It’s 1835. Young Tom Morris is fourteen. His schooling is over. It’s time to take his father’s trade but Tom’s ‘da’ has other ideas. John Morris, weaver and part-time postman, has noticed how his boy moves through the whins and tall grass of the links like a hound, sniffing out lost ‘featheries’. Young Tom eats, sleeps and breathes the game of golf. He’s not cut out for a life indoors, weaving cloth.

So a meeting is arranged with Allan Robertson, golf-ball maker who caddies for the Royal and Ancient redcoats and partners them in foursomes. Loud, cocky Allan is short, bull-necked and sports filigreed waistcoats and bright-coloured caps. Tom’s mother might fret about her son working for a man who consorts with gamblers, drunkards, cheats and low-livers but Allan can offer the boy steady work. So, with a firm handshake, John Morris contracts his son to Allan for a term of four years. On the morning his boyhood ends, young Tom gathers his few belongings, leaves his parents’ house and with the tang of the salt sea in his nostrils, walks a quarter of a mile to a little stone cottage at the corner of Golf Place and Links Road, his new home.

Young Tom is in awe of “Mr Robertson”, with his off-kilter smile. He's the best golfer in St. Andrews! Not five and a half feet tall, mutton- chop whiskers, with the wrists and arms of a blacksmith and a pick-pocket's touch around the putting-greens, Allan regularaly makes it around the links in under 100 strokes and once shot an incredible 87!

Allan’s golf ball factory is a cramped kitchen with a floor of wooden planks. A pot keeps water boiling over the fire, a sturdy worktable under an oil lamp casts a wan yellow light specked with feather dust. Tom cuts cowhide with a razor and boils goose feathers while opposite him sits Allan’s cousin, Lang Willie Robertson, six foot two with whisky breath and rheumy eyes, endless legs bent under him. Lang Willie has a story for every feathery he hammers into shape. Like the one about the Robertson forbear who caddied for decades and ‘died in harness’, dropping dead in a clatter of clubs on the Burn Hole. As canny Allan prepares to stamp another rock-hard feathery after its third coat of white paint with his stamp (ALLAN), he glances over at his young apprentice. He first noticed the wee lad swinging a cut-down club playing sillybodkins in North Street. There’s money to be made in wager matches with the Royal and Ancient worthies. He just needs a partner who can play. With a bit of grooming, young Tom Morris is going to be useful out there on the links.

Most feather golf ball makers realizing that their livelihood was in danger, sold off  large quantities of their feathery golf ball inventory to their major clients, and immediately turned their attention to developing and producing the new golf clubs that would be required by the players using the new gutta percha golf balls. However, there were those that were less pragmatic, such as Alan Robertson, who derided the new "high tech" golf ball and was vehement in his support of the classic feather stuffed ball. Robertson at one point in time, purchased as many gutta percha golf balls as he could, and set them ablaze in a bid to stop the balls from reaching his customers.

Now, paradox at its best. You see with the guttie, "the best players began to use irons to hit approach shots to the greens, striking down on the ball to send it up into the air with greater distance control than was possible using the old technique. Allan Robertson is credited with being the first to adopt this style, which helped him become the first golfer known to have broken 80 for 18 holes on the Old Course in St. Andrews."