Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Clubmakers

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Clubmakers

James Henderson
Dundee

The early Fife clubmakers were joiners (carpenters); in Aberdeen wheelwrights and gunsmiths. James Henderson came to the business from a most unusual direction beginning in business as a taxidermist or, as the Post Office Directories expressed it more prosaically, as a bird-stuffer. In a different approach to conservation than that with which we would be familiar today, rare birds which made the mistake of flying low over the Angus countryside risked being blown out of the sky and ending up in Mr Henderson’s workshop with newspaper reports of Bohemian waxwings, sheldrakes and stock-doves finding this strange kind of immortality.

The first advertisements I can find for his business in Barrack Street are from 1885 when he promises ‘birds and animals stuffed to the most artistic manner'. By 1893 he offers ‘'Large stock of finest flies and all requisites for fishing. Rod by finest makers' and the first advertisements for golfing equipment are in 1895.

He must, however, have been involved with golf before this as I have seen an iron marked “Henderson Dundee” which is clearly 1880s and he donated a stag’s head for sale at a stall at the Carnoustie Links Bazaar in 1892.. (This supposition has subsequently proved correct as the adverisement here is from 1891, still using the "P" for Patrick despite that business being dissolved the previous year.)

The Henderson family appears to have reached soap-opera levels of dysfunctionality. Originally the business was Patrick’s (the father) and was dissolved in March 1890 with a public auction of the stock. Whether it was this stock, or other items, James bought the stock-in-trade from his father, continued the business and promised to pay him 25 shillings a week. Not having the money to pay for the purchase he made formal acknowledgment of the debt which was fine until he assigned it to a Glasgow accountant who denied the debt and the wages agreement. Consequently, the father began legal action in 1896 against his son and the accountant. Meanwhile Patrick and son James, with another son, William, the gunmaker in the business (and probably the one who made the clubs, see below), were being sued in 1893 by yet another son, Alexander, a fishing tackle maker, about removal of some furniture he claimed to own. The court proceedings made Judge Judy look tame with the sheriff principal, the senior judge, lambasting the attempts of more junior judges to push the decision on to him to make while the first judge to hear the case described Alexander thus, 'Pursuer would have been a model witness upon a stage, with one exception, and that was he could not conceal an intense hatred for his brother James. ... on the other side, James was at no pains whatever to conceal a like intense hatred for the pursuer.’

A subsequent obituary of William Henderson in 1914 describes him ominously as ‘a strong personality in the East End of Dundee’ and, apparently, also ‘well known’ in Barrhill and Monifieth. Probably not the ideal person to be making guns but it reveals he also had a clubmaking business in Monifeith which ‘he relinquished on obtaining a postion in Dundee’.

So, Cain and Abel in the courts but James must not have been all bad. In 1908 he jumped into the King William dock in Dundee successfully rescuing a drowning boy. As a taxidermist, clearly a triumph of humanity over his professional instincts.

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