I have had a fine Summer's Golf

While in August 1898, Crockett wrote from Bank House to a work correspondent in a state of productive contentment: “I have had a fine summers golf and am now again at work'  many of his letters do show a body under strain in these years as he approached his 40s.

The previous summer Ruth Crockett, writing to Marion Macmillan in June 1897 after her husband’s bicycle accident and the abscess that followed, noted with quiet relief: “he is now able for his round of golf in the day, which is five miles walking.” 

The spring of that year had already brought a diagnosis of nervous exhaustion and six weeks abroad. The regime that had seemed so restorative in 1895 — eight weeks of golf, nearly three months of golf, fit as a fiddle — looked different by 1897 and 1898.

Chickens have a way of coming home to roost, and in a letter to Joseph Pennell in April 1899, Crockett reports on an operation to remove a tumour from his jaw some weeks previously. 

Yes, I ain't a BEAST - only for a long time I looked rather like one. I had a nasty (and ugly) semi cancerous growth on my jaw which the butchering doctor fellows excised six weeks ago. I’m just out of hospital. It wasn't anything congenital, praise the pigs, but begotten years ago by the stroke of a golf ball which caused a plate of bone to grow outwards. However it was ripe and beginning to send shoots southwards into my throat. So it was time to do for him.'

This may account for the end of Crockett's time golfing - or it may simply have been he was too busy for prolonged recreational stays as his work load increased and he spent ever more time abroad. 

However, he likely maintained some connection with the town as both of his daughters Maisie and Margaret attended St Leonard’s School in St Andrews in the early years of the twentieth century.

Whether he ever returned to the Old Course, or stood again on the seventh tee with the High Hole in mind, we will probably never know.  But the letters and photographs we do have in the archive open up many interesting connections - Seaton House, St Andrews and Golf were one small part of Crockett's life in the years of his peak fame.  It serves to remind us that with Crockett, the connections are never the expected ones.