Sheila 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.”
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 – 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.
You would have 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 great-great grand-daughter, who points to how 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.
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