Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Clubmakers

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Clubmakers

Ludovic G Sandison
Aberdeen

Auctioneers, and others, have transformed someone's description of Ludovic Sandison ‘following in the footsteps of Alexander Munro’ to him becoming Aberdeen’s ‘resident clubmaker’ as if it were some official city or golf-club based position. This is quite wrong and completely misrepresents the position of golf in Aberdeen.

Ludovic Grant Sandison, born in 1825, was apprenticed to Munro in 1841 (perhaps earlier: his advertisement about taking on the business in 1848 mentions 'upwards of 11 years'). We know Munro made golf clubs because a few of them have survived and Sandison includes golf clubs and balls in his message about stock 'always on hand' when he took over the business. However, it must have been a very small part of Munro's work as the first description he applied to himself in the Post Office Directory of 1824 was ‘fish and tackle maker’ and by the 1840s, 'turner, fishing rod and tackle maker'. It suggests he did not see clubmaking as a major part of his business,

Munro died in 1847 and Sandison took over the business at 118 King Street. That same year he married Margaret Smith on 2 July. Like Munro he described himself as a ‘fishing tackle maker’. Indeed he did not think to add ‘and golf club maker’ to his entry until the 1861-2 directory, when his son Robert was also listed a clubmaker in the census, (and intermittently thereafter) and this was only in the General Directory, there was no separate category for any activity to do with golf in the trade section until 1891 when a solitary clubmaker Andrew Simpson) was listed and that was probably because he bought an advertisement at the back of the directory. He was, clearly, involved in golfing circles as an advertisement in the Aberdeen Journal gives Sandison as a contact for the ‘conditions and privileges of membership’ of the Bon-Accord Golf Club.

In addition to his clubmaking and fishing tackle manufacture he was a singing teacher. Reputedly the first to introduce sol-fa notation to the North East, he taught the boys of Robert Gordon’s College to sing over a twenty year teaching career ‘in between making golf clubs’ recalled Dr Ross at an Old Boys’ reunion in London in 1907 so his generation clearly thought of him more as a clubmaker than a fishing rod manufacturer.

Sandison died, from cirrhosis (though, perhaps in deference to him having been precentor at Greyfriars Church for 30 years, the local evening newspaper attributed the death to ‘congestion of the brain’), on 27 November 1884. No one appears to have taken over the business as by 1887 the premises were being used as a confectioner’s.

The ‘resident club maker’ tag, and for that matter, the lack of directory entries for other makers, implies he was the only clubmaker at the time in Aberdeen. This is not so, membership of clubs was growing so there was clearly a demand. Charles Playfair certainly produced long-nose clubs and I plan to hunt down the others! What is interesting about the Aberdeen makers is that in being fishing tackle makers first, Playfair was, and a gunmaker, William Calder in the 1890s, and John Ritchie who seems to have been making golf clubs from 1881 but listed separately as a fishing tackle maker, they came from a quite different tradition to golf clubmakers in other parts of the country.

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