Of any beginner in golf, however eminent he may be in other walks of life, it may be assumed, and that without insulting him, that he will sooner or later get into a bunker. Even if he never make a bad shot, a large assumption, he will, in these days of far-flying balls, occasionally drive his tee-shot so far as to be caught in the bunker that is meant to trap the second shot of weaker vessels. Therefore he will be well advised to learn the art of getting out of it as quickly as possible, and he is to consider that it is an art, and not merely an affair of brute strength and good fortune. Most bad golfers give themselves up for lost when their ball disappears into a bunker; and not without reason, for they are singularly inept in extracting it. Yet to have a reasonable hope of getting out of a reasonably bad bunker in a single shot should not be too lofty an ambition for any ordinary mortal who will take the trouble to learn to play the stroke properly. To attain to this comparatively modest degree of skill is to gain enormously in confidence and so to strengthen the whole game, for a man is not nearly so likely to put his ball into a bunker if he believes that he can get it out again. A paralysing consciousness of impotence with the niblick is one of the approacher's worst foes and the bunker's best friends. Balls that lie in bunkers, by which it is, I hope, superfluous to add, I mean sand bunkers, may be primarily divided into two classes, those that lie heavy and those that lie clean. The former are taken first because they are the more frequently met with, and also because they alone demand a stroke which may be termed sui generis. By a ball lying heavy is meant one that has partially burrowed its way into the sand, that is lying, in fact, more or less cupped, and the great point to remember about such a ball is that the golfer's whole duty is to get it out - a contemptibly short distance maybe - but out. The first thing to do, then, is to take a niblick, a niblick with a very strong stiff shaft and broad heavy head, liberally dowered with loft, and to take it in a firm determined grasp. The shot that has now to be played is unlike any other in the game of golf, in that the one thing to be avoided is the hitting of the ball. The ball is to be removed from the bunker by means of an explosion, and the player merely resembles the gentleman of anarchist proclivities who lights the fuse. The explosion is caused by the club descending forcibly into the sand close behind the ball, and the ensuing commotion hoists the ball more or less straight up into the air, to fall no great distance away, but, let us hope, upon the turf; limp and lifeless, perhaps, but safe. The most important point of all is to keep the eye rigidly upon the particle of sand which it is intended to hit - which is an extremely difficult thing to do - and not, in the course of the stroke, to let the eye glide forward towards the ball itself, which is a fatally easy thing to do. As to exactly how far behind the ball the club is to be plunged into the sand, it would perhaps be rash to dogmatise. It may be some two inches, it may conceivably be more, and it may certainly sometimes be less. For one thing a great deal must depend on the nature of the sand, which varies enormously, not only with different courses but with the weather. At Woking, for instance, in a wet winter, the sand in the bunkers becomes of a consistency only to be compared to pea-soup, and to cleave through any appreciable quantity of it requires a strength perfectly gigantic. Wet, hard sand, moreover, must necessarily require different treatment to sand which is dry and powdery. In ancient days a player was allowed to make a preliminary trial of the sand with his niblick in order to test its consistency, and I have heard one venerable and scientific niblick player lament that this is so no longer, since a greater chance was thus afforded to the clever player to make a really clever shot. However, it is not allowed nowadays, and so we must just make the most of our powers of observation.

So much for the first great point. The second is that the stroke is to be far more of an up and down character than any other; indeed, it is not to be very far removed from the common chop. One of the gravest and commonest forms of original sin is the lifting of the club up too straight, with the almost necessary corollary of bringing it too straight down. Yet, curiously enough, when the golfer is told to give full rein to his sinful proclivities and take up the club almost as straight as he can, he appears incapable of doing so; either he does not in his heart believe what his instructor tells him, or else, having laboriously learnt a flat swing, he cannot suddenly convert it again into an upright one. Whatever the reason, there are hundreds of players who are practically helpless when their ball lies near even a moderately steep face of a bunker; they beat the ball again and again against the wall of its prison, simply because they will not or cannot come down straight enough into the sand to make the ball rise sufficiently vertically. Therefore it is essential to go straight up and come straight down, and let this manoeuvre be executed with all the freedom and vigour that is consistent with a reasonable measure of control and the keeping of the eyes glued to that particle of sand. This word of warning should be added: the bunkered one must not think that his whole duty has been done when he has brought his club down into the sand. He must not let it remain there, but must take it through to the best of his ability. This following through is a very important part of niblick play, and, just because it appears so superfluous, we are particularly apt to forget it. The explosion has to take place under the ball and not merely behind it.