Early Golf


By Chris Moore


ONE SUCH FOUNDER was John Leslie Walker who claimed he started golf here in 1866. His involvement is chronicled in The Golfers’ Annual of 1869 by Charles MacArthur who attributed Walker with ‘a keen instinct of a true golfer (who) had played over the green or at least some parts of it for many months without finding any kindred spirits to unite in instituting a Club’. This


seems entirely plausible in


that the attractions and appeal of the game were spreading fast, and people - predominantly men in that era - were bound to have given golf a try before


Far Right:


John Ball Senior with his son John, the


extraordinary amateur


Right: Brief


minutes taken 150 years ago


involved in


THE RECOGNISED GENESIS OF GOLF AT HOYLAKE IS THE MEETING IN THE ROYAL HOTEL ON MAY 15 1869 OF WHAT WOULD BE FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE LIVERPOOL GOLF CLUB. IT IS, HOWEVER, UNLIKELY THAT THESE GENTLEMEN GATHERED WITHOUT HAVING SOME EXPERIENCE OF THE GAME AS IT EXPANDED FROM ITS SCOTTISH ROOTS.


thinking about establishing a Club. It is very easy to imagine an early evening stroll onto the closely cropped turf of the race course of the Liverpool Hunt Club with a hickory and a gutta percha ball. Regardless of the apparent lack of support recorded above, by early 1869 there was clearly more interest - hence the inaugural meeting. Walker himself, apart from being forming the Club at


the


outset, was not one of the main driving forces although he was elected to the Council, proposed a number of new members and played occasionally with Jack Morris. The 1871 census recorded that James Walker lived with his young family in The Chase, a substantial villa along Stanley Road. He had been born in Liverpool and


was described as a ‘Produce Broker’. For unknown reason, his name disappeared from the reports of the fixtures of the Club and from the list of residents in the Hoylake area a few years after the Club’s formation. Nevertheless, he writes much later in 1890: ‘I was then staying at the Royal Hotel


of which young Ball’s father was and is, I hope, still the proprietor. Having no one to play with, I, with great difficulty, induced Mr Ball Senior to try the game, which he looked on with great contempt. He, however, very soon changed his opinion and became an ardent but brilliant player; and from this beginning was the Hoylake Golf Club formed, which was proved a great success, the links being first rate and much appreciated by all the best Golf players.’ Walker’s claims to have instigated golf at Hoylake are at odds with the more


established versions of the origins which attribute the development of course and Club to the fertile relationship between Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher, and his brother in law James Muir Dowie who had married Annie, Chambers’ sister, and who lived in West Kirby. Whatever the truth of the matter, Chambers’ credentials are somewhat better known than the rather more vague antecedents revealed about Walker. On balance, it is far safer if we stick


with the established origins whilst being intrigued as to how golfers took up the game here before the Club was formed. But by introducing the game to John Ball Senior, and his influence on all that followed, Walker surely performed a remarkable service for the greater good of the game and the Club. n


I am indebted to Dr Steven Reid of Royal Lytham & St Anne’s GC for unearthing this interesting facet of our history.


ROYAL LIVERPOOL GOLF CLUB 2019–2020 MAGAZINE 37


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