In that illustration is to be found the secret of all successful coaching, and if any reader sees in this only the system of laisser-faire, he is wrong. It is meant to convey a very different idea.

I have perhaps laboured this point because I believe it so important, and I may be accused of pointing out the obvious, but then I am not convinced that the ordinary man is very good at grasping the obvious. What I am convinced of is that it is nothing but this slavish imitation of the big men, who admit themselves that they owe so much to their physical equipment, that prevents so many golfers reaching the game that is in them.

My own practical experience in the art of coaching has been varied and unusually interesting. At Oxford the ever-changing generations of Young England' were always supplying all kinds of material. On looking up one of my old engagement books, I find from a haphazard selection in one term I was coaching an old Oxford man who was a frontiersman in Western America the year I was born - tall, thin, with hardly an ounce of superfluous flesh, keen as a razor, and with decision in every movement. His weight was a problem, or rather the want of it, for no captain of boats would have considered him for anything else but bow. Well, I taught him a full swing, noticeably slow, and before I left he was playing comfortably down to eight, but expecting Anno Domini to be putting up his handicap soon. I shall always remember the games I played with him, because if he did get annoyed now and again, he always swore in a language picked up from the Indians of Mexico.

Another of my pupils was a local celebrity whose fifth waistcoat button, counting from the top, successfully spoilt a view he once had of a rather clumsy pair of feet. All the agility he possessed was in his brain. I always suspected the doctor had a hand in his taking up golf. I coaxed him into a style more resembling the swinging pendulum of a clock: it was so clearly his line of least resistance, and I hammered it well in. Of course his friends did their best to explain how wrong it all was, but he took little notice and stuck to it, and very soon had his revenge by rattling their half-crowns in his pocket. He was a perfect trap to the unwary. His handicap was nine, and when most people saw his swing they jumped at the idea of taking him on, but it was mostly he that did the taking. He was invariably on the course with any club, short in length naturally, but he knew his own limitations, and never took any notice of what his opponent was doing.

A third from the list was a Rugby trials man, somewhat short in stature but finely knit. He also was encouraged to develop a short backward swing, a half-swing most people would call it; his swing was quite conspicuous in those days. His first handicap allotted him at Oxford was twenty, but before his time was up he played first for Oxford against Cambridge, and whenever the discussion arises among old 'Varsity golfers as to who was the finest player that ever played top, his name invariably comes up for consideration.

Those three were all at work during the same term, and I mention them because of the fact that all three were taught to develop entirely different methods. Of my own system of coaching I am inclined to say little. Each pupil I look upon as a problem, and diagnose his case to the best of my ability. I might say that I have found it best to start with the short shots first - the mashie - and work upwards. It makes for a better value of control, and I keep away from the course until ready to play a round, for I have found innate in most beginners a thorough dislike for spoiling turf. If he jags the turf with his first effort, he will top the next half-dozen for certain. Off the course you can instil in him the real value of turf; and I am always striving to effect that the club head must be travelling on the line of flight before it reaches the ball and after the ball has gone. All other matters depend on the man.

As a final summing-up of what I consider the hallmark of good coaching let me suggest the following imaginary case. Should I ever be honoured by a visitor from Mars selecting me for his coach - he knowing nothing whatever about this noble game, but by Nature splendidly equipped with all the qualities necessary for a champion - I feel that when he had entered for the amateur championship, and had shocked the great men and caused the inevitable discussion as to where he came from, no one would be likely to say ' that man was taught by Sherlock.' If I am wrong, I should feel that I had ignominiously failed in my trust.

There is one point of view I wish to mention, and at once I confess my own mental attitude towards it gives me no satisfaction. The truth is I feel in a state of chaos, caused by an innate respect for authority warring against certain ideas accumulated from observation and experience, possibly both inadequate and wrong. The question that puzzles me is: What are the so-called essentials of the golf swing and what are not? Would that some scientifically trained mind would come along, and by comparison and analysis adjust the theory to fit the facts and settle the confusion. There must be many besides myself who would be grateful.

No advice, in my judgment, is calculated to do more harm than to insist that certain points in a swing are essential if they are not. Numbers of people who claim to have thought about the game and try to prove it by overmuch talk, together with the small but growing army of authors, are all guilty. When they do definitely state what are these essentials, they deliver themselves into the hands of the enemy. They seem to hold as a rooted axiom that there must be some points of the swing that all successful golfers have in common.

What seems to me to have happened in the past is that the theory of the ' correct swing' was formulated by such writers as the author of the Art of Golf, a truly great book that no golfer can afford to leave unread, and that it has held the field more or less ever since. The author apparently had a shock on the appearance of the Badminton, which he frankly admits in the preface to his second edition, and he attempts an explanation, backing himself to defend 'these most pregnant and important theses': -