Fifty Years of Golf. By Horace G. Hutchinson. (Country Life.
10s. 6d. net.)—Mr. Hutchinson's reminiscences, with their many illustrations, will interest every golfer, for he is the leading authority on the rise of golf in England. When he was a small child, his father went to live near Bideford, two miles from the now famous Westward Ho ! course, which had been laid out in 1864, at the instance of General Monerieffe of St. Andrews and Mr. Gossett, the Vicar of Northam. Mr. Hutchinson learned to play as soon as he could wield a club, and was one of the Oxford team in the first inter-University match in 1878. Ho won the first Amateur Championship in 1886—the year when Mr. Balfour's appointment as Chief Secretary for Ireland drew public attention to the curious Scottish game of which he was a devotee. It is hard to believe as one looks back that the game, then almost unknown in England, has become universal in a generation. But golf in America has developed still more rapidly. Mr. Hutchinson's account of the best American courses, with water laid on at each green and other elaborate devices, shows that the American golfer takes his game even more seriously than our British players do. Mr. Hutchinson proudly reminds us that ho was the first Englishman to be elected captain of the Royal and Ancient, of St. Andrews, in 1908. One of his relatives remarked : " I'm glad they've made Horace that. It will look so well in his obituary notice."
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