'I've beat Tom Morris'

On 2nd October 1896, Crockett wrote to Dan Mowat from Seaton House in a tone of barely contained excitement. The letter opens with news of a triumph and immediately undercuts it:  'I’ve beat Tom Morris! Two up. Afternoon. Tom beat me four up The barometer falls.  I’ll read your cousin’s book if in words of one syllable – all I’m capable of at present.'

The same letter notes, almost in the same breath, that a further ten thousand copies of The Grey Man were being printed — making forty-five thousand before publication. It was a moment of success on two fronts. But Crockett’s sense of priority was clear: “But MY ambitions are to do the High Hole in 4 and make Willie Aughterlonie give me six strokes.”

Dan Mowat was a Glasgow book collector about whom the archive tells us relatively little beyond a shared passion for books and golf. Yet it was to Mowat — not to a publisher, not to a literary colleague — that Crockett wrote when he wanted to share a triumph. The nine letters between them, spanning 1894 to 1896, have a particular warmth and informality. An earlier letter from March 1895 notes that illness “knocks my golfing plans on the head”; by the winter of that year, Crockett had clearly recovered and was spending much of his time on the links. The October 1896 letter is the peak of this correspondence: exuberant, funny, and revealing what Crockett actually cared about when the publishers had been dealt with for the day.