CONTENTS
A Word on the Organization of the Book as Four Volumes
Volume Three: The 1907 New Course and Four of Its Players
Where was the New Course of 1907 laid out?
The Scorecard of the 1907 New Course
Clarence M. Warner and Willie Campbell
Can We Identify a Pro Who Might Have Designed the New Course?
Reiffenstein’s Amateur Course Record
The Story of Caroline Herrington
The Story of Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, Part One
The Story of Henry Lovell, Part One
The Story of George Patten Reiffenstein, Part One
New Course of 1907: six-hole and ten-hole rounds?
Foursome Sneath, Lovell, Reiffenstein, and Herrington’s Final Scores
The Story of Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, Part Two: He Shall Never Grow Old
The Story of Henry Peirce Lovell, Part Two: The Horror! The Horror!
The Story of George Patten Reiffenstein, Part Two: What’s in a Name?
The Story of George Patten Carr: More Sinned against than Sinning
The Story of Caroline Mary Sneath and Other Magnificent Herringtons
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 Three: The 1907 New Course and Four of Its Players
Why a New Course in 1907?
That there was a “new course” opened in 1907 is a fact. As the Hunters note: “On May 3, 1907, it was reported that, ‘The Napanee Golf Club’s new course was opened for play.’ The members concluded that it was much more difficult than the old course and although the greens were not in good condition yet, ‘when completed, will make a first-class course.’ ‘The panoramic view from Blanchard’s hill is of the whole course and adds materially to the pleasure of playing’” (Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 [Napanee 2010], p. 8).
Just what factors motivated the still young Napanee Golf Club to build a new course during the 1906 golf season is not clear. Yet we can imagine a number of possible motivations.
I suggested in the previous volume of this book that if the layout of the 1897-1906 golf course comprised five holes laid out in parallel, then members of the Napanee Golf Club could quite easily have played 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, whenever a group on the way out encountered a group on the way in, the two groups would have to alternate in teeing off on the tee box where they met. Such a thing would be cumbersome if the course were full. In the early years, however, membership was low and the number of club events was small (even at the weekly club tournaments mentioned in the newspapers of 1910 there were as few as five players), so crowding on the five-hole course was probably rare.
Still, the game was increasing in popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the club was picking up new members as time passed. There is little doubt that members would have anticipated fairly early on that they were eventually going to need a bigger course to accommodate a growing membership.
Similarly, official tournament play required 18-hole scores, so the prospect of enabling an eighteen-hole score by two circuits of a nine-hole course rather than by directing tournament traffic across four circuits of a five-hole course would have been very attractive.
The construction of a nine-hole course, as opposed to an eighteen-hole course, would have been the Napanee Golf Club’s ambition, for even if it were to secure access to all of Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township, the available land was at most 98 acres, and the consensus was that about 50% more land than that was the minimum required for eighteen holes (if golfers were not to be put in danger of being struck by the golf balls of players on other holes). Besides, in the early 1900s, the nine-hole course was the normal size of small-market golf courses. A golf club in a small market aimed for eighteen holes only when the golf club membership became so large that its nine-hole course became too crowded to accommodate all the members who wanted to play.
Another factor leading to the alteration of golf courses like Napanee’s in the early 1900s was the invention of a new golf ball.
When the Napanee Golf Club was founded in 1897, the golf ball then in use was the gutta-percha ball, or guttie (made from the rubbery sap of a Malaysian tree). In his 1898 book Golf, Gardener G. Smith explained to Americans new to the game that “The ball used in playing golf is made in various sizes, but that most in use measures about 1 ¾ inches in diameter. It is usually made of well-seasoned guttapercha, grooved or notched on the surface and painted white” (New York: Frederick A Stokes Co, 1908, pp. 11-12.). Companies selling golf balls would take orders for gutta-percha balls that would be available in six months’ time, after seasoning. Golfers could also buy cans of white and red paint for golf balls, since the gutta-percha rubber would not retain its paint well, and so balls would return to their natural black colour after several rounds of golf.
The gutta-percha golf ball was gradually replaced in the early twentieth century after the invention of the rubber-wound,rubber-core golf ball by a man named Haskell, who patented it in 1899. This ball – called the “Haskell Flyer” – flew 20 yards further than the gutta-percha ball. The latter had not been dimpled, but rather scratched and scored in various ways when golfers discovered that the gutta-percha ball that was roughed up after play (losing its perfectly smooth manufactured surface) flew further than when new and could be played with better control by the golfer. These discoveries led to the study in the early 1900s of the aerodynamic effects of dimples on a golf ball. When the new rubber-wound, rubber-cored golf ball received dimples, it flew another twenty yards further. After both the British and US Opens were won in 1902 by players using the new rubber-wound,rubber-cored ball, it became the golf ball of choice. The gutta-percha golf ball went the way of the Dodo bird.
By 1906, the increased distances that golfers could now hit golf balls must have been one of the factors leading the Napanee Golf Club to re-design its golf course in 1906. After all, the Ganton golf course in Yorkshire where Harry Vardon was the golf professional from1896 to 1902 had to be re-designed for this very reason shortly after Vardon left in 1903, as Bernard Darwin explains: “Some of the glamour of Harry Vardon still hangs around Ganton, although he has left it now for some years …. The course has been altered a good deal since Vardon’s days, for with the advent of the Haskell, it suffered the common lot and became rather too short” (The Golf courses of the British Isles [London: Duckworth, 1910], pp. 130- 31). The effect of the new golf ball was so dramatic, in fact, that many golfers in Britain and America called for it to be banned, for it was making too many existing golf courses play too short. Napanee Golf Club must have found this to be the case, for its original five holes had too many two-shotters just over 200 yards.

Figure 2 Experimentation with dimple patterns was rampant in the early twentieth century. See the patterns above offered by the "Colonel" golf ball company. Canadian Golfer, May 1920, vol vi no 1, p. 1.
The Napanee Golf course probably also wanted to be able to host other golf clubs on a golf course comparable to the golf course of its main competitors: comparable in terms of the quality of its tees, fairways, and greens, and comparable in terms of its length and in terms of the challenges it posed.
Recall that the earliest reference to golf in Napanee that the Hunters could find consisted of a newspaper report from November of 1905 which indicated that Napanee golfers had travelled to Kingston to compete with golfers there. I do not think it is a coincidence that in the 1906 photograph of Mary Vrooman at the club shed (a photograph that we studied so closely in the previous volume of this book) we see signs of construction activity on the golf course.
The Napanee golfers who travelled to Kingston for this competition included the men who would be President and Vice-President of the Napanee Golf Club in 1907, as well as members who would form the core of the men’s competitive team for many years to come. The President was Dr. Raymond Alonzo Leonard (physician and postmaster, and Napanee cricketer and curler from way back), and the Vice - President was John Wesley Robinson (owner of the big department store on Napanee’s main street, and also a champion Napanee curler). The golf course that they played on in Kingston was the home of the only golf club then located in Kingston: the Kingston Golf Club (the first nine holes was not built at Cataraqui until 1917, when Charles Murray came from Royal Montreal to lay out the course).
The Golf Annual of 1897 writes that the Kingston Golf Club’s “course is beautifully situated on government reserve ground near Fort Henry, overlooking the River St Lawrence, and the first of its famous ‘Thousand Islands’ group. It consists of thirteen holes, the first three and the last two of which are played over twice to complete the full eighteen. The hazards are marshes, roads, heights, and hollows” (Vol 10, p. 347). The Kingston Golf Club was important in the world of Canadian golf in those days: founded in 1886, it was a founding member of the Royal Canadian Golf Association in 1895.

Figure 3 Late 1800s photograph of a golf hole on Barriefield Common with a fence around the green to keep cattle off of it. The building at the top of the hill is the Barriefield School, at the north-east corner of Barriefield Common at the intersection of Main Street and James Street.
Five of the Kingston Golf Club’s holes were laid out over the Barriefield Common (see above).
The quality of the golf course that we see in the above photograph of a golf hole on the Barriefield Common in the 1890s does not seem significantly different in quality from the Napanee golf course of 1897-1906. The green is marked by a circular fence to keep the cattle off it. The “fair green” (as the fairway was called in those days) does not seem to have a clear distinction between fairway and rough. There are no bunkers, ditches, ponds, or trees – apparently no hazards at all.
Recall, however, that we noted in Volume Two of this book that the Kingston golf course wasredesigned in 1897 to make it accord better with the expectations of the American tourists who visited it. Eight years before the Napanee golfers’ 1905 visit, the Kingston Golf Club had undertaken a complete renovation in quest of such “first-class” status: “The Kingston golf club is making new teeing on the Barriefield links, and also intends entirely renovating the putting greens. Men are now at work making the improvements, which will make the grounds second to none in America” (Daily Whig, 17 April 1897).
I suspect that it was the experience of a proper golf course in Kingston in 1905 that almost immediately led to the making of plans in Napanee for its new course. The Kingston Golf Club must have had the kind of “first-class course” that Napanee aspired to have.
Note also that the Picton Golf Club was also scheduled to open a new nine-hole course in 1907. The first golf club in that town had been formed ten years before, a notice in Napanee Express observing that “A golf club has been organized in Picton” (8 October 1897). Napanee golfers would have been well aware of the improvements planned for this other local golf club.
With its new course of 1907, the Napanee Golf Club was no doubt trying to keep up with the Joneses in Picton and Kingston. Napanee golfers venturing into competition at other regional golf courses like the ones in Picton and Kingston would ultimately have to reciprocate the hospitality shown: they would have to invite these golf clubs to play competitions at Napanee. The prospect of not being able to host other golf clubs in the style to which such golf clubs were accustomed on their home courses would have been mortifying to the bankers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who made up the membership of the competitive men’s team at the Napanee Golf Club.
Golf was developing so quickly – there was the new golf ball, on the one hand, and there were younger and stronger golfers being attracted to the game, on the other hand – that a golf club that did not keep up with the times could be left behind. It seems that the Kingston Golf Club itself, which once set the standard locally, was in due course one of those left behind. The editor of Canadian Golfer explained the slow demise occurring at the Kingston Golf Club when he welcomed the development of the new Cataraqui Golf Club (laid out by Charles Murray in 1917): “They have played golf at Kingston since the eighties and it was probably for this reason that the course did not improve. What was good enough for a few players twenty-five years ago continued to be good enough for those who continued in the game. As a result membership remained very limited, and there was nothing to induce new membership to join” (vol iv no 8 [Dec 1918], p. 429).
By 1925, the Kingston Golf Club had been displaced by the Cataraqui Golf Club, and so it was disbanded and its golf course abandoned.
No such fate befell the Napanee Golf Club.
Finally, the laying out of a new nine-hole course in 1907 may have had something to dowith the Napanee Golf Club’s acquiring a long-termlease forthe land where the golf course was located. The Weekly British Whig reported before the beginning ofthe 1908 golf season that “The Napanee Golf Club has rented the Cartwright farm fora term of years and use the residence upon the farm as a club house” (2 April 1908, p. 3). It may be that this lease had been negotiated in 1907 and that the Napanee Golf Club concluded that financial investment in developing the Cartwright property would be worthwhile now given the long-term control of the land that had been acquired. The club certainly seems to have had big plans for its property: “Ithas decided to build a tennis court, and a bowling alley” (Weekly British Whig, 2 April 1908, p. 3).
There would be no tennis court or bowling alley, of course, but there would be money spent on the golf course.
Where was the New Course of 1907 laid out?
If the suggestions in Volume Two of this book about the nature of the 1897-1906 golf course are correct, then we can tell from contemporary documents – both the scorecard for the new course of 1907 and several photographs of golfers playing the course in 1912 (documents to be examined closely in the sections that follow) – that the new course was made not just by adding four holes to the original course, but also by lengthening four of the old holes. One hole remained the same.
Photographs and scorecard indicate that the first three holes of the 1907 course more or less corresponded, in the same order, to the last hole and the first two holes of today’s course.
Photographs establish that the fourth hole of the 1907 course proceeded 209 yards diagonally across today’s third fairway to a green by the fence-line at the railway tracks at about the level of the 150-yard mark in today’s fairway.
The 215-yard fifth hole of the 1907 course seems to have been the same fifth hole of the 1897-1906 course that Herrington and Hall played in 1906 (we studied closely the photograph of Herrington and Hall about to tee off on this hole in Volume Two of this book).
We shall see that the last four holes of the 1907 golf course largely occupied the same area as the first four holes of the 1897-1906 course, but that the new holes seem to have been considerably longer than the old holes.
The sixth tee of the 1907 course was probably the fourth tee of the 1897-1906 course. But it cannot have run parallel to the fifth hole (which was identical on the two courses) back to the flag we see behind Herrington in the 1906 photograph of her and her partner Hall. The distance of that old fourth hole paralleling the fifth hole was about 215 yards, whereasthe length of the sixth hole of the 1907 course was 427 yards. This sixth hole concluded in a green at the fence along the railway tracks. A draughtsman’s compass describing an arc of 427 yards from the most forward tee on today’s fourteenth hole pretty much prescribes the radius within which the green would have had to have been built: the back tee on today’s sixth hole.
Thereafter, as we shall see, the final three holes of the 1907 course seem to have paralleled the new sixth hole, the ninth hole being a lengthened version of the original first hole on the 1897-1906 golf course.
A detailed discussion of each of these nine holes follows. Those who wish to see how the nine holes mentioned above are located relative to the present golf course may consult the Appendix at the end of this volume, where they are drawn onto a contemporary satellite map of the Napanee Golf and Country Club property.
The Napanee Golf Club was evidently pleased with its new course of 1907, for we read the next year in the Weekly British Whig that “The Napanee Golf Club has rented the Cartwright farm for a term of years and will use the residence on the farm as a club house” (2 April 1908, p. 3).
The Scorecard of the 1907 New Course
The scorecard of the 1907-27 golf course will strike modern eyes as unusual in a number of respects.

Figure 4 The scorecard for the 1907-27 golf course of the Napanee Golf Club. Item A-2013.026. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The yardage of the individual holes is not given as a total.
The golf holes are not ranked in terms of level of difficulty.
Rather than there being a par indicated for each hole, we find a number referred to as “Bogey.”
The total of the “Bogey” scores for each hole is not printed on the card, but someone has written in the total by hand: 40.
The first two columns for recording scores indicate that the columns are for “Self” and “Opp[onent].”
The latter point is explained by the fact that in the first third of the twentieth century, the usual form of golf competition at Canadian golf clubs was match play. The preference for match play over medal play (or stroke play) was therefore a prominent feature of golf course architecture at the time: Stanley Thompson, for instance, believed that the last hole of a lay-out should always be a difficult hole so that a golfer leading a match by one hole should not be able to stroll to an easy victory by means of an easy final hole.
That golf holes were not ranked according to their level of difficulty is probably a sign that this scorecard dates from a time closer to 1907 than 1927, for handicap systems were not standardized in Britain or North America in the early years of the twentieth century. When the Napanee Golf Club was founded in 1897, debate raged as to how a match ought to be handicapped: should weaker players be granted a stroke or two for every hole, or should they be conceded a certain number of holes at the start of the match and be forced to play the better player even on all holes?
The most widespread way of determining a stroke handicap for players before World War I was simply to average a golfer’s three best scores of the year and then subtract from the number produced what was in the nineteenth century called the “ground score” – which was defined as the score that a firstclass golfer would make on a golf course were no mistakes made. The difference between the two totals would be the player’s handicap.
The scores and handicaps reported in the newspapers of 1910 and 1911 show the best golfers at the Napanee Golf Club scoring from the high forties to the mid-sixties, earning handicaps of from thirteen to twenty-five. Clarence M. Warner maintained a handicap of fifteen over the two years in question, suggesting that his three best scores were an average of fifty-five (producing a handicap of fifteen when the ground score of forty was subtracted). In a summer weekly competition in 1910, Warner’s score (gross, handicap, net) was given as “58 – 15 = 43” (Napanee Express, 8 July 1910). In a weekly competition one year later, his score was “52 – 15 = 37” (Napanee Beaver, 30 June 1911).
Of course good golfers regularly played to their handicap, since their scores were generally very consistent, whereas average golfers and bad golfers played to their handicap less often because their scores varied much more widely. In other words, the three best scores accumulated over a season were less a departure from their overall average score for good players than for other players.
The case of John S. Ham is a good example. In 1911, he began the year with a handicap of twenty-five but ended the year with a handicap of twenty-two. In May, the average of his three best scores was sixty-five; in September, the average of this three best scores was sixty-two. But such a golfer’s best and worst scores are widely divergent. In a weekly tournament in June, he scored terribly: “76 – 22 = 54” (Napanee Beaver, 30 June 1911). In May, however, in “The First Weekly Tournament … held on the local links on Wednesday afternoon …. Mr. John S. Ham easily won the best net with the lowest net score ever made in a tournament in Napanee …(54-25=29)” (Napanee Express, 19 May 1911).
Sandbagger!
Note also that many golf clubs did not establish a theoretical scratch score for their golf course. As Walter J. Travis observes, “In establishing handicaps it is customary to work up from the best player in the club, who is rated at scratch” (Practical Golf [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902], p. 173). Designating a club’s best golfer as the “scratch” player in relation to whom all other members were handicapped – even if their best golfer was not very good – clearly meant that handicaps at one club were likely to be out of line with the handicaps of members at other clubs.
Another problem was that it was up to each individual golf club to determine what a proper score was for each hole, and therefore what a proper score for the course as a whole was. The vanity of influential club members might result in the club deciding that the proper number of strokes to complete a certain hole was five, instead of four. A similar hole on another course might be regarded there as properly played in four strokes, rather than five. So two golfers of indistinguishable ability would have very different handicaps depending on where they played golf.
Still to be determined was a more accurate mathematical system for working out a player’s handicap than the best-three-scores method, a system for establishing the proper score for a golf hole and a golf course regardless of the preferences of club members, a system for comparing the difficulty of one hole to that of another, and a system for comparing the difficulty of one golf course to that of another.
Accurately determining the yardage of golf holes and golf courses and deciding upon a consistent standard for determining the “ground score” of each golf course would be essential in moving forward with a viable handicap system.
Measuring Yardage
If we add up the yardages of the nine golf holes on the scorecard reproduced above, we find that the total is 2,801.
In the American Annual Golf Guide from 1920 to 1923, the yardage for the course is listed as 2,801. In the issues from 1925 to 1927, the yardage is listed as 2,893. (From 1928 onward, after Fred Rickwood’s re-design of the golf course at the end of 1927, the yardage is listed as 2,750.) So we know that the scorecard we are studying dates from before 1925. And it seems likely that the yardage provided to the American Annual Golf Guide in 1920 reflected the yardage of the golf course in 1914, for the Hunters indicate that the golf club became relatively moribund during World War I – suggesting that there would have been no construction projects carried out on the course during the five years in question from 1914 to 1919.
In 1920, the Napanee Golf Club seems to have decided for the first time to broadcast far and wide the fact that it existed. The first mention of Napanee in the American Annual Golf Guide occurs in 1920, and in the spring of 1920 Secretary-Treasurer Tom German wrote to the editor of Canadian Golfer with news about the election of the club’s officers that year, and he also mentioned, by the way, that the professional course record holder at Napanee Golf Club was Karl Keffer, the Canadian Open Champion of 1909 and 1914, and co-second-place finisher in 1919 – tying with a young sensation named Bobby Jones from Atlanta.
Not all of the numbers that German provided were absolutely correct, mind you. He indicated that the golf club was founded in “1900.” And for some reason, whereas German told the American publication that the course was 2,801 yards, he told the Canadian publication that the yardage was 2,800.
Perhaps something to do with the exchange rate then ….
Note that more than a century ago, golf course yardages were determined not via measurement through the air (as they are now, via GPS and lasers), but rather via measurement along the ground – that is, by measuring contours via a yardage wheel run along the ground (also called a surveyor’s wheel, perambulator, or waywiser), following an imaginary line down the centre of the fairway, all the way from the centre of the tee to the centre of the green.

Figure 5 This antique folding metal surveyor's wheel would have been the kind of device used for measuring the yardages of the golf holes at Napanee Golf Club a century.
Consider the difference that the two methods of measuring distance on the “Gully Hole” would produce. Through the air, the distance from the front of the middle valley tee today to the centre of the green is about 160 yards. But running a yardage wheel down one side of the gully and up the other side would indicate a distance of perhaps 200 yards, or more.
This general point is made by Alan D. Wilson in a 1920s essay on “The Measurement of Golf Holes”:
The question is constantly asked whether holes should be measured in an air-line or along the contour of the ground. For practical reasons the contour of the ground is usually the better method. In the first place it is much easier …. If the play is over rising ground followed by falling ground and then another rise, it is true that the contour method slightly increases the length …. Of course, in certain exceptional cases, the air-line method should be used. Let us take, for instance, a one-shot hole of, say, 160 yards in a direct line, played from a high tee over a deep ravine to a high green beyond. The air-line measurement would be 160 yards. If a contour measurement were used, following down into the ravine and up the other side, it might show a distance of 200 yards, which would be entirely misleading, as the contour of the ravine in no way enters into the shot. In general, then, for the sake of practical convenience, holes should be measured on the contour of the ground; but in the unusual case where the contour does not enter into or affect the play of the shot, the air-line method should be used.(Bulletin of the United States Golf Association, Vol IV No 3, 24 March 1924, p. 74).
So when considering the yardages given for the 1907-1927 golf course in the various golf publications of the 1920s, bear in mind the measuring method. Does the difference between the yardage of 2,801 in 1923 and the yardage in 1925 of 2,893 mean that the course had been lengthened by ninety-two yards between 1923 and 1925, or merely that the course had been officially re-measured for the first time in twenty years and that the person walking along the ground from hole to hole had run the yardage wheel along a slightly different line from the one followed twenty years before?
Bogey versus Par
The references above to the “bogey” score for each golf hole may be unfamiliar to some.
For the first 500 or so years of golf history, there was no such thing as a par score for a golf hole or for a golf course. The goal of the golfer with regard to any particular hole was not to complete it in a particular number of strokes regarded as the theoretically ideal or normal number. One simply aimed to take as few strokes as possible.
So it was until the 1890s.
Then, as Robert Browning points out in A History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game (1955; reprinted Pampamoa Press, 2018), the concept of “ground score” was invented. At the golf club in Coventry, England, in 1890, the Club Secretary worked out a score for each hole, and thereby for a complete round of golf on the course, that first-rate golfers would achieve if they made no mistakes: he called it the “ground score.” His purpose was to create an ideal score that club members could try to match in their individual rounds of golf: a form of match play for a single golfer.
Within a year, the idea of establishing a “ground score” was adopted by the Club Secretary at the golf club in Great Yarmouth, England. There, one of the Club Secretary’s regular playing partners reacted in jocular frustration to his inability to match the “ground score” of the club’s “imaginary” ideal player: “This player of yours is a regular Bogey man!” He was alluding to a song popular in the early 1890s, “Hush! Hush! Hush! Here comes the Bogeyman!” whose lyrics about a mischievous, timorous, hard-to- catch goblin or bogey ran as follows:
Children, have you ever met the Bogeyman before? No, of course you haven't for
You're much too good, I'm sure;
Don't you be afraid of him if he should visit you, He's a great big coward, so I'll tell you what to do:
Hush, hush, hush, here comes the Bogeyman, Don't let him come too close to you,
He'll catch you if he can.
Just pretend that you're a crocodile
And you will find that Bogeyman will run away a mile.
The popularity of the club member’s witticism meant that the “ground score” at Great Yarmouth immediately became known as the “Bogey” score, and the practise of establishing a ground score and naming it the Bogey score spread like wildfire as Great Yarmouth club members played other golf courses throughout southern England. Soon, golfers all across Britain referred to the ideal player whose score they were trying to match as “Mr. Bogey.”
The Club Secretary at the military’s United Services Club in Gosport added one more element to this practice in 1892. Since all members of this club were required to have a military rank, their opponent could not be a civilian: so golfers at this club replaced “Mr. Bogey” with “Colonel Bogey.” The latter was made famous in the “Colonel Bogey March,” the British army bandmaster who wrote it having been inspired by a golfer who, rather than warning other golfers of a wayward ball with a shout of “fore,” instead loudly whistled two notes: the two notes of the descending musical phrase that begins each line of the “Colonel Bogey March” melody.
By the early 1900s, problems began to emerge regarding Bogey scores. What criteria should be used to determine Bogey?
In the United States, the Ladies Golf Association began searching in 1893 for a way of applying a standard in the determination of how many strokes it should take to complete a golf hole. This was to be a standard applicable no matter where the golf hole was found – regardless of the golf course, regardless of the country, regardless of the golf club’s traditions or wishes. The idea was to determine a proper score for every hole by means of its measured length. The United States Golf Association took up the idea and decided upon its standard in 1911: all holes up to 225 yards in length should take three strokes, all holes between 226 yards and 425 yards should take four strokes, all holes between 426 yards and 600 yards should take five strokes, and any hole longer than 601 yards should take 6 strokes.
In its determination of the number of strokes it should take to play its eighth hole, the Almonte Golf Club happened to agree with the standard that would be set several years later by the USGA. Otherwise, its values were very different. Remarkably, the club established five as the proper score for its third, fourth, sixth, and ninth holes, for each of which the USGA would later determine that the proper score was three. On the remaining four holes, the Almonte club allowed four strokes where the USGA would allow just three.
One can see that the USGA standardswere not applied to the Bogey scores of the Napanee Golf Club scorecard above: three holes of less than 226 yards are given a Bogey of four (rather than the three stipulated for such holes in 1911), and holes of 347, 400, and 415 yards are each given a Bogey of five (instead of the four stipulated in 1911). On only three holes at the Napanee Golf Club are the Bogey scores in accord with the USGA standards stipulated in 1911.
For its universal standards scores, American golf associations borrowed a term that traders in the stock market used to name the proper or normal value for a stock between the extremes of its high and low prices over time: “par.”
This term had been used in a similar context once before in golf, at the 1870 Open Championship at Prestwick.

Figure 6 "Young" Tom Morris, 1851-75, wearing the Open "championship belt" that he was given to own after winning it four times in a row. The belt was replaced by today's Claret Jug.
A golf writer reporting on the tournament had asked two golf professionals familiar with the twelve-hole golf course what the winning score for the tournament might be. The golfers suggested that a perfect score for a golfer who made no mistakes would be forty-nine. The writer for the first time invoked the stock-exchange metaphor to inform readers that forty-nine strokes would be “par” for the course. In the event, with a score two under the “perfect score” that the writer called “par,” twenty-year-old “Young” Tom Morris won the third of the four Open Championships he won in a row.
Latent here in 1870 was the concept of a “ground score” and the possibility of using the word “par” to indicate it, but nothing came of it.
Despite the American declaration in favour of standard par scores, golf clubs in Britain and Ireland maintained their use of the term Bogey, and individual golf clubs maintained their traditions of establishing their own Bogey scores according to the whims of the membership.
Where club members found a 400-yard hole very difficult to play, for instance, they were free (perhaps in service of nothing more than the vanity of influential club members) to declare its Bogey score to be five, rather than four (as according to the American standard).
Well, in the early 1900s, the scores of the best golfers in the game – both professionals and amateurs – were coming down dramatically. Golf swings were improving as tournament play increased at amateur and professional levels, allowing golfers to learn from each other better swing techniques in general and better swings for particular shots, to say nothing of better strategies for playing golf with the swings and shots that golfers now had in their arsenal. Furthermore, as we have already noted, new golf balls were being hit further and more accurately by the best players.
In the United States, where the practices of golf clubs in converting from their old Bogey scores to the new standard par scores was in flux, the best golfers regularly began to complete many of the golf holes graded with the old Bogey score in one stroke less than that score. So the terms “par” and “Bogey” began to diverge in American golf, as the best American golfers began to use the word “par” in reference to the perfect number of strokes for a hole and the word “Bogey” for one stroke more than the perfect number.
The American amateur champion Walter J. Travis explained his understanding of the two terms in 1902:
Par golf, it may be remarked, is perfect golf, determined according to the distance of the holes and with two strokes allowed on each green, while bogey simply represents the score of a good player who occasionally makes a mistake, not very glaring, but sufficient to make a difference in the round of four or five strokes. Bogey is an elastic quantity, however, so much so, indeed, on some courses, as to furnish no true criterion of the game of the player who now and then beats the Colonel! (Practical Golf, p. 173)
British golfers were understandably upset to learn how the word Bogey was coming to be used as a score meaning one stroke more than it took an American player to complete a hole! By 1914, just before World War I broke out, many British golf writers began to agitate for adoption of the USGA standards for determining the proper number of strokes for golf holes, but the war deferred further work on this idea. So it was not until 1925 that British and Irish golf Unions (as their golf associations are called) agreed to establish Standard Scratch Scores for all golf holes and golf courses.
Depending on how closely the Napanee Golf Club hewed to the advice of the USGA, the fact that the scorecard reproduced above shows Bogey scores rather than par scores, and the fact that so many of the Bogey scores diverge from the USGA standards of 1911, could be a sign that the scorecard dates from even before 1911.
Who designed the new layout?
Who found the four new holes at the south end of the course that would be added to the original five-hole layout to make up the new course of 1907?
Who decided that the fifth hole of the original course would remain unchanged in the new course?
Who figured out how to lengthen four of the original holes and for the first time to run a hole across the creek and deep, steep gully at the north end of the course?
Could it have been a committee of club members?
Or one club member in particular?
Or did the Napanee Golf Club hire a professional golfer to do the job?
Clarence M. Warner and Willie Campbell
Perhaps the collective golf wisdom of the most experienced golfers among the membership was judged sufficient to the requirements of designing a new course. Herrington had laid out a course at Camp Le Nid in the mid-1890s. Many club members were very familiar with the Kingston Golf Club, which had been upgraded to contemporary standards in 1897. But did anyone have first-hand experience of the kind of design that a professional golfer would lay out and the kind of work required to build it?
Clarence M. Warner may have had particularly relevant experience. In Rhode Island, he was not just an early member of the Wannamoisett Country Club (laid out as a nine-hole course by Willie Campbell in 1898, and redesigned as an eighteen-hole course by Donald Ross in 1914); he was also a founding “incorporator” of the club (Official Golf Guide of 1899, ed. Josiah Newman [New York, 1899], p. 291).

Figure 7 Willie Campbell plays from gorse and heather on a British links course in the late 1880s, when he finished second and third in the Open Championship.
Warner was one of eight men who got together in 1898 to establish this golf club and to commission Campbell to lay out a nine-hole design. He was barely twenty-four years old, and the golf club had 160 other members, yet Warner was named to the Finance Committee, as well as the Board of Governors, and he was also named one of the club’s four Officers as its Treasurer.
There is little doubt that he would have been one of the club officers who dealt with Campbell during the construction of the course. Campbell was subsequently appointed the professional golfer at the club for the summer of 1899. The question is whether Warner took a hands-on approach to the creation of the Wannamoisett golf course. . If he did, he may have accompanied Campbell as the latter laid out the course – as many club officers did when a professional golfer came to the club to route the golf holes through the club’s property.
Whether or not he discussed with Campbell the principles of golf course design that the latter was applying as he walked the land, Warner may well have learned by observation just what went into routing a golf course. It is possible that he had visions of golf course design dancing in his head when he returned to Napanee from Rhode Island in 1904: perhaps he agitated for the addition of golf holes to the south end of the property from the moment he played his first round of golf at his new club.

Figure 8 Willie Campbell circa 1890.
Willie Campbell, born in Musselburgh, Scotland, in 1862, was a former caddie to Bob Ferguson (regarded as the greatest golfer in the world in the 1880s), who coached him, and he had also apprenticed with Old Tom Morris. He was an excellent golfer. He was leading the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1887 by three shots with three holes to go when his ball came up against the sodwall face of a deep bunker. He refused to play out backwards, insisting on playing forward to get out. In a Tin Cup moment, he took half-a-dozen strokes to get out of the bunker, scoring nine on the hole, and losing the championship by three strokes.
After the round was over and the Claret Jug was awarded to the champion golfer of the year, Willie Campbell and his caddie were observed sitting on over-turned buckets on a side-street, sobbing.
The story goes that this was when he decided to emigrate to the United States and start a new golf life.
Whether or not that story is true, he went to the United States in 1894, becoming the head professional of the Country Club at Brookline, Massachusetts, laying out new holes for that iconic golf course, as well as laying out the first nine holes for several other Boston courses that would become foundational to the growth of the sport in Boston. He also went on to lay out courses elsewhere in Massachusetts, as well as in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
Campbell was clearly on his way to a place of importance in the early development of American golf. But his life was cut short by cancer. He died in 1901, having wasted away, when just thirty-eight years of age. Golf historians are left to wonder what he might have done if he had lived long enough to fulfill his potential as a golf course architect.

Figure 9 Willie Campbell in late 1890s around the time of his work at Wannamoisett.
Mind you, Campbell had not given up golf when he came to the United States. In the 1895 US Open, he was tied for the lead with six holes to go, when his shot came to rest against a wall; someone told him he would have to play back, to which he replied: “I never played back in my life!” In Tin Cup: the Sequel, obstinacy in a national championship once more produced a score of nine, and again he lost by three strokes (Brian DeLacey and John Pearson “Willie Campbell: a neglected champion,” in Through the Green [8], p. 12).
Despite his short life in America, Campbell has not been forgotten. Robert Muir Graves and Geoffrey S. Cornish observe that Campbell “became a pioneer in planning municipal golf courses in America – facilities that became significant in accommodating a tidal wave of people who were taking up the game…. Moreover, his wife Georgina became America’s first woman professional golfer” (Classic Golf Hole Design [Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2002], p. 181). Georgina not only married him; she became his apprentice.

Figure 10 Georgina and Willie Campbell outside their pro shop circa mid-1890s.
Georgina Campbell, born 1864 in Musselburgh, had learned golf in Scotland and met her husband when she was a member of the gallery following him in one of his matches there. She became his assistant golf professional in Massachusetts, making and painting gutta percha golf balls and giving lessons to wealthy Boston women eager to take up the game. She had played the game long enough to have experienced the transition from the time in her youth when a woman who took a full golf swing was thought unladylike to the beginning of a new age when women’s golf was unthinkable without the full swing that she taught in Boston.

Figure 11 Georgina Campbell circa 1910s.
In 1901, Georgina Campbell beat out all male applicants in the competition to succeed her husband at Boston’s Franklin Park Golf Links (which Willie Campbell had convinced municipal authorities to build in order to make golf available to working-class golfers at a cost of just 12.5 cents for a daily ticket). The success of this adventure in municipal golf had made the position of head pro at this course a lucrative one. So the job competition was fierce.
Of course Georgina Campbell immediately became famous as golf’s first woman head pro. In an interview with Golfing magazine shortly after her appointment, she argued that golf was the perfect game for women: “It is not necessary to make any great effort when using the golf clubs. Hence it is grand exercise, with the exact amount of effort used which suits the golfer’s physique. The fine long walks over the slopes and ridges which is the golf course; the bright, soothing, green grass; the incentive to beat one’s opponent without going into violence – I could play the game forever” (19 September 1901). And it seems she nearly did: she held the head pro position at Boston’s Franklin Park Golf Links until her retirement in 1927, but she kept up her golf game almost until she died in 1953, in her ninetieth year.
Even if Warner had followed closely the design theory and practice of Willie Campbell, would he have learned thereby how to lay out a golf course? Or would he have learned a different lesson?
He might have concluded from watching Campbell work out the route of the nine holes at Wannamoisett that laying out a golf course was not a job for amateurs. Perhaps he convinced his fellow club members in Napanee to do what he and his fellow club members in Rhode Island had done: hire a professional.
Can We Identify a Pro Who Might Have Designed the New Course?
Recall that at just after Napanee’s new course of 1907 was laid out, Fred Rickwood went to Amherst, Nova Scotia, to lay out the first golf course there.
In 1908, three of the women leaders of the wealthier members of Amherst society – Mrs. McDougal, Mrs. Hickman, and Mrs. Hodgeson – decided that it would be a good thing for Amherst to have a golf club. Golf was said to provide good physical and mental exercise for the professional classes. So these three women canvassed their wealthy friends for the funds needed to start a golf club and build a golf course. Their industry matched their ambition, and so within a few weeks Amherst had its first golf club.
Next came the matter of a golf course: where to build it, and who to build it?
The golf club leased a farm in West Amherst from a man named Baker as the location for the golf course, and then it hired Fred Rickwood to take charge of building the course: he directed the team that “measured the fields, pegged off the tees and greens, and made play possible” (C. Pipes, “The Early History of Amherst Golf Club” [1939], p. 3, cited in Michael J. Hudson, “An Examination into the Development of Golf Courses in Nova Scotia [MA Thesis, Dalhousie 1998]).
There were less than two dozen professional golfers in all of Canada in 1908 and somehow these good ladies got hold of one. They had not found Fred Rickwood by luck. It was not the case that an unemployed golf professional was hanging out in their community. The golf enthusiasts in Amherst had probably gone for advice in the matter of hiring a professional golfer to Canada’s unofficial head pro: the professional golfer at the Toronto Golf Club, George Cumming.
And George Cumming probably arranged for Fred Rickwood to go to Amherst.
If the Napanee Golf Club had decided to use a professional golfer to lay out a new course in 1906, they would probably have written to George Cumming, too.
By 1906, Cumming was well on the way to becoming the “doyen” of Canadian golf professionals, and “Daddy of them all.” My best guess is that if indeed a professional golfer laid out a new course for Napanee Golf Club in 1906, it was probably George Cumming who did so, or one of his apprentices at the Toronto Golf Club who served as his assistant professionals.
In the early 1900s in Canada, there were few Canadian-based professional golfers able to lay out golf courses. There were only about two dozen professional golfers in all of Canada when the Canadian Professional Golfers Association was formed in 1911. As we know, Fred Rickwood was one of them – and one of the few based in the Maritimes. Albert Murray, one of Cumming’s apprentices, had designed a new route for golf at Cove Fields on the Plains of Abraham in 1905 for the Quebec Golf Club, when he was just eighteen years old. His brother Charles Murray, an even earlier apprentice of Cumming’s, had laid out a golf course in Caledonia Springs at the beginning of 1904. Hired by the Royal Montreal Golf Club shortly after this, he continued to build golf courses in Quebec and Ontario. He would build the first nine holes at Cataraqui Golf and Country Club around 1917. We recall that Percy Barrett was also active in course design in the Toronto area in those days (laying out Lambton in 1903 and Mississauga in 1906)

Figure 12 George Cumming, 1879-1950, head pro at the Toronto Golf Club from 1900 to 1950.
But George Cumming was the most active golf course designer and he was the most well-known in those days. Observing that Cumming “was one of the earliest Canadian golf course architects,” Ian Andrew suggests that “he was likely selected initially to design courses because of his Scottish heritage and his place of prominence at Toronto Golf Club, but Cumming turned out to be an excellent architect in his own right” (“The Architectural Evolution of Stanley Thompson”).
Any of the ardent votaries of the ancient game in Napanee who read the Kingston newspapers would have known that George Cumming was the biggest name in Canadian golf at that time. Even his hiring in 1900 was news in Kingston: “The Toronto Golf Club has secured the services of George Cumming, Dumfries, Scotland, as professional coach.
He is now on his way to Canada” (Daily Whig 17 March 1900). Cumming was just coming off his apprenticeship to Glasgow’s Andrew Forgan, a renowned Scottish golf professional and golf course architect (he was the son of St Andrews’ Robert Forgan whose exported hand-forged club heads were the staple of every North American club-making shop). Andrew Forgan had taken Cumming along on the latter’s first adventure in golf course design in 1893: Cumming had just turned thirteen. The Kingston newspaper announced twenty-year-old Cumming’s hiring by the Toronto Golf Club because the latter was one of the oldest, and at the time certainly the most important and most prestigious, of the golf clubs in Ontario.
Is there anything to suggest that Cumming was in some way associated with the Napanee Golf Club at this time? I think there is a piece of circumstantial evidence.
When George Patten Reiffenstein made his score of 39 in 1914, the newspaper reported that he had tied the professional course record. Who was this professional who had played the new course of 1907 sometime prior to Reiffenstein’s 1914 round?
I suspect that there was an exhibition match staged at the Napanee Golf Club in 1907 involving the course architect, returning to open the new course that he had designed. In those days, new courses were often officially opened by an exhibition match involving professional golfers associated with the professional golfer who had designed the course. This match would not occur at the golf club’s spring opening in May but rather in mid-summer when the weather was better and a good group of spectators might be expected to show up and accompany the professional golfers around the course.

Figure 13 Karl Keffer circa 1910.
The circumstantial evidence that Cumming was somehow connected with the Napanee Golf Club consists of the fact that what seems to have been the first professional scoring record for the Napanee Golf Club was held by Cumming’s apprentice from 1906-1909: Karl Keffer.
As noted above, an item in the May issue of Canadian Golfer in 1920 refers to the Napanee Golf Club and its course record: “The Napanee Golf Club, Ontario, which has an interesting course of 2,800 yards, recently had its annual meeting, which was of a thoroughly satisfactory character…. Karl Keffer, open champion of Canada, has the record of the Napanee course, a 37, made some years ago” (May 1920, vol v no 1, p. 52).
As we know from Volume One of this book, Keffer was in the Canadian army from the end of 1916 to the beginning of 1919, so the course record “made some years ago” was certainly accomplished no later than 1916.
Furthermore, there are no newspaper items about the Napanee Golf Club during the war years from 1914 to 1919, so it seems unlikely that a professional visited the golf course during this relatively moribund period. Remember also that we know that Keffer was a two-time winner of the Canadian Open – first winning in 1909, and then winning again in 1914. Because the Open Championship was not held during the war, Keffer was therefore also the defending champion at the next Canadian Open, played in 1919, when he tied for second place with Bobby Jones, with whom he played the first two rounds.

Figure 14 Keffer follow-through circa 1920.
It is inconceivable that a Canadian Open champion could have even played the Napanee Golf Course in those days, let alone set a course record while doing so, without someone at the golf club reporting such a momentous event in golf club history to one or more of the Napanee newspapers. As the Hunters point out, the only time news about the Napanee Golf Club appeared in the Napanee newspapers was when someone from the club reported it to the newspaper. Yet amid all the many reports provided by club members about minor events in those days, such as the weekly club competitionsinvolving as few as half a dozen members, there is nary a word about a professional playing the golf course, let alone a Canadian Open champion, who also, by the way, shot the lowest round ever recorded on the course.
It seems to me that Keffer cannot have played the golf course and set a scoring record any time after he had won the Open Championship. He must have played the Napanee golf course and set the scoring record beforehis first Canadian Open championship victory in the summer of 1909 – when he was still George Cumming’s assistant professional at the Toronto Golf Club.
We need, therefore,to consider a possible – and I think fairly plausible – scenario.
After their contest at Kingston Golf Club in November of 1905, Napanee Golf Club directors wrote to George Cumming for advice on the designing of a new golf course. Either Cumming, or Cumming and his new assistant professional Karl Keffer, or Keffer alone, or even Keffer and his fellow Cumming apprentice Fred Rickwood himself, came to Napanee in 1906 and laid out a new course. After the construction of the golf course, at least Keffer, and perhaps Cumming or Rickwood also, returned in the summer of 1907 to play a ceremonial round of golf to officially open the new course.
Whoever played alongside him, Keffer was the one who shot the score that was ultimately remembered: 37.
Why was there no mention of Karl Keffer in a Napanee newspaper?
Recall the discussion in Volume One of this book of the fact that the golf professional was seen as a mere tradesman by the doctors, lawyers, bankers, and businessmen who comprised golf club memberships in the early 1900s. Golf was the domain of the honourable gentleman amateur. When the first Open was played at Prestwick in the 1860s, for instance, referees accompanied every professional player to keep the record of his score out of a concern that he might cheat or misreport his score, whereas every amateur was trusted to play fairly and keep his own score. Such was the distinction between the attitude toward a gentleman and the attitude toward a working-class person who played golf for money.
Around the turn of the century, golf professionals were not as a group even as good as the best amateurs. Most course records were still held by amateurs in the early 1900s. It was not until the 1920s that Canadian Golfer began to note that course records had become the domain of professional golfers. Furthermore, golf professionals in Canada played in just one tournament per year until 1911: the Canadian Open Championship. Thereafter they played in two tournaments, for the Canadian Professional Golfers Championship was created in that year. The tournament play that would make celebrities of professional golfer celebrities was still decades away.
So if George Cumming himself would have been seen as socially below the club members who consulted him in 1906, what of his mere apprentice?
Assistant professional Keffer’s 37 must have seemed a relatively un-newsworthy event to golf club members at the time. It is certainly a fact that whenever Keffer shot his record score of 37, there was no mention of it in the newspapers. In fact, when Reiffenstein shoots the amateur scoring record in 1914, there is no mention of the name of the professional golfer whose record bank manager Reiffenstein was said to have equalled. The professional golfer’s name may not even have been remembered.

Figure 15 Canadian Golfer celebrated Keffer's achievements in golf with this captioned photograph in 1919.
By 1920, however, when Secretary-Treasurer Tom German wrote to inform Canadian Golfer of the election results at the Napanee Golf Club’s annual meeting that May, he deemed it worth pointing out that a man who had subsequently won two Canadian Open championships, and who had just tied for second in the 1919 Canadian Open with an amateur from Atlanta named Bobby Jones, was the Napanee Golf Club’s course record holder. By now, the once unremarkable pre-war, pre-1909 scoring record by a no-name assistant professional from the Cumming shop was very remarkable, indeed: Karl Keffer had since made quite a name for himself!
Perhaps German was the only one who not only remembered Keffer’s feat, but also remembered his name.
More than ten years after the record was set, it seems that the Napanee Golf Club wanted to get out the word: the Napanee Golf Club has an interesting course where Canadian Open champions play!
Of course this argument that Karl Keffer was the professional golfer whose course record Reiffenstein was said to have equalled assumes that the 1914 announcement in the newspaper was incorrect in claiming that George Reiffenstein’s score of 39 had tied the professional course record.
Reiffenstein’s 39 was no doubt a new amateur record, but we have very good reason to believe that the professional record was in fact 37. This professional record – ostensibly set seven years before Reiffenstein’s magnificent performance in 1914 – had presumably simply been misremembered by the club member who reported Reiffenstein’s feat to the newspaper.
Alternatively, German may have misremembered Reiffenstein’s score from so many years before – turning a 39 into a 37.
Reiffenstein's Amateur Course Record
As we know, in one of his last rounds of golf before he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and went overseas to serve in France during World War I, George Patten Reiffenstein shot the best score ever recorded by an amateur at the Napanee Golf Course.
Under the headline “New Amateur Golf Record,” the Napanee Beaver reported as follows on September 11th, 1914 (five weeks into the war): “Mr. G. P. Reiffenstein made a new amateur record for the local golf links on Wednesday afternoon. His score was a follows: 5, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 4 – 39.”
Here is how that score translates to the scorecard.

Figure 16 George Patten Reiffenstein's Napanee Golf Club amateur course record set in September of 1914.
Reiffenstein’s score was one stroke under the Bogey score.
Of course the par score for the 1907-27 golf course according the USGA standards as of 1911 would have been much lower (33).
1907 First Hole
We have a photograph from the fall of 1912 of Caroline Herrington standing with her golf clubs on the first tee of the 1907 golf course.

Figure 17 Caroline Herrington indicates in her photograph album that this photograph was taken in the fall of 1912 on the first tee. Photograph N-08927. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
She stands in the area of some of the present tees on our ninth hole. Behind her is the stand of trees that has always grown between today’s eighth green and ninth tees. Through the trees behind her is visible the area that today serves as a driving range. The horizon of the land running through the middle of the photograph is constituted by the railway tracks on the east side of the golf course. The bare ground at her feet may mark the approach to a footbridge over the south creek that runs from the east side of the golf course through a gully all the way to Original Road (or Blanchard Road) not far from where she stands. I am guessing that because of the concentration of foot traffic at the approach to such a bridge, the ground immediately in front of it may have been worn bare.
Note, incidentally, that we see in this 1912 photograph not the fourteen-year-old novice with only a putter and a broken shaft in her golf bag that we saw in the 1906 photograph studied in Volume Two of this book, but a twenty-year-old golfer with a golf bag containing the six clubs that were regarded as the norm for a properly equipped golfer of the time.
The photograph below presents a cartoon image of a figure standing in the place today where I think that Caroline Herrington stood in the fall of 1912 at the first tee of the 1907-27 golf course. There is no sign that she was standing on the actual tee of the first hole – no chalk or whitewash outline of a teeing ground, no container of sand for making the tee – but she was in the general vicinity of the tee box.

Figure 18 Caroline Herrington indicated in her photograph album that the photograph of her on the golf course in the fall of 1912 was taken at the first tee. I believe she was standing near the area marked by the figure drawn above.
The scorecard indicates that the first hole was 347 yards in length. The green, therefore, must have been at the very top of Blanchard Hill. The Bogey score of five suggests that the hole was difficult.
We have a photograph from 1906 of “Mr. Bennett,” Caroline Herrington, and “Mr. Hall” standing on top of Blanchard Hill in the area where the first green of the 1907-27 golf course must have been located. The photograph was taken by Mary Vrooman.
These people were introduced in Volume Two of this book, where we observed the beginning of their day on the golf course in 1906 by means of photographs of Bennett and Vrooman standing before the club shed. They would have been near the first tee box, presumably about to start their round of golf. The next photograph of the group that we studied shows Herrington and Hall about to tee off on the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 golf course. We noticed in the foreground of that photograph that a significant portion of the turf in front of the tee box had been removed. This may be a sign that construction of the new course opened in May of 1907 was underway.
The remaining photographs of their day of golf seem to show the group making its way around the three new holes planned at the south end of the golf course. We shall see the group posing for photographs at what would become the tee of the first-ever version of the “gully hole.” They seem after that to have made their way up to the top of the cliff in that area of the golf course property and then to have walked along to where we see Bennett, Herrington, and Hall holding the group’s golf bags in the area of what would become the first green at the top of Blanchard Hill.

Figure 19 "Mr. Bennett," Caroline Herrington, and "Mr. Hall" at the top of Blanchard Hill in 1906. Photograph N-08785. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
We can determine fairly precisely where they are standing by examining their location relative to several buildings that are visible in the background of the photograph.
When the photograph is enlarged, behind the three golfers (over their shoulders and through the woods in the background on the right side of the photograph) a building can be seen – a building associated with what is marked on the topographical map of the day as the stone or brick house of John Blanchard.

Figure 20 An outbuilding (perhaps a garage) associated with the corner lot of John Blanchard is visible in the background behind Hall. (This building was located near the site of today's brick home across from the school on Golf Course Lane.)
Cartwright had sold two acres of land here to Blanchard in the 1870s. The lot was at the corner of what was called Original Road (or Blanchard Road, now called Hamburg Road) and the concession road now called Golf Course Lane.
Similarly, houses and farm buildings are visible at the left margin of the photograph, above and beyond the figure of Bennett. The topographical map indicates that these are wooden buildings. The ones on the left side of the cluster of buildings shown in the greatly enlarged detail below belonged to John Cannon. Cartwright sold a small 1.5 acre lot at the far south-east end of Lot 18 of Concession 7 in North Fredericksburgh Township to Cannon in 1875. Cannon’s property was at the end of today’s Golf Course Lane, on the north side of the road. The topographic map also indicates that across from Cannon’s house and outbuildings, on the south side of the road, was another property with house and outbuildings. Note also that this property contained a windmill.

Figure 21 Greatly enlarged detail of the photograph of Bennet, Herrington, and Hall shows the buildings of John Cannon and his neighbour at end of the concession road (just before the railway tracks) that is now called Golf Course Lane. Notice the windmill.
The buildings on the properties of Blanchard and Cannon, as well as the buildings across the road from Cannon, are clearly marked below on the topographic map of this area done in 1907.

Figure 22 Location of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall marked on the topographic map of the area done in 1907.
Given the location of these buildings within the photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall, we can identify the location of the three golfers within the topographic map. It turns out that they are standing in the vicinity of today’s ninth green and clubhouse.
There is further evidence that the three golfers stood on ground near today’s ninth green and clubhouse in a comparison of the photograph of them in 1906 with a late 1930s photograph of this area.

Figure 23 A photograph from the late 1930s shows four golfers on today's ninth green, watched by a man and his dog standing in the area where today's parking lot would be built. At the extreme left edge of the photograph at the centre of the page are rooflines of the buildings at the end of Golf Course Lane near John Cannon’s property.
The photograph above shows four golfers on today’s ninth green. Behind them is the clubhouse built in 1926. Observing them from the edge of a field that is the site of today’s parking lot are a man and his dog. Since the tree immediately left of the clubhouse steps (which the person disappearing into the clubhouse has just ascended) was planted no earlier than the fall of 1928, and since it is not much bigger than it appears in a photograph of the 1936 Quinte Cup champions, one assumes that this photograph was taken in the late 1930s.
At the extreme left edge of the photograph, at the horizon between land and sky, one can just detect the rooflines of two of the buildings at the end of Golf Course Lane in the vicinity of John Cannon’s property.

Figure 24 Super enlargement of a detail from the late 1930s photograph of play on the ninth green reveals the rooflines of buildings at the end of golf course lane.
One of the small barns on this property still stands at the end of Golf Course Lane today (although it is now so dilapidated that it may not remain standing much longer).
One of the small barns on this property still stands at the end of Golf Course Lane today (although it is now so dilapidated that it may not remain standing much longer).

Figure 25 Barn at the east end of Golf Course Lane today.
Because of the remarkable coincidence that both Mary Vrooman (who took the photograph of her three friends on top of Blanchard’s Hill in 1906), and the anonymous photographer of the late 1930s took their photographs from nearly identical positions near Original Road, where the slope at the top of Blanchard’s Hill is the most gentle, and because the buildings at the end of Golf Course Lane form a common point of reference on the left side of each photograph, we can superimpose the 1906 photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall upon the photograph of the four golfers in front of the clubhouse, watched by a spectator as they prepare to putt on the ninth green.
In this way, we can create a visual impression of where the three golfers from 1906 were standing relative to our contemporary landmarks.
In the composite image produced below, we can see that Bennett, Herrington, and Hall were standing just above the crest of the hill almost even with the bottom of today’s ninth green and that the pronounced rise in the ground where today a mature pine tree grows (a symbol of which is drawn onto the composite image below) was located to their left.

Figure 26 The 1906 photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall is here superimposed onto the late 1930s photograph of the ninth green and clubhouse. The symbol of a pine tree drawn on the photograph represents the pine tree that today grows on the mound evident in the late 1930s photograph. Composite photograph by Robert J. Childs.
In Volume Two of this book, we noted in 1906 photographs of Vrooman, Bennett, Herrington, and Hall certain signs that work was already underway on the new course that would open in May of 1907. We noted the felling of trees and the taking down of fences in photographs of Bennett and Vrooman standing in front of the old club shed, and we noted signs of turf dug out of the fairway in front of the fifth tee from where Herrington and Hall prepared to play. Recall that use of pre-existing turf from the golf course itself, rather than seeding new grass, was the construction method recommended for new tees and greens by the Wright & Ditson Guide reviewed in Volume Two of this book.
In the photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall that we are studying, it is possible that we catch a glimpse of what will become the green for the 1907 first hole.
In the detail from that photograph below, note that the grass at their feet immediately in front of them seems better manicured than other grass visible in the photograph. They stand at the edge between the better-manicured grass and the rougher grass. The edge between these two kinds of grass describes a gentle arc across the photograph below: it is marked by the letters “A.” This demarcating line curves gently upward from the bottom left of the photograph to the middle right. The rough grass on the top side of this line seems to comprise three low mounds (marked by the letters “B”). It is possible that soil moved to create the flatter surface for the smoother grass in front of the three golfers had been deposited here to make precisely such mounds behind the golfers.

Figure 27 Does the line suggested by the letters "A" mark the edge of a green?. Do the letters "B" mark three mounds built at the edge of a green? Left of the letter "C," does the darker circle of grass (surrounded by lighter grass), mark the location of an old hole or a makeshift hole to mark the centre of a green being built?
Most curious of all is the appearance of some sort of circular depression along the bottom edge of the photograph, left of the letter “C.” Perhaps it is the remains of a hole in which a cup had once been inserted; perhaps there was play on the new course in 1906 before its official opening in May of 1907. Or perhaps it was a marker of some sort to indicate the centre around which a green’s circumference was to be shaped.
The Hunters observe that in the newspaper’s announcement of the opening of the Napanee Golf Club’s new course in May of 1907, it was reported that “the greens were not in good condition yet” (p. 8). So we would not expect evidence of finished greens in photographs of golfers walking the new course at least six months before it was due to open.
Note that greens were not constructed in 1906 the way they are constructed today. Walter J. Travis claims that it was only through his own work in 1906 that North American golf architects began to build up greens to shape them according to contours and elevation changes that they wanted. Before this, says Travis, golf course designers accepted the lie of the land as they found it: every green would have the contours of the land as it existed in the place where the architect located it. (See Walter J. Travis, “Twenty Years of Golf,” American Golfer [9 October 1920].)
All the greens of the 1907 golf course that we will see in photographs reproduced below accord with Travis’s information: they seem to be merely parts of the fairway found suitable for putting. There are no signs that they have been elevated above the surrounding fairway or contoured in any special way.
The nature of the first hole of the 1907 new course was no doubt one of the reasons that golfers were quoted in the newspaper as saying that the new course “was much more difficult than the old course” (Hunters p. 8). Today, simply to climb up Blanchard’s Hill is for many a difficult task in its own right. Propelling a golf ball from the bottom of the hill to the top is also much more difficult than playing golf shots on level terrain. Doing so with hickory-shafted golf clubs must have made the job more difficult yet. And to have faced this golf challenge not as a task for the last hole of the round, when a golfer is as warmed up and as ready for golf as one can be, but rather as a task for the first hole of the day – when golfers are often beset with uncertainty and tentativeness, both mentally and physically – must have made this golf hole a most daunting challenge.
It was only 347 yards long, just twenty-two yards longer than the ninth hole, but the ground score for the latter was four, whereas the ground score for the former was five. The extra stroke allowed on the first was presumably in acknowledgement of its difficulty.
Play on the golf hole was not made any the easier by some sort of ball-swallowing sink hole mentioned in the “Local Ground Rules” published in the spring of 1927: “A player who drives his ball from the tee into the hole by the trees may drop back for a playable lie without penalty” (Hunters pp. 18-19). What was this mysterious hazard that was regarded by the early members of the club as simply too unfair to be the cause of a penalty stroke.
We observed in Volume Two of this book that there are hints in the photographs of 1906 that Caroline Herrington was receiving lessons on how to play golf from Herrington family friend and experienced golfer George Hall. He demonstrates the golf swing in one photograph. She carries just a putter and a broken shaft in her golf bag, presumably borrowing clubs to play her strokes this day.

Figure 28 Caroline Herrington's photograph of Thomas D'Arcy Sneath, fall 1912. Photograph N08626. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The context for the photograph of Caroline Herrington that is reproduced at the beginning of this section is completely different: standing at the first tee of the 1907 new course in the fall of 1912, she is on a date. The person who took the photograph of her in question wasthe young man she would marry one year to the month after the round of golf with him that she was about to play.
His name was Thomas D’Arcy Sneath.
As soon as he had taken the photograph of her with her bag of six clubs propped on the ground before her, they changed places and she took a photograph of him with his bag of seven clubs slung behind him over his shoulder.
What had brought Caroline Herrington to this point?
It is time to tell the story of her life between our 1906 and 1912 photographs of her.
The Story of Caroline Herrington
Known to family, friends, and teachers as Lena, Caroline Mary Herrington was born on August 4th, 1892, younger sister of Margaret Eleanor and older sister of Walter Harold. All were born, raised, and initially educated in Napanee.
Young Walter was known as Harold or “Had” to distinguish him from his father. He took after his father in more than name: like him, he became a lawyer, a mason, and a member of Camp Le Nid. He was also a member of the Napanee Golf Club.
Margaret’s family called her Helen. She also emulated her father, but not in terms of his vocation as a lawyer, but rather in terms of his avocations as a scholar: she pursued higher education, wrote academic articles, became a librarian, reviewed academic books, and so on. Unlike her siblings, Margaret never married; but, like them, she was also a member of the Napanee Golf Club.
If I interpret her earliest post-secondary education correctly, I would say that Caroline – unlike her sister – was inclined toward marriage from an early age.

Figure 29 Albert Collegiate Institute, Belleville, circa 1910. Professors Anglin and Cameron will have been among the staff assembled for this photograph.
After her graduation from the Napanee Collegiate Institute in 1909, she enrolled at Albert College in Belleville. She had just turned seventeen. At Albert College, she took voice lessons. Twenty years later, she wrote to the school magazine to inform former teachers and old school chums about her subsequent employment and mentioned that the two professors that she recalled twenty years after her graduation were Anglin and Cameron. Presumably, they were her favourites.
Professor Samuel Might Anglin was said by his family to have been very musical virtually from birth. Known by his friends as Sam, he was hired by Albert College shortly after receiving his B.A. from Queen’s University in 1905. He taught music and German at Albert College and directed the large choir at the Bridge Street Methodist Church in Belleville.
Professor Dan A. Cameron was the Director of the Vocal Department at the College. He was also the baritone soloist and choir conductor at the Bridge Street church in Belleville, and he was the conductor of Belleville’s Philharmonic Society. He taught vocal, choral, and glee classes. He was widely admired both by the music students for the “high state of the efficiency to which he … raised the musical standard of the clubs” and by the student body generally for the quality of the College concerts he organized (Albert College Times [February 1908], p.13). His favourite expressions, according to his students, were “By Jove” and “Oh Fudge” (p. 18). He was president of the College’s Athletic Society, and famous amongst the student body for “starring in acrobatic stunts” (p. 20).
Caroline’s single aunt, Lenora Herrington, who lived in her brother Walter’s Napanee home, was a graduate of Albert College a generation before Caroline and may have recommended the school to her. Or perhaps Caroline aimed to emulate her aunt.

Figure 30 Lenora Herrington, nursing sister, 1873- 1961.
Caroline’s aunt was a strong woman, a figure to be reckoned with. She was one of the legion of women inspired by Florence Nightingale in the late nineteenth century to take up nursing. During World War I, she was one of the first women to win the Military Medal. As her brother explains: “Miss Lenora Herrington, Napanee, was four years in France as a Nursing Sister, and was decorated at Buckingham Palace by His Majesty with the Military Medal. She was Night Superintendent of No. 1 Canadian General Hospital [in France] on the night of the raid in June, 1918, and was largely responsible by her personal example of courage for the maintenance of discipline and efficiency throughout that awful night” (The War Work of Lennox and Addington County, p. 100). The hospital had come under sustained bombing by the Germany army that night, during which three nurses were killed.
Throughout the terror of that bombardment, Herrington refused to deviate from her duties to her patients and the nurses serving under her. Canadian military officials argued that she deserved the Military Cross, and British officials generally agreed that she did, but the latter insisted that only men could in fact be awarded the Military Cross. Alas, the British view prevailed.
Before enrolling at Albert College, Caroline was probably taking voice lessons in Napanee from Luella Hall, George Hall’s younger sister (she was eight years younger than George, but five years older than Caroline). Luella was something of a musical prodigy in her youth and gave music lessons in Napanee when Caroline Herrington was in high school. We know that Caroline Herrington felt close to her because one of the two bridesmaids that she chose for her 1913 marriage was Luella Hall, whom she dressed “in pink brocaded satin with bodice of shadow lace and rhinestone trimming” (http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/MarriageS.htm).
Luella Hall regularly performed in public in Napanee after graduating from the Toronto Conservatory of Music, and the Conservatory kept its graduates aware of her concerts. In 1909, we read as follows in its journal: “Miss Luella Hall gave an organ recital at Napanee, in the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, on the 17th of Sept. Miss Hall will be remembered as a very talented pupil of Mr. J.W.F. Harrison. Her selections included the following difficult solo numbers: ‘Concerto Rondo,’ Hillins; ‘Rhapsodie,’ Saint-Sens; ‘Suite Gothique,’ Boellmann (1. Introduction 2. Menuet. 3 Prayer); ‘Tocatto and Fuga,’ Bach; ‘Canzona,’ Nevin; ‘Torchlight March,’ Guilmant’” (The Conservatory Bi-Monthly, vol 8 no 5 [September 1909] “Home and Foreign Notes,” p. 154). Vocalists came from Toronto to perform with her: “Miss Luella Hall, of Napanee, and a talented graduate of the Conservatory, gave a most successful evening recital with her pupils on Friday, December 6th, assisted by Mr. Francis Fischer Powers, vocalist, of Toronto. Miss Hall played the G minor Ballade of Chopin, and the exceedingly interesting programme included piano solos, trios and quartettes” (The Conservatory Monthly, vol 12 no 1 [January 1913], “Alumni Notes,” p. 15). The Toronto String Quartet came to Napanee to perform with her later the same year. She also sang, performing in 1909 at a Ladies Musical Club event called “The Opera.”
She also performed in musical operetta: in 1911, for instance, she appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore at the Briscoe Opera House, a production mounted by the Napanee Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Club. So it seems likely that she was the one who gave Caroline Herrington voice lessons and encouraged her to train further at Albert College in Belleville.
Did Caroline Herrington take voice lessons because singing was her passion? Did she do so with a view to becoming independent and earning a living from music, as Luella Hall did? Or was she refining an accomplishment that made the Victorian and Edwardian middle-class woman “a prize in the marriage market”? After all, scholars of the period suggest that the woman whose voice lessons enabled her to become “an acclaimed drawing-room singer” had gained “a pleasant addition to her list of desirable traits and abilities” (Maura Goodrich Dunst, “’Such Genius as Hers’: Music in New Woman Fiction,” Ph.D. Thesis [Cardiff University, Wales, 2013], p. 35). Of course the motive of earning a living from music and the motive of becoming a prize in the marriage market are not absolutely exclusive, but few middleclass men of the day would have tolerated a wife’s performing in public for money.
After graduating from Albert College, Caroline Herrington moved to Guelph where she attended the Macdonald Institute, an all-female institution affiliated with the Ontario Agricultural College. There, she took a “Homemakers” course for the academic year 1910-11. Her taking such a course suggests that she may well have been not just planning on marriage, but also planning for it.

Figure 31 The Macdonald Institute, Guelph, in the early 1900s. Notice the woman in white emerging from the halls of learning.
Herrington resided in Macdonald Hall, the exclusively women’s dormitory, to which at least one mischievous male undergraduate at the Ontario Agricultural College is known to have applied for accommodation in those highly segregated days. He was refused, but amused all by trying.

Figure 32 Macdonald Hall, the exclusively all-female dormitory at the Macdonald Institute, Guelph, in the early 1900s.
Denied rooms in the women’s residence, the male undergraduates at the Ontario Agricultural College still very much looked forward to the “At Homes” at the all-female Macdonald Hall. At the first of these “At Homes” in September of 1910, the “introduction committee” was busier than it would be later in the year, for the male and female students constituting the “eager throng” that “crowded” into the hall required formal introductions before they were allowed to record each other’s names on their dance cards. They danced to live music: “The programme consisted of solos, ably rendered by Miss Herrington, Miss Crews and Mr. J.B. Ellis, and piano solos by Miss Huestis and Mr. J.D. Lawson. These numbers were given in the gymnasium and were highly appreciated by all present…. Ten o’clock found the hall still ringing with the conversation and laughter of the merry couples. But, alas! The rules of Macdonald Hall must not be broken, and reluctant good nights were said and halls emptied before 10:30” (OAC Review, vol xxiii no 2 [November 1910], p. 88).
Caroline Herrington’s singing at the Macdonald Institute was not a one-off affair. At the “Promenade Bazaar” in December, “The programme in the Gym consisted of a violin solo by Miss Farmer, songs by Miss Herrington and Mr. Gibson, and an instrumental by Mr. J.R. Lund” (OAC Review, vol xxiii no 4 [January 1911], p. 218).
Most of the young women in Macdonald Hall would have had some training in singing as part of their up-bringing as middle-class women. That Caroline was the one who regularly performed at Macdonald Institute events suggests that she had an above-average musical ability and that perhaps she had indeed gone to Albert College to develop an exceptional talent.
Her family travelled to Guelph for her graduation in May of 1911, where they enjoyed the Macdonald Institute’s second ever May Day graduation ceremony (on May 26th). The ceremony involved a May Queen, a May Pole, dances, tea on the lawn, evening performances of verse and song, and fireworks (graduating classes in certain high schools in North America performed these May Day graduations well into the latter part of the twentieth century, and some still do).
The OAC Review devoted a section each issue to newsfrom the Macdonald Institute, and so we have an extensive report on Caroline Herrington’s graduation day:
As in the ancient festivities,the main feature of the day is the crowning of the May Queen. The conferring of the honored position of May Queen rests with the students. The girls are at liberty to choose her whom they all love, all admire, all respect. This year Miss Wink Frank was selected …. At 4:30 o’clock, on May Day, the Macdonald girls in dainty white frocks all assembled in the gymnasium and after forming in a line two and two they marched out to campus where the events were to occur. First came about twenty of the girls each carrying a brown and gold shepherd’s crook and buttercups. The crooks were joined together at the right distance by a slender rope when each girl took her proper place, marked off by a large space on the green for the dances and crowning of the Queen. Then came the rest of the Juniors carrying blossom covered boughs and wildflowers. Following these came the May Pole bearers, who carried out and placed in position the May Pole. The girls formed in a long double line through which the Queen was to pass followed by her maids of honor. Two tiny tots – dainty little flower-girls – led the way strewing the path to the platform with blossoms. How sweetly gracious and stately looked the Queen as she went to her crowning followed by two train bearers! The Queen took her place, her maids of honor grouped about her and she knelt to receive the crown …. (“The May Day Fete,” OAC Review (vol 23 no 10 [July 1911], pp. 570-72)
Fortunately, a photographer was present in 1911 to record forever the high points of these elaborate faux-May-Day ceremonies, and so at this great distance of time we can still witness the crowning of the May Queen just described.

Figure 33 The May Queen has been duly crowned and now presides over the graduation ceremonies, sitting on her throne under a floral arch, attended by maids of honour, flower girls seated on steps below. OAC Review, vol 23 no 10 [July 1911], p. 570.
The May Queen duly crowned, the May Pole was decorated and dances were performed around it.

Figure 34 The ancient spring rite, the May Pole dance, as incorporated in Macdonald Institute 1911 graduation ceremonies. OAC Review, op. cit., p. 572.
Of course for those of a psychoanalytical disposition, May Day rituals have long been interpreted as fertility rituals in which the Pole serves as a phallic symbol worshipped by chaste maidens not destined to remain so for very long, but in lieu of a thousand words on that topic, the picture above will have to suffice.
Caroline’s Homemakers’ class was asked to perform a special dance: the “Rheinlander,” a German dance invented in the nineteenth century, done in 2/4 time to slow Polka music (36 beats per minute).

Figure 35 Caroline Herrington is one of the members of the graduating class of Homemakers performing the "Rheinlander." OAC Review, op. cit., p. 571.
Conventionally, the dance involves a gentleman and a lady dancing as a couple, but at the all-girl Macdonald Institute, the graduating ladies danced with each other (the May Pole perhaps standing as the upright gentleman).
The rituals of spring would not be complete, however, without an actual act of fertility. So we read next of the president of the Ontario Agricultural College and the May Queen engaging in a very green ritual: “After … the several dainty dances were finished, President Creelman and the May Queen led the way to the spot chosen for the planting of the 1911 graduation tree, and the time-honored class ceremony was performed.”

Figure 36 The hole in the foreground has been dug. A shovel lies within it. A member of the OAC service staff prepares the class tree for planting by the Macdonald Institute graduating class of 1911. OAC Review, op. cit.
The account of the graduation ceremonies continues in the OAC Review, for the day’s events are far from over:
Tea was served on the lawn … and that tea on the lawn must ever prove a happy memory to every Macdonald girl who was there. To add to the happiness many out of town friends were present to participate in the day’s pleasures. The evening programme … had been prepared by the students …. The “Macdonald Searchlight” [presumably a poem composed by the graduating class of Homemakers], which was worthy of its editors, the Homemakers, was read by Lena Herrington…. Selections from Mr. Graesser’s Victrola proved a rare treat…. Vera McHarg and Amy Clarke delighted all with their vocal solos …. A fitting and delightful wind-up of the day’s sport was a line display of fireworks which Dr. Creelman kindly had put off from the top of the Institute. When the last skyrocket had made its majestic flight and fallen into a shower of glowing stars, the students and their guests went into the gymnasium where the festivities were drawn to a close by an enjoyable impromptu dance, and the second “May Day” became one more pleasant memory of Macdonald Days. (“The May Day Fete,” p. 572)
Again, we note, Caroline Herrington was chosen from among her peers as an exceptional performer: this time as a reader of poetry.

Figure 37 Tea served on the lawn after the May Day graduation ceremonies. OAC Review, op. cit., p. 573.
This account of “The May Day Fete” was contextualized in the OAC Review by the observation that “At the close of the school year at the Macdonald Institute, numerous paths lead from its open doors to the great outer world of opportunity and achievement. Some paths lead successful graduates to positions of honor and trust in other educational institutions, some to the school room from which the wave of knowledge flows and spreads, and a great many other kindly paths lead to the homes” (p. 570).
Caroline Herrington went home.
She returned to Napanee in June of 1911 ready to make any house a home. That fall, an article in the OAC Review described the typical behaviour of the enthusiastic Homemaker graduate during the summer of 1911 after her return to the family home. Because of her education, the writer observed, she would inevitably find her parents’ house not sufficiently a home according to the scientific standards of the Macdonald Institute:
School is over and with feelings of mingled joy and regret the now “experienced Homemaker” packs her trunks and takes the first train home. An uncontrollable gladness fills her heart as she is welcomed by the devoted family. The welcome is prolonged for several days and for a short time the homecomer experiences the pleasures of an honored guest.
But now she must go around the “home,” which she is to “make,” on a tour of inspection. Of course she begins at the kitchen – and what a shock greets her here. The maid is actually cleaning her windows without a newspaper under her pail! Now is the time to quote house practice cards and they are produced. Many explanations and directions follow. Alas! There is the meat still lying in the paper in which it was delivered, exposed to the heat and flies. Flies! Imagine! Little does the menial reck one fly now means a million by October, but the Homemaker is only too pleased to enlighten her on the life history of these pests.
Now let us follow the Homemaker on her tour. “Oh, those library curtains, they must come down, for we can’t have red curtains with buff walls. We’ll get a soft russet shade which will harmonize beautifully.” Now for the back yard. That old picket fence must be taken away immediately as it is neither useful nor ornamental, and those cans must be removed before it rains or we’ll have thousands of mosquitoes. How careless to have Syringa growing near the house; anyone knows that Buffalo moths are more numerous on it than blossoms.
Everywhere there is room for improvement, so the tearing down and fixing up begins.
Now the maid leaves.
This unforeseen catastrophe is surely enough to dishearten any ordinary mortal, but not the Homemaker. She looks up her notes and rising to the occasion makes out her plan for housekeeping. The family must all rise at seven o’clock – what matter if she hear sleepy mutterings about being more of a home-breaker than homemaker. Even Abraham Lincoln had to battle storms of abuse before he mastered the situation, and so with our Homemaker.
Now for the “division of labour” and the “standard of living.” Of course someone must oversee and direct, and why not the one who has been trained to do so? The Homemaker again. Here follow cottage puddings, with chocolate sauce, the lemon mists and orange vapors, mysterious soufflés and floating islands. No more waste or scraps. The left-overs are turned into delicious confections, so what does it matter if more have to be bought originally so that there will be left-overs to work with?
Then comes the wrestling with accounts. Such reckless extravagance as is discovered. Instead of using kerosene and bathbrick, they have been buying Dutch cleanser and paying for advertising and package as well as contents, and home-made soap is a thing unthought of. This must stop: another reformation is on foot and the family fortunes will be retrieved.
Thus in this delightful manner the summer passes, and from attic to cellar (don’t forget the cellar) our industrious worker finds places for improvement and lives up to the “standard” which for a whole year she has never been allowed to forget. (“Summer Vacation of a Homemaker,” OAC Review, vol xxiv no 1 (October 1911), pp. 46-8, emphasis added)
If such was Caroline’s behaviour on her return from Guelph in June of 1911, the Herrington’s maid may well have quit, just like the one imagined in this narrative. Home-maker or home-breaker: that is indeed a question!
But what would her mother’s reaction have been? What influence on Caroline might the example of Mrs. Herrington – Mary Matilda Tilley – have had?
Her obituary reveals that she was a classic example of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century middle-class womanhood:
Mrs. Herrington was a very prominent and public-spirited member of the community, and was an enthusiastic and energetic worker in every good cause. For many years she had been identified with the Children’s Aid Society, and at the time of her death was head of the Women’s finance Committee of the Victorian Order of Nurses. During the war the Red Cross work benefited by her labours, and it may be said that no movement for the welfare of the community failed to draw from her a sympathetic and substantial support. But what elicited the most unstinted devotion of her time and her talents was the work of her Church. In Sunday School, Choir, Women’s Auxiliary, and almost every form of church activity, her earnest zeal was manifested. For several years she had been President of the Church Woman’sGuild, and upon its work were lavished her time and her efforts, while her gifts of leadership and her personal popularity ensured that cooperation which so recently resulted in the achievement of the society’s main objective. In her Church, in the town, and in a very wide circle of friends, will Mrs. Herrington be greatly missed. (http://www.sfredheritage.on.ca/deathsobitsH.htm)
Perhaps it had been admiration for the kind of life her mother led by using the family home and the traditional world of middle-class women as her base that drew Caroline towards the Homemakers course at the Macdonald Institute.
Whatever the behaviour of Caroline upon her return to the Herrington home in 1911 (and whatever the reaction of others to it), however, all that would soon be moot: Caroline was about to acquire her own house to make a home, for the next spring she met the man she would marry – a recent Queen’s University graduate in civil engineering named Thomas D’Arcy Sneath.
Three years older than Caroline, he had come to Napanee during the summer of 1912 with fellow engineer and best friend Henry Lovell (whom Caroline called “Hank”): their job was to supervise the dredging of the Napanee River.
We will meet Henry Lovell shortly, putting on the second green of the 1907-27 golf course.
The two engineers quickly became friends of Caroline Herrington’s next-door neighbour, the Dominion Bank manager George Patten Reiffenstein. We will meet him on the second green, too.
All four of them especially enjoyed the golf course, where, as we know, Caroline and D’Arcy were playing golf on their own by the fall of 1912. By the spring of 1913, they had fallen in love, and in November of that year they were married.
It is time, then, to tell the story of Thomas D’Arcy Sneath up to the point of his arrival in Napanee.
The Story of Thomas D'Arcy Sneath, Part One
In photographs of Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, his posture is noteworthy: he stands straight, his shoulders square, his gaze direct and focused. It seems that his character could be described in the same way: he was morally upright, he was composed, and he led by example.

Figure 38 D'Arcy Sneath, Napanee Golf Club, 1912.Photograph N-09006. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
In fact, he was a born leader of men. But in the early twentieth century, many of those who were fated to lead men were also fated to die young.
His family and friends called him D’Arcy. He was born in the township of East Oxford, in Oxford County, in southwestern Ontario, on 19 August 1888. Sneath’s World War One attestation papers indicate that he was born in 1889, but his birth certificate says he was born in 1888, and his birth announcement appeared in the Woodstock Sentinel Review on 22 August 1888 (p. 2).
After his education in the local schools of rural Oxford County and the nearby town of Woodstock, Sneath served for seven months in the Royal North-West Mounted Police and for two years in the 3rd Regiment of the Prince of Wales Canadian Dragoons, a militia force.
Still a teenager, he enrolled in the fall of 1907 at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, to study science. In 1909, he enrolled in the Applied Science programme.
Sneath excelled at his academic studies, but he was also interested in student sports. For the school year 1909-1910 he was the Science representative on the Committee of the Association Football Club (that is, the “soccer club”).
Perhaps his soccer career was responsible for the scar on his left shin noted by the Canadian army medical examiners several years later when he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I.

Figure 39 Thomas D'Arcy Sneath, B.Eng., Queen's University, 1911.
In his graduating year at Queen’s University in 1911, Sneath was initiated into the Ontario chapter of the exclusive Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. He took fraternity life seriously. Four members of Phi Sigma Kappa were in the wedding party at his marriage to Caroline Herrington in November of 1913, one as groomsman, and three as ushers.
When Lena Herrington was preparing for her graduation from the Macdonald Institute in May of 1911, Sneath accepted a position with the “Department of Public Works of the Dominion of Canada.” He was hired as an Assistant Engineer by the notable engineer Josiah Gershom Sing, a fellow Woodstock resident from before Sneath’s birth, and since 1900 an important engineer working for the Government of Canada (in succession, he was Engineer in charge of Public Works in the Western District of Ontario, then the Eastern and Northern Districts, and then as of 1911 Engineer in charge of Toronto Harbor improvements and also the Toronto Water Works commission).
His office was at the top of the famous Canada Life Building in Toronto, where Sneath would also work.
A fellow employee under Sing was Henry Lovell, who was sent with Sneath to Napanee in 1912 to supervise the dredging of the Napanee River. The pair became fast friends. Photographs in Caroline Herrington’s photograph album show the two of them chumming together not only in Napanee, but also in Europe, where they were engaged in dredging operations in both France and Germany in the year before war broke out.
When Sneath and Lovell first came to Napanee, perhaps in the spring of 1912, I suspect that one of the first acquaintances they made was with George Patten Reiffenstein, the new manager of the town’s Dominion Bank. Both to manage their personal expenses while in Napanee and to manage the expenses associated with their dredging operation, they would have had to have made arrangements with a local bank.
Their choice of the Dominion as their bank was fateful, for Reiffenstein was golf-mad. He had arrived in town late in 1911, just months before Sneath and Lovell, to replace the outgoing Dominion Bank manager Dudley Leicester Hill. Reiffenstein immediately joined the Napanee Golf Club, representing it in matches against Kingston in October and getting himself appointed to the club’s Board of Governors in April of 1912. As we know, he would set the amateur course record at the Napanee Golf Club two years later. Shortly after he met Sneath and Lovell, he had the two of them playing golf with him on the Napanee golf course.
Presumably it was through Reiffenstein that Sneath and Lovell were introduced to middle-class society in Napanee, including the daughters of doctors and lawyers, such as the Vrooman sisters and the Herrington sisters. The Reiffensteins lived beside the Herringtons and were obviously quite close, for Caroline Herrington included a photograph of the Reiffenstein children in her photograph album and wrote under it: “Darcy’s rivals: the Reiffenstein Infants.”
Beneath a photograph of a dredging barge on the Napanee River, Caroline Herrington wrote the following phrase in her photograph album: “The cause of it all.” By November of 1912, D’Arcy Sneath and Caroline Herrington were a twosome on the golf course; in November of 1913 they became a twosome for life. In her album, under the heading “Spring 1913,” Herrington wrote, “It’s funny what a difference a few months make.”
They were married until death parted them. Alas, death arrived less than five years later.
But that is a story for a later section.
1907 Second Hole
Before we are introduced to Henry Lovell and George Patten Reiffenstein putting on the second green, we need to consider the puzzle of where the second tee was located, and the related question of where the second fairway ran.
The 1906 photograph of Bennett, Herrington and Hall shows two possible routes for the se cond fairway. It might have run along what is today the first fairway, or it might have run across the area that is today occupied by the parking lot and the practice putting green.

Figure 40 The broken orange arrow on the right marks the route of today's first fairway. The diagonal orange arrow on the left points over today's parking lot and putting green in the direction of the 1907-27 second green, which was close to today's first green. Photograph N-08785.Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
In the photograph above, the broken arrow on the right points down the area where today’s first fairway is found. It is difficult to tell from this photograph whether there was enough room between the trees in that area for a fairway to be run. Some of the trees that we see could have been scheduled for felling. We know from the photograph of Vrooman in front of the club shed (studied in Volume Two of this book) that trees were being felled in the area near the clubhouse.
The diagonal orange arrow on the left of the photograph points across the area where today we have a parking lot and a practice putting green. The green for the second hole of the 1907-27 golf course was located at the tip of this arrow, just left of where the present first green is located. We see a tree on the ground along the line of this arrow, to its right, in the background behind Bennett. Perhaps trees were being removed along this line of possible play.
There may be some evidence in the late 1930s photograph of this area that we studied above that such was the line of the original fairway for this hole. It shows that over time even more trees were removed from this ostensible line of play. By the 1930s, the present first fairway was in use for this hole. The area we are considering as perhaps the fairway of the second hole of the 1907-27 golf course remained a treeless field of overgrown grass – just as a fairway no longer in use might have done.

Figure 41 The orange broken arrow indicates a possible route for the second fairway of the 1907-27 golf course. In this late 1930s photograph, this route remains a treeless field of overgrown grass, as a disused fairway might have done.
The only thing that we know for sure about the fairway of the second hole of the 1907-27 golf course is that there were fearsome bunkers somewhere along the way to the green, for “Local Ground Rules” published by the golf club in April of 1927 advise as follows: “A ball played into the bunkers may be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke” (Hunters 18-19).
Were these bunkers particularly difficult to escape, or were too many club members really bad bunker players? Recall that the modern sand wedge was not invented until the 1930s, by Gene Sarazen. As Bruce Medd noted, back in the late 1920s and early 1930s, “Usually, you would buy a driver, a mashie and a mashie niblick, which would relate to today’s five and seven irons. No one had any nine irons or wedges” (Hunters p. 125).
The second hole was 298 yards long. Its ground score was four.
Although we may not be able to tell where the second fairway of the 1907-27 course ran, we can tell where it ended, for we have a photograph of Henry Lovell and George Patten Reiffenstein putting on it

Figure 42 Putting simultaneously on the second green of the 1907-27 golf course: George Patten Reiffenstein (left) and Henry Lovell (right), summer of 1912. Photograph N-08888. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
We can see behind and below them the valley of what was in those days called the “gully hole” (what is today our second hole). The green on which they putt was obviously built right alongside the cliff between today’s first green and the lower tees of today’s second hole.
In the greatly enlarged detail below of the photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell putting on the second green of the 1907-27 golf course, we can see more of the third hole of that golf course, the “gully hole.” We can also see in the background where the forest along the left side of the hole ends and where the golf course begins to open up again at the point where the next hole begins and the rest of the holes of the 1907-27 golf course are to be found.

Figure 43 This 1912 image of the gully hole and the beginning of the next golf hole is produced by greatly enlarging the background of the photograph above of Reiffenstein and Lovell. Photograph N-08888. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
If we assume that edge of the forest in the valley of the south creek of the golf course remains fairly constant over time, and that the forest along the left (west) side of the “gully hole” ended then – as it ends now – at the teeing area for the next hole, then we can use this area as a common reference point between the golf course then and the golf course now. Once again, then, we can superimpose an old photograph – our 1912 photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell – on a contemporary photograph of the same area.
We can thereby estimate where the second green of the 1907-27 course was located relative to our first green today.

Figure 44 Reiffenstein and Lovell on the second green of the 1907-27 golf course appear as ghosts where they would be on the golf course today. Photograph N-08888. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives. Composite photograph by Robert J. Childs.
Interestingly,there is no mention in the 1927 “Local Ground Rules” of the consequences of playing a ball over or into the fence that we see in the 1912 photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell. Since those “Local Ground Rules” mention the consequences of playing over or into fences on the fourth, sixth, and eighth holes of the 1907-27 golf course, one must presume that by 1927 the green in the 1912 photograph had been moved from its 1907 location at the edge of the cliff, eliminating the need for a reference to this fence.
Incidentally, I think we can tell from the photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell that it was apparently designed to be an “action” shot: Reiffenstein and Lovell were going to putt their balls simultaneously, and the photographer was to capture this event. Notice that Reiffenstein has just struck his ball: it has just left his putter and so both the ball and the putter are a little bit blurred because they are in motion. And Reiffenstein’s head was also in motion after his stroke, making his image blurry relative to that of Lovell. Lovell is just about to strike his ball: his putter is paused at the end of his back-swing. Their timing was just a little bit off for the simultaneous hits that they planned.
As we will see in later photographs, the companion of Reiffenstein and Lovell this day was their buddy D’Arcy Sneath. Perhaps he was the one who set up the “action” shot. Whatever the case may be, we will see similar fooling around in later photographs.
Notice also, by the way, that Reiffenstein uses the Vardon grip, the overlapping grip popularized by Harry Vardon about fifteen years earlier. (It is still used by about seventy percent of the world’s golfers.) Lovell, however, uses the unequal grip, with his hands slightly separated: he has come to golf from baseball or hockey, perhaps, and does not know that his grip undermines his potential at golf. Reiffenstein has clearly had an opportunity to observe good golfers playing the game, and has perhaps had high-calibre instruction. As we know, he set the amateur course record in 1914.
And note, finally, that this green, which would have been a long-grassed, slow-putting green in relation to what we have today, was no doubt a huge improvement over the greens on the 1897-1906 golf course. The putting surface is flat and level. The grass seems healthy and dense. The grass coverage seems full and consistent.
But whether the fairways of the new course of 1907 were also immediately improved is not clear. In particular, the question of when the fairways began to be tended with mowers cannot be answered. We read in the Napanee Beaver of 19 May 1911 that scores were poor at the opening of the golf course that year because of the “long grass in the fair green which is very difficult to negotiate.” The phrase “fair green” is the equivalent of our term fairway. It seems that in the spring of 1911 the cattle had not eaten the grass down to a manageable length for golfers.
Another nearby small-town golf course of similar vintage, the Links of Glen Tay at Perth, managed its fairways in the same way around this time: the American Annual Golf Guide of 1916 indicates that “This is a small, natural course, greens good, fair greens unkept” (p. 287).
The first reference in the newspapers to the fairways’ being cut with a mechanical mower does not appear until 1925, near the end of the life of the 1907-27 golf course: “The Napanee Golf Links are in exceptionally fine condition now, the regular rains bringing the grass on so rapidly that the greens are in splendid shape and the fairways are being closely cut” (Napanee Beaver, 29 June 1925). The 1925 mower was likely drawn by a horse, with a person seated on the mower.
After World War II, however,mechanical mowers were in use: “The cutting of the fairways in those days was done with a Jeep, pulling strung together ‘gang mowers’” (Wilbert Sweet, cited in Hunters, p. 49).
The Story of Henry Lovell, Part One
What is the story behind the arrival of Henry Lovell to the second green of the Napanee Golf Club in the summer of 1912?
Images of always grinning, impish, mischievous Henry Peirce Lovell abound in Caroline Herrington’s photographs of the pre-war years when “Lena”and D’Arcy became the centre in Napanee of a group of middle-class friends who enjoyed golfing, hunting, fishing and camping together.

Figure 45 William Henry Lovell, 1828-1907, grandfather of Hank.
Known to these Napanee friends as “Hank,” Henry hailed from Quebec. In fact, he was a member of a politically prominent family there. His father Moody was a member of the Quebec National Assembly and a personal friend of Wilfrid Laurier. His uncle Charles was a member of the House of Commons, and his grandfather William Henry Lovell was first a mayor of Coaticook, then a member of the Quebec National Assembly, and then a member of the House of Commons.
The Lovell family had originally emigrated from New England to Quebec in the early 1800s, but the family determinedly retained its New England connections for over a hundred years. Henry Lovell’s mother Charlotte Peirce descended from some of New England’s most prominent families, many of which had arrived on the Mayflower in the early 1600s.
Marriages between Lovells in Quebec and families of long acquaintance in New England continued into the 1900s.
Born in Coaticook, Stanstead County, Quebec, near the city of Sherbrooke, on September 19th, 1891, Henry Lovell lost his father just after he had turned 10 years of age. His father was a manufacturer (when he was not a politician) who ran his own father’s lumber company. The Lovell men who had preceded Henry (his grandfather and his grandfather’s three sons, including Henry’s father) had by the early 1900s also created a water company and an electricity company.
The father Moody had died before his son Henry could be introduced to work in these businesses. Perhaps this accounts for his lack of interest in business. But it does not explain his apparent determination to become independent of both the family’s businesses and the family’s traditions of service in local, provincial, and federal politics.
Whether by accident or by design, Lovell’s history after the completion of his education in Quebec comprises a series of cycles, each of which begins with brief returns home and then departures for worlds different from – and increasingly further from – the family, friends, and influences of Coaticook.
Young Henry’s earliest schooling was at the Coaticook Academy, the first of three religious institutions in which he would be educated.

Figure 46 Coaticook Academy, Stansted County, Quebec, in the late 1800s.
It dated from the mid-nineteenth century and was owned and operated by the Anglican Church, although it was open to other denominations.
Lovell then continued his education at the Feller Institute, the recently re-named Mission School at Grand Ligne, which described itself as “historically a Pentecostal, and hence a sacred place,” whose mission had been for almost 100 years the conversion of Quebec Roman Catholics to Protestantism (Historical Sketch of the Grand Ligne Mission [Montreal: Morton Phillips, 1893], p. 14).
The President of the Feller Institute wrote of the institute’s mission: “There are more than a million of Roman Catholics in this Province who have never heard the pure Gospel; most of them have never read the Bible, and in this sense are as much in need of the gospel as the people of India…. The Institute is a necessity as an academic school for French Protestant children, and as a training school for our colporteurs and missionaries. Over 50 pastors, evangelists, colporteurs and Bible women are now at work for Christ, who have graduated from this place” (pp. 17-18).

Figure 47 The Feller Institute, Grand Ligne, Quebec, in the early twentieth century.
After his education in this aggressively Protestant school system, Henry Lovell entered the University of Bishop’s College (now Bishop’s University). Like the Coaticook Academy, it was run by the Anglican Church and, just as the Feller Institute educated many missionaries, so Bishop’s College educated many generations of Quebec Anglicans for the ministry.
The religious tenor of undergraduate life at Bishop’s college when Lovell chose to go there is suggested by the undergraduate student’s publication, The Mitre, which always contained articles on Anglicanism and a section devoted to “Divinity Notes,” including announcements regarding the churches where the newly graduated “Divinity men” had been placed and expressions of best wishes for these graduates: “We wish all these men God’s blessing and every success in their work, praying that he may grant to each a long and fruitful life in His vineyard” (vol xxvii no 1 [Michaelmas 1920], p. 11).
When Lovell died “in the prime of his life,” the Anglican minister in Coaticook who conducted the funeral service was asked by Lovell’s “old schoolmate and long-time friend,” the Reverend C.G. Stevens, if he could assist at the funeral service. Reverend Stevens was allowed to do so, and he also served as a pall bearer.
Note also that in The Storied Province of Quebec Past and Present (ed. Col. William Wood [5 volumes; Toronto: Dominion Publishing Company, 1931], pp. 559-600) we read that Lovell “was a man of great promise, devoted to good Christian works,” which confirms that the religious mission of Bishop’s College would have been of interest to him. This quotation from the book in question also suggests that his home life would have reinforced the Protestant Christian education that he received, for this information about his “good Christian works” was probably provided to the book’s author by Lovell’s mother and sisters after his death.

Figure 48 Henry Lovell, Bishop's College football (i.e. rugby) team, 1908.
Young Henry was just 17 years old when he graduated from the Feller Institute. The Montreal Gazette announced in June that he had qualified for “Entrance to Applied Science” by passing his qualifying examination in trigonometry. So he was not yet 18 years old when he entered the University of Bishop’s College in 1908. Yet despite being one of the youngest freshmen on campus that fall, Lovell made the football team. He would have had to have been a very good athlete to have displaced older and more experienced player’s from such a team. Furthermore, he thereby earned his “colours” in very short order at Bishop’s College (students earned their colours for their contribution to their university “house” by all-round university activities, including the playing of sports).
So young Henry was on his way, and he was going fast. But it was not yet clear to him precisely where was he going.
In addition to being a good athlete, Lovell also seems to have excelled at his studies, especially the maths and sciences. Here, rather than in the priesthood, he would find his calling. And his calling to study the maths and sciences in earnest would also call him away from Bishop’s College in 1909, as we learn from an announcement in The Mitre: “Mr Henry Lovell is taking a course in Science at McGill University this year” (vol xvii no 1 [Oct 1909], p. 14). Lovell actually decided to take more than one course at McGill; he decided to take his degree at McGill, enrolling in the Applied Science programme. In 1912, he graduated as a civil engineer.
While he was away from Coaticook studying at university, he remained attentive to his widowed mother, if we are to judge by reports in the Sherbrooke newspaper. The Sherbrooke Daily Record regularly noted that “H.P. Lovell” was home during the various holidays to visit his mother (see, for instance, 22 December 1911 and 27 December 1911). In 1913, we again read in the “Coaticook” section of the paper that “Mr Henry Lovell” is back home, and also that he is “spending a couple of weeks with friends in Sherbrooke” (Sherbrooke Daily Record, 20 June 1913, p. 2).
Henry may not have felt quite as close to other family members as he did to his mother, however, for when his grandmother Lovell died in December of 1913, twenty-two year-old Henry, now living and working in Toronto, chose not to return home. Of course his mother attended the Coaticook funeral of her mother-in-law, but the Daily Record noted that “Henry P. Lovell of Toronto, grandson,” was one of two grandchildren who did not attend the funeral but instead sent “telegrams of condolence” (9 December 1913).

Figure 49 Henry Peirce Lovell, B. Eng. McGill University, 1912.
Despite his apparent determination to make his way in the world independent of his family’s Quebec connections in business and politics, young Henry had nonetheless learned the importance of social connections. While at McGill, he joined the recently established Quebec chapter of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity (this chapter of the fraternity was called the Quebec Alpha), membership of which he took quite seriously. When he moved to Toronto in the spring of 1912 to begin his career as a civil engineer with the Public Works Department of the government of Canada, for instance, we read in the report of the Ontario Alpha of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity at the University of Toronto that “Brother H.P. Lovell of Quebec Alpha … for several years lived with us at the chapter house here” (The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, vol xl [ ], p. 5).
His family seems to have been proud of this achievement on Henry’s part, for his obituary in the Sherbrooke Daily Record reports at the end of the paragraph about his education (as though it were the culmination of his university education) that “While at McGill he became a member of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity” (18 July 1927).
After graduation, Lovell’s immediately securing employment in Toronto as an Assistant Engineer with the Public Works Department was fateful.
He was hired by Public Works at the same time as another recently graduated civil engineer: Thomas D’Arcy Sneath. As Assistant Engineers for Public Works, Lovell and Sneath together learned the art of dredging and seemed always thereafter to have worked as a team on a variety of dredging assignments. They came to Napanee together in 1912, for instance, to dredge the Napanee River. Afterwards, they travelled to Europe together on dredging assignments. There, they were photographed in their work gear in ports in France and Germany just before the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914.
Not surprisingly, they became best friends, and so of course Lovell was one of Sneath’s groomsmen when Sneath and Caroline Herrington were married in Napanee on 6 November 1913.
In Napanee, however, the two amigos became three when they met George Patten Reiffenstein, whose story I tell next.
The Story of George Patten Reiffenstein, Part One
George Patten Reiffenstein was an Ottawa native, born in New Edinburgh, a suburb of Ottawa, on 23 March 1883, the son of James Henry Reiffenstein, a surveyor who became a civil servant working for the federal government of Canada, and Eugenie Florence Brigham, whose family had been in Ottawa virtually since that region’s founding. (The Brighams were one of the half-dozen loyalist families that Philemon Wright brought with him from the United States in the late 1700s to settle in Ottawa; Stan Brigham, present manager of the Champlain Golf Course on behalf of the National Capital Commission, is a member of this family and a cousin of Reiffenstein’s.)
From the beginning, George and his siblings were academic stars at school. In the 1890s, the Ottawa newspapers regularly list the Reiffenstein children as winners of high standing in various disciplines at the local public schools. At the Waller Street School in 1896, for example, thirteen-year-old “Patten Reiffenstein” (our George Patten Reiffenstein) won first place in the Fifth Class. The next year, Reiffensteins are named in the papers as winning first place in mathematics and in science, and third place in classics. One of them won a “commercial prize”: this must have been our “Pat,” one likes to think, for in due course he became, first, a bank accountant and, second, a bank manager.

Figure 50 Sixteen-year-old George Patten Reiffenstein, Ottawa Collegiate Institute football (rugby) team, 1899.
George obviously graduated from the Waller Street School with the highest of academic honours. He then moved on for his high-school education to the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, also known as Lisgar Collegiate Institute. Here he excelled as an athlete. In 1899 and 1900, he played on the OCI hockey team, promoted by some members of the community as the best hockey team in the city. In 1898, for instance, a widely anticipated exhibition match was arranged between the Lisgar Collegiate team and the champions of the Ottawa City League: “The match with the Bryson, Graham & Co. team in 1898 attracted great attention at the time. The Ottawa Evening Journal had offered a trophy to be given to the most popular hockey team in the Ottawa Valley, the winner to be chosen by readers of that paper. The contest had narrowed down to the O.C.I, and the B. G. & Co. teams, the latter at that time champions of the city league, when someone wrote to the paper asking about the record of the O.C.I. team and whether they could play hockey or not.
The answer was an immediate challenge and a score of 10 to 0 in favor of the O.C.I, in the subsequent match” (A History of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, 1843-1903, ed. By Ottawa Collegiate Institute Ex-Pupils’ Association [Ottawa: Mortimer Company, 1904], p. 120). The OCI hockey team nonetheless finished second in the public voting for the Ottawa Evening Journal trophy by a vote of 25,000 to 20,000.
Regardless of the result of the newspaper’s popularity contest, however, it is clear that Lisgar’s team of teenaged scholars played hockey at a very high level.
The same was true of the OCI rugby team, for which Reiffenstein also played in 1899 and 1900. The team played against other high-school teams in matches as far afield as Renfrew and Montreal (winning both home-and-home series). In fact, the team was so good that “the Collegiate boys were invited to practise with the senior Rough Riders …. The following clippings show how the boys faced this very unequal contest. ‘Those Collegiate youths would tackle a Wendigo’ (Ottawa Citizen). ‘It was surprising how those Rough Riders picked up after we started to practise with them’ (Vox Lycei)” (A History of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, 1843-1903, p. 117). (Note that to tackle a Wendigo was a supernatural feat, for the wendigo was in Algonquin myth an evil spirit or man-eating creature.)
Clearly Reiffenstein was not just a good scholar but also an exceptional athlete.
But young Reiffenstein is today remembered in the annals of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute on Lisgar Street less as an academic or athlete than as defender of civil rights. The controversial event for which Reiffenstein is remembered in Ottawa history, and very much celebrated in “Lisgar” history, occurred in January of 1900.
In an account of the lead-up to the event in question written by former Lisgar students just a couple of years after Reiffenstein graduated from the school (some of them fellow students of Reiffenstein’s), we read as follows in A History of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute: “Life at the Ottawa Collegiate is like all school life – like all life – in this respect, that it has long stretches, practically barren of event, followed by short periods in which events thicken. In the Lisgar Street Institute, throughout the years 1898 and 1899, day followed day in wearisome monotony. Meantime, however, mischief had been brewing in South Africa, and its effervescence disturbed the whole British Empire – and, therefore, the O.C.I. About the days of the spring term of 1900 there was a spirit of delightful uncertainty, any day might be a holiday – there was no restraining the military and patriotic ardor of the boys, or, indeed, of the girls. On January 19th there was a half-holiday that we might see the North-West Contingent on its way to the scene of the warfare. They came in by train at about 1 p.m., and marched down Wellington Street to Parliament Hill. What splendid looking fellows they were! What a stirring sight for the youth of the country they presented as they marched along, eight deep, erect, stalwart, steady! The city went wild over them – so did the boys of the O.C.I.” (pp. 220-21).

Figure 51 Large, boisterous crowds gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa for the official reception of troops bound for South Africa or just returned from the war, such as the crowd seen above in 1900.
What happened next caused the controversy.
The writers of the O.C.I. history say that “One enthusiastic group of boys was interfered with by a policeman” (p. 221). The policeman concerned, however, explained the question of who had interfered with whom in quite different terms: Police Constable Joliet said that he had saved a group of respectable women spectators at the military parade from the riotous behaviour of a youth named George Reiffenstein. To do so, he had been forced to hit Reiffenstein lightly on the head with his “baton.”
We know of the different perspectives on this incident because seventeen-year-old George Patten Reiffenstein hired a lawyer to press charges against Police Constable Joliet for assault. And Reiffenstein moved fast. Three days after the incident, an Ottawa Journal headline blared: “A Collegiate Institute pupil named Reiffenstein has laid a complaint against P.C. Joliet of assault” (22 January 1900, p. 6).
Perhaps surprisingly, the legal process moved fast, too. The trial occurred just six days after the alleged assault. The Ottawa Journal published an article late in the day of January 25th about that morning’s testimony in the trial: “The Joliet Case: Reiffenstein and the Policeman Tell their Stories” (p. 7). The policeman was backed up in his version of events by other policeman. Reiffenstein was backed up in his version of events by a number of citizens who witnessed the interaction between the Lisgar students and the policemen: these citizens had volunteered to testify. In fact, the Ottawa Journal observed that there was “A large number of witnesses” called to testify at the trial (25 January 1900, p. 7).
Joliet’s argument was that everything he did in his interactions with the Lisgar students had the purpose of keeping order within the large boisterous crowd lining the parade route. And the crowd was indeed difficult to control. It seems that nothing like it had ever been seen in Ottawa before, as we can see from the account of the crowd that reached Regina, Saskatchewan, where the newspaper reported that “An Ottawa journal states that the send-off given to Ottawa's own contingents [of troops bound for South Africa] was a big affair, but the reception given on Parliament Hill to the North-West contingent on Friday last was vastly bigger. Friday's crowd was larger than was ever seen gathered in the city before, as the railways ran excursion trains from outlying towns” (The Leader-Post, 25 January 1900, p. 4).
Now Joliet claimed that within this boisterous crowd, the Lisgar students in particular were boisterous to the point of disorderliness, pressing against the crowd from behind, pushing their way to the front of the crowd, and throwing snowballs all the while. He and fellow policemen, he explained, had had to enter the crowd at least twice to deal with disorder caused by the students. He explained that Reiffenstein was the most boisterous and disorderly of the students. Joliet said he saw Reiffenstein hit a woman in the face with a snowball and that he ordered the boy to cease throwing snowballs and to return to the back of the crowd. Joliet said Reiffenstein refused to obey him and that the boy had declared that he was not required to do so. Joliet then “struck him on the legs to show he did not want to hurt him.” Joliet said that at this point “the boy rushed at him head first.” So in response, said Joliet, he “swung the baton” and “struck the boy lightly on the head” to ward off “Reiffenstein’s rush” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 January 1900, p. 1). One of Joliet’s fellow police constables said that all police constables had their batons in hand because the crowd was so hard to control, and another said that he had thought at the time that Joliet’s baton had given Reiffenstein a little “tap” on the head only by accident.
When his turn came to testify, Reiffenstein “claimed that he was innocent … of disorderly conduct” (Ottawa Journal, 25 January 1900, p. 7). Asked why he had not obeyed Joliet’s command to go to the back of the crowd, Reiffenstein explained that “The others ahead would not get back, so we wouldn’t.” He said that after he had been hit by Joliet’s baton, his “head bled some,” but in response to a question as to whether his hat had been knocked off by the force of the blow, he confessed that he did not know whether his cloth hat had “fallen off when he was hit” (Ottawa Journal, 25 January 1900, p. 7).
Many witnesses testified on Reiffenstein’s behalf. A man named Mr. Alexander who was one of the House of Commons staff explained that he had heard the policeman and the student in conversation and that in response to Joliet’s order to Reiffenstein to go to the back of the crowd, “He heard Reiffenstein ask the policeman, ‘Do you own the earth?’” Alexander also said that “he with others remonstrated at the action of the policeman in striking the boy” (Ottawa Journal, 25 January 1900, p. 7). Another man named Pickens explained that he saw “considerable pushing going on” in the crowd as a whole and that he did not “think that the boy’s conduct was unreasonable.” Furthermore, he testified that he had seen the boy being hit by Joliet’s baton and that he had noted that Reiffenstein de finitely had a “dazed look” afterwards (Ottawa Citizen, 25 January 1900, p. 1).
Such was the gist of the evidence presented by Reiffenstein and the witnesses who came to testify on his behalf.
At the close of the one-day trial on 25 January 1900, the judge retired to decide between the accounts given by the policemen and the accounts given by Reiffenstein and his witnesses. He reached his verdict very quickly.
The refrain of the Sonny Curtis song from the 1960s says “I fought the law and the law won,” but a song written about young Reiffenstein in 1900 would have had to have had opposite lyrics, for the kid fought the law and the kid won!
The day after the trial, the Ottawa Citizen headline declared: “Exceeds His Duty: Police Constable Joliet Fined Two Dollars for the Parliament Hill Assault.” The judge agreed that Reiffenstein and his lawyer “had made out a clear case against P.C. Joliet of unjustifiable assault.” The judge said that Reiffenstein’s behaviour was never more than “horse play” and that “Reiffenstein’s violence was not sufficient to justify Joliet” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 1900, p. 5).
What of the fine? A two dollar fine does not seem to be much of a punishment. That’s because Reiffenstein asked the judge to be lenient in this regard. His lawyer explained that “He only wished a nominal fine imposed to show that the citizens of Ottawa had some rights and to set the reputation of the city right with the rest of the world” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 1900, p. 5).
What interesting insights into the character of this precocious student! On the one hand, we see the relatively juvenile “what about them?” logic that animated him (since “the others ahead would not get back,” then “we wouldn’t” either); on the other hand, we see the extraordinary maturity of his concern that the fine imposed on Joliet be merely a nominal one since the real point of the case was not vengeance on the policeman but rather vindication of the rights of citizens and restoration of the reputation of the city.
One can imagine the reaction of fellow high-school students to young Reiffenstein’s success in standing up for himself in such a determinedly public and dramatic way. According to A History of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, for schooling P.C. Joliet on the rights of Lisgar students, Reiffenstein was the big man on campus for the rest of the school year: “One enthusiastic group of boys was interfered with by a policeman whom lack of experience or discernment rendered unable to distinguish between disorder and patriotic zeal. His discernment was quickened and his experience widened a few days later when, in a test case before the Magistrate, a fine was imposed upon him, and the boy (George Reiffenstein), toward whom he had used violence and whose conduct was thus justified by law, was for weeks after lionized at the Institute” (p. 221).
Justified in court and lionized at school. Heady days for our hero.
Young Reiffenstein’s excitement at the sight of the Canadian soldiers parading through the streets of Ottawa, bound for South Africa to fight in what was then called the Boer War, was a sign of things to come. Not only would he volunteer for overseas service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War One, but he would also serve in three different militia units before the war, and after the war he would serve in the 1920s as a Major in command of B Company in the Frontenac Regiment. Furthermore, in the 1920s both of his sons enrolled as cadets at Kingston’s Royal Military College: in due course, one became a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Canadian army; the other, a Brigadier General in the British army.
But World War One was still a long way off when Reiffenstein graduated from the Ottawa Collegiate Institute. He found immediate employment in a bank, but not in Ottawa. Right after graduation, he moved to Montreal for a brief period of employment at a branch of the Dominion Bank. It was in Montreal, according to the Windsor Star, that “he first became connected with the bank” (19 March 1909, p. 1). In less than a year, however, he was on his way to Toronto.

Figure 52 120 Huron Street, Toronto, today.
Reiffenstein seems to have arrived in the city sometime in the second half of 1901, or perhaps early in 1902, to work at a branch of the Dominion Bank there, for we find him listed as a resident of Toronto working for the Dominion Bank as of 1902. He lives from 1902 to 1904 at 100 McCaul Street as a boarder or lodger (today the Art Gallery of Ontario is located here, where McCaul Street meets Dundas Street West). Then from 1905 to 1906 he lives as a lodger at 120 Huron Street, a few blocks north of his original lodging. All the while he works for the Dominion Bank, and since his new address is so close to his old address, I presume that he worked all this time for the same branch of the bank. During his five years at this Dominion Bank branch in Toronto, he was obviously learning about the banking profession from the ground up: he describes his employment in the city directories variously over these years as “clerk,” “ledger-keeper,” and “teller.”
By 1907, he is ready to be trusted with more important banking responsibilities. He is promoted to the position of Bank Accountant. And he is promoted right out of Toronto to another Ontario city, as we shall see shortly.
But there is more to the story of Reiffenstein’s sojourn in Toronto than his work as a banker, for while he was learning the banking profession, he also devoted his spare time to a large number of other interesting pursuits.
On the one hand, he enlisted in a longstanding Toronto militia unit, the Queen’s Own Rifles, which had sent soldiers to South Africa just a year or two before Reiffenstein joined it. The rapturous welcome given the Queen’s Own Rifles on the streets of Toronto upon the soldiers’ return from South Africa around the time that Reiffenstein arrived in Toronto presumably caught the young man’s attention.
On the other hand, Reiffenstein was passionate about sports – all sorts of sports.
Virtually as soon as he arrived in Toronto, Reiffenstein began playing for the Toronto Argonauts football club. Recalling that he practised just two years before as a school boy against the Rough Riders in Ottawa, we should perhaps not be surprised by the fact that he earned a place on the Argonauts team as an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. The Argonauts had a new coach as of the 1901 fall season, so perhaps Reiffenstein was fortunate to have arrived at a time when the team was in flux and there were presumably openings for new personnel. Note that this Toronto Argonauts team was extremely good: it “won the season championship of the Ontario Rugby Football Union in 1901” (The Neighbourhood Messenger: Newsletter of the Adolphustown-Fredericksburgh Heritage Society, no 18 [April 2018], p. 12). In fact, the team lost just one game. The Argonauts also won the Toronto city championship in 1901. The Argonauts lost the city championship the next year, however, to the University of Toronto team – their greatest rivals within Toronto in the early 1900s. To have earned a place on such a good rugby team in Canada’s biggest city right out of high school, Reiffenstein must have been an excellent rugby player.
There was also an Argonaut ice hockey team, and Reiffenstein played for it, too. Precisely when he began playing for the hockey team, however, is not clear, but an article in the Ottawa Citizen indicates that by the 1905-06 season of the Ontario Hockey Association, he played “cover” for the Argonauts hockey team. In those days, the two defensive players on the ice played the positions of “point” and “cover point,” the “cover point” player lining up behind the “point” player at face-offs. It was precisely during the period of Reiffenstein’s play for the Argonauts’ defense that the modern placing of the defensemen side-by-side was invented. The 1906 Argonauts hockey team is credited by no less an authority than Frank Selke (for whom today’s Selke award is named) as the originator of the modern defence positioning. The Argonauts team moved the players to the left and right positions used today. This modern defense setup is considered to have originated from the style of play that the Argonaut hockey team developed. The team ran set plays reminiscent of football, and moved the players to fit the set plays. The Argonauts were very successful in the 1905-06 hockey season, winning their way to the final round of the playoffs, but ultimately losing the championship series.
Again, to have earned a place on such a great team (remember that there were only seven players on a team in those days) shows that Reiffenstein was an excellent hockey player, too. And his superior abilities – his individual skills as a skater, puck-handler, and checker, on the one hand, and his individual aptitude regarding the strategic developments in hockey at this time, on the other – may well have been an important factor in allowing the development of the side-by-side defensive positioning invented by the team. Further investigation might show that Reiffenstein deserves a significant place in the history of Canadian hockey.
Both the Argonauts rugby team and the Argonauts hockey team were sponsored by the Argonauts Rowing Club, founded in 1872. The club chose as its team colours both the blue of the University of Oxford rowers, known as the “Dark Blues,” and the blue of the University of Cambridge rowers, known as the “Light Blues” – hence the knickname of all Argonauts teams to this day: the “Double Blues.”
It was as a rower for the Argonauts Rowing Club, rather than as a defenceman for its hockey team or as a winger for its rugby team, that Reiffenstein was to stake his greatest claim to fame. And his fame would not be limited to Canada, for between 1902 and 1905, he became one of the best rowers in the world – holder of world records, and winner of an Olympic medal.
During these years, Canadian and American newspapers are full of references to the exploits of the Argonauts Rowing Club in general and occasionally to team member Reiffenstein in particular. By 1902, Reiffenstein was competing for the Argonauts in Canada and abroad. He would represent the team over the years in various boats, including the junior singles, the coxless fours, and the senior eights. In 1902, he was positioned as the number two rower in the senior eights. Reiffenstein travelled to England with the Argonauts in 1902 to race at the Henley Royal Regatta, the prestigious five-day knock-out competition on the River Thames that culminates in the Grand Challenge Cup for men’s eights. Although leading for the first half of the race, the Argonauts were ultimately defeated by the University of Cambridge in a great race. A new world’s record for men’s eights was set at this regatta, so we know that the Argonauts team at this time was competing at the highest possible level.
A year later Reiffenstein had been moved to the bow position in the boat. The positions of the individual rowers within the boat were generally noted by the press, but Reiffenstein was singled out for his individual contribution to one of the Argonauts’ most celebrated wins of 1903. At the Canadian Henley regatta in St Catherine’s that summer, the victorious Argonauts senior eights were recorded in a time the “equal” of the “Henley world’s record” the year before (and perhaps the Argonauts’ time was a slightly superior one, the judges noted, given the wind that the Canadian team had faced). It was further noted in the newspaper that “The pace was a killing one for Reiffenstein, the Argonauts bow, for he fell in an almost lifeless condition at the finish” (Montreal Gazette, 10 August 1903, p. 2).
That summer, Reiffenstein also travelled with the Argonauts to Pennsylvania for the first American Rowing Association regatta (it was called in the newspapers the “American Henley”). According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the most intense focus by the media and by the thousands of spectators was on the men’s eights competition: “The chief interest of the afternoon will center around the final event, the race for senior eights, in which there will be crews from the Argonaut Rowing Club of Toronto and the Vesper and Malta Clubs of the Schuylkill Navy. The Argonaut Crew is the same eight which rowed in the English Henley last year, while the Vespers have entered the eight which captured the world’s championship at the Paris Exposition” (2 July 1903, p. 2). The Vespers were the Argonauts’ arch rivals. In 1902, for instance, the Argonauts had challenged the Vespers to a one-on-one match to settle debate as to which was the best crew that year. So the newspaper’s headline the next day after their 1903 race – “Argonauts Win Easily” – apparently says it all. But it does not convey the great satisfaction that the Argonauts rowers must have taken from the dominant victory (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 July 1903, p. 4). The Argonauts had beaten the world champion Vesper crew by as much as a hundred yards and so was informally recognized thereafter as the best men’s eights crew in the world.
So the Argonauts’ senior eights team was expected to win the gold medal at the St Louis Olympics in the summer of 1904. But there was a problem. The Winnipeg rowing club had lured away half of the Toronto team. Could the depleted Argonauts still beat the Vespers, who were strongly motivated to avenge their humiliating loss on home waters in Pennsylvania a year before?
The Argonauts Rowing Club was confident. It told the press so: “The defection of [five rowers] from the Argonaut Senior eight to Winnipeg, according to the Toronto Telegram, will not put the club out of business in the senior line by any means, though it will mean hard work on the part of coach Fred Thompson to drill an eight capable of beating America at St. Louis as he promises to do. Last year’s eight was easily a hundred yards better than any other crew in America, and the club is confident that it can, with Wright, the two Mackenzies, Reiffenstein and Strange as a backbone, build up a crew that will show its heels to any eight at the big fair” (The Province [Vancouver, B.C.], 4 May 1904, p. 5).
Perhaps club officials should not have taunted the Vespers with the observation that the Argonauts had been the better team the year before by “easily a hundred yards.” It is the kind of newspaper item that gets pinned up on the boathouse wall by one’s opponents as a motivator.
Whatever the case may be in this regard, it turns out that the Argonauts’ optimism was misplaced. The Vespers more than made up the hundred yards in question and won the gold medal in St. Louis.
So Reiffenstein came home with a silver medal.

Figure 53 Silver medal of the 1904 Olympics at the St. Louis World's Fair (or Universal Exposition).The name of the sporting discipline was engraved in the blank panel on the back of the medal.
Despite his disappointment at the Olympics, Reiffenstein’s enthusiasm for rowing was not diminished. He again rowed for the Argonauts in 1905, winning the coxless fours at the Canadian Henley in St. Catherines that year, as well as the men’s eights. And he was part of the men’s eights team that set a new world record in the Baltimore regatta in August.

Figure 54 This postcard from 1905 shows Reiffenstein's last competition at the Canadian Henley regatta. In excess of 10,000 people watched the races each day of the regatta. See the spectator boxes near right and at the extreme left side of the photograph in the far distance (on the horizon above the eight-man boat).
A winner of regatta rowing medals in Canada, the United States, and England, a member of teams that set world records, a winner of a silver medal at the Olympics, George Patten Reiffenstein was an exceptional rower.
By 1905, we also have evidence that he had become seriously interested in golf, for he was a member that year of the Highland Park Golf Club in Toronto.
In 1896, a group of west end sportsmen decided to build Toronto’s third golf course by designing a short, somewhat cramped eighteen-hole course on just fifty acres alongside the west bank of the Grenadier Pond (for context, note that the nine-hole Napanee golf course lies on twice that amount of land). They called their organization the Highland Park Golf Club. For a decade members enjoyed the course, and in 1904 a new clubhouse was built. But by 1906, housing demands were putting the squeeze on the members to find another place to play, so early the next year, the club wound up operations on its original site and bought a 98-acre parcel of property elsewhere and renamed itself the Highland Park Golf and Country Club.

Figure 55 The clubhouse of the Highland Park Golf Club in 1904.
Reiffenstein had probably been playing golf for some time before he showed up in the records of the Highland Park Golf Club in 1905, for his skills were sufficient to see him competing deep into the club championship that year. By the beginning of the fall that year, he was among the twenty survivors of the club’s summer match-play championship. The newspaper listed him as one of the members whose next championship matches were “to be played off on or before Saturday, September 23rd” (Toronto Daily Star, 19 September 1905, p. 10).
These championship matches are a particularly interesting moment in Reiffenstein’s story, for his play in Highland Park Golf Club competitions seems to have eventuated four years later in his marriage to Agnes Constance Gouinlock. I note that one of the other golfers who had made it to the same point as Reiffenstein in the Highland Park Golf Club championship was “G. Gouinlock” – the George Gouinlock who was either the father or the brother of the woman that Reiffenstein would marry on 2 June 1909.
Either George could have been the one who came to know Reiffenstein first. His future wife’s brother, George Holmestead Gouinlock, was two years older than Reiffenstein and was, like him, a member for six years of the Queen’s Own Rifles at the rank of Private. Perhaps the two became friends during their militia service and played golf together at the Highland Park Golf Club. His future wife’s father George Gouinlock, however, definitely played golf, but he was also interested in other sporting activities that could have led to his first encounters with his future son-in-law.
George Gouinlock senior was a substantial figure in Toronto business circles. Jesse Edgar Middleton writes about him as follows in The Municipality of Toronto: A History:
GEORGE GOUINLOCK— For many years a successful business man of Toronto, member of the firm of the Toronto Hardware Company, Mr. Gouinlock was known in the city of his adoption as an upright man of affairs and substantial citizen.
George Gouinlock, son of George Gouinlock, of Huron county, Ontario, and grandson on his mother's side of Dr. William Chalk, also of Huron County, was born in Harpurhey, now Seaforth, Huron County, Ontario, December 19, 1854. Mr. Gouinlock was educated at Upper Canada College. His business life began in the capacity of clerk for Adam Hope, of Hamilton. Returning to Seaforth in 1874, he was associated with his brother, Dr. Gouinlock, in the management of the Gouinlock Salt Works. He came to Toronto in [the early 1880s] and formed a partnership with J. H. Paterson, in the manufacture of hardware, the firm later becoming known as the Toronto Hardware Manufacturing Company Ltd., located at No. 1100 Queen Street, West.
He had been a member of St. Mark's Anglican Church, affiliated with the Masonic order, was a member of Lambton Golf Club, and a life member of the Parkdale Canoe Club.
He married Agnes C. Holmestead, daughter of A. Holmestead, a barrister of London, England.
Mr. and Mrs. Gouinlock were the parents of: George Holmestead, held the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Air Force and saw duty overseas, is now engaged in the business in Toronto; Agnes Constance, married George P. [Reiffenstein], manager of the Dominion Bank at Napanee, Ontario; Edith Audrey, married Trevor H. Temple of Toronto; Kathleen, married R. M. Harcourt of Toronto; and Naomi Frances, married C. P. Douglas of Toronto.
Mr. Gouinlock's death occurred in Toronto, October 4, 1915. ([Toronto: Dominion Publishing Company, 1913], Volume III, p. 342)
Note that Gouinlock was an avid golfer. He moved on from the Highland Park Golf Club (perhaps when it changed the site of its golf course in 1906) to the Lambton Golf Club, which had recently been laid out by Percy Barrett. And note also that Gouinlock was also a member of the Parkdale Canoe Club, which, like the Toronto Argonauts, also fielded rugby and ice hockey teams. In fact, Gouinlock was a lifetime member of the Parkdale Canoe Club (formed in 1905, its football team losing to the University of Toronto team in the first Grey Cup game in 1909), so either his passion for golf or his passion for sprint canoeing could have led to his first encounter with his future son-in-law.
By the time Reiffenstein made the acquaintance of the Gouinlock family, this son of a federal civil servant in Ottawa had made his way into The Society Blue Book of Toronto, Hamilton and London: A Social Directory 1904-05, which described itself as “A reliable directory to over 4,000 of the elite families of Toronto, Hamilton, London and numerous smaller towns.” Of course the family of George Gouinlock was listed in this book, too. They were certainly “elite.” When George Holmestead Gouinlock enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916 and then at the end of 1917 in the Royal Flying Corp, for instance, on each occasion he gave in response to the question about his “Trade or Occupation” the answer: “Gentleman.” (His father, however, described himself on the register of his daughter’s marriage not as “gentleman,” but rather as “manufacturer.”)
Reiffenstein had earned his place in the Society Blue Book by virtue of his membership of the Victoria Club, Toronto’s preeminent curling club. Of course this curling club was included in the Society Blue Book’s section on the “Leading Clubs of Toronto,” and consequently each of the club’s members was listed in this section of the book.
Who knew there was such a social advantage to curling at a high level?
George Patten Reiffenstein’s exceptional athletic abilities were rewarding this young banker with unanticipated social dividends. Curling and golf had made him a part of the Toronto country-club set, and I would not be surprised to learn that his first date with the Blue Book girl that he would marry, Agnes Constance Gouinlock, had been on the links of the Highland Park Golf Club, for when Daisy and Reiff (as they were known to their friends) eventually settled in Napanee, they were both mainstays of the Napanee Golf Club – one of them well into the 1930s, the other, well into the 1920s.
But marriage was still several years away. There were changes in Reiffenstein’s employment to occur before these nuptials – changes that would lead to his moving from city to city to city over the course of several years. There would have to be a series of promotions at the Dominion bank before he could hope to keep Miss Gouinlock in the style to which she had become accustomed in her wealthy family.
In 1907, Reiffenstein received his first significant promotion, but he had to leave Toronto to take up his new position. He was appointed Bank Accountant at a branch of the Dominion Bank in Windsor.
We find him interviewed there by the Windsor Star shortly after his arrival at the bank. The Star reporter was writing an article on the subject of the federal government’s recent announcement that over a half a million dollars had been discovered lying unclaimed in various bank accounts across Canada. Because the manager was away on the day that the newspaper reporter visited the Dominion Bank, the reporter instead interviewed “G.P. Reiffenstein, accountant” (5 July 1907, p. 1).
Just twenty-four years old, Reiffenstein sounds relatively worldly and wise as he explains how money comes to lie unclaimed in banks and how banks are trying to remedy the situation: “Reiffenstein … says it is surprising to learn how many absent-minded and thoughtless people there are in the world. ‘Every bank has deposits which lie unclaimed for years,’ he stated. ‘One would think that in money matters people would be very particular, but there are some people who forget they ever made a deposit or where they made it. Some depositors lose their pass books and neglect to attend to it. The banks are quite particular now in ascertaining all information concerning a new depositor. We take his name, address, his next of kin and so on, so we are able to trace up people when necessary’” (5 July 1907, p. 1).
Reiffenstein must have been a bit of a star at the Dominion Bank in Toronto, for the head office seems to have sent him to Windsor to oversee the integration within the Dominion Bank of a private local bank in Windsor, John Curry & Company, which the owner John Curry sold to the Dominion Bank in February of 1907. This bank had been active in cross-border commerce, specializing in forestry and charcoal products, which were exported to the United States, but Curry’s interests had come to focus mainly on real estate when he sold his bank. When Reiffenstein’s eventual departure from Windsor was announced, his successful work on behalf of the Dominion bank with the clients of this private bank was noted in the Windsor Star: “Mr Reiffenstein came to Windsor shortly after the acquisition of the private banking business of John Curry & Co. and enjoys the confidence of the bank’s patrons to a marked degree” (19 March 1909, p. 1).
As in Toronto, so in Windsor, Reiffenstein was devoted to sports. It turns out that hockey, rugby, rowing, curling, and golf were not the only sports in which his achievements were noted – and even celebrated – in the newspapers. He was also a baseball player in the indoor winter league in Windsor, where one particular play that he made as an outfielder was judged particularly newsworthy: “One feature of the games was Reiffenstein’s put-out from right outfield. He gobbled a grounder and ran all the way to the infield, tagging his man trying to stretch the triple into a home run” (Windsor Star, 5 December 1908, p.8).
During his two years in Windsor, Reiffenstein was also a member of the Windsor Curling Club and the Oak Ridge Golf Club. In fact, after less than a year in the city he had become “captain of the club team” at Oak Ridge (Windsor Star, 18 July 1908, p. 1). He may have been appointed club captain because he was one of the best golfers at the club, for we read that “G.P. Reiffenstein defeated G.A. Malcolmson on the Oak Ridge links yesterday in a match for the president’s pins” (Windsor Star, 2 July 1908, p. 7). Yet he must also have had very good social skills in order to have ingratiated himself so quickly with members at a new club. Perhaps he had something of a Blue Book manner about him.
But before either the Windsor curling season of 1909 had ended or the Windsor golf season of 1909 had even begun, Reiffenstein had been promoted again at the Dominion Bank, which meant that he was on his way to another, bigger city: Montreal. He had started his career with the Dominion Bank in Montreal nine years before.
It was at this point that Reiffenstein and Gouinlock decided to get married. Perhaps they had been engaged all the while he was in Windsor, or even when he and the Gouinlocks were members of the Highland Park Golf Club. (The Windsor newspapers reported that he had travelled to Toronto on Christmas Day, 1907 – perhaps to spend it with the Gouinlocks?) Or perhaps their relationship had only recently become serious. His promotion to the position of bank manager in a major Canadian city may have been decisive. The impending marriage was announced in Toronto on Saturday, March 15th, 1909, and reported the same day in the Windsor Star (p. 8), and the news of Reiffenstein’s promotion to bank manager in Montreal was announced in the Windsor Star on 19 March 1909 (p. 1), the two events occurring almost simultaneously.
Perhaps Reiffenstein’s calculation was that his promotion would enable him now to keep Agnes Constance Gouinlock in the style to which she had become accustomed. Or perhaps this was the calculation of Mr. and Mrs. Gouinlock, who announced the news of the impending wedding. It couldn’t have been the calculation of the bride-to-be herself, could it?

Figure 56 Agnes Gouinlock, golf club in hand, twenty years after her marriage to George Patten Reiffenstein.
Whatever the case, the wedding was celebrated in Toronto on 2 June 1909 at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Parkdale, with members of both families in attendance. Younger brother Henry Reiffenstein acted as best man and signed as witness for George. Younger sister Edith acted as maid of honour and signed as witness for Agnes. The wedding party and wedding guests repaired to the Gouinlocks’ family home for the reception.
Back in Montreal after his brief first stint at the Dominion Bank there around 1900-1901, Reiffenstein managed the Guy Street branch.
And he was still mad about sports. He played golf, of course, and he also curled. Furthermore, just a few months after his arrival in the city, he was appointed secretary of the Westmount Football Club (Montreal Gazette, 26 August 1909, p. 2). He also played football for the Montreal “city team” that played against the Rough Riders of Ottawa, the Argonauts of Toronto, and the Tigers of Hamilton.
An article in the Ottawa Citizen about Montreal’s university and city football teams notes in October of 1909 that unfortunately “Reiffenstein can’t go to Hamilton” for the city team’s next game (22 October 1909, p. 8). Again, he must have been an extraordinary rugby player to have earned a spot on this big city’s team virtually as soon as he arrived in Montreal. No doubt his reputation had preceded him to Montreal.
And he was still enthusiastic about the military. He served for the two years that he lived in Montreal as a Private in the 3rd Regiment of the Victoria Rifles, a venerable Montreal militia unit.
“Pat” and “Daisy” had two children while living in Montreal. The first, William Patten Reiffenstein, was born in March of 1910. We read in the Montreal Gazette that right after the first anniversary of her marriage, “Daisy” had gone home to her mother: “Mrs. G.P. Reiffenstein, Westmount, is in Toronto visiting her mother, Mrs. Gouinlock.”The cliché is that the wife goes home to her mother because she is angry at the husband, but Agnes presumably went home not because she had fallen out with husband Pat, but rather because she wanted to show her mother the latter’s first grandchild. Daisy would soon be pregnant again. Second son James Gouinlock Reiffenstein was born in 1911 on September 1st.
One doesn’t know whether or not Pat and Daisy knew it at the time, but it turns out that their family was now complete.
Right around the time of the birth of their second son came the young family’s move to Napanee in September of 1911. Reiffenstein was to replace Dudley Leicester Hill, who had managed the Napanee branch of the Dominion Bank for several years. As we know from the biographical account of him in Volume Two of this book, Hill was an avid golfer, an early member of the Napanee Golf Club, and a regular competitor both in the golf club’s intramural tournaments and in its competitions with the Kingston Golf Club and the Picton Golf Club. He was a good golfer, too, making the finals of the matchplay competition for the club championship of 1907, losing to Herb Daly, by a score of 2 and 1.
Joining one of the local golf club seems to have been something done as a matter of course by managers of the Dominion Bank in the early twentieth century. Of Windsor’s Oak Ridge Club in 1908 we learn that Reiffenstein had become a member of the golf club where his own manger was a member: “J.N. Stone, manager of the Dominion Bank, is a member of the club and an avid golfer…. G.P. Reiffenstein, accountant of the Dominion, is captain of the club team” (Windsor Star, 18 July 1908, p. 1). In Napanee, Reiffenstein not only joined the Napanee Golf Club, but he made sure that by September of 1911 he had got himself to town with his golf clubs, had signed-up as a member of the club, and was ready to play in the tournament in honour of the departing manager Hill.
The article on “The D.L. Hill Farewell” in the Napanee Beaver at that time notes that “The Golf Club will miss Mr. Hill. He was always ready to play in any match, whether at home or away, and though not the best player in the club he could generally be relied upon to beat his man” (22 September 1909). Yet the article also contains information that hints that the club might not have missed Hill’s golf game as much as members might have missed his company, for we can see that Hill’s replacement Reiffenstein was immediately awarded the second-lowest handicap at the club – two strokes lower than Hill’s.
Just half a year later, in April of 1912, Reiffenstein was elected to the Board of Governors of the Napanee Golf Club and exactly a year later was elected Club Secretary, and appointed to the Green Committee. He played regularly in Napanee Golf Club competitions over the next few years. He represented Napanee Golf Club at this time in its competitions against teams from the Kingston Golf Club and the Picton Golf Club. He won the Daly Cup in 1912, a competition played according to handicaps for a cup donated by 1907 club champion Herb Daly. The latter personally recalled Reiffenstein’s cup win in 1912 in a speech he made twenty years later at a Napanee Golf and Country Club banquet at the end of 1932: Daly noted that Reiffenstein had died just a few months before the banquet.
In retrospect, Reiffenstein’s most newsworthy accomplishment in golf during the years before World War I was undoubtedly his setting of the Napanee Golf Club amateur course record in 1914.
But perhaps his greatest importance in this study of the Napanee golf course of 1907-27 is the fact that he posed for photographs with Henry Lovell on a number of golf holes in 1912, and also the fact that he took photographs of his buddies Henry Lovell and D’Arcy Sneath on others. Without these photographs, we would know little about the central holes of the golf course that Fred Rickwood was called upon to re-design in 1927.
1907 Third Hole
We have had a glimpse of the original “Gully Hole” already in the section above in the greatly enlarged image excerpted from the 1912 photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell. We can return to that photograph again and detect within it (as it is reproduced below) the fairway, the banks of the south creek that flows from the railway tracks on the eastern boundary of the course to Original Road on the western boundary, and the area at the top of the hill rising from the gully where the green was located.

Figure 57 The third hole of the 1907-27 golf course known as the gully hole, with fairway, creek, and green location detectable.
In the 1927 “Local Ground Rules,” we read: “In the case of an unplayable ball on the ‘Gully Hole’ the player has not the relief of driving again as his second stroke, but must drop his ball further from the hole with the penalty of one stroke. There is no other relief on this hole.” Golf’s rules have never allowed a second stroke without penalty after the first produced an unplayable ball (unless for an unusual condition such as ground under repair, temporary immovable objects, etc.), so why a normal golf rule is asserted as a Local Ground Rule is not clear. It may be that until 1927 a Local Ground Rule had indeed allowed golfers to hit a penalty-free second shot after the first one ended up in the gully.
This hint of an early lenient local rule suggests that the “Gully Hole” was seen as an extremely difficult hole – in the eyes of some, perhaps, as an unfair hole. The leniency that was explicitly disallowed as of 1927, however, seems to have endured in a slightly modified form for women all the way down to 1982, for an article in the Napanee Beaver warns ladies of a change that year: “A few changes have been made around the course. Ladies beware the second and 11th holes are no longer a free lift” (19 May 1982).
Reversing the perspective of the photograph above, we can inspect the base of the cliff where the tee for the gully hole was located, for 1906 photographs show Vrooman, Hall, and Herrington in this area.

Figure 58 Left to right, Vrooman, Hall, and Herrington pose in the area of the gully hole teeing ground. Photograph N-08788. Courtesy of the Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Caroline Herrington was also photographed sitting on her own at the base of the cliff.

Figure 59 Caroline Herrington sits at the base of the cliff on the gully hole. Photograph N-08789. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Note that there is no sign on the cliff-top above of the wire fence with wood posts that would be built along the cliff edge as border for the second green on which Lovell and Reiffenstein stage putts in 1912.

Figure 60 In the photograph of Herrington in the area where the tee for the gully hole would be built, there is no sign yet of the wire fence and wood posts along the cliff edge in the photograph of Reiffenstein and Lovell putting on the second green in 1912.
Similarly, the photograph of Herrington alone and the photograph of Herrington with Vrooman and Hall show no clear indications of a tee box at the bottom of the cliff.
Yet if we enlarge the area of the photograph constituting the foreground at the feet of Vrooman, Hall, and Herrington, there may be signs that they are posing in the area planned for the tee box of the new course of 1907. First, one notes that the grass in front of them seems relatively level, although the ground rises steeply and unevenly behind them, and although the ground in front of them se ems to slope down steeply away from them. Notice in the photograph of Herrington, particularly, that the perspective shows that the photographer Bennett stands several feet below her and angles the camera upward along the line of the slope toward her. Second, note that the relatively level grass in front of them seems to be in the shape of a rectangle, perhaps the edges of a tee box in preparation for play in the following year. In this connection, one notes, thirdly, that there may be signs of soil having been dug away along the lines of the putative tee box in order to create this relatively flat, level area. Vrooman leans against, and Hall sits on top of, a little earth wall behind the level ground in question.

Figure 61 A possible tee box, with back edge and right edge marked by orange lines.
Leaves marked “A” and “B” above are identical to leaves marked “A” and “B” below.

Figure 62 Possible tee box, with slope over left edge and front edge marked.
Note that the leaves marked “A” and “B” mark the extreme front edge of the photograph of Vrooman, Hall, and Herrington, but we see several more feet of ground in this area in the photograph of Herrington. The extra turf that we see may reveal the front two edges of the rectangular tee box outlined in the previous photograph. In the second photograph, the level ground of the teeing area ends and rounds off to reconnect with the slope running all the way down to the creek at the bottom of the valley.
The photographs are tantalizing, but evidence of a tee box at the feet of Vrooman, Hall, and Herrington is inconclusive.
The third hole was 165 yards long. Its ground score was four – the allowance of four strokes to complete such a short hole being an acknowledgement of its level of difficulty.
The hole may actually have “played” shorter than its official length. The present green was not built until 1960. Before then, the green on the gully hole was always in front of the present green on the hill at the top of the rise from the valley bottom. This position was between the descent into the major gully in front of it and the descent into the minor gully behind it which is now built up with the present green. The distance from the centre of the old green to the cliff face measures 165 yards by range finder. Given how far in front of this cliff face the 1907 tee was, one presumes that for the distance of the hole to have been indicated as 165 yards at that time, the distance must have been measured by the yardage wheel – which would have been rolled down one side of the valley and up the other side.
Sam Snead’s reaction to this hole when he played it for the first time late in the summer of 1959 suggests that such was the way of measuring the hole in the old days. When he came to the hole, the yardage was posted as 163 yards. When he looked from tee to green, he could not accept that the yardage was correct. Convinced that the scorecard was misleading, according to the Napanee Beaver, Snead “took several practice drives on the short second hole, claiming that it was less than the 163 yards claimed” (2 September 1959).
1907 Fourth Hole
The green of the 209-yard fourth hole on the new course of 1907 was obviously drivable, for the “local Ground Rule” of 1927 “forgives” a drive that bounds over a fence near the green, although it does not make the same allowance for a second shot so badly misplayed that it bounds over this fence: “A ball driven from the tee which goes over or by the green into the fence or the field may be dropped inside the fence the same distance from the hole without penalty. No such relief for second shot” (Hunters 18-19).

Figure 63 Lovell putts, as Sneath watches, on the fourth green in the summer of 1912. Photograph N-09006. Courtesy of the Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
We have photographs of Lovell and Sneath putting on the 1907 fourth green (Herrington identifies the green as the fourth in her photograph album) – photographs that show the fence in question and that allow us to work out where this green was located in relation to the present golf course.
The fence was the one that remains in virtually the same position today between the golf course and the railway tracks along the eastern boundary of the golf course property. The side of the green nearest the fence is probably about ten yards from it. The fence marked the out-of-bounds line then – just as it does now.
Note that the field on the far side of the railway tracks (Lot nineteen of Concession seven of North Fredericksburgh Township) was devoid of trees in those days, so we can see virtually nothing beyond the horizon of the photograph constituted by the railway tracks.
The second photograph shows Sneath about to putt after Lovell had putted his ball close to the “flag.”

Figure 64 Sneath ready to putt. Photograph N-08890. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Why has Lovell left his golf ball on the green close to the line of Sneath’s putt?
Note that in 1912, golfers did not place a mark behind their golf balls and then remove them from the green until it was their turn to play. In the case above, however, something else seems to be at play: it looks as though Lovell was attempting to lay a stymie on Sneath.
A "stymie" was a part of match play when one golfer's ball sat on the green between the opponent's golf ball and the hole, such that Golfer A's ball blocked the hole for Golfer B's putt. Unless the two balls were within six inches of one another, the golf ball closer to the hole was not lifted. Golfer B was said to be "stymied."
The golfer whose ball was away could attempt either to hit down at an angle of forty-five degrees on his or her ball with the putter to pop the ball up into the air and over the interceding ball or chip the ball closer to the hole with a lofted club – perhaps even into it. A golfer might even try to slice or hook a putt around the intervening ball. If Golfer B hit the ball of Golfer A, Golfer B played his or her ball wherever it ended up, but Golfer A had the option of playing from the new location of his or her ball, or replacing it at its original location. You had to be careful, mind you, in trying to extricate yourself from the stymie: if your opponent was on the green in two shots and you accidentally knocked his or her ball into the hole with your own putt, your opponent scored a two for the hole!
Stymies typically occurred by accident. Often, however, when lagging a long putt close to the hole, golfers would aim to leave their ball in a position to block their opponent’s putt. That strategy was called “laying a stymie.” It looks as though Lovell may have tried to “lay a stymie” on Sneath.
Stymies were part of golf from the time of the earliest written rules in 1744 when lifting one ball to allow another ball to be played was permitted only when the balls were touching. Lifting was extended in 1775 to include balls within six inches of one another. That is why scorecards were initially printed so that they were six inches long: to provide a ready-to-hand device for measuring a stymie.
Stymies remained part of match play until revisions to the Rules of Golf in the early 1950s.
One wonders whether Lovell and Sneath had driven their golf balls onto the putting surface. The hole was just 209 yards in length. But for the forgiving local ground rule allowing a free drop for a drive running over or through the fence, an out-of-bounds area so close to the green would otherwise give golfers pause in undertaking such a shot.
The tee for this hole was probably near where the present tees for the third hole are located or near where the present fourth green is located. The drive would have been diagonally across today’s third fairway. Such an angle for the drive meant that it was indeed oriented towards the fence line (and not played parallel to it).
It is possible that the photograph below shows D’Arcy Sneath driving his ball from this fourth tee

Figure 65 D'Arcy Sneath finishes a swing at an unidentified location on the Napanee golf course in the summer of 1912. Photograph N-08885. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
In this photograph, it is clear that Sneath is playing golf on a different day from the one on which he was photographed playing golf with Lovell and Reiffenstein, for on this day he wears different shoes from the ones worn in the other photographs (they are a dark, shiny black, rather than white).
Unfortunately, Caroline Herrington does not indicate where Sneath is located.
But we can see that he is at a high point on the golf course, for trees drop away behind him down a steep slope, leaving only their tops visible in the middle background. And the most distant tree canopies visible behind him rise from right to left across the horizon – apparently ascending a big hill.
My guess is that Sneath stands on the north edge of the gully through which the south creek flows from the railway tracks on the eastern boundary of the golf course to Original Road on its western boundary and that it is the treeline running up Blanchard Hill alongside the right (west) side of the 1907 first fairway (today’s ninth fairway) along Original Road that we see in the distant background of the photograph.
The photograph below presents a greatly enlarged detail from the photograph of Sneath teeing off to illustrate this interpretation of the background.

Figure 66 A possible interpretation of the deep valley behind Sneath and the trees rising on land in the distant background is suggested by the annotations to the photograph above.
Today, unfortunately, a glimpse of the ninth fairway and of the trees along Hamburg Road as it rises up what was called Blanchard’s Hill is not as easy to obtain from this area. The trees growing in the valley between our third tee or our fourth green, on the one hand, and our ninth fairway and Hamburg Road, on the other hand, have grown so tall as to interfere with the view, and they are generally so dense that they almost completely block the view.
Nonetheless, a photograph attempting to replicate the perspective described above, taken during the winter of 2019 (when the foliage blocking the view across the valley was completely gone), provides a view somewhat similar to what we can pick out in the background behind Sneath.

Figure 67 The view today through the woods behind the back tee of our fourteenth hole resembles the view behind D'Arcy Sneath in the photograph above of him teeing off.
Much easier to determine than where the fourth tee was located, however, is where the fourth green was located.
There are several clues in the background of the photographs of Lovell and Sneath putting on this green. For instance, we can see the level of the fourth green relative to the level of the train tracks. The relative level of the golf course land and the train tracks varies along the length of the golf course, so we can search for this particular feature in today’s landscape. We can also see on the right side of the photograph in which Lovell is putting and Sneath is watching him that the golf course land begins to descend into a valley at this point.
A composite image of the two photographs of Lovell and Sneath provides a view of the se aspects of the topography along the railway tracks on the east side of the 1907-27 fourth fairway, and this view of their location matches well with a contemporary photograph of the area on today’s third fairway where the two pine trees grow beside the train tracks to the right (east) of the 150-yard marker in that fairway.

Figure 68 A composite image of the two photographs of Lovell and Sneath on the fourth green of the 1907-27 golf course.

Figure 69 Lovell and Sneath stood in 1912 in the area circumscribed in orange above.
Notice in the composite image of the two 1912 photographs above that the train tracks represent a perfectly level, constantsurface from one side of the photograph to the other(the same is true of the contemporary photograph of this area.). Of the five fence posts that we can see, the top of the one on the left appears even with the train tracks, whereas the ones on the right of the photograph drop steadily lower and lower relative to the tracks. The fence posts are presumably the same length, which means that observing their lower standing relative to the train tracks gives us a good idea of the slope of the land from left to right in the photograph. Similarly, as one looks from left to right in the photograph, more and more gravel, rock, and turf is visible to the side of the tracks: more material had to be provided as a base for the tracks to make up for the decline of the land into the little valley that the railway line crossed here. (The same slope of the land into the same valley appears in the contemporary photograph of this area.)
The photograph below shows once again where the fourth green of the 1907-27 golf course was located relative to landmarks in our present third fairway. It also shows where Herrington and Hall stood in 1906 on the fifth tee of the 1897-1906 golf course by means of two cartoon images of them.

Figure 70 Another perspective on the location of the 1907 fourth green relative to landmarks in today's third fairway. The orange arrow marks the direction of play from the fourth tee to the fourth green. The position of the photographer is indicated by the cartoon character in yellow. The position of Herrington and Hall in an earlier photograph is also indicated.
Coincidentally, in taking the photograph of Herrington and Hall in 1906 and in taking the photographs of Lovell and Sneath in 1912, the photographer (marked as the yellow figure above) in each case stood in virtually the same spot.
The 209-yard fourth hole was clearly drivable. A hole of such yardage would be regarded as a par three today, but its ground score on the 1907-27 golf course was four.
1907 Fifth Hole
I believe that the 1907 fifth hole was identical to the fifth hole of the 1897 course. One of the main purposes of the routing of the four new holes at the south end of the course in 1907, I think, was to bring golfers to the tee of the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 course. The idea was to be efficient: to re-use as much as possible of the original course in the new course.
If the turf that we saw cut out of the ground in front of Herrington and Hall was used to help build up and level the nearby fourth green for the new course of 1907, the re-use of the old course in building the new one was very efficient indeed.

Figure 71 Was turf cut from in front of the fifth tee to build-up and level the 1907 fourth green, located about thirty yards to the right side of the figures in this photograph – as indicated by the orange arrow?
A version of this golf hole seems to have lasted all the way up to 1952, when the present fourth hole was opened, for it seems that Fred Rickwood also incorporated it into his re-design of 1927.
If so, statements by early members of Napanee Golf and Country Club can help us to an understanding of the hole. Bruce Medd told the Hunters that “The green was to the left of the current fourteenth lady’s tee, right in front of the woods” (125). Barbara (Kimmerly) Cowle, a club member since the 1940s, agreed with Medd’s recollection of the hole, telling the Hunters that she “remembers the fourth green being down on the edge of the woods that are along where the women’s fourteenth tee is now” (126).
Bing Sanford pointed to the same area as the site of the green in question when we played golf together in 2019, confirming also that in the late 1940s the hole was played almost perpendicular to the line of play on today’s fourth hole.
These references to “the woods” by Medd and Cowle with regard to the location of this hole during the 1927 to 1952 era of play on the Rickwood course echo the mention of this hole in the “Local Ground Rules” published in April of 1927 for the 1907-27 course, just before Rickwood re-designed that course: “No relief whatever. A ball driven into the bush must be played back from where it lies.”
Reference to “the bush” seems appropriate, given the density of the forest in the area in question today. But we should note that the woods was not as thick then as it is today. A photograph from the mid-1900s looking from the clubhouse down the ninth fairway toward this area shows that there was relatively little under-brush then compared to the impenetrable forest growth that exists today.

Figure 72 The bush over the back of the 1907 fifth green was probably not as thick then as it is now. This photo from mid-1900s.
One could probably have attempted to play out of the bush 100 years ago, but not today.
So it seems that the fifth hole of the 1907 new course ran from the Herrington and Hall tee in a southwest direction to the woods marking the west edge of the fifth fairway. The defence of the green was the downhill slope before it and “the bush” behind it.
Like the 209-yard fourth hole before it, this 215-yard hole would have been drivable.
In fact, the first hole-in-one on the Napanee Golf Course was made on this hole in 1926: “Although golf has been played in Napanee for thirty years, it remained for a school boy, Carson Graham, to be the first member to hole out in one shot. On Wednesday morning … Carson found his drive from the fifth tee in the cup, the distance being 215 yards” (Napanee Beaver, 2 July 1926).
The ground score for the hole was four, although today such a distance would make the hole a par three. Still, with a “Bogey” score of four indicated on the scorecard, when young Carson Graham wrote his score of one on that scorecard, he was marking not just the first hole-in-one on the Napanee golf course, but also the first double-eagle or albatross!
1907 Sixth Hole
The sixth hole was the stoutest hole on the 1907-27 golf course. At 427 yards, it was quite properly accorded a ground score of five.
The tee must have been relatively close to the fifth green, which was in the area of the forward tees on today’s fourteenth hole.
From this tee, the sixth hole worked its way back to the same fence along the eastern boundary of the golf course against which the fourth green was located, for the 1927 list of “Local Ground Rules” indicates that “there is no relief for a ball played over or by the green into the wire fence” (Hunters 18-19).
So a fairway departing from a tee near the 1907 fifth green (near the forward tees on the present fourteenth hole) made its way 427 yards to a green beside the fence along the railway tracks. Since the present fourteenth hole runs 399 yards from its forward tee diagonally across the central part of the golf course in the direction of this fence, we might simply add twenty-eight yards to that line to approximate the sixth hole of the 1907-28 course. When we do, we arrive at the back tee box of today’s sixth hole, which sits right beside the old fence along the railway tracks. This was probably the site of the 1907-27 sixth green.
After all, south of this line of play, there is no 427-yard run of ground to the fence in question. The nearest relatively level ground to the south of today’s back sixth tee along this fence line is the bottom of the valley through which a creek intermittently flowed in those days (and still does). Such ground would not have been chosen for a green, and such a green would in any event have been no more than 350 yards from the 1907 tee box (not even approaching the 427 yards indicated on the scorecard). And the area along the fence line north of the back tee box on today’s sixth hole contained no level land, but instead dropped fairly steeply into the gully through which the north creek flows (where today a retaining pond sits). There was no place for a green in this area, either.
So we have good reason to suppose that the 1907 sixth green was in the area of the back tee for today’s sixth hole.

Figure 73 The back tee on the 6th hole today was probably the 6th green on the 1907-27 golf course. The railway track runs diagonally across the top third of the photograph. The old fence line corresponds to today’s tree line beyond the cart path.
Golfers would have played up to the green on an angle to the out-of-bounds fence similar to the angle of approach to the fourth green (as indicated on the photograph above in the section on the fourth hole).
There is other information about the sixth hole in the 1927 “Local Ground Rules”: “A ball driven from the tee, which lies in a roadway or within a club’s length of a tree or in a ditch-way, may be dropped back without penalty” (Hunters 18-19). Let us consider each of these items – “ditch-way,” “tree,” and “roadway” – in turn.
Note that reference to “a ditch-way” (rather than to “the ditch-way”) indicates that there was more than one “ditch-way” to negotiate. The sixth fairway of the 1907 new course would have crossed three pronounced valleys, just as the fourteenth hole does today. And in the bottom of each valley was an intermittently flowing creek. The old creeks have been tamed today; they are part of the fairways and usually mowed to fairway length, except where they are part of the rough. But 110 years ago these intermittently flowing creeks would have run through ditches. The “Local Ground Rules” of 1927 probably used the word “ditches” advisedly.

Figure 74 This map of the golf course shows the orientation of the 1907 6th hole crossing three creeks on its way from the forward tee on today's 14th hole to the green in the area of today's back 6th tee.
The penalty-free drop from trees was not, as such a thing tends to be today, a concession to the need to keep young trees from being damaged by a golfer’s swing. In the early 1900s, trees were not regarded by many as proper obstacles on a golf course: there were no trees on the original links courses in Scotland, where the game of golf originated, so why should there be trees on a Canadian golf course? Note that North American golf course architects in the late 1800s and early 1900s were generally trying to figure out how to reproduce Scottish links golf as best they could in farmers’ fields.
There were few trees on the golf course of 1907, virtually none in the area of the fairways – except for four. The “Local Ground Rules” probably had in mind the four well-established trees that were growing along the line of an old stone fence.
Bruce Medd, who joined Napanee Golf and Country Club in the late 1920s or early 1930s (in the Hunters’ book, his name first appears in connection with the club in a 1932 newspaper item), mentions trees and fence in a 1977 interview: “there was a two foot high stone fence across the fifth fairway (where the line of trees now stands)” (Hunters 113). He refers to four trees observable in a 1954 aerial photograph of the golf course.

Figure 75 The four trees that Medd mentions can be seen on the 1954 aerial photograph above. The 1907 sixth hole is drawn on the map, as well as the possible sites of two old stone walls.
The last of the four big old trees in question endured until quite recently, but fell in 2018.

Figure 76 The last of the four trees mentioned by Medd, which fell in 2018. The three other trees ranged to the right of it, as it is seen in this photograph.
Most present members of the golf club will remember it as the tremendously troublesome tree that marked the point between the present fifth and fourteenth fairways (one can see in the photograph of it the sign that was nailed to it to point golfers left to the fifth green and right to the fourteenth green). Three more trees of the same kind and size ran in a straight line east from the one just mentioned to the fourth tree, which was at the western edge of the present fourth fairway.
The fence that Medd mentionsis probably the one that we can make out in the background of the photograph of Herrington and Hall teeing off on the fifth hole.

Figure 77 Between the grass of the golf course in the foreground and the tall buildings and trees along the Napanee skyline in the background, there seems to be the low, two-foot high stone fence that Bruce Medd mentions.
People who play the golf course today are familiar with the remains of another old stone fence from days gone by, but may not recognize it as such.

Figure 78 Remains of the old stone fence between today's fifth and fourteenth fairways.
Between today’s fifth and fourteenth fairways, on one’s right as one approaches the fifth green, runs a low mound for about 100 yards. It is often marked with a white line in the grass to designate it as a zone from which one gets a free drop. Several young trees grow alongside it, and popping out of the grass at irregular intervals along its entire length are signs of what lies beneath the surface: large stones. The dozen that appear in the photograph to the left are a sign of the hundreds that lie beneath the surface of the mound.
The mound marks the remains of one of the old stone walls that used to divide up Cartwright’s pastures into separate fields.
Note that stone walls have long been regarded as integral parts of golf courses, so we find no discussion of relief from stone walls in the “Local Ground Rules” of 1927.
Today, in fact, stone fences are making a comeback: some golf course architects are building them from scratch in the middle of fairways on brand new golf courses – perhaps out of a nostalgia about the good old days. Others are exploiting existing stone walls on acquired properties and building golf holes in such a way as to incorporate the walls into play.

Figure 79 The Renaissance Club in Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland, was built in 2007 and routed its golf holes in such a way that dilapidated stone walls on the property could be rehabilitated and incorporated into design strategy. The Renaissance Golf Club hosted the Scottish Open of 2019, and will host it again in 2020.
Perhaps we should excavate and re-build our last fence.
A question remains: what of the reference in the “Local Ground Rules” of 1927 to a “roadway” that might be encountered on the sixth hole?
Recall that we studied closely in Volume Two of this book photographs of Vrooman and Bennett posing in front of the old club shed. Behind them we notes a dirt roadway, barely more than a track. The direction followed by that roadway suggests that it may have run along the line of the old stone fence now appearing as the rocky mound discussed and depicted above.
Given the aspects of the hole noted above, we can say that the 427-yard hole sixth hole of the 1907-27 golf course would have been a stout “three-shotter”– well worthy of its ground score of Bogey five.

Figure 80 A modified Google map shows a three-dimensional image by which we can locate the 1907-27 sixth hole in relation to today's golf course. Today's greens are marked in yellow. The fourth, fifth, and sixth holes of the 1907-27 course are marked in orange.
1907 Seventh Hole
We have no photographs of the seventh hole.
It was 415 yards in length: the next longest hole of the 1907-27 golf course after the sixth. It had a ground score of five.
If granted the location of the sixth green along the fence by the railway tracks (in the area of the back tee on today’s sixth hole), as suggested by the “Local Ground Rules” in the spring of 1927, we can tell a few things about the mysterious seventh hole.
First, as we shall see shortly, opposite the sixth green, across the gully through which the north creek flows from the railway tracks to Original Road, was the eighth green. Relative to today’s back sixth tee, it was on the opposite side of today’s retaining pond, which was merely a deep, overgrown gully in 1907. So we know that the seventh fairway did not run north across the gully in question: it would have had to have crossed the eighth fairway to do so!
Second, from a seventh tee in the area near the sixth green of 1907, there is no potential run of fairway for the 415 yards indicated on the scorecard other than back to the south-west toward the end of today’s driving range, today’s ninth tees, and today’s eighth green.Where the green was located in this area is as much of a mystery as everything else concerning the seventh hole. But since apart from the 1907 eighth green there were no golf holes north of the north creek, the long four holes with which the 1907-27 course concluded all had to fit into the space between today’s fourth fairway and today’s eighth fairway. The only way for them to do so in 1907 was the way they do so today: the four fairways must have run parallel to each other on a generally north-south axis.
So for there to have been room for the eighth and ninth holes to the west of it, the seventh hole must have started from a tee box near the well to the west of today’s fourteenth green, then run for 415 yards parallel to the 427-yard sixth hole (which was on the line of today’s fourteenth hole from the latter’s forward tees), and finally concluded on a green in the vicinity of the teeing ground for today’s driving range.

Figure 81 A likely route for the 1907 seventh hole drawn onto a greatly enlarged detail from a 1954 aerial photograph of the area.
A drive south-west from the teeing ground shown on the map above would have had to carry over the valley on today’s fourteenth fairway that seasonally flows with run-off water coming under the railway tracks from the fields on the other side of the tracks. In fact, precisely below the ridge where the well is located,the intermittent creek that flows across today’s fourteenth fairway is at its widest.

Figure 82 The photograph on the left shows the creek entering the fourteenth fairway from near the railway tracks and bifurcating into two streams. The photograph on the right shows the north tributary of this stream flowing into the bunker on today's fourteenth hole. The bunker was built in the mid-1970s where the “waterhole” used to be.
As can be seen in the photographs above, the creek actually bifurcates as it approaches this area.
Up until 1975, this relatively wild, unmown area was known as “the waterhole” (Napanee Beaver, 17 May 1975). It can be seen on the 1954 aerial photograph above as the light-coloured area indicated. This sort of light-coloured area on the aerial photograph seems to mark areas of long, reedy grass (in contrast to the dark areas of the photograph which represent mown grass and dense tree canopies).
As far as the “Local Ground Rules” of 1927 were concerned, the only issue to note on the seventh hole was this “ditch,” which I take to be a reference to what came to be called “the waterhole”: “No relief. An unplayable ball in the ditch must be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke” (Hunters 18-19).

Figure 83 A modified Google map shows a three-dimensional image by which we can located the seventh hole of the 1907-27 course in relation to today's golf course. Today's greens are marked in yellow. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh holes of the 1907-27 course are marked in orange.
1907 Eighth Hole
The eighth green was along the extreme east side of today’s sixth hole -- right along the fence line.

Figure 84 Lovell and Reiffenstein continue their match, with Lovell apparently having hit Reiffenstein's ball with his putt, leading to his repositioning of Reiffenstein's ball. Photograph N-08889. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The fence line today is the same as the fence line of 1907. The green was located at the top of the hill rising from the ditch on today’s sixth fairway. Until 2016, there was a huge poplar tree near the spot where Lovell and Reiffenstein appear in the photograph to the left. On the right side of the photograph, in the background, we can see the fence and the trees in the neighbouring field beginning to drop down the hill that bottoms out as the gully through which the north creek flows from the railway tracks to Original Road.
References to this hole in the 1927 “Local Ground Rules” are in accord with the observations above: “No relief. An unplayable ball in the ditch must be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke. No relief for a ball played over or by the green into the wire fence” (Hunters 18-19).
Subsequent to the taking of the photograph above, another photograph was taken of Lovell putting out.

Figure 85 Lovell putts on the eighth hole, observed by a spectator in the neighbouring field. Photograph N-08887. Courtesy of the county of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Note the length of the grass on the green: it looks even longer than typical fairway grass these days. One could tell on the fourth green where the grass of the green ended and the grass of the surrounding rough began. Not so here.
And look at the flag! At least the odd combination of sticks and rope that constituted the “flag” on the fourth green was vertical: this flag has a distinctly makeshift air, and its placement in the hole seems rather haphazard.
Still, the photograph documents a historic occasion. Notice the spectator. Someone has wandered over from a dwelling on Yeomans Street (one can make out in an enlargement a building in the background trees where Yeomans Street would be). The first gallery at the Napanee Golf Club!
The final photograph of the eighth green shows D’Arcy Sneath playing golf wearing his black shoes, as he was in the photograph above in the section on the fourth hole.

Figure 86 D'Arcy Sneath on the eighth green in the summer of 1912. Photograph N08886. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Here, the same flag as appeared in the photograph of Lovell and Reiffenstein is stuck in the hole, but it leans in the opposite direction. Note that in all photographs from 1912, the players are shown putting with the flag still in the hole. The recent rule change that allows golfers to leave the flag in the hole seems to have been a return to an early stage in the history of the game where precisely the same thing was allowed.
The 400-yard eighth hole would have paralleled the seventh hole, perhaps departing from a tee near the back tee on today’s eighteenth hole and proceeding across part of today’s driving range,today’sfifth fairway, and the west tee box for today’s sixth hole. At this point, the fairway would have crossed the gully containing the golf course’s north creek, before climbing the steep hill on the far side of the gully to the green seen in the photographs in this section.

Figure 87 A modified Google map shows a three-dimensional image by which we can locate the eighth hole of the 1907-27 golf course in relation to today's golf course. Today's greens are marked in yellow. The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth holes of the 1907-27 course are marked in orange.
1907 Ninth Hole
At just 325 yards, the last hole of the 1907-27 golf course seems to have offered early twentieth-century golfers a welcome respite after three holesin a row of 400 yards or more.
As mentioned in Volume Two of this book, the only image we have of this golf hole is from a postcard collection from 1910 showing about twenty Napanee sites of historical or cultural interest. The image below is the last postcard in the fold-out collection of postcards in question:

Figure 88 Postcard from 1910 purporting to show the ninth green of the Napanee Golf Club's 1907-27 golf course. Photograph N-03224. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
As I mentioned in Volume Two of this book, I doubt that what we see here is actually the Napanee golf course.
The “flag” – a little pole with a piece of wood or metal fixed to it, bearing the number “9” – does not accord with the flags we have seen on the course. This flag resembles the kind that were advertised for sale in the golf magazines of the time: why would the club have just one of these mass-produced “flags” and use its rag-tag collection of makeshift “flags” on other holes?

Figure 89 The "flag" in the 1910 postcard does not accord with the "flags" on other greens in 1912.
Perhaps the postcard company set up a photograph at the golf course: put its own flag in the ninth hole close to Original Road and posed two models on it?
Still, the dense woods depicted in the photograph do not seem consistent with the relatively treeless nature of the golf course in the early 1900s.
I suspect that the postcard company used a stock photograph – not bothering to represent the Napanee golf course accurately, contentsimply to indicate that Napanee possessed a golf course.
As to the nature of the ninth hole, my guess is that it was probably a lengthened version of the first hole of the 1897-1906 golf course.
The old first hole would probably have started at a teeing ground near the old club shed. The ninth hole of the 1907 golf course could have used the same fairway and green simply by backing up the tee for the old first hole to a point not far from the eighth green. A 325-yard hole could have been created by placing the tee across the gully of the north creek to the west side of the hill atop which the eighth green had been built. The eighth green was on the east side of today’s sixth fairway; the ninth tee box would have been parallel to it on the west side.

Figure 90 A modified Google map shows a three-dimensional image by which we can locate the ninth hole of the 1907-27 golf course in relation to today's golf course. Today's greens are marked in yellow. The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth holes of the 1907-27 course are marked in orange.
The 1927 “Local Ground Rules” again refer to difficulties that may arise from the need to carry the ball over a ditch: ”A ball driven into the ditch from the tee may be dropped back without penalty. Other shots unplayable in the ditch must be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke” (Hunters 18-19). Such a local rule accords with the idea that the tee shot on the ninth hole had to carry the gully through which the north creek flows.
But, my goodness, the Napanee Golf Club was a Mulligan-happy group of golfers back in the day: here again we see a poor drive forgiven. Locally mandated Mulligans must have been necessary to keep a certain portion of the early membership happy.
The drive from this tee-box would have been the start of a 325-yard fairway, according to the scorecard, which means that it would have had to have run about as far as the present eighth green.
In fact, the present eighth green could even be a descendent of the 1907-27 green, and the 1907-27 green could have been a descendent of the 1897-1906 green – the one on which Tom German inserted a putter up his pant-leg one Sunday when he felt the gaze of Reverend Dibb upon him.
If so, the eighth green today is the last part of the original 1897 golf course still in play.
New Course of 1907: six-hole and ten-hole rounds?
The Hunters wonder whether the new course of 1907 might have remained a five-hole course.
That seems unlikely.
The information regarding the yardage of 2,801 yards given by Secretary-Treasurer German to golf publications at the beginning of the 1920 season presumably indicates the golf course’s 1919 yardage, which presumably also represents its pre-war yardage, since the dearth of referencesto golf course activities during World War I suggests that the club and the course were in a quiescent state from 1914 to 1919 (unlikely to have undergone renovation or re-design). Against this background, we must presume that the golf course had nine holes by at least 1914.
So we can take George Reiffenstein’s course record of 1914 as a score achieved on a proper nine-hole course (not a five-hole course on which he repeated four holes). In this context, we note that the newspaper story about his nine-hole score refers to a nine-hole score achieved earlier by a professional golfer. Presumably the professional golfer’s record score was achieved on the same holes that Reiffenstein played (otherwise the records would not have been presented as comparable), and presumably the professional golfer’s record score was achieved some years previously . Otherwise the newspaper report about Reiffenstein would probably have indicated that he had matched the professional course record “set earlier this year,” or “just last year.”
This circumstantial evidence suggests that the golf course had nine holes for many years before 1914.
Of course we have photographs from 1906 to 1912 of golfers on future or actual golf holes at the south end of the golf course – holes corresponding to today’s ninth, first and second holes. When the new course opened in May of 1907, these south holes were part of the new course, for the newspaper writes of golfers on the new course being able for the first time to enjoy a panoramic view of the golf holes below from the new hole on top of Blanchard’s Hill.
For the golf course to have remained a 5-hole course after the building of these three new holes in 1906-07, the original five holes down below on the land near the original clubhouse would have had to have been pared down to just two.
This seems unlikely.
All of these things taken together make it extremely unlikely that the new course of 1907 remained a five-hole course and that it somehow – and quite silently (that is, without any comment about the fact in the newspapers) – became a nine-hole course a few years later.
The Hunters, however, point out that after 1907 there were occasionally rather odd competitive rounds of golf played in terms of the number of holes that the competition comprised. Certainly, on the one hand, as they point out, as soon as the new course opened for play in 1907, competitions of 9-hole length and 18-hole length were commonly reported in the newspapers. The Hunters summarize: “On Victoria Day, May 24, 1907, four-man teams, captained by the Club President, Dr. Leonard, and the Vice-President, Mr. Robinson, played a competition which saw Robinson’s team win easily. Judging by the scores, which ranged from 116 to 142, they played 18-hole matches. On a Friday afternoon, in June, a similar team format was used for nine-hole matches…. [When] The preliminary round for the 1907 Club Championship was played …. the first and second rounds were nine holes. The final 18-hole match was on July 31” (8). Yet, on the other hand, they also note that there are newspaper reports of five players participating in a 10-hole club tournament in 1910, and that there is a small club tournament described in 1911 (in honour of a departing member) that was scheduled for 18 holes, was then reduced to nine holes, and eventually proceeded to a post-prandial postscript of just six holes (see the Hunters p. 8).
How would members of Napanee Golf Club have played ten-hole and six-hole rounds of golf on a nine-hole golf course?
The explanation may be relatively straightforward.
To play a ten-hole round, one would have headed out to the ninth tee and commenced a round there, concluding the round by playing the ninth hole again as the tenth hole of the round. Note that the ninth tee was actually closer to the old clubhouse than the first tee.
To play a six-hole round, one could have walked back to the clubhouse after holing out on the sixth green, a walk of less than 200 yards from the old clubhouse. Other permutations would have been possible, too, based on the old habits of playing out and back over the same holes on the 1897-1906 course.
As long as the original clubhouse stood where it was, six-hole, and ten-hole rounds remained an option for club members.
There was even in the 1920s an odd gender-motivated division of the golf course into four-hole and five-hole circuits, as noted by the Hunters: “On Wednesdays in 1924, a series of tournaments was started whereby the men played 5-hole handicap matches, while the ladies played a 4-hole competition. Both groups engaged in their own driving contests. Presumably, this was a unique way of being together, without playing together” (p. 15). The ladies presumably had the four holes closest to the clubhouse, while the men went around the south end of the course, entailing a walk back to the clubhouse from the fifth green – a walk no longer than the walk from the clubhouse to the first tee.
Since after the reference to the new course of 1907 there was never any reference in newspapers to another new course opening a few years after 1907, and since there was never any reference to new holes being added to take the total from five to nine, it seems to me virtually certain that the new course of 1907 contained nine holes.
Foursome Sneath, Lovell, Reiffenstein, and Herrington's Final Scores
The four golfers in the photographs from 1912 that we have studied above enjoyed just two seasons of golf at the Napanee Golf Club before World War I broke out.
Then their lives changed – changed utterly, as terrible duties were borne.
I will take each of their stories to conclusion in the sections that follow.
The Story of Thomas D'Arcy Sneath, Part Two: He Shall Never Grow Old
D’Arcy Sneath and Caroline Herrington were married in November of 1913. They had less than two years of living together as husband and wife in Canada.

Figure 91 D'Arcy Sneath while employed in Toronto 1913-14, probably photographed at home in Colborne by Caroline Sneath. Photograph N-08924. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The newlyweds lived in Napanee for a while after the wedding, and then in Colborne. D’Arcy’s career in Toronto took off quickly. By 1914, he was the manager in Toronto of Balsam Lake Quarries. He was hired next by the Canadian Stewart Company and employed on the Toronto Harbor Works in 1914-15.
Then the couple was separated by World War One – separated first for a little while, but then forever.
Resigning his position in Toronto, Sneath returned to eastern Ontario to enlist in the Canadian army. Presumably he returned to his wife’s home town of Napanee. He went to Ottawa in March of 1915 for his medical examination in advance of joining the Canadian army. He signed his first attestation papers in the same city at the end of the same month. Before departing for England, Sneath “was one of the first officers selected upon the organization of the 8th C.M.R.” (Canadian Mounted Rifles) (“Queen’s Man Honored,” in Queen’s University Archives, Queen’s Remembers: The First World War: World War One: Individuals who lost their lives. https://archives.queensu.ca/exhibits/queens-remembers/world-war-i). Stationed at the Barriefield base in Kingston, Lieutenant Sneath was sent back to Ottawa to take “a course in the school of musketry” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 June 1915, p. 5). He returned to Barriefield in the middle of June, took “a special course in engineering and was attached to the 5th C.M.R.” (“Queen’s Man Honored”).

Figure 92 Thomas D'Arcy Sneath, 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, circa 1915.
Sneath sailed to England in July of 1915 with a contingent from the 5th CMR.
He was stationed at the Shorncliffe military base near Cheriton in the County of Kent, on the English Channel not far from the port of Dover, where he signed a second attestation paper on his wife’s 23rd birthday: 4 August 1915.
By November of 1915, Sneath was in the trenches, as reported by one of the Kingston newspapers early the next year: “He has been in the trenches since November last and up to the present has been fortunate enough to escape the shells of the Germans” (“Queen’s Man Honoured”).
Early in 1916, the Kingston newspaper reported that “his name has been mentioned in despatches …for his efficient work in securing detailed reports of the enemy’s defences” (Queen’s Man Honored”). The Ottawa Citizen contained a report of this work in February:
Several excellent reconnaissances were carried out during the week. Pte. G. W. Graham of the 2nd Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles, left our trenches in the middle of the day and crawling forward for some distance to a point near the German wire, where a good observation could be secured, remained there for two hours. Pte. Graham brought in valuable information. Detailed reports on sections of the German wire and works were also secured by Lts. T. D. Sneath and G. Graves, of our 5th Battalion, C.M.R., after a close personal Inspection. (28 February 1916, p. 2).
Sneath was shortly afterwards promoted to the rank of captain.
But how long would the newly promoted captain be “fortunate enough to escape the shells of the Germans”?
Not for long.
The official casualty reports published in British and Canadian newspapers in the middle of May, 1916, announced that Sneath had been severely wounded. His wide circle of family and friends in Woodstock, Colborne, Napanee, and Kingston held their breath as they awaited further news.
Historians describe the battle at Ypres in May of 1916 in which Sneath was wounded: “In command of ‘B’ Company, 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, his platoon moved into the front lines near Sanctuary Wood on 15 May. The following afternoon, the enemy ‘kept up very active fire on our line with rifle grenades and trench mortars causing many casualties,’ the unit war diary recorded. Captain Sneath was one” (Jennifer Arthur-Lackenbauer, Peter Kikkert, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer explain Familiar Fields to Foreign Soil: Three Rural Townships at War, 1914-1918 [Norwich, 2018], p. 125).
A Kingston newspaper finally received a letter from Sneath himself in June explaining his harrowing experience:
The suspense concerning the extent of the injuries to Capt. D’Arcy Sneath of the Canadian Artillery was considerably relieved by the receipt of a message from him on the 8th inst. [June]. On the 18th of May he was taken to a hospital in Boulogne in an unconscious condition suffering from shell shock. He was deaf and badly shaken up but in the course of a week was able to be removed to Hyde Park Hospital in London where he is steadily improving and hopes in the course of a few weeks to rejoin his battalion which has sustained heavy losses during the past week. His injuries were received from the explosion of a shell among a group of five officers. Two were killed outright and the other three were knocked over and buried under a great weight of earth from which they were, with difficulty, extracted more dead than alive. (“Capt. D’Arcy Sneath Severely Shocked,” Queen’s University Archives).
The concussion from the explosion of the shell beside Sneath “ruptured both of his ear drums,” but “his nervous system recovered and his ears healed after several weeks,” so that “by late June, he regained his strength and rejoined his unit” (Arthur-Lackenbauer, et al., p. 125). Sneath’s hope of an early return to his depleted unit was fulfilled.
He returned to his unit just in time to participate in the Battle of the Somme.
Commencing in July of 1916, this infamously costly series of attacks lasted many months but achieved relatively little. Under British command, 400,000 soldiers died in battles that advanced the front line of trenches just six miles.
The Kingston newspaper reported that Sneath “took part in the engagement in which the Canadians suffered so heavily about three weeks ago and was the only surviving officer of a double company that he led into a charge. They fought with desperation until their ammunition was exhausted, and then while retiring with a small remnant, he received a shrapnel wound in the hand, but we understand it is not a very serious one” (“Again Promoted,” Queen’s University Archives).
D’Arcy’s father Henry was extremely proud of his son’s military service. He told the Woodstock newspaper that his son had been promoted from captain to major at this time, leading to the following story:
Further Promotion for D’Arcy Sneath, Gazetted a Major and Given Short Leave Following Good Work at the Somme
D’Arcy Sneath has received further honors in France. In a letter to his father, Henry Sneath, of this city, he states that he has been appointed a major. The Woodstock soldier has made rapid advancement. Going overseas as a lieutenant in an Engineering Corps, he has received several promotions, and besides has been mentioned for bravery on several occasions. Major Sneath was apprised of his latest promotion just after he had been relieved, following the first big drive on the Somme. (Queen’s University Archives)
This promotion to the rank of major was clearly in the works before Sneath’s heroism at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme.
Sneath’s contribution to the Battle of the Somme in July was obviously noteworthy, but it was for his exploits in a September action in the ongoing Somme offensive that he was subsequently awarded the Military Cross. He was instrumental in the success of one of the few clearly successful attacks in the Battle of the Somme – the Flers-Courcelette offensive where Sneath led men across No Man’s Land alongside tanks.

Figure 93 Sneath was instrumental in the success of the offensive at Flers-Courcelette in September of 1916 where the tank was used for the first time in military history.
Peter Jackson’s film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) might be the best resource to provide graphic context for the horrors underlying the historians’ dry account below of events that day:
The Canadian Corps took on a significant role in the Flers-Courcelette offensive, launched on 15 September and involving two British armies. At dawn that day, the Canadians, on the extreme left of the British assaulting force, attacked on a two kilometre sector west of Courcelette astride the Albert-Baupaume road, supported by two detachments of three tanks. The appearance of these armoured land cruisers on the battlefield for the first time had what we today might call a “shock and awe” effect that encouraged some Germans to surrender. The tanks of 1916, however, were pitifully slow (with a maximum speed of 3.7 miles an hour), mechanically unreliable, and highly vulnerable to artillery fire, and most of the six assigned to the Canadians were put out of action within the first few hours of battle. The Royal Flying Corps attacked the enemy’s trenches with machine-gun fire, but in the end it fell to the artillery and infantry to take the objectives in a carefully prepared set piece attack. Advancing behind a creeping barrage, the Canadians took their main objective, a German stronghold known as the Sugar Factory, by 8 a.m. Soon after, Canadian units captured the ruined village of Courcelette itself and then cracked the Zollern Graben (a long German trench). Over the next two days, the Canadian units consolidated their gains and beat off German counter-attacks. It was a victory (one of the few that Allied forces secured on the Somme battlefield), but it came with the price of thousands of casualties… Capt. Thomas D’Arcy Sneath, who had already been mentioned twice in despatches for bravery, won the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry in action” as a company commander on 15 September. The war diary of the 5th Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles, noted his “conspicuous courage and skilful handling of his men [which] were instrumental in quickly overcoming the resistance of the Enemy.” They captured their assigned objective, taking several prisoners as well as a machine gun, “and his skilful dispositions enabled the position to be consolidated and held with a minimum loss to his men.” His Military Cross citation echoed how Sneath had “set a splendid example to his men.” (Arthur-Lackenbauer, et al., pp. 153-54)
D’Arcy’s letter to his father at the end of November of 1916 telling him about the award eventuated in a December newspaper article in Woodstock:
D’Arcy Sneath Wins a Military Cross: Says he cannot see that he did anything to deserve it …
Henry Sneath has received a letter from his son, Major T. D’Arcy Sneath, announcing that he has been awarded the Military Cross. With a modesty which is apparently a characteristic of men who earn recognition for bravery he says in his letter: “I cannot for the life of me see what I did to deserve it. I only did my duty as so many other poor chaps did who never even had a chance to get out. There were so many brave things done in the Somme fighting which will go unrecognized that I consider myself lucky…. This is certainly the spot to find out whether a man is a man or not. It is a supreme test.” (Queen’s University Archives)
D’Arcy Sneath probably did not anticipate that his reflections about his being awarded the Military Cross would make their way into a newspaper. But because of his father’s eagerness to publicize his son’s achievements, we have evidence in D’Arcy’s own words of his exemplification of the best Georgian standards of an officer and a gentleman that so impressed both the soldiers he commanded and the superior officers who commanded him.
Switching from the macrocosmic view of World War I to a microcosmic view, I turn to a consideration of D’Arcy’s socks.
Trench foot was one of the biggest problems that soldiers in World War I suffered from. Feet stood in trenches filled with water above boot level. Boots could often not be removed because they were frozen to the foot. Feet stayed wet for too long. They tingled, prickled, became numb, blistered, lost skin, became gangrenous. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered trench foot: 75,000 of them died from it.
Soldiers had no way of getting their feet dry: they had no second pair of boots; they had no second pair of socks.
But D’Arcy did.
He had home-made socks – perhaps the most expensive socks on the battlefield.
Back in Lennox and Addington, Herrington and Wilson tell us, the “Maple Leaf Women’s Institute sent the Red Cross [in London] a large quantity of goods that the women members of the Institute had made.” Sneath’s father-in-law Herrington adds one further piece of “inside” information: “Besides these regular contributions through the official channels, socks valued at $36.00 were sent to Major Sneath” (pp. 29-30).
In those days run-of-the mill socks cost about 25 cents per pair, and even cashmere socks cost less than twice that. Had Sneath been sent 144 pairs of socks (valued at 25 cents each), or one pair of $36 socks? Perhaps the socks sent to him by the Maple Leaf Women’s Institute were made of gold thread!
Even if his Napanee socks were magic socks, however, no magic could defend him from shell shock.
The Boulogne military hospital reported on May 18th, 1916, that Sneath had suffered “Shell Shock.” The official report of his injury states that he “was in good health until May 15th when he was in the trenches and was buried by a shell. He was not knocked unconscious but became so in about one hour.” He was hospitalized for about five weeks and was discharged on June 6th, 1916.
Added to the word “Shell Shock” in his medical file was the word “Concussion.” Army doctors at the beginning of 1916 still associated “Shell Shock” with the experience of concussion from the heavy shelling that could shakes trenches for hours at a time, and sometimes for days at a time. The medical board’s description of Sneath’s condition confirms that the “Shell Shock” that his doctors were describing was not the post-traumatic disorder that we now associate with the term “Shell Shock”: “this officer sustained the above disability [Shell Shock] near Ypres on 15th May 1916. The bursting of [a] shell ruptured his ear drums and there has been discharge from his ears. Ears are now all right, and hearing almost perfect, but he is somewhat week still.” The “shock” that the doctors describe was regarded as physical, not psychological.
Sneath was judged unfit for service for one month.
Yet by the end of the year, there are signs that there were elements of a stress disorder bound up in persistent health problems that Sneath was suffering from. On 16 December 1916, a Medical Board in Le Havre found that “Major Sneath is suffering from Debility, due to previous illnesses from May up to the present time. This Officer suffers from gastritis, anaemia, insomnia and general debility. The Board recommends that he be given three weeks sick leave in England.”
The psychological form of “shell shock” – that we now understand to have been a stress disorder – produced during World War I a wide range of symptoms such as anger, anxiety, agitation, depression, headaches, poor appetite or inability to eat, insomnia, palpitations, tremors, loss of memory, seeming blindness, seeming deafness, and so on. A soldier suffering from a stress disorder might display several of these symptoms, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps discretely.
Sneath’s trouble sleeping, his intestinal problems, his iron deficiency … these symptoms are all possibly signs of a stress disorder. Nonetheless, the records show that Sneath always returned to the battlefront, where he performed his duties as an officer with great efficiency and considerable courage, and even daring.