A golfing pioneer

BERNARD DARWIN

Only a very conscientious American student of our British newspapers may possibly have noticed the death of a certain Mr. William Thomas Linskill. Even in Scotland he was not well known to golfers, except at St. Andrews, where he had lived for the last thirty years of his life. The papers for the most part had just a colourless, discreet little statement that he had been the founder of the Cambridge University Golf Club, that the captain of the Royal and Ancient had attended his funeral and that the Silver Club, to which each captain has from time immemorial hung his silver ball, was carried in the funeral procession. Yet I want to try to say something about him because here was a figure that ought not to be allowed to depart in silence.

It always seemed to me that he was not so much a living character as a character created by Dickens. He was so wildly, tempestuously improbable that only Dickens would have dared to create him.

It was in the seventies that as a boy Mr. Linskill visited St. Andrews and it was the thrilling memories of it that made of Mr. Linskill one of the pioneers of the Oxford and Cambridge match.

He went up to Jesus College about 1875. It was always said of him—I do not know if this was defamatory—-that he never passed the "Little Go," which is the earliest of University examinations, but the authorities were easy going in those days and he stayed. Mr. Linskill did not trouble his head about his examinations but he made many strenuous efforts to find a golf course in the Cambridgeshire mud. At first he tried Coe Fen, well described by its name; then he found a flat, desolate, muddy, marshy spot called Coldham Common, on the outskirts of the Cambridge slums, and there he founded the club. That was in the later seventies; but nearly twenty years afterwards, when I went up to Cambridge in 1894, he was still there as honorary secretary, patron saint, dry nurse and Grand Panjandrum of the club, and it is as he was then that I can see him.

As I said, there was something of Dickensian exaggeration about him and everything to do with him. He was never seen in anything but knickerbockers and with them he wore a peculiar and unique form of gigantic spats. As his spats were longer than anyone else's, so was his weeping moustache. And his voice was louder. It was deep and thunderous with a blare in it that could carry from end to end of the course. The language in which he could on occasion address the golf ball was on a par with his voice. Dull, prosaic people might say that it was not respectable. Perhaps strictly speaking, it was not, but it was full of a wonderful and fiery imagery; it could on the spur of the moment summon up pictures so surprising and complex that the ordinary mind could never have conceived them in a week of thinking. His play was on the same god-like scale. Not that he was, save in one particular, a great player by any means, but through something doublejointed in his anatomy, he could swing the club further around his head than any other man. It was said that he had knocked the ball off the tee in his backward swing. It was in fact rather an absurd swing, though no one of us dared to say so or even to think so, but there was nothing absurd about his putting. I never'saw a man putt with so free and supple a wrist and putt better.

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Gradually he ceased to play golf, altogether though he was a regular visitor of the Club House; indeed, I recall only one occasion on which he did play. That was several years after the rubber covered ball had been introduced and he had never tried one. It chanced that on the Medal day, the late Lord Eldon was without a partner and Mr. Linskill was induced to play. Rumour flew quickly abroad and Lord Eldon, who was not a great player,

was somewhat surprised to find a large crowd assembled to see him start his round. Mr. Linskill took a considerable number of shots to cross the burn but at length his ball reached the confines of the green. Then he took up his old wooden putter and hit the ball as sweetly as ever. It struck the tin, leaped high in the air but refused t6 drop. "By God," exclaimed the player in a voice of thunder "if it had been a gutty I'd have banged it down."

I do not think that Mr. Linskill took much interest in the newer race of players. There was however one golfing function that he never missed; namely, the inauguration of the new Captain of St. Andrews at the Autumn meeting. However inclement the morning, there he was, smoking his pipe, one of the privileged persons who stood on the first teeing ground, from which the new Captain drove his ball.

Mr. Linskill wrote one of the earlier text books on golf, the modestest little book with just a few pages, the names of the different clubs, a copy of the rules and very little else. My copy of the work is, I imagine, a comparative rarity. Yet he was in his way one of the real pioneers of golf in England.