Tom Morris is one of the game’s icons, and the subject of considerable research and writing, but this article focuses on the last five years or so of his life. He was the winner of four Open Championships, a golf course architect, and an elder statesman who helped make golf what it has become today.
Old Tom’s life was devoted to the game, but it was also full of tragedy. We all know the story of his son Tommy’s tragic death on Christmas Day 1875 at the age of 24. His wife Nancy passed away a year later in 1876; his son John in 1893, and only daughter Lizzie in 1898. As he told an interviewer in the mid-1890s, “Had it not been for golf, I’m not sure at this day, sir, that I would have been a living man. I’ve had my troubles and my trials…and with the help of my God and of golf, I’ve gotten through somehow or another.” His trials would sadly continue.
When Tom returned to St Andrews from Prestwick in 1864 to become Keeper of the Green, it was with the understanding, as stated in the minutes of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, “that he was to have the charge of the Links, that his duties were – to keep the putting green in good order, to repair such portions of the Links as required it, and to make the holes.” The Committee was willing to give him “assistance at the rate of one man’s labour for two days in the week” when heavy work was required, and it was stipulated that he was “to work under the Green Committee.”
Tom immediately went to work improving the course. He built new greens on the first and eighteenth holes and cleared great swaths of whins lining the right side of the course, widening it and easing congestion. He continued to play money matches and lay out courses, coming and going as he pleased, but as the years churned on, time caught up with him. In September of 1891 the Committee of Management, tired of 70-year-old Tom’s frequent absences, told him he was to employ two additional men to assist David Honeyman (his assistant since 1876.)
The rest of this article will appear in the March issue of Through the Green, and I will share the rest of it then. It is an interesting story previously not known to the man who helped write the history of the Royal and Ancient Club of St Andrews. (N.B. A PDF of the article is on my Home page as of May 25, 2020)
