The iconic 4th at Woking Golf Club. Image courtesy of Jason Livy Photography.
There is always this feeling of time being important at Woking Golf Club, a wonderful pine and heather course just beyond the south-west reaches of London. For a start, it has a long and illustrious history; the first of the fine Surrey & Berkshire heathlands, and a home for many of the great and good of golf over a century and beyond.
The timber walls of the Clubhouse carry images of Freddie Tait and Roger Wethered, and of course Bernard Darwin, who loved this place and whose quizzical smirk peers down at the revelry in the Dining Room. There’s also been a Prime Minister here, A.J. Balfour, who was simultaneously Captain of the Club, and one wonders which set of meetings in that busy year were the more important to him.
Now and then, as they peer at the various honours boards which tell a stripped down narrative of the Club’s story right back to those early days, a visitor might whisper that stepping into that narrow, central corridor is like stepping back into time, but while they’re right in a way, don’t imagine that nothing has ever changed here. Along with those mentioned above, you’ll also find sketches of John Low and Stuart Paton, the gentlemen who quietly set about transforming Tom Dunn’s original Victorian layout into the subtle, influential masterpiece that sits atop Hook Heath today.
Evolution is normally the pace of change in such museums of the game, but those two, on a rainy day in the early twentieth century, dug a couple of bunkers in the middle of the fourth fairway, and in one fell swoop created a paradigm shift in golf hole planning; the birth of strategic golf design. Those bunkers will still suck up the modern golf ball; a man-made and intentional tribute to the Principal’s Nose bunkers that Mother Nature placed in the centre of the sixteenth at the Old Course, St Andrews. That moment was nothing short of revolutionary for those of us deep in the rabbit hole of golf course architecture.
Then there is the emphasis on fast golf, with plenty of singles and foursomes around. A cartoon on the wall depicts a new member asking one of the old guard what the course record is, to which the only appropriate answer at Woking could be “two hours, twenty-eight”. Pace of play remains far more important than the score, and, with my game, this arrangement suits me just fine.
Even the logo, of a clocktower stuck at nine minutes past three, speaks to the importance of time at Woking, and perhaps of it standing still for those moments when you play here. The notion of that emblematic stitching, which adorns the elbow-worn sweaters of the roll-up crowd, came from the clocktower that perches on the roof directly behind the fourteenth green, above the famous terrace where defeated golfers find solace in their refreshments.
The clock itself was a gift to the Club from another community that celebrates the history of golf in these parts, the Senior Golfers’ Society, and while the constituent members of both entities come and go, their stories renewed and revised with each generation, as a collective each survives the passing of time, enduring as does the inevitable early morning charge of Dad’s Army’s foursomes around the heath.
Wars and famines come and go, and pandemics too, but for a few hours each week, all the way back to 1893, Woking’s golfers defy the clocks, and settle very much in the present, with a mashie or a Martini for company. The irony of that clocktower, though, is that, in this place where time looms so large in the fabric of the Club’ story, it is almost impossible to get the damn thing to work reliably.
The delicate mechanism, accessed via a wobbling ladder whenever it stops (or more accurately, when the number of people who notice or care reaches double figures) is temperamental to say the least, and the balance between those hands turning and forever halting in the here and now is equivalent to the fragile mental and physical state of those terrified golfers putting out beneath it on the fourteenth, in front of the assembled drinkers.
But perhaps there’s a certain beauty in this tendency of the clock’s internal movement to give up shortly after the ladder is packed away. It’s a hint; this is a place in which to forget about the past, and the future, and limit your worries to the treacherous greens, and the match in hand. Time is important here, but perhaps mainly because you can forget it for a while…
Drive a mile or two down the road and you might swing left into the drive of New Zealand Golf Club, just a couple of years younger than Woking, and another glorious example of heathland golf at its traditional best. Here, the walls tell another story of different times, of those early years of inland golf. The Dining Room has the quiet feel of a place of worship in between sittings, and the sound of a clock ticking is, to the observant ear, strangely absent.
For above the door through which diners will pass - maybe stumble - back towards their spikes and the golf course, via an obligatory Kümmel - sits an old clock in a gorgeous mahogany case (housing a fusee drop dial mechanism, since you ask). The hands of this antique, thought to have belonged to Samuel “Mure” Fergusson - the original designer of the course and the Club’s first Managing Director - seem to have a will of their own, and will stop and start when the spirit of time moves them.
This clock has been removed and inspected by probably a voting majority of the world’s horologists by this point, but time after time it seems to decide to take a break in the early afternoon, leaving the assembled lunch party - too polite to look at their watch while their neighbour talks them through the horrors of the morning round - under the impression that there remains time for another glass of the claret, or perhaps, as the afternoon wears on but the clock’s hands hang frozen, port might be in order, with a little cheese.
By the time the afternoon foursomes eventually start, the schedule could have been derailed by an hour or more, but this is New Zealand, after all, and what constitutes the midday rush - one man and his dog - are on the thirteenth, probably trying to extract a ball from the bunkers Tom Simpson put there in tribute to those of Low & Paton back at Woking. It hardly matters that everything is running late, for while the play is fast here too (if not the lunch), it is so enjoyable that you’d hope it will never end. At Augusta, they say no-one is allowed to run; at New Zealand, no such rule is required, for there is nothing finer elsewhere on earth to run towards.
More than once I wondered if the management were tampering with the clock’s delicate internal workings in order to boost the lunchtime liquer receipts, but I settled on a more pleasing reason why this innocent looking object continues to confound clockmakers and deceive diners. Up in the tower above the Clubhouse, Fergusson lived and died, welded to this marvellous place and to all that is timeless about the simple traditions of a golfing life - friendship, foursomes, competition, camaraderie. His own time ran out almost a century ago, but this still feels like his territory, and the story goes that shortly after his passing, a large order of port arrived and was promptly returned, being “no longer required”.
Maybe that iron will with which he ran the club’s affairs implores those turning hands to a halt, in order to grant time for a tawny or two before the golf resumes. I’ve yet to see an image of him smiling, this formidable spirit, so the thought of a subtle smirk forming under that moustache as another round of drinks and laughter fill the Dining Room tickles me.
For such experiences as these are, to the golfing addict, magical adventures. Few of us get to spend time in close proximity to the vast oil paintings of the great masters, let alone play with them, care for them. On courses like Woking and New Zealand, we get to be part of the gradual unfolding of a living, breathing masterpiece, traversing acre upon acre of architectural genius in the company of a special type of friend, one who understands. Your fellow golfer. You get to walk in the footsteps of all those who have gone before you, the ongoing story of these evolving treasures as fluid as time itself.
So let these unreliable timepieces do what they will, and forget for a few fleeting holes that the world outside the gate rushes on past. For these moments are our refuge from the endless noise of a hurried existence, a place to slow down, and feel alive. As long as we keep up with the group ahead, we can forget about time for as long as we are out here, and live in the present for a change.
If, as Peter says in Withnail & I, “even a stopped clock tells the right time, twice a day” maybe your own rusty golfing mechanism might decide to show up for a change. Maybe today will be a day when you manage to find the sweetspot a couple of times, and feel the whole world and all its clocks stand still with you as that wretched ball mysteriously decides to take flight for a change, and soar above the flapping silk like a kestrel, preparing to dive.
And if not, well, there’s always tomorrow…
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Seventeen marvellously enjoyable holes at Woking…..and one devilish brute!
Both wonderful courses and lunch at NZ is as good as it gets