Clubs

First introduced in the early 1880s (and sometimes attributed to George Forrester of Elie: he certainly claimed to have invented it in 1884 in a letter to Golf in 1928¹) the mashie proved to be a club of many purposes. The first mashies had a loft of a number 5 iron and were recommended as an ideal club for the beginner. The club head of the mashie was shorter than normal allowing it to cut through longer grass more readily and in a sense it replaced the lofting iron. It only became really popular after its abilities were demonstrated by J H Taylor in the 1894 Open. When Taylor himself went into clubmaking his firm, Cann & Taylor, produced a modified mashie, shorter in the head, in 1898, which he felt was better suited to the average player: it was known as the mashie iron.

John Henry Taylor, populariser of the mashie

The mashie, as with all iron clubs, was not universally loved and certainly not by the traditionalists. As late as 1899 Lord Wemyss granted land to a club at Craigielaw but then turfed off the course those players who ‘lifted Scotland’ with their mashies. ²

Golfing did a vox pop of clubmakers³ to gauge their views on wooden clubs in response to this. Generally, they felt the day of the wooden club was gone though Robert Simpson favoured the wooden putter for run-up putts and A H Scott favoured the brassie spoon as a substitute for the cleek with irons used only for the approach shot.

Attitudes to the mashie soon changed.

‘Ýou drive for show but putt for dough’, has been a watchword in golf for many years but, when Badminton Magazine asked golfers in 1914 ⁴ what the most useful shot in golf was, the majority opted for ‘the mashie shot’. Katharine Stuart Creswell, writing in Golfers Magazine⁵ recalled Jimmy Anderson, son of Jamie, three times Open Champion, quoting his father’s maxim that it was not really necessary to carry a putter, meaning he could be so sure of his approach shots, any club would do to knock the ball into the hole! Ms Cresswell described playing against the great North Berwick amateur, Dorothy Campbell, winner of the British, Canadian and US championships, routinely out-driving her but, within fifty yards of the hole, always taking one more shot than her opponent. No disgrace in that, Miss Campbell, later Mrs Hurd and Mrs Howe, after her second marriage, was an outstanding approach player.

‘Dorothy’s best stroke was a run-up shot that she used from distances of up to 50 feet. She used her goose-neck mashie [which she called Thomas], closing the small clubface and hitting the ball on the downswing. At Augusta Country Club in 1926, she holed two chip shots and ended up having a record low of 19 putts for 18 holes, lowering Walter Travis’s record by two strokes for putts in one round.’ ⁶

Turning to the use of the club by ordinary mortals, Katharine Cresswell recommends,

‘A mashie being chiefly for lofted shots of short distance, should be deep faced, wee lofted and heavy headed with a good stiff shaft. A whippy shaft is no good because it cannot control the weight of the head and is all against accuracy …. Except in exceptional cases a woman should not use it for a distance greater than about 80 yards … on no account should a full swing ever be used with such a lofted club.’

‘The downswing must be as crisp and firm for the chip-shot as it is for the eighty yarder. This is where so many people go wrong ….’

‘For the full mashie shot the heel of my left foot is slightly ahead of. i.e. nearer the hole than the ball. The right foot is not quite square with the left but slightly adsvanced towards the ball. The feet I keep straight …. And not too far apart as if they are too much “straddled” it not only looks ungainly but takes away one’s power over the ball. The body mut not be bent too much …..’

‘For shorter shots feet closer together and right nearer the ball. For very short shots in which one stands well over the ball and grips the club short, it has a very steadying effect to rest the right forearm on the right leg/’

As with all irons, the mashie was soon differentiated into various forms, the mashie iron, already mentioned, the self-explanatory deep-faced version, the spade mashie with oversized head and, generally associated with Willie Park around 1900, the driving mashie, typically used off the tee at longer short holes.

REFERENCES

1. This claim generated a fair bit of interest. Originally, Hatold Hilton, in the Westminster Gazette in 1911 had asked the question of who had invented the club. A letter in response said the writer had been in Elie twelve years previously and one of the clubmakers had told him that one season, when the grass was long, they had introduced a club which “mashed” the grass. This was the claim rehearsed by Forrester in his letter to Golf. It sparked correspondence in the Scotsman where a writer suggested the club has been produced at Hoylake a couple of years prior to the Elie claim when Jack Morris, in conjunction with Mr A F Macfie, a future amateur champion, looked at a consignment of iron clubheads from Scotland and considered how the curved faces could be straightened and the loft increased.
2. Dundee Courier, 19 January 1899, p6
3. ibid
4. Creswelll, Katharine S, Mashie Play, Golfers Magazine, Chicago, 1918
5. ibid
6. Stringer, Mabel E, Golfing Reminiscences, Mills and Boon, London, 1924,
Keywords: FORRESTER TAYLOR MASHIE