About Gentry Links Books

Leading American golf historian Rand Jerris, Ph.D:

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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).

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In relation to Origins 1926 Mr Jerris wrote:

 

In this fine publication, Alastair Loudon once again encourages us to turn to a work of art - Anthony Oakshett's The Origins of The Ryder Cup 1926 - to enrich our understanding of golf history. In this instance, visual imagery serves as critical evidence for the evolving status of professional golf, both in Britain and America, in the early decades of the twentieth century.

 

This monumental painting, which graces the clubhouse at Wentworth Golf Club, documents both a moment in time, when a team of American professionals journeyed to England in June 1926 to compete against a team of British professionals in an informal competition, and an era in golf history, when professional golf had reached maturity and its stature was surpassing that of the amateur game.

 

Continuing his earlier methodology, Alastair leverages the foundational concept of artistic choice, this time enhanced by first-person description from the artist, to illuminate deeper meanings in the richly detailed historical composition.'