A G Spalding and Bros

Albert Goodwill Spalding first made a name for himself playing baseball in his home town of Rockford, Illinois. A stunning performance as a schoolboy pitching against Washington's National Baseball Club resulted in offers to turn professional. Mother Spalding disapproved and so "Al" entered employment with a series of companies which proceeded to go bankrupt through no fault of his. When a Boston insurance company became the seventh employer to meet this fate, Spalding was finally persuaded by George Wright (one of the Washington Nationals he had sorted out in Rockford, and later the founder of Wright and Ditson) to turn professional and join Wright's brother's team, the Boston Red Stockings. Here he won four consecutive national championships. In 1876, unhappy with the then state of professional baseball, he moved to New York as one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the National Baseball League. Shortly after, he moved again, to Chicago to join the White Stockings with whom he shared the first championship of the new league.

At the same time he set up A G Spalding & Bro, with his brother J Walter Spalding, to deal in sports equipment. Not surprisingly this company produced the National Baseball League's official ball and Al's pitching of it proved a great marketing tool. The first year's turnover of $12,000 soon grew and the Bro became Bros with the addition of William Brown, a brother-in-law and banker. The Spalding empire moved eastwards, taking over other sporting goods companies, and establishing its headquarters at Chicopee, Ma.

Albert Goodwill Spalding

Julian W Curtiss, an accomplished footballer and rower at Yale, joined the Spalding sales force in 1885 and in 1892 was dispatched to the UK to investigate the British manufacture of footballs. Seeing golf in Britain, perhaps for the first time, Curtiss ordered $400 of equipment to be sent to Chicopee. Curtiss's enthusiasm was not matched by the home office and this unauthorised expenditure found little favour. Curtiss, not being short of a bob or two, found a good way to publicise the game: he built a five-hole golf course in the family 'garden' in Greenwich, Connecticut (now Greenwich Country Club). The items he bought soon sold and his vision was ultimately recognised by his becoming president of the company.

Spalding's first moves into golf were relatively slow: it was 1896 before golfing items were included in the Spalding catalogue and then only balls. The advertisements emphasised the British connection 'the Silvertown ball is almost exclusively used on the principal links of Scotland and England ... we have exclusive control of this ball for the United States'. More British imports followed the next year and J Walter Spalding visited Britain that same year and signed up Harry Vardon to promote "The Vardon Flyer" and to play exhibition matches in the US. (This promotion of a guttie ball just as Haskells hit the market could have cost Spalding dear: a failed lawsuit against the Haskell was attempted but Spalding had to bite the bullet and license it). Despite this as Martin says in The Curious History of the Golf Ball, 'from 1903 onward, the history of the evolving golf ball would be written largely by Spalding'.

With the dawn of the new century the feigned reliance on British products disappeared. Indeed, in 1900 Spalding entered the British market supported by huge investment. Large retail outlets were opened with prestigious London addresses, High Holborn, Haymarket and Fetter Lane. Similar stores followed in Edinburgh and Manchester. At first Spalding brought its goods (not just golf, but tennis items, footballs and exercise equipment) from the US but soon found it worthwhile to manufacture in the UK also. A factory was set up in Putney in London and one in Dysart, in Fife, forged iron heads for Spalding clubs sold both in the UK and US. Irons made here can be recognised by the anvil cleek mark. The baseball mark was also found on British-made clubs but with the "Made in Great Britain" legend below it. The tong mark, in the eponymous brand, was also a British-made club. The company also bought golf equipment from other makers for sale and technology. William Taylor of Leicester received a patent for a golf ball with a covering of 'isolated cavities ... substantially circular in plan'. Spalding was the first American manufacturer to license this and introduced the first dimple balls to America in 1909 at $9 a dozen.

The range of clubs produced by Spalding during the hickory era is enough to satisfy any collector and many do collect only the clubs of this maker. There are unusual materials to be found in clubhead construction: Spalding soon followed Mills in offering a complete set of fairway clubs in aluminium; the Gold Medal series of 1910-1919 used aluminium bronze; putters were made with lead faces (for a soft feel) and, perhaps the most famous, the Cran cleek, an inlaid wood face on an iron club. James Cran was a clubmaker at Spalding who received the patent for this in 1897. Covered by the same patent is the 'spring face': this leaves out the wood and covers the cavity with a thin sheet of metal. Supposedly the recoil of this at impact acted as a spring. Weighting patterns of every kind can be seen in Spalding club heads: a hemispherical lump to concentrate weight at the sweetspot or bar backs to do the same.

Deep-groove irons, later ruled illegal, are associated with Spalding particularly the waterfall and waffle iron patterns and the Stop'Em and Dedstop brands. Even shafts were subject to experimentation. Spalding produced a lathe-turned hickory shaft with circular ridges left at regular intervals down the shaft. The appearance is bamboo-like and, presumably, was intended to mimic the strength and flexibility of bamboo.

The photographs show a selection of Spalding irons made in Scotland and a company advertisement from 1948.