Willie Park Junior

About the Book: 

 In the 19th century, Musselburgh was a hotbed of golfing genius and the local links produced five Open Champions. One of these was Willie Park Junior. More than a good golfer, he redefined the image of the golf professional and took the game from being an esoteric pastime to its present status as a world game. As well as winning the Open in 1887 and 1889, Willie played challenge and demonstration matches at home, in Europe and in North America. His workshops turned out golf balls and clubs to his own design and he had retail outlets in Edinburgh, Manchester, London, New York and Montreal. He designed and laid out over 100 golf courses in the British Isles and Western Europe.

When he published The Game of Golf in 1896 it was the first book on the game written by a professional. World War I killed off Willie's activities at home, so he moved across the Atlantic. Concentrating on course design he engineered over 40 courses in the US and 20 in Canada. Willie Park was the epitome of Scottish Victorian enterprise. Though not alone, he was the most active of missionaries, taking the skills and equipment of a local game to what were then the two major continents.

Reviews: 

Stephen is excellent at recreating the world in which the great Scotsman lived... There are weird but entertaining wanders along the lanes of golf in literature, the horrors of slow play, and the philosophy of the game. THE HERALD

About the Author:

WALTER STEPHEN was born in Thurso, Caithness and educated at schools and universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with degrees in Geography, Economic History and Education. He was Principal Teacher of Geography in distinguished schools in Fife and Edinburgh, then became the first Adviser in Social Studies in Edinburgh and Senior Adviser in Lothian Region. In schools shrunk by falling student numbers, he set up Castlehill Urban Studies Centre, the first successful Urban Studies Centre in Britain, and the History of Education Centre.

As an independent scholar he has been active in investigating Interesting Victorians and has been responsible for books on Patrick Geddes (planner and polymath), Willie Park Junior (‘The Man who took Golf to the World’), Frank Fraser Darling (born in 1903, but a Victorian in spirit who lived among the red deer and founded the environmental movement) and Charles Darwin (in The Evolution of Evolution: Darwin, Enlightenment and Scotland).