Sentiment, and The Golfer's Colours

Showing Us Some Interesting Differences Between English and American Golfing Clothes

BERNARD DARWIN

MANY people have written books about the differences—social, political, geographical,—between America and England. I have just been reading a very interesting one called "The Contrast" by Mr. Hilaire Belloc. But there is one small difference which I have never seen mentioned, and I therefore propose to regard myself as its discoverer. England has an infinitely elaborate system of 'colours' which does not appear to exist in America.

Here in England, if you go to any sporting function you will observe a multiplicity of neckties of various coloured stripes variously arranged. All those stripes mean something—that the wearer was at such and such a school, or in such and such a regiment, that he played some game against somebody or for somewhere. Moreover, if you are anything of an observer of these matters, you will know what nearly all of them signify, and if there is one that baffles you, you will regard it with curiosity and suspicion. You will know too that the tie has been carefully chosen for the particular occasion.

That old gentleman over there who can not be far short of eighty has delved into his drawer of ties this morning with tremulous fingers to find the colours of the Eton Ramblers, because today is the day of the Eton and Harrow cricket match. By putting it on he is saying to the world "Et militavinon sine gloria"—"I too played for Eton before you young men were born or thought of" and the young men respect him accordingly.

ANY self-respecting person in England would rather die than wear a colour to which he was not entitled; the mere thought of doing so makes him blush hotly. The combinations and permutations of colours are not endless; there must be similarities and clashings, but as a rule some one institution has established an inalienable and prescriptive right to a particular blend.

There is an old story which may bear repetition. It is told of the once famous Colonel Burnaby, the hero of the ride to Khiva. He was wearing the red and blue tie of the Guards which is one of the best known, as it is one of the most strictly preserved. A little man approached him and after gazing sternly at him for some while said "Sir, are you aware that you are pirating the colours of the Upper Tooting Bicycle Club?"

We are admittedly very solemn schoolboys on this colour question, but there is something to be said for us. Mingled perhaps with folly, there is a touch of pretty sentiment about colours, and they often enable us to discover a link of common background with someone we never met before. They are, in more senses than one, ties of affection.

Now unless I am quite wrong, America does not wear colours in this way. Of course, even such an ignorant person as I am knows the colours of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, in the sense that I have seen their representatives wearing them on the running track against Oxford and Cambridge. But the "old boy" of a school or college or the member of a particular club does not, I fancy, wear colours as he would here. 1 have met golfers in America wearing ties of pretty and complicated stripes and have asked them "What does that tie mean?"—only to find they have just bought it casually in a shop. In fact America is in this respect more grown-up than we are, and has "put away childish things", things that we are apt to regard as among the laws of the Medes and Persians.

With us golf—and here I come at last to what is supposed to be my subject—is the one game on which, till quite lately, colours had no hold. Once the red coat with various coloured facings was the traditional uniform of the club. Today, save when it has still to be worn as a danger signal on a public common, it is dead as a door nail. The golfers of Oxford and Cambridge hardly trouble to call themselves "blues" as do the University representatives of all other games. Those who play golf for England do not deck themselves with roses, nor the Scots with thistles.

A little while ago at St. Andrews, at a General Meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, it was proposed that the Club should have a tie, and the proposal was summarily, and I think rather derisively rejected. Nevertheless, our passion for ties is gradually overcoming the sturdy pride which thinks that golf is above such things. About five and twenty years ago the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society was founded and invented for itself a tie. It was a pretty little piece of symbolism—the dark blue of the one and the light blue of the other meeting on the green. For years it had no imitators and now suddenly has come a flood.

Yesterday I met a friend wearing a blue tie with narrow red and white stripes on it. "What is that?" I asked suspiciously. "It's the Medical Golfing Society," said he, "blue for the veins and red for the arteries and white for the colour of our patients when we've done with them." The Army Golfing Society has a green ground with narrow stripes of white and the traditional red of the British Army, and so on. I seem to spend half my time on a golf course asking my friends what their particular impersonation is today.

IT would be amusing—nor should I be altogether surprised—if we were some day and to some extent to infect you with our love of colours. It would be only poetic justice; because you have certainly influenced our golfing habits in the matter of clothes. I did not quite realize how much until, a day or two since, a non-golfing colleague was going through the golfing pages of an illustrated paper to find a particularly good one for reproduction in miniature. "I've been back to the pictures of the first year after the war," he said. "Before that the clothes look too antiquated." It was perfectly true. In a group of golfers today most of them are wearing jerseys or "jumpers"— "sweaters", I believe you call them. Before the war they would nearly all have been in Norfolk jackets. At this moment the jumper is threatened by something still more modern, namely a loose and indeterminate garment of leather tied at the neck and tucked in at the waist, such as cowboys seem always to wear in the "movie" dramas. As seen on Mr. Tolley's ample form on a breezy day, it presents something of a balloon-like appearance. It is, I am told, extraordinarily effective in keeping out the cold.

No doubt you have done us good. The "jumper" looks prettier than a coat and it gives a delightful feeling of freedom. A man feels automatically ten years younger when he first goes out to play in one. That is a delightful sensation, but it has its perils. Personally I feel so rejuvenated that 1 skip like a young ram and miss the ball. Indeed after wasting my substance on jumpers and trying hard to master them, I have now almost determined to stand fa9t in the old ways. It is not merely utilitarianism which makes me want somewhere to put my pipe, nor sentiment which makes me like the familiar feeling of golf balls in my pocket banging against me as I walk. It is the fact that in a jumper I can not refrain from overswinging myself more grossly than usual. I have often found a tighter garment a remedy against bad play, but a looser one hardly ever. And so I think I will be out of fashion; and my old coat and I will totter down the hill together.

YOU have not yet taught us to wear the knickerbockers of white linen which are so common in America, and I doubt if you ever will, simply because the weather here is seldom hot enough to justify them. When it is, we are prone to say that it is not golfing weather and either to sit supine in the shade or else play some less slowly grilling game. The subject of knickerbockers presents an interesting study to the historian of golfing manners. I am old enough to remember a time when a great many people habitually played golf in trousers. I had one old friend who always wore very black shiny ones. I fancy they were those of his second best evening suit, and had, as was said in that delightful little play Sweet Lavender "been attending funerals for years". In those days a professional in knickerbockers would have been looked at as if he had two heads. Then Vardon set the fashion, and all his brethren became so smart that at an Open Championship one says "That man must be an amateur. He is not well enough dressed for a professional". It is true that Braid and Taylor and Herd have never insinuated themselves into knickerbockers. Imaginary pictures of them doing so are beloved of the caricaturist, but the real thing has never been seen, nor ever will be.

I believe that superstition has more to do with the individual golfer's clothes than anybody but he himself knows. When we play on the asphodel and the secrets of all hearts are revealed, we shall be surprised to learn those of some of our friends whom we had deemed unimaginative. Many of us are, I feel sure, in the case of the late Victor Trumper, the great Australian cricketer, who thought he could only make runs in one shirt, so that this magic robe had to be washed on every night of the tour and became a very frail ghost by the end of it. I remember that the late Mr. Jack Graham always wore a particular shirt—a singularly unbecoming one with a blue check on it— in the annual England and Scotland match and it certainly served him well for he was only once beaten, but then, after all, he was good enough to win in the hair shirt of a hermit or a knight's shirt of chain mail.

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