Tommy's Honor (23 page)

He gave it extra force and overspin to make sure it reached the hole. Droplets of water spun up off the ball as it rolled. The crowd drew a collective breath, then let out a huge glad roar as the ball struck the back of the hole and dropped.

Four twosomes back, Tom Kidd heard the noise. The dapper leader was still bashing drives and hitting ribbed-iron approaches that hopped and stopped on Tom’s wet greens, but now he was missing putts left and right and short. By the time he wobbled to the teeing-ground at the Road Hole, Kidd was desperate for good news. It came in the form of a number: 183. Spectators relayed the number from the Home green through the crowd that lined the last two holes. Tommy Morris had shot 89 in the second round and was in at 183, an astronomical two-round total for him, giving Kidd a bit of breathing room.

The other contender, Jamie Anderson, had fought back from his 9 at the Heathery Hole until he stood at the last teeing-ground with a chance to finish at 179. All he needed was a standard four on the Home Hole, which measured a jot more than 250 yards. Anderson drove his ball to a dry spot on the wide lawn that served as fairway to both the first and last holes, but his approach fell short, the ball trickling to a muddy lie. He could not control his chip, which squirted off at an angle, barely reaching the green. Two putts for five left Anderson at 180, three shots less than Tommy’s score.

Tommy’s reign was over. Spectators walked past him to watch bearded, bedraggled Kidd trudge up the last fairway toward town, clinging to his lead and a rib-faced iron niblick. His pitch shot plunked to earth, close enough. One last putt and the deed was done: Tom Kidd was the Champion Golfer of Scotland.

Tommy applauded him and shook his hand. Red-coated R&A officials brought out the new trophy, a silver pitcher made by the Edinburgh silversmiths Mackay Cunningham & Co. at a cost of £30. The Golf Champion Trophy, as it was named, was a claret jug, a familiar feature of nineteenth-century clubhouses. Gentleman golfers had long bet wine as well as money on their matches and had lugged their claret to the clubhouse in such jugs in case they lost. Twelve inches high, this new Claret Jug—it was quickly, indelibly capitalized—would hold enough claret, champagne, or whisky to get a happy Open winner and several friends singing. But what it held mattered less than who held it. The jug would be kept for a year by the reigning Open champion, whose name would be engraved on its curved surface, and each champion would pass it on to his successor. In its time the game’s most-prized trophy would share railway berths with Harry Vardon, J.H. Taylor, and James Braid, the “Great Triumvirate” who combined to win sixteen Open Championships. The jug would ride in cruise-ship cabins with Bobby Jones, the American amateur who won three Opens. It would accompany Open winners until 1928, when the R&A decided to keep the trophy in its clubhouse year-round. That year the R&A commissioned a Claret Jug replica that has traveled with the champions ever since, while the original stayed home in St. Andrews (except in 1982, when Tom Watson, given the original by mistake, took it to his home in Kansas City, where a wild Watson practice swing dented it.) Every summer the one true Jug is hauled out and handed briefly to the Open winner, who is introduced as the “Champion Golfer of the Year.” The winner kisses the Claret Jug and holds it aloft for the crowd to see. His name is engraved on its wooden base—the latest name on a list of champions that reaches back to the soggy Saturday in 1873 when Tom Kidd upset Tommy Morris.

Yet if you look at the original Claret Jug in its glass case in the R&A clubhouse, lifting your eyes from the square wooden base where the name of the 2006 champion, Tiger Woods, is engraved, you see that Kidd’s name is not first on the list, but second. The first line belongs to the 1872 winner, whose name was backdated when the trophy was made. The first champion listed on the Claret Jug was and still is
Tom Morris Jnr.

Seeing his name ahead of Kidd’s on the trophy was no solace to Tommy, who spent the last weeks of 1873 seeing the
Citizen
and the
Fifeshire Journal
bestow on Kidd the title Tommy had thought of as his birthright:

“Tom Kidd (champion) beat Mr. Louden by 5 and 4….”

“Tom Kidd, the champion golfer, announced his engagement….”

But as Tom Morris was pleased to point out (for he so loved a proverb), “’tis an ill wind that bloweth no good.” The storm that swamped the links, ruined all Tom’s work, and probably cost Tommy a fifth Open was a boon to some—and not just the men who took long odds on Kidd. As the whole town learned after the Open, Kidd’s triumph was a boon for love as well. It made him solvent enough to propose to his beloved Eliza, who became the new champion’s fiancée within hours of his victory. As Open champion, Kidd took home £11, the richest purse of his career, and a gold medal that he promptly sold to pay for his wedding. He would have sold the Claret Jug if he hadn’t been legally bound to return it.

Tommy Morris had his own affairs to think about. He spent much of that winter courting a woman who had come to St. Andrews from Edinburgh. She was older than he, long of leg, dark of hair and eye.

Margaret.

S
he was tall enough to look him straight in the eye. Her hair was black, or rather the darkest possible brown, showing the brown only in direct sunlight. Margaret Drinnen was older than Tommy and she was no innocent, people said, but that was no sin as far as he was concerned. The St. Andrews lasses he knew, stuffed into their crinolines and flounced multitiered dresses, resembled toy dolls and knew as much of life as a doll knows. Raised to be marriageable, they could play piano, sew, and pray, and many would be rudely surprised by the barnyard aspects of their wedding nights. But this was a woman of thirty, new in town, working as a maid in one of the grand houses on The Scores.

No one knows how she and Tommy met. It may have been a dance. Margaret arrived from Edinburgh in 1872, too late to attend the Rose Club Ball that January, but there were other dances. Victorian mores set strict limits on contact between young men and women; dances were designed to subvert the limits. A young woman held her handkerchief a certain way to signal her willingness to dance with a particular fellow. He would bow and offer his hand. She moved to him and their left hands interlocked, his right hand on the curve of her waist. Scottish couples danced the faddish French quadrille as well as such old Scottish reliables as the Gay Gordons and Strip the Willow. Tommy may have first seen Margaret across the Town Hall ballroom, a tall woman in a long, dark gown and white kid gloves that stretched to her elbows, her dark hair framing an angular face that turned his way for a moment before a crowd of dancers drifted between them.

She came from West Lothian, a region the journalist William Cobbett described in 1832 as “a very fine county altogether; it has a due mixture of orchards, woods, corn-fields and pastures…. Butter and milk are the chief products of the soil.” Since then, coal and ironstone mines had turned farmland into a moonscape of coal pits and slag heaps, one of the most poisonous places on earth and one of the most productive, for the industry that blackened West Lothian helped build the British Empire.

Britain lacked the vast forests that preindustrial iron-making required. For centuries, as Barbara Freese wrote in
Coal: A Human History
, “iron was still essentially a forest product; you couldn’t make it without burning vast amounts of wood, which Britain simply didn’t have.” Coal was plentiful but it contained impurities that made for bad iron. Baking the coal yielded coke, which worked better, and in the 1780s technical advances helped smelters use coke and iron ore to make high-quality iron in unheard-of tonnages. Between 1830 and 1844, with steam-powered blast furnaces running day and night, Scottish iron production rose from 40,000 tons to 412,000. By 1850 Scottish iron accounted for ninety percent of Britain’s iron exports.

Margaret Drinnen’s father Walter, called Watty, was a coal-pit bottomer. He ran the cage that took men from the surface to the tunnels of a West Lothian mine owned by the Coltness Iron Company. Coltness had built a ramshackle town, Whitburn, atop the underground seams of coal and ironstone it owned. Watty Drinnen, a black-fingered, black-toothed man, lived with his wife and six children at number 5 Crofthead Road, Whitburn, one of 129 identical shacks facing a rutted dirt track. The eight Drinnens shared two rooms with a boarder who paid a few pennies rent. Margaret and the rest shared three water closets with more than a thousand inhabitants of the other two-room shacks on Crofthead Road. Some mornings the toilet lines were so long that people relieved themselves outdoors, adding to the stench of coal and sulfur that hung in the air until rain drove it into the muck. According to David Malcolm, a St. Andrews golf historian who uncovered many details of Margaret’s life, her hometown was almost unimaginably foul. “The hellish filth and squalor of mid-nineteenth-century Whitburn,” says Malcolm, “were entirely outwith the experience of present times.”

A generation earlier, women and children had worked in the mines, dragging coal up steep flights of steps. “The mother…descends the pit with her older daughters when each, having a basket, lays it down, and into it the large coals are rolled: and such is the weight that it frequently takes two men to lift the burden upon their backs,” goes one account. “The mother sets out first, carrying a lighted candle in her teeth; the girls follow…they proceed with weary steps and slow, ascend the stairs…till they arrive at the pit top, where the coals are laid down for sale; in this manner they go for 8 to 10 hours almost without resting. It is no uncommon thing to see them when ascending from the pit weeping most bitterly.” Eleven-year-old girls dragged hundred-pound loads and were “hags” before they turned twenty. An 1853 law that barred females from working underground simply shifted the burden to boys. In 1872 the House of Commons passed a bill cutting the daily shifts of boy miners—those under the age of thirteen—from twelve hours to ten. That left boys of nine and ten with six-day, sixty-hour workweeks. Men worked longer hours, including the occasional twenty-hour shift, sweating in darkness so thick they could taste it.

The air in the mines was heavy with coal dust. It stung the eyes and blackened bread that sat out too long. Coal wagons rode rails through rat-infested tunnels to the pit in the Coltness mine, where Watty Drinnen ran the steam-powered cage that had replaced the stairs—an innovation that coal-masters considered a kindness to miners. The wagons sometimes crushed exhausted boys who had fallen asleep on the rails. Killed boys were buried on Sunday, the one day their relatives didn’t have to work.

After women were prohibited from working underground, they sought other ways to supplement their husbands’ meager wages. Many looked after the children of other miners’ families as well as their own, calming the sick ones with watered-down ale or whisky. They would pour a week’s worth of porridge into a pewter-lined drawer; after it hardened you could cut out a chunk and fry it for breakfast, or wrap it in a handkerchief to save for lunch. Margaret Drinnen probably cooked hundreds of drawers’ worth of porridge while contemplating her one likely alternative to spinster-hood: marrying a miner and moving to another cramped shack in Whitburn. Even that honor was denied to many girls, since miners didn’t always marry the girls they got pregnant. When Margaret was eighteen, her older sister Agnes bore an illegitimate son. The same fate befell another Drinnen sister, Helen, three years later.

Margaret, the tall striking-looking one, wanted none of that. She was literate thanks to a school system founded on the belief that reading the Bible was vital to spiritual growth. Bright and capable, Margaret apprenticed as a lace tambourer, doing weaving that required quick, talented fingers. Lace tambourers occasionally landed work as ladies’ maids, and Margaret won a post as a maid in Edinburgh—a triumph for a Whitburn girl. “In those days you
dreamed
your daughter might get a job ‘in service,’” says Malcolm. “She’d be fed and clothed and live in a clean, well lighted house, a respectable house.” Margaret worked in the home of a prominent solicitor in Edinburgh’s thriving New Town, where she toiled like a dray mare for food, board, and pay of about £8 a year.

Housemaids typically worked from dawn until 10:30 or eleven
P.M.
, cleaning floors on their hands and knees, feeding coal fires, sweeping and shaking out rugs, dusting, washing windows, serving meals, making beds, heating and carrying water for baths, polishing brass, blacking shoes. Maids worked seven days a week and had little time for social lives. Some were literally barred from courtship: In many of Edinburgh’s better houses, the maid’s bedroom was the only one with bars on the windows. Still, the bars were not always enough to keep her virginal. Many maids were preyed on by men in the homes where they worked, men whose only other sexual outlet was paying prostitutes who had probably fled the ranks of domestic servants. As historian T. C. Smout of St. Andrews University notes, four-fifths of the prostitutes in the Edinburgh Magdalene Asylum had been maids.

Somehow Margaret thrived. Stiffer of spine than her ladylike manner suggested, she had a certain grace that set her apart. In 1872 she moved up in the world again. The Edinburgh solicitor’s mother, who lived in St. Andrews, needed a bright, reliable maid. The solicitor’s wife recommended Margaret, who went to live and work in a grand villa on The Scores, facing the sea.

If she hadn’t already heard of St. Andrews’ golfing celebrity, she soon heard plenty. Everyone in town knew “our Tommy.” Girls found him dashing; matrons clucked fondly over his quick smile, his fine-but-not-fancy suits, and his gallantry, for he was quite the young gent despite being only a greenkeeper’s son.

Like Margaret, Tommy had seen a bit of the world. He often visited smoke-shrouded Edinburgh with his Rose Club friends, some of whom spent time and coin in the city’s brothels—there were more than a hundred—and came home with unmentionable itches. Tommy may have done some scratching of his own. Young men were not expected to stay virginal into their twenties, and he was almost certainly not a virgin at twenty-two. Yet he wasn’t a wastrel, either. There was too much of his father’s common sense in him for that. Which left Tommy with a challenge: If whoring wasn’t his taste, and neither were innocent girls who lived to sew and pray, he would need to find an unusual woman.

It seems Tommy’s parents were not pleased to hear that their son was courting Margaret Drinnen. They had doubtless pictured him marrying a wealthy gentleman’s daughter. Never mind that Nancy had also been a maid in her day. This was different. Tommy was a celebrity, and his parents had reason to hope for a marriage that would secure all their futures in the middle class. But in love as in other things, Tommy made his own choices.

At least courting Margaret wasn’t sapping his strength. Tommy was in top form in 1873 and ’74, winning singles and foursomes matches in bunches, filling the pockets of both Tom Morrises.

The 1874 Open, held in April to coincide with the spring meeting of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, renewed the duel between the Morrises of St. Andrews and the golfers of Musselburgh. The surprise was that Musselburgh’s hero this time was not Willie Park or Bob Fergusson, but a man who had spent twenty years fishing.

A morning hailstorm turned the nine-hole Musselburgh links cold, bumpy, and white. The hail left meltwater on the putting-greens, but a breeze off the Firth of Forth dried them before play began at noon. Tom Kidd’s ribbed irons would do him no good today. A field of thirty-two golfers, the largest ever, featured five prominent St. Andreans: defending champion Kidd, sporting one of his colorful silk waistcoats, black-clad Davie Strath, and three Morrises—the famous two as well as Jimmy, a whip-thin young man of eighteen with even-thinner hopes of finishing ahead of his older brother.

Most of the crowd followed Tommy and Willie Park, the marquee pairing. Golf had changed mightily in the seven years since Park turned to Tom Morris at Carnoustie and asked, “What have you brought this laddie here for?” Now Willie had strands of gray in his bushy side-whiskers. He still swung as hard as any man, but these days his driving frightened no one. Tommy, Strath, and Kidd could all outdistance him. Park drew whoops from the Musselburgh crowd when he sank a long putt at the first hole, called The Graves to honor the sixteenth-century soldiers buried under the green. He wavered with a six at the next hole, a score Tommy was annoyed to match after a perfect drive and a second shot that sliced so far to the right that his ball rolled into a road beside the course. From there Tommy chunked his approach, the heel of his cleek bouncing at impact, the ball blooping only halfway to the green—a shot as noisome as the Park fanatics who applauded it. He and Park both finished the first eighteen in 83 strokes.

A hum in the gallery told them that someone was doing better. The crowd around Tommy and Park dwindled as spectators hurried to follow the surprise leader, who had fired a flawless 75 over the first eighteen holes. As
The Field
put it, “onlookers who had been following other couples forsook their allegiance and attached themselves to the game of Mungo.” When Willie Park heard the news, he smiled. The leader was his younger brother Mungo, the golfer who had gone to sea.

In his youth, Mungo Park had been the best boy golfer in Musselburgh. Then he took work on a North Sea fishing boat, perilous work that seemed to offer a better future than that of a golfer. After twenty years at sea Mungo came home, tanned and fearless, with scarred, corded forearms and a mustachioed face creased by winter gales. He bought a set of hickories and began beating all the local golfers except his brother Willie. And at the 1874 Open he shocked the crowd and probably even himself by taking an eight-shot lead on Willie and the player they both feared, Tommy Morris.

The more his gallery grew, the more Mungo squirmed. He gave five strokes back during his third circuit of the nine-hole course while getting no challenge from Willie, who fell back stroke by stroke. But Tommy crept closer while Mungo’s putter suffered from the shakes.
The Field
’s reporter saw the crowd yo-yo back toward Tommy: “A goodly number of the spectators bethought themselves of reverting again to their old favourite…towards the close of the match it was anticipated that he would at least ‘tie.’” Mungo wrestled home a putt on the last green to finish his closing eighteen in 84 shots for a total of 159, a score that eliminated every contender but one.

Now Mungo’s supporters charged out to join Tommy’s gallery. Some went to watch, some to hoot and hiss, some to kick his ball if they could. He disappointed them by spearing his drive into the fairway. As the
Scotsman
reported, he was “swiping beautifully” with his driver. At the next hole, named the Gas Hole for the fuming gasworks behind the green, he struck an approach that fell on a shallow arc, skipped forward and sniffed at the hole. For an instant it seemed it would fall in, but the ball ran just past. On his way to the green he had the same numbers in his head as everyone else: If he made this putt, then a standard three at the short Home Hole would be enough to tie Mungo. This putt and a deuce at the Home Hole would win the Claret Jug.