The Gentry Links Trilogy
What others say ...
We take great pride in our beautifully crafted and illustrated books, reflecting endless hours of hard work and artistic creativity: showing old images in new ways. Our books feature Forewords by most generous contributors who lend their many years of experience and wisdom to these pages, for which we are most grateful. Their words of praise and encouragement are a testament to the quality of our work
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Foreword
'Gentry Links and the Great Men of 'The Golfers
Events of the past provide numerous opportunities for investigation and research, followed by comment and debate. For meaningful debate to come about, the researcher has to be seen to be trustworthy and have the ability to pay particular attention to detail
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Alastair Loudon has inherited these skills from his father Niel, who for many years was the Rules of Golf Secretary of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews
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I was fortunate to have served on the Rules Committee with Niel as Secretary and witnessed at close hand his mastery of the intricacies of this sometimes very complicated subject through clear thinking and his ability to convey it to others
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With this pedigree, Alastair has the qualifications to be given particular attention when he shares his research and thoughts on that most famous golf painting, The Golfers
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In the year 2000, as Captain of the R&A at the time, I was asked to join with that year’s Open Champion, Tiger Woods, in signing 1,000 Limited Edition Prints, of which I have one
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I have looked at the painting countless times, without seeing anything other than a record of a match between Sir David Baird and Sir Ralph Anstruther against Major Hugh Lyon Playfair and John Campbell of Glensaddell, watched by some notable figures of the time. Occasionally I identify these against the key that goes with the painting and pick out someone in particular
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From now on, I will look at the painting with renewed interest, as a commentary on the people and events which were changing the old face of golf and starting to introduce it to a wider participatio
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We present-day golfers should be grateful to those responsible for change and to Charles Lees for recording it so vividly
The late Sir Michael Bonallack, OBE
Former Secretary and Captain of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews
St Andrews
October 2018
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Foreword
North Berwick, 1832 … and its Gentry Links
The Golfers: A Grand Match Played over the Links of St Andrews on the Day of the Annual Meeting of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, 1847 and The First Meeting of North Berwick Golf Club, the two most famous paintings in the world of golf, were exhibited together at The Philadelphia Museum of Art during the 113th US Open at Merion Golf Club in June 2013
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In May 2019, while I was in St Andrews for the Spring Meeting of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, I attended a talk by Alastair Loudon on his new book Gentry Links: The Great Men of The Golfers. I told Alastair that The Links Club in New York was the proud owner of the other great painting, The First Meeting of North Berwick Golf Club, and invited him to The Links Club to see it
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This book is the result. It is a work of meticulous scholarship. It reveals the significance of Sir David Baird, Bart, a key protagonist in the painting, in the evolution of the game and how the gentlemen of The North Berwick Golf Club became linked with Prestwick Golf Club and the first Open Championship in 1860. Alastair has brought to life gentry links which provide detail and colour to an important era of golf
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This is a book which will delight all those who are interested in the evolution of the game of golf, the painting itself and the world-acclaimed Scottish artist Sir Francis Grant, President of the Royal Academy
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Charles Blair Macdonald, the founder of The Links, was very proud of his Scottish ancestry. Now through this painting, owned by The Links, the importance of his favourite town in Scotland, North Berwick, has been told and the circle is complete
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John Nesbitt
Member of The Links Club
New York City
September 2020
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Foreword
Gentry Links … to the Modern Game: The Bigger Picture
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It is a well-known fact of Scottish sporting history that the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith established an annual challenge in 1744, but just over ten years later 22 noblemen and scholars of the Kingdom of Fife subscribed to the presentation of a Silver Club to be played annually over the links of St Andrews. Surmounting the list of subscribers’ names, dated 14th May 1754, is my namesake and forebear, Charles Bruce, 5th Earl of Elgin and 9th Earl of Kincardine, who regularly played golf at St Andrews where he attended the university, both as a scholar and a nobleman.
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The decade which elapsed between the annual challenges played at Leith and St Andrews was one of the most momentous in Scottish history. In August 1745 Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) landed on the northwest coast at Glenfinnan. By April the following year, his audacious attempt to seize the British throne with an army raised mainly from Highland clans had been snuffed out at the Battle of Culloden. In the aftermath of the rebellion, the leading Lowland families, sensing that the Jacobite cause had failed, turned their attention to improving their agricultural land and opening new businesses, thereby propelling Scotland from an economic backwater to become one of most enterprising societies in Europe
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Within two years of subscribing to the Silver Club, the 5th Earl himself founded a mineral-processing industry on his estate at Broomhall in Fife, laying out a model settlement 30 years in advance of New Lanark. His fellow gentry prospered in the new Scotland of enlightenment and enterprise: they joined learned societies, formed joint stock banks and invested in overseas trade. I have a strong suspicion that the camaraderie formed as a consequence of creating the world’s first golf clubs 270 years ago played an important part in this process
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I congratulate Alastair Loudon for adding to our knowledge of the history of golf. He has clearly captured the social circumstances that lay behind the origins of the game, and the characters who led it to maturity and who introduced it to North America and around the world. I commend his scholarship to everyone who is interested in the heritage of this great game
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Charles Bruce (Lord Bruce)
Heir Apparent to the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine
Broomhall, Fife
April, 2023
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Golfers at Leith Links, Edinburgh, 19th century, reproduced under licence from Alamy
Reviews
Gentry Links…To the Modern Game: The Bigger Picture, Medal Day, 1894
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With the publication of Gentry Links…To the Modern Game: The Bigger Picture, Medal Day, 1894, Alastair Loudon’s concludes his Gentry Links trilogy that masterfully explores the personalities and mechanisms that drove substantial growth of the game in the United Kingdom and the geographic expansion of golf to every continent in the second half of the nineteenth century. For each volume of the trilogy, Loudon has focused on a body of evidence largely overlooked by previous golf scholars—that is, paintings, and specifically three of the most significant paintings in the history of golf art.
Even a cursory review of golf literature will illuminate the fact that textual sources (newspapers, magazines, written documents, etc.) have been the primary source materials long leveraged by historians of the game. Loudon demonstrates convincingly that visual imagery can be equally relevant both for broadening and deepening our understanding of golf history. It must be acknowledged that this is an important advancement in the methodology of golf scholarship, one which begs to be continued by future historians.
Moreover, the three paintings (Charles Lees, The Golfers; Sir Francis Grant, The First Meeting of North Berwick Golf Club; and Alexander Hamilton Wardlow, Captain Driving Off) are well known, yet Loudon succeeds in extracting deeper levels of meaning from each work through his exacting efforts to identify every figure depicted, to summarize their professional, political and social standing, and to look carefully at the relationships between the figures (where they were positioned in the composition, with whom they relate, etc.) as a means of illuminating the social and political structures that influenced the game’s development.
In this third volume, Loudon deconstructs Wardlow’s Captain Driving Off, also known as Medal Day, 1894, an enormous canvas that hangs in the The Big Room of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews. The work features 191 individual portraits, most members of the club. From these, Loudon extracts three groups of principal protagonists—famous golfers, Captains of the club, and the members of the first Rules of Golf Committee—that played central roles in the creation of the modern game.
Critically important, Loudon explores in great detail, and quite masterfully, the connections between the individuals represented and the expansion of the game in North America. Where previous scholarship has focused considerable attention on the diaspora of Scottish professional golfers and greenskeepers to support the burgeoning game in Canada and the United States, Loudon instead focuses on the patrons who were more directly responsible for the establishment of clubs across the Atlantic. This is both a novel and refreshing approach, which for the first time illuminates critical relationships between many of the wealthiest families of the United States and Canada and the leading capitalists and industrialists of Great Britain.
Further, Loudon shows how Victorian British foreign policy nurtured these relationships, creating an extended “transatlantic Anglo-Saxon family” that drove the expansion of the game. Chapter 8 is especially important, for shining first light on the role that the French resort Pau played in the founding of Newport Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and The Country Club (Brookline, Mass.), all three to become founding members of the USGA in 1894; as well as on the women of leading Gilded Age families, in particular Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, whose embrace of golf substantively elevated acceptance of the game in American society.
Grant Books has recently released a boxed set of the Gentry LInks trilogy that makes Loudon’s scholarship more accessible and affordable. As expected, the quality of the production, especially the full-color reproductions of the critical paintings, is of the highest quality, matching the caliber and standards of Loudon’s scholarship and making this set a most worthy addition to the library of golf.
Review by Rand Jerris, Ph.D.
Golf historian and former USGA Executive
New Jersey
November 2023
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Reprinted by kind permission of the author, The Golf Heritage Society (in the USA) and The British Golf Collectors Society (in the UK).