History Of Strathtay Golf Club - pt III
The maintenance of this new course would be similarly simple and inexpensive. The fairways were narrow - they are much broader now - and the rough was left to grow wild, a great encouragement of straight hitting. Fairways would be cut by a local farmer, or by anyone who could drive a tractor. Nobody expected them to be immaculately smooth: the gang-mower was pulled over them no more often than was absolutely necessary. The greens were attended to more regularly, but they were much less amenable to good putting than they are today. They were cut by a variety of machines not always best suited for the purpose (I recall being asked, as late as 1963, to cut the first green, and being assured that my hand-pushed lawnmower would do perfectly well for the job). The greens fell short of perfection in other ways. It was impossible to water them, and in a long dry spell they withered and turned brown. They were infested with moss: the Strathtay valley is plagued by the growth of moss, and no drystone wall, boulder, treestump or garden is free of it. And of course for many years the greens were surrounded by wire fences which the player had to clamber over. The course was too uniquely valuable in the Strathtay area as grazing ground for this purpose to be abandoned, and so sheep served as a gallery to the efforts of golfers. They were no doubt useful in helping to keep the fairway grass short; but an ingenious or determined one could always find it^ way through the wire and leave its signature deposit directly in the line of somebody's putt. There was another use for the course. One of its more level areas was ideally suited for a football pitch, and the local team, Grandtully Vale, played its matches there, bringing in its goalposts for the duration of the game and removing them afterwards. It must be supposed that golfing activities were suspended while football was in progress. Incidentally, a local newspaper report in 1912 records a Strathtay Golf Club competition for The Ballechin Trophy, a cup sadly lost to us. It was won by Captain J. M. Steuart with a 79, a new course record. If he played round the course - the same 9 holes twice - in its early primitive condition, with his hickory-shafted brassie, cleek, mashie and niblick, he was no mean golfer to have recorded such a score. A single-figure handicap golfer today, unfamiliar with Strathtay's various hazards, or simply having one of those off-days which afflict us all, can easily run up such a total, or exceed it.
Needless to say, many of the local smaller courses in Scotland at this time were of much the same somewhat basic standard. The grand and internationally renowned courses - St Andrews, Carnoustie, Gleneagles and the like - would be kept well groomed by their squads of greenkeepers; and courses in and around cities, able to charge hefty membership fees, could also afford to maintain a high standard. Places like Strathtay, with a small membership drawn from a low-wage area, and relying on such visitors as turned up during the summer months, had to keep going on limited resources as best they could. They were more community projects than moneymaking businesses, and only volunteer labour permitted them to survive. Year by year, Strathtay Golf Club paid its way, and Captain Steuart's idea was kept alive. Membership fees were necessarily low, but they were paid; visitors did not come in droves, but they appeared. This income was sometimes augmented by local people who did not play golf. They understood that the golf course was a valuable amenity that attracted visitors to the area, and so they took out a membership as a contribution to its continuing existence. A number of visitors took to appearing regularly every year. They had fallen in love with the course's situation and the wonderful views of the surrounding countryside it afforded (rather, it must be admitted, than with its golfing facilities). Such reliable return visits were as good as membership. Some of them signed on as members anyway. The annual fee was modest in comparison with the rates in the places they came from, and it came to less than they would pay in green fees if they were staying for a fortnight.
The onset of the Second World War in 1939 was a setback for golf, and indeed for all kinds of sports. Members of golf dubs were drawn off into the armed forces to play a far more serious and hazardous game. Golf courses were often requisitioned as training grounds for infantry units. The combination of military exercises and lack of upkeep soon led to deterioration and virtual destruction of many courses as any kind of sports ground. It is said that the Duke of Wellington requested the British government to supply some financial assistance to the Spanish village of Fuentes de Onoro, explaining (in his usual dry way) that it had been in the centre of a major battle against the French and had 'not been much improved' in the process. Golf courses in a better state than Strathtay were left little better than waste ground. Some had actually been ploughed under to provide extra agricultural land, to supply a civilian population threatened with starvation as enemy action sank merchant shipping. Some courses never survived the years of rough treatment and neglect, and none was 'much improved'. Strathtay is reported to have been fairly fortunate. The Home Guard could be seen on it on Sunday mornings, practicing - with blanks - the volleys that would cut down the invading Huns, if they dared to appear. At one point a mass of tents sprang up on the course, providing temporary shelter for troops in transit: if, as one member recalls, they were from India, it is to be feared that they spent some cold nights. But at least our course was spared the damage that armoured vehicles or live ammunition would have inflicted upon it. It must have been in a sorely unkempt state, but it was not ruined.