The Regime

“I Have Been Golfing for Eight Weeks”

The picture of Crockett’s St Andrews summers that emerges from the correspondence is one of sustained routine. Ruth Crockett’s testimony about the four o’clock starts — quoted in the opening panel of this exhibition — is borne out by her husband’s own letters, which record a golfing season of considerable length.  He often played in October and November. In November 1895 he wrote to a work correspondent saying he'd been 'golfing for eight weeks' and in December 1895 writing to a Mr (Ashcroft) Noble, he stated “I have been playing golf for nearly three months so I am in good health and spirits.”  

By the spring of 1896, having finished The Grey Man the previous autumn, he was direct about how he had spent the intervening time: “I’m as fit as a fiddle and have done nothing but golf since I finish[ed] The Grey Man in September.” 

In truth, Crockett's health was frequently poor - something he wished to conceal from business connections lest it interfere with commissions which were often placed up to three years ahead.  The letters from this period frame golf consistently as a restorative — a counterweight to the writing rather than a distraction from it. Whether the regime was as straightforwardly beneficial as Crockett presented it is a question his later correspondence would begin to complicate.