history
Retail Restoration
The legend of Old Tom Morris lives on at the Home of Golf with the unveiling of the four-time Open champion's renovated workshop, writes Lewine Mair
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Courtesy of St Andrews Links Trust
heila Walker, the great-great granddaughter of St Andrews legend Old Tom Morris, will never forget that dark evening last winter when the workmen who were renovating Old Tom’s Shop – which overlooks the 18th green of the Old Course – tapped on her door. They called her down from her second-floor home under pretext of wanting to show her how part of the chimneybreast had fallen in. Only when she got there did they say, “There’s something else you need to see.” In one of those eureka moments, they had uncovered Tom Morris’s original locker – Locker No 1. “It was a truly amazing night,” says Walker. “The workman found a couple of doors from the other 15 or so lockers but Old Tom’s was the only locker which was intact.” 58
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Today, it is on display in a glass cabinet, one of several Old Tom artefacts to give visitors to T Morris, as the shop is back to being called, the feeling that they are sharing in the former Open champion’s life and times. “I think interest in him is escalating, if anything,” says Walker, who adds that they also unearthed a brown and gold-leaf sign saying that the business had been under continuous family management. That was one object she kept under wraps, the reason being that she is not managing the shop. “I am just the owner – HKGOLFER.COM
but a very happy one at the way the business is being handled.” The St Andrews Links’ Trust, who took over Tom Morris Ltd last year, are the people at the helm, with their chief concern one of ensuring that future generations will continue to revere Old Tom and the contribution he made to the game of golf. Yo u w o u l d h a v e thought that winners of the early Opens, where there were only a handful of competitors, would not have come close to making the same great names for themselves as the players of today but Old Tom was as much of a character as any Tom, Jack or Gary. Indeed, it was said of him during his lifetime that he was “known, it may be said without contradiction, in each of the four continents of the globe”. Old Tom won his Opens in 1891, 1862, 1864 and 1867. He was 46 for the last of those victories and, to this day, remains the oldest Open champion of them all. Just as his 17-year-old son, Young Tom, was the youngest when he followed on from his father in taking the title in 1868, 1869 and 1870. At that, he won the red leather and silver Championship Belt outright. Old Tom’s shop had opened in 1866, two years after he had been recalled to St Andrews from Prestwick where he had served as Keeper of the Green for 15 years. Almost certainly, his premises in St Andrews would have had a busy time of it in 1873, the first year the Open moved from Prestwick to the Old Course. There were 21 entrants on that occasion and all of them, including the winner, Tom Kidd, would almost certainly have gone to Old Tom for balls and club repairs. The reason the town so wanted Old Tom back in their midst was because they believed that this master of the links, with his wisdom and his diverse talents, would help to make St Andrews “the undisputed capital of golf”. “He was a multi-tasker,” says his greatgreat grand-daughter, who points to how HKGOLFER.COM
Old Tom was so much more than Keeper of the Green. Apart from running his shop and making his Tom Morris clubs and balls, he oversaw alterations to the Old Course and laid out the adjacent New Course, Old Tom’s thick wooden workbench was another of last winter’s discoveries. “I had no idea it was still there,” marvels Walker. The workman had removed the boarding which had covered it up for so many years – and there it was, unchanged from the Old Tom’s time. “It is a north-facing window, which is what an artist would want,” explains Walker. “There wouldn’t have been any shadows.” That north-facing window was necessary on two counts. Apart from the quality of light, it enabled Old Tom keep a watchful and proprietorial eye over the 18th green. If any local lads were fooling around on that hallowed piece of turf, he would be out of his shop in a trice. His dog, Silver, his constant companion in his later years, would no doubt have played his part in sending the youths packing. The fireplace where Old Tom would shape the gutta-percha balls is similarly back to how it was when the business started. Then, there would have been a spherical iron mould, with each gutty starting out as warm putty and coming out as a near-perfect sphere which was then hammered all over to make it fly better. Following the hammering, it would be given two coats of white paint and set aside for three months to cure before being sold. Each ball would be stamped with the same "T Morris" as was emblazoned across the shop front. Old Tom’s life was touched by tragedy as well as triumph. Young Tom died in 1875, they said from a broken heart. In September of that year, he and his father had gone to North Berwick to play one of their famous challenge matches against the Parks of Musselburgh and, during the course of the day, a telegram arrived calling for Young Tom to return home at once. His wife was in labour and dangerously ill. A member of North Berwick took father and son home by yacht and, when they arrived, mother and child were dead. Old Tom’s other children, including Jack, who spent his life in a wheelchair although he was entirely fit enough to help his father with the club-making, all died before he did, with the same applying to his beloved wife. This endlessly good and God-fearing man believed it was all part of the Lord’s plan.
St Andrews Style: The new facade at T Morris, which stands just beyond and right of the 18th green of the Old Course (left), the famous portrait (below) of father and son (Old Tom and Young Tom), captured in the 1870s
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Courtesy of St Andrews Links Trust
"That north-facing window was necessary on two counts. Apart from the quality of light, it enabled Old Tom keep a watchful and proprietorial eye over the 18th green. If any local lads were fooling around on that hallowed piece of turf, he would be out of his shop in a trice."
The Old and the New: The calm and agreeable interior of the new T Morris shop; Old Tom's original locker on display 60
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Young Tom’s championship belt, which today sits in the hallway of the R&A, remained his proudest possession and he would show it to all the writers of the times. No less than would apply today, sporting scribes queued up “to fill their notebooks with what they must have hoped would be his last words.” Old Tom stayed busy. He continued to serve as a starter for important events on the links, he never stopped singing Young Tom’s praises – and he never lost his sense of humour. When, for example, a neighbour was showing off a new telescope, Golf’s grand old men took one look at the moon and declared, “She’s terrible full o’bunkers.” In 1908, six years after the R& A had commissioned a picture of him which has pride of place in their clubhouse, the then 87-yearold Old Tom finally died himself. He had been at the New Club where, after an afternoon of looking over a sunlit links with his fading sight, he mistook one door for another and fell down a stone stairwell. His funeral was an occasion for universal mourning in the town, for no citizen of that old grey town was more respected. “His coffin was followed by professors of the university, members of the R&A and other golf clubs from
far and near. Old caddies came too and the Earl of Stair, who was captain that year, was one of the pall-bearers,” rememb ere d A nd r a Kircaldy, a well-known caddie, club-maker and golfer of the day. Walker inherited the shop from her mother when she died in 1996, with the property having come down through the female line. “None of this should have come to me at all,” she says. “My grandfather had a son called William Morris Hunter but he died at school at the age of 15.” The ref urbished shop has its own range of Tom Morris clothing – burnished orange and olive green were the main autumn colours – with all items bearing a modernised version of the old logo which Old Tom had been shrewd enough to design for himself. The glass display cabinet features a selection of the old champion’s favourite clubs, as well as his locker, while his picture hangs above the aforementioned fire-place with other family portraits around the walls. T Morris is an oasis. Far from being filled with sweaters and shirts and blaring music, as applies to so many of today’s golf stores, there is a sense of space and calm. If only in the imagination, you can almost hear Old Tom tapping away at his workbench.
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