THE R&A’s OFFICIAL OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP MAGAZINE
Before the internet, television or even radio, golf’s grip on the public imagination was largely down to the power of the written word. Heroic feats performed by the likes of Harry Vardon, Walter Hagen and the immortal Bobby Jones were first revealed to avid enthusiasts of the fledgling sport in their morning newspapers.
For roughly half a century from 1907, Bernard Darwin was The Times golf correspondent, and pre-eminent amongst his peers; in fact, he wrote with such grace and eloquence, many believe him to be the greatest writer on the game the world has ever known.
Darwin’s detailed knowledge of tournament golf was based on personal experience. After a traditional education at Eton and Cambridge, where he gained a golfing Blue, the grandson of Charles Darwin trained as a lawyer, but after a few desultory years at the Bar, he made the courageous decision to trade in his wig for a pen, all the while competing at the highest level. He was a contender in a number of Amateur Championships, making the semi-finals in 1909 and 1921, and even competed for his country in the very first Walker Cup in 1922, although in rather unusual circumstances.
Darwin travelled with the team to Long Island to cover the match for his paper. When Robert Harris, the British Captain, fell ill on the eve of the event, Darwin stepped into the breach. With Cyril Tolley, he lost his foursome to Ouimet and Guilford, but emerged triumphant after his singles against Bill Fownes.
A profound appreciation of the heat of competitive battle always informed Darwin’s prose; so, on Bobby Jones’s famous win over the writer’s old adversary, Cyril Tolley, in the 1930 Amateur Championship at St Andrews, he wrote: ‘Exactly how good the golf was I cannot now remember for there are occasions when that is of secondary importance. It was the devil of a match.’
This refreshing honesty and sense of being caught up in historic events were hallmarks of Darwin’s writing. He never pretended to have witnessed events at which he was not actually present, but this did not diminish his storytelling. His summary of Bobby Jones’s 1926 win at Royal Lytham & St Annes, with echoes of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, brings a beguiling immediacy to the tournament climax.
‘The advanced guard of his crowd came towards us, in the van one who trotted briskly, as if big with news to impart. I have a well-grounded distrust of spectators’ tales but this one looked a man of good counsel, sober and unimaginative; so I buttonholed him and asked his tidings. When he said that Bobby was now two under fours I thought he was only the usual liar, but what he said was true, for Bobby had done the holes from the sixth to the twelfth in 24 shots. After that the round was a triumphal procession.’
Today, we take almost for granted the ability of good sports writers to associate events on the field or green with the wider human condition, and to see in sporting flaws and foibles signifiers of a player’s deeper psychological state. As the grandson of the originator of the theory of natural selection, perhaps it is no surprise that Darwin was one of the very first sporting essayists to elicit these connections. Again in relation to his hero, Bobby Jones, he wrote: ‘The steady-going and unimaginative will often beat the more eager champion and they will get very near the top, but there, I think, they will stop. The prose labourer must yield to the poet and Bobby as a golfer had a strain of poetry in him. He stands for ever as the greatest encourager of the highly-strung player who is bent on conquering himself.’
As well as an appreciation of great players and tournaments, Darwin was passionate about golf courses and their design. In the year the Open returns to Royal St George’s for the 14th time, it is only appropriate to recount his love of the club for which he served as President between 1952 and 1961.
‘Sandwich has a charm that belongs to itself … The long strip of turf on the way to the seventh hole, that stretches between the sand-hills and the sea; a fine Spring day, with the larks singing as they seem to sing nowhere else; the sun shining on the waters of Pegwell Bay and lighting the white cliffs in the distance; this is as nearly my idea of Heaven as is to be attained on any earthly links.’
Woe betide the scoundrel who criticized such Elysian fields in the 1890s. ‘It would have ranked only a degree below blasphemy to have hinted at any imperfection,’ opined Darwin. And to those who espoused change to a course with so many blind shots, he railed: ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks! Why do they want to alter this adorable place? I know they are perfectly right, and I have agreed with them that this is a blind shot and that an indefensibly bad hole, but what does that matter? This is perfect bliss.’ It is a view undoubtedly shared by many clubs members today.
The par-5 14th ‘Suez Canal’ is so-called according to Darwin because, ‘many a second shot has found a watery grave’. He described the par-3 sixth, ‘The Maiden’, in his book, Classic Golf Holes, as ‘steep, sandy and terrible, with her face scarred and seamed with black timbers, but alas! we no longer have to drive over her crown: we hardly do more than skirt the fringe of her garment’. He quite simply adored this classic links.
It has been said of Darwin that he was a truly great essayist who just happened to write about golf. He was, in fact, also a Dickens scholar of note, but it is on his columns for the The Times, always signed ‘Our Golf Correspondent’, Country Life and 30-odd books that his reputation is founded. No serious library of golfing literature is complete without his 1910 The Golf Courses of the British Isles, a tome that did for Muirfield, St Andrews and Sunningdale what Vasari had done for the Renaissance masters.
The writing is seldom less than transcendent. Even A Round of Golf on the L&NER, a little gem written to promote the railway, contains passages like the following, this time on the quirky nature of Cruden Bay’s back nine: ‘…at the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth holes the most elderly and phlegmatic persons will pant up to the top of the bank like two-year-olds to see what has befallen their ball on the far side.’
Darwin is always on the side of the reader, never preaching from a great height or baffling us with science. We know he can play a bit, has seen more than most, and has the skill to distill his thoughts into deathless prose, but he is still one of us. Ever self-effacing, he once said: ‘I have often been gratefully aware of the heroic efforts of my opponent not to laugh at me.
The Bernard Darwin Trophy for public-school golfers over 55 years old is still played for in early July each year at Woking Golf Club, but with no disrespect to such a venerable competition, his legacy is rather more profound. Several generations of golf writers, readers and players are indebted to Darwin for his wit, erudition, and, above all, enthusiasm for the game. He loved it and wants us to share his passion.
Bernard Darwin was a great golf writer. More than that, he was a great writer.