Seaton House

“No Holiday as Far as Work Is Concerned”

The first indication we have of Crockett at St Andrews is a letter in April 1894 to T.Fisher Unwin where Crockett reports he’s just spent a week with Andrew Lang in St Andrews. and from 1895 onwards, the Crockett family spent their summers at Seaton House on the Scores, a boarding house close to the Old Course. The address appears on letters dealing with an extraordinary range of business: negotiations with T. Fisher Unwin, correspondence with Lord Rosebery about original Covenant documents, repeated overtures from the American impresario Major Pond, and, woven through all of it, golf. 

That Seaton House functioned as a working base rather than a holiday retreat is confirmed by the person best placed to know. Ruth Crockett, writing to her friend Marion Macmillan, was matter-of-fact about it: “when we go to St Andrews, you know, he gets up at four in the morning and works just as hard as if we were at home, so, although it is a change of scene, it is no holiday as far as work is concerned.” 

Crockett's own letters from Seaton House bear this out. During the 1896 stay, he was preparing The Grey Man for publication, working on The Black Douglas, and monitoring the serialisation of Cleg Kelly in Cornhill — all while playing thirty-six holes of golf a day. A letter headed Seaton House, St Andrews was as likely to contain a publisher's deadline as a golf score. Often it contained both.

When Major Pond visited in the summer of 1897 and later wrote to say how much he had enjoyed himself, Crockett's reply was warm: “We were pleased indeed to think that St Andrews gave you some pleasure. It is, as you say, a charming old city, and we were delighted to show it to you.”