Willie Dunn and the One-Piece Brassie in a Barrel
Circa-1898 Willie Dunn one-piece brassie.
The thrill for me in searching for antique golf clubs is the fact that when you find one, you’re holding a piece of golf history. Based on just a few markings or design characteristics, an old hickory golf club can tell a rich story. I like to remember that I’m not just collecting and preserving the physical artifacts of the game but the stories of the people who shaped it. And as much as I feel a responsibility to save a hickory club from being lost to history, I also feel the need to protect the stories from the same fate. I was reminded of the above when I recently happened upon a very rare Willie Dunn one-piece brassie in a barrel.
Finding Golf Gold
Mongers Market is a weekly indoor flea market on I-95 in Bridgeport, CT. My wife and I have been there a couple times now and based on what we've found so far, it's quickly become my favorite place to look for cool antiques. One of the many booths there has become quite the honey hole for interesting and valuable hickory golf clubs. Most of the selection is architectural salvage and I’m assuming the old golf clubs filling an old carboard drum are intended for decoration in pubs and mancaves.
During a visit in October 2020, I didn’t think I was going to find anything better than the circa-1900 Spalding Harry Vardon signature splice-neck brassie I’d found the last time we were there. But as a I muscled through some rusty and common Spalding Kro-Flite irons, I freed a brassie that immediately jumped out to me as unusual. I noticed the shaft curved into the head similar to a splice neck, but there was no whipping on the neck and no tell-tale splice. When I looked closer at the head and made out the name “Willie Dunn,” I had a feeling I was holding something special.
The Dunn Dynasty
The export of golf from Great Britain to the United States in the late 19th century is credited to many individual course designers, players, and clubmakers. But few names pop up in all three categories as frequently as the Dunns of Musselburgh, Scotland.
Starting with the family patriarch, Willie Dunn Sr., who was among the best players in the game from the 1840s-1860s, the Dunns had established themselves as a golf dynasty by the late 1880s. I’ll pick up their story in 1889 at Biarritz, France, where oldest son Tom and his younger brother Willie Jr. were laying out the first official Le Phare golf course. While at Biarritz, Willie recounted meeting a trio of wealthy Americans who were interested in bringing the game back with them to New York and invited him to design their course at Southampton. He accepted the offer and become the first Dunn to emigrate to America, taking credit for routing the first 12 holes at Shinnecock Hills in 1891.
This was the accepted origin story of Shinnecock for many years until another origin story crediting Royal Montreal Golf Club pro Willie Davis began to confuse the matter. In the book The Golf Course (1981) by golf course architect Geoffrey Cornish and golf course historian Ron Whitten, the traditional Dunn origin story is cited. But in his book North American Club Makers (1998), Peter Georgiady cites the Davis origin story, which suggests that sometime after 1981, Davis had become commonly accepted as the original Shinnecock designer. The Davis origin story was further strengthened by Whitten himself in a 2004 article for Golf Digest that was intended to set the record straight and credit Davis with the original layout. The official history of Shinnecock Hills now offered by the club cites Davis as the designer of the first 12 holes followed by Dunn's expansion of the course to 18 holes in 1895.
But further research into the issue by David Moriarty in 2010 cited Dunn’s own 1934 account where he describes in great detail his construction of new golf holes at Shinnecock - a claim seemingly supported by the account of Samuel L. Parrish, who was the Shinnecock club secretary in 1891. While Parrish names Dunn numerous times in his account and describes witnessing "Dunn" lay out the first 12 holes, he calls him "the Scotch Canadian professional," which better describes Davis and suggests Parrish simply misremembered Davis as Dunn.
Weighing all of the known information, it does seem more likely that it was Davis and not Dunn who designed the first 12 holes and that Dunn's account was referring to his expansion of Shinnecock to 18 holes. In any event - as Moriarty concludes - the confusion and subsequent research illustrate the challenges one faces when diving deep into the often times apocryphal history of golf.
Willie’s Influence on American Golf
After Shinnecock, Willie spent the remainder of the 1890s designing several other golf courses and finishing runner-up to Horace Rawlins in the very first U.S. Open in 1895. By this time, Willie had seen American interest in the game blossom and was eager to spread the word. As Cornish and Whitten write in The Golf Course:
Consequently, a good many of Willie’s friends and acquaintances flocked to the United States. He even lent some of them travel fare. Not all came to design golf courses, by any means. Some were clubmakers, some were greenskeepers, some players and some considered themselves golf Renaissance men, able to do any task related to the game. Others, being novices to golf, could do none of these. But they came, for Young Willie Dunn became convinced that the real future of golf lay not in Scotland, nor Britain, nor Europe, but in America. (p. 47)
Among those enticed by Willie to come to the United States were two more Dunns – nephew John Duncan Dunn and eventually John’s brother Seymour, who both made their biggest marks on the game through club making. Which finally brings this story closer to the aforementioned one-piece brassie in barrel.
The Clubmaking Dunns
By 1897, Willie Dunn was working for upstart American clubmaker Bridgeport Gun Implement (B.G.I.) in Bridgeport, CT, eventually moving on to brief and productive stints with Crawford, McGregor, and Canby in Dayton, OH, and Spalding in just a two-year span. As Georgiady writes in North American Club Makers:
With experience as important as his, Willie found himself a valuable commodity. American firms were rapidly expanding into the club making business, desperately trying to keep up with the soaring demand and Willie was sought out by several … However short his stays at each of those companies, he instilled in them the skills, methods and style to produce clubs to compete with Scottish imports. (p. 190)
The industry’s high regard for Willie and John’s own club making experience probably made it easy for Willie to name John as his successor at B.G.I. when he moved on to Crawford, McGregor and Canby in 1898. And it was through B.G.I. that American golfers were first introduced to John’s claim to club making fame: the one-piece driver. First patented in Britain in 1895 and in the U.S. in 1897, the driver was a jointless club crafted from a single piece of wood and fitted with a leather face insert. As Jeff Ellis notes in his book The Clubmakers Art, one-piece clubs had been around since the mid-1800s, but it was John's patent that popularized the design. Georgiady writes that the club received a lot of publicity in England when John first began selling it in 1894, but its drawbacks quickly became apparent to anyone who tried to use it regularly on the golf course. While it was truly a work of art and evidence of high craftsmanship, the fact that a crack could not be sufficiently repaired sealed its fate as impractical for play.
Despite this, limited production of John’s one-piece driver continued into the new century, and Georgiady notes it was sold by all four of the major American club manufacturers at the time (B.G.I. / Crawford, McGregor and Canby / Spalding / Wright & Ditson). Interestingly, when there was a Dunn name added to one of these clubs, it wasn’t John’s but Willie’s. Perhaps Willie was actually producing these clubs himself with John’s patent, but I think it’s more likely that these were all John’s clubs sold under Willie’s name, whose reputation and influence probably helped the club find an easier path to the American market. It’s also apparent that the one-piece design was expanded beyond driver to include brassies during Willie’s brief tenure at Crawford, McGregor and Canby.
My Willie Dunn One-Piece
A look at the one-piece design of the Willie Dunn brassie. Click here to view more photos and information of this club.
The one-piece brassie for which I’m now the proud custodian features “Willie Dunn – New York” across the head, a leather face insert, a “Crawford, McGregor and Canby” stamp on the shaft, and the original grip. Once I got it under the lights of my workshop, I could see the club was in average to poor condition. Along with an unfortunate chip along the top line of the head, the original stain was worn off in spots and the original grip was in tatters. But some random paint marks and general dirt were no match for a very light sanding with #000 steel wool, and I followed the sanding with a coat of Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil and halted restoration at that point.
Even in its poor condition, I know the club has significant value in today’s market because of its rarity – an appraisal from a veteran hickory club collector verified as much. And normally, I’m eager to sell collectible clubs that I come across because I like to keep my collection tight and focused on playable clubs. That all said, I think this one is headed for my wall because of who it represents.
While Willie Dunn Jr. doesn’t come up in the discussion over who is the “Father of American Golf,” a closer look at his first decade in the United States reveals the integral role he played in the game’s early growth here, both through his own contributions and through those of whom he enticed to make the trip across the Atlantic. I wholeheartedly agree with the observation in North American Club Makers that “Dunn’s influence on American golf is grossly underestimated,” and I’m glad I know more about him now thanks to that one-piece brassie in a barrel.
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Flea Market Find
Circa-1898 Willie Dunn One-Piece Brassie
Location
Mongers Market, Bridgeport, CT (10/25/2020)
Cost / Est. Value
$12 / $300
