Ottawa Golf and the Bogey Man

Introduction

In the spring of 1893, as the Ottawa Golf Club prepared to begin its third season after its founding in April of 1891, we learn from the newspapers of the competitions that the club had scheduled for the coming months:

The season’s matches include weekly handicaps with prizes, semi-monthly competitions to decide the championship and the holding of the Gilmour Cup, a valuable cup donated by Col. Allan Gilmour, and a “Bogey” competition. (Ottawa Free Press, cited in the Montreal Star, 2 May 1893, p. 5)

This item appeared in the Montreal Star, but it was reproduced from a report in the Ottawa Free Press. And the information contained in this item was no doubt supplied to the Ottawa Free Press by the Secretary of the Ottawa Golf Club, Alexander Simpson.

Figure 1 Alexander Simpson, Letter to the Editor (inviting British golfers visiting the Chicago World’s Fair to play golf in Ottawa), Golf [London], 12 May 1893, p. 154.

Simpson was vigilant throughout the 1890s in keeping the Ottawa newspapers informed of developments at the Ottawa Golf Club, and in the mid-1890s he also communicated club news and information to British publications such as Golf (London) and the Golfing Annual.

He no doubt put the word “Bogey” in quotation marks in acknowledgement that the word was a neologism: he was indicating that the familiar old word “bogey,” which meant “an evil or mischievous spirit,” or “a person or thing that causes fear or alarm,” was being used in an entirely new way in relation to golf.

The Ottawa Free Press simply presents the information it received from Simpson (perhaps verbatim) and offers no explanation of the term. It probably could not do so: this was the first time that the word had been used in this way in a North American newspaper.

Late in 1891 in England, the word had been used for the first time in history to indicate a new form of golf. The idea of “’Bogey’ competition” had caught on at several golf clubs in the south of England by the spring of 1892. Then it advanced northward through English golf clubs during the 1892 season. It reached a golf club in the north of Ireland in mid-summer, and it reached Scotland in the fall. “’Bogey’ competition” became known fairly widely in British and Irish golf clubs only by the spring of 1893, when the Ottawa Golf Club became the first in North America to make acquaintance with it.

In the United States, the first use of the word “Bogey” in relation to golf appeared in newspaper and magazine reports only late in the summer of 1894, but not – as in the Ottawa newspaper – in relation to “a ‘Bogey’ competition.” The word merely referred to scores achieved on golf holes (see Vogue, vol 4 no 7 [16 August 1894], p. C3 and Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation, vol 24 no 6 [September 1894], p. 173). There is no reference to Bogey competitions being played at American golf clubs until 1895, and references to Bogey competitions merely caused confusion, as the editor of Outing observed in August of 1895: “The puzzling ‘Bogey’ is exercising the wits of some of our correspondents, who fail to find an explanation in the ‘glossary’ of the so-called practical textbooks, one of which is just off the press. ‘What is the bogey man?’ is the query we have been called upon to answer” (Outing, vol 26 no 5 [August 1895], p. 11).

And yet the word “Bogey” appears in the spring of 1893 in a Canadian newspaper’s account of the schedule of competitions for 1893 at the Ottawa Golf Club. The club had introduced an innovation to golf in North America. The editor of Outing could have directed his correspondents to the Ottawa Golf Club for an answer to their question, “What is the bogey man?”

The ripples from the invention of Bogey would prove to be among the most far-reaching in the history of golf in general, and Ottawa’s introduction of the concept to Canada in 1893 would have far-reaching consequences in terms of the golf professionals hired by Quebec and Ontario golf clubs in the 1890s and in terms of the improvement of the quality of golf played in Canada during that decade.

Engaging with the concept of Bogey in the spring of 1893, the Ottawa Golf Club was the first into the field in what would become a decades-long battle between Bogey and par for the hearts and minds of golfers regarding which term would be chosen to name the perfect round of golf.

A Bogey Par?

As we know, the word “Bogey” had been introduced to golf in England less than two years before it was used in Ottawa. And, as we shall soon see, it became associated with one of the most important concepts ever developed in golf – the idea of a proper score for a golf hole (and thereby a proper score for a complete round of eighteen holes).

We now call this score “par,” but in the 1890s it was more often called the “Bogey” score than the “par” score, and a preference for Bogey over par endured well into the twentieth century. For instance, when twenty-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet defeated Harry Vardon and Ted Ray for the U.S. Open Championship of 1913 at Brookline, Massachusetts, British golf writer Bernard Darwin marked Ouimet’s score on an official scorecard that indicated a Bogey score for each hole, rather than a par score.

Figure 2 Francis Ouimet’s scorecard in the playoff with Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, 20 September 1913.

The same preference for Bogey over par endured in Canada well into the 1900s.

See below the scorecard for the nine-hole course of the Napanee Golf Club in the early 1900s.

Figure 3 Undated scorecard for the 1907 design of the nine-hole golf course of the Napanee Golf Club, a course in play from 1907 to 1926.

Although the concept of par preceded the concept of Bogey by twenty years, the latter initially prevailed.

Two decades after its invention in 1870, the concept of “par” had still not caught on with golfers, but when the concept of Bogey was invented in 1891 (in support of a new form of competition that it enabled), it immediately became more famous and more popular than the concept of par had ever been.

Ironically, however, the elastic way in which the concept of Bogey came to be used differently from one golf club to the next soon created problems for golf that only a reinvigorated concept of par could solve.

Ultimately, during the early decades of the twentieth century, all golf clubs – from the great Country Club at Brookline to the modest Napanee Golf and Country Club – would convert to par. The fate of Bogey would be to name a score on a golf hole of one more than par.

Oh, the ignominy!

The Invention of Par

For the first 500 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 was simply to take as few strokes as possible to complete a golf hole and, in turn, a golf course: for neither a golf hole nor a golf course was there recognized a theoretically proper number of strokes that a first-class golfer should take in completing them.

Figure 4 Scorecard of Young Tom orris for rounds one and two of the 1869 Open Championship at the Prestwick Golf Club in Scotland.

Note the photograph to the left, for instance, which shows the scorecard of Young Tom Morris for the 1869 Open Championship on the twelve-hole links of the Prestwick Golf Club in Scotland: it simply lists by number the twelve holes to be played, with no par score indicated for any hole.

Young Tom won the three-round championship by eleven strokes, his second win in a row, and in doing so he recorded the first hole-in-one in Open Championship history on the eighth hole during the first round (as recorded on the scorecard shown to the left).

At the next Open Championship in 1870, another first occurred in golf history when the word “par” was used in reference to a golf score in a discussion amongst some of the top competitors who had returned to the same Prestwick course to battle again for the Championship Belt.

Top amateur players of the day, Alexander Hamilton Doleman and William Doleman, along with younger brother Frank, were sharing a cottage at Prestwick with Scotland’s top three professional golfers: Jamie Anderson, Davie Strath, and Young Tom Morris. It was assumed that one of these three accomplished young professionals would win the championship, Young Tom having won the previous two.

Talk amongst the housemates turned to the question of what the professionals thought the winning score would be. American golf writer Charles Quincy Turner summarizes the conversation that ensued:

Figure 5 David Strath (1849-79).

Davie Strath, Jamie Anderson, Tom Morris, Jr., and the brothers Doleman were staying in the same cottage, when naturally they fell to discussing what score ought to win on the morrow. Some said one thing, some another. At length William Doleman, so says his brother A.H., asked Davie Strath and Jamie Anderson what a certain hole should be done in, if played correctly.

Davie Strath gave the required number at once.

Figure 6 James Anderson (1842- 1905).

Figure 7 William Doleman, 1880.

“Ah!” says Jamie Anderson, “that’s a’ very guid, but what about a bad lyin’ la’?”

“Tut! Tut!” says Davie, “that has naethen’ tae dae wi’ it, Jamie; that’s the number you should do it in.”

And Davie laid great stress on the “should.”

By degrees M[r]. W. Doleman led the professionals on to give the “should” for all the other holes.

And this ideal, or perfect, round was found to be 49 for the twelve holes.

And then says Davie, “That is the number we should do it in, if we play perfect golf, but I know we won’t do it.”

While Davie was still talking, in walked Tom Morris, Jr.

And hearing what Strath was saying, he shook his head, smiled, and then said, “We’ll hae to try ony how.”

Figure 8 Young Tom Morris (1851-1874).

And Young Tom did try, and made a noble effort, coming within two strokes of perfect golf by holing the thirty-six holes in 149 strokes, very nearly an average of fours.

Mr. A.H. Doleman, thinking it would be a good thing to have some word to indicate the required number of strokes for a hole, and so for the whole round, on an infallible principle, chose the word “par.” (Golf [New York], vol 14 no 2 [February 1904], p. 100).

Figure 9 A.H. Doleman, circa early 1890s.

A.H. Doleman had chosen the word “par” for the number of strokes that a hole should normally take because this number struck him as analogous to the price used to indicate the “par” value for a stock certificate.

A corporate charter indicates the original or nominal value of shares issued for purchase. In the stock market, however, shares may sell for a price higher or lower than the “par value.”

Similarly, golfers can make a score on a golf hole higher or lower than its “par value.”

The Par Brothers Doleman

William Doleman (1838-1918) had easy and familiar access to Scotland’s top golf professionals because he was an elite amateur player who regularly played against the professionals in medal-play tournaments or played with them in foursomes match-play competitions.

He had played against Jamie Anderson and other top professionals in an important tournament in Montrose in 1866, and he had defeated them all. He played against Young Tom Morris at another important tournament at Carnoustie in 1867 (a tournament open to professionals and amateurs, which the precocious sixteen-year-old Morris won in a playoff).

William Doleman also played against Young Tom, Davie Strath, and Jamie Anderson in the Open Championships held at Prestwick from the mid-1860s to 1870. After each of these competitions, all four players engaged with various partners in exhibition matches at Prestwick.

Figure 10 Contemporary aerial photograph of the Musselburgh Links Golf Course located within the Musselburgh racecourse.

Doleman had learned to play golf at Musselburgh. The city’s nine-hole course along its main street would become one of the most important in Scotland, hosting six Open Championships between 1874 and 1889. As it still does today, the golf course played into and out of the infield of the Musselburgh racecourse.

Doleman’s father, also called William, was at first a tailor, but he became in 1838 the Race Stand Attendant at the Musselburgh racecourse, and so he also looked after the “boxes” (a form of locker) that were rented by club members. His sons were allowed to play on the golf course, and they all did so with enthusiasm.

The youngest brother, Francis (“Frank,” 1848-1929), was the only one to become a golf professional. In the 1860s, he worked at both golf clubs on the Wimbledon Common (the London Scottish Club and the Royal Wimbledon Club). Then he returned to the Edinburgh area, working a short while as a golf professional before becoming manager (and then owner) of a club-making business.

Figure 11 John Doleman, Golf Illustrated, vol 2 (20 October 1899), p. 41.

The oldest brother, John (1926-1916), settled in Nottingham in 1884 and founded the Notts Golf Club. He was the only brother not to play in an Open Championship. Mind you, he was present at the Open Championship of 1870, although not as a competitor. Instead, he played with his three brothers in the exhibition matches at Prestwick held the day after Young Tom’s victory: “John Doleman and William Doleman played a match of two rounds (24 holes) against A. Doleman and F. Doleman. John and William won by one hole” (Glasgow Herald, 17 September 1870, p. 3).

By far the best golfer among the brothers was William, but he was also the one with the greatest wanderlust: “Willie” became a sailor when he was fifteen, determined to see the world.

And so he did.

Figure 12 William Doleman, circa 1898.

In 1854, he was on a British ship that participated in the bombardment of Odesa on the Black Sea at the beginning of the Crimean War.

As he always took his golf clubs with him on his sea voyages, during the two weeks he was in port at Quebec in 1859, he set up a makeshift golf course on Cove Field on the Plains of Abraham and played many a round over it.

He returned to Scotland in the 1860s. After winning a prestigious tournament on the Montrose Links (a tournament that included professionals Old Tom Morris, James Anderson, and Bob Kirk), he told astonished organizers that he “drives a baker’s van in Glasgow every day” (Golfer’s Yearbook for 1866, ed. Robert Howie Smith (Ayr, Scotland: Smith & Grant, 1867), p. 72). He afterwards became a cab driver in Glasgow, eventually owning his own cab hire company.

As a member of Prestwick’s St. Nicholas Golf Club, he pursued golf with a passion, becoming in 1865 the first amateur player to enter the Open Championship. He went on to post the lowest score by an amateur every year from 1865 to 1872. Becoming a member of the revived Glasgow Golf Club in the mid-1870s, he also posted the lowest score by an amateur in the Open Championships of 1875 and 1884. His best finishes in the overall standings were third, fifth (twice), sixth (twice), and seventh. In 1872, only Young Tom Morris and Davie Strath beat him. In an exhibition match at the 1876 Open championship at St Andrews, Doleman played against the 1874 champion Mungo Park and beat him by one hole (Field, vol 48 no 1241 [7 October 1876], p. 422). He would play in the British Amateur Championship until 1912, when he was seventy-three years of age. When he died in 1918, Field described him as “the finest amateur golfer of his day” (cited in The Transcript-Telegram [Holyoke, Massachusetts], 12 August 1918, p. 5).

Although William had been the one whose close questioning had elicited the principles of par golf from the professional golfers, it was his brother Alexander who became the one most closely associated with the articulation and promotion of the concept of par if for no other reason than that he was the one who became a writer and contributed essays on the subject of par to the golf journals of the day.

Figure 13 A.H. Doleman, circa early 1890s.

Alexander Hamilton Doleman (1836-1914) was from the beginning the most academically inclined of the four brothers. He attended the Bridge Street Academy in Musselburgh, graduating as one of the top students. Whereas his younger brother William was eager to leave school as soon as possible, Alexander could hardly get enough of it. So, the son of Musselburgh’s Race Stand Attendant and keeper of the golf club lockers took a degree at the University of Cambridge.

Determined to become a teacher, Alexander moved to Blackpool in the late 1850s to set up his own private school.

Still in love with golf, but finding no golf courses in the area, for five years A.H. Doleman played golf alone on the sand dunes along the seacoast of the Irish Sea near Blackpool, forced to set up his own makeshift golf course.

Finally, four local gentlemen joined him, overcome with curiosity about what he was up to, and soon thereafter founded with him (along with fifteen others) the (now Royal) Golf Club of Lytham and St Anne’s (regular host of the Open Championship). Doleman became perhaps the most important person in the club over the next four decades and was honoured in due course as “a Father of Fylde Golf” (as seen above in an image from a local publication celebrating his influence on the Borough of Fylde in Lancashire).

In 1870, William Doleman had worked hard to winkle out of the professional golfers at Prestwick the principles by which to determine the number of strokes in which a golf hole should be done, and A.H. Doleman’s invocation of the word “par” to denote the accomplishment of this feat was inspired.

Yet progress in the use and understanding of this term was slow and fitful for the next twenty-five years.

Early References to Par

The Doleman brothers continually used the word “par” themselves, working out the par score for every golf course they played, and explaining the concept of “par golf” to anyone who showed the slightest curiosity about it. And they continued to ask professional golfers what they thought the par score should be for various golf holes and golf courses.

The word “par,” however, appears infrequently in newspapers and golf journals from the 1870s to the early 1890s. And we can see that among those who used the term there was not a common understanding of what it meant.

In 1879, we read in The Scotsman a report of a competitor at St Andrews who “was unlucky in running up an awkward 6 at the first hole, where 4 is par play” (8 May 1879, p. 7). There is no ambiguity here: par is four. Also in 1879, however, we find a report of a match at Musselburgh in which a competitor does well, “notwithstanding a very bad seven run up at … [a] hole for which the ‘par’ play was no more than four” (The Field, vol 54 no 1,400 [25 October 1879), p. 571). Here there is ambiguity: it seems that “‘par’ play” is relatively elastic, as it might be four, or it might be three.

The phrase “par play” was used more frequently in the 1880s.

Figure 14 Early golf at Seaton Carew, County Durham, England.

One of Field’s correspondents in 1883 reports on the new golf course of the Durham and Yorkshire Golf Club “at Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool,” observing that “the green consists of eleven holes only” and that “Par play for the eleven holes would be 58” (vol 61 no 1584 [5 May 1883], p. 596). And later the same year, a writer in The Newcastle Daily Journal describes the golf course at Earlsferry, Scotland, as “a second-class course only … on which par play means an average of 3 ½ strokes to each of the twelve holes” (4 December 1883, p. 4).

For these writers, par seems to be a fixed standard of play. Still, others continued to use it in a more elastic way.

In the spring of 1882, for instance, a writer from North Berwick tells of a remarkable round of golf played there in windy conditions and suggests that a “par” score should be understood not as a fixed standard but rather in relation to the conditions prevailing on the day:

The weather on Saturday was not conducive to brilliant work, for, although dry overhead, there was a strong east wind, which had an aggravating tendency to materially contribute toward heavy totals when cards were handed in…. Strange to say, none of the scratch men were ever dangerous, the trophy being carried off by Major Hay with a total of 85, and a net score of 79… [T]hat a player who received 6 [strokes] … should, under the wind disadvantages, negotiate it in 85 strokes is of itself a fact worthy of note. It is undoubtedly a “par” score, and the best testimony of its merits is the distance it is ahead of the totals of such experts as Messrs Whitecross, Bloxom, and Chambers, all of whom were in good playing form. (The Field, 8 April 1882, p 474)

The writer has heard of the concept of “par” scores, but if Davie Strath were to have heard him suggest that the day’s windy conditions had anything to do with determining the “par” score for the course, he would have said: “Tut! Tut!... That has naethen’ tae dae wi’ … the number you should do it in.”

In 1887, when A.H. Doleman himself used the phrase “par play” to report in Field on a competition at the Lytham and St Anne’s Golf Club, a reader signing his letter “an old golfer” later wrote to the editor to ask what on earth was meant by the phrase “par play”:

I was rather amused on reading an account of the meeting of the Lytham and St. Anne’s Golf Club in your issue of Saturday last. Your correspondent speaks of the par play of that green. What does he mean by this?

Is it the lowest score it is possible to do the round in, bar mistakes, bad play, bad luck, etc?

It is very easy matter to decide what number of strokes a course can be done in when you are sitting by the fireside with a pencil and a piece of paper in your hand.

As an example of what a hole might be done at, take the first hole at Hoylake. Last autumn, my partner started with a long drive off the tee and followed this up with another right on the putting green within about three club lengths of the hole, but, unfortunately, missed the ‘put’ for a three, and also his next, therefore taking five to hole out – a very fair number after all.

Would your correspondent say that three strokes was the ‘par’ of this hole? (Field, no 1887 [9 April 1887], p. 478)

Doleman replied with equal parts incredulity, condescension, and disdain:

Where is the “old golfer” who does not know what the par play of a green is?...

Every good golfer knows what a first-class player ought to do a hole in ….

[P]ar does not mean what a hole can be done in. As an example, the Rushes hole at Hoylake can and is sometimes holed in one stroke, but most certainly that is not the par of the hole. The par is three.

Again, the first hole is seldom driven in two strokes, unless by exceptional drives, consequently five must be taken as the par. (Field, no 1792 [30 April 1887], p. 606)

Doleman is rather hard on the person who signs his letter, “old golfer.” That “Every good golfer knows what a first-class player ought to do a hole in” does not mean that every good golfer knows that the phrase “par play” was coming to be used to describe the accomplishment of this feat. Doleman’s tone perhaps reveals a frustration that, seventeen years after his invention of the term “par,” it is still only the golf world’s cognoscenti who understand the term and use it properly.

Yet the more the word appeared in print, the more occasions there were for readers like “old golfer” to enquire of editors just what the word meant. And however slowly, such curiosity helped the use of the term to spread.

Par? What Is It Good For?

The most important factor in keeping the concept of par from gaining popularity was that it had no practical implications for the playing of the game.

Golf culture in Scotland had from the beginning understood match-play to represent the essence of the game. Contests among members of golf clubs were conducted by match-play. Team contests between golf clubs were conducted by match-play. The nineteenth century’s many famous, high-stakes matches between the top professionals were conducted by match-play (before hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of spectators).

Figure 15 Photograph circa 1854-55 commemorating a match-play contest involving Willie Dunn (addressing ball), Willie Park (to his right, watching him), Allan Robertson (club on shoulder), and Tom Morris (holding one club, right hand on grip, left hand on head). Ranged behind, left to right, are caddies James Wilson, Bob Andrew, D. (“Daw”) Anderson, and Bob Kirk.

Match-play required no concept of par, and it gained nothing from it.

Medal play was regarded as a necessary evil – a departure from match play made necessary by a large field of competitors: medal play was merely a practical and convenient way of determining a champion from a large number of players in a much shorter time than match-play among them would require.

Obviously, since the winner was the one who completed the course in fewer strokes than any other competitor, medal play also required no concept of par, and it gained nothing from it.

And the idea of using a universal standard of par as the basis for handicapping golfers would not occur until the late 1890s and early 1900s, and only then because the concept of Bogey had shown both how such a system of handicapping might be possible and why it might be necessary!

And so, for the first twenty-five years of its existence, the concept of “par” seemed to be literally useless

The Relative Uses of Par

And so, having brought the concept of par into being, the Doleman brothers struggled to find a use for it.

For the better part of three decades, they were happy to argue that it had a “relative” use: that is, it was useful in comparing golf courses. One could relate the test posed by a golf course with a par value of x to the test posed by another golf course with (say) a par value of x + 2 or, perhaps, a par value of x – 3, etc.

Although William Doleman became associated with the Glasgow Golf Club for more than four decades after its revival in 1870, before that he had been forced to travel to Prestwick to play golf as a member of the St. Nicholas Golf Club. In the latter’s club championship in February of 1871, held on the Prestwick links one year after Young Tom Morris’s record-setting score there in the Open Championship held in September of 1870, Doleman’s fellow club member James Hunter (who would introduce golf to Quebec in 1874) shot a score on the newly lengthened links that led to the implicit invocation of the concept of par in order to compare the performances of the two young stars:

Figure 16 Young Tom Morris, 1870.

The weather was most adverse to good play – a high wind and a drenching rain prevailing during the whole game.

The match consisted of two rounds of the Links, [or] twenty-four holes….

The club medal was gained by Mr. James Hunter, whose scores of 55 and 58, respectively, have rarely, if ever, been excelled, even by professionals.

The present round of the Links being four strokes longer than that [on] which the champion, [Young] Tom Morris, carried off the belt in September last, makes the success of Mr. Hunter all the more remarkable. (Glasgow Herald, 21 February 1871, p. 6)

Although the word “par” was not used in the passage above, the newspaper report noted that the course had been made four strokes longer in the five months between the rounds of Morris and Hunter. Doleman’s method of using the length of a hole to determine the number of strokes it should take to complete a hole is responsible for this calculation of precisely how many strokes longer the Prestwick links had been made by its redesign.

Note that Doleman, who had prompted the invention of par through his conversation with the young professionals at the Prestwick Open championship the previous September, may have been the only club member who knew what the professionals had determined to be the par of the course a few months before. And he was probably the only one who knew the distances that they had decided were appropriate for par-three, par-four, par-five holes. Furthermore, Doleman was Hunter’s playing partner during the round in question. One might suppose that Doleman was the source – if not the author – of the newspaper report cited above that compares the two versions of the golf course in terms of their relative pars.

Similarly, when in 1881, Glasgow Golf Club member Andrew Whyte Smith won the Tennant Cup for the second year in succession, in a tournament that was effectively the British amateur championship at that time, the Glasgow Evening Post indicated the quality of his play relative to par play:

Figure 17 A.W. Smith, 1880.

Last year, the first occasion on which the cup was played for, Mr. A.W. Smith was the winner, and Mr. Smith and his partner, Mr. Finlayson, of Edinburgh, had a large following on Saturday.

Mr. Smith was in magnificent form. He started with a couple of threes, each of the holes being well taken at four, and the round of nine holes, the par of which is 39, he finished at 40.

The second round was gone over in an almost equally faultless manner at 41 …. His total of 81 was an excellent performance…. When all the cards had been handed in, it was found that Mr. Smith had carried off the cup for a second time. (Glasgow Evening Post, 25 April 1881, p. 4)

William Doleman was a regular playing partner and personal friend of Smith’s from the moment Smith joined the club in 1874 to the day he left for Canada in May of 1881. Doleman was undoubtedly responsible for the fact that talk of the par score at the Glasgow course became a commonplace.

This use of par to assess the relative difficulty of golf courses began to spread.

In the late 1880s, for instance, discussion of Old Tom Morris’s work at Dornoch occasioned wider understanding and use of the word “par”:

The present course of eighteen holes was laid out by Tom Morris in the spring of 1886. We all know what Old Tom can do in this way, and his skill has not failed him at Dornoch. The par of the green is seventy-one strokes, and this will give all golfers an idea of what they could do upon it. For those who do not know what par play means, a word of explanation may be given. Take a first-class player, and then any hole he can drive in one should be holed in three. If it takes him two long shots and an iron stroke to be on the green, then the hole should be finished in five, and so on. (Fifeshire Journal, 12 September 1889, p. 2).

According to the editor of the Fifeshire Journal, after being instructed as to the meaning of par play, golfers informed of the par score of a particular golf course should be able to estimate the challenge that it will pose for them.

Figure 18 D.S. Duncan, early 1900s.

A year later, in the third volume of the Golfing Annual, which covered the years 1889-90, the journal’s new editor, David Scott Duncan, noting that the Dornoch golf course was about to be redesigned by Old Tom Morris, also observed that “The par of the green is seventy-one” strokes” (p. 31).

And, like the editor of the Fifeshire Journal, Duncan knew that he had used a word and invoked a concept that even most of the dedicated and knowledgeable golfers who read his specialized golf publication would find unfamiliar.

And so, we find him apparently borrowing word-for-word the passage above from the Fifeshire Journal:

For those who do not know what par play means, a word of explanation may be given. Take a first-class player, and then any hole that he can drive in one should be holed in three. If it takes him two long shots and an iron stroke to reach the green, the hole should be finished in five, and so on. I believe this method of calculation was invented by my good friend, Mr. William Doleman, one of the best authorities on all points of the game. (Golfing Annual for 1889-90, p. 31)

Editor Duncan did not use the word “par” again until he had occasion to discuss the completion of the Dornoch redesign two years later: “Following the suggestion of Tom Morris the course was considerably lengthened last year …. With this extension, the par of the green is raised from about 72 to 78 strokes” (Golfing Annual for 1891-92, p. 135).

Figure 19 William Doleman, American Golfer, vol 9 no 4 (February 1913), p. 386.

In 1896, William Doleman hit upon the idea of using the concept of par play on different golf courses to compare the achievements of great golfers of different generations.

At the Open Championship held at Muirfield in 1896, Doleman had objected to claims by journalists and professional golfers alike that the play at this tournament had been superior to championship play by golfers of previous generations.

He was convinced that such claims were incorrect. But was there a way to disprove them by means of an objective recourse to facts?

Doleman immediately hit upon the idea of using the score for par play on different golf courses as a factual constant against which the play of golfers from different generations could be measured and compared.

He used this strategy to argue that no golfer’s performance relative to the par score of Carnoustie in 1896 had matched the performance of Young Tom Morris relative to the par score of Prestwick in 1870 (a performance that Doleman himself had witnessed):

There isn’t a man, English or Scotch, in all this field that impresses me with the same sense of power, or golfing genius, call it what you like, as Tommy did, the instant he addressed the ball….

But they tell us he had nobody to play against.

That’s nonsense, for he had Davie Strath, Bob Ferguson, Jamie Anderson and other notable golfers; but supposing he hadn’t, he had always the ideal, the “par” score of the green to play against.…

It is there we get at Tommy’s position in the golfing world of today …. (quoted by William Weir Tulloch, The Life of Tom Morris [London: T. Werner Laurie, 1909], pp 170-71).

Doleman had appreciated at the Glasgow Golf Club in 1881 his friend A.W. Smith’s record score relative to the “the ideal, the ‘par’ score of the green,” but in 1896 he proposed to compare Young Tom’s 1870 Prestwick score relative to the par score of that links to the best Muirfield scores relative to the par score of this new links.

Doleman proceeded to calculate the par score for Muirfield (“Mr. Doleman’s own calculation, and that of some professionals with whom he had discussed the question,” was 74 [cited by Tulloch, p. 172]), and then he pointed out that the best score at the relatively new Muirfield course for the thirty-six holes of the 1896 Open Championship was seven over par, whereas for the thirty-six holes of the 1870 Open Championship at Prestwick, the score of the winner Young Tom Morris was only two over par.

Doleman was left with one conclusion: “Some of these moderns are grand golfers, no doubt, but the more I think out these things, the more I am convinced of Tommy’s surpassing greatness, and the better am I able to vindicate his superiority against all comers” (quoted by Tulloch, p. 173).

Doleman’s vindication of Young Tom as the greatest golfer of all time clearly depended on the concept of par.

Figure 20 A.H. Doleman, Golf [London], vol 6 no 50 (28 July 1893), p. 34.

Finally, in 1898, A.H. Doleman explained the concept of par play in the fullest and clearest terms yet.

In articles published at the beginning of the year, he promoted widespread calculation of par scores for all golf courses as the only way for golfers to assess the relative challenge they would face at the dozens of unfamiliar new layouts that were opening each year in the British Isles.

Twenty-eight years after the invention of par in the rented cottage at Prestwick, it was still necessary both to rehearse the basic concept and to anticipate the usual objection that since a hole could be completed in fewer strokes than its par score, then par could hardly be called the “ideal” score:

If we take a hole on any green, it may be a long hole, or it may be a short hole, every good golfer, when he has played it a few times, can tell what the hole should be done in, if he play it without mistake.

Should he take more than this number, from whatever cause, he knows that one or two strokes, as the case may be, have been lost. Should he take less, he knows again that he has done something which no amount of practice can give him any tolerable certainty of repeating….

Thus, when one holes a full shot with any club, everybody knows that no amount of practice will ever enable any golfer to repeat this with any amount of certainty. But more than this, no amount of practice will ever enable any player to hole in two strokes with any amount of certainty from a full drive, [and] a cleek or an iron approach.

Again, no amount of practice will ever enable any golfer to hole putts at any distance within twenty yards of the hole. A time may come when these shots will be looked for as what a first-class player ought to do, but it has not arrived just yet.

Having seen what is not to be expected from the first-class player, let us see what is expected.

In approaching a hole, whether it be by a full drive or the ordinary approach, it is expected from a first-class player that he shall be somewhere on the green. Being on the green, he ought to be dead with his long putt, or so near as to hole in two, thus enabling to hole in three off the approach.

This is the standard now; and, looking back for a period of nearly fifty years, always has been the standard for first-class play.

Whether some of the many patents [for new types of golf clubs] coming out every day will so revolutionise the game as to enable us to hole in two off the approach with no more difficulty than we do now in three, I cannot say, but “I hae my doots.”

Seeing that three strokes is the requisite number from the approach, we have only to add the number of full drives in a hole before the approach, and the proper number of strokes for the hole is known. Thus, if a hole requires one full drive before the approach, it is a four-hole; if two drives, a five-hole, and so on. Of course, if the hole consists of only one stroke, be it a full drive or ordinary approach, it is a three-hole.

The word by which this number is known in the golfing world is called “par”; and when the totals of the different holes are added together, we get the par of the links.

When therefore we see a record from some green, especially if it is not well known, those who insert the record should take care to insert the par, for it is only by knowing the par that outsiders can judge the quality of the play [that produced the record score]. (Golf [London], vol 15 no 394 [28 January 1898], p. 354)

A.H. Doleman could hardly have made things any clearer: calculating par required a simple mathematical calculation. And this calculation would allow a relative assessment of the level of difficulty of all golf courses.

Resisting Par

In addition to benign neglect of the concept of par, there was also considerable resistance to the way the Doleman brothers conceived of par scores and par play.

First, the Dolemans’ method of determining par required a measurement of golf holes according to an implicitly straight line down the middle of a fairway, and then it required the measured distances to be divided by increments according to the driving distance of the first-class player (understood from 1870 to 1890 to be about 170 yards). This mechanical and mathematical approach put off those who saw golf as an art.

Second, the Dolemans’ golf course was implicitly one on which the sun always shone, and no more than heavenly breezes ever blew. On actual golf courses, however, drenching rain (or even snow) might fall, a gale might blow, and poor light conditions (even darkness itself) might impede scoring conditions. On a real golf course, the ground might be waterlogged or baked dry, and it was seldom level or flat: judging the distance to hit a shot was made difficult by hills and valleys, and mounds made bounces unpredictable. On the Dolemans’ course, furthermore, there seemed to be no hazards to be avoided. A par score was relevant only to a golfer sitting in an armchair dreaming of par play on an abstract layout.

Third, their method seemed to require a good deal of talk. As English golf writer W.L. Watson observed in Golf Illustrated in 1899 (a year after A.H. Doleman’s articles promoting par had appeared):

As for the par score: ah! What is the par score?

We all remember Mr. [A.H.] Doleman’s attempt to define it, dictated by an admirable spirit and having in view the best interest of the game; but it is to be feared that the impression he left was that the “par” of the green is only to be arrived at by an involved process of trigonometry and dialectics. (Reprinted in Golf [New York], vol 5 no 6 [December 1899], p. 398)

By “dialectics,” Watson alludes to the way Socrates developed the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions: Socrates would ask his students for their definitions of beauty, or love, or justice, highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies until through a process of corrections and qualifications a viable definition was arrived at. In just this way, William Doleman had dialectically elicited a definition of par from the professionals at Prestwick in 1870, and he had done so again from the professionals at Muirfield in 1896.

Should dialectics be required to determine par?

In 1889, Duncan, the editor of the Golfing Annual, had agreed with the editor of the Fifeshire Journal that the par of the Dornoch links that Old Tom Morris was about to redesign was 71, but when he looks back at the original course after the completion of Morris’s work in 1891, he says that the old par was “about 72” (Golfing Annual for 1891-92, p. 135). As Duncan thinks of the original Dornoch layout, his opinion of its par has changed. Similarly, assessing the new links at Muirfield, Duncan suggests in the Golfing Annual for 1892-93 that “the par of the round may be placed at about 72,” yet in 1896 William Doleman and various golf professionals would say that the par for Muirfield was 74 (Golfing Annual for 1892-93, p. 58). Opinions of Muirfield’s par differ.

Can par be a matter of opinion?

Should a hole on which two perfect shots could reach the green, provided the second shot were to clear a ditch immediately in front of the putting surface, be regarded as a par four? If, except under some dire necessity in a match, first-class players would seldom attempt such a dangerous second shot, preferring instead to play short of the ditch with the second shot and then play onto the green with a third shot, should such a hole not be regarded as a par five?

Is there an elastic element in measuring par?

Figure 21 Henry Stirling Crawfurd Everard (1848-1909). Golf Illustrated, 1 February 1901.

In an 1899 article about that year’s early golf events, widely-respected English golf writer Henry Sterling Crawford Everard looked ahead to the 1899 Open Championship at Royal St. George’s Golf Club in Sandwich, England, and opined that talk about the par score for the Sandwich golf course was neither here nor there: it was interesting only “if we accept Mr. A.H. Doleman’s estimate of perfect play” (Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes [London], vol 8 no 4 [May 1899], p. 282, emphasis added).

His point was that the actual golf that would win the championship would require a mental measurement of actual distances and a mental gauging of actual conditions to produce actual physical shots and an actual score.

What had real golf got to do with an abstract and artificial “estimate” of perfect play?

Over the three decades after Bogey was invented in 1891, however, an “estimate” of something like perfect play on each club’s golf course increasingly became one of the most practically important questions to be decided at virtually every golf club in the world.

The Invention of Bogey

A year after Duncan’s first reference to the Dolemans’ concept of par in the widely read Golfing Annual, a similar concept emerged during the winter of 1890-91.

At this time, as Robert Browning points out in A History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game (1955; reprinted Pampamoa Press, 2018), the concept of a proper score for the golf ground of the Coventry Golf Club was determined by the club’s Secretary, Hugh Rotherham.

Figure 22 Hugh Rotherham. Golf Illustrated, vol 2 (22 December 1899), p. 283.

Rotherham had set himself the task of considering whether a way might be devised for a large number of club members to engage in match-play competition such that a winner might be determined after a single eighteen-hole round played by all contestants on the same day. As things stood up to 1890, if (say) sixty-four club members were to engage in a match-play tournament, it would take at least three days of matches, comprising two eighteen-hole rounds per day, to determine a winner.

Rotherham recognized that, in theory, were each contestant to engage in a match-play competition against the same golfer at the same time, their relative performances against this common competitor could be measured in terms of how many holes each of them had won or lost in battle with this person. In theory, the person who won the most holes from (or lost the fewest holes to) this common competitor could be declared the winner of that day’s competition.

Rotherham’s ingenious insight was that the common competitor requisite for such a contest need not be real: for each hole, a score could be recorded ahead of time as the score achieved by an imaginary person with whom each club member would then compete in the day’s match-play tournament.

What scores should be recorded ahead of time for this fictitious competitor?

Rotherham decided to attribute to this imaginary golfer not necessarily the score represented by what the Dolemans called par play, but rather the hole-by-hole scores that the club’s best golfers (who were in those days designated the club’s “scratch” players, regardless of whether they scored in the 70s, 80s, or 90s) tended to make at each hole, provided they made no serious mistakes. By February of 1891, he had worked out such scores for each hole of the Coventry golf ground, thereby determining what he regarded as a proper score for a complete round of golf as played by his imaginary golfer. He called this the Coventry “ground score.”

The first tournament that the Coventry Golf Club conducted based on each golfer’s match against the hole-by-hole scores recorded on this imaginary person’s scorecard occurred in the middle of May in 1891:

An interesting competition was played on the Coventry links on May 13th, for a handsome prize given by Mr. Hugh Rotherham. The scratch score of the holes had been fixed, and each player played a match against the ground score under handicap. The arrangement was found to be an excellent one, enabling a match-play competition to be finished in the day. (Golf [London], vol 2 no 36 [22 May 1891], p. 173)

As golf courses in those days were often called a “golf ground,” the phrase “ground score” was presumably a short-hand version of the phrase “the Coventry golf ground scratch score.” As a theoretically appropriate “score for the ground,” this score was analogous to a par score, and as a score against which players could measure their performance in competition, it was the first practical application of a concept related to par.

Less than a week after this innovative form of golf competition occurred, Coventry Golf Club member Harold Smith (who had finished third in the inaugural tournament) passed along news of the innovation to the Great Yarmouth Golf Club: “I introduced Mr. Rotherham’s system of playing against an imaginary fixed score for each hole to several members of the Great Yarmouth Golf Club at their Whitsuntide [i.e., mid-May] meeting in 1891” (Golf [London], vol 3 no 78 [11 March 1892], p. 410).

As was required to enable this system of single-day match-play competition, the club secretary, Dr. Thomas Browne (a surgeon in the Royal Navy), worked out the requisite “ground score” for the Great Yarmouth golf course and golfers immediately began informally to compare their score at each hole to the scores making up the theoretical ground score. The reaction of golfers to the difficulty of achieving these scores soon resulted in the name “Bogey” being given to the imaginary person with whom golfers would compete.

Figure 23 Dr. Thomas Browne, Golf Illustrated, 11 July 1902, p. 28.

One of Dr. Browne’s regular playing partners became fascinated with the Great Yarmouth ground score. He was a good golfer but could not match the stipulated score. He enjoyed the challenge but found it frustrating.

One day, he erupted in jocular exasperation at his inability to match the “imaginary” ideal player that Dr. Browne had summoned into existence: “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!” The lyrics described a mischievous, timorous, hard-to-catch goblin: the Bogeyman.

They 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.

Browne immediately proposed that the imaginary, mistake-free golfer against whom they were competing be named “Mr. Bogey.” The name became popular, and soon the “ground score” at Great Yarmouth and elsewhere became known instead as the “Bogey” score – an early version of what today we call par for the course.

Then, in the fall, Mr. Bogey joined the armed forces.

An anonymous member of the United Service Golf Club of Gosport, which was organized for the exclusive use of members of the military, wrote to the editor of Golf (London) to explain Mr. Bogey’s commission:

Bogey was introduced to the members of the United Service Golf Club some months ago by the well-known secretary of the Great Yarmouth Golf Club, Dr. T. Browne, R.N. The versatile sportsmen of the United Service Golf Club were not long in trying a taste of his [i.e. Mr. Bogey’s] quality, much to their discomfiture at first, as they did not realise sufficiently that “Bogey” is a player who cannot lose his temper, or be in any way demoralized…. “Bogey” assumed the designation of Colonel on admission to the United Service Golf Club, as naval or military rank is an indispensable qualification for its membership….

Joking apart, the advent of “Colonel Bogey” seems likely to introduce a new and permanent feature into the game of Golf. By using him as an intermediary, one can compete with the whole field simultaneously by match, instead of medal, play….

It appears to me, then, that the so-called “Colonel Bogey” is destined to take and to hold a permanent place in the game of Golf, and to add some fresh and interesting features to the noble art. (vol 3 no 76 [26 February 1892], pp. 384-85)

By 1892, the name “Colonel Bogey” was coming to be used in preference to “Mr. Bogey” by golfers at the several golf clubs in the south of England where Bogey competition had gained a foothold.

Making the Acquaintance of Colonel Bogey

Figure 24 Image of Colonel Bogey, circa 1914.

In the 1890s, it often took a personal introduction to Colonel Bogey for golf clubs to get up the confidence to try out the new-fangled system of Bogey competition.

Such was the situation at the second and third golf clubs to try out this new form of competition: the Great Yarmouth Golf Club and the United Service Golf Club, respectively.

We recall that Coventry Golf Club member Harold Smith had carried news of this new form of match play to the Great Yarmouth Golf Club one week after the first tournament (in which he had finished third).

And Great Yarmouth’s Club Secretary, Dr. Thomas Browne (a surgeon in the Royal Navy), carried news of the fearsome Bogey to fellow military personnel the United Service Club in the fall of 1891, where this fictional figure received a commission at the rank of Colonel.

At every golf club, members needed time to become accustomed to the peculiar features of the competition. Although Rotherham had worked out Coventry’s ground score by February of 1891, it was not until May that he felt club members were ready for a full-scale competition against the ground score. Similarly, although at Great Yarmouth, Browne had learned of the new system of competition in May of 1891 and immediately set about working out a ground score for the Great Yarmouth links (a score that he shared with certain club members who wished to assess their own play by means of it), he reported in Field that the club’s Easter competition in 1892 ten months later “was the first occasion on which such a competition had been attempted on a large scale” (no 2052 [23 April 1892], p. 594).

Although it may be hard for a twenty-first-century golfer to appreciate how difficult it was for golfers in the 1890s to understand and become comfortable with Bogey competition, it is simply a fact that it took time to introduce club members to Colonel Bogey and to establish a rudimentary Bogey culture at a golf club.

Consider all the things that a club secretary, green committee, handicap committee, and regular club members had to work out for the first time.

First, a club secretary or a green committee would have to work out a ground score for the club’s golf course. This had never been done before. And it is unlikely that anyone had ever worked out even a par score for the course. After all, in the early 1890s, it was still the case (much to the frustration of A.H. Doleman) that most members of golf clubs had never heard of the concept of par, let alone knew anything about the practical measurements and calculations necessary for determining it. So, there was a steep learning curve facing those who would for the first time ever work out a ground score for their course.

Remember, too, that a par score was not the score to be attributed to Colonel Bogey. The latter was not to be seen as being as good as a golf professional. Instead, he was to be regarded as someone who always played the best game that the club’s top players occasionally played. So even if someone had worked out a par score for one’s golf course, the question remained for those working out a ground score: where would Colonel Bogey take more strokes than a golf professional to reach the green on certain of the holes?

And so, when determining a ground score for their golf course, committee members regularly engaged in argument about how many strokes it should take their best golfers to play this hole or that hole. There was always debate about whether it was appropriate to allow Colonel Bogey to reach a certain green with one shot, or another green with two shots, when it took almost all the club members two shots and three shots, respectively, to do so.

And there was always debate about whether it was appropriate to credit Colonel Bogey with his customary two putts per green. After all, what about the club’s most fearsome putting surfaces where most members took three putts? The only saving grace in the practice of having Colonel Bogey two-putt every green was that he was never allowed to make a two on a three-shot hole, a three on a four-shot hole, or a four on a five-shot hole, although some members would inevitably do so in every Bogey competition.

In Golf Illustrated in 1899, golf writer W.L. Watson gave vent to frustrations arising from his long experience of these sorts of discussions at the West Middlesex Golf Club where he was a member:

The bogey score is not a score at all; it is the product of some imaginary player and the predilections of the club committee.

Figure 25 Colonel Bogey card in the Game of Sporting Snap deck of playing cards, Major Drapkin & Co., 1928.

Figure 26 In the presence of the match referee, two competitors assess a possible stymie occurring in a competition circa 1930.

It is usually arrived at by count of hands.

If a majority decided that any particular hole is too difficult for four, they make it five.

Approaching the matter from the other point of view, they may resolve that it would be too easy in five, and so make it four.

That is bogey: he is really not a bogey at all, but merely a mild-mannered abstraction of votes and opinions, ready to change his play at any committee’s bidding, and hole out in any number of strokes they may suggest….

A most complacent fellow he is, but certainly no bogey, rather a timorous, middle-aged fool.

(Reprinted in Golf [New York], vol 5 no 6 [December 1899], p. 398)

Watson’s West Middlesex committee was used to these sorts of meetings. Golf clubs going through the process for the first time would have found it confusing, disorienting, and frustrating.

And then there was the question of the rules, for in this form of match-play competition, medal-play rules often had to be used in place of the regular match-play rules.

For instance, since the two players sent out together in these competitions were competing not against each other but rather against Colonel Bogey, one player would not be allowed to stymie another.

In regular match play, however, whether occurring by accident or design, a stymie occurred when one golfer’s ball sat on the green between the other golfer’s ball and the hole, such that Golfer A’s ball blocked the hole for Golfer B’s putt.

As indicated in the original rules of golf formulated in 1744, unless the two balls were within six inches of each other, Golfer A’s ball was not lifted, and Golfer B was said to be stymied.

In matches against Colonel Bogey, however, the medal-play convention was observed: a ball on the green interfering with a player’s putt would have to be played first.

Similarly, although in match play one had the option of cancelling an opponent’s shot when it was played out of turn, since players were not competing against each other in a Bogey competition, a stroke played out of turn would not be cancelled: the shot played out of turn was not relevant to a playing partner’s match against Colonel Bogey, and it obviously had no effect on Colonel Bogey’s performance.

And since the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews would not get around to formalizing rules for Bogey competitions until 1911, there were other questions for all clubs to decide.

Would a player who lost a ball lose the hole to Colonel Bogey (as the player would according to the match-play rules of the day), or would the player be allowed a stroke and distance penalty as in medal play – thereby allowing the player the possibility of still competing with Colonel Bogey’s score on the hole?

Playing a wrong ball in match-play resulted in the loss of the hole, but should playing a wrong ball in a Bogey competition result in the loss of the hole, or should the player simply be assessed the two-stroke penalty imposed in medal play and be allowed to continue to compete with Colonel Bogey’s score on the hole?

In the matter of handicaps, however, the match-play convention was followed rather than the medal-play convention. In medal-play, club members received the full value of their handicap, but since high handicappers generally earned their high handicaps not by a consistent performance on every hole but rather by uneven performances on several spectacularly bad holes per round, it was understood that to compete by match play against a good player like Colonel Bogey they did not need their full handicap. They would lose their worst holes to Colonel Bogey by several strokes, but on the holes they played well, their handicap allowance would allow them to be competitive with him.

Still, the handicap committees would have to decide whether players would be allowed three-quarters of their handicap against Colonel Bogey, or just two-thirds. Practices varied in England.

And there were other questions.

How seriously would one take the competitive element of the tournament itself? Most clubs understood that competitors wanted to know the Bogey score they had to beat at each hole, but some clubs seemed to think that “the ‘Bogey’ score should at times be fixed unknown to the competitors” (Golf [London], vol 3 no 75 [19 February 1892], p. 362). For the sake, apparently, of introducing an element of surprise into the calculation of results at the end of the tournament, one accepted that players who “did not know the score they were playing against … might go on hammering when they had possibly already lost the hole” (Golf [London], vol 3 no 75 [19 February 1892], p. 362).

Would the Bogey score be set for the season, or would it be adjusted for each competition, according to prevailing conditions? If the latter, a club would need a diligent committee: “Alter the score according to weather and wind if you like; but, as that would have to be done on the morning of the competition, … it would give more work to the committee than most of them seem to care about” (Golf [London, vol 3 no 75 [19 February 1892], p. 362).

Given the large amount of information that had to be gathered and disseminated, and the large number of questions that needed to be addressed and decided, simply to get well-established English golf clubs ready for their first Bogey competitions between 1891 and 1893, one can appreciate that the staging of the first ever Bogey competition in North America by the Ottawa Golf Club in 1893 would not have been easy.

And given the fact that questions from English golf clubs about how rules should be applied in Bogey competitions were regularly directed to the editor of Golf (London) throughout the 1890s, one can appreciate that golf clubs often relied on someone with experience of Bogey competitions to bring their members up to speed on the nature of this new form of match play and to help them with the organization of their first collective battle with the Colonel.

At the Ottawa Golf Club, that person was its first golf professional, Alfred Ricketts, and he was allowed six months to get everything organized.

Royal Wimbledon's Professional Bogey Man Comes to Ottawa

A year before any other golf club in North America became acquainted with him, Colonel Bogey came to Ottawa in March of 1893 when the Ottawa Golf Club hired its first golf professional: Alfred Ricketts, “a professional from Wimbledon” (Ottawa Free Press, cited in the Montreal Star, 2 May 1893, p. 5). The reference to Ricketts as a “professional from Wimbledon” refers not to his birthplace but rather to the golf club where he worked: Royal Wimbledon.

Laid out in the 1860s, the eighteen-hole golf course on the Wimbledon Common was the third oldest in England. It hosted two golf clubs. Located at one end of the course was the London Scottish Golf Club, which operated out of the relatively spartan clubhouse known as the “Iron House” (seen below right); at the other end of the course was the Royal Wimbledon Golf Club, which operated out of the more commodious red-brick clubhouse (seen below left).

Figure 27 Left: Royal Wimbledon clubhouse. Horace Hutchinson, British Golf Links (London: J.S. Virtue, 1897), p. 27. Right: London Scottish clubhouse, circa 1890.

When he arrived in Ottawa, Ricketts was only the second golf professional ever hired in North America. Royal Montreal’s Willie Davis had been the first, but he had left in February for Newport, Rhode Island, and Royal Montreal’s new golf professional, Bennett Lang, would not arrive until mid-May (Golf [London], vol 7 no 170 15 December 1893], p. 218).

So, in March of 1893, Ricketts was the only golf professional in Canada.

Alfred Henry Ricketts had been born in Wimbledon (a town about 10 miles south-west of London, England) in February of 1869, the third of the six children of Letitia and George Ricketts. A carter by trade, George Ricketts seems to have been a successful businessman: he employed several people, including a number of family members, and his home was large enough not only to accommodate his family of eight, but also to accommodate lodgers – even a family of three at one point.

In 1881, twelve-year-old Alfred was working as an errand boy, but by 1891, he had become a golf professional, presumably working as an apprentice to one of the golf professionals at the golf course located on the Wimbledon Common.

Ricketts had sailed to Ottawa in mid-March of 1893, a newspaper reporting the news of his arrival on the first day of spring:

To Boom Golf

Ricketts, the professional, engaged by the Ottawa Golf Club, has arrived here for the season.

Under his tuition, it is expected that Golf will boom. (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 21 March 1893)

Within six weeks of his arrival, Ricketts had persuaded the Ottawa Golf Club’s executive committee to include a “’Bogey’ competition” in its fixtures list.

Ricketts presumably promoted this innovative form of match play in response to the expectation that he would help to “boom” the game. He knew how popular Bogey competitions had become in England, and he had first-hand knowledge of this form of play at Royal Wimbledon.

By the end of April of 1892, Bogey was known only in England, and only to members at Coventry, Great Yarmouth, “the United Services Golf Club, as well as some other southern clubs” (Field, vol no 2052 [23 April 1892], p. 594). Fortunately for the Ottawa Golf Club, Royal Wimbledon was one of the “southern clubs” of England that had among its members a number who were strong advocates of Bogey competition. In fact, one of the members of Royal Wimbledon was promoting Bogey competition at the club by late 1891 and wrote to the editor of Golf in January of 1892, calculating a Bogey score for the Wimbledon course, and recommending Bogey scores be established everywhere as a way for single golfers to play a round of golf without playing out holes on which they were taking far too many strokes:

I am very pleased to see that the “Bogey” play is coming more into fashion, and to see in your interesting paper some competitions played under that system. It savours more of the legitimate match play and makes a little change from the long and tedious medal rounds.

I also strongly recommend it to those players who are so fond of toiling around by themselves, keeping their correct scores, thereby blocking up the greens and proving themselves a nuisance to many. I do not mean that I advocate single play, but that I think that anyone who prefers that way of practice can get along much faster on the “Bogey” plan, and so help less to block up a green. (vol 3 no 71 [22 January 1892], p. 302, emphasis added)

Wimbledon was one of the busiest golf courses in England, with as many as 40 couples on the course at a time, so slow play was always a concern. Since when playing against Colonel Bogey, one would not be playing for the sake of a correct medal score, one would pick up one’s ball after the hole had been lost to the Colonel.

Royal Wimbledon also had a thriving women’s club (the Wimbledon Ladies’ Golf Club) with a course that was also maintained by the Wimbledon professionals: “The course is one of nine holes … and is about 1200 yards in length”; it has “a great many hazards in the shape of whins and gravel bunkers” (The Golfing Annual 1891-92, p. 222; The Golfing Annual, 1893-94, p. 299). And it was on this course that the Wimbledon Ladies’ Golf Club played a well-organized Bogey Competition in mid-November of 1892. It drew over forty entrants (twice the number of playing members at the Ottawa Golf Club at this time).

We can see, then, that during his last two years at Wimbledon, Ricketts would have learned a good deal about the new method of golf competition.

But he would be given a whole season at Ottawa to set up the first Bogey competition to be held in North America.

At the beginning of May, six weeks after Ricketts’ arrival in Ottawa, the club’s Secretary-Treasurer Alexander Simpson informed the Ottawa Free Press that there would be a “‘Bogey’ competition” at Ottawa during the 1893 season. The tournament was scheduled for a Saturday in November, and it is clear that this tournament was Ricketts’ baby, for he offered the winner’s prize himself. The Ottawa Daily Citizen and the Ottawa Journal both published the information about the tournament and its prize that had been supplied by the club secretary, who continued to put the word “Bogey” in quotation marks: “On Saturday next the ‘Bogey’ competition for the handsome prize given by A. Ricketts will take place” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 1 November 1893, p. 5); “The ‘Bogey’ competition for the Ricketts prize will take place this afternoon at 2:30 sharp” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 4 November 1893, p. 5).

Just as at Coventry Hugh Rotherham was the only one to step up and offer a prize for the new form of competition he had invented, so at Ottawa Ricketts was the only one to step up and offer a prize for the new form of competition he had introduced. (Note that Ricketts played in many club competitions over his three years at the club from 1893 to 1895, yet this was the only one for which he purchased the prize himself.)

It is also interesting to note that Simpson described the prize offered by Ricketts as “handsome.”

The most important prize offered in 1893 was described as “a valuable cup” given by “Col. Allan Gilmour” for a season-long semi-monthly competition among club members by handicap medal-play (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 5 April 1893, p. 5). And then there were a dozen or so other prizes offered for more ad hoc tournaments, such as the three organized in mid-November: “On Wednesday afternoon next, there will be a competition for a prize offered by the Secretary, on Thursday for one offered by Mr. R.C. Douglas, and on Saturday for one offered by Mr. W.L. Marler” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 13 November 1893, p. 5). And there were prizes for women’s competitions: “Major St. Aubyn has donated a handsome prize to be competed for by the ladies on Friday, 12th May” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 24 April 1893, p. 5).

We can see that not every prize was described as “valuable,” and just two prizes were described as “handsome,” so Simpson’s description of Ricketts’ prize as “handsome” signalled that the prize offered by the club’s working-class employee was at least comparable to prizes offered by well-heeled members (and that it was implicitly more splendid than the prizes that received no descriptor at all). By hyping the prize as “handsome,” Simpson perhaps tried to encourage more entries into the strange new tournament.

The Bogey Score at Sandy Hill

One of the first things that Ricketts had to do to prepare the Ottawa Golf Club for a “‘Bogey’ competition” was to establish a Bogey score for each hole of its two-year-old golf course.

In 1891, at the end of April, the Montreal golf professional William F. Davis had laid out twelve holes for the Ottawa Golf Club in the part of Ottawa known as Sandy Hill. Nine holes were used as the golf course proper; three holes were used during 1891 as a beginner’s course and practice area. In the spring of 1892, however, these three practice holes were probably re-worked into the ladies’ course laid out before the beginning of the 1892 season.

The golf holes were divided between the meadow at the eastern end of the old By Estate (marked below as B) and the eastern end of the old Besserer Estate (marked below as A).

Figure 28 An enlarged and annotated detail from an 1876 map of Ottawa.

The nine-hole golf course comprised three holes in the meadow west of the Dominion Rifle Range (again, the area marked above as B) and five holes on the higher ground north of the Rifle Range (again, the area outlined above as A). These holes were linked by a hole that went up the steep hill from the meadow to the higher ground.

This nine-hole course ran from a first tee at the clubhouse, which had been built on a high point of land near the junction of Osgoode Avenue and Russell Street, to a green on the flat land across the road from the Protestant Hospital on Rideau Street.

Although there is no record of the official Bogey score accorded to the Ottawa Golf Club’s nine-hole golf course in Sandy Hill, we can make an informed estimate of the approximate score that was attributed to Colonel Bogey that day, for we know both the length of each of the nine holes and the nature of a good number of the hazards associated with them.

And for further context, we can take the Bogey score of the Quebec Golf Club’s fourteen-hole Cove Field course in 1896: with four holes played twice to provide an eighteen-hole score, the length of the course was 4,703 yards: its Bogey score was 87.

Similarly, Royal Montreal’s nine-hole Dixie course (laid out in the fall of 1896 and brought into play in the spring of 1897), when played around twice to produce an eighteen-hole score, had a distance of about 4,900 yards: in the spring of 1898, its Bogey score was reduced to 86. It is not known how much higher than 86 the Bogey score had been when the course was laid out at the end of 1896, but it must have been at least 87.

The Montreal Star published a description of the Ottawa Golf Club’s golf course on 2 May 1893, the year during which the first Ottawa Bogey competition was held: “The links are near the rifle range and form a nine-hole course. The longest run is about 360 yards and the shortest 180, while the whole course is some 2300 yards” (p. 5). The playing length for an eighteen-hole competition would be 4,600 yards.

Similarly, sometime during the 1893 season, club member E.C. Grant wrote for Collier’s Once a Week an article called “Golf in Ottawa”, which appeared in the issue of 30 September 1893. He observed:

The ground is admirably situated for golf, there being plenty of space, and quite enough hazards in the shape of fences, ditches, hills, sand bunkers, etc. There are only nine holes, which are played over twice, but nearly every variety of ground to be found. The longest hole is three hundred and sixty yards and the shortest, one hundred and seventy-five yards, while the whole course is about twenty-four hundred yards. (Collier’s Once a Week, vol 11 no 45 [30 September 1893], p. 5).

And so, we know that the golf course was between 2,300 and 2,400 yards in length. When played around twice to produce an eighteen-hole score, the length of the course would have been, at most, 4,800 yards, which suggests that its Bogey score would have been like those at Quebec and Montreal: around 87 strokes.

Fortunately, we have information on the kind of scores made on each of the Ottawa golf holes by expert players, for on 24 May 1893, a much-publicized match occurred at Ottawa between the newly-arrived golf professional Alfred Ricketts and Kingston’s newly-arrived crack amateur Thomas Harley (who would win the first amateur Championship of Canada at Ottawa in 1895): Ricketts shot 91; Harley, 100. See below their scores for each of the nine holes that they played four times that day:

The high scores made on certain of the relatively short golf holes on this course by two of the top golfers in Canada in 1893 indicate how penal certain of the hazards proved to be. Ricketts’ score of 91 was probably just a few strokes above what he would have set as the Bogey score for the course.

In the mid-1890s, Ottawa Golf Club secretary Alexander Simpson (who was also the club’s “scratch” player) twice wrote to the editor of Britain’s Golfing Annual to describe these hazards. In his letter for the 1893-94 volume, he writes: “The green has at present only nine holes, and is intersected by sand bunkers, roads, fences, and patches of rough ground” (p. 351). In his letter for the 1894-95 volume, however, he revises this description slightly to warn visitors that the course is harder than he originally suggested: “The course of nine holes is an exceedingly difficult one, being intersected in all directions by heavy bunkers, hills, roads, and rough ground” (p. 400, emphasis added to show new elements).

Both the Collier’s and the Montreal Star articles describe the golf course and the disposition of its hazards more or less hole-by-hole. Furthermore, Grant also commissioned for his Collier’s article detailed sketches of the first, fourth, seventh, and ninth holes.

Hole #1

According to the Montreal Star, “For the first, one has to tee immediately in front of the club house. A low swampy rocky piece of ground has to be covered, extending about 150 yards, and woe to the luckless wight who gets into it. If this is successfully carried, the player finds himself within about 30 yards of the hole. And with good ground before him” (2 May 1893, p. 5). An article in the same newspaper later in the year similarly observes that “A start is made from a high hill and before reaching the first hole a very bad swamp has to be navigated” (7 October 1893, p. 9). Grant describes the hole in similar terms: “The first teeing ground is near the clubhouse, and the course to the first hole is from the top of a very steep hill over a tract of about one hundred and fifty yards of swampy ground, which, if cleared, leaves the player about sixty yards of nice green (i.e., fairway] to finish the hole in” p. 5). The various accounts disagree only as to whether the hole was 180 or 210 yards long.

Figure 29 The view from the first tee of the Ottawa Golf Club's Sandy Hill course. Visible in the distance is the Rideau River, (which I have coloured blue) along the eastern edge of the Dominion Rifle Range. Collier's Once a Week, vol 11 no 45 (30 September 1893, p. 4).

Given that only very good players of the early 1890s could carry their drives 150 yards – for instance, Charles Blair MacDonald, 1895 U.S. Amateur Champion, won the long-drive competition at the International Tournament at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1895 with a drive of 175 yards (which included significant roll out) – one can see why a hole such as the first at Ottawa would probably have been accorded a Bogey score of 4. (Ricketts made it twice in 4.)

The name for the first hole was apparently “Oshkosh.”

Hole #2

Grant says, “The next hole is over a stretch of rough common of about two hundred and eighty yards covered with long, thick weeds, with the exception of a strip about thirty feet [wide] of cleared space extending from the teeing ground to the hole, and which makes it extremely difficult should the player wander from the direct line” (p. 5). The writer of the Montreal Star article must have been a straight driver: “The second hole is about 280 yards. The ground is rough but presents no other peculiar difficulties” (p. 5).

The Ottawa Golf Club’s scratch player Alexander Simpson would have expected to reach the green of the second hole with his second shot (Ricketts made the hole twice in 4).

The Bogey score would probably have been 4.

Hole #3

According to the Montreal Star, “The third hole is over ground of the same [i.e., ‘rough’] character, about 200 yards distance” (p. 5). Grant, however, had encountered other hazards on this hole: “Then comes another two hundred yards of common, very much similar to the last one, only that it contains two or three mudholes, which are most disastrous to the unfortunate” (p. 5).

Of course, on a 200-yard hole, skilled players might have occasionally scored 3 (or even 2).

Note, however, that in four attempts at this hole, Ricketts and Harley made scores of 8, 6, 5, and 4 (averaging 5.75). The hazard of rough ground pitted with mud-holes must have been extremely penal.

And note Grant’s observation about the distances obtained by the drive of 1893: “if successfully hit, the ball can be sent a distance of two hundred yards, though from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty is a good average drive” (p. 4). The carry over the rough ground and mud-pits of the third hole might have required a perfect drive, anything less falling into the penal hazard.

The Bogey score would have been at least 4, and it might well have been 5.

Figure 30 A.Z. Palmer, circa 1900.

Incidentally, the first recorded hole-in-one in Ottawa was made on this hole in 1894: “in playing on the Ottawa Links against the Kingston Club on the 2nd of June [1894], Mr. A.Z. Palmer, of the Ottawa Club, made the third hole, 193 yards, in one” (Golf [London], vol 8 no 202 [26 June 1894], p. 350).

As the word “birdie” would not be introduced to golf until the first decade of the next century, and the words “eagle” and “albatross” a while after that, is it worthwhile asking whether Palmer scored eagle or albatross?

We catch a glimpse in the photograph below of the meadow where the first three holes (and the tee for the fourth hole) of the Sandy Hill golf course were laid out.

Figure 31 Holes 1 to 3 were laid out in the meadow seen in the background of this circa-1895 photograph of a shooting competition at the Rifle Range. The buildings of Davis house mark the end of Theodore Street (today’s Laurier Avenue East) at that time. The photographer stands at the future junction of Theodore and Charlotte. I draw on the photograph the approximate locations of the first three holes, and the 4th tee. The 1st tee was on the high hill where the clubhouse was built at Russell and Osgoode. The 4th tee was in the meadow at the base of the hill to be climbed up to vacant lots along Theodore.

Hole # 4

The Montreal Star observes: “The fourth hole is across rough ground, about 350 yards from the tee. This presents several obstacles, including two fences, a rough road, and a high, steep hill. If the top is not reached, the player finds himself in difficulties, but when the top is attained, he has only about 180 yards to the hole over very easy ground” (p. 5).

The Collier’s article provides a view of the fearsome tee-shot facing golfers on this hole.

Figure 32 Collier's Once a Week, vol 11 no 45 [30 September 1893], p. 4.

Grant speaks with wisdom born of experience about the potential difficulties encountered on this hole:

The fourth hole may be either one of the easiest or most difficult of all. The teeing ground is at the base of a very steep hill, with two fences and a ditch between, and with a successful drive one ought to do the hole in three or four strokes as, once over the hill, it is nice clean common; but woe betide the one whose ball strikes the fences or goes only half way up the hill, where it is sure to roll down, as it is one continuation of swamp and long weeds, and will run one’s average beyond redemption should he not play with the utmost precision and coolness. (p. 5)

Because of the difficulties attending a single mis-played shot on this hole, it would almost certainly have been accorded a Bogey score of 5 (the score that Ricketts made both times he played it).

Hole # 5

The fourth hole brought golfers up to Theodore Street (today’s Laurier Avenue East) through the vacant lot between the Davis house and the next house along Theodore at Chapel Street, and because a number of houses had been built along the north side of Theodore Street as far east as Cobourg Street, golfers had to walk a good distance from the fourth green to the fifth tee, where the really difficult part of the course began: “This [fourth] hole finished, we cross over about five hundred yards and into the ‘cuss-word’ country, as the next four holes are a succession of sand bunkers, some of them being eight and ten feet in depth, with steep banks that make the player wish that a lacrosse stick could be included in his outfit” (p. 5).

Strangely, however, given the many occasions for “cuss-words” that Grant must have had on the next four holes, he does not describe them individually.

But the Montreal Star does.

Of the fifth hole, we read: “The fifth hole crosses a heavy sand bunker immediately in front of the hole, which is on a tongue of land surrounded by sand bunkers, which requires straight driving. A pulled or sliced ball will land the player in the sand and send his score to pieces. If the bunkers are once carried, it is an easy hole to make” (p. 5).

From the golfer’s point of view, Sandy Hill clearly lived up to the “sandy” part of its name.

The length of the fifth hole is not given in the Montreal Star article, but if we subtract from the 2300- yard total that is indicated the 1970 yards of the 8 holes whose yardages are given, we derive a yardage for the fifth hole of 330.

Depending on how far the drive had to carry in the air to get over this hole’s fairway-crossing “heavy sand bunker,” the Bogey score would have been 4 or 5 (Ricketts made 4 here twice; Harley made a 4 and a 5).

Hole #6

According to the Star, “The sixth hole is Hades: bunker after bunker for some 300 yards, gullies, long grass, roads, sidewalks, etc., making very careful play necessary” (p. 5).

Note that in the 1890s, there was no free relief from a road or a sidewalk. Perhaps because they were in place before the laying out of the golf course and had not been specifically constructed to serve as artificial impediments, they were regarded as “natural” hazards. One had to play the ball as one found it on road or sidewalk – or wedged between them!

Willie Davis had utilized the same sorts of hazards at Shinnecock Hills (Long Island, New York), where he laid out its initial golf course of twelve holes less than three months after he laid out his twelve holes in Ottawa. As the U.S.G.A. explains in “The Evolution of Shinnecock Hills Golf Course,” both the twelve Willie Davis holes and the six holes that were added in the mid-1890s by Willie Dunn, Jr, reflected the standard design philosophy of the day:

The Davis/Dunn course … reflected the architecture then prevalent on late Victorian English inland courses. The course’s mostly straight holes were traversed by cross hazards in the form of “cop” bunkers, ravines, ditches, roads, rail lines or other obstacles.

Following Victorian design tenets, such hazards were placed so that players were required to hit over them and for that reason they were often called “carry” hazards. They could be quite severe, on the rationale that the worst miss – the dreaded topped shot – deserved the most severe punishment.

(https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/history/the-evolution-of-the-shinnecockhills-golf-course.html)

It is no surprise, then, that in 1895, when reviewing the best golf courses in the New York and New Jersey area for Scribner’s Magazine, golf writer Henry Howland noted on these links hazards of precisely the sort that Davis had utilized at Shinnecock and at Ottawa four years before: the St Andrews course, “at Yonkers on the Hudson …., is an inland course of stone-wall hazards [and] rocky pastures”; the hazards at the Tuxedo Club include “hills, stone walls, railroad embankments lined with blast-furnace slag, … brook, boulders, and road”; “at the Essex Country Club of Manchester-by-the-Sea,” “the hazards are nearly all natural, consisting of fences, barns, roadways …” (May 1895, vol XVII no 5, pp. 531-33, emphasis added).

Roads, stone walls, fences, barns, and railroads were all treated as “natural” hazards!

And so, on Ottawa’s sixth hole, if you could not hit over “bunker after bunker …, gullies, long grass, roads, sidewalks,” and so on, you were in Hades, and – according to the architectural theory of the day – you deserved to be so.

Taking into consideration the name of this hole, along with the description of its numerous and fearsome hazards, one would reasonably expect that it had been accorded a Bogey score of at least 5 in 1893.

Given that Ricketts and Harley averaged 6 on this hole (despite the fact that Ricketts once did it in 3!), it might have been rated as a Bogey 6.

Hole #7

An article in the Montreal Star published in October of 1893 informs us that “near the finish [of the Ottawa links] is a sand hill that puzzles the most scientific players” (7 October 1893, p. 9).

This sand hill was an oblong geographical formation that rose several storeys above the surrounding land and ran on a southwest to northeast direction through the area bounded by Theodore Street (today’s Laurier Avenue East), Cobourg Street, Besserer Avenue, and the cliffs at the edge of the Rideau River, as can be seen below on the 1888 Contour Map of Ottawa.

Figure 33 An enlarged and annotated detail from the 1888 Contour Map of Ottawa.

Note on this map that green marks the highest land; pink, the next highest; and blue, the lowest. And note the three numbers indicating of the elevation of the land shown in this part of Ottawa: I have marked with white circles the elevation points that are 75, 85, and 115 feet above the lowest sill of the Rideau Locks. Much of the area between Rideau Street and Theodore Street (today’s Laurier Avenue East) is just above 85 feet of elevation, whereas a large part of the sand hill between Theodore, Cobourg, and Rideau rises above 115 feet of elevation. The sand hill marked on this map was high!

This part of the Ottawa Golf Club’s links lives up to the word “hill” in the neighbourhood’s name, Sandy Hill, for the sixth and seventh holes seem to have been routed over this hilly land that perplexed golfers. The Montreal Star tells us that “The seventh hole is back over the same ground [as the sixth] for about 360 yards, only there are more bunkers and pitfalls” (p. 5).

There are even “more bunkers and pitfalls” than found on Hades! What was the seventh hole called – “Hades, the sequel”? “Hades, forever”?

Grant noted that although at this part of the golf course one found oneself in Hades, it was also a place where heavenly breezes blew: “Though the courses [i.e., the holes] over the sand bunkers are most difficult, a great thing in their favor is that they are situated on a high piece of land overlooking the river, from which there is nearly always a pleasant breeze blowing, which is seldom strong enough to interfere with the direction of the ball” (p. 5). Grant commissioned a sketch of the view from the hilltop (seen below).

Figure 34 Looking north from the 7th tee on the elevated sand hill in Sandy Hill. The Rideau River is shaded blue. The Protestant General Hospital on Rideau Street (today’s Wallis House apartment building) is shaded brown. The 9th green was across the street from the hospital. Collier’s Once a Week, vol 11 no 45 (30 September 1893, p. 4).

We see above both the relaxing view of the Rideau River as seen from the teeing ground of the seventh hole and also the more intimidating view in the foreground of the fearsome eight- to ten-foot-deep bunkers that had to be carried to reach the fairway. (One can also see some of the buildings along Rideau Street.)

Since the seventh hole was said to go “back over the same ground” as the sixth hole, the former may well have paralleled the route of the latter over the notorious sand hill that constituted the club’s “cuss country.”

As the longest hole on the course (sixty yards longer than “Hades”), the seventh hole would probably have been accorded a Bogey score of 6 (the lowest score made on it by either Ricketts or Harley).

Hole #8

According to the Montreal Star: “The eighth is a short hole, about 175 yards, the only obstacles being a road and a fence” (p. 5).

Given that the best score made on this hole by either Ricketts or Harley was 6 (as was the case on the seventh hole, which was twice as long as the eighth), one presumes that the hazards on the eighth constituted significant difficulties.

One would normally see a 175-yard hole accorded a Bogey score of 4 in the early 1890s, but because of the “obstacles,” the Bogey score might have been 5.

Hole #9

The Star says, “The ninth hole is easy at 175 yards” (p. 5).

Yet, Ricketts and Harley averaged 4.75 strokes on this “easy” hole.

Once again, however, perhaps through the experience of what troubles can arise from errant shots on this hole, Grant adds an important detail to the Star’s otherwise similar description of the hole: “The ninth course [i.e., hole] is an easy one of one hundred and seventy-five yards, with a steep hill near the hole which warns the too eager player to put restraint upon his motive power” (p. 5).

Oh, for the days when a savvy caddie would warn us to “put restraint upon our motive power”!

The sketch below shows the ninth green of the Sandy Hill course, which was “the finishing point … near the Protestant General Hospital” (Ottawa Journal, 10 September 1894, p. 15). Note that the caddie on the left side of the green holds a disk fixed to a stick, the device used in the 1890s to mark the location of the hole for golfers playing approach shots: “In each hole is placed a white disk, about six inches square, on a pointed stick about eighteen inches long, and which the caddy boy removes and replaces again after the hole is played” (Grant, p. 4)

Figure 35 The ninth green. Collier's Once a Week, vol 11 no 45 (30 September 1893), p. 4.

The person who drew the above sketch seems to be looking from east to west. Out of view to the right is Rideau Street and the Protestant General Hospital (on the far side of Rideau Street). In the background of the sketch is seen the block of houses built many years before on the far (west) side of Charlotte Street between Rideau and Besserer. The fence that can be seen in the background had presumably been built along Charlotte.

The Bogey score for the ninth hole was probably 4.

Total Bogey Score

According to the standards of 1893, the Ottawa Golf club’s Sandy Hill golf course would have been accorded a Bogey score of between 41 and 44, making its Bogey score for eighteen holes between 82 and 88 – roughly comparable to the Bogey score of 87 for the similar courses at Quebec and Montreal in 1896.

Note, however, that a golf course such as that in Sandy Hill where wet ground in the spring would have added strokes to scores as the mud-pits and swamps in the meadow became larger and deeper, a Bogey score for a spring competition might have been several strokes higher than a Bogey score calculated for a later competition over a drier landscape.

Furthermore, in October of 1893, the two best golfers in Canada – amateur Andrew Whyte Smith of the Toronto Golf Club and Ottawa’s golf professional Ricketts – jointly set a new course record of 83 for the Sandy Hill golf course. Ricketts had shot 91 in May when he played Harley. His improved score in the fall probably came from learning how to play the course better as the season progressed and from improved playing conditions as his work on the course began to show results. Note that a report in the London journal Golf about the state of the Ottawa golf course in October of 1893 observed that “the state of the greens reflected great credit upon the Ottawa club’s professional, A. Ricketts” (Golf [London], vol 7 no 163 [27 October 1893], p. 108).

If the play of club members between May and November of 1893 reflected similar improvement in scores, not only because of improved playing conditions but also because of Ricketts’ instruction, the Bogey score for the November Bogey competition might have been set lower than it would have been in May.

An October Day of Bogey and Par at Ottawa

The 1893 interprovincial competition between teams of Ontario and Quebec golfers was scheduled to be played on the Sandy Hill golf course of the Ottawa Golf Club on Friday, October 6th, with the first pair of match-play competitors teeing off at noon.

At the last minute, however, because the Royal Montreal and Quebec Golf Club players would be competing against each other in Montreal the next day, plans changed: “The interprovincial golf match will commence this morning at half past ten instead of in the afternoon, as previously announced, to enable the Montreal and Quebec players to catch the 4:30 train” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 6 October 1893, p. 5).

The Ontario team won the match easily, avenging its loss to the Quebec team the year before. The day was a complete success for the young Ottawa club:

At noon, the whole of the 15 pairs had been started by Col. Irwin, president of the Ottawa club, and the few first pairs arrived home shortly after on the first half of their round. (Ottawa Journal, 6 October 1893, p. 7).

The game started at 10:30 and lasted until 3 p.m., when the last pair [of 15] were through. (Montreal Star, 7 October 1893, p. 9).

The local club entertained the two teams to a sumptuous dinner in a special marquee after the game and a great deal of enthusiasm was felt at the Ontario team gaining such a good lead. (Montreal Star, 7 October 1893, p. 9).

Shortly before three o’clock the match was concluded, when all sat down to a luncheon provided by the Ottawa club.

President Irwin of the club gave the visitors a most hearty welcome when right keen appetites had been satisfied. Col. Irwin proposed the toast of the Queen. He afterwards toasted the defeated team, coupling with the toast the name of the captain, Mr. J. Hamilton of Quebec. Mr. Hamilton replied and in turn proposed, “The Ontario team.” Captain Hunter responded. He thanked the Ottawa club for their kindness and toasted it.

Col. Irwin and Secretary-treasurer A. Simpson replied. The latter was given credit for having the match played in Ottawa, he having worked hard in the interests of the game. (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 7 October 1893, p. 5)

After the interprovincial game, Messrs. Smith and Scott of Toronto played Mr. Harley of Kingston and A. Ricketts (pro) of Ottawa. The Toronto side won by one hole after a fine exhibition of the game. (Ottawa Journal, 7 October 1893, p. 8)

After the big match, Messrs. Graham and Simpson of Ottawa defeated Messrs. Hunter and T.M. Scott of Toronto by six holes up and four to play…. Messrs. Cappon and Robinson of Kingston also played Messrs. Gordon and Dick of Toronto by nine holes up and six to play. (Ottawa Journal, 7 October 1893, p. 1).

There was such bonhomie associated with interprovincial and interclub matches in the 1880s and 1890s that visiting golf teams were escorted by local club members to and from the train station. And so, in due course, “the visiting team were given a hearty send off when they left by the afternoon train for Montreal” (Montreal Daily Herald, 7 October 1893, p. 5).

The out-of-town golfers will have arrived at the Ottawa train station throughout the day on Thursday, October 5th . Quebec’s team of fifteen golfers comprised four representing the Quebec Golf Club and eleven representing the Royal Montreal Golf Club. In addition to four members from the local Ottawa club, the Ontario team included seven members from the Toronto Golf Club and four from the Kingston Golf Club.

With just two golf clubs in Quebec and just three in Ontario in 1893 (given that the Niagara and Brantford clubs were in the doldrums at this time), at a gathering such as the interprovincial championship, members of the different clubs were eager to compare notes about their courses, the running of their clubs, and their tournament fixtures and prizes.

About to play the Sandy Hill course for the first time, the visitors would have been eager to see the course and may have arrived early enough to play a practise round over it on Thursday. To a man, members of the Ottawa Golf Club would have been eager to go round the course with them.

It seems inevitable that members of the Ottawa Golf Club would have mentioned – and perhaps even boasted about – their upcoming Bogey competition. How could proud members of the progressive young club resist drawing attention to the fact that their club would be the first in North America to participate in this innovative form of competition so recently invented in England?

I believe that the interprovincial championship of 1893 was what epidemiologists call a “superspreader” event: by means of it, knowledge of the concept of Bogey scores was disseminated to Canada’s existing golf clubs.

Bogey will have been mentioned in many conversations – conversations between the two playing partners during the official matches, conversations among the four players during the exhibition matches, and conversations at the dinner tables during the concluding banquet.

Indeed, Royal Montreal members may have arrived with a question already prepared for their hosts: “What, on earth, is a ‘Bogey’ competition?” For, as we recall, it was in May of 1893 that one of their city’s main newspapers, the Montreal Star, had listed a “’Bogey’ competition” as among the Ottawa Golf Club’s fixtures for the year.

If the Royal Montreal members had posed this question to their own golf professional, a Scotsman named Bennett Lang, when he arrived in Montreal a few weeks later, he is unlikely to have been able to provide an informed answer, for, unlike Ricketts, he had acquired no experience of Bogey competitions before he left Scotland for Montreal.

When the interprovincial match was held, Ottawa’s first Bogey competition would not occur for another month, but preparations for it had been underway since Ricketts first arrived in Ottawa. In the weeks after his arrival, he had explained the idea of a Bogey competition sufficiently well to the executive committee for its members to have voted to add such a competition to the club’s fixtures list. Then Ottawa members at large were informed of that fixtures list and will no doubt have asked the same question that readers of the Montreal Star will have asked: “What is a ‘Bogey’ competition?”

And so, by the time the out-of-town members of the Quebec and Ontario teams arrived in Ottawa at the beginning of October, every Ottawa member would have had at least some information about Bogey that they could share with anyone who asked about it. Indeed, as a way of showing how up-to-date the new Ottawa club was, the Ottawa members who were enthusiastic about the upcoming Bogey competition may well have been eager to tell golfers visiting from Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston as much as they could about it.

An Ambassador of the Dolemans' Par

Whether out-of-town golfers who had probably never even heard of the concept of par could have quickly or easily understood the concept of Bogey, let alone the idea of a match-play competition in which all club members competed simultaneously against an imaginary person, is doubtful. But visitor to Ottawa that day who knew of the abstract concept of par would have been curious to learn how Bogey compared to par.

As it turned out, the most important Canadian golfer to have heard of the concept of par before he came to Ottawa became the star of the interprovincial matches in Ottawa.

Figure 36 A.W. Smith, Daily Mail and Empire [Toronto], 11 July 1896.

Leading the Ontario team in 1893 was the leader of the Quebec team in 1892, Andrew Whyte Smith (1849- 1901), the best amateur golfer in Canada from 1881 to 1901, and the person that Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine called “the father of golf in Canada” (cited in Book of Honour: Portraits of Men and Women Who Shaped Our Heritage [Toronto: Toronto Golf Club, 2019], p. 6).

Smith was probably the first golfer in Canada with a good understanding of par, for he had played golf in Scotland throughout the 1870s with Young Tom Morris, Davie Strath, Jamie Anderson, and William Doleman – precisely the men who had invented par in 1870.

A member of the Glasgow Golf Club from 1874 to 1881 (when he immigrated to Canada), he was Doleman’s great rival at the club. And in addition to competing as an amateur in Open championships in the 1870s, Smith won the most prestigious amateur tournaments in Scotland in 1878, 1880, and 1881, leading to his recognition as one of the best amateur golfers in the world at that time. (For more on his life and times, see my essay The Father of Golf in Canada: Andrew Whyte Smith.)

We recall that when Smith won the Tennant Cup in 1881 on the golf course of the Glasgow Golf Club, his score was celebrated in the newspaper as just a few strokes over par (Glasgow Evening Post, 25 April 1881, p. 4). Smith was both a regular playing partner of William Doleman’s for seven years at the Glasgow Golf Club and the club’s Assistant Secretary for five years, so there can be no doubt that he was quite familiar with the concept of par in general and with the particular calculation of par for his club’s links.

When he came to Ottawa in October of 1893, he played exhibition matches with Alfred Ricketts. They were scheduled to play their first match before the official interprovincial competition began:

On Friday next, the interprovincial Golf match, Ontario vs. Quebec, the greatest golfing event of the year in Canada, will be played on the Ottawa links…. In the morning, it is expected an exhibition match between A.W. Smith, of Toronto, the leading amateur of Canada, and A. Ricketts, the local club’s professional, will be played. (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 4 October 1893, p. 8)

I have found no newspaper report of the result of this match, mind you.

Figure 37 Alfred Ricketts, shown driving "The Lane" hole at the Rochester Country Club, late 1890s. Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 28 October 1923, p. 38.

We recall that the competition schedule was advanced by an hour and a half at the last minute (to allow an early departure on the afternoon train by the Quebec team, whose members were playing the next day in Montreal for their own clubs in their final inter-club competition of the year), so it is possible that this exhibition match was cancelled. But the fact that Alexander Simpson reported to the Golfing Annual that the record score for the Sandy Hill course was 83, held jointly by Smith and Ricketts, suggests that they did indeed play their singles match.

Smith was in excellent form on the day. The item about the interprovincial competition published in Britain observed that “The play all round was very fair, that of one or two, especially Mr. A.W. Smith, being brilliant” (Golf [London], vol 7 no 163 [27 October 1893], p. 108).

Smith and Ricketts also played against each other in a foursomes match after the official competition concluded, Ricketts partnering with the second-best amateur in Canada, Thomas M. Harley (who, we recall, had lost handily to Ricketts in an exhibition match at Ottawa in May of 1893, but who would win the first amateur championship of Canada in 1895), and Smith partnering with the third-best amateur in Canada, Andrew P. Scott (club champion at the Quebec Golf Club in the late 1870s, but now playing second fiddle to Smith at the Toronto Golf Club). This was probably the best foursomes match yet played in Canada: “After the inter-provincial match was finished … Mr. A.W. Smith and Mr. A.P. Scott (Toronto) defeated Mr. T.M. Harley (Kingston) and A. Ricketts (professional, Ottawa), after a fine exhibition of the game, by one stroke on the last hole, score 1 hole up” (Golf [London], vol 7 no 163 [27 October 1893], p. 108).

Figure 38 Left to right: William F. Davis and A.W. Smith, October 1893. The Golfer, vol 2 no 2 (December 1895), p. 51.

Ricketts and Smith were asked to play against each other in these exhibition matches because everyone recognized that they were the two best golfers in Canada. There would have been a mutual respect for each other’s golf games from the beginning. As their identical scores of 83 suggest, Smith was likely the equal of Ricketts. If so, no one would have been surprised by this fact: in Smith’s seven recorded matches against the only professional golfer in North America between 1882 and 1892, Willie Davis of Montreal, he compiled a winning record (three wins, two losses, two ties), leading Davis to declare after his last match against Smith (at the interprovincial contest held at Montreal in October of 1892) that “he was the best man he had ever met” (Gazette [Montreal], 31 October 1892], p. 5). Indeed, the fact that Ricketts’ best score after six months of play on the Sandy Hill course was matched by Smith on his first round over the course may even suggest that Smith was the superior golfer.

Smith would have been very curious about the innovative form of match play that Ricketts had brought to Canada. In particular, he would have been very interested to understand the relationship between Bogey and par. During the hours they spent on the Ottawa course, Smith no doubt asked Ricketts many questions. And the two of them no doubt discussed the Ottawa golf course carefully in terms of the relationship between the scores for par play over the nine holes of the Sandy Hill course, on the one hand, and the slightly different scores that would be credited to Colonel Bogey, on the other.

Their playing partners, as well as the many spectators (from Ottawa and from out of town) who followed this special match, must have been fascinated by these conversations and will have carried news of Bogey (however imperfect) back to their home golf clubs.

Bogey's Birth (Botched?)

The Ottawa Golf Club’s long-awaited 1893 “‘Bogey’ competition,” announced in the spring, occurred on November 4th: “The ‘Bogey’ competition for the Ricketts prize will take place this afternoon at 2:30 sharp” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 4 November 1893, p. 5).

Golf Clubs were often full of excitement at the prospect of their first Bogey competition. In 1896, for instance, the Hartford Golf Club of West Hartford, Connecticut, announced its inaugural competition by means of a formal invitation from Colonel Bogey:

Colonel Bogey presents his compliments to the members of the Hartford Golf Club and challenges each of them to mortal combat on the green, Saturday, Oct. 3. Clubs will be drawn at ten, and eighteen passes will settle the question. The colonel will take pleasure in presenting a souvenir to the player who beats him the best. The colonel hopes to have the pleasure of the player’s company at dinner that night. (Boston Evening Transcript, 26 September 1896, p. 6)

Newspaper reports regarding the Ottawa competition, however, were few, and the information contained in them was minimal.

Alas, there is reason to think that the inaugural Bogey competition may have been mishandled.

Newspaper reports on the results of the Bogey competition are simultaneously mysterious and revealing:

Saturday Golf

The golfers played for the Ricketts prize on Saturday last, and it was won by Mr. C. Magee with a score of 60.

The nearest scorers to him were J.A. Grant 79, T.W. Pugsley 85, C.J. Jones 87, and S.H. Fleming 93. (Ottawa Journal, 6 November 1893, p. 7)

In a handicap competition determined by match-play against Colonel Bogey’s hole-by-hole scores, it is perplexingly irrelevant to be told only the medal scores, for the winner is not the player with the lowest medal score, but rather the player who wins the most holes against Colonel Bogey or loses the fewest holes to him.

Medal scores are irrelevant to Bogey competitions.

In fact, medal scores can be downright misleading with regard to match-play results. That the person listed third, Pugsley, scored 85 and that the man listed fourth, Jones, scored 87, for instance, does not necessarily mean that Pugsley did better against Colonel Bogey than Jones, for Jones may well have accumulated a medal score two strokes higher than Pugsley’s because of a very high score on a single hole, allowing him nonetheless to have performed better against Colonel Bogey than Pugsley did on the other seventeen holes.

In the spring of 1892, the Great Yarmouth Golf Club had invented the system that came to be the standard one used in scoring Bogey competitions:

On the scoring card is printed, opposite each hole, the number of strokes in which the hole is made by “Col. Bogey,” and on this card the secretary also marks the holes at which strokes are to be awarded to the player. The scoring is thus easy. If the player wins a hole, it is marked +; if he loses, -; if halved, 0; and the difference between + and – gives the result, with far less trouble than adding up a medal score. (Field, no 2052 [23 April 1892], p. 594)

Generally, the score on a hole lost to Colonel Bogey was not even recorded, and often golfers stopped playing a hole when they had exceeded the score credited to the Colonel and so would have no score to record for such a hole, so a player’s medal score was often unknown. The only information published in the newspapers and magazines was the number of holes up or down that a player finished in relation to Colonel Bogey.

Whatever information that Secretary Simpson had passed along to Ottawa newspapers, the only newspaper to report on the Bogey competition was the Ottawa Journal, and its writer did not know how to interpret what he had been told. Simpson will have explained the results with numbers and terms other than those reported in the newspaper. It is likely that the Journal’s writer reported only the numbers he understood. Perhaps editors at the other newspapers, the Ottawa Daily Citizen and the Ottawa Free Press, could make no sense of Simpson’s report and simply set it aside.

That newspaper editors in 1893 would not understand the reported results of a golf competition (especially a new form of competition) would not be surprising, for neither editors nor run-of-the-mill newspaper writers in Canada knew much – if anything – about golf.

Newspaper writers who knew nothing of golf assumed that scoring in golf was analogous to scoring in other sports: the winner was the one with the highest score! For instance, when the Montreal Gazette reported the result of the exhibition match in Ottawa between Harley and Ricketts that took place before the official team match between Kingston (“the Limestone city”) and Ottawa in May of 1893, its writer misinterpreted what it meant for Ricketts to have shot 91 and Harley to have shot 100: “Great interest was taken in an exhibition match between Harley … and Ricketts. It was beautifully contested, but the Limestone city representative proved too strong an opponent and won by 100 to 91” (25 May 1893, p. 8).

Huh?

And consider the attempt by a writer in the Ottawa Daily Citizen to convey to readers what he had been told about the game at the time of the interprovincial match in Ottawa in the fall of 1893:

Golf is a game that probably very few people in Ottawa know much about, except those who play the game …. At the present time, the club has a membership of nearly 100.

Golf may be played on any solid land, but that on which hills and hollows abound is preferable. The local club’s grounds are on the Rideau bluff and are about the best in Canada because of the extra science they call for to “hole the ball.” The golf ground is called the “link.” The starting point is the “tee.” There are eighteen small holes at distances ranging from 109 to 350 yards from each other and into these the players have to puck a small ball with clubs made similar to hockey sticks. First in the hole counts one. Players must not touch the ball with their hands. If they do, the opposing player counts one. The number of holes a player is ahead of his opponent counts points to his opponent’s “0.” (7 October 1893, p. 5)

This writer struggled to understand what he had been told about golf by members of the Ottawa Golf Club. Confused by talk of eighteen-hole scores, the writer did not recognize that the course had just nine holes. When told that the golf course was called a “links,” he somehow heard “link,” a word that no one at the golf club had used. When he was shown a golf club, he saw it as like a hockey stick – which suggests he had paid attention only to the long-nosed wooden clubs of the day and had paid no attention to the clubs with iron heads. And he obviously had no idea what he was saying when he reported that “extra science” was required to play golf in Ottawa.

Oh dear. If this guy was one of the newspaper editors to whom Secretary Simpson four weeks later communicated the results of North America’s first “’Bogey’ competition, it is no wonder that not much was made of what will have seemed a jumble of terms and numbers: medal scores, handicaps, a special score for an unknown person named Bogey, a list of the number of holes that club members were up or down versus the mysterious Bogey.

Whatever the case may be, the low net scores reported in the newspaper suggest that the handicap committee had got things terribly wrong.

In the fortnightly handicap medal competitions throughout the 1893 season at the Ottawa Golf Club for the Gilmour Cup, handicapping was calculated according to the scratch scores of Alexander Simpson. This was the handicapping practice generally at golf clubs in the 1890s. Although Simpson occasionally scored over 100, he generally scored in the 90s. His best score on the course in 1893 was 91 (the same score Ricketts had shot in his match against Harley in May). At the end of the year, the Ottawa Journal reported that “In all the contests of the season, his average scoring was 94” (Ottawa Journal, 27 November 1893, p. 7).

So, the Ottawa Golf Club’s handicap committee awarded handicaps with the intention of allowing club members to produce net scores around 94 after their handicap had been deducted from their gross scores. A half-hour before each handicap competition was to begin, “the committee” met to determine handicaps for the day’s play, tweaking a member’s handicap when improving or deteriorating performances suggested a new calculation was required. And so, we read: “The ‘Bogey’ competition for the Ricketts prize will take place this afternoon at 2:30 sharp. Committee meeting at two o’clock” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 4 November 1893, p. 5, emphasis added).

Adjustments to handicaps were frequently necessary in 1893. The level of play among members was improving quickly. On the one hand, many people were new to the game at the beginning of the year and inevitably improved as they gained more experience over the season (some beginners were awarded a handicap of 75 in May of 1893 but were down to 36 by the beginning of the next year). On the other hand, “The play of members had very much improved … largely due to the excellent coaching of Ricketts” (Montreal Star, 4 April 1894, p. 3). Ricketts was an excellent instructor, celebrated as such (after leaving Ottawa) at Albany and then Rochester (where he taught Walter Hagen how to play golf).

It is instructive to consider the handicapping during the 1893 season of E.C. Grant (the author that year of the article on “Ottawa Golf” for Collier’s cited above). He was awarded a handicap of 36 for an eighteen-hole competition in the spring, but for a thirteen-hole competition at the end of the year he was awarded a handicap of 7 (equivalent to a handicap of 10 for eighteen holes). Grant had improved so much from spring to fall, in fact, that he was chosen to represent Ontario in the interprovincial match! (He drew his match against the Secretary-Treasurer of Royal Montreal, E.G. Penney.)

Figure 39 Walter Arthur Fleming, 1888. Kingston Whig Standard, 20 March 1928, p. 9.

And then there was Walter Arthur Fleming (a son of Sir Sandford Fleming).

In April, playing off a handicap of 18, he shot an eighteen-hole score of 154, producing a net score of 136. And yet three weeks later, when his handicap was adjusted to 24, his net score tied Alexander Simpson’s mid-90s scratch score. W.A. Fleming’s handicap was next set at 15, at which point his net score beat Simpson’s scratch score by four strokes over just thirteen holes! How could one expect the committee to handicap such an erratic player accurately?

The case of third-place finisher J.W. Pugsley is also interesting.

In the club handicap medal-play competition one week before the Bogey competition, Pugsley was accorded a handicap of 75. He completed eighteen holes in 171 strokes, which, with his handicap deducted, produced a net score of 96: approximately what the handicap committee intended. Was it with the same handicap of 75 that duffer Pugsley played against Colonel Bogey a week later, when his net score was 85?

Pugsley may have been improving at a rate that the handicap committee was unable to appreciate on the day of the Bogey competition. Two weeks after it, the committee reduced his handicap by 21 strokes to 54. Even so, however, his first net score with his new lower handicap was still much lower than the committee desired: 74 (128 – 54). In the three weeks that passed after he shot 171 at the end of October, he had knocked 43 strokes off his gross score. Not surprisingly, perhaps, at the beginning of the next season, his handicap was further reduced to 36. In his first tournament of 1894, he shot 121 – 50 strokes lower than his gross score at the end of October the year before.

Pity the poor handicap committee having to cope with the erratic play of W.A. Fleming and the rapid improvement of J.W. Pugsley.

Under such difficult circumstances, the handicap committee usually did a commendable job. In one of its biggest competitions ever, with 24 members playing (the largest turn-out in 1893 for a club competition at Ottawa), and with handicaps ranging from scratch to 54, the results must have been gratifying to the handicap committee: the top nine net scores ranged from 88 to 98, all reasonably ranged around scratch player Simpson’s average score of 94. And it is also worth noting that Simpson won more Gilmour Cup competitions – a season-long handicap medal-play tournament – with his scratch scores than anyone else did with their net scores, which indicates that generally the committee was not erring on the side of generosity in its handicapping calculations.

Given that the handicap committee aimed to produce net scores in the low- to mid-90s, how does one explain the top five net scores reported for the Bogey competition: 60, 79, 85, 87, 93?

Figure 40 Left: Sandford Hall Fleming (1858-1949), with daughter and father, circa 1895.

The man who was listed as finishing with the fifth best net medal score, Sandford Hall Fleming (another of Sir Sandford Fleming’s sons), regularly produced gross scores in the high 90s and low 100s. He was awarded a handicap of from 12 to 15, which during the 1893 season produced net results for him from the high 80s to low 90s, which seem to have been the sorts of scores the handicap committee sought. In a club competition one week before the Bogey competition, he was awarded a handicap of 15: his net score was 94. In the Bogey competition itself, Fleming scored a net 93 – virtually the same score from the week before and about what he scored in the club’s regular handicap medal competitions.

And so, it may be that S.H. Fleming’s net score of 93 in the Bogey competition indicates that he played off his full handicap of 15 against Colonel Bogey, rather than the three-quarters or two-thirds of his handicap that was conventional for match-play events in general, and especially Bogey competitions.

That the inaugural Bogey competition at the Ottawa Golf Club had indeed been conducted with players allowed their full handicap seems to be confirmed by Alexander Simpson’s score: 98 (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 6 November 1893, p. 5). This number would seem to represent his scratch score.

Had the inaugural Bogey competition been botched by unconventional and unavoidably inaccurate handicapping?

The winner of the Bogey competition, club vice-president Charles Magee, was generally accorded a handicap of 36 during the 1893 season. He usually scored in the 130s and 140s for eighteen holes, regularly producing a net score in the low 100s. Yet in the Bogey competition, his net score was 60: at least 48 strokes lower than his usual net medal-play scores, 38 strokes lower than the best net score for 18 holes so far reported for club competitions in 1893 (88), and 23 strokes lower than the course record set by Smith and Ricketts four weeks before (83)

That’s not right!

The committee certainly did not intend for anyone to shoot a net score of 60 in the Bogey competition. Even the second-place score of 79 was far too low.

Did the record score of 83 shot in October by Smith and Ricketts lead the committee to credit Colonel Bogey with such a score? If so, did club members intimidated by such a score petition for their full handicap allowances against Colonel Bogey – or perhaps petition for even higher handicaps than usual, since their handicaps had previously been calculated against Simpson’s average score of 94?

Whatever the case may be in this regard, it is clear that the handicap accorded to Magee, producing the outrageous score of 60, meant that duffer Magee defeated Colonel Bogey by an absurd number of holes: even if the bogey score had been set at 83 (probably the lowest Bogey score conceivable in November of 1893), a person producing a medal score of 60 in a match-play contest against Colonel Bogey’s steady 83 would have won most of the holes, and perhaps all of them.

That is not how bogey competitions worked. As Horace G. Hutchinson explains:

The score of Colonel Bogey, as settled by the committee of the club, is usually not a prohibitive score, so to speak – not an impossible score. Rather, it is such a score as may be made by the ordinary scratch player, playing not ideally well, but without a single big mistake. Sometimes, therefore, Bogey will be beaten; but he will never be beaten badly, and he will win a great majority of his matches. (Golf [1890; new edition, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895], p. 280)

As Great Yarmouth’s Secretary Browne observed in the summer of 1892: “‘Colonel Bogey’ plays a steady match-game – nothing brilliant, but ever steady. On this course, he never makes a two-hole, and only two 3’s in the round of eighteen holes. He is hard to beat, is still undefeated, and challenges the world to a match under handicap” (Golf [London], vol 4 no 91 [10 June 1892], p. 218).

When Ricketts was still at Wimbledon in the fall of 1892, the women’s competition against a Bogey score produced winners in both the first-class field and the second-class field who lost to Colonel Bogey. This result at Wimbledon was typical of the results for Bogey competitions wherever they were played in England.

Every committee charged with setting Bogey’s score tried to make sure that he would not be embarrassed. At Hoylake, for instance, the great amateur player John Ball, jr. (many times a winner of the Amateur Championship, first in 1888, and a winner also of the Open Championship of 1890), was forced to give six strokes to Colonel Bogey to ensure a competitive match:

Mr. John Ball, jun., has been to the full as successful as ever [during the 1892 season], some of his feats over his own green at Hoylake being really marvellous…. In one of the “Colonel Bogey” competitions now fashionable, wherein a more or less ideal score is set, representing first-class play against which the field pit themselves hole by hole, Mr. Ball had to give his ghostly adversary … six strokes. Although 86 was the number fixed upon [for Colonel Bogey], he conceded these odds and was victorious by one hole. (Saturday Review of Politics and Literature, vol 75 no 1942 [14 January 1893], p. 36)

The committee got it right.

Furthermore, experienced handicap committees at English golf clubs usually arranged things so accurately in terms of handicapping that often two or more members tied each other in the number of holes they won or lost against Colonel Bogey, leading to playoffs. No one ever finished as far out in front of others as the top competitor did at Ottawa in the fall of 1893.

One wonders how club members reacted to Magee’s victory.

Ottawa Reactions to Colonel Bogey?

On the first Saturday of November in 1893, “A large field of golfers turned out … to compete for the Ricketts prize” (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 6 November 1893, p. 5). About twenty-two players entered the competition (just two fewer than entered the most popular tournament of the year).

What was the reaction to a lop-sided win by Charles Magee?

Was Colonel Bogey defeated in more ways than one by this man’s score? That is, was the idea of Bogey competition itself discredited in the opinion of Ottawa Golf Club members because of this peculiar result?

Or, recognizing that the committee had made a grotesque handicapping mistake, were club members able to look past the anomalous result and recognize an interesting potential in this new form of competition?

Perhaps the reaction to Bogey competition at Great Yarmouth, after its first two large-scale tournaments in the spring of 1892, can give us an idea of what the range of reaction at Ottawa might have been in the fall of 1893:

As to whether “Colonel Bogey” was an interesting opponent, with whom it was a pleasure to compete, opinion varied.

Some were enthusiastic, and declared it was the finest system of Golf competition ever invented.

Others, more cautious, … [declared it] an agreeable variety and a relief to the monotony of the everlasting medal round, and the terrible total apt to be run up.

A few said they could see nothing in it, or [could not] get up an interest in the match, having a feeling they were playing against nobody.

The great bulk of feeling was, however, clearly in favour of these new match competitions which seem to have been established on numerous links with increasing popularity. (Golf [London], vol. 4 no 91 [10 June 1892], p. 218)

One can imagine that the same range of opinion would have been expressed at the Ottawa Golf Club, but that “the bulk of feeling” at Ottawa was also “in favour of these new match competitions” is perhaps less likely, for Bogey competition by no means experienced “increasing popularity” among the members. In fact, Bogey competitions did not become a part of the regular fixtures list at the Ottawa Golf Club until the early 1900s.

In fact, so far as I can tell, there was just one more Bogey competition held at the Ottawa Golf Club in the nineteenth century.

"A Handicap Match by Holes"

By the early 1900s, the Ottawa Golf Club’s Bogey competitions produced the kind of results that were expected. Saturday Night reported in the spring of 1902 that “The Ladies’ Golf Club played a match against bogey for a prize given by Mrs. St. Denis Lemoine. Mrs. Sidney Smith was the winner, 8 down to bogey” (31 May 1902, p. 6). And in 1913, a year after the club had been designated Royal, there was a men’s Bogey competition: “None of the competitors managed to defeat Bogey”: “Messrs. A.B. Broderick and R.H. Fraser tied for the trophy, and both were one down with Col. Bogey” (Ottawa Journal, 29 September 1913, p. 4).

Coincidentally, Molson’s Bank manager A.B. Broderick, who finished one down to Bogey in 1913, had in 1894 played in the last of the early Bogey competitions staged on the Sandy Hill golf course.

In October of 1894, eleven months after the inaugural Bogey competition, there was an interesting announcement in the Ottawa newspapers:

Golf

The Ottawa Golf Club play the Kingston club next Saturday over the latter’s course.

This week, the members of the Ottawa club will compete for the Palmer prize, a handicap match by holes.

Entries must be handed in to the secretary by this afternoon [Tuesday]. Play will commence tomorrow. (Ottawa Daily Citizen, 9 October 1894, p. 5).

This mysterious “handicap match by holes” was a competition to be played on a weekday, leaving the weekend free so that Secretary Alexander Simpson could lead seven members of the men’s team (more than ¼ of the club’s regular playing members) down to Kingston on Friday afternoon for its Saturday match against the Kingston Golf Club.

According to the newspaper report, the “Palmer prize” was to be awarded “this week” to the winner of the handicap competition arranged for Wednesday afternoon. With play beginning at the end of the workday, there was no way that a conventional handicap competition could produce a champion in such a short space of time. Only the Bogey competition format (with all contestants playing a handicap match by holes simultaneously against Colonel Bogey) could produce a prize winner in the time available.

Note also that the peculiar phrase “handicap match by holes” may have been Alfred Ricketts’ way of describing a Bogey competition, for when he introduced Bogey competition to the Country Club of Rochester in the spring of 1898, we find the club secretary using virtually the same phrase – “hole handicap play” – to explain the peculiar new competitive format to the local newspaper:

The play yesterday was hole handicap, considerably different from medal handicap play, which is more fully understood in this portion of the state, perhaps. In medal play, a participant is allowed a certain number of strokes as against Colonel Bogey, the mythical gentleman who is supposed to play exceptionally good golf always and whose nerves are never on edge.

In hole handicap play, the Colonel is supposed to make the different holes in certain numbers of strokes called the Bogey score, and each individual player plays against him and is allowed strokes at certain holes as against the Bogey, according to the ability of the player. The strokes are taken at holes designated by the greens committee of the club. (Democrat and Chronicle, 2 July 1898, p. 14)

I can find no report in newspapers or magazines of the results of the 1894 “handicap match by holes” at Ottawa.

Figure 41 A.Z. Palmer, Ottawa Citizen, 1 July 1912, p. 8.

It is interesting to note, however, that the prize for this competition was provided not by Ricketts, but by Armory Alfred Zouch Palmer (elected president of the Ottawa Golf Club three years later).

A.Z. Palmer (as he was known) had spent part of the summer of 1893 in England, returning to Ottawa late in September and resuming his play at the Ottawa Golf Club. One wonders if he had played golf in England and perhaps experienced the enthusiasm for Bogey competition there.

In any event, Palmer seems to be proof that there was at least one convert to Bogey competition at the Ottawa Golf Club: moved to offer the prize for the 1894 version of the event, he seems to have been like those at Great Yarmouth who, having played in their first Bogey competition, “were enthusiastic, and declared it was the finest system of Golf competition ever invented” (Golf [London], vol. 4 no 91 [10 June 1892], p. 218).

After this 1894 contest, however, it would be many years before anyone at the Ottawa Golf Club played again over the club’s links in an official Bogey competition. But this does not mean that the experiment with Bogey competitions at Ottawa was not productive: Colonel Bogey had made friends while in Ottawa, and was soon invited to Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto.

Montreal's Bogey Committee

I suspect that widespread talk of Bogey at the interprovincial golf competition at Ottawa in October of 1893 had an important impact on the members of Royal Montreal’s executive committee: it made them curious about the concept of Bogey scores and led them to hire a golf professional who knew more about Bogey than even Ricketts.

The club’s need for a new golf professional at this time arose from the fact that the man they had brought over in the spring of 1893 to replace Willie Davis soon proved unable to do the job.

Initially, however, optimism had reigned when the Montreal Star announced in March of 1893 that in the wake of Davis’s departure, there would soon be two new golf professionals in Canada: “There are two new professional golf players to come from Great Britain to Canada. One is to play with the Ottawa Club, which intends to do great things this year, and the other with the Royal Montreal Golf Club” (25 March 1893, p. 8). The timeline suggested in this item was inaccurate: the Ottawa Golf Club’s professional, Alfred Ricketts, had already arrived in Ottawa almost a week before this item appeared in the Montreal newspaper, and the new Montreal golf professional had not even been hired yet. It was only at the end of April that readers learned of the outcome of the hiring process: “For a long time the club has cast about for a suitable man and at last Mr. Bennett Lang, of Scotland, was recommended to them as a man who knew his business and a first-class club-maker” (Montreal Star, 27 April 1893, p. 5).

Lang arrived in Montreal on 11 May 1893.

Did he bring knowledge of Bogey to Montreal as Ricketts brought knowledge of Bogey to Ottawa?

Probably not.

Lang was working as a green superintendent in Perth when Bogey was invented in England. According to his friend Peter Baxter, Lang remained in Perth until 1892, and then “a desire to see more of the world caused him to accept an engagement in Ireland with the County Down Club at Newcastle [now Royal County Down], where he acted as professional during the summer season” (Peter Baxter, Golf in Perth and Perthshire [Perth: Thomas Hunter, 1899], p. 35). He thereby avoided the earliest incursions of Colonel Bogey into Scotland. And County Down Golf Club did not play Bogey competitions in the summer of 1892. In fact, the first Irish club to do so was the Royal County Golf Club of Portrush, Antrim (now known as Royal Portrush), where we read at the end of June that later that summer “there will be a match against Colonel Bogey, which will be a novelty on Irish links” (Northern Whig [Antrim, Ireland], 28 June 1892, p. 7).

Lang left Ireland before Bogey competition became known there and returned to Scotland. At the end of the summer of 1892, he accepted an invitation to work exclusively as a club-maker for Sir Walter Hamilton-Dalrymple (1854-1920), the owner of a large estate at North Berwick. The latter was not only the lord of the grand manor on which a couple of local golf courses were laid out, but also an enthusiastic devotee of the royal and ancient game and a designer of patented golf clubs – some of them of a rather eccentric nature.

Figure 42 The Dalrymple "Hammer," built by Bennett Lang from 1892-93.

Lang was hired to make Dalrymple’s revolutionary two-sided club, designed to function as both a putter and a cleek. In the patent awarded in September of 1892, it was referred to as “The amble-faced or hammerheaded Golf club,” but it was often also called “The Duplex” (Golf [London], vol 5 no 105 [16 September 1892], p. 6). Dalrymple had patented other golf clubs, but the “hammer-headed club brought him into fame as a Golf patentee” (Golf [London], vol 9 no 226 [9 November 1894], p. 160). And so, Lang built “the wonder” that “burst on the season” of 1892 (Golf [London], vol 5 no 124 (27 January 1893], p. 315).

But he was not employed as a golf professional on any of the links at North Berwick, and he was not involved with any of the various golf clubs that played on the North Berwick links in 1892-93.

So, he remained insulated from any first-hand knowledge of Bogey competition until he set out for Montreal in May.

It is not surprising, then, to see no hint of an awareness of Bogey at Royal Montreal in 1893. The club fixtures for 1893, which were announced in the spring (when the Ottawa Golf Club announced its Bogey competition), were all medal-play events, except for the contest for the Drummond Cup, which required a two-month-long knock-out match-play competition.

At Royal Montreal, Lang was very successful as a golf instructor, and he demonstrated his prowess as a golfer by setting the scoring record on Fletcher’s Field, but he became most famous in golf history as an excellent maker of golf clubs. To everyone’s disappointment, including his own, Lang was unexpectedly afflicted with sciatica before the end of his first year at the club. He was still able to make golf clubs after the onset of this illness, but he was not able to fulfil his other duties: the keeping of the green, instructing club members, and playing rounds of golf with members.

It was known at least by January or early February of 1894 that Lang’s illness would make him incapable of fulfilling the majority of his duties, for in February the club placed an advertisement to run in two consecutive March issues of Britain’s Golf newspaper. The first one appeared on March 2nd:

Figure 43 Golf [London], vol 7 no 181 (2 March 1894), p. 398

There is reason, however, to suspect that Lang may have been incapacitated by sciatica, effectively unable to play golf, even earlier, for it is notable that in October of 1893 he did not come to Ottawa during the interprovincial competition to play an exhibition match against the new golf professional Alfred Ricketts.

Since Canada’s golfers were rarely able to see the game played at its highest level in the 1880s and early 1890s, exhibition matches involving the nation’s top golfers were staged whenever possible. As we know, Montreal’s previous golf professional, Willie Davis, had played against Canada’s top amateur golfer, A.W. Smith, at interprovincial contests (in 1882, 1891, and 1892, for instance). Also, when the Royal Montreal team travelled to Quebec in 1890 for the annual Victoria Day competition against the Quebec Golf Club, Davis came along as coach and after the official matches played another exhibition match against Smith, who had just moved to Quebec from Toronto.

Similarly, in Ottawa’s match against Kingston in October of 1894, Ricketts would go along to Kingston as Ottawa’s coach and, after the official matches, play in a foursomes match alongside Alexander Simpson against Thomas Harley and Professor A.J. Cappon.

Ricketts, we know, had been eager to test himself against Canada’s top golfers as soon as he arrived in Canada. In the spring of 1893, he had played Kingston’s new import, Harley. But at the interprovincial championship in Ottawa in October of 1893, Ricketts played A.W. Smith. Where was Lang, the coach of the Royal Montreal team and the course record holder at Montreal? Davis had accompanied the Royal Montreal team to Quebec, yet Lang had not accompanied the Montreal members of the Quebec team to Ottawa. Why?

So, Royal Montreal may have been aware by the time of the interprovincial match in Ottawa in October of 1893 that it would need a new golf professional for the next season. If so, they will have been very interested to speak to Ottawa Golf Club members about their experience with their new English professional and they will have heard about the knowledge he brought to them of the yet-to-be-tried innovation called “‘Bogey’ competition.”

Figure 44 Edward Goff Penny, Montreal Star, 16 January 1894, p. 6.

Notably, the committee in charge of finding a replacement for Lang consisted largely of Royal Montreal representatives who had played on the Quebec team at the interprovincial competition in Ottawa. Of the seven committee members elected in December of 1893 for the 1894 season, five had been in Ottawa in October, including the two most important committee members: “Captain, Mr. J.L. Morris, Q.C.; secretary-treasurer, Mr. E. Goff Penny” (Montreal Star, 13 December 1893, p. 3).

The latter, Edward Goff Penny, placed the club’s advertisement in Golf, and he subsequently conducted the voluminous correspondence with the more than three dozen applicants for the position of golf professional at the Royal Montreal Golf Club.

More News of Bogey at Montreal

One presumes that the editor of Golf (London) sent to the Royal Montreal Golf Club copies of the March 2nd and March 9th issues in which the club’s advertisement appeared. Members of the hiring committee are likely to have inspected at least the March 2nd issue before they began to receive and review applications from golf professionals.

On the first page of this issue, they found a list of fixtures soon to be played at golf clubs all over England, and these fixtures included many Bogey competitions: a “’Bogey’ Tournament” at West Middlesex, a “’Bogey’ Competition” at Crookham, a “’Bogey’ competition” at King’s Norton, a “’Bogey’ competition” at Minchinhampton, and the “’Bogey’ Cup at Caernarvonshire” (p. 385). And committee members will also have found an account of Bogey competitions played the previous week by various other golf clubs. At “West Herts Golf Club,” there had been “The usual monthly medal ‘Bogey’ competition” (p. 397). And just a few lines above the Royal Montreal advertisement itself, there was a report on the Hartley Wintney Golf Club’s “monthly ‘Bogey’ competition” (p. 398).

As was the case in the Ottawa Free Press and the Montreal Star in May of 1893 when the Ottawa Golf Club’s fixture list was published, all references to “Bogey” in Golf put the word in quotation marks to indicate that it was a neologism.

Supplementing whatever they had been told at Ottawa in October of 1893, members of the hiring committee would have found that some of the reports in Golf hinted at how Bogey competitions worked. At the Wakefield Golf Club, for instance, there had been a Bogey Competition for the “Leatham cup”: “fourteen competitors entered for this cup, and the winner was Mr. B. Waterhouse, who in tempestuous weather returned a card of 8 holes down against a round of 82 by ‘Col. Bogey’” (p. 397). At the “Cambridge University Golf Club,” there had been a Bogey competition for the “Barrow medal, played for by ‘Bogey’ score. The score was fixed at 81. Day fine and cold. Two-thirds usual handicap. Result: -- Mr. H. Glasier (3 [handicap]), halved; Mr. G. R. Bastow (13), 3 down; Mr. J.H.J. Webb (13), 3 down …” (p. 393). This report on the Cambridge scoring went through a list of twenty more players, the last of which finished “12 down” to Colonel Bogey.

Having learned just a few months before of a Bogey competition introduced to the Ottawa Golf Club by its new golf professional, and having learned from Golf of the increasing popularity of this innovative form of competition at golf clubs throughout Britain, how could members of the Royal Montreal committee not have wanted to get up to date regarding Colonel Bogey by means of the golf professional it would hire?

A Bogey Man for Montreal in 1894

The Royal Montreal Golf Club had cast a wide net with its advertisements and subsequently received applications from golf professionals working at British clubs great and small, young and old.

Just thirteen days after the first advertisement appeared in Britain, the Montreal Gazette noted that “A meeting of the committee of the Montreal Golf Club was held … when applications from new professionals were read, and the secretary was instructed to reply to them” (Gazette [Montreal], 16 March 1894, p. 8). A week later, the Montreal Star boasted about the quality of the top applicants: “The club has advertised for a new professional and club maker, and already there are half a dozen applications from some of the best men in the Old Country” (Montreal Star, 22 March 1894, p. 3). The winning candidate was later told that the advertisement had produced a total of forty applications from Scotland and England (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 November 1920, p 18).

By what criterion would the “committee of the Montreal Golf Club” choose the best candidate from among such a stellar field?

In the context of the contemporary buzz about Bogey in Britain and Ottawa, how could committee members not find their interest piqued by a job candidate who had apprenticed at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club, which had become well-known by the spring of 1894 as the most important centre in the promulgation and popularization of Bogey competition?

Thomas Smith

The Royal Montreal committee hired Thomas Smith, a twenty-one-year-old golf professional from the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club.

Figure 45 Thomas Smith (1873-1967?). Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, 10 February 1902, p. 7. Photograph modified and enhanced.

This new golf club in Brancaster, Norfolk, had opened its new links course in January of 1892 and had hired Tom Smith as a greenkeeper during its first months of operation.

The course had been laid out on the Brancaster Common by the 1886 and 1887 Amateur Champion Horace G. Hutchinson (1859- 1932), who was also the Captain of the club (the captain of a golf club functioned in the nineteenth century as what we would today call a president). So, Tom Smith was associating with golf royalty in the early 1890s.

Having a membership of over 200 by the summer of 1892, the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club seems to have maintained several golf professionals on staff at the same time (they served as greenkeepers, instructors, and club makers).

The club announced high standards in this regard: “The committee are about to engage the services of the very best professional they can secure for the post of greenkeeper” (Golf [London], vol 3 no 78 [11 March 1892, p. 408).

In Smith’s opinion, this new links course in Norfolk was “the finest course to be found in England for first class golf” (Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, 10 February 1902, p. 7). He soon held the course record: “The record of the green is 85, made by Aveston, the Cromer [Golf Club] professional, and also by the present green-keeper at Brancaster, Thomas Smith, of Yarmouth” (Golf [London], vol 4 no 100 [12 August 1892], p. 357).

Tom Smith may have been the golf professional who demonstrated (shortly after this new club officially opened) how to hit a golf ball for the first chairman of the new club, who confessed that “he knew little or nothing of the game” and “had seen it played for the first time that [February] afternoon”:

I had the pleasure of watching a ball struck by their professional this afternoon.

I saw it leave the ground, watched it till it became a speck in the air, but whether it came down in this county [Norfolk] or in Suffolk I cannot really say.

From the satisfied manner of the players, I suppose it fell on the [Brancaster] common. (Golf [London], vol 3 no 75 [19 February 1892, p. 358).

Smith would also hold the course record at Royal Montreal. It is no wonder that when Smith later left Montreal for Pittsburgh, his references – which may have included one from Royal West Norfolk captain Hutchinson himself (who had come to be regarded by the mid-1890s as one of the greatest living authorities on golf) – described him as a “a strong player” and as “a good groundskeeper” (Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, 10 February 1902, p. 7).

Figure 46 Willie Fernie, circa 1890.

Before Smith arrived at Pittsburgh’s Westmoreland Country Club in April of 1902, the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette reported that “Tom Smith learned the game at Great Yarmouth, Eng., under the noted professionals, Tom and George Honie” (10 February 1902, p. 7). “Honie” is a typographical error for the name of one of the most famous Scottish golfing families of the late 1800s and early 1900s: Fernie.

Born in St. Andrews, the sons of school master William Fernie, brothers Thomas (1853-1911), William (1855-1924), and George (1860-1915) all became golf professionals. As the winner of the Open Championship in 1883, and the golf professional at Troon from 1887 to 1924, Willie became the most famous, but he had honed his game on the Old Course at St. Andrews in competition with his two brothers.

Graduating from service as a caddie at Great Yarmouth Golf Club, Tom Smith apprenticed from about 1885 to 1887 under Thomas Fernie, who greatly improved conditions at the relatively new course. This was Fernie’s first appointment as professional after playing golf as an amateur until the early 1880s at the course of the Dumfries and Galloway Golf Club where he lived with his brother Willie, who served as the golf professional there when he won the Open championship in 1883. Tom left Great Yarmouth in 1888 for the Ardeer Golf Club in Scotland, becoming the greenkeeper in replacement of his brother Willie who had just moved to Troon. Before he left Great Yarmouth, he married Mary Elizabeth Vince in April of 1888. He later served as golf professional successively in the 1890s at the City of Newcastle Golf Club, the Bentley Green Golf Club (Great Bentley, East Essex), and Aldeburgh Golf Club (Suffolk), where he set the course record in the late 1890s. He retired to Great Yarmouth in the early 1900s, where he was a property owner and golf club maker unaffiliated with any golf club. He died in October of 1911.

Figure 47 George Fernie, early 1900s.

Smith continued his apprenticeship at Great Yarmouth from 1888 to 1890 under George Hood Fernie, who had come from Dumfries, where he had served as the golf professional after Willie left. George left Great Yarmouth in 1890 and moved to Troon to become Willie’s assistant. In the mid 1890s, he became the golf professional once more at Dumfries (where in 1894 he set the course record on the club’s new course laid out by his brother Willie). He later worked as a golf professional in Ireland, first at County Down Golf Club in Newcastle (1898), then the Ormeau Golf Club in Belfast (1899-1901), where he set the course record of 65. He also held course records at the County Louth Golf Club in Drogheda and Athlone (Garrison) Golf Club.

George Fernie earned his lasting place in golf history through his experiments with golf ball technology in 1893. Attempting that year to replace the solid gutta-percha golf ball (which had been in use for more than forty years) by wrapping thin strips of rubber around a core of cork, and adding a gutta-percha cover, he was eventually ruled by the House of Lords in 1907 to have anticipated the technology of the rubber-wound ball of the American inventor Coburn Haskell, and so the attempt by the latter’s company to enforce its patent in Britain was prevented, allowing British manufacturers to use the same technique.

Both Tom and George Fernie will have taught Smith how to make and repair golf clubs and golf balls, how to keep a golf course, and how to instruct golfers in the art of the golf swing. Smith later told a reporter in New Jersey that he had, “as a boy, learned the game of golf under the tutelage of the well-known Scotch professional, Tom Fernie” (The Record [North Jersey], 20 April 1916, p. 5).

But since Smith was just twelve to fourteen years of age when learning how to play golf from Tom, but was fifteen to seventeen years of age when working under George, I presume that the latter had a very significant role in refining a variety of the young apprentice’s skills as he prepared to seek a job: especially the art of giving lessons in the golf swing, making golf clubs, and laying out a golf course.

Newspapers observed of George Fernie that “He was an excellent instructor” (Evening Despatch [Warwickshire, England], 6 September 1915, p. 6).

Not a great golfer like his older brother Willie, but better than his oldest brother Tom, George Fernie was a very good golfer: “George Fernie, the newly-appointed custodian of the Great Yarmouth links, recently made the round of eighteen holes in 72 strokes – the lowest on record” (Golfing Annual: 1888- 89, p. 158). A year later, he reduced the record by two more strokes. He also played in several Open Championships before and after his time at Great Yarmouth (his best finish being seventh place in 1884, the year after his brother’s victory). In the mid-1880s at Dumfries, he held the nine-hole course record of 33.

Figure 48 Links of the Royal Cromer Golf Club circa 1900. The first tee is in front of the lighthouse, top left.

He had also become a well-established golf course architect, laying out at least two courses in Norfolk – Royal Cromer in 1887 and Hunstanton in 1891 (where Fernie held the course record) – as well as several courses in Scotland. Smith may well have accompanied Fernie when the latter designed the course at Cromer. Golf professionals often took their apprentices along on such work to teach them the rudiments of laying out a golf course. And Fernie also stayed in the area during the spring of 1891 while working at Hunstanton and could also have invited Smith to work with him there.

Smith himself would subsequently lay out a well-received nine-hole golf course for a summer resort on Lake Champlain in 1898, and he probably laid out Royal Montreal’s new nine-hole course at Dixie in late 1896.

George Fernie was also esteemed as a clubmaker. When he was at Great Yarmouth, and golfers began writing letters to the editor of Field nominating the best clubmakers in the country, one of his old Dumfries patrons sang his praises:

Everyone has his particular favourite. I have played golf for a quarter of a century, and had nearly all makers through my hands, but I must give the palm to George Fernie, Great Yarmouth. I have played with his driver for a number of years; it was made from beech from Lettercairn Forest, and is indestructible. – J. Leitch (Dumfries and Galloway Golf Club). (Field, no 1893 [6 April 1889], p. 477)

After all his travels, and after the great rubber-wound golf ball trial of 1905, George Fernie settled to club making back in Dumfries. He was found guilty of a breach of the peace in 1907 and sentenced to a fine of seven shillings and six pence or five days in jail. He spent five days in Maxwelltown Prison near Dumfries.

He eventually returned to Troon, where esteemed brother Willie remained the golf professional and presumably put club making work his brother’s way.

When he was originally in Troon in 1890, he had married Flora Struthers Richardson, with whom he had a son and three daughters. The boy, George William Fernie, born in 1891, also became a golf professional, listing his occupation as that of club maker. Flora died of liver cancer in 1915, and George himself died of stomach cancer in August of the same year. Eight days before his father’s death, the son enlisted in the Royal Navy. He, too, was dead within a year, collapsing from the administration of an anaesthetic before surgery (in a military hospital in England) to treat wounds suffered to back, right hand, and face by a grenade explosion while he was serving in Stavros, Greece.

All are buried at Troon.

George Fernie had left Tom Smith’s life in 1890, however, when he returned to Troon just before Bogey competition was promulgated and popularized at Great Yarmouth. And so, his apprentice Tom Smith may well have been one of the club’s golf professionals consulted by Secretary Browne as he sought opinion and advice during his work on calculating a ground score for the Great Yarmouth links during the summer and fall of 1891 – the score that would soon earn the name Bogey score when one of Brown’s friends made a joke that the score was as elusive as a Bogeyman.

Figure 49 General Dixon and club Captain A.H. Mathison, and caddies, in front of the clubhouse of the Great Yarmouth Golf Club, circa 1896.

The Captain of the Great Yarmouth Golf Club in 1890-91 was Horace G. Hutchinson, who, as we know, became Captain of the new Royal West Norfolk Golf Club when it opened in January of 1892. Tom Smith was hired at Royal West Norfolk at the same time.

I suspect that Hutchinson knew Smith well from their time together at Great Yarmouth and respected his work, leading him to invite the young golf professional to join him at Royal West Norfolk.

Since new greens were laid out on the Brancaster links in the spring of 1893, one presumes that in addition to whatever George Fernie had taught Tom Smith about architectural theory, the twenty-year-old greenkeeper also acquired a good deal of practical experience of green construction while at Royal West Norfolk (Field, no 2106 [6 May 1893], p. 666). Seen below is Royal Norfolk’s sixth green as it appeared in March of 1893.

Figure 50 Royal West Norfolk’s 6th green. Golf [London], vol 6 no 133 (31 March 1893), p. 42. The man with his bag of clubs at his feet may be young golf professional Tom Smith playing with three members, whose bags are carried by the young caddies.

Colonel Bogey's Birds of a Feather

When Secretary Brown began working out appropriate Bogey scores for the Great Yarmouth golf course in the spring of 1891, Tom Smith was not the only young golf professional with whom he might have consulted about Bogey scores: there was Tom’s older brother Harry and there was his younger brother Arthur, both of whom had also apprenticed under the Fernies at Great Yarmouth.

Figure 51 Left: Arthur W. Smith (1874-1944), Akron Beacon Journal, 21 July 1933, p. 26. Right: Harry William Smith (1871- 1962), Akron Beacon Journal, 6 June 1938, p. 15.

Arthur (photograph on the far left) would come to Montreal with Tom in the spring of 1894 and would become in the spring of 1895 the first golf professional hired by the Toronto Golf Club.

Harry (photograph on the near left) would cross the Atlantic in the spring of 1897 to replace his brother Arthur at the Rochester Country Club and then become in the spring of 1898 the first golf professional of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club.

The boys’ relatives must have been surprised at their career choices, for there had been no one in the family connected to golf before them.

George Smith (1844 -1916) and Cecilia (also spelled Celicia) Davie (1846-1878) had three girls and three boys between the time of their marriage in 1866 and the time of Cecilia’s death shortly after the birth of their last child in 1877. All three boys became caddies at the Great Yarmouth Golf Club at a young age and then as teenagers became apprenticed to the Fernies as greenkeepers, club-makers, and instructors.

Such a career choice for young Thomas Smith was not a sure thing even in 1891. In that year’s Census of England and Wales, his father seems to have told the census taker that the occupation of his eighteen-year-old son, who was apprenticed at the golf club, was nonetheless actually that of “Naturalist.” It seems that Tom Smith was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father George, and perhaps even those of his paternal grandfather Thomas, who were also “Naturalists” – of a sort.

George Smith was a bookbinder by trade, but he had by the mid-1870s also become “a purveyor of rare birds” who was well-known by wealthy collectors throughout England.

Figure 52 Ralph Reville (1867- 1957), circa 1920.

Although his son would not become the “Naturalist” that George Smith expected him to be, the father passed his interest in birds on to Thomas, who never lost it.

Indeed, thirty years into his career as a golf professional, wherever Thomas Smith went, he was also always known to golf club members as an expert on birds.

As the pro at the Brantford Golf Club in 1920, for instance, playing in a foursomes match against Ralph Reville (the editor of Canadian Golfer magazine), Smith made so many birdies (and thereby won so much money) in defeating Reville and his partner that Reville erupted on the subject of birdies:

As the editor passed over a roll [of dollar bills] big enough to choke a hungry caddie, his partner exclaimed: “Who’d ever have thought that Smith would get all those birdies?”

“Well, why shouldn’t he?” snapped the editor, as he noted the lightness of his pocketbook.

“Isn’t he an ornithologist?” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 November 1920, p. 18)

Similarly, William Everett Hicks, the popular golf writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Times,” said that “Any club that has members given to collecting ‘birds’ would find Smith very valuable, as he is a trained ornithologist” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 November 1920, p. 18).

In Great Yarmouth, George Smith was “in his way quite a character and a celebrity”: a long-time employee of a local bookbinding company who was also politically active (being described as “an out and out socialist”), he was more celebrated as a “well-known local naturalist and bird dealer” (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2). The magazine Caged Birds described him as “a character widely known for his knowledge of British bird-life”: “he did some useful work for the science of ornithology; he is said to have noticed the first appearance in England of the Mediterranean Black-headed Gull, … and he is also credited with being the first to record in Norfolk the White Wagtail, Tawny Pipit, Iceland Gull, Greater Shearwater, and some others” (13 January 1917, p. 8).

Today, “naturalists” would be astonished at the application of the term to George Smith, for he dealt in the skins of dead birds, eggs pilfered from nests, and even the nests themselves. These birds, eggs, and nests were found on the North Denes, an extensive area of beach along the North Sea (on the east side of Great Yarmouth) where all varieties of known types of dune and most varieties of dune vegetation species were found and where a great variety of birds lived.

The North Denes is today a specially protected nature conservation site, but in the 1800s it was a hunting area.

Arthur H. Patterson, another eccentric local naturalist who wrote a regular nature diary for Norfolk’s Eastern Daily Press (he also wrote books and poems, sometimes using the self-deprecating pseudonym “John Knowlittle”), once wrote a sketch of George Smith:

Figure 53 Arthur H. Patterson (1857-1935), in his own punt, circa 1900.

George Smith was one of the old school of local naturalists who, like its contemporaries, the punt gunners, are becoming themselves an obsolete fraternity.

Smith’s father was an old walking gunner, whom the writer often passed on his rambles to and from the North Denes, when that noted bird and rabbit resort was still in its virginal state: a series of rolling sand dunes, clothed with many hundred acres of fane and sand-sedge … and rest-harrow, when French partridges nested there, and linnets ….

Old Mr. Smith was keen on land dotterel and slew more than most men of this fast-vanishing bird.

No wonder the son George grew – no, not exactly as gun-man – but enthusiastic bird-man, noting the habits and plumages of the birds he came in contact with, launching out later as a dealer in eggs and rare birds. A bookbinder by trade, he spent all spare hours hobnobbing with gunners and ornithologists, his circle of acquaintances and clients being scattered all over the country. He was a henchman of the late Lord Lilford, piles of letters testifying to frequent correspondence….

Many bird collectors enriched their museums with birds that passed through Smith’s hands, Booth (once named Burcher Booth) of Brighton found him helper and advisor when on his periodical spring excursions after the red-knot and godwits, the black-breasted grey plover, and many others on their vernal migrations. (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2).

When George Smith died at the end of 1916, the editor of Caged Birds lamented that Smith’s expert knowledge of “British bird-life” had been gained “in his pursuit of collecting rare specimens of birds and eggs” (13 January 1917, p. 8). During his lifetime, Smith became an increasingly controversial figure, as Patterson notes: “Smith, it is believed, overdid the egg business somewhat and got to loggerheads with those who were keen on preserving the bearded tits [also known as the “bearded reedling” or “reed pheasant”], with other rare Norfolk breeders, having handled more reed pheasants’ nests in situ probably than any other dealer” (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2).

Patterson had pulled his punches; the editor of Caged Birds did not: “He was responsible more than any one person who could be named for the scarcity of the Bearded Reedlings in Norfolk” (13 January 1917, p. 8). Smith was still notorious in the 1930s for his predation of this bird’s eggs: “Today the reed pheasant, once in danger of extinction, is fairly plentiful … and gradually extending its breeding range …. It is scarcely surprising that it almost became extinct, for … George Smith, the Yarmouth dealer, received the incredible total of 113 eggs between April 10th and 25th , 1876” (Field, vol 156, no 4066 (29 November 1930), p. 777).

George Smith’s reputation has continued to decline. With regard to his claims to have been the first to have documented sightings of birds regarded as rare in Norfolk, he has come to be regarded by contemporary experts in the area as unreliable.

The Smith boys had a front-row seat to view the passions and compulsions that were part of their father’s bird dealing. On the one hand, they lived in a space full of birds: “The small front room was adorned by cases of interesting species” (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2). On the other hand, important and unusual people came to talk birds with their father.

Lord Lilford (1833-1896), who maintained a large museum displaying his collection of dead birds, as well as extensive aviaries containing exotic birds from around the world, was one of Smith’s birding friends. And so was Robert Chase (1852-1927), the wealthy Birmingham manufacturer of brushes who also served as president of the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society: “Robert Chase, Birmingham, and many other noted collectors, were frequent visitors to Larne House to view rare bird skins and to discuss birds” (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2). Some of Smith’s birds are now owned by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery through its acquisition of the Robert Chase collections.

In addition to hobnobbing vicariously with the gunners and ornithologists who visited their father, the boys accompanied him when, “On Saturday mornings, he ransacked the market and poultry stalls searching for rare and interesting birds” (Yarmouth Independent, 6 January 1917, p. 2). It is no wonder that the family’s fascination with birds and “birders” affected son Thomas so profoundly that his own love of ornithology became known wherever he lived and worked.

Because their father was a well-known local celebrity, his sons enjoyed an echo of his celebrity. In the fall of 1901, the local newspapers reported on “the golfing successes achieved in America by the sons of Mr. G. Smith of Larne House, Yarmouth” (Eastern Daily Press, 9 November 1901, p. 3). Several weeks later, there was more news: “Arthur Smith, son of Mr. George Smith, of Larne House, New Town, has won the open championship of Western Pennsylvania” (Yarmouth Independent, 28 December 1901, p. 7). The same son made his father proud again seven years later: “Arthur Smith, son of Mr. George Smith of Great Yarmouth, who was last year’s professional golf champion in Ohio state, U.S.A., has just carried off the honours a second time” (Yarmouth Independent, 17 October 1908, p. 8). And there was good news again in 1913: “For the fourth time, Mr. Arthur Smith, son of our well-known townsman, Mr. George Smith, won the golf championship and gold medal of the state of Ohio” (Yarmouth Independent, 1 November 1913, p. 8).

Before George Smith died, therefore, his sons had become well-known locally as golf’s birds of a feather from the links of Great Yarmouth.

Royal Montreal's First Year of Bogey

By June of 1894, Tom Smith was living at 75 ½ Aylmer Street, within walking distance of the Fletcher’s Field golf course. After being awarded the job of Royal Montreal’s golf professional, he had probably arrived in Montreal sometime in May.

Since only six of the forty applications that were received for the job had arrived by March 22nd , and since in the case of applications of interest, “the secretary was instructed to write asking further particulars” (adding weeks to the hiring process as letters were sent back and forth by boat across the Atlantic Ocean), the Royal Montreal committee cannot have completed the selection process much before the end of April (Montreal Daily Herald, 16 March 1894, p. 1). The timeline had been similar the year before, when Bennett Lang was hired near the end of April and arrived in Montreal just before mid-May.

But the Royal Montreal Golf Club’s fixture list for 1894 was announced during the second week of April. Unlike Ricketts, who had arrived in Ottawa in mid-March of 1893, Smith will not have been able to propose adding a Bogey competition to the club’s schedule of events during his first year at the club. And so, the fixtures list for 1894 was the same as that for 1893: all competitions were medal-play events, except for the months-long knock-out match-play competition for the Drummond Cup (the fixtures are discussed in some detail in the Montreal Daily Herald, 13 April 1894, p. 2).

How soon after arriving in Montreal might Tom Smith have worked out a Bogey score for the Fletcher’s Field nine-hole golf course?

In May, there was a report from London printed in both the Montreal Star and Montreal Daily Herald that reminded Royal Montreal members that in England, people who knew golf were presumed to know what a Bogey score was:

GOLF

Results of the English Parliamentary Handicap

London, May 11 – In the Parliamentary Handicap at Furzedown, on Saturday, the Hon. A.J. Balfour, M.P., giving a stroke, halved his match with Mr. C.L. Anstruther, Clerk to the House of Lords. Mr. Anstruther was two holes up at the turn, but Mr. Balfour won the 10th and 11th holes, thus bringing the match “all square.” From that point every hole was halved in “Bogey” score. (Montreal Star, 12 May 1894, p. 8)

Most Royal Montreal club members would have noticed this newspaper item. In early conversations with their new golf professional, Royal Montreal members who had not been to Ottawa the previous fall must have asked Tom Smith what a Bogey score was, how it was determined, and what the Bogey scores for the nine holes of the Fletcher’s Field course would be.

Still, whatever knowledge of Bogey scores Smith imparted to club members during his first season in Montreal, a description of the golf course published in the Montreal Star in the fall of 1894 shows that he had made no headway with the writer who used the pseudonym “Putter” when writing about the Royal Montreal Golf Club. A member of the Ladies’ Golf Club, “Putter” wrote a hole-by-hole account of what the golfer faced on the Fletcher’s Field course but showed no hint of an awareness of Bogey scores (in fact, she does not even hint at the yardage of any holes):

Fore [Caddie] and [Bag] Caddie having been selected, the “teeing Ground” for the “First Hole” is reached…. Stroke after stroke is made till the “Putting Green” is reached….

The next we reach is the “Elm,” a beautiful sweep of green, and standing majestically in the centre, in solitary grandeur, is the old elm tree which only too often has been struck by the swiftly flying balls.

Then the “Cemetery” driver is given, a most difficult one, as the two roads leading to the cemetery must be crossed. However, with patience and perseverance the difficulties are overcome, and we look for better things after these first three holes are played out.

The next is called the “Mountain” drive, and rightly christened, the ascent being steep and rocky.

“Gibraltar” teeing ground [comes next], a very favorite one, owing to the picturesqueness of the surroundings …. Having driven from this height, they rapidly descend the steep hill, in pursuit of the balls, to feel the soft grass of the meadow beneath their feet…. This being an easy hole, the fair players need but one hand to count their number of strokes.

The charms we leave behind us rival those we next approach, “The Meadow,” the teeing ground hidden behind the Sumacs. One hears only the report of the club, or driver, as it strikes the ball …. Again the ball is addressed, and with a few clear strokes, the putting green number six is reached and played out.

Still another hill must here be climbed where … the drive is taken through the “Hall” property ….

Next comes the “Orchard” … a short and easy hole – the ambition of old and young to accomplish it in three strokes.

Number nine brings them “Home,” and … they count up their strokes to see who has taken the fewest number of strokes ….

(Montreal Star, 10 November 1894, p. 9, emphasis added to highlight the names of the golf holes)

When H. Stanley Smith assessed the course for Horace G. Hutchinson around 1890, he provided at least a hint as to the length of the holes and he also implied the scores that might be expected on them:

The weak point … is the short distance between the holes – a good drive and an iron shot will, in most cases, bring you to the putting-green; on the other hand, there are no links in the old country where a topped ball, off either the drive or iron, is more invariably and unmercifully punished … A Willie Park or John Ball, junior, would cover … these links in an average of four with little trouble, but the moderate player finds no difficulty in running up an average of six and even getting beyond it. (H. Stanley Smith, “Golf in Canada,” in Famous Golf Links, ed. Horace G. Hutchinson [London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1891], pp 191-92)

H. Stanley Smith implies a vague awareness of the concept of par, insofar as he suggests that top professional and amateur golfers would shoot 36 on the nine-hole Fletcher’s Field by getting on most putting greens with “a good drive and iron shot,” and taking two putts per green. He was writing before the invention of Bogey. “Putter” was writing in November of 1894 – after the invention of Bogey, but apparently without awareness of it. By October of the next year, however, she had played in a number of Bogey competitions.

The first newspaper account of a Bogey competition at Montreal involves the Ladies Golf Club, whose members engaged in such a competition in the fall of 1895 before one of their weekly teas: “The usual Thursday tea given by the members of the Ladies’ Golf Club took place yesterday at the club house on Fletcher’s Field…. Prior to the tea a match was played … against a ‘Col. Bogey’ score for golf balls” (Montreal Daily Herald, 5 October 1895, p. 2).

This report might have been supplied to the newspaper by the club’s secretary, Edward Goff Penny, who had led the hiring process that brought Tom Smith to Royal Montreal. This report’s casual reference to “a ‘Col. Bogey’ score” indicates that the club was familiar with the phantom named “Colonel Bogey.” Furthermore, it seems that by October of 1895 the concept of “a “Col. Bogey’ score” required no explanation. Even the relatively mundane prize – “golf balls” – suggests that this bogey competition was just another of the regular intramural events of the Ladies’ Golf Club (Montreal Daily Herald, 5 October 1895, p. 2). To attract interest, the Bogey competition required no such “handsome prize” as Ricketts had had to put up in Ottawa to attract entrants: “golf balls” did the trick.

Familiarity with the nature of Bogey competitions would seem to have been established at Royal Montreal much earlier than this October competition. Recalling that at English golf clubs it often took months to introduce a club’s first Bogey competition, the matter-of-fact report about the Bogey competition amongst women in October suggests that there had been a sufficient number of Bogey competitions played previously amongst the women for this particular competition to be brought off in an easy – almost off-hand – manner.

As at Ottawa, so at Royal Montreal, this form of competition had presumably been explained and introduced by the club’s new golf professional. And just as Ricketts had no doubt helped club secretary Alexander Smith work out a Bogey score for the Sandy Hill golf course, so Smith had probably helped club secretary E.G. Penny work out a Bogey score for the Fletcher’s Field course – “a ‘Col. Bogey’ score” for the men and another one for the women.

It is also important to note that Royal Montreal had acquired a new member at the start of the 1895 season: Walter A. Fleming. This early member of the Ottawa Golf Club had become a good golfer over the previous two years, his handicap dropping to 6 at Ottawa by the end of the 1894 golf season. Representing Ontario in the interprovincial match against Quebec in October of 1893, Fleming had played against one of Royal Montreal’s best golfers, Fred Stancliffe, beating him by one hole. Fleming quickly established himself as a stalwart of the Royal Montreal team, being responsible for more than 25% of the eighteen-man team’s points in its one-point victory over the Quebec Golf Club team at Quebec in May of 1895. A few weeks later, he further burnished his credentials at Royal Montreal by finishing third in the handicap competition at Ottawa in the first Canadian Amateur Golf Championship

From the point of view of this essay, however, the thing to note is that Fleming had played in the Ottawa Golf Club’s Bogey competitions of 1893 and 1894 and so brought to his new club experience of Bogey culture that may have been useful in establishing a Bogey culture at Royal Montreal.

Another Use of Bogey at Montreal

Although women seem to have played Bogey competitions fairly often at Royal Montrel by 1895, Bogey competitions for men seem not to have become a feature of play at Royal Montreal until 1898: “The Bogey score of Dixie has lately been fixed at 86, and for bringing all players to this mark, at least, the green committee has resolved to introduce bogey competition from time to time” (Montreal Herald, 30 May 1898, p. 6). We can see that up to the end of the 1897 season at Royal Montreal, “the green committee” had not introduced a regular “bogey competition” for men – and perhaps not even “from time to time.”

At Royal Montreal from 1894 to 1897, that is, Bogey competitions were not part of the club’s official fixture list for men. But just as the women decided every now and again to play a competition against “a ‘Col. Bogey’ score,” so groups of men may also have occasionally done so – perhaps not for grand trophies with club members’ names attached to them, but rather for golf balls.

But that the men did not play official bogey competitions between 1894 and 1897 does not mean that they did not compete against Colonel Bogey. We can see from the newspaper item quoted above that “the green committee” regarded “the Bogey score” as the standard of proper golf on its golf course and saw competition against this score as a means “for bringing all players to this mark, at least.” And so, although Colonel Bogey seems not to have featured before 1898 as an opponent for a field of allcomers, he nonetheless functioned as a personal opponent for individual club members during their practice rounds.

The introduction of Bogey scores served an educational purpose. Colonel Bogey became a surrogate for the kind of golf displayed in the exhibition matches between Willie Davis and A.W. Smith and between Alfred Ricketts and Tom Harley. Davis, Smith, Ricketts, and Harley showed how the game ought to be played, and the green committee’s calculation of Colonel Bogey’s scores reminded club golfers of how Canada’s best golfers played the game: the initial drive should place the ball on fair grass here; the second shot should place the ball on fair grass there; the approach shot should place the ball on the putting green; two putts (at most) should see the ball into the hole.

Like the great golfers of the day mentioned above, Colonel Bogey helped to raise a player’s golf IQ. He was a means of education.

And so, Colonel Bogey performed a great service in suggesting to Royal Montreal golfers a standard of golf play that was more than just respectable: it was proper.

Royal Montreal's Bogey Layout

As we know, when the Royal Montreal Golf Club left Fletcher’s Field and laid out a new golf course on its own property at Dixie in the fall of 1896, the Bogey score was a factor in encouraging improved play amongst the men: an important goal of the green committee in calibrating the Bogey score was to bring members to the mark of that score.

But it also seems to be the case that the new nine-hole course was laid out according to what the architect thought it was reasonable to expect Colonel Bogey to do on each hole. That is, the golf course was designed to accommodate the play of Colonel Bogey.

At the beginning of 1896, after several years of fruitless attempts to lease Fletcher’s Field on terms that would allow the club to make worthwhile financial investments in improvement of its golf course and clubhouse, the Royal Montreal Golf Club purchased its own land in Lachine: “the Meloche property … known as Summerlee” (Montreal Daily Herald, 28 January 1896, p. 2). It was not far from the Dixie train station, and so club members referred to their new property as Dixie.

Work on the new Dixie layout was underway by the end of the year, but play continued on the Fletcher’s Field course until the end of the season.

The club had apparently let it be known known that it had enough land for an 18-hole golf course, and that it ultimately planned to lay out such course, which led the Montreal Herald to report in the fall of 1896 that at Dixie there is “a good eighteen-hole links laid out under the supervision of a committee formed from the club’s most active members” (23 November 1896, p. 5). But only nine holes were laid out in 1896 and more land would be purchased before Willie Dunn, jr., was hired in the spring of 1899 to lay out the club’s first eighteen-hole golf course.

The reference above to “links laid out under the supervision of a committee formed from the club’s most active members” may be misleading: it probably means that the committee in question was supervising the work of the club’s golf professional, Tom Smith. With such an expert on hand, the club would not have had its “most active members” design the new course.

A review of this new nine-hole layout appeared in the Montreal Gazette in the spring of 1897 (before play on the new course had properly begun), and it was probably written by a member of the supervising committee who was privy to discussions with Smith about his design philosophy. In the review’s description of the way to play the sixth and seventh holes, for instance, I suspect that we can hear Smith’s explanation to the committee supervising his work of how he had conceived these two holes: “The sixth and seventh holes measure together nearly 600 yards, and if they are to be taken in five a piece, the player must get a far sure drive, a bold iron, and a cautious approach” (17 May 1897, p. 2).

Figure 54 Scorecard for the 9-hole golf course of the Royal Montreal Golf Club from 1897 to 1899.

We find evidence here that the two holes in question were laid out in terms of expectations for how many strokes “are to be taken” in proper play – but not proper play as defined by the play of a golf professional such as Tom Smith, but rather proper play as defined by the play of the more limited Colonel Bogey.

The sixth hole (“Elm”) was 320 yards long and the seventh hole (“Lower Brook”) was 260 yards long.

These were hole distances that the Doleman brothers (and golf professionals, generally, including Tom Smith) had always defined as having a par of four: two shots being required to reach the green and two putts being allowed to hole the ball.

At Royal Montreal, however, we can see that the holes in question were conceived in terms of a Bogey score of five: two putts to hole the ball after “a far sure drive, a bold iron, and a cautious approach” to reach the putting surface.

And the Bogey score was clearly understood as representing the standard of play that should be each club member’s target: implicitly, that is, the sixth and seventh holes “are to be taken in five a piece.”

Note that the scorecard for this course (which was used until Willie Dunn, Jr, laid out his eighteen-hole course in 1899) does not list the Bogey scores for the nine holes. We know, however, that Royal Montreal had been designating Bogey scores for the nine holes at Fletcher’s Field since at least 1895 (when women members occasionally played competitions against “a ‘Col. Bogey’ score”). And we know that in the spring of 1898 the Bogey score for the Dixie course was adjusted downward to 86, which means that there had been a Bogey score for the 1897 season that was higher (Montreal Herald, 12 September 1898, p. 7).

We can infer from the late 1890s scorecard shown above that although there was a fixed Bogey score of 86 in 1898 (and a fixed Bogey score a stroke or two higher the year before) it was not practical to print fixed Bogey scores on Royal Montreal scorecards at this time because, unlike the par scores with which we are familiar today, Bogey scores were elastic. They might be changed not only from year to year, but also from competition to competition: we recall that in October of 1895, the women played not against the Colonel Bogey score, but rather against “a ‘Col. Bogey’ score” (emphasis added).

For competitions played on a course so wet in the spring as to inhibit the rolling out of the ball, a Bogey score might be set higher than a Bogey score set for a course so dry in the late summer that the ball was rolling out a very long way. In the spring of 1898, for instance, at the Rosedale Golf Club in Toronto, where the Bogey score had been set at 82 when the course was laid out three years before, “The Colonel’s score was raised to 84, owing to play being [on] temporary greens” (The Globe [Toronto], 21 April 1898, p. 10).

Or it might have been the practice at Royal Montreal to set a bogey score on the day of play: a Bogey score for a cold, rainy, windy day being higher than a Bogey score for the very next day if the latter turned out to be warm, dry, and calm. In the Bogey competitions that the Ladies’ Golf Club organized at Royal Montreal during the 1895 season, it may well be that “a ‘Col Bogey’ score” was calculated anew for each match.

And a Bogey score might be adjusted downward as play by the members of a golf club improved over time. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was expected that a golf course would become easier to play the more traffic there was upon it: foot traffic would compress the soil of fairways and putting greens, producing more predictable bounces and rolls over time. Furthermore, as players got to know their new golf course better, they produced better scores on it through what we call “local knowledge” – in other words, proper course management. And players often improved quickly and drastically through professional instruction, producing much lower scores over the course of even a single season.

Figure 55 Fred Stancliffe, Official Golf Guide for 1899, ed. Josiah Newman (New York: privately printed, 1899), p. 312.

For example, when Frederick Stancliffe joined Royal Montreal in the spring of 1893, he was accorded the maximum handicap that the club allowed (as was the convention with regard to all new members who were new to golf). As he intended to become proficient in the game, he immediately received a course of instruction from the new golf professional, Bennett Lang, who would later boast that with this Royal Montreal member (who had taken up the game only in his mid-40s), he had “proved that a golfer can be made out of a middle-aged gentleman” (Baxter, p. 36).

Stancliffe soon won competition after competition at the club, his handicap reduced after each victory until, by the end of the year, playing as a scratch player, he won one of the club’s top prizes with a score of 80.

Thereafter, he regularly represented Royal Montreal in its matches with the Quebec Golf Club, and he regularly represented Quebec in the interprovincial matches between Ontario and Quebec.

All sorts of factors, then, might have been responsible for the reduction of the 1897 Bogey score at Dixie to 86 in 1898.

Note that the Royal Montreal Golf Club also refrained from printing a Bogey score on the scorecard for its new golf course laid out at the end of the century.

Even after the formal opening in 1900 of the full eighteen-hole course at Dixie designed by Willie Dunn, jr., provision was made on the new scorecard for writing in a Bogey score for each of the eighteen holes. One can see on the photograph of the early 1900s scorecard shown below that a column has been left in the centre for writing in the “Bogie” score of the day beside each hole.

Figure 56 Scorecard for the first 18-hole golf course of the Royal Montreal Golf Club, laid out by Willie Dunn, jr., in April of 1899, full course opened for play in 1900.

One notes also that there was still no need to indicate on the scorecard a par score.

Royal Montreal retained the names of eight of the holes on the nine-hole Dixie course laid out in 1896, which reinforces the idea suggested by the Montreal Gazette that Dunn had added nine holes to the existing nine-hole course:

Likely as many as five hundred cart loads of sand will be spread over the present course …. The other nine-hole course, now being added to the links, was under survey last week for laying out …. When the full course is in working shape, it will be one of the longest courses in America. Mr. W. Dunn, of New York, said last week that there was nothing to hinder it becoming also one of the best. (Gazette [Montreal], 4 May 1899, p. 2).

Although the names of eight of the holes on the nine-hole Tom Smith course were used for names of holes on the eighteen-hole Willie Dunn course, the distances of many were changed dramatically (the length of “Orchard” was halved; “Lower Brook” had almost 200 yards added to it). Remaining unchanged on the Dunn course, however, was “Hawthorn” (seen below).

Figure 57 "Hawthorn," Dixie course, Royal Montreal Golf club. Golf [New York], vol 9 no 5 [November 1901], p. 348.In 1897, the hole was 110 yards long; in 1900, it was 105 yards long. The clubhouse appears in the background. One player has removed the wicker basket marking the hole while the other woman putts.

The Bogey score for “Hawthorn” would have been three.

Quebec's Ubiquitous Bogey

Given the regular matches between the Quebec Golf Club and the Royal Montreal Golf Club, one is not surprised to find that Colonel Bogey had established himself at Quebec by the spring of 1896. He was probably in place at Quebec even before this.

In the spring of 1896, the Quebec Golf Club seems to have been ambitious to publicize the seriousness and respectability of its golf culture. The secretary wrote regular contributions to the Quebec Morning Chronicle, promoting the game in general, the golf course, and certain members’ scoring accomplishments against Colonel Bogey.

The club had undertaken to measure its golf course precisely and to publish the numbers.

Figure 58 Left: Players tee off on the 1st tee of the Quebec Golf Club's course on Cove Field circa 1900. The wall of Quebec City's Citadel is visible on the right side of the photograph. Right: In the bottom left foreground of the photograph is the 7th tee at the base of Cove Field’s Martello Tower closest to the St. Lawrence River. A chalk line marks the forward edge of the tee and a marker like the one in the photograph to the left marks the right edge of the tee. The Citadel’s walls appear on the horizon at the top of the photo.

On the one hand, the club intended explicitly to suggest that its length was comparable to that of the Old Course at St Andrews. On the other hand, implicitly anticipating A.H. Doleman’s argument that publishing the par scores of golf courses would allow golfers to gauge each course’s level of difficulty, it intended to provide a context for its Bogey score of 87:

One can form some slight idea of the skill necessary to accomplish a full round of our (unrivalled in America) links in, say, 100 strokes, by glancing at the subjoined table of distances between each teeing ground and hole, as established recently by Messrs. Brodie and d’Eschambault, the Club’s efficient Green Committee.

The full course is 4,700 yards long, as the crow flies, and when one considers the devious routes which the gutta percha globe takes, with or against the player’s desire, it will be apparent that a distance of at least 3 ½ miles must be covered to make a complete round, the actual distance between tees and holes totalling 2 2/3 miles.

At the same time, probably encouraged by the golf club to do so, several Quebec City newspapers published a long list titled: “TECHNICAL TERMS USED IN THE GAME OF GOLF.” Included was: “Bogey – Usually given the title of Colonel. A phantom who is credited with a certain score for each hole, against which score each player is competing” (Quebec Morning Chronicle, 6 June 1896, p. 4)

A few weeks later, we find an article in the Quebec Morning Chronicle both announcing and celebrating the fact that a club member has finally beaten the Cove Field Bogey score – an announcement that implies that club members have been suffering defeat at the hands of Colonel Bogey for quite a while:

To Major Sheppard is due the honor of being the first member of the Club to claim a victory over the ghostly Colonel, and with it breaking the record of the links for the season to date….

Appended is Major Sheppard’s score [87] compared with Colonel Bogey’s [87], which shows the former to be one up in holes, and even as regards strokes ….

Had the Major played the 5th hole as he generally does his opponent would have been defeated in strokes as well as holes. (29 June 1896, p. 1)

Colonel Bogey was nearly defeated again just a few days later:

Major Sheppard and Col. Bogey narrowly escaped defeat by Mr. R.C. Patton, two or three days after the former achieved his victory over the Colonel.

Curiously enough, it was the Cliff hole that spoilt both scores … as far as defeating the Colonel by strokes is concerned….

Mr. Patton [finished] one stroke more, but holes all even. (Quebec Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1896, p. 4)

It seems that when these scores were made, neither Sheppard nor Patton had been engaged in an official Bogey competition. At Quebec, as at Royal Montreal, the practice had developed of members playing against Colonel Bogey even when not playing in a competition – and even, in fact, when playing a round on one’s own.

This practice had also become popular in England. It was welcomed by many as an antidote to the loss of interest in a round that might occur when early on one suffered a high score: playing for a good eighteen-hole score, one despaired that because of a bad score on one or two holes the chance of a good overall score was gone, whereas in a match against Colonel Bogey, one knew that since but a single hole had been lost to a bad score on that hole, much remained to play for.

Such had been the case in the rounds at Quebec played by Sheppard and Patton, who had each scored 7 on “The Cliff” – a hole that was just 220 yards long. They had seriously impaired their medal score for the day, but they had only lost one hole to Colonel Bogey, so there was still everything to play for.

At the end of 1896, the journal Outlook recommended that American golfers adopt “Bogey play” for the same reason – as an antidote to the round lost “once the score is ruined by that one unlucky hole”:

Bogey play, which is only a relentless form of match play, against an imperturbable opponent, who never talks back, is far more general in Great Britain than here.

At this style of game, the player looks forward to each hole as almost another game. He leaves behind him at each tee his discouragements and mistakes and sets out anew to retrieve his fortunes.

It were well for us if, when our next season opens, we plan for more match play and less medal play. (cited in Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 2 January 1897, p. 14)

A Psychological Use of Bogey

As we have seen, after the introduction of Bogey competition at the Ottawa Golf Club in 1893, the practice at Montreal and Quebec was apparently not so much to organize Bogey competitions themselves as to use the Bogey scores determined for their courses as an invitation for golfers playing practice rounds to improve their games until their medal scores matched Colonel Bogey’s score.

At Montreal, Bogey scores were revised bearing in mind precisely the strategy of using the Bogey score to incite better play, and at Quebec, individual medal score achievements were clearly measured against Colonel Bogey’s score.

Considering these facts, it is interesting to note that Young Tom Morris had in 1870 reacted to the invention of a par score for the Prestwick golf course in the same way. When, at the conclusion of the conversation between William Doleman and Davie Strath (about how many strokes it would take to play the Prestwick links), the “ideal, or perfect, round was found to be 49” (for the twelve holes), “then says Davie, “That is the number we should do it in, if we play perfect golf, but I know we won’t do it.’ While Davie was still talking, in walked Tom Morris, Jr., and hearing what Strath was saying, he shook his head, smiled, and then said, ‘We’ll hae to try ony how’” (Golf [New York], vol 14 no 2 [February 1904], p. 100).

He recognized the concept of par as a standard by which to measure achievement in a round of golf, and he responded to the par score for Prestwick as an incitement to try to match it or better it.

The practice of playing a golf hole with its Bogey score in mind, however, seems also to have had an unintended but quite noticeable consequence: to the chagrin of some, it installed Colonel Bogey as a psychological presence in the mind of golfers – a place where traditionalists were sure that he did not belong.

That is, Bogey scores came to be used by golfers in the 1890s as a way of maintaining equanimity during difficult competitive matches. In Golf Illustrated in 1899, W.L. Watson observed this new aspect of golf culture – and he did not approve of it:

How often in these days does one hear a player say when he has lost a hole, “I don’t mind; he [the opponent] did it in one less than bogey.”

We have even heard this counsel given to a player in a club match, “Never mind what your opponent does, you just work steadily for bogey all the way round.”

A man who did that would certainly not be playing golf; but it illustrates the extent to which the local bogey score is assumed as a standard of play. (reprinted in Golf [New York], vol 5 no 6 [December 1899], p. 399).

The concept of a Bogey score clearly had practical implications for golf culture beyond the question of whether or not a golf club added official Bogey competitions to its fixtures list (as the Ottawa Golf Club had done in 1893 an 1894): architects laid out courses to provide a proper challenge for Colonel Bogey, golfers practised their games in an effort to match Colonel Bogey, and golfers kept their wits about them in competition against others by trying to match the imaginary Colonel Bogey no matter what their living and breathing opponent might do

Toronto's Bogey Man

Tom Smith’s younger brother Arthur, who had also become a golf professional via caddying at Great Yarmouth, followed Tom to Canada – perhaps travelling with him in 1894.

Ten years later, when Arthur won the Western Open (which was in those days considered a “Major”), the Chicago Tribune provided its readers with a brief biography of this unexpected champion: “He went originally to Montreal, and from there came to Pennsylvania. Later, he was professional at Washington [D.C.], and this year is located at Columbus [Ohio]” (1 July 1905, p. 10).

Arthur Smith no doubt welcomed this write-up in one of the most important American newspapers, but he would have been surprised that his brief sojourn in Montreal was acknowledged whereas the fact that he had served for five years as the golf professional of the Toronto Golf Club from 1895 to 1899 was omitted entirely.

Figure 59 Arthur Smith (1875-1944), Pittsburgh Daily Post, 1 September 1901, p. 6.

Montreal seems to have been Arthur’s base of operation for perhaps a year. Confirmation of the Chicago Tribune’s association of Smith with Montreal comes from the Yarmouth Independent in 1895: “A. Smith, of Montreal, has been appointed professional player to the [Toronto] club” (17 August 1895, p. 2, emphasis added).

Given that the Montreal club had refused to hire an assistant for its original golf professional, Willie Davis, several years before Tom Smith was hired, I doubt that Royal Montreal had hired Arthur to serve as an assistant to his brother. It may be that Arthur made a living in Montreal for a year as a freelance clubmaker and instructor.

Whatever his situation in relation to Royal Montreal, however, he was certainly allowed (and perhaps even encouraged) to play golf on Fletcher’s Field, for, as the Yarmouth Independent observed of its local boy made good in Canada: “He is a fine player, and holds the record for Montreal” (17 August 1895, p. 2). Apparently, Tom had first set the course record with a score of 74; Arthur shortly thereafter reduced the record to 72 (Montreal Herald, 17 June 1898, p. 6).

In Canada and Britain in those days, club members paid their golf professional a fee specified in his contract to accompany them during a round of golf (there was a fee agreed for nine holes and a fee agreed for eighteen holes). During such a round, those playing with the professional could observe his play and he could offer instruction. So, in addition to whatever work Arthur was able to get making and repairing golf clubs and golf balls, he is likely also to have had opportunities to play with Royal Montreal members for fees similar to those his brother would have earned.

Given Arthur’s prowess at the game, one is not surprised to learn that after just a few months at the Toronto Golf Club, he “beat all previous records at Toronto” on its new eighteen-hole course; the report sent to Great Yarmouth (probably sent by Arthur himself) noted that “His best drive was 238 yards” (Yarmouth Independent, 17 August 1895, p. 2).

Arthur Smith was also a golf course designer. In fact, I believe that he was hired by the Toronto Golf Club at the beginning of 1895 to lay out a new golf course on land it had recently acquired: this layout would become the first eighteen-hole golf course in Canada.

To come up with the funds necessary to hire Arthur Smith for the spring of 1895, the Toronto Golf Club had inaugurated a creative subscription plan: “Application for membership will have to be accompanied with the annual subscription” (Toronto Evening Star, 28 March 1895, p. 2, emphasis added). For the first time in the club’s history, one had to pay the membership fee up front. Why? According to the newspaper: “It is not intended that anyone shall reap the benefits of the professional services who has not paid for the same” (Toronto Evening Star, 28 March 1895, p. 2). But the more important reason was to get the cash on hand to pay Smith’s salary in the early months of the year.

Since the newspaper report about “this rule” designed to enable the hiring of a golf professional comes at the end of March in 1895, and since it is also said at that time that this rule “has been adopted with great success by the Toronto Golf Club,” one can see that this whole matter was thought through months before it was mentioned in the newspaper (Toronto Evening Star, 28 March 1895, p. 2). Reference to the “great success” of the new rule means that lots of money has already come in. To have born such fruit by March, the new rule must have been passed by the Committee of Management well before March. Of course, the brainstorming that produced the new rule occurred well before the new rule was ready to be submitted to the Committee of Management, and the brainstorming about this money-raising new rule occurred subsequent to the emergence of a desire on the part of certain club members to hire a golf professional.

I suspect that Arthur Smith was a glint in the eye of certain members of the Toronto Golf Club by the fall of 1894.

Figure 60 A.W. Smith, Official Golf Guide for 1899, p. 312.

Club secretary-treasurer A.W. Smith would have been the person in charge of this plan, and he would have been the club official communicating news of the plan to Toronto’s newspapers.

If the idea of hiring a golf professional for the 1895 season was indeed in the Toronto Golf Club’s mind before the end of the 1894 golf season, it is interesting to note that influential club members, led by its best golfer A.W. Smith and including five members of the club’s “Committee of Management,” played for the Ontario team against Quebec in the interprovincial competition at Royal Montreal in October of 1894.

Here, they would have been able to observe how Fletcher’s Field was faring under the stewardship of the one Smith trained at Great Yarmouth, and they would have been able to discuss with members of Royal Montreal their impressions of the other Smith – the one who had probably been playing golf with Royal Montreal members and making golf clubs and golf balls for them, and who had perhaps also been assisting his brother in greenkeeping.

Toronto committee members might have had occasion to interview the young man himself. They may even have returned to Toronto with creative plans for financing his hiring dancing in their heads.

By the end of 1894, the Toronto Golf Club was well along in its planning for laying out its first eighteen-hole golf course. At its annual meeting in March of 1894, “The opinion was expressed that it would be advisable to purchase permanent links for the club, and a special committee was appointed to take up the matter” (Toronto Empire, cited in Montreal Daily Herald, 26 March 1894, p. 2). Five weeks later, we learn that “The Toronto Golf Club have about completed the purchase of 30 acres of the Fernhill estate which the club has leased for a number of years” (Canadian Contract Record, vol 5 no 13 [3 May 1894]). In July, it was revealed that club secretary A.W. Smith was one of thirteen members who had incorporated as the Fernhill Land Company, Limited, and the Toronto Golf Association, Limited (the incorporators of the two companies were identical and all were all members of the 1894 Committee of Management of the Toronto Golf Club). At this time, the Fernhill property (on which the club’s nine-hole course had been laid out in 1893 by “old golfers … A.W. Smith, A.P. Scott, and F.W. Phillips”) was purchased (Montreal Star, 30 March 1893, p. 5). And then the club “acquired the right to play on certain fields to the east of the present links” along both sides of Gerrard Street (in those days, it was still a sandy road) when “the captain W.G.P. Cassels deeded this property to it” (The Globe [Toronto], 18 April 1895, p. 10).

The laying out of the golf course seems to have occurred in the early spring of 1895, precisely when Arthur Smith arrived. We can see that the course was not built in the fall of 1894, for the club’s nine-hole course was still in play on 25 December 1894, when many members of the Toronto Golf Club played a tournament on their frozen links:

Golf on the Christmas Green

On Christmas Day, quite a number of the Toronto Golf Club enjoyed themselves over the green at Norway Heights. During the morning a cold wind prevailed, but what at one time looked like a threatening snowstorm soon died away. The green was hard and keen, and as a few of the putting greens are slightly on the incline, no little amusement was caused when a putt very cautiously played would wriggle away a dozen feet beyond the hole. After luncheon … gentlemen engaged in a sweepstake competition, the conditions being one round of the course, or nine holes. (The Globe [Toronto], 26 December 1894, p. 6)

Although we read in the Globe’s review of the new eighteen-hole course in April of 1895 that “the Green Committee have laid out a number of new holes and changed some of the old ones, bringing the course up to the full eighteen holes,” such a way of writing about the design of a golf course in the 1890s is consistent with the green committee’s merely having supervised a golf professional’s design work (rather than having gone out as a committee and staked the course) (The Globe [Toronto], 18 April 1895, p. 5).

On the one hand, a club’s green committee was understood to have charge of the links. On the other hand, in the 1890s (and well into the early twentieth century), golf professionals tended to be regarded as tradesmen whose services did not necessarily need to be acknowledged in a newspaper anymore than those of a house builder: the gentlemen who hired a golf professional to build their golf course and the gentlemen who hired builders to raise their mansions often got the credit in the newspapers for what was built in their name.

Having more experience of championship golf than any other golfer in North America, and interested as the main instructor of Toronto’s newest members to have a golf course that would develop proper golf skills (both physically and mentally), A.W. Smith would have been very interested to discuss with Arthur Smith the Toronto Golf Club’s requirements and expectations with regard it its new course.

On the one hand, Smith had by this point seen links laid out from scratch or remodelled at Brantford, Toronto, Quebec, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ottawa, and Montreal. He knew what was possible for golf-course designs in Ontario and Quebec in terms of constraints posed by climate, soil, grasses, and natural hazards. He would have wanted to assure himself on behalf of the club that Arthur Smith was alert both to the club’s general requirements and to the particular challenges of designing a good inland golf course on the property that the club owned.

And in the wake of his encounter at Ottawa in October of 1893 with the concept of Bogey scores, and with the practical consequence of Bogey scores both for a new form of competition and for educating golfers as to the proper standard of play on any particular golf course, Smith will have been interested to discuss with Arthur Smith how he thought holes should be laid out in relation to Bogey scores.

In the mid-1890s, it took only a few weeks to lay out a golf course and bring it into play. By the second week of April in 1895, the club was holding competitions on the new course. On Good Friday, A.W. Smith made “a record score of 85 strokes over the newly-laid-out course of 18 holes” (The Globe [Toronto], 23 April 1895, p. 8). Shortly afterwards, he reduced the record to 84, and in May he shot 81. By mid-summer, however, Arthur Smith had reduced the record to 77.

The Bogey score of the 1895 course was probably somewhere between 77 and 81, although after certain holes were re-designed and certain others were eliminated, leading to the lengthening of the course by several hundred yards, the Bogey score in 1898 was 82.

And it seems likely that the new golf course was indeed accorded a Bogey score as soon as it was opened for play in April of 1895. After all, the new eighteen-hole course laid out in Rosedale for the Deer Park Golf Club just three months later was accorded a Bogey score (82). So, by the spring of 1895, knowledge of Bogey scores had clearly arrived in Toronto and implicitly become a standard by which to convey information about the challenge represented by a golf course.

It is likely that the bearer of Bogey scoring standards to Toronto in 1895 was the city’s first golf professional: Arthur Smith.

Who Was Rosedale's Bogey Man?

The Deer Park Golf Club of Toronto (which was founded in 1893 and played at Moore Park on St Clair Avenue, where the club had secured a lease on its golf grounds and made “a special effort to get them in good shape for the [1894] season), suddenly decided during the 1895 golf season to re-locate to a new property in Rosedale (The Globe [Toronto], 11 April 1894, p. 6).

Poor John Moore, who owned the land on which the links of the Deer Park Golf Club had been laid out, ended up with a golf course but no golfers:

Moore Park Golf Links

In the prettiest suburb of the city, Mr. John T. Moore, an enthusiast in golf, has laid out a splendid course, which presents many attractions to the player. It consists of nine holes and has just enough hazards to make the game interesting without rendering it disheartening and exhausting to the amateur. Mr. Moore has generously thrown open these links for public use, so that the royal game may be encouraged. (The Globe [Toronto], 21 October 1895, p. 6)

And so was born Toronto’s first public golf course.

Concerning the Deer Park Golf Club’s new “full 18-hole links” in Rosedale, the New York editor of Golf (Josiah Newman) tells readers that it “was laid out in June, 1894” (Golf [New York], vol 2 no 4 [April 1898], pp. 13-14). But he must have meant 1895, for it was only in March of 1895 that plans had been initiated for the Deer Park Golf Club to amalgamate with a sports club whose grounds were in Rosedale (see The Globe [Toronto], 30 March 1895, p. 17). It was reported in June of 1895 that “A golf club has been formed in connection with the Toronto Lacrosse Club, and links will be laid out in the grounds” (Toronto Evening Star, 22 June 1895, p. 8). September brought news of success: “The Deer Park Golf Club has amalgamated with the Toronto Lacrosse & Athletic Association, and links have been laid out at Rosedale” (Toronto Evening Star, 12 September 1895, p. 3).

From the point of view of the golf club, access to the Lacrosse Club’s ground was perhaps the most important immediate advantage of this amalgamation, but the greatest benefit in the long run was that it brought into the golf club the cricket-mad secretary-treasurer of the Toronto Lacrosse Club who handled the amalgamation and who would soon be on his way to becoming Canada’s greatest amateur golfer: George S. Lyon.

And so, the Deer Park Golf Club’s new course was laid out in Rosedale in June of 1895 (not 1894), and by mid-September of 1895, it was reported that “Several well-known members of the club who have recently played over the course have expressed themselves as well pleased with it” (Toronto Evening Star, 12 September 1895, p. 3). The golf course was deemed not yet ready for club competitions, which would not begin until the 28th of September; in fact, we learn that in mid-September the links still “are receiving every attention of the groundman, who hopes to have them second to none in the country in a short time” (Toronto Evening Star, 12 September 1895, p. 3). Even so, no more than 14 holes seem to have been available for play even when the club started to use the course at the end of September, for we learn in the spring of 1896 that “The links at present consist of 14 holes, but four more will be added, which will make everything complete” (Toronto Evening Star, 2 April 1896, p. 3).

From the point of view of this essay, what is interesting about the golf course as of September of 1895 is that it had been assigned a Bogey score even before all eighteen holes were completed: that is, the designer seems to have planned it with a Bogey score in mind from the beginning (rather than leaving this matter for a green committee to determine for a Bogey competition to be played at some future point after the opening of the course).

Note the following account of the first competition on the course on 28 September 1895, which happened to be a competition by medal play:

DEER PARK CLUB’S HANDICAP

The first handicap of the season was played on Saturday over the new links at Rosedale, 18 holes. The grounds were found to be in first-rate order, and about twenty members took part in the competition.

Mr. J.E. Baillie won the medal, with a fine score of 97 strokes, less 15, net 82, which equals Colonel Bogey’s score over the course. (The Globe [Toronto], 1 October 1895, p. 6)

Since four holes would not be completed until the next spring, the club presumably had competitors play four holes twice to make up the eighteen-hole score or allowed the four holes yet to be completed to be played nonetheless, perhaps with temporary greens. Interestingly, although the competition was by medal play, the club’s secretary felt it was important to report to the newspapers the Bogey score for its new golf course.

This emphasis on the Bogey score suggests that the Deer Park Golf Club wanted to establish a Bogey culture like the ones we have observed in place at the Quebec Golf Club and Royal Montreal around the same time: by evaluating the winner’s net score in terms of the Bogey standard, that is, the club secretary was implicitly using the Bogey score as a way of informing both the public and club members about the score that proper golf should produce on the new golf course.

And this announcement of a Bogey score for the golf course before significant play had even begun on it and before the last four holes had been completed indicates that calculation of a Bogey score had not awaited news of members’ actual experience on the course. The kind of negotiating and voting in committee to establish a Bogey score (of which W.L. Watson complains above) seems not to have been necessary. The Bogey score had presumably been determined before any golf had been played on the course by a simple mathematical analysis: a knowledge of the length of each hole and a calculation of how many strokes it would take Colonel Bogey to cover the distance in question yielded the Bogey score.

I suspect that just as Bogey was apparently in the mind of architect Tom Smith and the supervising committee at Royal Montreal when the Dixie course was laid out in 1896 (in terms of which holes were to be taken in five, which were to be taken in four, and which were to be taken in three), so it was in the mind of the architect who laid out the Rosedale course in June of 1895. And it seems to me quite likely that the person who laid out this course with awareness of the Bogey scores appropriate for holes of certain lengths was not “the captain” (as reported by Josiah Newman), but rather the latest of the Great Yarmouth Bogey brothers to get an appointment at a Canadian golf club: Arthur Smith (Golf [New York], vol 2 no 4 [April 1898], pp. 13-14).

But it was probably the captain of the Deer Park Golf Club who arranged for Arthur Smith to lay out the Rosedale course, and the two of them probably walked the grounds together as this work was done, leading the captain retrospectively to be credited with the layout in the item about Rosedale in the 1898 issue of Golf (New York) cited above.

There were close connections between the Deer Park Golf Club and the Toronto Golf Club at this time. For instance, Francis Gordon Osler, the son of Edmund Boyd Osler (Toronto Golf Club president from 1892 to 1893, and donor of the Osler Trophy to the club in 1894), was a member of the Deer Park green committee (The Globe [Toronto], 26 October 1895, p. 13). More interestingly, in May of 1895, the captain of the Deer Park Golf Club, James Ferrier Kirk, was listed in the Globe as one of “the members of the Toronto Golf Club [who] competed in a handicap sweepstakes” on “the Queen’s Birthday” (28 May 1895, p. 6).

Figure 61 James Ferrier Kirk on the golf course of the Rosedale Golf Club. The Globe [Toronto], 28 November 1896, p. 1.

I suspect that Kirk was not actually a member of the Toronto Golf Club, but rather a guest that day. Although he was listed by the Toronto Golf Club as one of the players in the “Queen’s Birthday” competition, he did not submit a scorecard. And he is never mentioned in the newspapers before or after this competition as a member of the Toronto Golf Club.

In the fall of 1894, not yet having been named Deer Park Captain, Kirk had established himself as one of the best golfers at the club when he won the October Handicap Medal as a scratch player (The Globe [Toronto], 30 October 1894, p. 8).

At the Toronto Golf Club in May of 1895, however, he was accorded a handicap of nine.

As Deer Park’s best player, Kirk was well known to members of the Toronto Golf Club from the previous fall when the first two matches ever played between the clubs were held. He had played on Toronto’s nine-hole course at the end of 1894 when the Rosedale team was defeated by the Toronto team in a home-and-away pair of matches begun on the Deer Park Golf Club’s nine-hole course at Moore Park at the beginning of November and concluded on the Norway Heights course of the Toronto club at the beginning of December.

On Victoria Day in May of 1895, Kirk was playing the Toronto club’s new eighteen-hole layout for the first time. My guess is that he had been invited to play the new Arthur-Smith-designed golf course in connection with the idea that Smith would also lay out the Rosedale course with Kirk a week or two later in June.

Kirk knew nothing of Bogey.

He had been born in St Andrews in 1848, immigrating to Canada in the late 1860s to take a position in the Bank of British North America. From the late 1870s, however, he was employed by the London and Canadian Loan and Agency Company, becoming its manager in the late 1880s. He was widely known as a “Canadian sportsman” (The Globe [Toronto], 5 September 1898, p. 2). In addition to his support of the Deer Park Golf Club and the Rosedale Golf Club, he supported the flourishing North American culture of dog shows as a widely respected judge in great demand at events throughout Canada and the United States. When he died unexpectedly in 1898 (at fifty years of age), at his funeral, “Many friends of the deceased among dog fanciers and golf enthusiasts were in the congregation” (The Globe [Toronto], 6 September 1898, p. 12).

Kirk was named to the founding executive committee of the Royal Canadian Golf Association in 1895. And he not only represented Rosedale in its matches with the Toronto Golf Club, but he was also named to the Ontario team to compete against Quebec in the 1895 Interprovincial Competition (although he did not play) (The Globe [Toronto], 26 September 1895, p. 8). Two years later, along with fellow Rosedale members George S. Lyon and Vere Brown (winners of the Canadian amateur Championship before the end of the nineteenth century), he was also named to the 1897 Ontario Interprovincial Team.

Returning to the game in his mid-forties for the first time since leaving St Andrews when he was hardly out of his teens, Kirk’s golf game was improving each year, so much so that, shortly after Toronto Golf Club member W.A.H. Kerr won the Canadian Amateur Championship of 1897, Rosedale designated Kirk to take on Kerr in the club match between Rosedale and Toronto: “The play between Mr. J.F. Kirk, the Rosedale Captain, and Mr. W.A.H. Kerr, the Canadian champion, was exceedingly interesting, Mr. Kirk finishing in the lead” by two holes (The Globe [Toronto], 26 October 1897, p. 8).

Having finished second at the Third International Golf Championship at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1897, Kirk spent most of the first week of September of 1898 in the town preparing to compete in that year’s tournament. But the surprisingly extreme heat of late summer made him feel unwell:

Early last week Mr. Kirk went to Niagara-on-the-Lake to participate in the golf tournament. For a time, Mr. Kirk had been a sufferer to some extent from a cardiac affection, and the excessive heat compelled his return to the city on Friday night. He visited Dr. Tyrrell and, after taking some restoratives, felt considerably better. Later on, he became very weak, and Dr. Tyrrel advised Mrs. Kirk to send for Rev, Father Walsh, who administered the last rites of the Catholic Church…. On Saturday morning, Mr. Kirk expired. (The Globe [Toronto], 5 September 1898, p. 2)

In addition to his golf legacy, Kirk left a widow and ten children.

And Who Was The Niagara Bogey Man?

The golf tournament in which Kirk was preparing to compete in 1898 had first been proposed by the Queen’s Royal Hotel of Niagara-on-the-Lake in May of 1893. At the time, since there were so few American golf clubs, the hotel had proposed a grand tournament for Canadian golf clubs only. But by 1895, there were so many more well-established American clubs that an international committee of expert golfers was formed to organize the first International Golf Championship for September.

Figure 62 Madeline Mary Geale (1865 -1923), circa 1895.

The women’s championship, won by Mary Madeline Geale of Niagara-on-the-Lake, would be conducted over the nine holes of the links on the Mississauga Common, but the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club wanted an eighteen-hole course for the men’s championship and so it hurriedly prepared a second nine-hole course on the Fort George Common on the other side of town so that the two nine-hole courses could be used to make an eighteen-hole circuit.

The newness of the one course, where the greens were not all that they should have been when the tournament opened, and the fact that cattle grazed on the other course up to the day before the competition (even during the women’s practice rounds), led to widespread complaints that the quality of the golf had been compromised by such poor conditions. The Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club immediately resolved that there should be no such complaints at the 1896 tournament. As the editor of the Boston journal The Golfer observed in November of 1895:

The links at present are certainly not in good condition, but the soil to the south of the town on the Niagara River is excellent, and with a reasonable amount of money expended, there can be made a fine golfing course. The ground is owned by the Dominion government and steps are being taken to secure control of the [Fort George] common, so that the course can be properly laid out and improved without fear of being ruined by the grazing cattle. (vol 2 no 1 [November 1985], p. 7)

And under the supervision of club secretary-treasurer Madeline Mary Geale, the laying-out of the new course was undertaken in mid-June of 1896:

The Niagara tournament … promises to be better in every way than that of last September. The new links [of nine holes on the Fort George common last year] had only just been laid out at that time, and although all the players equally shared the disadvantages, it was perhaps a little difficult for everyone. This year, at the annual meeting of the 13th inst., several hundred dollars were voted towards having the course put in the best possible order – a resolution which the executive committee lost no time in setting in motion. The Fort Mississauga links have been given up, and a very beautiful eighteen-hole course completed on the Fort George common. (The Buffalo Commercial, 20 June 1896, p. 13)

The executive committee meeting took place on Saturday, June 13th, and the Buffalo Commercial reported on Friday, June 19th , that “A fine new, 18-hole course has been laid out on the Fort George common, and the greens are being put into the best of condition” (19 June 1896, p. 9).

We can see, then, that the course was laid out between Monday, June 15th, and Thursday, June 18th . The work seems to have been accomplished swiftly and surely – dare one say, professionally?

Recall that The Golfer expressed an interest that the new course “be properly laid out” (The Golfer, vol 2 no 1 [November 1895], p. 7). Was there a suggestion that the nine-hole course laid out on the Fort George common in the summer of 1895 had not been properly laid out? Is this why it was not in proper condition for the championship? Was The Golfer suggesting that a golf professional be commissioned to lay out the new eighteen-hole course?

There were few golf professionals in Canada, and only one of them had laid out eighteen-hole golf courses.

Figure 63 Left, Charles Hunter, c. 1895. Right: Captain R.G. Dickson, c. 1890.

Golf indicates in 1898 that the new Niagara-on-the-Lake course had been laid out by the club president at the time, Charles Hunter, and the club captain at the time, Captain Robert Geale Dickson (the first cousin of the secretary-treasurer, Madeline Geale). But we recall that Golf (New York) also indicated in the same issue that the Rosedale course was laid out by Captain Kirk. As at Rosedale, so at Niagara-on-the-Lake, I suspect that the designer was Arthur Smith.

We know that the new course had been accorded a Bogey score in 1896 because the achievement of the winner of the tournament’s handicap contest was measured against it: “The winner of the handicap turned up in Mr. Stewart Gordon of Cobourg, a gentleman who has been playing on the old country links during the summer and who was let in easily at a handicap of eight. He went around in ninety-five, and with eight less, had a bogey score to his credit” (Buffalo Courier, 3 September 1896, p. 7). The Bogey score, then, was 87.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that in August of 1895 the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club published a detailed description of the two nine-hole courses to be used for the inaugural International Golf Championship, and there seems to have been no awareness then of the proper Bogey score for the golf holes. In the detailed, hole-buy-hole analysis of the Fort Mississauga course, the emphasis is on the hazards faced here and there rather than on the number of strokes it should take to complete a hole – which is a question raised with regard to just one hole: “No 5, 250 yards. If a road hazard is cleared in the drive, this should easily be made in four” (cited in Buffalo Courier, 18 august 1895, p. 9).

Just two other holes are discussed in terms of the score to be made:

No. 2 hole, 165 yards, may be driven, but as this hole is in Fort Mississauga, surrounded by a deep dry moat and high grassy embankments, not to mention some old rifle pits in the line of play, the player may think himself lucky who makes it in four….

No. 6, 540 yards, is the most difficult, as well as the longest hole in the course, furnishing a variety of hazards, and is not likely to be done in under seven. (cited in Buffalo Courier, 18 august 1895, p. 9)

The club mentions what these two holes might be done in, but there is no indication – to quote Davie Strath – of what they “should” be done in.

The description of another hole more vaguely implies what it might be done in: “No. 9 is a long hole and not of a highly sporting character. A good shot from the tee will carry a sand bunker, while a good brassy stroke will give you a good lie on grass over a rutty road. A long cleek or brassy stroke will land on green” (cited in Buffalo Courier, 18 august 1895, p. 9).

Again, however, it is not clear whether the three long shots required to reach the green are to be expected of golfers as part of proper play or instead represent mere heroic possibilities. As. A.H. Doleman pointed out in the 1880s regarding the first hole at Hoylake, the fact that its putting green can be reached in two strokes does not make the par of the hole four, and so the fact that the ninth green of the Fort Mississauga course can be reached in the three long shots mentioned does not indicate the number of strokes it should take to reach the green.

Of only one hole do we find a description that implies the kind of thinking that founds conceptions of Bogey and par: “No 4, 400 yards. A long drive over rough ground lands on a grassy slope, with a … bunker [to be carried[ in the shape of rifle butts about 150 yards away and in direct line for the hole. A successful brassy shot will land on level turf, with good approach” remaining from there (cited in Buffalo Courier, 18 august 1895, p. 9). If the club assumed that two putts per green was to be expected, this description implies the proper score for the hole: five.

The design of the eighteen-hole course on the Fort George common in June of 1896, however, had the hallmarks of the Smith brothers’ Bogey design principles:

The length of the holes has been so arranged that a fair drive, followed by a good brassy, cleek, or iron play, is required to reach the green in the proper number of strokes. Mistakes in driving are especially punished, but the “tee” stroke being well played, the ball is either on the putting greens or lying in good ground for the next stroke. (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 26 August 1896, p. 15)

This paragraph was supplied by a Toronto Mail and Empire reporter who had never played golf before and confessed to knowing nothing at all about the game until being taken out on the course by Charles Hunter, whose information he was clearly channelling in his article.

Occurring in less than a year, the conceptual differences between the club’s descriptions of its golf courses is remarkable, and the extraordinary increase in the sophistication of its understanding of “the proper number of strokes” it should take to complete a golf hole is a sure sign that Charles Hunter and his fellow executive committee members at Niagara-on-the-Lake now know what a Bogey score is.

Hunter, that is, the prime mover in golf culture in Niagara-on-the-Lake since he established a summer home in the town in the mid-1870s, conveyed clearly to the reporter the concept of Bogey scores: according to Bogey theory, each hole should be completed in “the proper number of strokes,” and so, the architectural practice on the Fort George common was to design each hole with a Bogey score in mind. Unlike British and Canadian golf courses designed before either the concept of Bogey or the concept of par became known, the Niagara-on-the-Lake course would have no holes about which committees would debate the proper bogey score: the Bogey score was established by the architect.

Through Hunter, the Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake golf clubs had long been intertwined. Madeline Geale’s older cousin John Geale Dickson had laid out the first golf holes in Niagara-on-the-Lake on the Fort George common in the mid-1870s, and his twin brother Captain Robert Geale Dickson had been named the club captain (that is, president) when the first golf club was officially organized in 1882, but Hunter was the one who kept the club going. When, between 1885 and 1886, “In consequence of several of the members leaving Niagara, it was found impossible to keep up the club,” Hunter stepped forward to retrieve the situation. At the beginning of 1889, as incoming president of the Toronto Golf Club, Hunter determined to bring its resources to bear on the problem: “owing to the efforts of Mr. C. Hunter, … there is every prospect of Niagara becoming a golfing ground again. The Toronto Golf Club intend having the links put in good shape, and to play twice a week if possible” (Golfing Annual: 1888- 89, p. 157).

The Niagara-on-the-Lake golf course had always attracted players from Toronto during the summer, who found it easy of access because of the timely and efficient regular ferry service between city and town. And Hunter enjoyed hosting his fellow Toronto golfers in his stately summer residence, as well as beating them on the Fort Mississauga links. Hunter’s clear explanation of the Bogey principle of golf hole design to the Toronto Mail and Empire reporter suggests that he knew well the architectural theory behind Arthur Smith’s work at Toronto and Rosedale in laying out Canada’s first eighteen-hole golf courses. Hunter, furthermore, was the chairman of the Toronto Golf Club’s green committee in 1896, meaning that he would have had a very close working relationship that year with Arthur Smith, so I think it is likely that he “borrowed” Arthur Smith to lay out the eighteen-hole Fort George course in June of 1896 (The Golfer, vol 2 no 6 [April 1896], p. 169).

Along with his brother Tom, Arthur Smith was invited to participate in a professional competition at the 1896 International Golf Championship. The Canadian supporters of the tournament hoped that the prize money on offer would attract eight professional entrants, but so eager were people to see the Smith brothers in action that the tournament committee was persuaded to go ahead with the professional contest even when it seemed there would be just one American-based professional to oppose them:

The committee this afternoon decided to give the purse for the professional [championship], whether the requisite eight professional entries were made or not, as Foulis, the Chicago Open Champion of the United States, and Arthur Smith and [Tom] Smith of Montreal, the two best professionals in Canada, have entered and a meeting between these three is greatly desired by Canadian golfers. This afternoon, Arthur Smith went around the course in the remarkable score of 81 …. (Buffalo Courier, 30 August 1896, p. 16)

Arthur Smith’s demonstration of his excellent form one week before the professional contest was scheduled to take place may have made up the committee’s mind to proceed with the event. Although 1896 U.S. Open champion James Foulis did not show up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the prospect of watching Arthur Smith play against him must have whetted the appetite of Canadian golf enthusiasts.

Why was Arthur Smith in Niagara-on-the-Lake on the Saturday before the tournament was to begin on Wednesday of the following week? Furthermore, the professional contest was not to occur until the following Saturday. Smith had not come to Niagara-on-the-Lake to spend the week preparing for the tournament: he returned to Toronto after his remarkable round of golf in August. He did not show up again in Niagara-on-the-Lake until the day of the professional contest, and the rough ferry trip that brought him to town that day played a big role in the outcome of the event.

On the one hand, the point of Smith’s visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake may have been to generate pre-tournament publicity. His scores were reported in several Canadian and American newspapers. And he was quoted as declaring that the new golf course was the best in Canada: “The links were put in excellent shape for playing and Arthur Smith, the Toronto professional, who went around … in 81 and 88, pronounces them the finest in Canada” (Boston Evening Transcript, 5 September 1896, p. 4).

On the other hand, I suspect that he had come to Niagara-on-the-Lake out of an almost proprietary interest: he was there precisely to ensure that “the links were put in excellent shape for playing.” On the day of Smith’s visit, a Buffalo newspaper reported that “the new Fort George links … have been put in the best possible condition” and that “No expense has been spared to have the ground in excellent order” (The Buffalo Commercial, 29 August 1896, p. 12). If Smith had indeed received the mandate in June to build the “properly laid out” golf course that the editor of The Golfer regarded as the sine qua non of the second International Golf Championship, follow-up visits to check on the progress of the new links would have been par for the course, so to speak (The Golfer, vol 2 no 1 [November 1895], p. 7). He may have been on site in July for the same purpose: “The new 18-hole course was laid out in June and is now in excellent condition and the greens are receiving special preparation for the tournament” (Buffalo Courier, 25 July 1896, p. 9).

To the relief and gratification of everyone associated with the new layout, golfers agreed with the verdict of the Democrat and Chronicle: “The links are in first-class condition and are far superior to those used last year” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 2 September 1896, p. 11).

In Smith’s declaration that the new eighteen-hole layout at Niagara-on-the-Lake was the best golf course in Canada, there was probably an element not just of self-congratulation, but also of self-promotion. He will have noticed that Willie Dunn, Jr., the golf professional regarded as the best course designer in North America in those days, and certainly the most prolific, was quoted in newspapers wherever he went as assuring golf clubs that they had given him excellent land upon which he would build them the best golf course on the continent.

All ambitious architects adopted this mantra.

The Country Club of Rochester was certainly paying attention to Smith’s work at this time. At the end of August, just before the International Golf Championship was to begin at Niagara-on-the-Lake, the club hired Arthur Smith precisely to layout their first eighteen-hole golf course.

Rochester's Triple Bogey Men

Arthur Smith had been the talk of several towns in advance of the International Golf Championship.

He had drawn the special attention of Rochester golfers, particularly the president of Rochester’s Thistle Golf Club, John Harry Stedman (1843-1922), who was shopping for a golf professional who would lay out a proper eighteen-hole course in Rochester.

Figure 64 John Harry Stedman (1843- 1922).

In competitions played against the Buffalo Country Club, Rochester golfers had discovered that they far preferred the Buffalo golf course to their own. The Rochester men seem to have complained that their golf course was too difficult – the holes were too long, the holes were all the same length, the scores for a round of golf were too high – whereas at the Buffalo course, not only were scores lower, but there was also an interesting and enjoyable mix of long and short holes.

Stedman had published an article in the local newspaper at the beginning of August comparing and contrasting the courses at Rochester, Buffalo, and Shinnecock Hills, his purpose apparently being to explain and justify (and reconcile his members to) the fact that the course record at Rochester was 111, as compared to 88 at Buffalo and 84 at Shinnecock Hills (Democrat and Chronicle, 1 August 1896, p. 14).

By the end of the month, however, he had not only accepted that the existing golf course was deficient, but he had actually hired someone to build Rochester an eighteen-hole golf course just like the one in Buffalo, and that person was Arthur Smith.

Smith brought architectural know-how to Rochester, and he also brought Colonel Bogey with him.

Stedman, president of a local steam heat company (and later the inventor of the streetcar transfer ticket, as well as the fuzzy pipe cleaner still produced today), had been one of Rochester’s golf pioneers. In the fall of 1894, he had been one of the first persons in Rochester introduced to the game:

Golf was first brought directly to the notice of Rochester people a year ago by the late William S. Kimball, who took several local men down to his links at Nantucket. The autumn months of last year saw the South Park links laid out and called into use by Mr. Kimball, Frederick P. Allan, J.H. Stedman, W.W. Webb, Josiah Anstice, and a few others. These links proving unsatisfactory, when the Country Club took possession of the Bloss-Parsons property on East Avenue, an effort was made to have one laid out on the club grounds. (Democrat and Chronicle, 22 November 1895, p. 15)

The layouts of late 1894 and early 1895 would have shocked our modern understanding of what a golf course should be.

In a field across Brighton Road (also known as East Avenue), which ran in front of the clubhouse, there were nine holes averaging 350 yards each, “making a total distance of something less than two miles” – that is, about 3,500 yards (Democrat and Chronicle, 5 July 1895, p. 8). An average length for nine-hole courses today, this would have been the longest nine-hole course in North America at that time. More interesting to today’s golfer is the fact that instead of “erecting ‘bunkers’ of earth and sod,” Rochester’s first golfers had “bunkers and hazards built of fence rails” (Democrat and Chronicle, 14 November 1895, p. 15).

Yet one ought not to be shocked by such golf architecture in the mid-1890s. A few years later, for instance, the early American golf club manufacturing company Wright & Ditson published advice on building a golf course that recommended precisely this sort of architectural strategy for land that had no natural hazards: “Where nature, by some oversight, has forgotten to provide hazards or bunkers, they should be built by man”; try “wooden hurdles with sloping sides” (although “the ball often strikes them and bounds over on the other side”); or try “building hedges of branches, such as are used in hurdles of steeple-chasing” (although “the ball is apt to be lost in them or creep into such a nook as to be unplayable”) (Guide to American Golf [Wright and Ditson, 1895; second edition 1897], pp. 29-35).

Fortunately, Rochester golfers would not have to face fence-rail hazards for long.

At the end of the summer of 1895, at the inaugural International Golf Championship at Niagara-on-theLake, two things taught Stedman that the understanding of golf prevailing in Rochester at that time was primitive. On the one hand, he learned what golf could be by following hole-by-hole what Willie Dunn, jr., declared to be the best golf match yet played in North America: the championship final between Canada’s best amateur golfer, A.W. Smith, and America’s best amateur golfer, Charles Blair MacDonald. On the other hand, he saw on the nine-hole links laid out on the Fort Mississauga and Fort George commons the nature and variety of hazards prevailing on a state-of-the-art golf course in 1895. He returned home determined that Rochester golfers should have two things: a proper golf course and instruction in the art of the proper golf swing.

And so, back in Rochester, he founded a golf club, and then hired a golf professional.

“The Thistle Club of Rochester” was born 28 September 1895 (Democratic and Chronicle [Rochester], 29 September 1895, p. 15). Stedman was elected president. Apparently, “The golf fever had been steadily spreading during the late summer months, but not till after the international tournament at Niagara-on-the-Lake … did it become epidemic”: the “enthusiastic report” brought back by those who were at the event was identified as “the provoking cause” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 22 November 1895, p. 15).

The golf professional hired shortly afterwards was Thomas Gourlay, a “a well-known Scottish professional golfer” (Courier and Argus [Dundee, Scotland], 12 August 1897, p. 4). He had been born in St Andrews in 1857, learning how to play golf on the “Old Course.” He played in the 1885 Open championship at St. Andrews, but by the late 1880s he had gone south to work as greenkeeper at Royal Wimbledon, where he will have met Alfred Ricketts. In 1890 he was appointed “as professional and green man” at the new nine-hole golf course laid out at Llandrindod Wells in Radnorshire, Wales, by the Royal Wimbledon golf professional Alexander Patrick (Field, no 1963 [9 August 1890], p. 212). By the fall, however, he had been hired at the new Bowden Golf Club near Altrincham, England, where he was to bring a new eighteen-hole course into play: “The council of the club have recently engaged T. Gourlay, formerly of St. Andrews and latterly of Wimbledon, as professional and greenkeeper, and under his care the new and enlarged course opened in September has largely improved” (Field, no 1977 [15 November 1890, p. 736). Gourlay set the course record the following summer. In the spring of 1894, “The committee of the [Didsbury] Golf Club … engaged Gourlay, late of Bowden, as greenkeeper,” but just over a year later he was off to Rochester (Golf [London], vol 7 no 182 [9 March 1894], p. 412).

By November of 1895, Gourlay had laid out a new nine-hole course to replace the unsophisticated layout that had done service at the beginning of 1895: “There are ten men at work on the links of the Country Club at present, getting the ground in better condition. They are erecting ‘bunkers’ of earth and sod, which will be a great improvement over the old bunkers and hazards built of fence rails” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 14 November 1895, p. 15).

As can be seen on the scorecard produced below, the golf course comprised nine holes ranging in length from 215 to 400 yards (given that the drive of a good player in those days was understood to travel around 175 yards, we can see that none of the putting surfaces was intended to be reachable in one shot).

Figure 65 Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 10 May 1896, p. 15. Image modified and enhanced.

Like the original nine-hole course, Gourlay’s layout used the field across Brighton Road in front of the clubhouse, but it also used a field to the side of the clubhouse: “The result is that [a] links with nine holes, covering some thirty acres, occupies the property on both sides of East Avenue [or Brighton Road] in front and rear of the club house” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 22 November 1895, p. 15). Gourlay touted his achievement and promised an even better course if more money were spent upon it:

Mr. Gourly [sic], the “greens keeper,” said yesterday to a Democrat and Chronicle representative:

“Rochester golfers have what may be made one of the best links that I have ever driven a ball over. As it is, few equal it, but the judicious expenditure of a little money in constructing more bunkers and thereby increasing the difficulties of play would be a great advantage. Especially is a bunker needed to guard the home hole.” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 22 November 1895, p. 15)

Play commenced at a tee in front of the clubhouse, proceeding right of the building and away from the road, and then the second hole reversed the direction of play, paralleling the first fairway and returning toward the road. (The photograph of the clubhouse below seems to have been taken from the first tee.)

Figure 66 Country Club of Rochester clubhouse (from 1895 till its destruction by fire in 1902), as seen from the first tee.

As can be seen on the map below, the Gourlay layout required that two shots be played across the road running in front of the clubhouse seen above: after the tee shot on the second hole, one had to play across the road to reach the field where the course from the spring of 1895 had been laid out; similarly, one on the ninth hole, one had to play back across this road from the field in question to reach the final green beside the clubhouse. (Note that roads were regarded as proper “natural’ hazards of the day.)

Figure 67 Democrat and Chronicle, 10 May 1896, p. 15.

Gourlay’s ten-man crew built four bunkers (highlighted in purple on the map above), but not the one that he wanted for the ninth hole. Gourlay also referred to “embankments and ditches which have been constructed in different parts of the field,” and he indicated that he had used “fences,” “trees,” and “the East Avenue roadbed” as hazards “to increase the difficulties of making a round and thus call a player’s skill into use” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 22 November 1895, p. 15). The seventh and ninth fairways crossed each other, leading the newspaper to report: “The course doubles upon itself, but this is not felt to be a serious defect” (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 22 November 1895, p. 15).

Gourlay left the Country Club of Rochester at the end of the 1895 season and moved on to Baltusrol, leaving the Thistle Golf Club without a professional until early in May of 1896. And much work remained to be done on the golf course he had laid out. In fact, the work was not regarded as done until Rochester welcomed rivals from Buffalo to a competition in July of 1896:

The first match of the season on the grounds of the Country Club will take place on Saturday when the golf team of the Buffalo club will meet the representatives of the Thistle Golf Club of this city. Work on the links of the Thistle Golf club has been going on for many weeks and the whole new course will probably be in first class condition for the tournament on Saturday….

The visitors will certainly find a course of unusual perfection in the one on the Country Club grounds, and the entire length of it, [excepting] perhaps a hundred yards, will be in view from the piazza of the Country Club house. (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 9 July 1896, p. 15)

The person supervising this work on the Gourlay layout was the golf professional hired in May.

Since Gourlay had left Rochester for Baltusrol in the fall, the question of who would succeed him had hung in the air. Indeed, the Thistle Golf Club was still discussing the “very important” matter of “the engagement of a greens-keeper” at a club meeting called by Stedman at the end of April the next year (Democrat and Chronicle, 22 April 1896, p. 1). Only in May of 1896 was it announced that a new man had been found:

Thistle Golf Club’s Professional

CONTENTS