Clubs

Putters have always attracted the most design tinkering and the first softer metal, brass, was used in putting heads from around 1890 (though Mullocks sold one in 2011 they claimed dated to 1875). The first brass putters were straight bladed clubs that could be used right or left handed. The idea was that there was more feel with the softer metal and lead, cork and rubber were all tried with the same idea in mind. Almost completely the opposite approach was also tried, adding brass face inserts to wooden putters, as the London Golf Company did with Cuirass putters (and drivers). The idea of a brass insert has lived on with relatively recent putters from the likes of Otey Crisman using this feature and the solid brass putter has continued through the Spalding “Cash-in” model or Ram Eagles’s Claw, 350 or Golden Tour up to Piing and Acushnet putters.

Selection of brass putters 1895-1925

We generally use ‘brass putter’ as a catch-all term but there are two separate alloys coming under this description. True brass is copper (60-80%) and zinc (20-40%) and has a bright yellowish colour. Gunmetal, technically a kind of bronze, mixes copper (87%), tin (10%) and zinc (3%). It is harder than brass (a bending gun barrel is not great) and the higher copper content gives it a reddish tinge.

Alick Watt, claimed both in conversation and his book, Collecting Old Golfing Clubs that all brass putter heads were made by the same company in Birmingham. I am sceptical. Although I do not have clubmaker receipts for brass putter heads, I have receipts for brass soleplates supplied to Simpson of Carnoustie from a quite different company. The ladies’ putter in the top left of the picture above has, in addition to the Robert Simpson stamp, a moon and star cleekmark of Gourlay of Carnoustie suggesting the head was forged there.

After the initial brass blade putter, the metal was used both as an insert in more exotic putter shapes or, in some cases, to form the whole head in mallet form (and in the ZoZo as a mallet head with a steel insert). Quite bizarrely, given the softness of the metal, brass was also used as a head for mashies, notably in clubs by Simpson of Carnoustie.

Two ZoZo style brass mallet putters with metal inserts by Goudie and the St Andrew Golf Co and a branded ZoZo putter by Anderson of Anstruther (who probably made all the ZoZos sold by the London Golf Co, the first to use the name).

Brass putters for sale in the catalogue.