Arthur Bell
on the persecution
of his father
Robin McMillan
on a remarkable
pilgrimage to Scotland
Coodham Estate. Photograph by Islay McLeod
My mother died on Christmas morning, 2012. Just for the record, she was 95. Actually, she was 55, or 25, going on 17-and-a-half, maybe 12. Really doesn’t matter. Until the end, she never seemed too old. She liked to laugh.
But I did take care of her remains. While visiting in November of 2011, I was driving her from Aberdeen to Fife, ostensibly to pick up some old clothes and what-not, when she gave me specific instructions as to what to do with her cremated remains. I was to mix them with my father’s remains, which my brother had neglected to collect from the local undertaker, but which I would pick up and stash safely the following morning. Despite my mother’s advancing age, she was very clear about this. I was to scatter them on the grounds of a country estate called ‘Coodham’.
At the time she told me all this, we were cruising along just north of Dundee, weather fine, and it struck me as she sat next to me while looking nowhere in particular because, as noted, she was blind, that she’d been thinking about this for some time.
I’d had my issues with my mum over the years, but I always was impressed by how she always had a plan, good or bad. Or rather, good and bad. A lot of people could learn from that. But ‘Coodham’? I’d never heard of the place. And neither my father or mother had ever mentioned it, even though clearly it occupied at least part of a significant limb of our family tree. But I would go there and dispose of my folks on one of the most bizarre days of my life.
Coodham, however, was where my mum and dad would take long walks when they started dating, sometime around 1950. It comprised the large, red Georgian Coodham House, four storeys high, a small lake, and paths and gardens on a plot of land that overall covers almost 100 acres. It wasn’t where they fell in love – that would be first sight, of course – but it was where, you know, they figured things out, or at least figured out that they would spend the next several decades figuring things out together. That tends to be how it works, no?
They had met when my mum was running the night-time emergency room at the Kilmarnock Infirmary, about 12 miles north of Symington. My dad had shown up to play poker with a resident doctor called Andrew Boyd, his best friend, but the poker game got cancelled because Andrew also was playing football for Glasgow Rangers at the time but had arranged to do his football training with Kilmarnock because it would allow him to complete his medical training. However, the Kilmarnock training that night had gone on too long, lazy buggers, so Andrew high-tailed it to the ER as soon as he got off, but not in time, even though he didn’t shower, so there went the poker game. But Andrew’s girlfriend was my mum’s close friend so at least they all could get a cup of tea together.
Forgot something. Just after my father proposed to my mother – those romantic Coodham walks clearly paid off – he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He called the whole thing off. Why on earth, he told my mother, would you marry someone who was on a slow track to tragedy? It took two years for my mum to nurse my dad back to health. Then she married him. If you had ever met them, you would understand why.
The issue was access. Scotland doesn’t really have a tight trespassing law – go where you please but take care of your surroundings – but I was worried that some flashy Glasgow real-estate posse might prevent me from entering the Coodham grounds.
If that did happen, Plan B. I already had decided to honour mum’s wishes – and dad’s, I suppose – even if it meant doing so under the cover of darkness. I’ve jumped over walls before, but usually for apples and not ashes. Just for the record, my brother – and others – thought I was nuts. Just for the record, I didn’t care.
Thank you iPhone. A few buttons punched and I had about 800 yards to go. The gates were open. Not a goon in sight. I drove in and crawled slowly past the main house and a bevvy of suave cars parked outside. Trying not to draw any attention, I rolled past as quietly as possible, Bond-style, and then downhill to a spot by the lake, out of sight of everyone. There were a couple of elegant old houses back in the nearby woods. The nearest was posted as The Stables. Looked nice, likely had been there for a while. But, that was it. For want of a better expression under the circumstances, there were no real signs of life.
I pulled to a stop and stepped gingerly towards the lake, 20 yards through mushy, muddy, clumpy grass – it was a damp January afternoon, after all. Satisfied that this could work, I returned to the car and removed the two boxes that contained my mum and dad. I placed them close to the water and then – and this was purely for posterity – I took a quick photo of them. At which point I heard several footsteps crunching quite loudly down the road. Busted.
So here came a man, a woman, a teenage boy and two dugs. The man was portly, balding, probably in his 40s, while the lady seemed about the same age but sinewy, shaped much like the teenage boy. With them were a shivering Yorkie and a slightly muddy West Highland White Terrier.
I figured the smart plan was to pretend to look for something in the back of the car until they strolled by, and hope that they wouldn’t see the wee green boxes. Then I’d resume the ceremony. This worked like a breeze until the portly chap stopped in his tracks, looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Would you mind telling us what you’re doing?’
Instead, the lady gestured out towards the lake, past a swan and a lot of mallards – there were ducks all over the shop – and said, ‘Why don’t you sprinkle their ashes on the island?’
‘Aye,’ added the man. ‘I could lend you a boat.’
I hadn’t noticed the island, but there it was, looking a little lonely out there amongst the fowl, with a few sodden picnic tables and chairs hidden in part by high grass. I stammered a bit, a little confused, and asked, ‘Do you think my parents would have gone to the island?’
‘Doubtful,’ said the lady. ‘It was put there only about 10 years ago.’
I thanked them for the idea, still wondering how we had progressed to somewhat casual conversation, and explained that I’d prefer to find someplace that they would have strolled together. The man chimed up. ‘There’s a hidden graveyard at the far side of the lake,’ he said. ‘About a dozen people buried in it. It’s creepy and overgrown, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". Nobody knows about it.’
I offered that I really didn’t want to sprinkle my parents’ remains in a graveyard, ironically enough, and asked if perhaps they knew the most likely place a young couple in love would have stopped for a rest.
‘Aye, on the other side of the lake,’ said the man, ‘and not too far from the graveyard, there’s a spot under a tree by the water where you can sit on the grass and look out across the lake and up to the big house.’
That sounded perfect. I asked how to get there. Could I drive? (At this point, I wanted just to get this over with.)
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Ye have to walk. And you’ll need wellies.’
I told him I really didn’t mind destroying a perfectly good pair of regular shoes, which I was wearing at the time, if it meant I could do this properly. He looked down.
‘Size o’ feet ye got?’
‘Wait here a minute,’ he said, and off he went towards The Stables. In the meantime I chatted with the lady. She actually worked as a teacher in the current school in Symington, and knew of my grandparents’ house. I told her I had been worried about access to Coodham but she informed me that one of the conditions of the condo development was that the gardens be kept open to the public. Whether that extended to the sprinkling of human remains, well, she couldn’t say. The Yorkie kept shivering. The Westie sniffed my legs.
A few minutes later, the man returned with a pair of wellies. He must have had a teenager somewhere because they fit perfectly and they weren’t classic Hunters but instead a pair adorned with what appeared to be images from Marvel Comics. Reds and yellows and blues everywhere. People in various costumes flying about. Loud and a wee bit ugly. Psychedelic, almost.
I knew the rough agenda when I set out for Coodham from Kirkcaldy, but I really didn’t know what to expect when I’d get there. I certainly hadn’t figured on disposing of my parents’ remains while wearing Captain America wellingtons.
‘Sit in your car and put these on,’ the man said. ‘I’ll hold your mum and dad.’
A minute or so later, the wellies were on and we set out. The lady and the yorkie kept on their walk, in another direction. It was only a matter of a few hundred yards to the spot under the tree but it wasn’t easy. In places the mud was deep and squelchy. I might not only have ruined my shoes, I may have lost them completely. We introduced each other en route. The kid’s name was Sean. The big guy was Gordon Kinsella. The Westie was Cara, which is Gaelic for ‘friend’. En route, I asked Gordon about the place.
He explained that Coodham once had been known, among other things, as the ‘Scottish Lourdes’. Talk about the Auld Alliance. It had been a retreat run by a sect of the Roman Catholic Church called ‘Passionists’. For those unfamiliar with such stuff, the term ‘passion’ in this context refers to suffering and absolutely not to love or unbridled lust. The full name of the sect is ‘The Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ’. This lot actually did mince their words.
Their mission, so to speak, was to create a refuge – they called it ‘Fatima House’ – at which they would teach the locals how to pray. It might also have been a sanitarium. I can’t say if all or any of this stuff worked, but people did travel from all over Britain to give it a go. It was a bit of a shrine. In fact, Gordon told me, three former archbishops from the Glasgow archdiocese were buried in the graveyard he’d mentioned earlier.
At any rate, the Passionistas rocked their casbah until 1988, whereupon they flogged it and the new owners stripped it of everything worth a nickel and let the rest rot. Then the banks stepped in. The condo gang followed.
Before the church took it over, however, Coodham House had belonged to the Holdsworth family, the lord of the manor Sir William Henry Holdsworth, a Scottish gent who made his fortune in cotton and steel in the north of England and in central Scotland. He also was Conservative member of parliament for the Manchester North West constituency from 1883 to 1906 – succeeded, interestingly enough, by Winston Churchill.
In case you’re wondering, I did look that stuff up. It would have been a bit much to cover in just 300 yards of mud, although I don’t doubt Gordon could have done so if asked.
But one thing he told me floored me. One of the original occupants, he mentioned in passing, had created the Open Championship or, as we call it in the US, the British Open – as in golf, the oldest major championship of them all, the oldest championship of any import that remains in existence, the holy grail of the royal and ancient game.
Its creator was one James Ogilvie Fairlie. I doubt my parents knew this, because they certainly knew I had played golf since sometime in the 1960s and had worked in golf since 1983 as a writer and editor at GOLF Magazine and Sports Illustrated in the US, for Golf Monthly in the UK. When it came to golf, I’d created magazines, books, television shows, newspapers, and more – you name it. They probably would have told me. But then, when they were hand-in-hand and whatever by the house and the lake, Ogilvie was long gone. There were prayer lessons at work. Two passions for the price of one.
After returning from the subcontinent in 1812, William Fairlie settled in London. He, too, became an MP – these industrialists clearly liked to protect their interests – serving the constituency of Leominster in Herefordshire, England, until his death in 1825. That’s when his widow built Williamsfield. She died 20 years later, whereupon James inherited the house and estate.
At around this time, new railways were beginning to steam down Scotland’s south-west coast, at the same time that golf was becoming the sport of affluence on Scotland’s east coast. James Fairlie and his good friend Archibald William Montgomerie, aka the ‘Earl of Eglinton’, decided to start a golf club on land that the earl owned on the Ayrshire coast, about 15 miles from Coodham. It was in a place called Prestwick.
Fairlie was well connected in the game, probably through his contacts from having served as an officer in the British army, and persuaded the St Andrews legend Old Tom Morris to come to the area and help create what would become the Prestwick Golf Club. Fairlie and the earl would create the club, Morris would create and tend to the course. It set up shop in 1851.
Just as the game was spreading, so was the ability of its finest players, and now there was evolving an east-coast/west-coast scramble for bragging rights – especially after the death in 1859 of one Allan Robertson of St Andrews, the Nicklaus/Palmer/ Ballesteros of his day.
Fairlie took care of that. He persuaded the earl and other Prestwick members that the best way to find the country’s best golfer was to organise a championship. Fairlie himself wrote to the potential entrants, inviting them to play. In 1860, Prestwick held the first Open Championship (although in its first year it was ‘open’ only to professionals). Eight players contested three rounds over the 12-hole course and Willie Park Sr won with a score of 174, edging Morris Sr by a brace. Prestwick would hold the Open Championship 23 more times.
By the end of the afternoon, I was stunned. A lot had gone on. After I’d combined my parents’ ashes, as mum had asked, and had sprinkled them on and into the Coodham lake, Gordon, Sean and Cara had taken me to see the graveyard, and little wonder no one could find it. Once you had scrambled and climbed through a vague path of mud and tree limbs, there was an arched entrance that looked like a wishing well, but the graveyard itself – no more than 30 yards square – was so overgrown I could barely detect an eight-foot-high gravestone that was but eight feet in front of my psychedelic wellies.
Fairlie’s grave and those of some of his families were similarly tough to detect. Gordon pointed them out. They seemed to be arranged in a flat square on the ground, more branches and boughs and other such vegetation preventing any proper reading or appreciating.
I didn’t understand this. Why the grave of the creator of such an important episode in not just the history of golf but also the history of sport and, indeed, the history of this particular corner of the globe, could be in such disarray was just baffling. There’s a plaque by the door of the house marking Fairlie’s association with The Open, but the actual grave is hidden by an impenetrable thicket of gnarly branches, leaves, twigs and vines. Why? Maybe the condo developers will do the right thing – clip it all and clean it. Maybe I should.
But, good lord, if you want an example of an intriguing day arising from absolutely nothing, this had been it. After washing off, returning the Marvel wellies, and profusely thanking my hosts (which included wee Cara), I just climbed back into the rental car and drove off back to Kirkcaldy – wondering what on earth had just transpired, but comforted that my faith in the kindness of strangers remained absolutely firm and comforted also by the fact that my mother and father now would be together for eternity. Least I could do.
Robin McMillan began his career in journalism as a teenage reporter for the Fife Free Press in Kirkcaldy. He moved to New York (via London) in 1979, and still lives there with his wife and two daughters. He edited and wrote mainly for GOLF Magazine/Sports Illustrated for almost three decades – while penning six books – and was longtime American correspondent for Britain’s Golf Monthly. He still follows Raith Rovers from afar
SR is having a short break over Easter and will return
on Tuesday 9 April