the development of a permanent Boy Scout camp for the training of scouts and scout leaders.
German would have been a familiar face in Napanee from his time on County Council in the 1880s. But after taking up residence in Napanee in the early 1890s and opening up a law office there, German would have immediately made the acquaintance of fellow lawyer Herrington, who had been practising law in Napanee since 1886. The two would inevitably have encountered each other fairly frequently as relatively newly-minted lawyers starting their legal careers at the same time in the same small town. Whether by conversation or by observing the other carrying his golf clubs through town, they must have discovered fairly early in their acquaintance that they were both ardent votaries of the ancient game. I suspect that they were two of the first people to play golf in Napanee.
The Brothers-In-Law
Jessie (Dibb) Hall recalled that the Millers were a family that was associated with the Napanee Golf Club in the earliest years. The 1908 photograph of club members backs up her claim, for we can see on the right side of the photograph her uncle Frederick Fraser Miller. Like Herrington, Miller is not listed in the newspapers as a competitor in any of the weekly tournaments at the Napanee Golf Club or as a member of the teams that competed in the early days against Picton and Kingston. There is a newspaper item from 1909, however, that supports Hall’s claim that the Miller family was involved with the golf course in those days, for it indicates that her aunt, Mrs. F.F. Miller, accompanied the Napanee Golf Club team to Picton to observe the day’s matches as a spectator (Picton Times, 8 July 1909, p. 1).
Figure 21 Frederick Fraser Miller circa 1920.
Frederick Miller was the son of a prominent Napanee merchant named William Miller (1830 – 1903). Born in Napanee in 1861, he attended public school and high school in the town. He was regarded as a brilliant student, especially in mathematics. Qualifying to study science at McGill University in 1879, he was awarded the Governor General’s silver medal for his high standing upon graduation from the university in 1882, and then spent a year as a lecturer at McGill. In 1884, however, he accepted employment at a company of land surveyors that was surveying the Napanee and Tamworth Railway. He qualified as a Provincial Land Surveyor in Ontario the next year and in 1886 was one of the charter members of the Association of Ontario Land Surveyors.
Miller shortly thereafter deployed his engineering skills as a contractor building bridges in Quebec. He developed them further when he moved to Pennsylvania in 1894 where he worked first for Beaver Falls Iron Works and then Berlin Iron Works.
So Miller was not living in Napanee in the early 1890s, when Herrington’s ardent votaries of the ancient game were first hitting golf balls near the town.
When his father died in 1903, however, Miller returned to Napanee to look after his father’s estate. He still worked occasionally as an engineer and surveyor, but he was also an inventor: experimenting with new methods of home heating in an effort to decrease fuel consumption. He was a Mason, he was passionate about politics, and he was devoted to the Anglican Church (serving at the provincial level on its Executive Committee and serving nationally on its council for Social Service).
He caught typhoid fever at the end of the summer of 1924 and, although seeming to be on the way to recovery, died unexpectedly in October.
Although the name of Frederick Miller is not reported in the newspapers in connection with club play, he probably played golf at the club socially and may have played in weekly tournaments, the vast majority of which were not reported in the newspapers.
Frederick Miller’s daughter Diana became a member of the golf club and served on the board of directors and entered various competitions from the 1920s to the mid-1930s. She played golf regularly with her cousin Jessie Dibb.
Jessie (Dibb) Hall’s recollection that members of the Miller family were important early club members may be based on the fact that the extended Miller family also included a number of golfers, for Frederick Miller’s two sisters married devoted golfers.
Figure 22 William C. Smith in 1880s cycling cub photograph.
The one, Edith Miller, married William C. Smith (1858 – 1943). Smith was a popular citizen of Napanee – a hale fellow, well met. He was a jeweler by profession, but a life-long sportsman and outdoorsman. In the 1880s, he was president of the cycling club and a member of the snowshoe club.
He was a hunter, and an excellent marksman. When a bull being led to the slaughtering house escaped in South Napanee (and trapped several young ladies in the yard of Nellie McLaurin on Lot 17 of Concession 6 in South Napanee, formerly part of North Fredericksburgh), citizen Smith was called upon to save the ladies by shooting the animal: “On Monday afternoon a mad bull, in the neighbourhood of Mrs. McLaurin’s, South Napanee, caused unusual stir in that quiet vicinity.
The animal was being led to the slaughterhouse by … butchers, and seemed to understand its coming doom, for by a mad effort it broke loose and rushed at its captors, both of whom made their escape by clearing a fence. Some young ladies on the street just managed to get into Mrs. McLaurin’s yard as the infuriated beast came by, making straight for them. As the butchers found it impossible to capture the animal, Mr. W.C. Smith, who is an expert shot, was sent for and promptly despatched the enraged quadruped. He made three shots, one in the fore shoulder and two in the forehead” (Napanee Beaver, 15 May 1896).
That a man famous in Napanee as perhaps the best rifle shot in town should have become interested in golf is not surprising.
Figure 23 William C. Smith, circa 1902.
At the end of the nineteenth century, many country clubs that had been formed by wealthy men to facilitate their recreation as hunters added golf courses to their grounds.
The conversion of fabulously wealthy American businessman William K. Vanderbilt from hunting to golf was not atypical. Early golf course designer Willie Dunn, Jnr, says that Vanderbilt first encountered golf in France when Dunn demonstrated the game for him, the result being that Vanderbilt was instantly converted into a devotee of golf who not only wanted to play the game but also wanted Dunn to build him a golf course:
“In 1889 I was engaged in laying out an 18-hole links at Biarritz, France…. I had nearly completed the Biarritz links when I encountered [W.K.] Vanderbilt, [Edward S.] Meade, and [Duncan] Cryder. They showed real interest in the game from the beginning; I remember the first demonstration I gave them. We chose the famous Chasm hole – about 225 yards and featuring a deep canyon which has to be cleared with the tee shot; I teed up several balls and laid them all on the green, close to the flag. Vanderbilt turned to his friends and said, ‘Gentlemen, this beats rifle shooting for distance and accuracy.’ Soon afterwards these men asked me to come to America and build a golf course there” (24).
Smith was not just a marksman and golfer, but also an excellent horseman and a longstanding member of the local militia (he was in charge of Number 6 Company of the Frontenac Battalion in the 1890s). He was also an admired artist: some of his oil paintings that remain in possession of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives include his portrait of his mother and one of his landscape paintings that the Gibbard family purchased after the painting won a competition at the Napanee Fair.
In January of 1912, he was one of the four members of the Napanee curling team that travelled to Kingston to play a pair of visiting curling teams from Scotland. In January of 1923, he was again a member of a Napanee curling team that went to Kingston to play another pair touring Scottish curling teams.
Smith played for the Napanee Golf Club against other local golf teams very early in the twentieth century, and he continued to represent the club in Quinte Cup competitions right down to 1927, when he was in his seventieth year. In the early years, he won weekly golf competitions, and in 1917 he won the Daly Cup.
So Smith was living in Napanee in the early 1890s, and he was a sports nut: he may have been one of the first to play golf then.
Frederick Miller’s other sister Sarah also married a golfer: the Reverend Frederick Thomas Dibb, the father of Jessie Dibb. Reverend Dibb had served at churches throughout Lennox and Addington from the 1890s onward, but until 1904, he had come no closer to Napanee Town than Bath.
In 1904, however, he was appointed rector of St Mary Magdalen Church and then took up residence in town.
Figure 24 Reverend Dibb in the doorway of St. John's Anglican Church, Bath, circa 1903.
He had been born on October 10th , 1864, in India in the countryside near the city then called Madras (today’s Chennai) to parents who had come from the city of Hull in England as missionaries. He was sent back to England for his education, where he was enrolled in a boarding school, but after his father died in 1880 just a few weeks after his return to England from India, teenager Frederick Dibb got a job with the Great Eastern Railway. He lived with his mother in Hampstead, London, at this time.
But not long afterwards, he immigrated to Canada where he got a job in the mid-1880s as a clerk in a Montreal store. Soon, however, he decided to follow his parents into Anglican service, enrolling in the late 1880s at Bishop’s College in Lennoxville, Quebec, to train for the priesthood. Here, in the fall of 1890, Dibb and fellow student R.B. Waterman staged a series of protests against the way the students were housed and fed at the college. They submitted written demands to the college president. The protests still live in college memory, known as the “Stigma Riots.” College authorities were not amused, sentencing student leaders Dibb and Waterman to “rustication” – banishment from campus to a rural residence. Still, the protests effected change in the way Bishop’s College treated its students. Despite their temporary banishment, Dibb and Waterman were duly ordained as Anglican priests in Brockville in 1892. From 1892 onward, Dibb served at the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve, Odessa, Ernestown, Wolfe Island, Deseronto, and Bath, finally moving to Napanee in 1904, where he was made rector of St Mary Magdalen and was also appointed as Rural Dean of Lennox and Addington.
Figure 25 Reverend Frederick Thomas Dibb and Sarah (Miller) Dibb with their young children at the rectory in Bath, just before their move to Napanee in 1904.
In Napanee, Dibb immediately joined the golf club and represented Napanee in that earliest recorded match against Kingston in November of 1905. Whether Dibb and his brother-in-law Smith had independently fallen in love with the game of golf, or whether the one had had a longstanding interest in golf and then perhaps introduced his brother-in-law Dibb to the game, is not known. Both are among the earliest golfers mentioned in the newspapers in connection with the Napanee Golf Club.
If we recall that Tom German was afraid that Reverend Dibb would disapprove of his practising his putting on the Lord’s Day, and also recall that Dibb’s daughter Jessie says that her father not only laughed when he told the anecdote, but told the anecdote over and over again, we might wonder what kind of minister Dibb was: strict, or indulgent?
In his ministry, Dibb was most famous for his sermons against the consumption of alcohol. His argument on this score was rather innovative, insofar as he did not see the act of consuming alcohol as inherently sinful – as so many religious figures did – but rather saw it as harmful to one’s reflexes! And so he advanced scientific – rather than exclusively moralistic – arguments against drinking:
"Look not upon the wine when it is red when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright, for at the last it stingeth like a serpent and biteth like an adder." Solomon. Old words! Spoken nearly 3,000 years ago! And lo! they are now abundantly proven by the experiments of modern science…. I shall not dwell … on the devastations of drunkenness, nor on the horrors of its homes…. In the past it has been a generally received opinion that a moderate use of alcohol was beneficial as an aid to indigestion, a stimulant to old age, and a healthful, or at least harmless, solace amid the cares and trials of this mortal life. In view of the actual results of careful scientific experiments this opinion is no longer tenable. Even the most sparing use of alcohol, with or without food, means a diminution of efficiency in any muscular or mental exercise…. All this is scientifically demonstrated by the experiments of Prof. Paul Dubois, and Dr. L. Schnyder, at Berne, Switzerland. (The official report of the opening of All Saints' Cathedral at Halifax, N. S., the Canadian Church Congress and other proceedings at Halifax, Windsor and Annapolis Royal, N. S. : in connection with the Bicentenary Commemoration of the Church of England in Canada, 1710-1910 [Halifax: Chronicle Printing Co., 1911], pp. 124-26)
Interestingly, Dibb supported his scientific arguments with anecdotal evidence from the golf course and the shooting range: “Any golfer will tell you that even one glass of whiskey and soda at lunch, the effect of which is entirely imperceptible, will put him off his putt for that afternoon. Any marksman will tell you that one glass of alcoholic beverage taken before going to the ranges means giving away the match” (126).
Of course Dibb’s brother-in-law Smith was a shooter and a golfer. Did Smith tell Dibb about the effects of alcohol consumption on shooting and putting. Or was it Dibb’s own observations of fellow members of the Napanee Golf Club team missing putts in their matches against Picton and Kingston after imbibing alcohol before play that confirmed the scientific research he had studied?
Of course there is also another possibility: perhaps Reverend Dibb himself had missed a short putt after a wee sip of whisky at lunch, leading him to give up alcohol and preach against it: blessed are the sober, for they shall sink putts.
A local newspaper said of Reverend Dibb: “He was a strong man, physically, morally, and mentally and was a vigorous advocate of temperance principles and of all measures leading to better citizenship” (http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/deathsobitsD.htm ). So perhaps German had some reason to suspect that he might get a lesson from Reverend Dibb on ways to be a better citizen.
Yet his daughter Jessie remembered her father as someone who made her laugh. She enjoyed recalling his amusement at Tom German’s embarrassment at having been discovered practising his golf on a Sunday. My guess is that part of his amusement came from seeing the intimidating effect that his gaze had had upon German. Jessie also recalled her father’s interest in poetry, and particularly his enjoyment of non-sense alliteration and tongue-twisters: “Father was very fond of poetry and also had a great sense of humour. I remember him saying, ‘Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran their rural races’” (Dialogue [Diocese of Ontario] June 2010).
Sadly, Reverend Dibb’s tongue-twisting sayings, his science-based preaching against alcohol, and his concern to improve a golfer’s performance on short putts all came to an abrupt, tragic end in December of 1910:
One of the most distressing accidents occurred at the Grand Trunk station on Friday noon last. The Rev. Rural Dean Dibb, accompanied by his wife, little daughter Jessie and his sister-in-law, Mrs. W. C. Smith, went to the station to take the fast train for Kingston. When they arrived at the depot the mail train was just in and they decided not to wait for the fast train. Mr. Dibb went to secure the tickets, while the others boarded the train. The train started and he rushed from the station and succeeded in catching hold of the handles of the coach, but unable to maintain his grip, was swung under the moving train. Two coaches passed over the unfortunate man's body, cutting it to pieces before the train was stopped." (This is an account from a local newspaper, found at http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/deathsobitsD.htm )
Figure 26 Napanee train station in the early 1900s.
An article in the Montreal Gazette in December of 1910 explains what happened next: “While sympathizers were mustering courage to break the news to the bereaved wife, she was anxiously waiting for him in a coach of the train. Her agonized cries when told of the accident were heart-rending, and she was taken from the train in a hysterical state” (3 December 1910, p. 4).
What eleven year-old Jessie Dibb witnessed that horrible day had a lasting effect on her. Of course the young girl was immediately deprived of her father. Within a few years, however, having just become a teenager, she was also deprived of her mother, who never recovered from the trauma of her husband’s gruesome death. Jessie was raised thereafter by the only other family member who was with her at the accident site, her mother’s sister: Jessie’s aunt, Edith (Miller) Smith.
Other Men of the Cloth
Reverend Dibb was the only Christian minister who was a member of the golf teams that represented the Napanee Golf Club in matches against Kingston and Picton, but he was not the only minister who was a member of the club.
Reverend Allan Leslie Howard, the minister at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Napanee, and Reverend William Ennis Kidd, the Vicar of St Mary Magdalen Anglican Church in Napanee, are mentioned just once in connection with play at the Napanee Golf Club: they are both named by the Napanee Express as playing in the first weekly tournament of 1911 at the beginning of May that year. Note, however, that reports of these weekly tournaments in the early years are quite sporadic. Furthermore, a good number of participants in the weekly tournament declined to submit their scorecards at the end of the round of golf, preferring to regard their play that day as part of a social event rather than as part of a competition, meaning that the names of any such social players were omitted from newspaper accounts of the occasional weekly tournament results that were reported. So the two ministers may well have played golf fairly regularly at the club without their names appearing in the newspapers.
Reverend Kidd was Reverend Dibb’s replacement.
Kidd was born in Burritt’s Rapids in Rideau Township, Grenville County, Ontario, in 1879. During his long life, it is clear that he took to heart the ideal of “service” to the community. From the beginning, he was particularly interested in combining Christian pastoral service with military service.
During his early years at school, Kidd’s interest in academic studies was supplemented first by membership in the Boy Scouts and then, when in high school, by membership in the Cadet Corp.
He was a very good student, qualifying to attend the University of Toronto, where he completed B.A. and Masters degrees at Trinity College. His education included the classic languages, which eventuated in his performing at the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of Trinity College in a presentation of Aristophanes’ play The Frogs. (The theatre critic of the Toronto Globe gave the performance a very positive review!)
His first appointment after ordination as an Anglican minister was in Frankville, Kitley Township, Leeds County. In 1908, he married Margaret Louisa Dealtry Woodcock, daughter of an Anglican minister who performed their marriage ceremony. A daughter Phyllis was born in Frankville in 1909, and a son Thomas in 1910. Their little boy, raised in Napanee, became a journalist in Britain and in 1942 married a daughter of Lord Beaverbrook (Canadian financier, politician, author, and owner of Britain’s newspapers the Daily Express, Sunday Express, and Evening Standard who served as cabinet minister in British governments during World War I and World War II).
Eastern Ontario would remain Reverend Kidd’s home for most of his life.
He took up his duties in Napanee as of March 1st , 1911, at virtually the same time as Reverend Howard did. As Herrington points out in his History of the County of Lennox and Addington,” Reverend Kidd succeeded “the late lamented Rev. F.T. Dibb,” who had died in December of 1910 (p. 262).
As winter turned to spring in March of 1911, one of the first things that Kidd did on his arrival in Napanee was join the Napanee Golf Club. Perhaps he had learned what a stalwart his predecessor Dibb had been on the Napanee Golf Club teams that played against Picton and Kingston and was determined to try to make up for the community’s loss of Dibb in as many ways as he could. Whatever the case, just two months after his arrival in town, he played in the first weekly golf tournament of 1911 at the beginning of May.
Beyond joining the golf club, Kidd established himself in his new community as the Anglican minister was expected to do, serving on church committees, writing the parish newsletters, baptizing, marrying, and burying parishioners, and so on. In November of 1913, he performed the marriage ceremony for the couple that figures so prominently in the next volume of this book: Caroline Mary Herrington and Thomas D’Arcy Sneath.
But just a year later, everything changed: on 1 November 1914, Reverend Kidd – former Boy Scout and Cadet – enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Herrington writes in The War Work of Lennox and Addington County as follows: “Rev. W.E. Kidd resigned his position as Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene Church, Napanee, and accepted the position of chaplain in the 21st Battalion. He left Canada in May, 1915, and spent three years on the Western front. He was not content with the duties appertaining to the office of chaplain, but whenever he could help his comrades in distress he cheerfully did so. For his bravery in rescuing the wounded at the battle of Courcelette, he was decorated with the Military Cross by His Majesty at Buckingham Palace” (p. 106).
Figure 27 Captain the Reverend William Ennis Kidd circa 1915.
The official announcement of the awarding of the Military Cross to Kidd appeared in the London Gazette: “For conspicuous gallantry and dedication to duty. He tended and dressed the wounded continuously for three days under very heavy fire, displaying great courage and determination” (no 29837 [25 November 1916], p. 11549).
A month before this official announcement of the award, the Montreal Gazette presented a more dramatic account of Kidd’s heroism: “A cable received here [Brockville] brings the information that Rev. W.E. Kidd has been awarded the Military Cross.
He brought in four wounded men under heavy fire, and, with Captain Rev. Thompson, dug the graves and buried 150 men. All the help they had were the shells dropping around them making holes in the earth” (25 October 1916, p. 4).
Decades later, in Stretcher-Bearers – at the Double! History of the Fifth Canadian Field Ambulance which Served Overseas during the Great War of 1914-1918 (Toronto 1937), Frederick W. Noyes names Kidd as one of the very few army chaplains genuinely respected by the soldiers in the trenches of World War 1. Noyes celebrates Canon Scott in particular, “the beloved padre of the First Division,” and then explains why chaplains like Scott and Kidd were so well loved and respected:
When the padre stated that he had been with his men through the hell of the trenches he spoke the truth. He lived the sort of life he preached about…. We cannot resist comparing him with the other type of army chaplain who used to preach to us so fervidly and tell us before each scrap to go forward unafraid, that our faith would pull us through and that a Great Reward awaited us if we were killed in battle. We remember all too well how often we were compelled to chase this type of chaplain from our advanced dressing dugouts, to make room for the wounded. We never could understand why this sort of bible-thumper was so reluctant to face Death if he really believed all the stuff he poured into our ears. We must add the names of five other padres: Carlisle, McGillivray, McDonald, Harris and Kidd, to that of Canon Scott as army chaplains we knew who, by example, tolerance, humility and kindness inspired us to the utmost. Thank Heaven, the Fifth was fortunate in its choice of padres. (pp. 167-68)
Reverend W.E. Kidd also appears as one of the final figures in the accounts of the fate of many Canadian soldiers in World War I: at the interment in official war cemeteries in Northern France and Belgium of Canadian soldiers who had died on the battlefield, Captain and then Major the Reverend William Ennis Kidd performed the burial rites.
Figure 28 Reverend the Major W.E. Kidd circa 1930.
Kidd retained the honorary title of Major after World War I.
When he returned to civilian life, the Anglican Church posted him to a variety of Ontario communities, such as Kingston, Ancaster, and Deseronto. When in Kingston, he had a regular role at the Royal Military College in Kingston, presiding at many religious services there. When in Deseronto, it seems likely that he would have once again played the links of the Napanee Golf Club.
He certainly maintained contacts with his old Napanee friends through the masons, serving on various Grand Lodge committees alongside W.S. Herrington right up until the latter’s death in 1947. Throughout his time in Eastern Ontario, Reverend Kidd served as the Frontenac District chaplain for the Grand Lodge.
In the 1930s, Kidd was appointed Protestant chaplain of the Kingston Penitentiary, where another instance of his personal courage received official notice. In 1935, the Inspector of federal penitentiaries wrote to the Minister of Justice in Ottawa about a potential prisoner uprising that Kenny had single-handedly faced down and extinguished:
On the 11th & 12th May, the Warden reported that both chaplains had received information from convicts of impending trouble. The Warden anticipated that if an émeute [uprising or riot] occurred, it would be in the Protestant Chapel. Without consulting the [Protestant] chaplain, Major the Rev. W.E. Kidd, DSO, MC, or giving him any information, the Warden placed eight armed officers [hidden] in that part of the Protestant Chapel formerly used by the female convicts. The first service in the Protestant Chapel and the service in the Roman Catholic Chapel were completed without any unusual occurrence, but during the opening hymn of the second service in the Protestant Chapel, it was estimated that some 25 convicts endeavoured to cause a disruption, some shouting “Let’s go, boys!” this being followed by the tapping of feet. The singing of the hymn was carried through without stopping, after which, when Rev. Kidd commenced to speak, the tapping of the feet recommenced. He remained in silence for a moment, facing the congregation with a firm countenance. The noise ceased. There was no further disruption. The manner in which Major Kidd met the situation evoked the respect of the officers and convicts present. (J.T.L. James, A Living Tradition: Penitentiary Chaplaincy [Ottawa: Correction Service of Canada, 1990], p. 106).
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Kidd was in constant demand as a guest preacher and also as a public lecturer: he spoke at reunions of the 21st Battalion, he spoke at schools throughout Canada, and he spoke at seminaries throughout Canada and the United States. In 1941, for instance, he spoke to students at Trinity College: “Major Kidd spoke of the British Empire as a power for good in the world. He told us what a wonderful thing the Empire is and outlined the dangers now confronting it. He compared its freedom with the conditions in Germany, where youth is merely state property. With us, youth is allowed to work out its own destiny. He concluded with a petition to God to give us strength to overcome the hazards that beset us” (Trinity College School Report [August 1941] vol 44 no 6, p. 5).
But then World War II broke out in 1939, and although he was in his sixties, Reverend Kidd returned to military service as senior chaplain of Military District No. 3. As such he conducted religious services at RMC throughout the war, including memorial services, and he also conducted services for soldiers and cadets who died in training accidents in his district. He was now accorded the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
After World War II, he once again returned to the Kingston community, continuing to serve in the Anglican Church well into his eighties, becoming president of the 21st Battalion Association for many years, and continuing to serve as padre of the 21st Battalion until he was ninety years old.
When he died in Galt, Ontario, in 1970, his funeral service was held at the Cathedral Church of St George in Kingston, where Major the Reverend William Ennis Kidd had served as Curate in the early 1920s.
The 21st Battalion remembered him as follows:
For over fifty years our Padre had served us in war and peace. In war he had lent strength to the wounded that they might survive, and those whose wounds were fatal he had comforted – the believing and unbelieving alike – and eased their passing into the unknown. The advanced dressing stations knew him well, for there was his chosen post in the battle areas of France and Flanders.
Where the soldier served as he was trained to serve, our Padre served his God and the soldier, for the soldier was of the Kingdom of his God and therefore his responsibility as the servant of the God he worshipped. Our Padre was a Godly man, a good man, a gentle man. He loved all mankind and his greatest love was for the soldier whom he served in battle and in preparation for battle. He loved the weak as he did the strong, for they were all children placed in his charge by Him to whom he had sworn fealty. We knew our Padre in war and we knew him in peace. For more than half a century he had joined us in annual reunion and had continued to minister to us. We knew him as he marched with us in his flowing robes from church services he had conducted on our behalf. We knew him when, enfeebled by age, he continued to hearten us by his presence. In Lindsay in 1969 he had been with us and pronounced his last benediction, a supreme effort, for the once sturdy man of God was nearing the end of a wonderful life. On April 5th, tired and bereft of his wife of more than sixty years, our beloved Padre entered into eternal sleep. So ended a long chapter in a life given to mankind. And it was a good life lived by the kindliest of men, a man who served, whose vocation befitted him for the service so freely rendered. (http://21stbattalion.ca/tributehl/kidd_we.html)
Lieutenant-Colonel the Reverend William Ennis Kidd was well-remembered.
Figure 29 Lieutenant-Colonel the Reverend W.E. Kidd circa 1960.
And he has been long-remembered.
In 2007, thirty-seven years after his death, a memorial stained-glass window was to be unveiled and dedicated to commemorate those who served in the 21st Infantry Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and in the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment. It was located in St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Kingston, the regimental church of the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment. Because of Reverend Kidd’s importance in the history of the 21st Battalion, the regiment searched for a relative of Reverend Kidd to participate in the ceremony. So the window was unveiled on 13 May 2007 jointly by the commanding officer of the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment at the time and by the “niece to Lieutenant-Colonel the Reverend Canon Dr. W.E. Kidd, MC, 1st Chaplain of the 21st Battalion.”
Another early golfing Christian minister in Napanee was Reverend Allen Leslie Howard. He was born in Bond Head, Clarke Township, Durham County, Ontario, in 1873. He died in Ingersoll, Oxford County, Ontario, in 1959.
Like Kidd, he we was an excellent student and devoted to the ideal of Christian service from an early age. He was not an Anglican, however, but a Presbyterian – and such a distinction was important to him.
Figure 30 Allen Leslie Howard when a University of Toronto student in the early 1900s.
His father died before Howard was out of his teens, but his mother encouraged him to pursue higher education rather than take a job to help her make ends meet. At the end of the 1800s, she had two sons studying at the University of Toronto. She took in boarders to help pay her expenses, and she allowed son Allen to live at home with her in Toronto while he studied at the University of Toronto. He graduated with his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1901, when he was twenty-seven years old, and then went on to take a Masters and, eventually, a Ph. D.
Signing himself A. Leslie Howard, he was ordained a minister by the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in July of 1903.
His first posting was as the first minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Cayuga, Ontario, where he served from 1903 to 1907. Before coming to Napanee, he served three years in Kemptville (1907-10) and a year in Peoria, Illinois, at Calvary Presbyterian Church (1910-11).
While in Kemptville, he published his first book: 7,000 Facts about Temperance (Toronto: William Briggs, 1908), which was listed among the “Canadian Books of the Year” in The Canadian Annual review of Public Affairs 1908 by J. Castell Hopkins (Toronto: Annual Review Publishing Co., 1908, p. 16). In September of 1909, he had travelled to the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, a Presbyterian school of theology founded in 1829 whose campus borders that of the University of Chicago. He is recorded in McCormick records as a member of the Class of 1909. This must have been the institution that awarded him his doctorate, and this period in Chicago must have been the occasion of his making contact with Presbyterian circles in Illinois.
He arrived in Napanee in the first months of 1911 as the Reverend Dr. A.L. Howard, and one of the first things he did was join the Napanee Golf Club. As noted above, he played in the opening weekly tournament in May of that year.
One of the next things he did was to host a debate on the merits of Church Union – a debate initiated within the Presbyterian and Methodist churches when one of three Presbyterian delegates to the 1902 Methodist Conference in Canada proposed that Presbyterians and Methodists consider uniting in Canada to form one protestant denomination. We read as follows in the Queen’s Journal of January, 1912: “In the Presbyterian church at Napanee, on Monday evening, before a large representative audience, and board of judges, consisting of two Methodists, one Anglican and two Presbyterians, the battle was fought out. E.B. Wylie and P.L. Jull, representing the Theological society, were ... on the affirmative. Rev. John Shaver, of Picton, and Rev. Dr. A.L. Howard, of Napanee, defended the conservative interests against church union. The various points, pro and con, were well debated, but the judges decided unanimously that the affirmative had won by a good margin” (Queen’s Journal [19 January 1912, vol xxxviii no 21, p. 7).
On this subject, the Reverend Dr. Howard was momentarily down, but definitely not out – as we shall see shortly.
During his years in Napanee, Howard continued to contribute to issues of community concern, travelling to Toronto in 1913, for instance, to deliver a lecture at the thirteenth annual meeting of the Ontario Library Association. He addressed members on the topic of “What the Public Library Owes to the Community.”
Reverend Howard had married Grace Awrey in Hamilton in 1905 and had two children before arriving in Napanee, the first born in Cayuga and the second born in Kemptville. The couple’s third child was born in Napanee in 1912.
After his term of service in Napanee, Howard served as Presbyterian minister in various other locations. He was at Avonmore, north of Cornwall, from at least 1918 to 1923. He was an active member of the community both as pastor and as private citizen: on the one hand, for instance, he wrote letters to the editor of The Glengarry News on behalf of parishioners; on the other hand, he enthusiastically displayed his personally gathered collections of insect, weeds, and so on, in local agricultural fair competitions. His connection to Avonmore’s St. Andrew’s Church seems to have been affectionate and enduring, for he returned in 1931 to participate in the induction of a new minister into the pastoral charge of St. Andrew’s.
By 1931, Reverend Howard had travelled far from Avonmore. By the mid-1920s, he had returned to his old stomping grounds with a posting in Simcoe at St. Paul’s Church, which lasted to the early 1930s (he was president of the Rotary Club in Simcoe, too). He was posted to Georgetown early in 1931, and so it was from this southern Ontario posting that he had journeyed back to Avonmore later in 1931. He stayed in Georgetown until 1935, writing a science fiction novel while there: The Magnificent Eugenic (Toronto: Charters Publishing Co., 1933).
The Magnificent Eugenic was a utopian novel imagining the perfection of human society through the triumph of eugenics. Howard introduced the woman who was the main character of his novel in his “Foreword” as follows: “Here is a precocious woman who possessed a great purpose in life, and one who heroically defied distaste for eugenic attitudes. She vitalized her character with the symphonic thought, ‘Blessed are the well-mated.’” It seems odd now to see a Presbyterian minister implicitly adding to Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount” by means of eugenical truisms, but such was the enthusiasm for eugenics in Europe and North America in the 1930s (it was not just Hitler who was enamoured of this pseudo-science). Howard asks, “Why not genetic classification for humans as well as animals?”
Interestingly, chapters of this novel published in 1933 had actually been written much earlier. Various chapters were published in magazines under such titles as “Thoroughbred Humans,” “Give Me Joseph,” and “Blessed Are the Well-Born.” I wonder if the Reverend Dr. Allen Leslie Howard preached sermons on the subject of eugenics at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Napanee.
Perhaps such early twentieth-century sermons have contributed to the fact that Napanee’s residents today are so healthy and attractive.
I wonder if Howard brought up his daughter to follow the eugenic ideals of his novel’s heroine. After a few years in Georgetown, Howard was posted to St. Thomas, where his daughter was married in 1935, just two years after Howard’s novel about his “magnificent eugenic” heroine was published. Did she share with the novel’s protagonist “the symphonic thought, ‘Blessed are the well-mated’”?
Figure 31 Reverend Dr. Allen Leslie Howard circa 1950.
By 1937, Howard was located in Palmerston, where he was president of the local branch of the Upper Canada Bible Society. He then served at Willis Presbyterian Church in the Oro-Medonte area of Simcoe County from 1939-1942. In 1950, at the age of seventy-seven, he was elected mayor of Meaford, Ontario, on the south shore of Georgian Bay. He died in Ingersol in 1959.
I conclude this account of early Napanee golfer the Reverend Dr. Allen Leslie Howard by recalling his arguments against Church Union between Presbyterians and Methodists at the big debate in Napanee in 1912. When he was serving in Simcoe in 1927, he had the chance to walk that talk.
Howard became personally involved in the tensions created by the union of Methodist and Congregationalist churches in Canada with about two-thirds of the Presbyterian churches in Canada, which came to pass in 1925.
In fact, he was a leader in disputes between the new United Church and two Presbyterian congregations who refused to accept union within the new church. In 1927, for instance, as “interim moderator” of the “Jarvis and Walpole Presbyterian congregations which voted against church union in 1925,” he found his Jarvis congregation turned out of their own church by members of the United Church who had moved into the Jarvis church and its manse, and then changed the locks! Howard led the displaced congregation back to church determined, according to the newspaper account, “to have entrance made”: “This was easily effected without any destruction of property, and with the assistance of a carpenter’s screw driver the doors were thrown open and a relieved congregation entered.” With this defeat of the members of the new United Church, the newspaper reported that “the final stage of the trouble was passed”: “Jarvis and Walpole Presbyterian congregations … are now re-established” (The Jarvis Record, 28 July 927, p. 1).
Reverend Howard clearly led a very interesting life – before he arrived at Napanee, while he lived at Napanee, and after he left Napanee.
Of course neither Howard nor Kidd were among the early ardent votaries who played golf in Napanee in the early 1890s, for they arrived in Napanee only at the beginning of 1911.
The Bankers
As we know, Walter Arthur Bellhouse came to town in the mid-1890s to serve as assistant manager of the Merchant’s Bank, where he was ultimately promoted to the position of manager. He started his career with the Merchant’s Bank as a teller in Hamilton from the late 1870s to early 1880s, and was then transferred to Brampton, where he served as manager until 1893.
He was an avid numismatist, with a number of extraordinary finds. A surviving letter of his to Chapman Brothers coin dealers of Philadelphia inquires about the value of a fifteen-shilling scrip that he had obtained, issued by the Colony of New Jersey in March of 1776, before the American Revolution began.
Figure 32 Letter to Chapman Brothers coin dealers of Philadelphia, written by Bellhouse when he was manager of the Merchants Bank in Brampton.
He is remembered fondly by Herrington in his history of the county as a supporter of the two big country club sports: Bellhouse “gained great popularity in the town as an able and obliging banker, and a most enthusiastic golfer and curler” (260). But then came the diagnosis of “his illness in 1909,” and his death shortly thereafter from cancer of the bowels (260).
Bellhouse and Herrington were members of the same curling team and no doubt played golf together as well. Arriving in town in 1893, Bellhouse may have been one of the first to play golf in Napanee. But whether he was among the very first is not clear.
Bellhouse was not the only banker who played golf. In fact, fully one third of the golf club members mentioned in the Napanee newspapers before World War I were bankers!
One of them was a Bellhouse rival both as manager of another bank and as one of the top golfers at the Napanee Golf Club.
Dudley Leicester Hill arrived in Napanee to work as a teller at the Dominion Bank at the end of 1898. He had been born in Saugor in the Bengal district of India in 1865, the son of a Captain in the British Army.
Arriving in Napanee just a year after the Napanee Golf Club was founded, Hill was another stalwart of the early golf teams, appearing on behalf of Napanee in the first match against another club on record: the contest with the Kingston Golf Club in November of 1905.
My hunch is that he and Reverend Dibb were good friends. Both were born in India, perhaps the only two men in Napanee who had been, but more importantly Hill was a devout Anglican. He was one of just a few lay representatives from the Diocese of Ontario to attend the Anglican Synod in London (Ontario) in September of 1911 (he would return to Napanee and immediately play in the golf tournament held there in honour of his departure to a new posting). In Orillia, where he later made his home, his name is on a plaque marking the 1941 centenary of the Church of St James in commemoration of his having served there as a churchwarden. His serious engagement with the governance of the Anglican Church in Canada would have brought Hill and Dibb together in frequent conversation about issues of common concern.
Figure 33 Napanee-born Keppel W. Hill, 1899-1975.
It was no doubt Dudley Hill’s own devout Anglicanism, and perhaps also the example set by Reverend Dibb, that led Hill’s son Keppel Wigmore Hill to become an Anglican priest himself. After serving in the Canadian army during World War I, Keppel Hill would serve at churches throughout Canada and the United States, moving from Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) in the 1920s, to Oklahoma in the dust-bowl of the 1930s, to California in the 1940s, where he served until his retirement in 1966, and death in 1975.
This Hill family’s military lineage can be traced back beyond Dudley Leicester Hill for five generations to his great-great-great grandfather Captain Richard Hill, who served in the army of King William in the 1690s in Londonderry, but then killed an actor in London in a fit of jealous rage.
He had fallen in love with the most famous actress on the London stage, Emma Bracegirdle. When she did not reciprocate his affections, he assumed that the actor William Mountford who played opposite her in various love scenes could not have performed so convincingly if the two were not actually in love. So sixteen-year-old Captain Hill first tried to kidnap Bracegirdle, but when she escaped into her house, he waited outside it and stabbed Mountford with his sword as the actor walked past on his way home from the theatre.
Figure 34 Hill, with accomplice Lord Mohun, stabs William Mountford, 9 December 1692.
Hill thereby stilled the heart of the man who had written the play in which one of the characters speaks the line we all know: “Be still my beating heart”!
Dudley Leicester Hill’s 3x great-grandfather fled Britain and did a form of penance by volunteering in regiments that served in Newfoundland and Flanders from the late 1690s to the early 1700s, and was duly pardoned by King William’s widow Queen Anne (after the intervention on his behalf of various aristocrats and a prime minister who all extolled his military service). She also gave him as a reward for the military service thus brought to her attention a considerable amount of land in Ireland, which established many generations of the Hill family as landed gentry in Ireland over the next 200 years.
On his mother’s side, Dudley Leicester Hill was also well-connected. The Montreal Gazette reported in March of 1898 that the famous British General Sir Hugh Henry Cough, recently appointed the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, was visiting Montreal. It was noted that he “is the uncle of Mr. D. Leicester Hill, teller at the Dominion Bank in Montreal” (12 March 1898, p. 5).
Like Dibb, Hill had returned from India to Britain for his schooling, and then immigrated to Canada. He started his banking career in Orillia, where he got married in 1893. About three years later, he was transferred from the Dominion Bank in Orillia to Montreal, and then he was transferred at the end of 1898 from the Dominion Bank in Montreal to Napanee, where he was appointed Acting Manager and then Manager between 1904 and 1911.
In 1911, however, he was transferred again, this time to a branch of the Dominion Bank in Gravenhurst. But while World War I was raging, he became ill with Bright’s Disease (an old-fashioned name for what is today seen as a variety of diseases of the liver), which led to his death in 1919 after about two years of decline. He had by then returned to Orillia, where he was buried and subsequently commemorated at his church.
When he left Napanee at the end of the summer of 1911, a special golf tournament and banquet was held in his honour by the Napanee Golf Club. The report in the local newspaper reads as follows:
THE D. L. HILL FAREWELL
On Wednesday afternoon last the members of the Napanee Golf Club held a complimentary tournament in honor of Mr. D. L. Hill. The scores were Gross, Handicap, Net: Warner 46, 15, 31; Smith 47, 13, 34; Leonard 51, 17 34; Ham 56, 22, 34; Reiffenstein 51, 15, 36; German 53, 13, 38; Robinson 59, 15, 44; Hill 62, 17, 45. No card – H. Daly. The tournament was scheduled for 18 holes, but as some of the players were unable to complete the full course, the scores at the end of the first round were counted for the result. After the completion of the tournament the players and their friends gathered on the lawn at the Club House and Mr. Hill was presented with a club pennant and a stick pin. He replied in fitting language to the presentation address and expressed his sorrow at having to leave those friends with whom he had enjoyed so many matches. In concluding, he suggested that all join in one last six-hole match as a finale, and accordingly the match was played. Some of the players were not proud of the record made at this time. The Golf Club will miss Mr. Hill. He was always ready to play in any match, whether at home or away, and although not the best player in the club he could generally be relied upon to beat his man. (Napanee Express, 22 September 1911)
Dudley Hill left a lasting impression at the golf club. Although he had left Napanee in the fall of 1911, Herbert Daly spoke of him twenty-one years later when awarding the Daly Cup at the closing banquet of 1932. He recalled that Hill had won the Daly Cup in 1909, just two years after Daly had donated it (a consolation for Hill, no doubt, after having lost the 1907 club championship to trophy-donator Daly in a close match, 2 and 1).
Although bank manager Dudley Hill left Napanee in 1911, the Napanee Golf Club was never short of members who were bank managers. On the one hand, Hill’s replacement George Patten Reiffenstein arrived in town and joined the golf club before Hill had even left. In fact, Reiffenstein played alongside Hill in the golf tournament to celebrate Hill’s contributions to the club.
On the other hand, the man who had been appointed manager of the Northern Crown bank in Napanee in 1904 (this bank would become part of the Royal Bank) was also a member of the golf club. His name was Richard Geris Harris Travers, and he was as devoted to the Napanee Golf Club as Hill and Bellhouse – if not more so.
Although I cannot yet identify him in the 1908 photograph of club members above, Travers is likely to be in it. He played regularly in intramural competitions at the Napanee Golf Club before World War I (he won the Daly Cup in 1910), and he was also a member of the teams that played against Picton and Kingston. Furthermore, he served on the Board of Directors and was elected club President in 1913.
Travers was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, on Christmas Day, 1879. He arrived in Napanee when twenty-five years old. He joined both the golf club and the curling club. In 1909, in fact, he was elected vicepresident of the Central Ontario Curling League.
In Napanee, he married a woman from Providence, Rhode Island, who had come to town as the wife of Napanee resident John A. Shibley. She was widowed in the early 1900s but married Travers in 1908. She was one of the founders of the Ladies Golf Club at the Napanee Golf Club in 1907. The couple had a son, Richard Denning Travers, born a year after their marriage in Napanee.
Travers’ family life, his golf and curling activities, and his banking career were all completely disrupted by World War I. From the outbreak of war, Travers was determined to serve overseas. Along with the new manager of the Dominion Bank who had succeeded Hill in 1911 (Reiffenstein), Travers prepared himself – and a host of other young men in Napanee – for the challenges to come:
In the winter of 1914 a band of young men, some in uniform and the rest in mufti, could be seen every afternoon drilling upon the market square in Napanee, and when not thus employed they seemed to gravitate towards the Royal Bank. This was their headquarters. They had neither barracks, nor place to drill, but they were just as enthusiastic as the well-equipped platoon, which took possession of the armouries the next winter. During the autumn and early winter of 1914 Mr. Travers, manager of the Royal Bank, and Mr. [Reiffenstein], manager of the Dominion Bank, attended to their banking duties during the day, but spent their evenings in Kingston undergoing a course of training in order to qualify as officers in the army. As soon as Mr. Travers secured his commission as Lieutenant in the 39th, he set out to secure recruits in Napanee …. (W.S. Herrington and Rev. J.A. Wilson, The War Work of the County of Lennox and Addington [Napanee: The Beaver Press, 1922], p.234)
Herrington observes that “No class of young men throughout all Canada responded to the call more readily than the clerks in our numerous banks” (234). One of these was David Roy Foster, who “was stationed at Enterprise, a member of the staff of the local branch of the Royal Bank. He resigned his position April 30th, 1915, came to Napanee the next day and enlisted in the 39th under Lieut. R. G. H. Travers, the manager of the Napanee branch of the same bank” (219-20). Herrington writes that “after a few weeks' preliminary training in Napanee,” Travers and his young recruits “joined their company at Belleville, where they were kept until June 24th, when they set out upon their long journey for the front” (234).
Herrington summarizes Travers’ war experience briefly: “R. G. H. Travers was manager of the Royal Bank at Napanee, which position he resigned in the autumn of 1914. He joined the 39th as a private, took a course of training at Kingston, and gradually rose to the rank of Captain. He was three and one-half years in the service; was once gassed and returned on sick leave in May, 1918” (139).
Travers was sent to England only after months of training in Canada, and he was sent to France only after months of training in England. By the time he arrived in France, he was under no illusions about what trench warfare might hold in store for him: his brother had been killed in action in June of 1916.
By then end of 1916, it is clear that Travers’ officer training back in Kingston was paying off: he was promoted from lieutenant to temporary captain at the end of 1916, and for several months in 1918 he served in Givenchy, France, as temporary major.
By May of 1918, he was judged to be a “surplus officer,” and was returned to Canada as “surplus to requirements.”
Travers returned to Napanee as soon as he was demobilized. The Royal Bank had kept his position as manager open for him. Less than a year after returning to his old post, however, the Royal Bank transferred Travers to Walkerville (now a heritage precinct of Windsor). His many friends in Napanee were sensible of the loss this meant for the community. We read in the National Post that “Prior to his departure from Napanee, R.G.H. Travers, who has been manager of the Royal Bank at this point for fourteen years, and who has been appointed manager of the branch at Walkerville, was recently presented a substantial testimonial from his friends at Napanee” (22 May 1920, p. 8).
It seems that the Napanee community had a habit of bidding its departing bank managers a fond farewell.
Although the Royal Bank could take Travers out of Eastern Ontario, it could not take Eastern Ontario out of Travers after his fourteen years of living in Napanee. After less than five years in Walkerville, Travers managed to have himself transferred to Kingston, where he spent the last forty years of his long life. He worked as manager of the Royal Bank in Kingston until retirement age, and from the beginning of his life in Kingston he was a leader in the community. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Kingston General Hospital, serving as Chairman of the Board in 1935-6. Similarly, resuming his love of curling in Eastern Ontario, he served on the executive of the Kingston curling club, and skipped teams in Eastern Ontario curling bonspiels from the 1920s to the 1960s. In the Ottawa Journal, for instance, we find an account of his match as eighty-four year-old skip of a Kingston team against an Ottawa team (13 February 1963, p.6)!
So far, we have reviewed the biographies of three bank managers (Bellhouse, Hill, and Travers), and we have mentioned a fourth (George Patten Reiffenstein, who replaced Hill as manager at the Dominion Bank, and about whom there is much to say in the next volume of this book). Four other bankers appear in the early newspaper reports about the Napanee Golf Club: “W.A. Anderson,” “E.L. Kenny,” “F. Chenoweth,” and a man named “Fitzgerald.”
The first-mentioned of these other bankers seems to have been William Anderson, born in 1888 and living in Napanee in 1911 with his apparently widowed mother who is described in the 1911 census as living on her “income.” Anderson was at the time a bank clerk.
He appears twice in accounts of early activities of the Napanee Golf Club. In 1907, he seems to have finished ninth in the first round of the club championship, apparently a medal (or stroke-play) competition to determine the eight players who would compete in the match-play finals. When Bellhouse was unable to play his quarterfinal match that summer, however, Anderson replaced him – presumably because he was the next highest finisher in the preliminary round. Anderson promptly lost to the eventual winner Herb Daly.
In 1911, Anderson played in the first intramural club tournament in May. He appears in no newspaper accounts of club activities after this.
I suspect that he was eventually promoted to the position of manager at the Elmvale branch of the Bank of Toronto, where “W.A. Anderson” is listed as manager in 1920.
The next-mentioned banker, Elijah Lally Kenny, was born in Ottawa at the end of 1882 and after his schooling in Ottawa, where he finished first or second in many of the courses that he took, he entered the banking profession in Toronto in 1904. Kenny was then posted to Napanee as a bank clerk. Whether he had learned to play golf in Ottawa or Toronto, or instead took up the game in Napanee, where all the bankers played golf (it seems), is not clear. Whatever the case, he competed in the Napanee Golf Club championship in 1907. He finished among the top eight in the medal play part of the competition, but then lost to Reverend Dibb in the match-play quarterfinals. He is probably in the 1908 photograph of club members above, perhaps the man to the left of Allison (rising above others in the back row).
Kenny married a woman from Kingston at the end of 1911 and then travelled to Alberta at the beginning of 1912 to continue his banking career there, where he served as manager in the Bank of Commerce in branches at Empress, Medicine Hat, Edmonton, and so on. At the end of the 1920s, he moved to British Columbia, where he managed a branch of the Bank of Commerce in Vancouver. There, he played golf regularly and also helped to organize the Vancouver Curling Club in 1930.
Figure 35 Manager Elijah Lally Kenny describes for reporters how his Vancouver branch of the Bank of Commerce was robbed in 1938. Vancouver Sun, 25 October 1938, p. 2.
Kenny retired in Vancouver in 1943 and died there in 1964.
Another of Napanee’s early golfing bankers was Frank Chenoweth, a rising star at the Dominion Bank. Like Kenny, he qualified for the match-play competition for the club championship in 1907 as one of the top eight finishers in the preliminary round. In the quarter-finals, he was drawn against his manager at the Dominion Bank, Dudley Hill.
Chenoweth promptly lost to his boss. Perhaps a good idea.
He had been born in Liverpool, England, at the beginning of 1883, but his family had moved to Canada in the mid-1890s, settling in Toronto.
Life was not easy for them. Frank’s mother Christina worked as a music teacher and his father Richard worked as a waiter at the Queen’s Hotel. But then he got a job as an agent for the W.B. Bailey clearing house, a banking establishment – an entry into the banking world that would determine the future of two of his children.
After finishing their schooling, both Frank and his older brother Walter entered the working world as sixteen-year-olds. They became clerks at various Toronto companies, and then teenaged bookkeepers at these companies. By 1902, Walter became a clerk at a Toronto branch of the Ontario Bank (founded in Bowmanville in 1857 by John Simpson). Frank followed him into the bank in 1903 as a clerk. But he transferred to the Dominion Bank in 1904.
And he did so just in time, for the Ontario Bank manager Charles McGill was using bank funds to speculate on the US stock market, resulting in losses of more than a million dollars of the bank’s money, which in turn resulted in the absorption of the Ontario Bank by the Bank of Montreal in 1906. McGill was convicted of filing false tax returns, after testimony by Walter Chenoweth, and sentenced to five years in prison. Walter moved to Montreal to work for the Bank of Montreal, but was convinced in the 1920s to become superintendent of the city’s financially-struggling Royal Victoria Hospital, whose fortunes he quickly turned around. (His first son, David, eventually became the president of Molson’s Breweries, Limited – the first person not a member of the Molson family to do so.)
Frank was in Napanee when all this played out at the Ontario Bank in Toronto. Although he was thriving in Toronto, where he had joined the 48th Highlanders, a part-time militia infantry regiment, he seems to have been ambitious and eager to see more of Canada, so he moved to Napanee to serve as a bank clerk around 1905, the first of a number of moves connected with promotions at the Dominion Bank.
His stay in Napanee was not a long one – perhaps no more than five years in total over two stints between 1905 and 1911. But he must have become well-known rather quickly in the small town, for his brother’s testimony in the trial of Ontario Bank manager Charles McGill was widely reported in all major Canadian newspapers of the day, and since the extremely rare name of Chenoweth was hardly known in Canada, people that Frank Chenoweth met in Napanee would no doubt have asked him if he was related to the bank clerk named Walter Chenoweth who was being mentioned so frequently in the newspapers in connection with the sensation trial.
Like so many bankers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, once established in his new position, young Frank Chenoweth immediately joined the local golf club. He also invested time in the community in other ways. On New Year’s Day in 1909, for instance, he was one of the performers in a production put on by the Napanee Ladies Musical Club. One detects the influence of his mother here, for she must have passed her love of music on to her son Frank (love of music also went deep into his sister Rose, who worked in Toronto for the Anglo-Canadian Music Publishing Company).
Shortly after this brush with stage stardom in Napanee, however, Frank was promoted to the position of manager at the Guelph branch of the Dominion Bank. Yet he was back in the Napanee branch by the spring of 1911. Perhaps his return to the Dominion Bank was in connection with the departure of manager Dudley Hill later that year. In the end, however, Chenoweth did not become the new manager in Napanee. Perhaps he knew that his return to Napanee would not be a long one this time, for he did not secure a permanent residence: he merely lodged at the Campbell House hotel while in town.
The year 1911 was a busy one for Chenoweth. From Guelph he travelled to Montreal in January of that year to serve as best man at his brother Walter’s wedding. By March, he was back in Napanee, indicating to the census taker that he was still a bank manager. In May, he played in the opening tournament of the Napanee Golf Club. By the fall, he had been appointed manager of the Dominion Bank in Strathcona, Alberta. Then in December of 1911, the Edmonton newspaper notes that “Mr. Chenoweth, manager of the Dominion Bank, Strathcona, has gone east on a three weeks’ holiday” (Edmonton Journal, 2 December 1911, p. 14). Chenoweth presumably spent his holidays in Montreal, where his brother and widowed mother lived (her husband, Frank’s father, had died ten years earlier).
After 1911, Frank Chenoweth seems never to have returned to Napanee.
And he did not stay long in Alberta, or stay much longer in the banking world. He served as manager of the Strathcona branch of the Dominion Bank for most of 1912 but resigned his position to move to Regina, where he became an accountant working first for the Regina Plumbing and Heating Company and then for the Engineers’ and Plumbers’ Supply Company.
He was not just a musical artist, it turns out. He was also an exhibitor at the “First Regina Arts Exhibit” in February of 1914. When he moved to Vancouver ten years later, he continued to express himself artistically, appearing in dozens of amateur plays, and especially musicals.
But Chenoweth was also an athlete.
In Regina in 1913, he joined the Regina Rowing Club and came to dominate the sport. Regina had only a shallow, weed-filled man-made lake on which rowers had to make a right-angle turn mid-lake in order to row the distance at which they would be competing, but Chenoweth was instrumental in developing a team that could compete with Canada’s best rowing clubs. Headlines in the sports section of the Leader-Post over the course of two months that summer show how quickly this happened. In July we read of his brilliant appearance on the scene: “F. Chenoweth, the Star of Regina Boat Club’s Regatta” (2 July 1913, p. 6); in September, we read that he has won it all: “F. Chenoweth Carries Honors at Regatta and Is Now Champion” (2 September 1913, p. 7).
Figure 36 Frank Chenoweth, Machine Cup champion, Winnipeg, 1920.
In 1920, he and three other members of the Regina Rowing Club’s fourman boat went to Winnipeg and won the “Machine Cup” in that city’s prestigious regatta, a coveted championship, for which they were fêted on their return to Regina.
Chenoweth seems to have been a major figure in the establishment of the Regina Rowing Club’s high standing in the rowing world between 1913 and 1924. He bestowed the Chenoweth Cup on the Regina club, and what became known as the “Chenoweth Races” were conducted at the Regina Rowing Club right up to World War Two (two decades after Chenoweth left the city).
Having come to dominate the Regina rowing world by 1913, however, Chenoweth’s career as oarsman – to say nothing of his careers as accountant and artist – was interrupted absolutely by World War I.
On January 13th, 1916, Chenoweth volunteered for service in the 195th Battalion of the Canadian OverSeas Expeditionary Force, receiving a commission at the rank of captain. He shortly thereafter reverted to the rank of lieutenant, however, so that he could be posted overseas. He returned to the rank of captain at the end of 1916, and at the end of that year was promoted to the rank of temporary major. He was wounded at Epinoy in France at the end of September, 1918, blown up and knocked unconscious by an exploding shell while in action, resulting in a concussion and head contusions that left him prone to occasional deafness. He was restored to his commissioned rank and demobilized in April of 1919.
Chenoweth resumed his life in Regina after demobilization, and as we know became one of the city’s most celebrated rowers. In 1924, however, he moved to Vancouver, where he worked for the B.C. Tractor Equipment Company. He became a star of the amateur stage, as noted above, and he became president of the Vancouver Kiwanis Club in 1942, representing it at events across Canada during World War II. He died in 1949. The Province newspaper noted that he “excelled in sports” generally, “was a crack oarsman” in Regina, and in Vancouver “won many cups at the Marine Drive Golf Club” (1 February 1949, p. 13). The love of golf evident in his participation in events at the Napanee Golf Club between 1907 and 1911 never left him.
I think there was one other bank employee who was a member of the Napanee Golf Club before World War I.
We find a man named Fitzgerald listed as a member of the Napanee Golf Club team that played a homeand-away pair of matches against the Kingston Golf Club in October of 1910. This is the only reference to a club member named Fitzgerald in the newspapers of the time.
The man in question was probably Ernest Roy Fitzgerald, a bank clerk for the Dominion Bank in the early years of the twentieth century. He was born in London, Ontario in 1887, the son of a painter.
In 1910, he was listed in the Dominion Bank’s report for that year as residing in Napanee. Fitzgerald turned twenty-three in October of 1910 while involved in the home-and-away competition with the Kingston Golf Club. A few months after this, however, he was gone from Napanee. He was recorded in the federal Canadian census at the end of March, 1911, as a lodger in the Peel region of Ontario, his profession still being that of bank clerk. He was shortly thereafter named manager of the Dominion Bank at Mount Albert, Ontario (just north-east of Newmarket), and then the manager of the Dominion Bank at Baden, Ontario (just west of Kitchener). He married in Baden in 1913 and had six children over the next ten years. He died in Toronto in 1957 at seventy years of age.
Fitzgerald’s time in Napanee as bank clerk at the Dominion Bank would have overlapped with that of Chenoweth. Indeed, there is a hint that they were not just fellow golfers, but also musical and theatrical birds of a feather.
At the production put on by the Napanee Ladies Musical Club on New Year’s Day in 1909, for instance, Fitzgerald was also one of the performers, his name appearing in the programme right next to Chenoweth’s. Similarly, three weeks later, the names of Fitzgerald and Chenoweth again appear side-byside in the programme listing participants in a concert at Trinity Methodist Church. In November of 1909, however, Fitzgerald appears without Chenoweth at another production put on by the Ladies Musical Club – an event at the Town Hall called “First Club Day.”
So of the twenty-three men who are listed in the newspapers as members of the Napanee Golf Club before World War I, eight were bankers. As noted above, that is more than one-third of the total!
Given this fact about the Napanee Golf Club’s early membership, and given the importance of bankers in the inauguration of golf activities in Brantford, Halifax, and Perth from the early 1870s to the early 1890s that we have also noted above, one could argue that there ought to be a book written on the role of bank employees as golfers in the history of golf in Canada!
Whether managers, clerks, accountants, or tellers – they all played golf in large numbers.
The Doctors
Two doctors were among the most important of early golf club members: Raymond Alonzo Leonard and Richard Conway Cartwright.
Leonard (1851-1924) was the president of the club by at least 1907. How long he had held this position before 1907 is not known. Neither is it known what presidents might have preceded him between 1897 and 1906. He is simply the first known president.
He had been born in Odessa in 1851 and studied medicine at Queen’s University, graduating with his medical degree in 1879 and immediately opening a practice in Napanee.
Figure 37 Dr. R.A. Leonard in Napanee team’s cricket gear for match against Syracuse in 1886.
He was an active sportsmen in Napanee from the moment of his arrival in town. He played cricket for Napanee in the 1880s (with younger teammate Herbert Daly) and was also a founding member of the indoor curling club in 1896-97 alongside Bellhouse, Herrington, and Smith. He skipped one of the two Napanee rinks that played international matches in Kingston against Scottish curlers in January of 1923. (His team, which included William C. Smith, lost their match by one shot.) He was active in the administration of the curling club, working with Herbert Daly to issue shares when the club became Napanee Curling-Bowling Limited in 1918. The same two men organized the sale of shares again two years later. Of course Leonard became an active bowler as well as an active curler.
Birth certificates from the time show that Dr. Leonard delivered a good number of the children born in Napanee from the late 1870s to the early 1920s. In many cases, he continued to see these children as their families’ doctor as they grew up over the nearly half century that he practised medicine in Napanee.
We catch a glimpse of his life as doctor in Napanee, coincidentally, on the same day that the newspaper reported the exploits of marksman William C. Smith in shooting a mad bull.
While Smith was called out to deal with the bovine emergency in the yard of a house in South Napanee, Dr. Leonard was called out to a house on the other side of the river for an emergency of quite a different sort: “On Friday last the little son of Mr. Robert Solmes, market square, met with a painful accident. Mrs. Solmes had just finished getting dinner ready, and after pouring out the tea turned to replace the teapot on the stove. While the mother’s back was turned the little fellow reached up and grasping hold of a cup upset it. The hot tea ran down his throat and breast, badly scalding it. The services of Dr. Leonard were called in and the little one’s injuries were promptly tended to. The babe is just twelve months old, and a very bright child. It is now doing nicely” (Napanee Beaver, 15 May 1896).
Leonard served alongside Herrington for many years on the Executive Committee of the Lennox and Addington Historical Society. He was also a Corresponding Secretary of the Ontario Medical Association for a number of years in the 1880s
Figure 38 Dr. R.A. Leonard, Mayor of Napanee, 1893.
Figure 39 Dr. R.A. Leonard, 1902.
He was elected Mayor of Napanee in 1893. He served as Reeve in 1897.
Political connections formed in these ways presumably led to his appointment in 1898 as “Gaol Surgeon” (in today’s terms, “Jail Surgeon”). Traditionally a patronage appointment, this position paid him “$75 a year, which was to serve to cover fees for services rendered in the examining of lunatics confined in the jail” (reported in the Napanee Beaver, 8 May 2014, p. 8). He held this position for many years.
Leonard also ran as a Liberal Party candidate in Lennox against incumbent MP Uriah Wilson in 1900, and lost. Leonard was defeated, but not down and out: he was appointed postmaster of Napanee the next year, presumably as an act of Liberal Party patronage.
After a three month illness, Dr. Leonard died in the Kingston hospital in 1924 of cholecystitis and gall stones.
As mentioned above, Leonard served as president of the Napanee Golf Club in 1907. He also played in the first recorded match against Kingston Golf Club in November of 1905. Over the next twenty years, he served in virtually every executive position for the Napanee Golf Club, right up to the time of his passing in 1924.
Resident of Napanee as of 1879, and a keen athlete and sportsman from the beginning, Dr. Leonard could well have been one of the ardent votaries of the ancient game who played golf in Napanee in the early 1890s.
Dr. Richard Conway Cartwright – the man who sold the golf course land to Thomas Beattie Wallace in 1926 – was probably involved in the golf match that the 1908 photograph commemorates, for he was a regular participant in such contests up to 1913. I have not yet been able to identify him, however, in the photograph in question.
He was the first-born child of Sir Richard John Cartwright, who was the owner of the golf course land and a long-time member of the cabinet in the various governments of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Sir Richard Cartwright was no longer an elected politician, instead accepting appointment to Senate in 1904. In the Senate, he led the Liberal members of that body as of 1909. And from the Senate he still served in Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier’s cabinet through all the years of Liberal government at this time.
Born in 1862, Richard Conway Cartwright was educated the way his father had been: “In the boardingschool tradition that he had experienced, [Sir Richard] Cartwright’s sons were sent to the school run by Frederick William Barron at Gore’s Landing, Ont., and to Trinity College School in Port Hope” (Dictionary of Canadian Biography, xiv [1911-1920]). Son Richard bore the expectations of his father, described as “the archetypal Victorian paterfamilias” – one to whom family members gave “loving reverence” (Dictionary of Canadian Biography, xiv [1911-1920]).
Cartwright was a very successful student, qualifying to study at Queen’s University upon graduation from Trinity College. He enrolled in the medical sciences, intending to become a physician. Before being granted his degree by Queen’s University in 1884, however, he also studied at Trinity College, Dublin (where his father had studied in the 1850s, without taking a degree), as well as at the University of Edinburgh. He also worked in a number of hospitals in London, England. His training as a physician and surgeon was extensive.
When resident in Kingston while attending Queen’s University in the early 1880s, he served as a lieutenant and then as a captain in No. 5 Company of the 14th Battalion of the militia, the Princess of Wales’ Own Rifles. Captain Cartwright resigned his militia position in 1885, however, because he was moving to Rochester, New York, to set up a medical practice.
Dr. Cartwright became a naturalized citizen of the United States after several years of practice in Rochester, and then did two important things.
First, he returned to Canada to get married. In September of 1891 he journeyed to Barriefield, Ontario (near Kingston), to marry Kate Ethel Hora, of Pittsburgh, Ontario. The newly married couple quickly established themselves within the Rochester community. Mrs. Cartwright was mentioned in the local newspaper in connection with various charity activities. Dr. Cartwright became well-known as a doctor: “He is very popular and successful and occupies a foremost position among the younger class of physicians in the city” (Democrat and Chronicle, 9 June 1891, p. 11). He also became well-known as an athlete: “Dr. Cartwright is prominent in athletic circles, being one of the best all-round athletes in the city, and a director of the Rochester Athletic Association” (Democrat and Chronicle, 9 June 1891, p. 11).
Second, Dr. Cartwright accepted appointment by the Police Commission as Rochester’s Police Surgeon. The position was well-paid: whereas Dr. Leonard was paid $75 per year in Napanee, Dr. Cartwright received $600 per year in Rochester – a substantial supplement to the income earned through a doctor’s regular practice.
The work could be difficult, since the police surgeon might be called upon at any time of the day or night to attend to an injured person in police custody. The unexpected call tended to come at night, and the person to be treated tended to be drunk. So Dr. Cartwright was called to the scene of drunken saloon brawls, drunken domestic assaults, drunken suicide attempts, and various other drunken misadventures. He was also expected to treat police officers who were injured or became ill in the course of duty, to advise the Police Commission whether officers had become incapacitated with regard to future work, and also to inspect all new applicants in terms of their health. When the Police Commissioner became worried that too many police officers were overweight, “Police Surgeon Cartwright had strict orders to watch out for fat-inclined applicants” (Democrat and Chronicle, 7 October 1901, p. 5).
Appointment as Police Surgeon was a matter of patronage politics in Rochester. When a new mayor was elected, and then a new Police Commissioner was appointed, a new Police Surgeon tended to be appointed.
Figure 40 Dr. R.C. Cartwright is probably one of the six civilian employees of the Rochester Police Department ranged here behind the Chief of Police and standing before the assembled officers of the Police Department.
Cartwright learned about the bruising nature of Rochester municipal politics the hard way. First, in July of 1896, the Common Council of Rochester tried to wrest the power to appoint the Police Surgeon away from the Police Commission. The Council passed a motion that Dr. Cartwright’s appointment as Police Surgeon had been illegal back in 1891. Cartwright sought an injunction to prevent his firing and to force Council to continue to pay his salary. The mayor finally took Cartwright’s side, but the harrowing legal and political battles had lasted from July to September of 1896. The newspapers referred to this matter as the “Cartwright scrap.”
Two years later, however, another “Cartwright scrap” occurred consequent upon another change in municipal politics. Newspaper headlines in April of 1899 sounded familiar themes: “Police Surgeon’s March Salary Held Up”; “Cartwright Is the Victim” (Democrat and Chronicle, 1 April 1899, p. 17). Dr. Cartwright secured an injunction in court against the withholding of his salary. In December of 1899, what the newspapers now called the “Cartwright case” was finally decided in his favour.
And yet the victory was short-lived. A new mayor took office at the beginning of 1900 and displaced Cartwright with Dr. John A. Stapleton. A new Police Commissioner came into office in August of 1900, however, and he re-appointed Cartwright as Police Surgeon. After the municipal election in the fall of 1901, the contest between Cartwright and Stapleton finally ended in Stapleton’s favour. His reappointment in 1902 led to his serving as Police Surgeon for over a decade after that.
Cartwright did not take the slings and arrows of this outrageous political misfortune without opposing them. He became instrumental in the formation of Rochester’s “Citizen’s Party, an organization of disaffected Democrats and Republicans” which would contest the municipal election of 1903 (Democrat and Chronicle, 4 November 1903, p. 3). Cartwright headed a committee charged with the responsibility of filling out the new party’s ticket of candidates. He also came up with the campaign strategy of projecting the image of the party’s mayoral candidate onto the wall of a downtown building by means of a new-fangled projection device called “the stereopticon” (Democrat and Chronicle, 25 September 1903, p. 12).
Alas, the party lost. Ingloriously, it finished well behind the Republican and Democratic tickets.
Disappointed, disheartened, and perhaps disgusted, Cartwright decided to fold his tent and leave the state altogether. He remained in Rochester until the summer of 1904 in order to testify on behalf of a former patient in the latter’s lawsuit against the Rochester Railway Company for negligence. But then Cartwright returned to Canada, for good.
However upsetting the trials and tribulations of the Rochester political process had proved to be, perhaps in the long run it was a good thing that Cartwright had been displaced from the job of police surgeon. The job was changing as the stress of life in a growing city impacted citizens and police alike. A year after Cartwright left Rochester, his replacement Stapleton was nearly murdered while performing his duties. He had made a house call to inspect a policeman who claimed to be too ill to work, and upon his sharing his diagnosis with the policeman, the latter so disagreed with it that he drew his revolver on Stapleton and discharged it at him several times as the Police Surgeon fled for his life.
By 1907, Cartwright had taken up residence in Napanee. There was no opening for “gaol surgeon,” the Napanee term for what Rochester called the “police surgeon.” Dr. Leonard had that job sewn up. But Dr. Cartwright did not even open up a private medical practice in Napanee. Perhaps the stresses of his work for the police department in Rochester had left him burnt out.
Whatever the case may be in that regard, Dr. Cartwright devoted his life in Canada to business rather than medicine. In the census of March, 1911, he described himself not as a physician, but rather as the “manager” of the Napanee Gas Company.
He became more intensely business-oriented after his father died in 1912, Sir Richard Cartwright having appointed his sons Richard Conway Cartwright and Alexander Dobbs Cartwright as executors. As such, they were placed in charge of a great number of properties in Ontario and the Canadian prairies, and stewardship of their father’s estate involved them in many lawsuits, both as plaintiffs and as respondents. One case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1914.
In Napanee, Dr. Cartwright not only managed the Napanee Gas Company, but also became a major figure in the running of the Dominion Rock Drill Company.
According to the E-History Project of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives,
The Dominion Rock Drill and Foundry Company began in 1900, and specialized in the small scale production of Empire rock drills and steams hoists. Later, they expanded to include a line of iron castings…. The business was operated by a board of directors that included John M. Wallace, Dr. Richard Conway Cartwright, Dr. John P. Vrooman, and Edmund John Roy, who served as manager, and later as president. Originally the company occupied a stone building on Mill Street just off Centre Street, Napanee…. The shop did not have electricity, waterworks, or a sewer, but ran with lights powered by a steam engine…. By 1912, the operation had grown immensely, and the company was capitalized at $200,000. To meet demand, the company reorganized as the Napanee Iron Works Limited, and moved to a new location at Ann Street and West Street along the railway line. (http://e-history.lennoxaddington.on.ca/virtual_exhibits/8_between_the_wars/iron_works.html)
Cartwright was instrumental in this change of factory address and change of company fortune, for Napanee Iron Works “opened in new buildings made available by Dr. Cartwright in exchange for shares” (http://tracksidetreasure.blogspot.com/2014/06/napanees-rail-served-industries.html).
Figure 41 Napanee Iron Works circa 1912 in the building supplied by Cartwright.
The E-History Project observes that
The new site provided many more amenities, and a significant improvement in space, offering room for an office, machine shop complete with travelling crane, an erecting room, a pattern shop, a blacksmith shop, a storage room, a foundry, an electrical shop, and a boiler shop. Electricity, plumbing, ventilation, and a reading and lunch room were also included. The building was more than 150 feet square, and was supported by a steel frame. At this time, the Iron Works began producing boilers, which would become their signature product. The Iron Works could produce an entire boiler on-site, constructing coal and wood-fired models. Steel plate was cut, rolled to shape and riveted, and head, back plates and boiler tubing was installed. After testing, fitments and controls were added to the assembly. The boilers were then shipped out by railway flat car to its destination. During the First World War, the Iron Works manufactured artillery shells in the tool room. (http://e-history.lennoxaddington.on.ca/virtual_exhibits/8_between_the_wars/iron_works.html)
Having established himself as a prominent businessman in Napanee, Cartwright seems to have played golf at the Napanee Golf Club quite regularly before World War I.
Kate Cartwright is the first member of the family mentioned in the newspapers in connection with the Napanee Golf Club. She travelled to Picton in July of 1909 to watch the men’s team of the Napanee Golf Club compete against the men’s team of the Picton Golf Club. Her husband is listed as a member of the Board of Governors for the Napanee Golf Club for 1912 and 1913. In the summer of 1913, he was a member of the seven-man Napanee Golf Club team that travelled to Picton to compete against the men’s team there. In September of 1913, he was also on the team that welcomed the Picton team to Napanee for the return match, as well as on the team that travelled to Kingston to play a team representing the Kingston Golf Club.
Before the start of the 1914 golf season, however, Kate Cartwright died. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the spring of 1912. She died less than two years later in March of 1914.
Dr. Cartwright does not seem to have played golf during the year following his wife’s death.
In September of 1915, however, twenty-four years to the month after his first marriage, Cartwright married again, wedding a Napanee woman named Florence Mary Henry. (She became co-owner with him of the Napanee golf course land, and so she is listed as co-equal grantor of the land on the contract by which they sell the property to Thomas Beattie Wallace.) In the year they were married, the newlyweds moved to Kingston, where they resided for many years and where Dr. Cartwright became heavily involved as vice-president and manager in the running his father’s old company, the Frontenac Loan and Investment Company.
But Cartwright had not forgotten his old golf club. Even though resident in Kingston, he returned to Napanee to play golf. He was the winner of the Daly Cup in 1919, for instance, and perhaps competed for the same cup earlier in the war. When the war concluded, he again accepted appointment to the golf club’s Board of Directors.
After 1920, however, he is not further mentioned in the newspapers in connection with the Napanee Golf Club until he sells the golf course land to Thomas Beattie in 1926.
Dr. Cartwright eventually retired to Ottawa, managing the estate of his deceased mother as her executor – a job that again involved a number of lawsuits.
He died in Ottawa in 1941. He was seventy-nine years of age.
The Merchants, the Manufacturers, and the Miscellaneous
John Wesley Robinson (1862-1941), a club vice-president by at least 1907, was the owner of the largest dry-goods store in Napanee and a leader of the business community. He had purchased the Robert Downey Company dry goods store at the corner of Dundas Street and Centre Street in 1887 and renamed it Robinson & Company, where he came to employ as many as thirty-five people.
His career in business nearly ended the summer it started, for as Robinson was stocking his new store with Gibbard furniture, the delivery van in which he and a member of the Gibbard family were transporting the furniture was run over by two run-away horses drawing a delivery wagon behind them: “the horses … dashed down East street, the wagon bounding like a rubber ball. Near the residence of Mr. R. G. Wright they crashed into the furniture van of Gibbard & Son, in which were seated Mr. John Gibbard and Mr. J. Robinson, who narrowly escaped serious injury. The maddened brutes sprang into the van, which stopped their career, one of them being knocked down and having four of its ribs crushed in, and the skin torn from its legs. The wagon was considerably broken up” (Napanee Standard, 26 August 1887).
Figure 42 John Wesley Robinson in 1902.
With sportsman and outdoorsman William C. Smith, Robinson was a fellow member of the Snowshoe Club in the 1880s, and he was a longtime member of the Curling Club, from his signing of the contract for the rental of the indoor ice rink in 1897 to his appearance alongside Smith in the Napanee team that played international matches against Scottish curlers in Kingston in 1912.
He was a public-spirited member of the community, serving on the Board of Education (alongside Dudley Hill in 1910), serving for many years on the Executive Committee of the Lennox and Addington Historical Society, serving as President of the Lennox Agricultural Society in 1919, and over the years serving in virtually all of the executive positions for the Napanee Golf Club. During World War I, he was active in the local Victory Loan Campaign of 1917.
For Robinson, golf was a passion. He played golf on the Napanee Golf Club team in the first recorded competition against another golf club in the contest with Kingston in November of 1905. In fact, he recorded Napanee’s only point that day. He was the first winner of the Daly Cup in 1908.
Given his twin passions – dry goods and golf – I wonder if an item in the Dry Goods Review of 1911 was based on Robinson’s experience. The article is about interactions between managers of dry goods stores and traveling salesman, with the former complaining about the “obtrusive” members of the latter’s ranks. The writer warns that methods such as the following will “soon destroy that dignity which is one of the first essentials of salesmanship”: “It is related of one that he tracked down a buyer to the golf links and even so far forgot the dignity of his calling as to follow the buyer all around the course attempting to induce him to look at his merchandise” (15 August 1911, p. 1).
Figure 43 J.W. Robinson with the Quinte Cup trophy in 1928.
Whether or not Robinson, who was well-known to the Dry Goods Review, was the source of this anecdote, his passion for golf survived all distractions, big and small: he would represent Napanee in the Quinte Cup competition as late as 1928, when he was sixty-six years old. The 1928 Napanee Golf Club team won the cup that year.
At the closing banquet of 1933, Robinson would address the Napanee Golf and Country Club as an expert on its early history. He seems to have been a member of the club from its inception in 1897. He had originally resided in Hastings County, but moved to Napanee with his purchase of the Robert Downey Company in 1887. As an outdoorsman and sports enthusiast from the 1880s onward, I suspect that when Robinson saw ardent votaries of the ancient game carrying golf clubs past his store window, he was quick to join them and try the new game. What’s more, he would have been quick to stock in his store and display in his windows the jackets, trousers, and caps that were typical offerings of dry goods stores in the 1890s.
Herbert Daly, one of three brothers who owned the Daly Tea Company of Napanee in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Napanee, became a very good golfer, but he took up the game only in 1906 – the last year in the life of the 1897 – 1906 golf course. So he was obviously not one of Herrington’s playing partners in the early 1890s.
Figure 44 Herbert Daly at the Napanee versus Syracuse cricket match in 1886.
The Daly family had been in Napanee since arriving from Ireland in the 1840s. Herbert was a sportsmen from early in his life, representing Napanee at cricket from the mid-1880s onward. But then he took up golf late in 1906, and there was no turning back: “The annual club championship tournament was held on the golf links last week and Mr. Herb Daly established his title to ‘Champion.’ Herb only took to the royal game last fall and his erstwhile prowess on the cricket crease is now being duplicated on the golf links. Congratulations are in order to Mr. Daly” (Napanee Express, 2 August 1907). The next year, Herb Daly donated a trophy, now known as the Daly Cup, to be awarded to the club’s match-play champion. It is now the oldest trophy that the club possesses.
Clarence Warner played golf for the Napanee Golf Club quite regularly in the 1900s, but when he was just nineteen years old he had left Napanee.
He moved to New England in 1893 and did not return to Napanee until 1904. Before he left, had he played golf in Napanee in the early 1890s?
He was born in Wilton, Ontario, in 1874, attending school in Napanee, and then moving to New England in 1893. He lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where he worked for the Commercial Paper and Bond Business.
In Rhode Island, he was not just an early member of the Wannamoisett Country Club (laid out as a ninehole course by Willie Campbell in 1899, and redesigned as an eighteen-hole course by Donald Ross in 1914); he was also a founding member. The Official Golf Guide of 1899 contains the following entry about Wannamoisett Golf Club: “This is a popular organization, with a club house and a nine-hole course. The incorporators are Walter D. Brownell, George F. Hall, Russell W. Knight. Frederick S. Philips, Frank H. Martin, Clarence M. Warner, J. Herbert Foster and Bertrand J. Fortin” (ed. Josiah Newman [New York, 1899], p. 291).
It is possible, I suppose, that nineteen-year-old Clarence Warner was one of the ardent votaries playing golf in Napanee in the early 1890s and that he took a love of the game with him when he moved from Napanee to Providence in 1893. His older brother Stanley was Herrington’s partner in the firm Herrington, Warner & Grange, so it is possible that Clarence Warner associated with golf-fanatic Herrington before he moved to the United States. Jane Lovell indicates that Warner appears to have been a guest at Camp Le Nid during the summer season of 1896 (email to author, 9 January 2020). We know that the bond between Herrington’s family and Clarence Warner’s family became a close one, for many years later Herrington’s daughter Caroline travelled to the United States to spend six weeks with the Warner family in 1925.
Figure 45 Clarence M. Warner circa 1915. Photograph N-1467 Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Warner had married an American woman in Providence, with whom he had one child, a girl, but he returned to Napanee in 1904 to help an older brother look after his business when the brother, Stanley, who had been in partnership with Herrington, moved to Colorado out of concern for his wife’s health.
Clarence Warner was a serious amateur historian, serving for ten years as president of the Lennox and Addington Historical Society and also serving as president of the Ontario Historical Society. He was also an important member of other historical societies in Ontario, New York, Massachusetts, and so on. He donated his extensive library of Canadian history books to Harvard University and was appointed Harvard’s Curator of Canadian History and Literature.
As soon as he returned to Napanee, he joined the Napanee Golf Club, playing in the Club’s first recorded match against Kingston in November of 1905.
Given his involvement with the laying out of the Wannamoisett golf course by Willie Campbell in 1899, it is possible that he was able to offer advice on the laying out of the “new course” in Napanee at the end of 1906.
He played regularly for the Napanee Golf Club over the next decade. We find him in the back row of the 1908 photograph of club members. He generously offered his motor boat as transportation for team members and spectators travelling to Picton for matches against the Picton Golf Club. When his mother died in 1915 and his brother Harvey died in 1916, however, he and his family returned to the United States. His association with the golf club ended.
Charles Allison lived on the Allison family homestead in Adolphustown. He descended from United Empire Loyalist forebear Benjamin Allison, who along with two of his brothers, settled in the Bay of Quinte area in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Another brother settled in New Brunswick, instead of Ontario, and had Mount Allison University named after him.
Figure 46 Charles Allison in 1908.
Allison attended Kingston Business College in the 1890s, served as Reeve of Adolphustown several times over several decades in the early 1900s, and served on the Lennox and Addington County Council several times, as well.
Living on the Allison farm on Bayshore Road south of Adolphustown, Allison was presumably located too far from town to have been available for the kind of relatively spontaneous golf activities that I imagine Herrington and a few friends organized in the early 1890s. But one never knows. He played on Napanee Golf Club teams that competed against teams from Picton Golf Club and Kingston Golf Club in 1909 and 1910. He was a fairly good player, it seems, since he was one of only three players from the nine-man Napanee team to take any points from the Picton team in the match played at the Picton Golf Club in July of 1909.
In the 1908 photograph of club members, Allison is the wag who rises above the group at the back, probably standing on a chair, holding a tray aloft as though he is a waiter, pretending to pour a bottle of beer into his glass as the photograph is taken. (One imagines that Reverend Dibb would not have been amused!)
Frank M. Bowen was mentioned just twice in the early newspaper accounts of Napanee Golf Club activities. He won one of the weekly tournaments at the club in July of 1910, and in October he represented the Napanee Golf Club in a match against the Kingston Golf Club.
Bowen was a constable for the County of Lennox and Addington in the 1890s, and as such relatively well-known in the community. But he became the Market Clerk in Napanee by the 1900s, and as such became even better known – especially among the county’s farmers and other members of the agricultural industries.
Figure 47 The Napanee Market Square on a market day in 1908. As Market Clerk, Frank Bowen presided over this market.
Bowen did not have many years of golf left after his good play in 1910. His health began slowly to deteriorate, and he died suddenly in May of 1918. His obituary in a local newspaper expressed surprise at his death:
BOWEN – At Napanee, on Sunday, May 12th 1918, Frank Melbourne Bowen, aged 58 years, 2 months and 3 days.
The death occurred on Sunday morning of Frank Bowen, one of Napanee’s well-known and highly respected residents. Deceased, who was 58 years of age, was stricken at the breakfast table, heart trouble being the cause of death. He had not been very well for some time but his sudden demise was a shock to his family, and numerous friends. The late Mr. Bowen was not only well known in town, but in the farming community as well, as he had been a town official in the capacity of market clerk, for a number of years. His genial smile and good natured manner will be missed by young and old alike. (http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/deathsobitsB.htm)
Another golfer mentioned just once in these early years was Willet Jacob Doller. He played in the opening club tournament in May of 1911.
Born in 1865 into the Doller family that had been in the Napanee area for several generations already, Willet was initially a Rail Road mail clerk for more than fifteen years, but by the early 1900s he had become a manufacturer. He founded Doller & Company, which seems to have manufactured drug-store items, such as Tenz Tablets (produced by license from Tenz Limited, of London, England): the Doller & Co advertisement said that with the breath deodorant Tenz Tablets (10 tablets for ten cents!), you could “Take your breath away after food, tobacco, or alcohol.”
Doller’s rise from mail clerk to manufacturer saw him become very well-off. We find him hiring a domestic servant from Scotland in the early 1900s, and then hiring a lawyer to complain about her job performance to the minister in the federal government responsible for the programme that enabled her immigration! Doller was instrumental in leading a drive for war donations during World War I. He attended Lennox and Addington County council meetings when issues of concern to him were being discussed. He held patents with the U.S. patent office.
Doller seems to have passed on a love of golf to his son, William Douglas Doller, who became a regular player at the Napanee Golf Club in the early 1920s, winning a long-drive competition, playing on Quinte Cup teams, and serving as a member of the Executive.
Also appearing in the earliest accounts of golf club activity was John S. Ham, a Napanee insurance broker.
Figure 48 John S. Ham in 1908.
He played in the opening tournament of 1911 and was mentioned in the newspapers regularly throughout the 1911 golf season in connection with the weekly tournaments at the club. Perhaps his greatest contribution to golf in Napanee was not his own play, however, but rather that of his sons Doug and Ken, who played regularly on Quinte Cup championship teams over the course of several decades.
Like the Doller family, the Ham family had been in the Napanee area for several generations by the time John Ham was born. He was part of the Miller family, insofar as his mother was a Miller, the sister of the William Miller who was the father of Frank, Sarah, and Edith – his first cousins. Furthermore, John Ham also married a Miller.
One other early club member is mentioned in the newspapers before World War I, but I cannot identify him definitively. He is a man mentioned in the Napanee Express by reference to his last name only: Taylor. In June of 1910, he played in the Napanee Golf Club’s first weekly tournament of that golf season.
There were several Taylors residing in Napanee in 1910 who might have joined the Napanee Golf Club.
There was a Matthew Taylor who was a dry goods salesman, perhaps for J.W. Robinson’s dry goods company. There was a Garrett Taylor who was a bookkeeper for Daly’s tea company. If salesmen and bookkeepers were of a social class high enough to allow them to circulate socially with doctors, lawyers, bankers, manufacturers, and company owners, either of them might have been the Taylor who played golf for the club in 1910.
Perhaps a more likely candidate is the J. Taylor who owned a store on Dundas Street selling boots and shoes, or the Melvin Taylor who was a watchmaker in Napanee. They were business owners, like J.W. Robinson and Herb Daly, but on a much smaller scale.
Figure 49 The Campbell House hotel in Napanee as it appeared in advertisements in the late nineteenth century.
Or there is Harry Taylor who was running the Campbell House hotel where Chenoweth stayed during his brief return to Napanee in 1911. This Taylor was well-known in the community, as we can see by the reference to him in the Napanee Beaver’s account of the 1905 Warden’s Supper. This event followed county council’s election of its warden – that is, its leader: “Mr. Harry Taylor, the popular proprietor of the Campbell House [capacity for 100], did himself credit on the occasion, the tables being beautifully decorated and the menu a long and varied assortment that tempted the inner man” (10 February 1905).
Various members of the golf club attended events of this sort at the Campbell House hotel. At the 1905 event in question, for instance, W.S. Herrington was the assistant chairman of the night’s proceedings and Tom German was one of the respondents to the toasts (to King, country, judiciary, military, etc.) that were part of such an event.
So there was plenty of opportunity through acquaintance with golf addicts Herrington, German, and Chenoweth for Harry Taylor to have learned of the game’s importance to these men and perhaps to have become interested in it himself.
I note that Harry Taylor was not listed as proprietor of the Campbell House hotel in the 1919 telephone directory. Perhaps he left town not very long after the first weekly tournament of 1910.
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
The first woman to play as a member of a team representing the Napanee Golf Club was “Mrs. J.W. Robinson.” The team she played on was not one of the women’s team, however, but one of the men’s teams.
And so, Mrs. Robinson, we’d like to know a little bit about you for our files.
She was born Edith Fowler Herring in 1872, the daughter of a Napanee manufacturer of agricultural implements. Her father died when she was still a young girl, and her mother remarried in 1886, providing her children with a rather extraordinary step-father: an Englishman named Captain A.F. Holmes.
In 1849, Holmes had run away to sea from his home in England when just nine years old. He sailed to India and helped to relieve sieges of British ports there; he sailed in expeditions through the Canadian Arctic in search of the Franklin expedition; he ran blockades during the American Civil War. After sailing the Great Lakes and helping to develop crude oil burning technology, he settled down in the Napanee area to enjoy patronage appointments from Conservative federal governments. When the Liberals returned to power, and he lost the favour of patronage, Holmes travelled to the Philippines, Japan, and China as an agent of the Crown Life Assurance Company.
He died in 1910, with the Napanee Beaver offering the following observations: “The Captain was a man of splendid natural abilities, and his school of experience rendered him unusually interesting. In all situations he possessed a rare vein of humour which was used with modesty and charity. One of his chief characteristics was his great love of home, which makes his loss most deeply lamented by his stepchildren as well as his own children and widow” (22 April 1910).
In 1896, when she was twenty-three years old, his step-daughter Edith Herring married John Wesley Robinson, a man ten years her senior. Their marriage was a long one, and seems to have been happy. Today, we find their joint tombstone in Napanee’s Riverside Cemetery. She died in 1957.
During World War I, she worked for the Napanee Red Cross Society, both as Convenor of the Refreshment Committee and as an Auditor. She was also an officer of the Committee for Women’s Patriotic Service and Red Cross Work, serving as a “Buyer.”
She was a founding member of the Ladies Golf Club of the Napanee Golf Club in 1907 under the presidency of Mary Matilda Herrington (wife of Walter S. Herrington and mother of Caroline Herrington). In 1920, she was appointed to the golf club’s Ladies Executive Committee, and served regularly on it thereafter. Perhaps more importantly, in 1923, she was appointed second vice-president of the Napanee Golf Club. So far as the records published by the Hunters are concerned, she seems thereby to have become the first woman ever to be appointed as an officer of the Napanee Golf Club as a whole.
We find her mentioned regularly after this in the Hunters’ records: throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, she plays in various club competitions (on one occasion, her nine-hole score was 53 – an average score for many of the men who played the course in those years); she takes charge or assists in the weekly “teas” put on by the Ladies Golf Club; she plays as a member of the women’s team in competitions against other golf clubs, such as the Belleville City Golf Club, the Gananoque Golf Club, the Trenton Golf Club, the Picton Golf Club, and the Cataraqui Golf Club. By the mid-1930s, however, she seems to have retired from competitive golf.
Her claim to fame in this part of the book, however, which is about people who played golf on the Napanee golf course before World War I, is that she participated in a match between the men’s teams of the Napanee Golf Club and the Picton Golf Club in the summer of 1909.
Concerning that match, the Picton Times reports: “The Napanee players arrived about eleven o’clock and the Picton ladies served dinner on the club house verandah, and no more charming place could be found anywhere for a meal. The verandahs are cool and roomy and the view which greets the eye cannot be surpassed for quiet beauty in Canada…. When the time for reckoning came and the score cards were totalled up it was found that the Prince Edward men were three up. Miss Christine Barker and Mrs. Robinson of Napanee also played a round which resulted in Miss Barker’s favor three up” (8 July 1909, p. 1).
Figure 50 A postcard circa 1910 shows the clubhouse of the Picton Golf Club and the view from the golf course across the Bay of Quinte.
One notes that the two teams reckoned only the men’s scores.
Apparently, then, the reason that Mrs. Robinson and Miss Barker were asked to play a match against each other was not to help the men make up the numbers for a proper competition. It was definitely not a spur-of-the-moment arrangement. Rather, the Napanee and Picton golf clubs had arranged an exhibition match: it seems that the two women were invited to play a match in order to demonstrate the virtuosity of their golf games.
Alas, the Napanee golfer lost to the Prince Edward golfer.
Regardless of the result of the match, of course, low-handicapper Tennyson would have said it is better to have played and lost than never to have played at all. But since the match was so close, had these two women played golf on Robinson’s home course in Napanee, rather than Barker’s home course in Picton, I bet that Robinson would have won.
Historically, however, given the long tradition of chauvinism in the men’s game with regard to the women’s game, the important thing was not that a Picton woman defeated a Napanee woman in a game of golf, but rather that two women played golf at the Picton Golf Club at the same time as the men, and at the same time as the men were playing in a competition.
Figure 51 A photograph, circa 1910, of a man putting on the ninth green at the Picton Golf Club, watched by two women. The year before, Mrs. Robinson and Miss Barker were not spectators, but golfers. Photograph from the Picton Gazette (23 May 2007), p. 12.
So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson: heaven holds a place for those who play!
Seven Candidates for Votaries of the Early Years
So, to sum up: of the two dozen members of the Napanee Golf Club mentioned in the newspapers before World War I, the only ones who were resident in Napanee in the early 1890s along with Herrington were German, Bellhouse, Smith, Leonard, Robinson, and Warner.
Warner had lived in Napanee until 1893 and could have played golf with any of these men in Napanee before he left for the United States. He was a teenager then, however, and perhaps it is not likely he would have been playing sports with men who were ten to twenty-five years older than him. But one never knows when it comes to golf.
Bellhouse arrived around 1893. Herrington implies that golf was being played in Napanee a year or two before this. Bellhouse might have immediately joined the men who were playing golf then, but he may not been one of the earliest of the ardent votaries to whom Herrington refers.
Note also that there may have been others who played golf with Herrington in Napanee in the early 1890s whose names have been lost to time – perhaps because they moved to other towns before newspaper reports of golf activity began in 1905, perhaps because they gave up the game after a brief flirtation with it, or perhaps because they passed away before they could be recorded by the Napanee newspapers as local golfers.
It is possible that one of the early golfers – perhaps Herrington – introduced the others to the game in the same way that Matheson had introduced the game to six others in Perth in 1890.
Or perhaps a number of Napanee men had discovered golf on their own at one of the 1880s golf clubs in Kingston, Montreal, or Toronto, and then later discovered in Napanee in the early 1890s that they shared a mutual interest in the game – just as in the 1870s Darling had found others who also played the game, both when he was in Brantford and when he was in Halifax.
The Most Likely Golf Grounds
Where would an early devotee of the game have attempted to play golf in Napanee in the early 1890s if one had been inclined to do so?
Sportsmen in Napanee curled before there was an indoor rink, and they played baseball and cricket before there were grounds developed for these activities. The same must have been true of golf. Before there was any serious talk of founding a golf club, I suspect that people like Herrington, German, Smith, Leonard, and Robinson went out – alone, or in groups – to play rudimentary games of golf on common land or pasture land around Napanee.
Would Cartwright’s pasture lands on Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township have been the first choice for an early links at Napanee? Certainly these lands were a likely target of early golfers. A “Bird’s Eye View” map of Napanee from 1874 shows potential grounds for golf, including the bottom of Cartwright’s land, as well as the Crystal Palace fair grounds.
Figure 52 1874 Bird's Eye View of Napanee shows north end of today's golf course, as well as the old Crystal Palace and the fairgrounds around it.
Early golfers would have required unpopulated, open land within walking distance of their homes and places of business. They did not have automobiles. There was no public transport. They would not have wanted to ride horses or take their horse-drawn carriages to play golf, only to have to leave the horses tethered to a fence post while they devoted several hours to pursuit of the ancient game.
Common ground would have been available at the Crystal Palace at the east end of the town. The Napanee Crystal Palace was one of dozens of buildings featuring glass and steel construction that were built in Canada in the last half of the nineteenth century in imitation of the Crystal Palace exhibition hall built in London in the 1850s to demonstrate the potential of glass and steel for modern construction.
Figure 54 Detail enlarged from 1874 Bird's Eye View of Napanee shows the Crystal Palace at the east end of Napanee.
The Crystal Palace grounds in Napanee were the early fair grounds.
Figure 53 The Crystal Palace in Picton resembles the drawing of the Crystal Palace in the Bird's Eye View of Napanee above.
Here, early horse races were conducted. Here, one might have had the space to lay out a rudimentary golf course. Note, however, that the walk to these grounds was longer than the walk to Cartwright’s pastures. And it is not clear that one could have counted on the Crystal Palace grounds being empty of other people (strolling, riding horses, driving carriages, playing baseball, and so on) – a sine qua non for golf.
Cartwright’s pasture lands were the appropriately-sized open lands, devoid of human traffic, closest to the Napanee downtown where all potential ardent votaries worked and closest to the nearby residential areas where all potential early votaries lived.
Very efficient access to Cartwright’s pasture lands would have been possible by means of the old footbridge across the Napanee River. The 1870s version of this footbridge is visible in the map above. It provided the people of Napanee the most direct pedestrian access to the part of North Fredericksburgh Township that would soon become a part of Napanee Town as the suburb of South Napanee. Jessie (Dibb) Hall remembered using this bridge to get to the golf course in the early 1900s.
Figure 55 The Napanee footbridge, circa 1910, which led from downtown Napanee to Lot 18 of Concession 7 of North Fredericksburgh Township.
The Cartwright Factor
Perhaps there is a clue in Herrington’s history of the county of Lennox and Addington as to who might have approached Cartwright on behalf of the early ardent votaries to request the use of his pasture lands as a golf course.
Herrington writes that “few towns possess better natural advantages for obtaining beautiful recreation grounds than Napanee; but in its early years no effort appears to have been made to secure a proper place for field sports or to set aside any of the vacant lands for a park. The cricket club used a pasture field or commons …. The first step towards providing a park was taken about twenty-five years ago by a few leading citizens, among them being His Honour Judge Wilkison, Wm. Miller, Nelson Doller, Stephen Gibson, and several other public-spirited men” (254).
William Miller was father of the son and father-in-law of the two sons-in-law who were early members of the golf club: F.F. Miller, W.C. Smith, and Reverend F.T. Dibb, respectively. Nelson Doller was the father of the Willet J. Doller mentioned in 1911 and grandfather of the William Douglas Doller who played in the 1920s.
I am interested in Herrington’s naming of Stephen Gibson as an early mover and shaker in regard to securing the use of vacant lands for parks and field sports.
Like Herrington, Gibson was a Napanee lawyer, and he was also an advisor to Sir Richard Cartwright regarding business and political affairs in Napanee. His initiative “about twenty-five years ago” (in conjunction with the others mentioned above) to approach Cartwright for land for a park may also have developed over time into an approach to Cartwright for permission to use the pasture lands of Lot 18 on Concession 7 of North Fredericksburgh Township for a golf course. Recall that Herrington said in 1913 that golf had been played in Napanee “for more than twenty years.” Golf’s emergence “More than twenty years ago” is pretty close to Gibson’s request for Cartwright lands for parks and field sports “about twenty-five years ago.”
When Gibson died unexpectedly in a Montreal hospital in 1908, the obituary published in the Montreal Gazette mentioned a more important connection to Cartwright: “Stephen Gibson, aged 80 years, registrar of Lennox and Aldington for about 15 years, died in a hospital in Montreal on Saturday, after a three week's Illness. Mr. Gibson was taken to Montreal for an operation for gall stones, and he had chances of recovery, but pneumonia set in and carried him away. He was manager of the Cartwright estate” (Montreal Gazette 17 November 1908, p. 14).
Gibson was just seventy-one when he died in 1908 , not eighty (as the newspaper says), but the big thing to note here is that Gibson was clearly at least as well-known as the “factor” or manager of the Cartwright Estate as he was as the county registrar.
Others in Napanee served as Napanee managers of the Cartwright estate before and after Gibson. There was Isaiah Abrams, described as “bailiff, Cartwright estate,” in the Belleville business directory of 1877, and described in his 1896 Napanee obituary as “factor of the Cartwright estate.” Similarly, the Deseronto Tribune observed that “For some time he acted as agent for Sir Richard Cartwright.” There was also Alfred Knight, described as a Napanee agent of Sir Richard Cartwright from about 1897 onward. According to land records in the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives, Knight actually owned Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township for several years in the early 1900s before selling it back to the Cartwright family.
But Gibson seems to have been the most important “factor” in Napanee (pun intended) in the period of the late 1880s and early 1890s that we are investigating.
Stephen Gibson
Obviously, the Cartwright “factor” would have been a big man on the Napanee scene. How had Stephen Gibson come to have this position?
He was born in 1837 in St Martin’s in the Scilly Isles, located off Land’s End at the south-west tip of England in the county of Cornwall. We find the first fifty years of his life story in A Cyclopedia of Canadian Biography (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1886). The author George Maclean Rose writes that his information about the people included in his book has “all been verified … by reference … to the persons themselves,” which means that the biography of Gibson that we find in the book was provided to the author by Gibson himself, who was the only one in Canada who knew his life’s story (p. vi).
Gibson tells the story of his forebears in such a way as to make it clear that he descends from a line of managers of land and business affairs: he tells Rose that his grandfather John Gibson “went to St. Martin’s of the Scilly islands from Scotland and was a man of sterling character and marked ability. He was in his day, owing to the isolated position of the islands, looked up to by the inhabitants as the chief man of the place, and in their communications with the outside world he was the head business man of the island, and transacted all the people’s affairs. After his death his position was filled by his son” (p. 407).
By the time Rose asks Gibson to tell him his life’s story in the mid-1880s for the Cyclopedia, Gibson had been living in Napanee and practising law there since the fall of 1869, and was well-established as a community leader: by the mid-1870s, he had been appointed Notary Public, he was President of Napanee’s Y.M.C.A. and he was a member of Napanee Town Council. At a special meeting of the Town Council in 1876, he was the councillor who took the lead in supporting a petition presented by the Workman’s Temperance Association to raise the fee of licenses for local drinking establishments. Gibson argued that increasing the license fee would diminish the number of drinking establishments, ensure that the ones that remained were of a better class, and contribute to a decrease in drunkenness (Napanee Express, 27 January 1876). In 1881, he was appointed to the Board of Audit of the County of Lennox and Addington. It is clear that he was trying to follow the example of his father and grandfather in taking a leadership role within the community.
In the years after publication of his entry in the Cyclopedia, he was even more active locally. He was named the Returning Officer for federal elections; he was appointed County Registrar; he was appointed to the Napanee Board of Education. He was a Mason and he was an Odd Fellow. Like so many other middle-class professional Napanee men in those days, he was also interested in local history, as acknowledged after his death by the Lennox and Addington Historical Society: “Through the kindness of Mr. Stephen Gibson, County Registrar for Lennox and Addington, we have seen a rare old document in regard to the existence of slavery in this county among the first of the U.E. Loyalist pioneers” (Thomas Casey, “Early Slavery in the Midland District” [14 and 21 February 1902], in Lennox and Addington Historical Society Papers and Records [Napanee, Lennox and Addington Historical Society, 1909], Volume I, p. 12). He was an important local figure in the Methodist church, chosen to represent the Napanee district at Methodist conferences, both with regard to the Sunday schools in particular and as one of the district’s laypeople (Daily Whig, 28 May 1898, p. 2). He was the first president of the Children’s Aid Society of Napanee, formed in 1899.
How had Gibson made it from the Scilly Isles to Napanee?
Gibson tells Rose a long tale of a young boy becoming a self-educated sailor, businessman, student and barrister:
The subject of this sketch early acquired a taste for reading. Having obtained a thorough knowledge of the common English branches of study, he endeavoured to extend his knowledge by personal effort, after he had gone through the common school course. There being no advanced schools at the island he determined to educate himself, and procured the necessary works. He soon acquired a knowledge of the French language, which he put in practice as much as possible and whenever the opportunity offered, with the French sailors who came into port, and was soon able to interpret for the pilots. From general reading he acquired a desire to see and know something of the great world outside. Owing to the limited means afforded by the occupations of the islands, he had a desire to try his fortune in America; and in the spring of 1858 he left home, arriving in Canada on May 5th, 1858. He went as far as Cobourg, and made that place his home for a few years, while looking around to determine his future course. At this time, the openings for young men were not very good, owing to the depression over the country; but he determined to persevere, and while using every spare moment in a study of classics and mathematics, he engaged in the forwarding business during the summer season. In this way he made a large commercial acquaintance, and visited all the principal towns and cities fronting the Great Lakes from Kingston to Chicago. During the winter months he prosecuted his studies, and as soon as he was qualified, entered Victoria University [of the University of Toronto], attending there during the winter sessions. Here he was enabled by forced work to keep up the year’s work in the winter session, as well as take other general studies not in the regular course. In the year 1863 he … determined to study law. He passed the matriculating examination, and was entered on the books of the Law Society at Osgoode Hall …. At this period … a practising barrister at Picton offered him a position in his office, and he removed thither, where he remained until admitted to practice in May, 1868 …. Having severely taxed his health by close application to study, he paid a visit to his native home, after an absence of eleven years. Although his time was very short, being limited to six weeks, the bracing sea voyage completely restored his naturally strong constitution, and he returned to work with renewed vigour. He was called to the bar in February, 1869, and remained in Picton … till the fall, when he removed to Napanee, and opened an office there. During his course of study he had to work hard to obtain the necessary funds to carry him through, without any assistance, refusing to ask help from his friends at home, and determined to make his own way independently. Whatever position he has attained is owing entirely to steady, persevering application. (pp. 407-8).
Behind the words of Rose one can detect Gibson’s pride at how he had managed through dint of effort to earn himself an education – a pride that seems quite justified.
He was no doubt just as proud that his daughter was one of the first generation of young women to seek a degree at the University of Toronto, and pleased that she followed him into Victoria College there. Forty-five years after his graduation, the college had not forgotten him: “Miss Gibson, ’11, has our heartfelt sympathy in the death of her father, Mr. Stephen Gibson, the registrar of Napanee. Mr. Gibson was an old Victoria student” (Acta Victoriana [December 1908]. Vol xxxii no 3, p. 286).
While still a university student, Gibson was also a soldier who defended Canada against Fenian raids in 1866.
Between 1866 and 1871, the Fenian Brotherhood of the United States conducted five major attacks against British forts, customs houses, and canals near the Canada-U.S. border in an attempt to put pressure on Britain to grant Ireland independence. Gibson was involved in the battles of 1866: “During vacation in 1864 he attended Kingston military school and passed the regular examination as cadet, and obtained the usual certificate entitling him to a commission. In 1866, during the Fenian raid, he joined the 16th battalion volunteers … and was appointed lieutenant of No. 4 Company, serving with the battalion while they were at the front. He continued his connection with the battalion for a few years, attending the annual drill for some time after leaving Picton, but pressure of business would not allow him to retain the position and he resigned, although very much devoted to military drill and life” (p. 408).
Gibson’s immediately busy and successful legal career in Napanee had forced him to resign from the militia, with regret, but it also soon put him in close contact with an important member of the Cartwright family. And there would be no regret about that.
Rose writes up Gibson’s story of his early legal career in Napanee as follows: “Coming to Napanee, in September, 1869, although a complete stranger, having no friends or acquaintances, yet he soon acquired a steady practice by close attention to business, and in the spring of 1872, he entered into partnership with James S. Cartwright, … and this business connection continued until the fall of 1877, when Mr. Cartwright removed to Toronto” (p. 408). These partners were listed in the Canada Law Journal as “Cartwright & Gibson, Barristers, Attorneys-at-Law, Solicitors in Chancery, and Insolvency, Notaries Public, etc.” Cartwright moved to Toronto to become the Registrar of the Queen’s Bench Division of Ontario’s Supreme Court. He would thereafter circulate in the upper echelons of Ontario’s legal community. And Gibson was his former Napanee partner! What a useful connection for Gibson to have.
Gibson’s partner James S. Cartwright was a first cousin of Sir Richard Cartwright. Note that the latter was not the only Cartwright with property in the Napanee area. James S. Cartwright’s father John Solomon Cartwright “is said to have given the land for every school, public building, and church” in Napanee (Dictionary of Canadian Biography). So Gibson’s first contact with a member of the Cartwright family not only gave him an important connection to the most powerful lawyers in Ontario, but also put him in close contact with the major land-owning family in Napanee. That Gibson felt close to the Cartwright family not just professionally and politically, but also personally, is indicated by the fact that his son born in 1888 was named James Cartwright Gibson, after his partner from eleven years before.
Gibson’s political work would put him in contact with another Cartwright: Richard John Cartwright, the one who owned the land that would become the golf course. By the late 1880s, Gibson had become an important adviser of Richard Cartwright, who was an important politician in the Liberal Party, which languished in the Opposition benches in the late 1880s and 1890s. During these years, Gibson seems to have been the most important “factor” of the Cartwright estate. Although Alfred Knight came to the fore as Cartwright’s “factor” in the early 1900s, Gibson continued to be part of legal matters in Napanee involving the Cartwright family well into the early 1900s.
Ontario’s historical archives contain letters from Gibson to Cartwright on various topics from 1887 to 1897. Gibson acted as Cartwright’s lawyer on occasion, but he also kept Cartwright (who was a banker, businessman and politician) informed about business and political matters in Napanee generally. In a letter to Cartwright in 1889, for instance, Gibson “reports on the local political situation.” Cartwright was in these years effectively in charge of the federal Liberal Party’s Ontario organization, and Gibson’s politics were thoroughly Liberal: “Being a member of the Liberal Association for Lennox in 1883, he was elected president of the Lennox Reform Association, … and he has always taken an active part in politics, acting with the Reform side” (Cyclopedia, p. 408).
Interestingly, the majority of Gibson’s letters to Cartwright preserved in the Ontario historical archives date from 1887 to 1889, precisely the period “about twenty-five years ago” when Herrington says that Stephen Gibson and others were busy setting about the acquisition of Cartwright land for the development of recreational facilities for Napanee.
Approaching the Cartwright Estate
Recalling the likely ardent votaries of the ancient game who resided in Napanee in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Herrington, German, Leonard, Robinson, and Smith, one suspects that their political, legal, and business dealings with the Cartwright estate would have given them an occasion to raise with Cartwright’s local representative Gibson the subject of the appetite within the Napanee community for a golfing grounds within easy reach of the homes and places of business of the leading members of the community.
Herrington himself represented Richard Cartwright in a court case in 1894. Perhaps more importantly, like Cartwright and his “factor” Gibson, Herrington and Leonard were dedicated members of the Liberal Party, with Leonard actually running as a Liberal candidate. So Herrington, Leonard, and Gibson could easily have co-operated in an approach to Cartwright for permission to play golf on Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township.
How might an approach to Richard Cartwright about the possible dedication of some of his land for use as a golf links have been framed?
An article in the Toronto Globe in May of 1890 introduced the game of golf to its readers, outlining its history, and the nature of the game. “Golf has a language of its own”; it is “evolved, refined, decorous, filled out with dignity, but not altogether unlike the sanguinary games that used to fill the playgrounds” (“The Game of Golf—Another Scotch Athletic Exercise Becomes Popular,” The Globe, 17 May 1890, p. 2). More interestingly, the article explains the value of the game for the kind of professional men and leaders of society who played it: “Golf is a manly and eminently healthful recreation. The walk is a tonic, and the clear air that blows over the heights gives zest … and surely it promises pleasure enough—an afternoon of healthful pedestrianism in the pure country air…. The pace can be made easy or smart … and thus the exercise adapts itself to the age and exuberance of its players… The brain is used, too, for calculation is required and one must make allowances for wind and a dozen other things” (2). The article also described the best location for a golf course: “The game may be practiced on any good stretch of land where the grass is not too rank; but the ground best suited for the purpose is a reach of undulating country” (2).
When the lawyers, bankers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians of Napanee approached Sir Richard Cartwright for permission to use the undulating pastures below Blanchard’s Hill for their golf course, they could not have done better than to quote liberally from this article. They would have done well to underline the word “undulating,” for we all know that a distinctive feature of the Cartwright land is its undulating ground, and they would have done well to underline the word “pedestrianism,” for Cartwright was a devoted walker.
Cartwright was personally interested in the welfare of Napanee in general, and in the fate of many individual Napanee residents.
Figure 56 Sir Richard John Cartwright, 1835 - 1912.
The records of his correspondence in various archives show dozens of letters received from Napanee people, ranging from letters from his agents advising him of local business affairs and the state of politics in the town to the letter of the high-school master asking for help with the purchase of new arc lights, and to the letter of a man requesting a decrease in his rent. As Herrington points out, when Cartwright began business in the town as its first banker in 1860, he did so with a view to conducting his business in a way that would improve the lives and habits of ordinary people: “The first Savings Bank opened in Napanee was purely of local origin and was known as the Napanee Savings Bank Society…. Sir Richard Cartwright was the founder of this very laudable institution; he … advanced the very excellent reasons for all persons of small means patronizing the bank that the money ‘thus placed out of their immediate control, will prevent their indulging many an extravagant desire, will teach them careful and provident habits, and in addition will be improving in amount to be ready for them at any moment when really required."
Fifty years later we see the same man, then Minister of Trade and Commerce in the federal government, “placing upon the Statute Books of Canada a similar provision to encourage thrift among the poorer classes throughout the entire Dominion” (259).
From this point of view, an approach to Cartwright suggesting that a recreation ground for the middleclass leaders of the community by way of a golf course, to be established on certain of his pasture lands, would probably have received a fair hearing, and perhaps a sympathetic ear. As Herrington himself wrote, “the Cartwright family have always taken the deepest interest in everything affecting the public welfare of Napanee and have contributed liberally to every worthy object brought to their attention by the citizens or any organization in the town” (Herrington 363).
Would Sir Richard Cartwright have been particularly sympathetic to a request for land for a golf course? Was he a golfer himself?
Figure 57 John Mortimer Courtney, 1838- 1920, Sir Richard Cartwright's colleague and golf-addicted friend.
No one knows for sure, but there is the following interesting passage in the “Preface” written by J.M. Courtney to Cartwright’s book Reminiscences (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912): “From 1870 to 1873 my acquaintance with Sir Richard Cartwright was a club acquaintance for the short time each year that Parliament sat in Ottawa. We were both readers of books; we had each in our youthful days studied and read the works of the famous men who lived in the past; and having had that kind of training we were able to read and enjoy every new novel that made its appearance. The seventies were to some extent a studious period. Typewriters were unknown, the production of books was scanty as compared with the present day, there was no golf to distract, and the leaders of that time had always a book at hand to beguile the time, and Sir Richard Cartwright read everything, and could talk on the morrow of what he had read the night before.
At that time, and for many years after, Sir Richard was an athlete; he dearly loved a boat, he exercised with clubs and dumbbells daily, and every morning he took a very long walk” (vi, emphasis added).
Courtney was a life-long public servant in Ottawa who had worked for Cartwright when the latter was a government minister, and when golf began to boom in Canada in the 1890s, Courtney became a devotee of golf – an ardent votary who joined both the Ottawa Golf Club (later Royal Ottawa) and the Rideau Golf Club. It is unlikely, given the writing conventions of the day, that Courtney would have said that “there was no golf to distract” him and Cartwright from their reading in the 1870s if golf had not come to distract both of them later in their lives. If only Courtney, and not Cartwright, had come to be distracted by golf, Courtney’s reference to his passion for golf would have been seen as irrelevant and self-absorbed talk about his own pastimes in a piece of writing that convention required to be focused exclusively on a celebration of the life, character, and values of the deceased writer Cartwright. So Courtney’s reference here to the distractions of golf is a strong hint that Cartwright’s life-long love of exercise in general, and of walking in particular, developed later in life into a “distracting” love of golf.
Lady Cartwright was certainly interested in socializing with golfers. In 1896, Henry J. Hewat, who had been responsible for reviving the Kingston Golf Club in 1891 after the original 1886 club had sputtered out, arranged to return to Kingston from his new home in Paterson, New Jersey, to play a match against the Kingston club’s best player, Tom Harley (winner of the first Canadian amateur championship in 1895). After the match, we read, “Lady Cartwright and Miss Hora will give the golf tea” (Kingston Daily News, 5 September 1896, p. 4).
Similarly, in 1899, Sir Richard Cartwright was invited to spend time at the Ottawa Golf Club by its president, Lieutenant-Colonel D.T. Irwin (Ottawa Citizen, 2 October 1899, p. 5). At this time, the Ottawa Golf Club’s course was located on the Chelsea Road in Hull, and it was regularly frequented by members of parliament who were not necessarily club members but who wished to play a round of golf before going to the House of Commons (see James Edgar, Canada and Its Capital [Toronto: George N. Morang, 1898], pp. 135-36).
By at least 1904, one of the Cartwrights’ sons, A.D. Cartwright, had become a member of the Ottawa Golf Club, playing to a handicap of 18 (Ottawa Citizen, 19 September 1904, p. 8). He may have begun to play golf at the Kingston Golf Club, as his sister Mary Josephine (“Molly”) Cartwright had done some years before. By the early 1900s, she was an accomplished golfer, winning a club competition in 1903: “The scores of the present ladies golf matches … prove very interesting. The match for the ‘Grey trophy,’ which was won by Miss Molly Cartwright, was played in last Thursday’s furious gale of wind, and the scores are excellent, considering the day” (Daily British Whig, 27 October 1903, p. 3).
The enthusiasm for golf on the part of Canada’s leading politicians, businessmen, public servants, doctors, lawyers, and industrialists, to say nothing of his own wife, son and daughter, was therefore well-known to Sir Richard Cartwright by the late 1890s and early 1900s.
So those in Napanee who approached Cartwright for permission to formalize playing of golf on his vacant pasture lands (playing of golf that might have been occurring informally for some time before) may have had an ear more sympathetic to the healthful claims of golf than they might have known or imagined.
Dates with History
Even were the earliest golf ground at Napanee no more sophisticated than the one at Camp Le Nid, if it can be established that Herrington’s little band of ardent votaries played golf on Sir Richard Cartwright’s fields in the early 1890s – the very fields that Cartwright let to the Napanee Golf Club in 1897 – then the claims for the Napanee golf course to be one of the oldest still-operating golf courses in Canada is enhanced.
Note the essential distinction between the concept of a golf course and the concept of a golf club.
The Napanee golf club stands tied for 21st in the category of the oldest golf club in Canada because its year of origin as a club is 1897.
It is another question how old the Napanee golf course might be – that is, how long Lot 18 of Concession 7 of North Fredericksburgh Township has been used for golf. This land has hosted a golf club since 1897, but it may have hosted a golf course from even earlier in the 1890s.
If it has been used by ardent votaries of the ancient game as a golf course since 1891 or 1892, then the Napanee golf course would move up to second or third position in the category of the oldest golf course in Canada upon which golf has been continuously played.
Mowing the Early Golf Course
Art and Cathy Hunter report that “the original course consisted of no more than five holes, cutting across our existing number three, four and five holes. It was probably not much more than a pasture, with the only ‘mowing’ of the fairways done by grazing cattle or sheep” (6).
The tradition of sheep and cattle mowing the fairways of golf courses was an early one, and quite widespread. Recall the photograph of Tom Vardon and his green-keeping staff at Ilkley Golf Club. I draw your attention to the ground keepers standing between the five men and the clubhouse: sheep!
Figure 58 Tom Vardon's ground-keeping crew at Ilkley Golf Club, Yorkshire, in the late 1890s included four workmen (Fred Rickwood perhaps being the third one to Vardon's left) and a flock of sheep, visible on the hill behind the crew.
The photographer has carefully set up the photograph to include all the members of the ground-keeping crew: men and beasts!
I note also that the “first-class” links virtually next door to the brand new Napanee Golf Club, the newly renovated Kingston Golf Club, had to protect its new tees from cattle in the spring of 1897: “The links of the Kingston golf club are now in capital condition. The teeing grounds have been entirely remade and sodded and are now surrounded by wire fencing to keep the roving cattle out. The putting greens have not yet been uncovered” (Daily Whig 29 April 1897). The greens were surrounded by wire fence, too.
Figure 59 This late-1890s photograph of one of the golf holes of the Kingston Golf Club on Barriefield Common shows the circle of fence-posts on which the wire fencing was strung to keep cattle off the green within the fence. The green and fencing can be seen in the centre of the photograph on the right side.
So Napanee Golf Club was not at all behind the local golfing curve in 1897 by having animals mowing the “fair green” (the latter being the term 100 years ago for what today we call the fairway).
In the case of the Napanee golf course, we know that it was not sheep (as at Ilkley in Yorkshire), but rather cattle (as at Kingston) that grazed on the golf course, for as part of her recollections about the very earliest days of the golf course, Jessie (Dibb) Hall observes: “my sister's birthday was May 24th, and several times before 1910 we had picnic parties on the Golf Course, crossing over by the old swing foot bridge [suspended over the Napanee River]. We always gathered May flowers and yellow cowslips. The links were also used as pasture for the Blanchard's cows. They had the big brick farm house, south of the links. There were no power mowers … in those days” (Hunters 7).
Jessie Dibb was born in 1899, and her sister was born three years before in 1896. The reason that Jessie (Dibb) Hall mentions that the birthday picnics in honour of her sister occurred before 1910 is that her sister died of complications from diabetes in March of 1910. She was just 13. So since there were birthday picnics “several times” up to 1909, the picnics may well have been on both the first and second versions of the golf course, the first lasting until 1906, the second opening in May of 1907.
Note that people referred to the Napanee Golf Club’s golf course as a “farm” right down to the 1920s. We read in the Napanee Beaver of 28 April 1922 that “Boys and girls have been doing a good deal of injury in past years to the farm and grounds used by the Napanee Golf Cub and we are informed that the Club is going to take steps to put a stop to such damage.”
How to Build a Golf Course in 1897
Art and Cathy Hunter further explain that “the greens and tees would have been quite simple constructions – and from today’s point of view, very primitive, indeed” (6). “The greens would have been ‘built,’” they say, “simply by cutting an area with a mechanical mower” (6).
The photographs of the Golf Links of Camp Le Nid in the 1890s may indicate the kind of tees and greens that the Napanee Golf Club began with in 1897. If Herrington and his fellow early ardent votaries of the ancient game had set up a course on the Cartwright pastures in the early 1890s, Herrington’s standards at Le Nid may have resembled the construction standards of Napanee’s other early ardent votaries on Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township.
We can understand the nature of the original golf course by consulting the first “guide” to golf published in North America, the Guide to Golf in America by Wright & Ditson. This 1895 book, along with J. Stuart Balfour's Golf (Spalding Athletic Library, 1893), James P. Lee's Golf in America (1895), and James Dwight's Golf: A Handbook for Beginners (1895), was one of the first four books ever published on North American golf. In its 1897 edition, Wright & Ditson’s Guide to Golf in America included a new section on how to build a golf course. This section suggests how the ardent votaries of the ancient game would have gone about the construction of the first golf course in Napanee.
The Guide’s operating assumption was that in addition to the wealthy golf clubs established in North America’s metropolitan centres and holiday resorts, there were bands of hardy golf pioneers in 1897 who would not have the financial resources to fell trees, uproot stumps, move earth, and dig ponds to build the golf course of club members’ dreams. Rather, modest golf clubs would need to find a golf course within an existing landscape (the process, we recall, that Fred Rickwood followed in his creation of the two Amherst courses in 1908 and 1911).
As it was for Fred Rickwood in Amherst, so it would be for Napanee’s early golfers: a pasture land would be the golf club’s target. Such land had already been cleared by previous generations of settlers and grass coverage was well-established on land long-dedicated to the grazing of sheep and cattle.
Practical advice on building a golf course was scant in the 1890s. James Dwight’s section on “Laying Out Links” in his 1895 Handbook comprised just seven sentences: “It should be understood that links vary greatly in length as well as in the character of the ground. There is no definite distance between the holes. If you possibly can, get some competent person to lay out the course for you. It is hardly likely that a beginner can take all advantage of the different natural hazards, etc. The distance between the holes must vary according as open places occur with some hazard in front. As to distance, an average of 300 yards makes a good long course. Some of the holes should be 400 to 450 yards apart, and one short hole of 100 to 120 yards” (p. 41). That is all the advice he offers. Now build it!
Against this background, if the ardent votaries of the ancient game in Napanee turned for golf course building instructions from Dwight’s scant advice in his Handbook to Wright & Ditson’s Guide, the latter book must have seemed encyclopedic by comparison: there were nine whole pages of advice! A summary of the sections “Laying Out a Course” and “Construction and Upkeep” follows:
Laying Out a Course
The game may … be played on any fields affording requisite room and turf that can be kept in condition to afford reasonably good lies between the holes…. It is not possible or desirable that the distances between the teeing-grounds and holes should everywhere be the same…. Holes should not be too much alike .… The distances and hazards should be as varied as possible. The putting-greens may be sometimes on the flat turf, sometimes on the top of a ridge or knoll, or even on the side of a gently sloping hill. The first drive from the tee should be sometimes from the crest of a low hill, and sometimes on the flat; and the hazard to be surpassed (for there should be always some hazard or bunker to trap a poorly played drive) should be sometimes near the teeing-ground and sometimes at nearly a full drive’s distance from it….
Selecting a convenient place for the first teeing-ground, not too far from the club house, and having determined from the general “lay of the land” the direction in which the first hole is to be, walk in that direction and seek a convenient stretch of level turf which may be used as the putting-green, at least 250 yards from the tee, for the first hole should not be a short one. See that a full drive will be rewarded with a tolerably good lie. Having placed a stake in the centre of the spot selected for the first green, consider where is the most favorable spot for the next teeing-ground to be placed….
Do not be afraid of hazards. A good sporting hole may be often made in the most unpromising place if a good drive can place the ball where a good lie can be obtained for a second shot….
Where nature, by some oversight, has forgotten to provide hazards or bunkers, they should be built by man. The best are made by building a pile of earth work, about waist high and with sloping sides…. The trench behind the mound should be filled with loose sand, if possible, as … it is less unpleasant to play a ball out of sand than out of the mud that is sure to collect in such a place in wet weather….
Running water and small ponds add to the variety of the course and are desirable hazards.
Returning to the second teeing-ground, we continue as before, weighing considerations of distances, difficulty of ground, favorable spots for putting-greens and position of hazards, and driving our little stake that marks the position of the future putting-greens as we go along, constantly bearing in mind that we must return to a point somewhere near where we started, and arriving at the last hole but one choose our last teeing-ground, so that we may return to the home green in such a way as not to endanger the lives of members who may be watching the game from the clubhouse veranda or grounds, and at the same time not make the hole too easy, for the last hole should be a difficult one.
Now we may go over the whole course again and see if it cannot be improved by shifting this hole or that teeing-ground a little. If it cannot be so improved we may return home and give our orders for the construction of such holes, teeing-grounds and bunkers as we have described.
Construction and Upkeep
It is not necessary or desirable that the greens should be absolutely flat, but … it is essential that they should be as smooth as may be. Wetting and pounding under heavy boards will work wonders, and grass treated in this way takes far less time to become playable than when the whole is re-sodded…. To keep the greens in the best condition, they should be cut and rolled every morning and after every rain. A heavy roller drawn by two men should be used, and the lawn mower should be set low…. The putting-green is defined by the rules as all ground within twenty yards of the hole, not including hazards, but all putting-greens are not kept in that swept and garnished condition we have a right to expect for so great a distance. Indeed, on many links we have to be satisfied if we find tolerable smoothness within five yards of the hole….
The teeing-ground is sometimes indicated by a parallelogram in whitewash marked upon the ground…. This is drawn upon the level ground or on a gentle upward slope, and is the simplest and cheapest form. Sometimes, however, there is not sufficiently large or level space for this, and a teeing-ground has to be built. These are built of earth, well pressed and pounded down and covered with sod….
Through the green, the amount of care required to keep the course as it should be depends altogether on the quality of the soil. Loose, sandy-soiled links practically look out for themselves; but many inland courses on rich, clayey soil require constant attention with a horse mower. In any case, the grass should certainly be short enough anywhere near the middle of the course to afford a good lie to the ball … for few things are more provoking than to find a well-played ball lying so deep in grass that a stroke must be sacrificed to play it out. At the sides and edges of the course longer grass does not matter so much, as it may be considered a fit punishment for erratic play. (pp. 29-35)
Figure 60 Unidentified 19th-century turf pounding golf enthusiasts making either a teeing ground or a putting green for their eighth hole.
So if the putting greens and teeing grounds of the original Napanee golf course were merely relatively level areas of pasture-land turf made into a relatively smooth surface by the application of heavy planks in a “wetting and pounding” exercise, then it is no surprise that no identifiable trace of them remains today. Any small, flat, relatively rectangular or circular area on today’s driving range and today’s third, fourth, or fifth fairways might have been a teeing ground or putting green in the 1890s.
Unless some of these teeing grounds and putting greens were incorporated into the “new course” of 1907, it may be that over time they simply retreated back into the landscape.
A Curious Napanee Incident
Incidentally, in the context of this talk about putting greens and teeing grounds being made of turf “well pressed and pounded down,” I draw attention to an interesting newspaper reference to the Cartwright estate’s factor, Stephen Gibson.
According to an article in the Napanee Standard of August 26th, 1887, the Napanee town council dealt with a very curious matter as its last item of business: “Mr. Carson moved, seconded by Mr. Saul, that the indebtedness of Mr. S. Gibson on account of plank borrowed and stone taken without leave be placed in the hands of the town solicitor for collection. Carried.”
“Mr. S. Gibson” is presumably Cartwright estate manager Stephen Gibson. Tacking this item onto an itemization of accounts of council spending on lamps, night watchman’s wages, expenses incurred “chasing tramps,” and so on, seems almost comical, especially in light of the arch language about “indebtedness” for material “borrowed” and “taken” “without leave”: the council members are going out of their way to avoid calling Gibson a thief!
Yet the apparent intention is to make Gibson pay for not “signing out” the plank and the stone. He will “pay for this” both literally and figuratively: by forking over some money and by being embarrassed.
I wonder if town council was just “messing with” lawyer Gibson. Was it merely a jest to authorize the council’s solicitor to go after the barrister who was the County Registrar and the Cartwright “factor” for rent owed on a plank and stone?
In the same year that he “borrowed” county plank and stone “without leave,” Gibson had also ordered repairs to his Registry Office and then submitted the bill to the County Council. Again, the County Council put their lawyer on the case. The County’s Property Committee hired a lawyer to determine whether or not Registrar Gibson actually had the authority to order these repairs. It turned out that he did not, and so on December 9th, 1887, the Property Committee reported to County Council that Gibson had exceeded his authority.
If the contretemps about unauthorized use of a plank and stone was mostly a joke, the contretemps about unauthorized spending certainly was not.
Gibson quickly smoothed things out: by the end of the winter of 1887-88, Gibson and the County Council had become friends again. How did he manage that?
We find the following item in the Lennox and Addington County Council Minute Book for March 16th , 1888: “An invitation to the Council to an oyster supper, from S. Gibson, County Registrar, was read. Moved by Mr. Reid, seconded by Mr. Allison, that the invitation be accepted with thanks. Carried unanimously.”
This was the first item of business for the Council that day. The members had their priorities right. The man from the Isles of Scilly would know his oysters. And a good supper at the Gibson residence would no doubt make concerns about unauthorized repairs to his office and unauthorized borrowing of a plank and a stone seem equally unimportant.
Still, one wonders: for what purpose had barrister, Notary Public, County Registrar, and Cartwright “factor” Stephen Gibson purloined a town plank and a town stone? Why had a barrister-at-law risked becoming known as a thief-at-large?
Perhaps the man whose family had emigrated from Scotland to the Isles of Scilly around 1800 had inherited a love of golf.
Fancifully, I imagine Gibson out on Sir Richard Cartwright’s pasture land, applying water to a relatively flat part of the turf, placing his purloined plank down on the ground just so, and then pounding the daylights out of the plank with the stolen stone in order to make … what?
Why a putting green, of course, or a teeing ground!
Quite a fanciful thought, but a fun one.
The Clubhouse
An actual question, rather than a fanciful one, concerns the recommendation in the Wright & Ditson Guide that a golf course commence at a clubhouse.
Did the 1897 golf course even have a clubhouse?
The wooden building that became the clubhouse may well have come to the golf club along with the land for the golf course.
Figure 61 1908 photograph of original clubhouse, which was already an old building by then.
On the one hand, we have images of the clubhouse from 1908 in photographs taken on the occasion of a match between the golf clubs of Napanee and Picton. A meal was served outdoors and the clubhouse appears in the background of two photographs. On the other hand, this building appears on the 1907 topographical map of the Napanee area, together with the Blanchard House located on the concession road (now called Golf Club Lane) at the south-west corner of the golf course land and together with the Cannon house further down this same concession road at the southeast corner of the golf course land near the railway tracks. These were the only three buildings on what is now the golf course property.
Note that we can also see the Blanchard House and the house that would become the clubhouse clearly marked on the 1878 map of the Napanee area. (Cartwright sold the lot down by the railroad tracks to John Cannon in 1875, but Cannon had not built his house there in time for it to have been marked on the 1878 map).
So there is little doubt that the building that would become the first clubhouse of the Napanee Golf Club appears on the 1878 map. It must have been in existence even before the printing of the map in 1878, for the county-wide research undertaken in preparing the map would have been done well before its printing that year.
Figure 62 Left: Map of Frontenac-Lennox-Addington 1878, by J.H. Meacham & Co. Right: Department of National Defence map of Bath, Ontario, Region, published in 1916, but survey for the map conducted in 1907.The clubhouse building is visible on each map in the top left corner, located on the right side of Original Road.
Jessie (Dibb) Hill describes the first clubhouse as follows: “The original clubhouse was situated between what is now the 7th and 8th holes, and was a small, red-frame building with a veranda across the front. There were two or three small rooms, and a small kitchen” (Hunters 7). Glenn Wagar also told the Hunters about his memories of it: “Glenn remembers the original clubhouse back in the thirties, when it was being used as an equipment shed. It was located on the east side of the present eighth fairway, on the rise south of the existing pump house. It was only a small building, about 10 feet x 20 feet” (p. 126).
Both the photographs of the original clubhouse of the Napanee Golf Club and the descriptions of it by Hall and Wagar suggest that this building was not designed to be a golf clubhouse. Rather, it was a house built sometime before 1878, designed to be someone’s home on pasture land then on the southof-the-river outskirts of Napanee in North Fredericksburgh Township. This pre-existing house was turned into a clubhouse either out of financial necessity or as a practical virtue, just as hundreds, if not thousands, of golf clubs of Napanee’s vintage saved money and time by making a clubhouse out of the farmhouse already on the farm land that they had turned into a golf course.
Many of them still exist today and continue to serve as clubhouses.
A Club Shed
In the 1908 photograph of assembled club members produced above, we can see that there was another building on the golf course in relatively close proximity to the clubhouse. In the greatly enlarged detail below from the photograph in question, we can see what is technically called a “gable roof” behind four of the ladies apparently standing on chairs in the back row of the assembled club members.
Figure 63 The "gable roof" of a building is visible behind the four ladies standing in the back row of the 1908 photograph of assembled club members. Also apparently visible is the very top of the post supporting the roof on the left side of the verandah (which will be seen in photographs below).
This building may have served as a club shed. The clubhouse itself was so small that a separate building for storing the members’ golf clubs would have kept space in the clubhouse free for other purposes.
We have two photographs of this club shed from the album of Caroline Mary Herrington in the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives. In the one, we see Mary Vrooman, daughter of Napanee doctor John Perry Vrooman and best friend of Caroline Herrington. In the other, we see a man that Caroline Herrington calls “Mr. Bennett.”
This man may have been William Hector Bennett, born in 1888, the only son of a Napanee cabinet maker named Joseph Bennett. He was raised and educated in Napanee, but by 1910 he had moved to Toronto where he was employed by the Canadian Kodak Company in its camera-making factory. His father and mother moved their family from Napanee to Toronto a year later, and William moved back into the family home as a lodger. But he soon moved out again, for he got married in Toronto late in 1911, by which time he had become a stock-keeper for Kodak. After his wife died, William Bennett remarried in Toronto in 1923, by which time he had taken up his father’s trade as a carpenter.
Figure 64 "Mr. Bennett" in a photograph from the album of Caroline Mary Herrington. Photograph N-08787 Courtesy of County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
If the Mr. Bennett who is photographed playing golf in Napanee is indeed William Hector Bennett, he would be the first working-class person known to have played at the Napanee golf course – a generation before Fred Bentley graduated from caddy to club member. Whoever this “Mr. Bennett” may be, he has the distinction of being the only person to have been photographed playing golf at Napanee in the early days while wearing a tie! (Perhaps “Mr. Bennett” had over-dressed out of self-consciousness about being a working-class lad playing golf with the daughters of professional men – one the daughter of the doctor Vrooman and the other the daughter of the lawyer Herrington.)
Notice in this photograph of Bennett the gable roof on the shed behind him and the post holding up the shed’s verandah. The roof has the same shape and the same angles as the one in the 1908 photograph of club members. Furthermore, the roof seems to be oriented in the same direction as the roof in the 1908 photograph. Amazing to say, the photographer was standing in virtually the same spot and aiming the camera in virtually the same direction in the case of each photograph. These coincidences will help us to determine where the club shed was located.
Mary Vrooman
Mary Vrooman posed for a photograph in front of the club shed in the very same spot where Mr. Bennett stood, and the photographer stood in almost exactly the same spot as the photographer who took the picture of Mr. Bennett.
Figure 65 Mary Vrooman stands in front of the club shed. Note the evidence of recent tree felling to her left. Photograph N-08790. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The story of the doctor’s daughter is a sad one.
Mary Catherall Vrooman was born in Yarker in 1892, the daughter of John Perry Vrooman and Rose Catherall. Dr. Vrooman practised in Yarker for eight years, but he moved his practice to Napanee in 1896. He became mayor of Napanee in 1903, unsuccessfully ran for federal parliament in Lennox and Addington in 1922, and won a seat in the Ontario provincial legislature in June of 1923, but died that summer before being seated at Queen’s Park.
Vrooman entered the Napanee school system in 1897, the year the Napanee Golf Club was founded. She quickly became best friends with a Napanee girl born in the same year as her and thereafter went through each year of school with her: Caroline Herrington.
Figure 66 Mary Vrooman outside her home, which was also Dr. Vrooman's Surgery (see the sign in the window). Photograph N-08588. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
While her friend Caroline was dating and slowly falling in love throughout 1912 and 1913 with a civil engineer named Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, Mary Vrooman was dating and falling in love with the son of a civil engineer. We have already met the civil engineer, Frederick Fraser Miller. In 1913, his son, Captain William Miles Miller, of the Royal Canadian Engineers, asks Mary Vrooman to marry him, and she agrees to do so.
A logistical problem arose because Captain Miller was posted to England and could not return to Canada for a wedding. So John and Rose Vrooman took their daughter to London for a wedding there. The three Vroomans sailed for England in June of 1913 and resided together in a London hotel for the duration of the summer. The wedding took place at St. Andrews Church in the parish of St Marylebone on 25 September 1913. The couple was still resident in London when World War I broke out ten months later in August of 1914, and so Captain Miller was one of the first Canadian soldiers to have become involved in the war.
Mary stayed in Britain for the duration of the war. Her best friend Caroline also lived in London from 1916 to 1919, so the two of them may well have seen each other there during these years. Mary returned to Napanee on her own, however, in June of 1919. She had had no children during the six years she lived in England. Her husband Captain Miller stayed on in Britain and Europe beyond the end of the war, for he was posted to Germany as a member of the Canadian forces that occupied the defeated country after the war.
William Miller was eventually able to join Mary in Napanee. The two are recorded as resident in Napanee at the time of the Canada census of 1921. But they return to England together in August of 1921, residing in the county of Sussex, although William was regularly abroad in Europe.
Figure 67 Dr. John Perry Vrooman circa 1923.
Then disaster strikes. Mary becomes ill. Dr. Vrooman travels to England on 3 March 1922 “to visit my daughter” (as he says on his ship’s Passenger Declaration). His visit, however, was not just as a father, but also as a physician: he would tend to his daughter in her illness. Despite his best efforts, she died. Dr. Vrooman returned to Canada late in May with her body. Captain Miller returned to Canada in August of 1922 a widower.
Her death was announced in a Napanee newspaper:
The funeral services of the late Mary Catherall, wife of Capt. W. Miles Miller, M.C., Royal Corps of Signals, late of Royal Canadian Engineers, were held in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, on Monday, July 10th. The service was conducted by the Rev. J. H. H. Coleman, assisted by the Rev. W. E. Kidd, of Kingston. After the service at the church, the remains were laid to rest in the Riverside cemetery.
Mrs. Miller was the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. J. P. Vrooman, and was born in Napanee on April 1st, 1892.
Nine years ago she was married to Capt. Miller, at the Church of St. Andrew’s in London, England. Most of her married life was spent in England, and she made many friends in that country. The news of her illness and death came as a dreadful blow to her relations and friends in Canada and England, and letters of grief and sympathy have been received from many countries by her bereaved family.
She is survived by her husband, Capt. Miller; her father and mother, Dr. and Mrs. J. P. Vrooman; one brother, Capt. P. H. Vrooman, and her sister, Miss Josephine Vrooman. (http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/deathsobitsM.html)
Her husband continued his career in the Canadian army, serving with great distinction in World War II and in various sites of conflict throughout the world after the war. Similarly, her brother Percy also made a career in the Canadian army, serving in World War II and around the world, just as his brotherin-law Captain Miller did. Sister Josephine remained in Napanee, never married, and was an active member of the Napanee Golf Club.
Stories Told by a Club Shed
The club shed was the site of golf-course construction activity when Bennett and Vrooman were photographed in front of it.
Trees in the vicinity had been pruned and felled, the limbs piled to the right of Vrooman. The last log has been tossed against the pile cross-ways. The ground seems to be covered in strips of bark. The wire fence between the fence-post beside Vrooman and the fence-post behind the wood pile has simply been knocked down (as opposed to carefully cut away and removed); it hangs from the fence post, bent and sagging. The work site has not been tidied up and put in a finished state. The deforestation may be continuing. It seems that whatever the purpose of this activity, the project that has been undertaken is not yet done.
The club shed does not seem to be a new building. A window pane is missing. The light-coloured paint on the door seems a bit faded and discoloured. The clapboard siding is not new and seems relatively weather-worn.
Yet the club shed may not always have been on its present site. There is a provisional, perhaps temporary, aspect to its location. Rather than being built on a permanent foundation, it has been made level on this site by the wedging of flat stones under its corners. This is not the way one builds such a shed from scratch. It may have been hauled to this location from somewhere else. Perhaps it was given no more permanent a foundation than wedged rocks because it was anticipated that it might be moved again. Rocks shift with the heaving of the ground caused by frost, so a building propped up as this one has been will probably have to be re-levelled from time to time.
I think that the photograph of Vrooman at the club shed can tell us approximately when the photograph was taken when we compare it to the 1908 photograph of club members.
In the detail below from the Vrooman photograph, we can see that the club shed then stood in front of one tree (marked A), to the right of two pine trees (marked B and C), and diagonally behind a massive pine tree (marked D)
Figure 68 The club shed is located in front of tree A, beside trees B and C, and diagonally behind tree D, against which Vrooman leans.
Trees A, B, and C appear in the 1908 photograph, but tree D does not. It has been removed. And the club shed has been moved from in front of Trees A, B, and C. It is found behind the three trees and to their right in the detail below from the 1908 photograph.
Figure 69 Shed moved and tree removed by 1908.
Not only has the big old pine tree been removed, but the club shed has also been removed – to a different location. It has been placed behind the trees and to their right. The pile of logs has been removed. The rock that was lying on the turf at Vrooman’s feet has been removed. The ground still slopes downward from the trees, but it has all been turned into a gently sloping lawn. Were the big old pine tree (D) still in place, there could have been no such photograph of club members on this lawn: it would have been in the way.
In fact, removing the tree and moving the club shed seem to have had the purpose of making space available on the lawn for club events. The 1908 photograph of club members sitting down to a meal on this lawn shows an old fence post like the one in front of Vrooman and Bennett still in place.
Figure 70 The fence post visible in this 1908 photograph of the original clubhouse was probably part of the fence that can be seen beside Vrooman at the club shed.
Assuming that the clubhouse faced west toward Original Road (or Blanchard Road) and that we see the south side of the clubhouse in this photograph, I presume that the old fence of which this post was a part separated the old farm house from the field comprising today’s driving range and eighth fairway.
We can be confident of the analysis of the history of the club shed’s movements in the photographs above because of the remarkable coincidence that the photographs of Bennet and Vrooman were taken from almost the same location, and from almost the same angle of vision, as the 1908 photograph of the assembled club members.
Direct comparison of the background in the 1908 photograph of club members with the background of the photograph of Vrooman at the club shed reveals the same objects in the same location in each of the photographs. Careful analysis of the details below reveals that in each photograph there is farm building or outbuilding (marked A), tree canopies (marked B) behind the building in question, a tree (marked C) on the horizon, which is partially obscured in the bottom detail by the wheel of a horsedrawn wagon (marked D – the position of the missing wagon in the top detail also marked by D).
Figure 71 In the top and bottom details, there is a fam building or outbuilding (A), tree canopies behind the building (B), another tree on the horizon (C), which is partially obscured in the bottom detail by the right front wheel of a wagon (D), located behind two fence posts, which would have been located in the top detail behind the same two fence posts at point D. Note that tree C seems to have grown considerably between the time of the bottom photograph and the time of the top photograph.
So the story told by photographs of the club shed is that the photographs of Bennett and Vrooman must have been taken before the 1908 photograph of assembled club members since the massive pine tree in the former photographs is missing from the latter.
Caroline Herrington indicates that the page of her photograph album where we find the photographs of Bennett and Vrooman contains photographs of events from the spring of 1912. Certainly the photographs that we will study in Volume Three of this book of her and her friends Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, Henry Peirce Lovell, and George Patten Reiffenstein on the golf course date from 1912 (these people did not meet until 1912). I assume that she put the photograph album in question together much later in her life and that when she did so she simply grouped all of her golf photographs together, leading to an inaccuracy in terms of the date applied to earlier photographs of herself with Vrooman, Bennett, and Hall.
I believe that Bennett and Vrooman were photographed in 1906, as the golf club was building its “new course,” which would be officially opened for play in May of 1907.
Leonard, Robinson, Smith, Hill, Dibb, and Warner had gone to Kingston in November of 1905 to play a match against the men of the Kingston Golf Club. They had been invited to play on a first-class golf course and they had been hosted afterward in a first-class clubhouse.
The six men of Napanee lost the golf match by a big score, but they were not going to lose face by hosting the Kingston team with such facilities as Napanee had in 1905: a short five-hole course, and a small clubhouse without so much as a lawn where tables for a meal could be spread out – because of the trees and fences and club shed!
I suspect that the activity evident in the photograph of Vrooman at the club shed shows the work well begun to give the Napanee Golf Club a proper golf course (comprising a more varied and appropriately lengthened nine holes) and something at least approaching a proper clubhouse.
The Location of the Five Holes of the 1897-1906 Golf Course
In Volume Three of this book, we shall study closely the scorecard of the “new course” that officially opened in May of 1907. For the purposes of our study of the five holes of the 1897-1906 golf course, the importance of the scorecard for the 1907-27 golf course is that it suggests that the latter course was created by grafting four holes onto the pre-existing five holes of the former course.
The four new holes of 1907 were added at the south end of the course: they consisted of today’s ninth hole, first hole, and second hole, as well as a short (209-yard) hole running diagonally from south-west to north-east on today’s fourth fairway, running about half-way up this fairway, with the green abutting the fence at the railway tracks.
This short hole was paralleled by a similarly short hole of 215 yards going in the opposite direction. Then followed four more holes, all in parallel, and all quite substantial holes of 427, 415, 400, and 325 yards, respectively.
With the exception of a single green, all six holes after what was called the “gully hole” (today’s second hole) were located on the land south of the creek that has two retaining ponds along its run today from the railway tracks to Original Road. Three greens were located along the fence that separated the golf course from the Grand Trunk railway tracks. So close were the greens to the fence that approach shots that went more than ten yards over any of these three greens would go through the fence and out of bounds.
Apart from a green built in 1907 along the fence at the top of the hill on the north side of today’s retaining pond beside the railway tracks (the green was near where the grand old poplar tree stood on the east edge of the sixth fairway until 2016), there were no golf holes where today we find the top half of the sixth fairway, the sixth green, the seventh hole, and all but the most forward of the eighth tees. From 1897 to 1906, the area in question comprised fenced fields.
In the background of the photographs of Bennett and Vrooman at the club shed (which is on the east side of the clubhouse, assuming that the clubhouse faced Original Road), we get a view behind it of land stretching in the direction of the part of today’s golf course where the sixth fairway is located. A view of what is today’s sixth fairway is cut off by the horizon of the photograph, confining our view to the fields east of the clubhouse where today’s fifth green and sixth tees are located.
Behind Vrooman, as we know, we see a farm building or outbuilding, as well as a horse-drawn carriage nearby. Just visible at the right side of the club shed in the photograph of Bennett is another farm building or outbuilding. We see a network of fences dividing the fields around the old clubhouse and separating the golf course land to the south from its future lands to the north of the creek (which presumably is found below the horizon of the photograph).
There is even a suggestion of an access road running immediately behind the club shed, which is probably one of the “roadways” in the area of today’s fifth and fourteenth fairways that are mentioned in the Napanee Golf Club’s Local Ground Rules of 1926 (from which golfers were allowed a free drop).
Figure 72 A composite image of the background in the photographs of Bennett and Vrooman at the club shed shows a panoramic view looking north-east behind the club shed. We can see that there were at least three buildings in addition to the clubhouse on the part of today’s golf course property to the south side of the creek that now has the two retaining ponds along its run from the railway tracks to Original Road.
In all three photographs of the club shed that we have studied, the photographers are standing well below the level of the club shed on the land south of the old clubhouse that slopes down to the gully on today’s eighth fairway. Consequently, the higher land on the golf course to the north-east of the photographers’ vantage point creates an artificial horizon for each of the photographs. It seems that the horizon created by their perspective cuts off a view of the gulley on today’s sixth fairway.
But I think that we can still tell what is beyond the horizon.
All along the horizon we see tree canopies in the far distance. They stretch all the way from the right edge of the photograph to its left edge. We see the various tree canopies, but we cannot see where any of the trunks of these trees reach the ground. I believe that the trees in question run along the Grand Trunk railway tracks, beginning on the right side of the photograph in the area around the tees on today’s sixth hole that are in front of the retaining pond and ending on the left side of the photograph at the north-east end of the field that today stands as the eastern boundary of the sixth hole.
Figure 73 Here is a composite image of three 1912 photographs (to be studied in Volume Three) that show golfers putting on the eighth green of the 1907 golf course. The golfer in the foreground putts to the hole, marked by a stick. The spectator in the background stands in the field to the east of the golf course boundary marked by the fence seen here. (The same fence and the same field mark the boundary of the course today.) The trees along the horizon parallel the Grand Trunk railway tracks. Composite image of photographs N-08886, N-08887, N-08889. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The trees running along the Grand Trunk railway tracks at the extreme east end of the field that borders today’s sixth fairway can be seen across the field in question in the image above. This image presents a composite of three photographs from 1912 that show golfers putting to the stick marking the hole on the eighth green of the 1907 golf course. (The three 1912 photographs in question will be studied in detail in Volume Three of this book.)
The ground at the extreme right edge of the photograph begins its steep slope down to the gully where the creek emerged from the tunnel under the Grand Trunk railway tracks. Today, there is a retaining pond at this point on the creek’s run from the railway tracks down to Original Road, but there was no such pond in the early 1900s.
A direct comparison of the tree-lined horizon of the composite photograph above and a greatly enlarged detail of the tree-lined horizon in the photograph of Vrooman standing in front of the club shed reveals remarkable similarities.
Figure 74 The tree canopies along the horizon of each photograph match up remarkably well. Note that the tree marked by the letter "A" grows in front of the building and so is not at the horizon with the other trees.
My conclusion as a result of the preceding inspection of various photographs support’s the Hunters’ assertion that the original five-hole golf course of 1897-1906 consisted of five parallel holes running on a south-west / north-east axis on the undulating land between the two creeks that still cross the golf course today.
These five holes were probably similar in orientation to the five holes with which the “new course” of 1907 concluded, but they must have been much shorter. For instance, there was no 427-yard hole concluding at the green shown in the photograph above, for all holes concluded well before the creek and the steep gully through which it ran, at what was then the north boundary of the golf course – a boundary apparently marked by the fence and outbuildings visible in the background of the photographs of Bennett and Vrooman at the club shed.
What can we know about the original five holes?
The First Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
Although several greens were very close to the fence along the Grand Trunk railway tracks, one green was near Original Road.
Jessie (Dibb) Hall refers to it in her account of her father’s reaction to observing Tom German practising on this green on a Sunday in the early 1900s. Recall that she wrote: “My father was Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene Church, and one Sunday afternoon, was driving with his horse and buggy, past the Golf Course on his way to see a sick parishioner. Mr. Tom German, a bachelor lawyer member, was putting on the green, near the road, and seeing my father, he put his golf club up his trouser leg, not wanting to be seen playing on Sunday. My father had a good laugh over that” (Jessie [Dibb] Hall, Letter to the Editor, Napanee Guide [1995], cited in Hunters, p. 7).
We know that the golf course did not use the land between the golf course’s north creek and Henry Street until Fred Rickwood’s 1927 re-design of the golf course, so Reverend Dibb could not have seen Tom German on a golf course green if he were driving his carriage along Henry Street.
We can infer that he was driving his carriage up Original Road to reach his out-of-town parishioner’s home.
We observed above that in those days, playing golf on Sunday was controversial. Many Christian ministers denounced the practice. In some North American jurisdictions, it was illegal. Recall that a Kingston newspaper carried a story in the early 1900s of a man being arrested in New York City for playing golf on a Sunday. Here we have Jessie’s father, who is not just any minister, but the Reverend Rural Dean of the Ontario Diocese of the Anglican Church, and he has observed not just any a member of the Napanee Golf Club offending against spiritual and temporal law, but a lawyer!
Since Jessie (Dibb) Hall refers to “the green, near the road,” we can assume that the incident of which her father spoke to her concerning Tom German occurred on the 1897-1906 golf course. Her phrase “the green, near the road,” (as distinct from “a green near the road,” or “one of the greens near the road”) means that when her father observed German’s transgression, there was just one green by the road. Father and daughter could refer to “the green, near the road,” confident that everyone would know the green they meant, because there was only one green they could have meant.
As of 1907, we know, there were two more greens by roads – for there was a green at the top of Blanchard’s Hill near our present ninth green, visible from Original Road, and there was a green near today’s first green, visible from the concession road now called Golf Course Lane.
So we can infer that Reverend Dibb was driving his horse and carriage up Original Road to visit his outof-town parishioner, and that the green on which Tom German was seen putting was near that road – probably on what is today the eighth fairway.
This green was probably the first green of the 1897-1906 golf course, with the teeing ground presumably in the vicinity of the club shed at which Bennett and Vrooman pose for photographs.
It is possible that we have a photograph of the green in question and the fairway leading up to it. A Napanee postcard dated around 1910 contains a sequence of images of Napanee and environs. One of the images indicates that it shows the Napanee “golf links.”
Figure 75 This is one of a sequence of images representing Napanee sites in a postcard collection published circa 1910. Photograph N-03224 Courtesy of County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Every other photograph in the collection of postcards in question presents an accurate image of a Napanee building or park, so this photograph could be accurate, too. What was the first hole of the 1897-1906 golf course had become the ninth hole as of the opening of the “new course” in 1907. So the image above could represent what a photographer captured around that time from a vantage point on Original Road.
But there are reasons for doubts. On the one hand, the golf course hardly had any trees in the fields where the original course was laid out, let alone the dense stands of trees represented in this photograph. On the other hand, the “flags” that the Napanee Golf Club used when the “new course” of 1907 was opened were home-made and quite various.
Figure 76 Three “flags” used in 1912. The one on the left is a square-shaped length of stick with a piece of cloth tacked to it. The "flag" in the middle is a cylindrical pole with what appears to be cloth tacked to the top of it. When they combined sticks and rope to make the “flag” on the right, only the club members and the Lord knew what they were thinking: now the Lord only knows! Details from photographs N-08886, N-08890, N-08888. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Note that not one of the make-shift “flags” above had a hole number on it.
My guess is that the postcard company in 1910 used a stock photograph of a golf hole to represent the Napanee “Golf Links,” trusting that no one would notice.
And perhaps no one did – for about 110 years.
Two More Golfers on the 1897-1906 Course
We have a photograph of two people about to tee off on one of the holes of the 1897-1906 golf course – the two other people on the golf course with Vrooman and Bennett in 1906. One was Vrooman’s best friend, Caroline Mary Herrington, second-born daughter of Walter Herrington. The other was George Ernest Hall, the oldest of the four golfers, and the one who may have been the most serious golfer.
We have a photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall taken by Vrooman.
Figure 77 Left to right: "Mr. Bennett," Caroline Herrington, "Mr. Hall." Photograph N-08785. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Inspecting the 1908 photograph of club members, I suggest that it is George Hall who sits on the grass beside Caroline Herrington’s father Walter and the Dominion Bank manager Bellhouse. (The person that I think is Hall is the only one in the photograph holding a golf club.)
George Ernest Hall was born in Napanee in 1879, son of William Fletcher Hall, who was an important figure in Napanee. He seems to have been known professionally and personally to Caroline Herrington’s father. The two fathers appear seated beside each other in a photograph of the 1890-93 Napanee Board of Education. They also served at that time on the Board of Trustees of the Napanee Collegiate Institute.
Figure 78 William Fletcher Hall and W.S. Herrington photographed with the Napanee Board of Education, 1890-93.
William Hall had already had a large number of children by 1890-93. His son George was just entering his teen years by the end of this period. Herrington had just started his family: Eleanor Margaret was born in 1891; Caroline Mary, in 1892. (Walter Harold would be born in 1898).
William Hall had begun his work life in a paper mill, rising to the position of secretary for the mill in the 1870s. He was a widower by the early 1870s, marrying his second wife Sarah Smith in 1874 (with whom he had George in 1879). He described himself in 1879 on his son’s birth certificate as a manufacturer, so he may still have worked at the paper mill at this time.
But Hall also worked as an assignee by at least the early 1870s. Generally, as an assignee, he was charged with managing the business, property, and assets of those faced with insolvency. His duties would often involve auctioning off the insolvent’s possessions. In 1875, Hall was appointed an official Assignee for Ontario under the Insolvency Act of 1875. This was a position of high trust.
As an assignee, Hall dealt regularly with various members of the local legal community, from lawyers like Herrington to the Judge of the County Court, William Henry Wilkison, who mandated the auctioning off of a bankrupt’s property and possessions. His work also brought him into contact with the bankers, of course, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that he was a pall bearer alongside such figures as Judge Wilkison, a man who was a federal member of parliament, and another man who was a former federal member of parliament at the 1895 funeral of Alexander Smith, the manager of the Napanee Merchants Bank for thirty years (Bellhouse had replaced him a few years before Smith’s death).
Hall was also a Fire Insurance Agent, and remained an insurance agent until his death in Napanee in the spring of 1923 at 80 years of age (his attending physician was Dr. Vrooman, who would himself die just months later). Fifty years before this, Hall was elected a town councillor in Napanee for the 1873-74 term. He served on the Board of Education from the 1880s well into the 1900s, eventually becoming its Secretary Treasurer. He was elected a Director of the Napanee, Tamworth, and Quebec Railway in 1887. He also served in the 1890s and early 1900s as an Auditor for the County of Lennox and Addington.
Hall was clearly a significant figure in the Napanee community, so his son George could count on being recognized as someone who came from a good background.
We also have reason to believe that the Hall family and the Herrington family knew each other socially, for at Caroline Herrington’s wedding in the fall of 1913, one of her bridesmaids was George Hall’s younger sister Luella Hall.
So of the four golfers in the photographs we are studying, George Hall was the older brother of Caroline Herrington’s good friend Luella Hall, and Mary Vrooman was Caroline Herrington’s best friend. Only Bennett’s relationship to Caroline Herrington is unknown. I note, however, that the Bennett family and the Hall family were both active in Napanee’s Methodist church, so George Hall and William Bennett may have known each other through church activities, and it may have been Hall who invited Bennett along to play golf on the day in question.
George Hall trained as a stenographer and had his initial employment in Napanee as such. He may have worked in the court system, or perhaps he worked for the firm of Herrington, Warner, and Grange.
But the quiet life of a stenographer was not for George Hall. First, he went to work for the railway. We find him in the 1911 Canadian census located in Thunder Bay, where he indicates that he is working as a “fireman” for the Canadian Pacific Railway (a “fireman” fed coal into the boiler of the steam engine). By 1914, however, he had become a “railway official.” Second, he joined the Canadian army. According to the Lennox and Addington Historical Society, “he enlisted before the War and received military training with the Canadian Garrison Artillery” https://www.lennoxandaddingtonhistoricalsociety.ca/WarG.html). He was a member of the Canadian Garrison Artillery’s Montreal Heavy Brigade, composed of the 1st and 2nd Heavy Batteries of the Montreal Siege Company.
In Montreal, he married a well-to-do widow in the spring of 1914. The wedding was given a full account in the Montreal Gazette.
Palms and white and pink flowers decorated the chapel at St James Cathedral yesterday for the marriage of Mrs. L. A. Burke, formerly Miss Charlotte Trihey, daughter of the late Thomas Trihey, to Mr. George Ernest Hall, son of Mr. and Mrs. W. F. Hall, of Napanee, Ontario, which was solemnized at nine o'clock by the Rev. Mgr. Gauthier in the presence of relatives and a few intimate friends of the bride and bridegroom. The bride, who was given away by her brother, Mr. Thomas Trihey, wore a handsome costume of French blue moire antique and hat to match, trimmed with blue plumes and a large Beauty rose, and carried a shower bouquet of Beauty roses and lilies-of-the-valley. Mr. Michael T. Burke, son of the bride, acted as witness for Mr. Hall. .Following the ceremony a reception was held at the home of the bride, 275 Mountain Street, where the decorations were carried out with bridal wreath and pink and white carnations, the dining room being decorated with orchid and pansies. Amongst the relatives were the bride’s two daughters, Miss Honor Burke, wearing a white costume and small white hat with saxe crown trimmed with flowers and carrying a bouquet of Beauty roses; Miss Owen Burke, in a dainty rosecolored suit and white hat trimmed with pale blue ribbons and pink roses, and carrying a bouquet of white roses; the bride's niece, little Miss Clement, in a white frock and hat with pink trimmings, who acted as her flower girl; Mr. W. F. Hall, of Napanee; Miss Hall, wearing a blue charmeuse gown and white flower-trimmed hat; Miss Luella Hall, gowned in white charmeuse and white hat trimmed with roses and a lemon colored wrap; Mr. Myers, of Rochester, New York, and Mrs. Myers, another sister of the bridegroom, who was gowned in black charmeuse with white Chantilly lace and a black and white hat; Mrs. Clement, the bride’s sister, and her two small sons; Miss Trihey, and Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Trihey and little daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Hall have left for an extended tour of the west, before taking up residence in the city. (Montreal Gazette, 3 June 1914, p 2)
Then, right after the honeymoon, came World War I.
Herrington writes as follows in The War Work of Lennox and Addington County: “George Ernest Hall, son of W. F. Hall, of Napanee, enlisted as Captain in the Canadian Heavy Artillery, and was afterwards promoted to the rank of Major. He went over with the First Contingent, spent ten months in France and returned in November, 1915. He was subsequently granted ‘sick leave’ and was appointed head of the Military Hospital Commission for the Province of Quebec” (p. 97).
Figure 79 Captain G.E. Hall, Heavy Brigade, 1914.
Charlotte Hall had briefly joined Captain George Hall in London, staying at the Savoy Hotel, but she returned to Canada when her husband was sent back to Canada to convalesce in 1915. In 1916, when ready to return to service, Hall was “retained” in Canada for service in Montreal, as Herrington points out.
Captain Hall was in charge of the hospital and the sanitarium of Unit “A” in Military District 5. As such, he was the head administrator of the Grey Nun’s Hospital in Montreal. He was regularly mentioned in the Montreal newspapers during the war, for he was in charge of receiving the wounded Canadian soldiers returning from Europe. They came by train to Windsor station in Montreal and were processed by Hall, whether they were to stay in Quebec, travel to Ontario, or travel to the west. He welcomed them with his own soldiers, with Boy Scout troops to carry the luggage of the veterans, with military bands, and, most importantly, with crowds of family and friends.
Newspaper accounts also note the transportation that he arranged for the soldiers: “No mere ordinary conveyances would do for the returned men. Outside the station there was a long line of waiting cars, loaned by friends of the work, running all the way from stately limousines to ‘tin Lizzies,’ which were used to convey the soldiers to headquarters” (Montreal Gazette, 15 October 1917, p. 5).
At the hospital, he presided, on the one hand, over military discipline, making sure that the convalescent soldiers observed the army’s schedule hours for their daily activities, and, on the other hand, over the entertainment, arranging for vaudeville acts visiting Montreal to perform for free for the soldiers at the Grey Nunnery.
In 1917, now a Major, Hall appeared before a government inquiry into the administration of military hospitals. He was asked about his own service overseas and about how he disciplined those among the 230 convalescent overseas soldiers he supervised who might have become drunk or disorderly, or who had otherwise breached military regulations:
I went with the first division in August 1914…. I was in France nine months and a half…. I was second in command of the First Heavy Battery…. On my assuming command on the 1st of August, 1916, of A Unit, it was very forcibly impressed upon me the necessity of having detention cells for convalescent soldiers, and I took immediate action, and after consultation with at least one member of the Montreal branch of the Military Hospitals Commission, as well as my O.C., a location was decided upon for the cells and detention room… [“What do you do … when a convalescent man comes back under the influence of liquor?”] If I may be permitted to say, in the British Army, a man is either drunk or sober, and if he is drunk he is tried. The man who returns to the home drunk is placed under arrest and is paraded for office on that charge the next morning. In every instance I will go so far as to say, and I am prepared to back it up, that … a man is given the benefit of the doubt in every case, and if there is any question as to whether he is drunk or sober the man gets the benefit of it…. [“That is, he is given a bed to sleep it off?”] Yes…. If he gets beyond control, if he upsets the whole ward where perhaps there will be sixty or seventy men, and nothing can be done with him, then he is placed in the cells…. (cited in Herbert Ames, Returned Soldiers: Proceedings of the Special Committee Appointed to Consider, Inquire into, and Report upon the Reception, Treatment, Care, Training, and Re-Education of the Wounded, Disabled and Convalescent who Have Served in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces … [Ottawa: House of Commons, 1917], pp. 584-86)
Major Hall’s testimony gives the impression of an officer who, on the one hand, knows the army regulations very well, but also, on the other hand, knows how to interpret and apply them in a wise and humane way.
Figure 80 Caroline Herrington. Detail from photograph. N-08789. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The third of Hall’s golfing companions in 1906 was Caroline Mary Herrington.
Born 4 August 1892, she was a few months younger than her friend Mary Vrooman, and so she was the youngest of the four golfers in the photographs that we are inspecting.
We shall learn much more about Caroline Herrington in Volume Three of this book, when we study photographs of her and several of her other friends on the golf course in 1912.
Golf seems to have been in her blood. Her mother Maria Matilda Herrington (née Tilley) organised the Ladies’ Golf Club of the Napanee Golf Club in the spring of 1907, becoming its first president.
Figure 81 1907 founding constitution of the Ladies' Golf Club.
Like the father, the mother was also an ardent votary of the ancient game, so one presumes that both parents encouraged their daughter to give the game a try.
I suspect that Caroline Herrington was the least experienced of the four golfers out on the course in 1906. In her golf bag are just two clubs – and one consists of a shaft with no head! Has she broken one of the clubs during play this day?
Close attention to the golf bags that the other golfers carry with them reveals that she is the only one who has significantly less than the six clubs that tended to make up a typical set of golf clubs in the early 1900s.
Figure 82 The first bag is Herrington's: one club (a putter?), and one shaft. The second bag is Bennett's: one wood, two irons, and a putter. The third bag is one of two held by Hall: one wood, two irons, and a putter. The fourth bag is the second held by Hall: two woods, three irons, and a putter.
Bennett has four clubs in his bag: a wood, two irons, and a putter. In the light-coloured bag that Hall holds in his left hand, there are four clubs: one wood, two irons, and a putter. In the dark bag that he holds in his right hand, there are six clubs: two woods, three irons, and a putter.
It seems that the single club in Herrington’s bag is a putter. She will have had to borrow clubs from her companions to play from tees and fairways. That Herrington apparently does not have her own set of golf clubs may suggest that she is relatively new to the game of golf. It is possible that the photographs that we are inspecting actually document her introduction to golf.
It may be that all three teenagers (Herrington and Vrooman were fourteen years old, while Bennett was eighteen years old) were receiving golf instruction from Hall on this day.
The Fifth Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
We have a photograph of Herrington and Hall posing as though about to tee-off on one of the holes of the 1897-1906 golf course. If I am correct in my hypothesis that the “new course” of 1907 was created by grafting four new holes at the south end of the golf course property onto the pre-existing five holes of the original golf course played across today’s fairways on the eighth, fifth, and fourteenth holes, as well as the driving range, then we find Herrington and Hall in this photograph standing on the tee of what is the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 golf course (which would become the fifth hole of the “new course” of 1907 when the four new holes in question were added).
Figure 83 Herrington and Hall on the fifth tee of the 1897-1906 golf course.
Hall is poised to swing the club, either to hit the ball or to take a practise stroke. Herrington places her driver behind her ball as though checking that the ball has been teed at the right height for her drive.
Where are Herrington and Hall located with reference to the golf course as it exists today?
They stand in a pronounced valley. On the top right side of the photograph, we see the white fence posts marking the wire fence separating the golf course from the Grand Trunk Railway tracks. On the top left of the photograph, we can make out the skyline of the town of Napanee, beyond a low fence that runs across the golf course property to the north-west of Herrington and Hall. This information within the photograph allows us to locate their position on the golf course today.
When greatly enlarged, the distant skyline of Napanee reveals the spire of what is today called Grace United Church and the towers of churches such as St. Mary Magdalen Church and Trinity United Church, as well as the towers of the post office and the County of Lennox and Addington building.
Figure 84 This is an extremely enlarged detail of the skyline of Napanee town from the photograph of Herrington and Hall about to tee off. The skyline appears above a horizon created from the photographer’s perspective by a two-foot high stone fence crossing what are today the fifth, fourteenth, and third fairways.
The fence indicated on the image above was described by long-time club member Bruce Medd (who first began playing the golf course in the late 1920s) when he was interviewed by the Napanee Beaver in 1977: “There was a two foot high stone fence across the fifth fairway” (22 June 1977). When Medd spoke to the newspaper in 1977, today’s fifth green had not yet been built, so his description of the stone fence as crossing what was then the fifth fairway indicates a fence crossing both of today’s fifth and fourteenth fairways.
The dock silo indicated on the image above was part of what appears to have been a large grain storage and shipping operation located on the south side of the Napanee River right at the docks. Beside the silo was what was perhaps a grain elevator, and it was just as tall as the silo. An aerial photograph of Napanee taken in 1917 reveals that the silo and the elevator were the town’s twin towers – the tallest structures in Napanee in the early twentieth century – at least as tall as the tallest church steeple.
Figure 85 Aerial photograph of the town of Napanee from 1917. It shows the grain silo and elevator at the docks of the Napanee harbour and some of the various spires and towers prominent on the Napanee skyline.
So we can superimpose the photograph of Herrington and Hall onto a contemporary photograph taken from exactly the same location between the railway tracks and the Napanee skyline as the earlier photograph, using their common points of reference to coordinate the superimposition.
Figure 86 In the image above, the photograph of Herrington and Hall is superimposed on a photograph taken in the fall of 2018. Superimposed photograph by Robert J. Childs.
It turns out that the tee from which Herrington and Hall are about to play is located in what is today the third fairway. They are just a few yards beyond today’s 150-yard marker.
Note that in the case of each photograph, the photographer stands in the valley bottom of the fairway at that point and so creates a relatively artificial horizon for the background of the photograph. In neither case can we see the ground in the background beyond the top of the next hill in the fairway behind them.
One of the things to note in the photograph of Herrington and Hall about to tee-off is evidence that the 1897 - 1906 golf course was prepared along the lines of the recommendations for the laying out of golf courses in the Wright & Ditson Guide. Notice the faint chalk or whitewash line that runs through the grass across the front of the tee: Caroline Herrington tees her ball at the far edge of this line, and the line turns perpendicularly toward Hall’s golf bag at the bottom of the photograph. As the Guide said, “The teeing-ground is sometimes indicated by a parallelogram in whitewash marked upon the ground…. This is drawn upon the level ground or on a gentle upward slope, and is the simplest and cheapest form.”
Figure 87 The orange line above parallels a faint chalk or whitewash line outlining the teeing ground. The letter "A" marks a place where turf has been removed. The letter "B" is placed directly above a pot on the ground containing teeing sand. On top of the pot is a light-coloured implement, or perhaps container of some sort.
Chalk or whitewash may well have been the cheapest way of marking out a tee box, but it was not necessarily the cheapest of golf clubs that used such methods.
In 1919, Edward, the golf loving Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallace Simpson) played from just such a tee box in Alberta during his royal tour in October of 1919.
Figure 88 His Royal Highness, Edward, Prince of Wales, driving off from behind chalk lines marking the first tee box of Macleod Golf Club, Alberta (2 October 1919) during his tour of Canada in 1919. Photograph from Canadian Golfer, vol v no 7 (November 1919), p. 399.
Evidence of construction work is visible in the left foreground of the photograph at the point marked by the letter “A.” Apparent removal of turf has left a rectangular scar on the ground. This turf was probably used for the building up and levelling of the teeing ground here.
Note also that on the ground near Herrington, to her left (below the letter “B” marked on the photograph), seems to be a dark-coloured container – a pot or bucket – with another light-coloured container (or perhaps an implement of some sort) attached to it or lying on top of it.
This earthenware pot or metal bucket would have contained the sand that golfers used in those days to tee up their balls for a drive. The wooden tee peg was not yet in use (and would not become widely used until the late 1920s), so golfers made a little conical mound of sand upon which the golf ball could be perched for the purpose of driving from the teeing-ground. The container for sand at each teeing ground would also have a container of water with it, for the sand had to be wet to be shaped in a stable, efficient way (using a minimum of sand) into the required conical form.
So note also to the right of the bucket or pot a small spherical object that may have been the tee-making implement for shaping the wet sand into a conical shape of the right height. See here a photograph of the sort of device that golf courses placed by each tee box’s sand container, and that many golfers also carried with them personally for this purpose.
Figure 89 Example on the left of a pot to hold sand on the tee box of a course's eighteenth hole. Example on the right of a sandtee mold (fill with wet sand and turn over onto ground and then place ball on cone of sand thereby formed). Middle photograph shows sand pot on the ground to Herrington’s left, and perhaps a sand-tee mold on the ground to the pot’s left.
According to their orientation in the central valley of today’s fourth fairway, Herrington and Hall are about to drive off in a southwesterly direction – apparently toward a green near today’s forward tees for the fourteenth hole.
The Fourth Hole of the 1897-1906 Course
In the background of the photograph of Herrington and Hall preparing to tee off on the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 golf course, we can make out a pole and flag that probably mark the fourth green of that original layout.
Figure 90 A flag attached to a short pole appears behind Herrington to the left of her head and shoulder.
We recall how primitive and various were hole markers in the late 1800s and early 1900s – and how relatively short they all were! So what we see above would not be unusual as a hole marker on the 1897-1906 golf course. Even the tilt of the flag-pole is consistent with what we have seen above in regard to how these early flags were placed in the holes.
If the flag in this detail from the photograph of Herrington and Hall indeed marks the fourth green of the 1897-1906 golf course, and if the five golf holes of the original layout paralleled each other (as I have supposed), then it would seem that the fourth and the fifth holes of the original layout were about the same length.
That is, the green of the fourth hole and the tee of the fifth hole parallel each other. The green of the fifth and the tee of the fourth may also have paralleled each other in the area of today’s most forward tees for the fourteenth hole. After all, the woods that have always grown there (from the edge of the south creek that flows through the property on up the side of the gully through which the creek flows and right up to the top of slope) limit both the end of any hole and the beginning of any hole in that area.
If these suppositions about the fourth and fifth holes of the 1897-1906 golf course are correct, such golf holes would have been no more than 250 yards in length.
The Layout of the 1897-1906 Course
After reading the Hunters’ assertion that “The original course consisted of no more than five holes, cutting across our existing number three, four and five holes” (p. 6), I initially wondered whether play was back and forth through the bottom of the valleys running on an east-west axis across the course (with the walls of the valleys perhaps functioning as bowling-alley-like bumpers to keep the ball rolling along the route of the fairway toward the flag), or whether play was along the hill-top ridges between the valleys – the strategy being to keep the ball up high so that it did not roll down into the valley bottoms.
120 years ago, the valley bottoms were creeks – often dry creek beds, but creeks nonetheless. And as anyone knows who plays today’s golf course very early in the spring or very late in the fall, the creeks return to life with a vengeance. Then they are a real hazard – to both health and happiness, insofar as dry feet for the golfer and a long roll for the golf ball are concerned.
Figure 91 The photographs here show the old creeks on the property of the Napanee Golf and Country Club flowing once more in the fall of 2018.
Hazards!
Recall that the universal advice in the 1890s was to build golf holes in such a way that hazards had to be crossed on the way from tee to green. Recall that the Wright & Ditson guide says that “the hazard to be surpassed (for there should be always some hazard or bunker to trap a poorly played drive) should be sometimes near the teeing-ground and sometimes at nearly a full drive’s distance from it.” The idea was to force golfers to learn how to get the ball airborne and to penalize those who could not do so. The topped ball and the skulled ball were anathema to the golf course architects of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Given this early golf course design ethos, it seems likely that the original layout of the holes by the Napanee Golf Club was across the undulations and ditches that early golf course designers sought out as proper challenges for anyone who would be a golfer. Based on our interpretation of the words of Reverend Dibb and the photograph of Herrington and Hall, we might suppose that the 1897-1906 layout was along the lines represented in the map below.
Figure 92 Possible layout of 1897-1906 golf course: five parallel holes bounded by north creek and woods bordering south creek. First hole begins at club shed. Position of Tom German and Reverend Dibb within sight of each other on "green near road" is indicated. Position of Herrington and Hall at the tee of the fifth hole is indicated.
One might look at this representation of what I suggest is the most likely layout of the original golf course of the Napanee Golf Club and observe that it was a long walk back to the clubhouse after play finished on the fifth green.
I doubt, however, that play very often finished on the fifth green.
Five Holes Played as Nine
An advantage to the layout described above is that it would have allowed members of the Napanee Golf Club quite easily to play their five-hole course as a nine-hole course.
Once a group of golfers had finished the fifth hole, it could return to the clubhouse by playing its way back on the very holes played on the way out. That is, after completing the fifth hole, the group would play the fourth hole as its sixth hole, the third hole as its seventh hole, the second hole as its eighth hole, and the first hole as its ninth hole.
Of course if the golf course were ever crowded, a group on the way out would have to alternate on a tee box with a group on the way in. Such a thing would be cumbersome if the course were full. But perhaps no more cumbersome than we find it today as a group coming of the ninth hole to commence its second nine holes of play alternates with a group waiting to commence its first nine.
Was the golf course ever crowded in the early years? The club membership was very small between 1897 and 1906, so presumably the course was seldom crowded. Note that when the results of weekly club competitions first began to be reported in the newspapers in 1910, well after the “new course” of nine holes had been opened, there were as few as five players competing in these weekly events. So in earlier days, when the club had even fewer active golfers, playing out and back on the five-hole course was probably the norm.
Whether or not such a way of playing the golf course had been anticipated from the beginning, certainly golfers would have figured out this possibility before long.
I suspect, in fact, that five-hole courses were the first layouts developed in places like Napanee and St. John, New Brunswick, precisely because the small group of ardent votaries of the ancient game in communities like these could easily get a nine-hole score from five golf holes laid out in parallel: simply play your way out and play your way back.
Conclusion
The original golf course in Napanee is not significant in world golf history. It is no St. Andrews: the home of golf. Or rather it is St. Andrews only as the home of Napanee golf.
And Walter Stevens Herrington is no Old Tom Morris: the father of golf. Yet he is something of a father of golf so far as Napanee is concerned.
In fact, Herrington and the men and women who joined with him in playing golf in Napanee in the early years are all fathers and mothers of the local game. They have each earned at least a footnote in golf history, if we credit nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s observation that “History is made by those who show up.”
These people showed up.
Appendix: The 1897-1906 Golf Course on a Contemporary Satellite Map
Figure 93 A likely routing of the 1897-1906 golf course, as suggested by the position of Herrington and Hall on what was probably the fifth tee, as suggested by the flag behind Herrrington that probably marked the fourth green, as suggested by Jessie (Dibb) Hall’s reference to a green by the road, and as suggested by the location of the club shed, which may have been close to the first tee.
© Donald J. Childs 2020