Harry Vardon King of Clubs Part 1
Welcome to another episode of the History Islands.
Harry Vardon grew up in poverty, in a tiny cottage in rural Jersey. He would become a founding father of the modern game of golf. He singlehandedly revolutionised its play; his innovative Vardon grip became the global standard. When he toured America, the world beat a path to his door. His duel with Francis Ouimet lit the touchpaper for the golf mania that would consume the USA in the twentieth century.
When Vardon took the radical step of sporting knickerbockers, the golfing world spun on a dime and embraced this novel fashion. With his obsessive practice regime, his consummate discipline, as much as his effortless style, Vardon was the shape of things to come. This is his story.
Harry Vardon
Grouville Common, Jersey
1878
I remember the day when the strangers seized our land. The vagabonds at our cottage gate wore stove-pipe hats and carried warrants in their hand. Their eyes glinted with delight, as they sized up the dunes and calculated the lie of the slopes.
‘Harry, get back indoors!’. My father pushed past me to the door, his neck bulging with rage as he moved to confront the interlopers. He remonstrated with them, spitting out oaths in Jersey French, but there was nothing he could do. All the tenant farmers along the coast were up in arms; for the ancient Common was being snatched from under our feet. The Constable had decreed it, and his word in our parish runs as sure as holy writ.
The intruders were intent on levelling the land. Our beloved cottage was nothing but an obstacle, earmarked for destruction. Tensions were riding high, and Father even roared that he would summon a dreaded, mythical beast to defend us - the “clameur de haro”! Taken aback by the threat, the men reluctantly agreed to spare our home. Yet they would soon return, as inevitable as the tide. The next day, as my mother Eliza sobbed by the fireplace, I slipped outside to watch the strange visitors who had unleashed this whirlwind.
The men in black seem like visitors from a strange and distant world. I stood barefoot before them in the grass, watching them measure the dunes, parcelling out our playground. They were dividing up the bramble heath where my brothers and I ran freely as rabbits. All the secret dens where we nestled, thick as thieves, the cricket pitch we had scratched out last summer; everything must go. Mother explained that our cherished playground was never actually ours, but rather parish land; and now the Constable was earmarking it for some curious new purpose.
The surveyors paid me scant attention. Dressed in rags and with a dirty, bemused face, I must have seemed like a ghost from a world that was already slipping into the past. We’d always lived here in Grouville, where the parish falls away into the bay, by the very edge of the dunes. The shadow of France hangs on the horizon. Two great bastions, the brute hulk of Fort Henry close by, and Mont Orgueil astride the horizon, marked the boundaries of my world. My life on the Common was simple; a cabbage loaf in the oven, brawling with my brothers, and miserable mornings cloistered in the schoolhouse. Since the shipyards closed their gates, Father had eked out a hard living. He laboured wherever he could find work to feed us, and I would hear him wheeze with exhaustion at night, when he collapsed in front of the fire.
Sometimes I wished he would toil a little less. Two of his precious pennies a week consigned me to the misery of the Gorey schoolhouse and the tedium of Mr Boomer’s relentless declensions and conjugations. As soon as the sun bursts over the bay, I would skip school and run truant across the fields. I knew furious old Boomer would make me muck out his rabbit hutch later, but that punishment was water off a duck’s back. I dreamed only of the place where the sand sweeps across the fields, where I could chase a ball and be free.
And now the commons were dying. As the year wore on, the landscaping proceeded apace, and workmen tamed the heath into a strange new form. The ditches and culverts were filled, the ragged outcrops polished. They planted beds of fresh grass until the land stretched as velvet as an Alpine meadow. The new landscape was fit for a prince, and indeed Her Majesty would very soon bestow it with the favoured title of “Royal”.
And in 1878, the sweet fairways opened, and the gentlemen arrived, trussed to the nines in odd paraphernalia. They bore a curious armoury of clubs, with names from an older, northern kingdom: the mashie, the brassie, the niblick. They placed a rubbery, misshapen ball on the ground – they called it a gutta-percha – and then endeavoured to smash it as far as their unsullied hands would allow.
On the day the Royal Jersey Golf Club formally opened, I was once again standing there, watching the strange spectacle unfold. Our cottage was marooned now, like a beached whale stranded among the greens. They’d even taken the Royal Oak pub and turned it into their clubhouse – the “Golf Inn”, they were calling it these days.
While my brothers lost interest and returned to the fireside, I continued to stand there, enraptured by the play. My bare feet felt the softness of the freshly hewn grass, as rich as a king’s carpet. In my bones, I felt a curious warmth, drawing me as close as the tide lapping on the shoreline, as natural as my mother’s embrace. I looked at the ridiculous sportsmen in their great-coats and ties, struggling with their clubs. And then I looked beyond them, in my mind’s eye, and saw something more.
That night, when the wealthy gentlemen had taken their carriages home, when the sun dipped over the western ridge, and the golf course slipped into darkness, I dreamed a strange dream. I was standing in that empty field, where I had taken my first steps. The cottage was behind me, and the sun was rising in the east. Something was lying buried there, some hidden part of me, waiting to be found.
They say some people must travel to the ends of the earth to find their treasure, their life’s calling. Mine had come searching for me. Now it stood at my door, waiting for the key to turn, and for the great game to begin.
To be continued…
Paul Darroch is the author of Jersey: The Hidden Histories and Jersey: Secrets of the Sea. You can hear him on The History Islands on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
(c) Paul Darroch 2023