Pitchmarks #63 - 8th September 2024 - "Dreaming of Darwin"

Once again, that familiar motion from childhood, of pressing the metal rail to slide down the window then reaching through to open the carriage door from the outside. Stepping down onto the platform, and then into a dash, along towards the ticket office, the smell of the sea air in our nostrils. I clutch the irons that are rattling in my little leather bag, but the ringing doesn’t quite sound right, and doesn’t stop when I prevent the heads knocking against each other.

On it goes, this sound, on and on, and then I sense what is happening, and the latest edition of this old, recurring dream - of being on some never-ending golfing mission on the clackety trains of a time forever gone - slips away, and the daylight penetrates my eyelids, and I am back in a world where Bernardo too is forever lost to us, his disciples. I turn off the alarm that has so rudely prevented me from - this time - the fresh winds of Cardigan Bay, whistling up the Dyfi Estuary, and replace that sound with the whir of the coffee grinder and the building hustle of the kettle.

And then I reflect that, though the dream is over, Bernardo is never quite gone, for in his timeless prose he has grasped some tiny slice of eternity for himself, and oh, how he deserves it. And I realise what prompted his visit in my slumber, for yesterday - 7th September - was the date in 1876 when Charles and Emma Darwin’s first grandson came into existence. The world is in many ways unrecognisable from that into which he arrived, but such was his genius that his legacy - a very different one to that which his famous grandpa left - remains both delightful and precious today.

Charles (or “Baba”) once wrote, towards the end of his own innings, “if I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week” but of late I have been observing a different rule of my own, which is to sit with the work of that greatest of golf writers “at least once every week”, and this leaves me with the widest of smiles, every single time. For this Darwin has enough poetic flair and musical rhythm in his voice to penetrate every golfing soul, and there is so much to get through - his a lifetime of joy and wonder barely distilled for us to slurp from.

Hardly a topic exists that he didn’t cover with effortless aplomb, and there are times for me - and I suspect anyone else who dares to write about this maddening game he called “an all-pervading, all-ruling, unsleeping deity” - when we question why we bother to try when he has set such an impossible bar before us, or perhaps above us. Alfred Whitehead once observed that Western philosophy was little more than “a series of footnotes to Plato”; surely then all attempts at golf writing, particularly given the demise of decent print journalism, are simply “footnotes to Darwin”.

There were advantages for Bernardo, of course. His family background helped, and ensured a fine education (though one might learn as much about life from his work as from any syllabus of the Classics). Golf was very much a part of Eton’s framework for him, and so many of his friends and peers in the game were also alumni of Cambridge, or members of “The Society” (The Oxford & Cambridge Golfing Society, of which he became the President). It was a glorious time of growth for golf, too, and many of the clubs at which he played his fine amateur game were borne in that era. He was involved at Aberdovey, from whence I was so rudely awakened, right from the start. Early on at Woking, via the trains that stopped on demand down by the fourth, and his lifelong love affair with Rye.

But he travelled widely too, and “The Golf Courses of the British Isles” remains an essential starting point for those interested in the romance and architecture of the game to which he gave his life and soul. And what is interesting are the ones he never saw - Dornoch, Brora, Lahinch and Machrihanish among them. No AI programme will ever be able to wax in his lyrical style of these places he maybe knew only in his dreams, for no AI programme will ever write from a place of such devotion, such pure and simple love.

And then there are the people - my goodness, the people. John Ball and the Triumvirate; Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen. Longhurst, Hilton, Mure Fergusson. Wethered’s Roger and Joyce, Simpson, Abercromby. Low and Paton at Woking…the list goes on. The passing of the game’s baton from amateur to professional. The Golden Age of architecture, accelerated from within that “temple of golf” on Hook Heath. The Haskell ball, and the pyratone shaft. Darwin lived through extraordinary times, and his “Golf Between Two Wars” depicts a time just as turbulent as any.

He could play a little, too, though he barely mentioned it. A century ago he won “The President’s Putter” in January then the inaugural Halford Hewitt in April, with his beloved school’s side. Two years earlier, he was the travelling journalist with the first Walker Cup side, sailing all the way to the National Golf Links of America, and only slung a bag on his back to fill Robert Harris’s boots when the Captain succumbed to the bite of “a giant sandfly”. He quietly disposed of the home Captain - William Fownes Jr of the Oakmont family, a former US Amateur champion - in the singles. At fifty-seven, in 1933, he partnered Joyce in the Worplesdon Foursomes, and despite putting with his mashie to combat a classic dose of the yips, this “elderly gentleman whose name for the moment escapes me” became the foil for her eighth victory in that classic.

When he wrote in 1927 of the fashion to number irons heads (his essay titles were often as fine as the prose itself: “Mournful Numbers”), he described this latest fad as “a soulless, cut-and-dried business”, which makes me ponder what he’d make of the sickening excess, the endless blind greed of today’s professionals, today’s ball manufacturers. But of all the advantages Bernard Richard Meirion Darwin C.B.E. was lucky enough to possess and generous enough to pass on, perhaps his kindness is the one we need most in the game and the world today.

I suspect his body spins furiously in that churchyard grave at Downe when news percolates through the soil of the latest degradation of his cherished pastime, or that this course or that have succumbed to a dumbing down that he began to quietly grieve aeons ago. But were he still here in our waking hours, he’d focus not on avarice or pride or sacrilege, but on those pockets of the game where simple beauty persists…in the pleasure of a quiet evening stroll, or the humble lessons of a lost foursomes tie. Always energetic, always finding the charm and the quirk of the quest rather than getting caught up in the politics. He’d be raving about the Curtis Cup last week, and the splendour of Sunningdale, then riffing on the divine majesty of St Patrick’s Links, or the serene sound of a lone, stubborn persimmon, ringing through some deserted pine forest.

I feel blessed to have stumbled under Darwin’s spell whilst in my own service at Woking - to have spent weeks of lockdown alone with that oil painting of him for company. Blessed to have seen another version hanging at Rye, and to have sat in his grandfather’s chair, a few feet from his very own ball on the first Putter shaft (hickory, of course!). To have lingered in his “Pulpit” on that heavenly links, and passed along so many of the other corridors through which he played and walked, my journeys often inspired by his pen.

He wrote with such sadness of his fondness for the “lost holes”, and no doubt he missed many of those just as keenly as he regretted the demise of terms like “mashie” and “niblick”. But he still walked with the image of them - the feeling of them - safely squirrelled away in his soul, and because he then wrote so eloquently of them, so can we. And when - every now and then - some impertinent alarm interrupts my own doomed attempts to breathe that same fresh air that Bernardo inspired, I feel my own sense of sadness that all we have left are his memories, and not the man himself.

“It is a law of nature that everybody plays a hole badly when playing through”, wrote the grandson of the famous naturalist, and we have all tested and proven this golfing hypothesis a hundred times over. But everyone who has put pen to paper since Darwin’s canon closed is “playing through” him in another way, so we should be comforted when we fall, inevitably, short. He was the real Greatest Of All Time, and I can hardly wait for the next dose of shut-eye, in case he shows up. With a glint in his eye and a smirk on his face.

A belated Happy Birthday, Bernardo…I shall see you on the platform.

For more on Darwin, here are two podcasts that often get an airing on my way to some old haunt of his or other:

The Duffer’s Literary Companion - Episode 1

The Golfer’s Journal Podcast - Episode 135