Retail Restoration

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.

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-year-old 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 morning 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,” remembered Andra 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 refurbished 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.