The exploits of the Apple Tree Gang and John Reid, in particular, often described as “the father of American golf”, in founding the St Andrew’s Golf Club in Yonkers in 1888 are well-known. The Scottish background of John Reid, and of Robert Lockhart, who is not given sufficient credit for his role in the founding of the club is perhaps not so well known.
Both Reid and Lockhart were from Dunfermline and Robert Lockhart was a founder member of that club presenting it with the Lockhart Medal in 1888, and still played for today, a gold medal with a large number of gold bars on which the winner’s name is inscribed. Both emigrated to the United States but Lockhart, as a linen buyer, was often back in Scotland on business as, at that time, Dundee was the largest linen producing town in the world. On a trip home in the summer of 1887 he bought some clubs from Old Tom Morris’s shop in St Andrews and brought them back to the US in a golf box (as was the custom before the golf bag became popular). His son Sydney, in correspondence with the Dunfermline Golf Club in 1929, remembers unscrewing the lid and taking out ‘ten or a dozen clubs and about two dozen gutta percha balls’ which had been packed in sawdust. ‘My father showed them to his friends and members of the Yonkers Tennis Club of which he was a member’, he continues, ‘The “funny hooked sticks” excited no small amount of curiosity and, just as an experiment, many of the members wanted to play the game. So, a short course was laid out in Yonkers and the game was duly launched on American soil, although in a primitive manner. Father’s admiration for the game was ably sustained by Mr John Reid, a Scotsman. In a few weeks Father had to send for five more sets.’
The story usually has it that these clubs were ordered on behalf of John Reid but Sydney Lockhart’s account does not reflect this. Neither do the stories of Robert Lockhart’s brush with the law when playing with these new clubs. One report, recounted in the Herald Tribune of 15 April 1930, and repeated in Douglas Ferguson’s history of the Dunfermline club, suggests Lockhart tried out his clubs in Central Park in New York, terrifying some old ladies who complained to the police. He ended up in jail but, as golf was unknown at that time, there was no specific legislation which could be invoked against him and he was released without charge. A slightly tamer version comes again from Sydney Lockhart who recalled going with his father and brother Leslie to ‘a place on the river which is now Riverside Drive’ where his father teed up under the watchful eye of a mounted policeman. ‘Father teed up the first little white ball and, selecting one of the long wooden clubs, dispatched it far down the meadow. He tried all the clubs and then we boys were permitted to drive some balls too.’ Curious, the policeman asked if he too could try. ‘The officer got down off his horse and went through the motions of teeing up, aping Father in waggling and squaring off to the ball and other preliminaries. Then he let go and hit a beauty straight down the field which went fully as far as any that Father had hit. Being greatly encouraged, and proud of his natural ability at a game that involved a ball and stick, he tried again. This time he missed the ball completely and then, in rapid succession, he missed the little globe three more times; so with a look of disgust on his face he mounted his horse and rode away.’
The ‘short course’ was, in fact, three holes on a cow pasture set out on 22 February 1888 in the middle of a winter thaw which, in less than three weeks, gave way to a blizzard which covered the little course in three feet of snow. They returned after the snow had melted but felt the need for a bigger course and soon moved to a 30 acre site owned by a German butcher. From here, on 14 November 1888, John Reid (shown in picture), invited his golfing friends to his home. The St Andrew’s Golf Club, distinguished from its Scottish mother by the addition of the apostrophe, was born with Robert Lockhart as the first active member. It is said he was offered the position of president but declined as he was away too frequently. John Reid did accept the position of president and a place in history. Another famous son of Dunfermline, who supposedly decide to sell his holdings in US Steel for $300 million while on he gold course, and also a member of St Andrew’s Golf Club, wrote in the Boston Transcript in June 1911, ‘Let it be recorded, therefore, in the annals of time, that the introduction of golf to America was the work of two Dunfermline bairns, Lockhart and Reid, both of Dunfermline, Scotland, and of Yonkers, NY’. Of course this is not really true: Scottish soldiers serving in the War of Independence brought golf across the Atlantic with them and the South Carolina Golf Club in Charleston was supposedly founded as a result of their efforts in 1786 and US newspaper advertisements for golf clubs were known as early as 1779. However, golf declined here, as it did in Scotland, until the end of the 19th century and, although there may be case to be made for A H Findlay, a native of Montrose, laying out a course in Nebraska a few years ahead of the Yonkers’ one, it was really the efforts of Lockhart and Reid which lit the flame under US interest in the game.
Dunfermline’s US connection did not end with the foundation of the St Andrew’s club. The naval importance of the Firth of Forth during the First World War resulted in close and friendly relations between the club and the Royal Navy and, later in the war, the US Navy to whom the facilities of the course were extended. Indeed, the US Navy are the only people known to have played the course in uniform. Apparently a boat brought them so dressed to a jetty at North Queensferry from where they carried on to play a round of the course. The Sixth Battle Squadron, US Navy, with the battleships New York, Texas, Wyoming, Florida, Delaware and Arkansas donated the US Navy Cup in September 1918, a handsome silver trophy much prized by the club and still competed for annually.
(Sources include Douglas Ferguson, Dunfermline Golf Club 1887-1987 (1987), Malcolm Campbell, The Encyclopedia of Golf (1991))
|
Size: 372x479 (115 KB)
Click on the image above to view the full size image
|
|
