CHAPTER XLII 



GIANTS OF THE LINKS 



I CAN remember when, as a small lower-school fag, I 

 used to be dispatched to the butcher's on the morning of 

 a football match for a couple of bullock's bladders — one 

 to be held in reserve, the other to be inflated to fill the 

 leather ball-covering for the afternoon's play. The infla- 

 tion of that bladder was not a savoury task. Sometimes 

 the bladder collapsed in the middle of a game, and then 

 the reserve bladder had to be inflated by some poor devil 

 of a fag, whose lungs and olfactory nerves were sorely tried. 



I have never heard that the butchers found themselves 

 serious losers by the substitution of other substances for 

 the inflation of footballs ; but the makers of the old- 

 fashioned golf-balls were in a great state of consternation 

 when the new gutta-percha ball first came into vogue. 

 For centuries golf-balls were only made in one way — a 

 stout leather case stuffed hard with boiled feathers. The 

 balls were expensive, but that tended to keep the game 

 select and aristocratic. In the year 1848, Campbell of 

 Saddell, whose hunting songs have made him famous, 

 first introduced gutta-percha balls at St Andrews. Very 

 soon the cheapness of the new ball began to appeal to the 

 canny Scot, and the manufacturers of the old feather balls 

 raised a fierce protest against the gutta-percha innovation. 



Foremost among them was Allan Robertson, of whom 

 old golfers speak with bated breath as the greatest golfer 

 that ever lived, just as veteran cricketers used to speak 

 of Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn in the days before 

 "W. G." and "Ranji." Allan, like his father and grand- 

 father before him, was not only a great player but a famous 

 maker of balls. He was turning out upwards of 2500 balls 



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