Introduction
In September of 1895, Madeline Mary Geale (1865-1923) won the ladies’ championship at the first playing of the International Golf Tournament at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
The prestige of the “International championship” in the world of North American golf in 1895 cannot be overestimated. After all, both the U.S.G.A.’s Amateur Championship and its Open Championship were delayed in 1895 in order to accommodate the Niagara tournament: “The championship golf matches, both amateur and professional, which were to have been played on the links at the Newport Golf Club early in September, have been postponed until the first week of October on account of the Canadian tournament in the second week of September” (Boston Globe, 21 August 1895, p. 7).
By his victory in the inaugural 1895 International tournament, Charles Blair Macdonald – widely regarded as the best American amateur golfer at this time (although he had been born in Niagara-on-the-Lake) – began to redeem his two surprising second-place finishes in 1894: first, at the so-called “American” amateur championship at the Newport Golf Club of Rhode Island in September of 1894, and, second, at the so-called “United States” amateur championship at the St Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, New York, in October of 1894.
Figure 1 Charles Blair MacDonald (1855- 1939), circa 1895.
Chicago newspapers saluted his Niagara win in no uncertain terms: one said, “Chicago claims the champion golf player of the continent. Charles B. Macdonald, president of the Chicago Golf Club, won the international championship”; another said the same thing slightly differently: “Charles B. MacDonald of Chicago tonight bears the proud title of champion golf player of the United States and Canada” (Inter Ocean [Chicago], 9 September 1895, p. 3; Chicago Chronicle, 8 September 1895, p. 4). When MacDonald won the 1895 U.S.G.A. amateur championship a few weeks later at Newport, Rhode Island, the same newspaper ranked MacDonald’s win at the International Championship as equal to the amateur championship: “Charles Blair MacDonald, amateur champion of the United States and international champion, …. now holds the only two championships worth striving for” (Inter Ocean, 4 October 1895, p. 4).
Figure 2 Madeline (sometimes spelled "Madeleine") Mary Geale (1864-1923), Niagara-on-the-Lake, circa 1895.
As the first USGA national amateur championship for women would not be held until November of 1895, and as the RCGA would not hold a national amateur championship for women until 1901, Madeline Geale held the first and only North American championship for women up to that point. Like MacDonald, she became the champion golf player of the continent, bearer of the proud title of champion golf player of the United States and Canada.
Note also that even if one were inclined to claim that MacDonald was technically a Canadian because he had been born in Niagara-on-the-Lake, since the women’s championship match was played in the morning on the final day of the tournament, whereas the men’s championship match was played in the afternoon, Geale remains nonetheless the first Canadian to win an international golf championship.
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And so, Madeleine Mary Geale holds a unique place in Canadian golf history. Her story should be told.
A Renaissance Woman
When it came to golf, Madeline Geale was many things.
In addition to being Canada’s best woman player, she wrote fiction and poetry about golf, she was the secretary-treasurer of the Niagara Golf Club (apparently the first woman in North America elected to the executive committee of a golf club), she named the holes of the new nine-hole layout on the Fort George Common in June of 1896 (along with club founder Charles Hunter, who insisted that the fifteenth hole on the course be named after her, “Geale’s”), and she probably helped Hunter and her cousin John Geale Dickson lay out this course.
She also wrote essays, fiction, and poetry about many topics besides golf. In the Canadian Home Journal in 1897, for instance, we find “a very graphically written sketch of a trip from Toronto to Chippawa from the pen of Madeleine Geale” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 September 1897, p. 6; Canadian Home Journal, vol 3 no 5 [September 1897]). Her short story “The Pantry Ghost” in the Canadian Home Journal the next year was said to be “well worthy of perusal” (Lethbridge News, 4 May 1898, p. 8; Canadian Home Journal, vol 4 no 1 [May 1898]). Under her married name (Windeyer), she published the poems “Love’s Awakening” and “Drifted” in Ainslee’s Magazine (in July of 1903 and February of 1904, respectively) and the poem “In Memoriam” in Munsey’s Magazine (May 1910). A short story called “Sandy’s Old Woman,” accompanied by professional illustrations, appeared in Everybody’s Magazine (December 1904).
Figure 3 Madeleine Windeyer, "Sandy's Old Woman," Everybody's Magazine, vol 9 no 6 (December 1904), p. 733.
And in January of 1913, a musical composition called “A Miniature” – “words by Madeleine Windeyer, music by J.D. Freeman” – was officially copyrighted (Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1913 Compositions, part 3, new series, vol 8 no 1 [1913], p. 1266).
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And there were many more poems and short stories – a good number of them about golf – which will be discussed in sections below.
Golf was not Geale’s only sport. She played tennis competitively, for instance, making it to the semifinals for tournament novices at the Canadian international tennis tournament at Niagara-on-the-Lake in the summer of 1894. The next year, she reached the finals.
In 1896, Toronto’s Globe newspaper reported the Niagara Golf Club’s opinion that Geale “is a lady of great executive ability and business capacity” (The Globe [Toronto], 19 June 1896, p. 10).
Geale seems to have given up competitive golf around the time of her marriage in 1899. She gave birth to her one and only child in 1900. And after that, in her spare time as wife, mother, poet, and writer of fiction, she raised money for the Red Cross Society during World War I, served as first vice-president of the 234th Battalion Auxiliary during that war, and she became a competitive yachtswoman in sailing matches on Lake Ontario.
An Old Family
Madeline Mary Geale (pronounced “Gale”) was born into a family long-resident in Canada, the United States, and the British North American colonies. The various families from which she descended had been in North America since the early 1700s. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Saturday Night magazine said of Madeline and her siblings that they were “connected with a number of the old and well-known families in society” (25 December 1909, p. 18).
And her family had long been associated with the Niagara area in particular. Her paternal grandfather, Lieutenant Bernard Geale, fought in the War of 1812, in which he was wounded and taken prisoner near Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Figure 4 Colonel William Claus (1765-1826)
Her paternal grandmother, Catherine Claus (circa 1796-1873), who had married Bernard Geale, was the daughter of Colonel William Claus (1765- 1826), who also fought in the War of 1812. He served as a member of the Executive Council of Upper Canada, and he was “for thirty years deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs in Upper Canada” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 August 1899, p. 5).
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William Claus’s father had served in a similar position, having been appointed deputy to his father-in-law (Madeline Geale’s great-greatgrandfather), Sir William Johnson (1715-1774), who had been appointed the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1756 for all of Britain’s northern colonies.
Johnson had learned the Mohawk language in the 1740s and become a key figure in relations with the Iroquois people
Figure 5 Sir William Johnson (circa 1715-1774).
Johnson commanded Iroquois and colonial militia forces in the “French and Indian War” (conflicts from 1754 to 1763 between British colonists and their indigenous allies, on the one hand, and French colonists and their indigenous allies, on the other). He particularly “distinguished himself at the capture of Fort Niagara from the French in 1759” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 August 1899, p. 5).
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​At Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1847, Madeline Geale’s father, Captain John Bernard Geale (1819-1899), married her mother, Caroline Cox (1825-1886), herself the daughter of a captain in the British Army.
Figure 6 Left: Captain John B. Geale (1819-99), circa mid-1890s; right: Caroline (Cox) Geale (1825-1886), undated.
Madeline was the last-born child of the four boys and three girls that her parents had.
Her father had a long and distinguished military career: he “served on the frontier in the suppression of the rebellion of 1837. In 1853, he received a commission in the Royal Canadian Rifles and was appointed barrack-master at Hamilton, and subsequently transferred to Niagara as keeper of military properties, which position he held until the time of his death” (Gazette [Montreal], 19 August 1899, p. 4).
Captain Geale’s role as keeper of military properties in Niagara-on-the-Lake was probably instrumental in the plans of his nephew: Lieutenant John Geale Dickson. With his uncle’s permission, the latter laid out several golf holes on the Fort George Common in the mid-1870s, and then, along with his friend Charles Hunter, he laid out a nine-hole course on the Fort Mississauga Common around 1877 (although the greens of the original layout have been moved and re-developed since 1877, many of the original fairways remain in play today on the golf course of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club).
The Dad-Blamed Parent
Madeline’s father must have been a source of great pride and great upset for her.
On the one hand, Captain John B. Geale was respected by many.
Figure 7 Captain John B. Geale, circa mid-1890s, holding his cane.
In his reminiscences of nineteenth-century Niagara-on-the-Lake, Joseph E. Masters recalled that Captain Geale was “A fine looking man, tall and erect, sporting a moustache and side whiskers,”and that he dressed fashionably: “He carried a cane … and in winter he wore a red sash about his waist. This was quite common wear for the smart men in those days” (Joseph E. Masters, “The Masters Papers,” Niagara Historical Society Research Room, p. 289).
Masters notes that “The Captain seems to have been a publicly minded man, as he served six years in Town Council” (“The Masters Papers,” p. 422). This seems to have been in the 1860s, around the time that Madeline was born. He also ran in the Ontario provincial election of 1868, seeking to become the MLA for Niagara town and township.
He lost in a landslide, having represented the interests of the railroad companies – whose candidates were swept out of power in the Niagara area at that time at both the provincial and municipal levels.
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In 1895, Captain Geale was honored for his long military service, being called upon to raise the flag over Fort Mississauga to mark the opening of that year’s summer training camp: “The flag was hoisted by the hands of Captain Geale, a splendidly preserved veteran of the old Royal Canadian Rifles” (The Globe [Toronto], 25 May 1895, p. 9).
He will have told Madeline of the outbreak of war in Crimea in 1854 and of his desire to fight for Queen and country. But, as he explained to others, “his wife wouldn’t consent to his going” (Joseph E. Masters, p. 559). And he will have told Madeline of witnessing colourful incidents in his grandfather’s life as “Indian Agent”:
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Captain Geale used to tell of his remembrance as a boy of meetings at the ‘Wilderness,’ [a five-acre property at Niagara-on-the-Lake] belonging to his grandfather, Colonel William Claus …. He had seen the spacious ground around the house full of Indians who had come for their presents [i.e., monies owed by treaty] received annually. (Janet Carnochan, History of Niagara [Toronto: William Briggs, 1914], pp. 197-98).
To a little girl raised on stories of her father’s army life and of his childhood adventures, Captain Geale will have seemed a romantic figure.
On the other hand, a soldier who had served under Captain Geale in Niagara-on-the-Lake at the outbreak of the Crimean War saw Geale’s inability to serve Queen and country differently: he called him “That … Bloody Coward” (Masters, p. 559). Would the young Madeline have heard such opinions of her father voiced in the community?
In 1886, when Madeline was twenty-two years old, her mother died, and sometime after that, her father quarrelled with his family and began a downward spiral toward ruin. According to Masters,
The Captain, in his later days, was caretaker of the Government Buildings and became estranged from his family. He made the headquarters building [of the army barracks] his abode. It was during his caretakership that the extra roof was imposed on the building in Fort Mississauga. The gallant Captain fell on evil days in his old age, estranged from his family and impoverished. I had the duty, as Bailiff, of serving papers on him for debt and much of his furniture was sold by the Town for arrears of Taxes. (The Masters Papers, p. 289)
Soldier, singer, fashionable gentleman, husband, father, Town Councillor, Canadian Militia property manager, family exile, debtor …. Madeline’s father was a man with a complicated public and personal history.
How will his decline have affected her?
Captain Geale died in poverty a month before Madeline’s wedding.
Life to the Mid-1890s
Madeline’s life in her late teens and early twenties was typical of the life of the young middle-class woman of that day.
Figure 8 Part of 5.5-acre Geale's Grove (alias, "The Wilderness") circa 2019, of which four acres remain heavily wooded.
The local Anglican church, St. Mark’s, was important to the spiritual life of the family, and all three of the daughters of John and Caroline Geale taught Sunday school there, organizing church picnics in Geale’s Grove (approximately 5.5 acres of land in Niagara-on-the-Lake known since the beginning of the twentieth century as “The Wilderness”), a property granted to their great-grandmother in recognition of her husband’s (Daniel Claus’s) acts of kindness towards indigenous peoples.
Madeline was a regular participant in the usual social events involving middle-class young women. We regularly find Madeline and her unmarried sisters, for instance, mentioned as “the Misses Geale” who were invited to “a delightful little afternoon tea” here and there at the homes of the social matrons of Niagara-on-the-Lake (Buffalo Commercial, 6 July 1895, p. 7). A young woman might be invited to enliven one of these events with performance of a song, the playing of a musical instrument, or the recitation of verse or drama. As a published author, and therefore something of a local celebrity, Madeline Geale would regularly have been called upon for contributions of this sort.
In her mid-twenties, she clearly enjoyed the company of children, delighting in entertaining them. For instance, she helped out at the big “party at the Anchorage given in honor of the twelfth anniversary of Master Joey Syer’s birthday,” where she supervised “dancing and games of every description,” helped to seat “the merry little guests” at “little tables” where “ices and delicacies of every description” were served, and so was acknowledged as one of “the older ones who helped to amuse the children and who seemed to enjoy the games as thoroughly as the juveniles” (Saturday Night [Toronto], 12 September 1891, p. 11).
And in her mid-thirties, she still delighted in entertaining children. At “the annual Festival held in the Park … under the management of the Guild of St. Mark’s” in the summer of 1895, she presided over the most popular of “the prettily decorated booths … bright with Chinese lanterns”:
One half of the tent [housing the “fancy table in white and crimson”] was claimed by Miss Arnold and Miss M. Geale, who managed a mysterious thing under the name of a Cherry Pie, out of which came parcels of all sizes and shapes. This, of course, was generously patronized by the children, who immensely enjoyed the glorious uncertainty attached to a dip under the cherry-colored netting. (The Buffalo Commercial, 27 June 1896, p. 14).
It seems that Madeleine Geale’s creative bent was not just confined to her writing.
And her writing occasionally concentrated on children’s topics, such as “Dorothy’s Dream” (1909), an enchanting poem about a young child’s dream of encounters with elves, fairies, and brownies in a garden where flowers smile and laugh, and crickets dance. The opening stanzas run as follows:
When all the world was hushed last night,
I saw a very funny sight.
I dreamt that I was standing still
Just underneath my window sill,
With daisies all around my feet,
And grasses cool and wild and sweet.
And all about the cottage wall
Were bobbing weeds and flowers tall,
And little things with golden leaves
Like webs a fairy spider weaves,
And swarms of little elfish things
With fluffy feet and silver wings.
I held my dolly very tight
And wondered at the funny sight,
For round and round and in and out
The queerest Brownies danced about,
And every one that stood around
Played dummy harps that would not sound.
And over on a patch of green
Two bunnies sat and watched the scene,
While fairies fled with wings outspread
Before the Brownies’ lightsome tread.
The moon looked down with face aglow
To see how fast their feet would go –
Such little feet, so small and round,
They hardly seemed to touch the ground.
And all the stars with twinkling eyes
Laughed merrily and thought them wise,
And called them strange and queer and grand,
The Brownies and the fairy band.
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(Cassell’s Little Folks [London, New York, Toronto: Cassell and Co., 1909], p. 64)
This poem was written when her own child was nine years old, and so one might speculate that it had been written for him.
Military Society
Given her family’s military background, it is not surprising to find Madeline Geale socializing within the military community, especially since her father continued to serve in the Canadian Militia and “was extremely popular” in “a very large circle of friends” (Gazette [Montreal], 19 August 1899, p. 4). Joseph E. Masters says that he was “a fine-lookingman, wearing a moustache and side whiskers, and that “he had a fine singing voice” (“it was a treat to hear him”) (“The Masters Papers,” p. 233). Francis MacKay, of the Niagara Historical Society, concurs: “J.B. Geale was noted for his dashing charms and fine singing voice which contributed much to the choir of St Mark’s [Anglican Church] as well as soirées” (https://www.niagaraonthelakeinn.ca/history/lyons-house-historical-notes/).
And so, in 1890, we find Madeline Geale alongside the best of Niagara-on-the-Lake high society watching a mock battle played out by the local militia forces across the site of the Fort George Common where Geale would six years later help to lay out the Niagara Golf Club’s new eighteen-hole course in June of 1896.
The woman who was in the summer of 1896 the reigning champion woman golfer of North America and the secretary-treasurer of the Niagara Golf Club, preparing a new layout to host huge crowds excited to watch the international golf skirmishes of red-coated players from Canada and the United States, was the woman who in the summer of 1890 was listed among the “fair ones” that Saturday Night Magazine named as observers of the military exercise that marked the end of that summer’s training camp for certain units of the Canadian Militia:
A great number … came on Friday for the sham battle, which brought the twelve days’ camp to a close. Early in the afternoon, crowds gathered from every direction and thronged the ramparts of old Fort George, from which a splendid view of the field could be obtained. Although the heat during the first part of the afternoon brought a rather unbecomingly deep flush to many an otherwise bewitching face, few found it too warm to remain for the exciting and splendid manoeuvres which later delighted the large crowd of spectators. The excitement of some of the ladies became slightly alarming, and once a few feeble screams relieved the feelings of the more timid when a line of red-coated skirmishers unexpectedly charged up the side of the fort embankment, but the smiling faces of the invading party were so reassuring that the fears of the fair ones were soon lost in the intense interest with which they watched the advance of pursuers and the retreat of the routed enemy. (Saturday Night [Toronto], 5 July 1890, p. 11).
She also attended the end-of-summer balls that marked the conclusion of the training camps at Niagara-on-the-Lake for the local militia companies, including those from Toronto.
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In the summer of 1895, Madeline Geale was among prominent Niagara-on-the-Lake residents invited by the American troops to visit Fort Niagara:
Never before have the officers of the Niagara Brigade Camp and the blue coats from Fort Niagara exchanged such unusual and marked civilities – socially – as during the last ten days.
Figure 9 Fort Niagara, Youngstown, New York, late 1890s, as seen when approaching by boat from the Canadian side of the Niagara River at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Dinners and dances have followed fast upon each other on both sides of the water, but the dances given by the officers of the 13th U.S. Regiment in honor of the Canadian Red Coats outshone them all. It was in every way a thoroughly charming and most enjoyable affair …. The guests from across the river were met at the landing by a guard of trim privates, who escorted them to the adjutant’s office … and from there to the gaily decorated ball room …. The floor, the supper, the music, everything was perfect, and although boats and cabs had been ordered for twelve, it was not until after two that the soft strains of Auf Wiedersehn – the last waltz – floated out over the river, followed by Auld Land Syne, and God Save the Queen. Even then everyone seemed reluctant to go. (Buffalo Commercial, 29 June 1895, p. 5)
Only a relatively small number of the many dozens of American and Canadian guests who attended the event were named in the newspaper, but one of them was “Miss Madeline Geale” (Buffalo Commercial, 29 June 1895, p. 5).
Her Poetry in General
Dramatic recitation of poetry was a regular feature of women’s social events. Writing poetry oneself was also fairly common, but writing it competently and publishing it was much rarer.
Most of Geale’s poetry is relatively conventional and quite competent regarding rhythm and rhyme, as we can see from the opening stanzas of “Dorothy’s Dream” cited above.
The themes and style of two of her best poems make clear that she has studied closely the great British poets of the nineteenth century. For instance, in “Winter at Niagara-on-the-Lake” (1894), she implicitly recalls “Dover Beach,” the celebrated poem of her great Victorian precursor Matthew Arnold, who combines the image of “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling” upon the shore with the image of human beings “on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night”:
Winter at Niagara-on-the-Lake
No tumult here,
No ceaseless tramp of hurrying toilers’ feet –
Only a hush above the wide old street;
Or loud and clear,
Up from the long, low line that bounds the lake,
The noisy crash of waves that rise and break.
And over all,
Lost in the hush and mingling with the roar
Of sullen waters breaking on the shore,
The bugle call
Drifts from the Fort, that nestles, quaint and low,
Beyond the river’s frozen fields of snow.
(The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art, and Literature, vol 2 no 5 [March 1894], p. 428)
This poem was republished in the Buffalo Morning Express in 1897 (17 January 1897, p. 2).
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In an 1896 poem (written at the time she created the popular “cherry pie” device for children at the St. Mark’s summer Festival), Geale takes Romantic poets William Blake (1757-1827) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) as her models for a poem about a child. In the two-stanza poem called “Two Answers,”Geale introduces a person speaking to a little child. In the first stanza, the adult tells the child she lovers her, and the child immediately responds in kind. In the second stanza, however, the little girl has grown old enough to be called “a maid,” and so, when the adult tells her again that she loves her, the older child no longer responds in kind:
Two Answers
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“I love you, sweet,”
I said to a child,
Whose curls in a mass of tangles wild
Fell over the shoulders, soft and fair,
Kissed by the sun and the summer air.
“I love you, sweet”;
And she turned and smiled,
The frank, fresh smile of a trusting child.
“I love you, too;
“I love you best,”
The lips of the little one confessed.
“I love you, sweet,”
I said to a maid,
And the dimples alternately went and stayed.
“I love you, sweet”; and the laughing eyes,
Blue as the bluest summer skies,
Looked shyly up,
And as shyly down
Under the lashes of golden brown;
But I waited in vain for the words confessed –
“I love you, too;
I love you best.”
(The Argosy, vol 42 no 4 [July 1903], p. 699)
The second answer provided by “the maid” – silence – speaks the meaning of the poem. Madeline Geale follows the tradition of Blake and Wordsworth, who regularly reflect on how the experience that children acquire as they grow up slowly deprives them of the innocence and trust with which they enter the world, gradually making them more guarded about what they will confess to others.
This 1896 poem became a favorite of editors, reappearing several times over the years, including republication in The Argosy magazine in 1903 and in the Morning Register newspaper of Eugene, Oregon, in 1904.
Her Short Stories in General
The short story form had become popular by the late 1800s and early 1900s. As opposed to long Victorian novels full of many characters and many storylines, the short story generally focussed on a couple of characters and a single event in a moment of time. And the plot typically produced a surprise at the ending of the story.
Geale’s story “Sandy’s Old Woman” exemplifies these short-story traits.
Geale tells of an impoverished boy named Sandy who received from a woman who nursed him through illness a book called Legends and Folktales, one of the stories telling of how a certain grand house contains gold for those who can enter it and find the right room at dawn on Christmas Eve. Mistaking the book for an account of the real world, Sandy enlists his even poorer friend Curly to search their town for the mysterious house described in the book. Finding a grand one that approximates the house in question, Sandy sends Curly in.
Figure 10 Madeline Windeyer, "Sandy's Old Woman, illustrated by B. Cory Kilvert, Everybody's Magazine, vol 11 no 6 (December 1904), p. 737.
Apprehended by the household servants and set before the homeowner in the middle of the family’s Christmas party, Curly cannot find words to respond to the interrogation that follows, so he pulls Legends and Folktales from his pocket and points to the relevant page. The homeowner reads it aloud, he and his guests dissolve in laughter, and they soon resolve to fulfil the boy’s expectations. He is given a sack full turkeys, plum puddings, and mince pies, and added to it are gifts from under the Christmas tree. Curly is then told to open a desk drawer and to add to his sack a handful of the coins he finds there.
Sent on his way, Curly rejoins Sandy, and, in wonder and triumph, they inspect their treasure.
Her brief short story “Fore!” (published in Saturday Night in 1902) is similar.
Fore!
Two people, one young and fresh, with soft, windblown hair, and the brown roses of the sun glowing through the pink and white of her dimpled cheeks. And the other a little old maid, with the shadow of a disappointed life in her faded eyes.
“Golf! Golf!” she said bitterly, as she lifted the clubs the girl had laid on the table, and deliberately dropped them out of the window. “Never let me hear the word, child, never bring those terrible sticks into my house. Many times, long ago, I heard that golf was a game in which men cheated as often as they chose and no one could prove otherwise. They told me nine out of ten played it unfairly, that no one ever knew if the other could be trusted, that even the little boys who carried the sticks were bribed. Fences and hollows and hills hid the players from each other and left them free to do as they wished. I did not believe them. I loved someone who loved the game, and one day I went up the course with many others. They went to see the game. I went to watch the players.”
She paused, forgetting the other, who had grown strangely interested. “Well?” asked the girl at last.
The little old maid woke with a start from her dreaming, and her grey curls bobbed excitedly as she went on. “Yes, it was true. I had thought him so immeasurably above anything petty or mean – and I saw him cheat. I heard him lie to win a game. I did not pretend to understand how they played, or how many shots were necessary to win or lose, but I could count. That was enough.”
Again she paused, and again the girl’s enquiring “Well?” urged her on.
“Yes, I counted, to my sorrow. He put his ball on a little lump of mud and knocked it off, and I jotted down ‘one.’ Five times he hit it between that and a certain field. Then his ball went down into a pit that came in his way, and remembering what they said about cheating, and smiling to myself in my absolute confidence in him, I watched. Ah! He disappeared from sight, and just as I said to myself, ‘He is playing his seventh,’ he called at the top of his voice: ‘Four!’”
“My head swam. I could hardly believe my senses. Four! When I had counted every shot and knew it was seven! I held my breath, thinking surely he would remember and correct his mistake, but instead he called again, loudly and defiantly: ‘Four!’”
“Child, that was forty years ago, and I have never seen him since. You may think it was a little thing, but if he would cheat in a game, for nothing but the winning of a day’s sport, how could I trust him in anything? It was the bitterness of my disappointment in him that killed the love. To cheat, with a falsehood added, and for such a little thing, for such a little thing!”
“And didn’t you ask him? Didn’t he explain?”
“ – Ask him? Explain! No. I told him nothing. I asked nothing. One falsehood more would not have bettered things. They told me afterwards that he won the match by a shot, and I knew that the honor and the trophy he carried away were stolen things. How could he have explained?”
The girl rose to her feet with a torrent of words on her lips. They died away unuttered as her eyes fell on the grey curls, the worn cheeks, the faded eyes, and she remembered the stretch of years between. “Oh! The pity of it, the pity of it,” she said to herself, as she stole softly away.
M. Geale Windeyer (Saturday Night [Toronto], 8 February 1902, p. 7)
The two stories are similar. The “little old maid” lives out a delusion that both the reader and the young girl in the story recognize. The young boys live out a delusion that both the reader and the people in the story recognize. And the author makes us ask ourselves whether or not it would be better to apprise the old woman and the young boys of their delusions or to leave them be.
Early Golf
Just when Madeline Geale first took up golf is not clear.
The Buffalo Morning Express claimed that 1895 was “her first season’s playing” (25 July 1896, p. 7). The Inter Ocean newspaper of Chicago, however, asserted that by 1895 Geale was “conversant with every nook and corner of the [Niagara] links, having played on them daily for the past three years” (9 September 1895, p. 3).
Perhaps the information in the two newspapers can be reconciled: it may be that the Buffalo newspaper means that 1895 was her first season of competitive tournament play, and it may be that the Chicago newspaper means that she had been playing golf socially at the Niagara Golf Club for several years before the 1895 season.
Interestingly, when Geale was elected secretary-treasurer of the Niagara Golf Club in the spring of 1896, it was noted that she “has always taken the greatest interest in golf at Niagara” (The Globe [Toronto], 19 June 1896, p. 10, emphasis added). The word “always” would not have been appropriate in this commendation if Geale had been involved with the club only since the beginning of the 1895 season twelve months before this statement was made.
What is interconvertible is that when Madeline Geale took up the game, she became obsessed with it: she played the game daily. Following her victory in the inaugural International Golf Tournament, she was interviewed by the Buffalo Morning Express about her experience of golf:
A prominent member of this [Niagara-on-the-Lake] coterie of enthusiasts is Miss Madeline Geale, who is the champion woman golf player of Canada, having won her laurels last year in her first season’s playing. She confesses that before she played herself, she thought it frightfully stupid to chase balls all over a hot, sunny field, but now she would rather play than eat. (Buffalo Morning Express, 25 July 1896, p. 7)
Those of us who are addicted to golf know whereof Geale spoke in 1896.
And after her conversion to golf, she had little tolerance for women who affected to play golf but were really playing a different game:
Two Kinds
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A sight for the gods, indeed!
A blouse of blue, and a skirt of tweed,
A glimpse of an ankle, trim and neat,
And stout, spiked shoes on the shapely feet,
A dimpled face, sun-browned and fair,
And a gleam of gold in the wind-blown hair.
And with her another strode,
While a caddie shouldered her shining load.
She wore a hat that was Fashon’s pride,
With puffs in front and plumes at the side.
Her waist was pulled into slender grace,
And a veil protected her tender face.
In fact, her style was a duplicate
Of a stunning cut in a modiste’s plate.
Ghost of a golfer! Fancy that,
High-heeled shoes, and a picture hat!
Gloves on her hands and a train to her gown.
And ivory cheeks instead of brown!
And yet, by thunder! There are such girls
Who golf in ribbons and borrowed curls,
Who haunt the links when the days are fair
Because of the fellows and fashion there,
While down in their hearts, misguided dames,
They’ve not but scorn for the game of games.
Away, all such, to your gentle sports,
Hie off to your teas and your tennis courts;
God’s fields, and downs, and sun-lit hills
Are not for the women of fads and frills.
The winds blow sweet, and the skies are blue,
But the breath of the links is not for you.
(Saturday Night [Toronto], 27 April 1901, p. 7)
Geale uses the trusted rhyming couplet of eighteenth-century poets such as Alexander Pope to mock her target: women who use golf to display themselves before eligible bachelors.
“Two Kinds”was republished in 1902 in Britain’s premier golf magazine, Golf Illustrated (vol 11 no 34 [3 January 1902], p. 14).
Niagara Golfing Forebears
Whenever it was that Madeline Geale decided it was not “stupid to chase balls all over a hot, sunny field,” her aptitude for the game will have immediately been noticed by the club’s best players: her much older cousins, John Geale Dickson and Robert George Dickson, and a summer resident of Niagaraon-the-Lake name Charles Hunter who became an admirer of her golf game and her golf mentor in general.
Figure 11 John Geale Dickson. Canadian Golfer, vol 16 no 9 (January 1931), p. 677.
Madeline was the first cousin of John Geale Dickson (1845-1931), who first laid out three holes on the Fort George Common in the early 1870s:
Educated at Galt and Cobourg, Mr. Dickson and his twin brother, afterwards Captain [Robert] [George] Dickson, went to England, where they entered the army.
It was while an officer [lieutenant] in the 47th Regiment in 1871 … that Mr. J.G. Dickson took his first lessons in golf.
Leaving his regiment in 1872 and returning to Niagara, his birthplace, he settled there and with Mr. Ingersoll Merritt, late of the 30th regiment, laid out a rough links on the Southeastern [Fort George] Common or Government Reserve there. (Canadian Golfer, vol 16 no 9 [January 1931], p. 677.
John Geale Dickson was twenty years older than his cousin Madeline. When Dickson set up the first golf course in Niagara-on-the-Lake, she was less than ten years old.
Subsequently, with Charles Hunter(1847-1922), who lived in Toronto (where he was chief agent for the Standard Life Assurance Company) but maintained a summer home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Dickson laid out a nine-hole course around Fort Mississauga around 1877.
Hunter was perhaps the most influential member of the Niagara Golf Club. As Janet Carnochan observes, “In 1877, the club was organized chiefly by the exertions of Mr. Charles Hunter, who ever since has been its strongest supporter” (History of Niagara, [Toronto: W. Briggs, 1914], p. 260). This club lapsed after a few years, but the Niagara Golf Club was re-formed for good in 1881. Hunter served on its executive committee perpetually (often as president), was instrumental in organizing in 1895 its famous International Golf Tournament (which endured for twenty years), and religiously documented its history in a scrapbook now in possession of the Niagara Historical Society.
He was a good friend of Madeline Geale’s: he invited her to serve alongside him on the committee organizing the International Golf Tournament of 1896; they went out together on the new St. George links of 1896 and named the holes together; and she gave him an autographed photograph of her for his scrapbook.
It is possible that Madeline Geale is the unidentified woman in the photograph below that shows Charles Hunter and his wife, Emily Joanna Lauder (a St Catherines’ woman that he married in 1878), on the Niagara-on-the-Lake golf course in the late 1880s or early 1890s.
Figure 12 Three caddies and three golfers on the Niagara-on-the-Lake golf course. Left: Charles Hunter. Right: Mrs. Charles Hunter (Emily Joanna Lauder). Middle: unidentified woman (perhaps Madeline Geale). Richard D. Merritt, On Common Ground (Toronto: Dundurn, 2012), p. 195.
Robert Geale Dickson (John’s twin brother) became the first captain of the Niagara Golf Club when it was formed in 1881.
Figure 13 Captain Robert George Dickson (1845-1924), circa early 1870s.
Robert Dickson, John Dickson, and Charles Hunter are remembered today as among Canada’s golf pioneers.
In the early 1880s, they organized Niagara Golf Club matches against the only other golf clubs in Ontario at the time: the Toronto Golf Club and the Brantford Golf Club. They also represented Ontario in interprovincial matches with Quebec, and they arranged for the Niagara Golf Club to host the interprovincial match of 1883.
Although Madeline Geale initially looked askance at the game, she must have had many occasions to observe it up close in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and not just because her cousins were so enamoured of it, for golf matches in the 1880s were exotic events – attracting curious spectators, interested to see both the unfamiliar game (with its odd implements and peculiar swing) and the bright red coats that the golfers wore in those days (contrasting so dramatically with the green field over which they strode so purposefully).
Miss Geale's Playground: the Mississauga Links
Eight women entered the International Tournament of 1895 from golf clubs in Quebec, Ontario, and the United States. All were eager to test themselves in the first great golf championship for women to be organized in either Canada or the United States. Although the championship “was not the result of a deliberate act on the part of the two Associations,” the “International Amateur Golf Tournament, held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in September, had … the tacit sanction of the United States and Canadian Golf Associations” (The Golfer, vol 2 no 1 [November 1895], p. 7).
The men’s tournament was by match-play over eighteen holes. The first nine holes were played on the nine-hole Fort Mississauga Links, and the second nine holes were played on the new Fort George Links, to which the competitors were taken by a carriage ride across town. The women’s championship, however, was by medal play over just nine holes, which were played on the Fort Mississauga Links.
Tournament organizers laid out the new nine holes of the Fort George links over the summer of 1895, but they were at work on significant improvements to the Fort Mississauga links even earlier that year:
The golf course, starting from the grounds of the Queen’s Royal Hotel, laid out over as fine a stretch of common as can be seen anywhere, consists of nine holes and is one and a half miles [i.e., about 2,640 yards] in extent. The hazards consist of a series of broken ground about Fort Mississauga, rifle pits, old fortifications, embankments, moats, wet and dry ditches, water, and sandy shore. Many of the holes are of extremely sporting character and sufficient to bring even the most experienced players to grief. Great improvements are to be made on this ground in the spring and it is the intention of the committee to form a golfing green worthy of the surroundings. (The Times [Niagara-on-the-Lake], 4 April 1895, p. 8)
The condition of the golf course on the Fort George Common was not all that the Niagara Golf Club had hoped it would be by September, for it had been rushed to completion so that the men’s championship at the International Tournament could be conducted on a proper eighteen-hole golf course. A reporter for the Chicago Times-Herald observed: “The fact of the matter is that the greens are by no means in first class order. Putting greens are not made in a day – particularly in ‘clayey’ soil, which demands a good deal of treatment to make a proper course” (cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4).
But conditions on the long-established Fort Mississauga links were far worse. The problem was cows: “cattle have been permitted to roam at will over the course, and that alone is sufficient to place the links out of the order of the first class” (Chicago Times-Herald, cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4).
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Cattle had grazed on the common right up to the day before the first matches were played:
Early in the afternoon, a drove of over 100 cows passed over the St. George links [this is an error: the cows were on the Fort Mississauga – not the Fort George – links] and one feminine golfer – properly a “golferine” – tried a long and elevating drive from the tee over the passing cows and much to her own and everybody’s surprise landed the gutta-percha ball in the midst of the cows. One cow thought that it was a delicatessen of some sort, dropped from some place for her sole benefit, for she tried to eat it. But the attempt was unsatisfactory, and the animal turned from it with disgust. The young woman considered it an extreme hazard to venture among the cows to recover the ball, but a caddy was more venturesome. (Buffalo Courier, 7 September 1895, p. 6)
Farmers had been using the Mississauga Common as a grazing ground for their cattle from a time before the golf course was laid out on it. The image below, from a historical plaque at Fort Mississauga, shows cattle grazing in the moat around the fort around 1879, a year or two after John Geale Dickson and Charles Hunter laid out the first course on the Mississauga Common.
Figure 14 "Old Fort Mississauga circa 1879," Historical Plaque, fort Mississauga, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
An anonymous American competitor was interviewed by an American reporter about the problem caused by the cattle (this person may have been C.B. MacDonald, who is quoted by name in the article a few lines later offering his assessment of the Canadian players), and the player complimented the tournament organizers for having done their best: “The men of Niagara … have done all that they could under the circumstances to put the ground in good condition, and I must say that few courses have an historic old fort for a hazard. The ground forms a pleasing view to the to the artistic eye of the novice, but when a golfer looks at it, he sees at once its shortcoming” (Buffalo Courier, 6 September 1895, p. 6)
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So many complaints arose about the effect of the cows on the golf course that within weeks of the conclusion of the tournament, the Niagara Golf Club began to consider laying out an 18-hole course entirely on the Fort George Common southeast of the town. As the editor of the Boston journal The Golfer observed:
The links at present are certainly not in good condition, but the soil to the south of the town on the Niagara River is excellent and, with a reasonable amount of money expended, there can be made a fine golfing course. The ground is owned by the Dominion Government and steps are being taken to secure control of the common so that the course can be properly laid out and improved without fear of being ruined by the grazing of cattle. (The Golfer, vol 2 no 1 [November 1895], p. 7)
Located at one end of the Fort Mississauga links was the pavilion of the tournament sponsor, the Queen’s Royal Hotel (which had first broached to Canadian clubs the idea of a grand tournament in Niagara-on-the-Lake in the spring of 1893). At the opposite end of the course was the summer residence of Charles Hunter.
The sketch below, from the Buffalo Courier in the summer of 1895, shows the view across the Fort Mississauga golf course (which was also called the “Lakeside Links”), looking towards the Queen’s Royal Hotel (seen in the far background on the extreme right side of the sketch) from the part of the golf course located in front of the summer home of Charles Hunter.
Figure 15 Buffalo Courier, 18 August 1895, p.9.
Fort Mississauga is seen in the centre of the sketch. Lake Ontario is on the left, the ferry from Toronto arriving at Niagara-on-the-Lake. A golfer putts on what is probably the third green of the 1895 course, to which he has played from a tee located on top of the embankment around Fort Mississauga. The second green and the sixth green were located on opposite sides of the fort seen above, laid out on the flat bottom of the dried-up moat seen in the postcard image below.
Figure 16 Postcard showing Fort Mississauga circa 1900.
The Canadian Militia used the Mississauga Common for exercises in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Figure 17 Bell tents of the Canadian Militia pitched around Fort Mississauga circa 1900.
The Militia conducted mock battles on the common in which mounted cavalry charged across the golf course and artillery carriages were drawn across it, so grazing cattle were not the only source of unusual hazards for golfers. The sketch below (looking across Fort Mississauga towards the residence of Charles Hunter, with Lake Ontario visible on the right, along with one of the ferries plying the route between Niagara-on-the-Lake and Toronto) shows play on the sixth green of the 1895 course.
Figure 18 Players putting in the Fort Mississauga moat on the sixth green of the Lakeside Links of the Niagara Golf Club. The summer residence of Charles Hunter is visible on the horizon in the background. Buffalo Courier, 18 August 1895, p. 9.
The full nine-hole layout of the Fort Mississauga golf course of “Lakeside Links” appears below, the first tee and ninth green shown beside the Royal Queen’s Hotel, the fourth green and fifth tee located in front of the summer residence of Charles Hunter.
Figure 19 Buffalo Courier, 18 August 1895, p. 9.
The Golf Resumés of the Contenders
Mrs. Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor – a woman born Rose Farwell (1870-1918) – was supposed to win the International Golf Tournament.
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Geale’s opponent arrived at Niagara-on-the-Lake as a celebrated golfer. But she was also a social celebrity.
Figure 20 John Elliott portrait of Rose Farwell, 1889.
In 1890, she had married a Chicago man born Hobart Chatfield Taylor (1865-1945). Her husband had hyphenated his last name with an ostensibly superfluous second “Chatfield” at the insistence of his maternal uncle as a condition for inheriting this uncle’s substantial estate.
Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor had launched a career as a writer by the time he married Rose Farwell. He co-founded the political journal America in 1888, published the first of many novels in 1891 (the year after marrying Rose Farwell), lectured at universities on seventeenth-century French and Italian drama, and later wrote a highly acclaimed biography of the French writer Molière.
But Rose Farwell had gathered notoriety herself well before marrying the up-and-coming Chatfield-Taylor. Although she later won fame as a golfer, as a bookbinder (she learned the art of bookbinding in Paris), and as a suffragist, she had become famous as a teenager for her beauty.
The subject after her marriage of paintings by Adolfo Müller-Ury, she was painted before her marriage, when still a teenager, by English-born artist John Elliott. (The portrait is shown above.)
Identified universally in the newspapers of her day by her married name, Mrs. Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor was by the mid-1890s an experienced golfer of whom The Buffalo Commercial observed: “success … usually follows her on the links” (10 September 1895, p. 12).
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Both her brothers and her husband were devoted exponents of the game, too, but she seems to have had a special talent, for we read that although “Mr. Chatfield-Taylor … is a fairly good golfer, he is not so good in his class as is Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor in the ladies’ events” (Buffalo Courier, 6 September 1895, p. 6).
In fact, this “young woman of great beauty and many graces … as a golfer has yet to meet a woman her superior” (Buffalo Courier, 6 September 1895, p. 6). Enthusing that “as a driver she is considered to be marvellously clean and accurate, while her putting is deliberate and clean, and her judgment of distance and gauging excellent,” the Chicago Times-Herald crowed that she “had never met any woman who could begin even to compare with her in general all-round play” (cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4).
In July of 1895, her husband had been named at the beginning of July to the organizing committee for the International Tournament, so it was widely anticipated that she would enter the competition. In due course came the announcement that she would do so, and as Saturday Night noted: “the announcement that Mrs. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor of Chicago had entered the tournament was received with the general conviction that she would assuredly add one more to her long list of victories” (14 September 1895, p. 3).
By comparison, Madeline Geale was virtually unknown to either the American or Canadian golfing public. Her entry into the tournament was unannounced, unremarked, and unheralded.
Interestingly, however, when Janet Carnochan, in her History of Niagara, wrote of the good golfers at Niagara-on-the-Lake in the 1890s, she observed that “Among the ladies, Miss Madeleine Geale was easily first” (History of Niagara [Toronto: W. Briggs, 1914], p. 260, emphasis added). Since Geale was reputed to have played daily, members of the Niagara Golf Club were no doubt familiar with her abilities. Easily the best of the women players, she would have produced scores better than many of the male members of the club. In the early 1890s, however, there were few women’s competitions between golf clubs. After all, it was only in 1891 at the Royal Montreal Golf Club that a woman (Florence Watson, née Stancliffe) was for the first time in North America admitted to membership of a golf club. So, before 1895, Geale would have had little opportunity to establish a reputation beyond the Niagara Golf Club.
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But Madeline Geale’s anonymity up to the summer of 1895 would not last. All changed when the thirty-year-old golf prodigy from Niagara-on-the-Lake played a practice round with the twenty-five-year-old Chicago crack.
The Practice Round
It took just one glimpse of Madeline Geale playing a practice round with Chatfield-Taylor for the Canadian and American fans to recognize that they were in store for a very competitive contest between these two players.
The day of the practice round was sunny and hot, prompting complaints from some of the spectators, but occasional cloud cover and a strong breeze made conditions bearable.
And the strong breeze improved conditions in an unexpected way, for the practice of the women on the Fort Mississauga course was to the accompaniment of an American military band whose music was carried across the Niagara River to the links: “music … was furnished by the United States band stationed at Fort Niagara. It was a long-distance concert of an excellent sort, and the sweet strains were wafted over the river to the great delight of the golfers” (Buffalo Courier, 7 September 1895, p. 6).
Figure 21 The bottom of the photograph shows the contemporary golf course laid out around Fort Mississauga. At the top of the photograph can be seen Fort Niagara, whose military band serenaded the women playing a practice round on the Mississauga Links.
The colourful outfits of the men and women golfers drew the attention of the reporters, especially when contrasted with the cows allowed to graze on the Fort Mississauga golf course:
The golfers’ costumes were somewhat varied, the red top coats, the white trousers, and caps of the men, the white dresses, pink waists, and jaunty caps of the women, and the oddly dressed caddies, arranged in picturesque groups all over the great meadows, presenting a very pleasing landscape picture.
Early in the afternoon, a drove of over 100 cows passed over the St. George links [other newspaper reports make clear that the cows were on the Fort Mississauga links where the women’s championship was held – not the Fort George links] and one feminine golfer – properly a “golferine” – tried a long and elevating drive from the tee over the passing cows and much to her own and everybody’s surprise landed the gutta-percha ball in the midst of the cows. (Buffalo Courier, 7 September 1895, p. 6)
Whether the unknown Geale or the well-known Chatfield-Taylor played this drive into the cows is unknown, but it was well-known that they had played a practice round together, leading the Buffalo Courier to sound a prophetic note of caution to supporters of Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor:
She will play tomorrow in the ladies’ championship event and there is a possibility that her colors may at last be lowered, and that too by a Niagara girl. Miss Gale [sic] of Niagara and the Chicago beauty played a practice game that resulted in a tie, and while Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor’s prowess is not at all underestimated, it is thought that Miss Gale has an excellent show [sic] to win. (Buffalo Courier, 6 September 1895, p. 6)
Having seen the two women playing side-by-side, most reporters described the match-to-come as a toss-up. On the eve of the finals, the Buffalo Courier stated: “They are excellent players and the partisans of both are equally confident” (7 September 1895, p. 6).
After the match, the Chicago Times-Herald explained that the practice round had indeed foretold the contest to follow:
Surprise as it was [that Mrs. Chatfield -Taylor lost to Miss Geale], it can hardly be said that it was entirely unexpected.
The practice game which those two crack players had the other day, which resulted in a tie, showed that the Chicago player would have to look well to her laurels if she hoped to retain the championship and to continue her record of unbroken victories ….
The “knowing ones” who saw Miss G[e]ale play and compared her style and method with that of Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor were agreed that she would make no mean opponent and might indeed win. (cited Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4).
Similarly, the Montreal Gazette explained in retrospect that “From the outset, it was seen that Miss Geale, of Niagara, would be the most formidable competitor Mrs. Taylor had to encounter, and as the play went on, the others gradually dropped behind, leaving these two cracks to finish together a match that for skill and closeness has yet to be equalled” (Gazette [Montreal], 9 September 1895, p. 5).
The Big Match
Accounts of the match suggest that the level of skill displayed by Geale and Chatfield-Taylor was high: “The scores of the leaders, 65 and 71, respectively, are worthy of record, significant as they are of [the] careful golf exhibited in this match, the importance of which might well influence the nerves of many players to such an extent that their play would anything but represent their actual form” (Gazette [Montreal], 9 September 1895, p. 5).
The throngs of spectators – the likes of which Madeline Geale had never seen before – were a constant reminder (if one was needed) of the importance that the golfing world was attributing to the International Golf Championship.
On Saturday, September 7th, the largest crowd of the week assembled on the Mississauga golf course, as well as on the roads alongside it, to watch the tournament’s final matches: “The concluding day of the International Golf Tournament furnished to the large gathering play of a very high order. The event that evoked the greatest interest was the ladies’ single competition in which Mrs. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, one of Chicago’s most expert golfers, met the pick of the Canadian players” (Chicago Tribune, September 1895, p. 7).
Spectators had been just as excited in anticipation of the men’s final, “but the wind and rain on Saturday afternoon unfortunately prevented many from witnessing the finals for the championship trophy between Mr. [Andrew Whyte] Smith of Toronto and Mr. [Charles Blair] MacDonald of Chicago” (The Buffalo Commercial, 10 September 1895, p. 12).
The writer for The Buffalo Commercial describes the great crowds that came to the links daily and the sense of the occasion that animated them:
Some were only present [at the first tee and ninth green] to see the start and finish – for however much they may love golf and the golfers, not everyone cares to evidence it by following the scarlet coats over several miles of rough common, including ravines and ruined forts and innumerable other hazards so dear to the hearts of those who are skilled in the grand old Scottish game.
Many, however, braved everything and followed the players as closely as possible, the ladies silently rebelling against the rule which made anything above an inaudible whisper the gravest breach of etiquette.
At Fort Mississauga, one longed for a kodac [sic], or a camera – anything that would keep the scene from being the picture of the moment. Out beyond stretched the limitless blue lake.
Behind lay the old brown Common with a red flag fluttering here and there above the holes, while up the steep ramparts of the fort scrambled a veritable regiment of men, women and children whose one ambition was to keep as near as the rules allowed to the two red-coated players in front.
Farther on stood a line of carriages, which, with their occupants, followed wherever the course allowed. (10 September 1895, p. 12)
Figure 22 Madeline Geale, circa 1895. Charles Hunter Scrapbook. Niagara Historical Society.
Regarding the women’s final, we read that “Both played with marvellous judgement and accuracy,” but Madeline Geale seems to have played with greater consistency and control: “Miss Geale appeared to excel in driving, a feature of her play that called for the highest encomiums from the many old golfers who followed the contestants” (Gazette [Montreal], 9 September 1895, p. 5).
Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper said that it was her “driving and lofting” that prevailed (9 September 1895, p. 3, emphasis added).
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The match was very competitive, the Chicago Chronicle observed, and it was only after “some very brilliant playing” by Geale that she was able to vanquish her Chicago opponent (Chicago Chronicle, 8 September 1895, p. 4)
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Apparently, Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor often found herself facing a difficult lie.
Yet she seems to have been a bit of an escape artist (a nineteenth-century Phil Mickelson, of sorts), and so she stayed in the match till the very end: “Mrs. Taylor displayed rare ability in slipping out of awkward dilemmas, and on several occasions won out the hole when success seemed impossible” (Gazette [Montreal], 9 September 1895, p. 5). One can hear the ladies – in rebellion “against the rule which made anything above an inaudible whisper the gravest breach of etiquette” – asking themselves, “What will Rose do next?”
Figure 23 Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor. Chicago Tribune, 10 September 1895, p. 1.
Surprised that Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor had lost, Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine implied that Geale’s opponent suffered from bad luck: it seems that “Mrs. Taylor … got into one or two unfortunate hazards” (Saturday Night, 14 September 1895, p. 3, emphasis added).
Those cows!
Or was there perhaps another, more nefarious, explanation?
Partisan Canadian and American support was at a fever pitch during the championship matches, for in both the women’s and the men’s finals, an American was pitted against a Canadian.
As the eventual men’s champion, Charles Blair MacDonald, revealed many years later, a Chicago member of the crowd had bribed a forecaddie to favour him over his opponent, Andrew Whyte Smith:
Smith and I reached the finals. Smith was a very good Scotch player and, I think, quite my equal in playing the game….
A regrettable but amusing incident occurred in our match. As the golf course was quite rough, with bogs full of long grass in many places, we decided to have a fore-caddy. At one of the holes, Smith drove and almost hit the fore-caddy and then I drove. I noticed the fore-caddy going at once to where my ball lay.
Coming up, we were looking for Smith’s ball. We asked the fore-caddy where it was. He denied having any knowledge of it whatever. We told him we saw he had to dodge for fear it would hit him, but he was adamant.
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Finding Smith’s ball all right, we went on.
Late in the evening, after due celebration of our victory, one of my party confessed to me that he had given the boy five dollars to be sure and always stand by my ball. (C.B. MacDonald, Scotland’s Gift, Golf: Reminiscences by Charles Blair MacDonald [New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928], Chapter 7)
Skulduggery may have been afoot on the other side, too, for MacDonald’s caddie had so greatly feared interference with MacDonald’s ball from Canadian supporters of his opponent, Smith, that he took extraordinary measures to protect it: “I shall never forget my caddy, … lying over my ball to see that no one tampered with it, as the feeling was running very high” (Scotland’s Gift, Golf, Chapter 7).
There were no reports of bribery or interference with the players’ balls in the women’s final, but one should bear in mind that the same spectators were present at the women’s final in the morning as were present at the men’s final in the afternoon.
Although they would be disappointed by the result of the men’s final in the afternoon, Canadian fans were ecstatic when the last putt dropped in the morning championship match that the Chicago Times-Herald described as “one of the greatest surprises the golfing world has been treated to” (cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4)
Big Parties
We read that during the week of the International Championship Tournament, “Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald royally entertained their many Chicago friends who… formed their house party” (Chicago Chronicle, 8 September 1895, p. 4). After MacDonald’s victory in the last match of the tournament, the Chicago Golf Club members in Niagara-on-the-Lake were as ecstatic as the Canadians had been in the morning: “Chicago won seven out of the ten prizes offered” (Inter Ocean [Chicago], 9 September 1895, p. 3).
It was time to party: “An informal party was given this evening at the MacDonald country house in Lundy’s Lane by Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald, and their Chicago and New York friends are tripping the light fantastic” (Inter Ocean, 9 September 1895, p. 3).
Rather than deferring their party until after the championship matches, as the Americans did, the Canadians partied the night before:
Mr. Charles Hunter entertained a number of the golfers at his lovely summer home, The Cedars, on Friday evening. About fifteen or twenty were present and a very jolly evening they had.
Mr. [A.W.] Smith, who so nearly escaped being Canada’s champion, Mr. J. Geale Dickson, and Capt. R.G. Dickson sang several songs, and before supper the Niagara brass band unexpectedly arrived upon the scene bent on a serenade, which they gave to the evident enjoyment of host, hostess and guests.
At the close of the evening, the golfers joined hands around the supper table and sang Auld Lang Syne. (Buffalo Commercial, 10 September 1895, p. 12)
Perhaps Smith’s party-dog performance before the championship match was a mistake. Songster Smith lost to MacDonald on the eighteenth hole.
Only Madeline Geale survived the “very jolly evening” in her best form. Perhaps she drank less than Smith, or handled the alcohol (or hangover) better.
A Farewell to Farwell
The Chicagoans were disappointed only by the defeat of Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor.
And so were American and Canadian newspapers, which worked hard to snatch some sort of victory from the fact of defeat.
Newspaper reporters found it difficult even to acknowledge that Geale’s famous opponent – “that clever golferine, Mrs. Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor of Chicago” – had really lost (Buffalo Courier, 8 September 1895, p. 11). The account of the match by the writer for The Buffalo Commercial was typical:
the ladies’ singles for the championship … ended in a final contest between Chicago [and] Canada, Miss Geale keeping the championship under the Union Jack by six strokes, making a score for the nine holes of 65 against Mrs. Taylor’s 71.
If the representative of the Chicago club lost her match, however, it was only one thing against many which she won, for she captured the hearts and unbounded admiration of everyonewho saw her.
She is exceedingly handsome, with a fascinatingly bright smile, and a sweetly unconscious smile, which is only one of her many charms. (10 September 1895, p. 12, emphasis added)
“If” she lost her match?
Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper mixed compliments with excuses. On the one hand,
Mrs. Chatfield Taylor did some splendid work…. There were eight entries in the ladies’ contest, and Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor was the only American in the match. She has been in form but three months and, considering the field against her, she made a magnificent showing. The Canadians were profuse in their praise of her pluck and brilliant playing. (Inter Ocean, 9 September 1895, p. 3).
On the other hand, Geale’s knowledge of “every nook and corner of the links” was “an advantage which the Chicago lady could not overcome” (Inter Ocean, 9 September 1895, p. 3).
The Chicago Times-Herald suggested that the Chicago champion might have prevailed but for the cows:
On several occasions, the ball would land in a muddy hole or cow path, and it was almost impossible to loft it.
For these reasons, a stranger to the links, not knowing where or how to avoid these places, was greatly handicapped, and this, in no small degree, as well as Miss Gale’s knowledge of the course, conspired to defeat Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor. (cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4)
Events “conspired” against the Chicago lady.
The Canadian press was equally sympathetic – if not more sycophantic – in explaining (away) Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor’s loss.
We read in a number of Canadian newspapers that “Although Miss Geale won, it cannot be taken for granted that Mrs. Taylor is an inferior player” (Gazette [Montreal], 9 September 1895, p. 5).
Saturday Night implicitly offered the second-place finisher an honorary “Mrs. Congeniality” award:
Mrs. Taylor and Miss Geale … played so evenly that up to the last it was either’s match. Mrs. Taylor, however, got into one or two unfortunate hazards and lost by six strokes, the score being sixty-five and seventy-one for the nine holes.
Mrs. Taylor played a very pretty game, but far prettier than the game was the player.
She is exceedingly handsome, tall and graceful, with a charming face, pretty light-brown hair and a warm, soft, nutbrown complexion. And her manner is as frank and charming as her face.
During her short stay at the Queen’s, she made many friends and admirers. (Saturday Night [Toronto], 14 September 1895, p. 3).
To paraphrase Alexander Pope’s observation about reaction to flaws in the fair maid Belinda in The Rape of the Lock:
If to her share some golfing errors fall,
Look on her face, and you’ll forget ’em all.
And so, despite her loss to Geale, Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor was even more celebrated when she left Niagara-on-the-Lake than when she arrived: she had conquered hearts.
But Madeline Geale had broken the aura of invincibility that accompanied Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor on the golf course.
And she may have undermined her confidence, too.
Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor returned to Chicago immediately after her Niagara-on-the-Lake loss, eager “to enter the play again” in a tournament the next day (Chicago Chronicle, 10 September 1895, p. 4). It was said that she had returned to Chicago “looking none the worse for her defeat in Canada, where she was a good second,” but “strange to say, she had to put up with her second place, her conqueror on this occasion being Miss Carpenter, a young woman only 14 years old” (Chicago Chronicle, 10 September 1895, p. 4).
Despite these first two losses of her golfing career, suffered in the consecutive tournaments she played in September of 1895, Chatfield-Taylor continued to play golf at a high level in the Chicago area for many more years.
In 1918, however, at just forty-eight years of age, she died of pneumonia at the family’s home in Santa Barbara, California, after what had seemed initially to have been a successful operation to remove her appendix.
Golf Pretty
Figure 24 Rose (Farwell) Chatfield-Taylor, c. 1895.
Travelling back to Chicago on the overnight train after the finals in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Chatfield-Taylor arrived at her home golf course the next day ready to play another tournament.
As noted above, she was described as “looking none the worse for her defeat in Canada” (Chicago Chronicle, 10 September 1895, p. 4).
All was well, both with her golf game and with her looks: “Mrs. Taylor [had] played a very pretty game, but far prettier than the game was the player.” (Saturday Night [Toronto], 14 September 1895, p. 3).
And so, after the gruelling final match of the International Championship Tournament, the one was ‘looking none the worse for her defeat.”
What about the other one? Was Madeline Geale looking any the better for her victory?
Figure 25 Madeline Geale, circa 1895.
Belatedly, the Canadian woman who was the first to defeat the pretty Chicago woman was also described by a newspaper as pretty – in fact, as exceedingly so.
In her History of Niagara, Janet Carnochan recalls that “in the [Toronto] Mail and Empire of 1896, where her picture appeared, she was described as having the prettiest golf stroke among women players of the time” (p. 260).
A second victory: Miss Geale’s golf swing was prettier than Mrs. Chatfield-Taylor’s!
Ah, but how did the pictures compare?
Hattie Gale
Several American newspapers referred to Mrs. Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor’s opponent as Hattie Gale.
Madeline Geale’s name first appeared as such in the Buffalo Courier: “Much interest centers in the ladies’ match. The competitors will include Mrs. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor of Chicago and Miss Hattie Gale of Niagara-on-the-Lake. They are excellent players and the partisans of both are equally confident” (7 September 1895, p. 6).
I suspect that the American reporter who produced the above “Special” report from Niagara-on-the-Lake had heard Madeline Geale referred to familiarly as “Maddie,” but misheard this name as “Hattie.” Or perhaps he had submitted a handwritten story to typesetters with the name “Maddie” in it, but typesetters misread “M” and “d” as “H” and “t.” Or the reporter may have submitted the story by telephone, his “Maddie” being misheard as “Hattie.” This would also explain how “Geale” (pronounced “gale”) came to be printed as “Gale.”
The problem was perhaps a “game of telephone.”
Whatever the case may be, Hattie Gale became well-known in Chicago.
The Chicago Chronicle reported that “the ladies’ championship …. narrowed down to a contest between Mrs. Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor of Chicago and Miss Hattie Gale of Niagara-on-the-Lakes” (8 September 1895, p. 4, emphasis added).
Similarly, Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper reported that “Mrs. Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor played a plucky game with Miss Hattie Gale, Canada’s champion lady golf player of Niagara-on-the-Lake” (9 September 1895, p. 3).
And the Chicago Times-Herald referred sensationally to “one of the greatest surprises the golf world has been treated to. This was none other than the defeat, after a notable struggle, … of Mrs. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor of Chicago by Mis Hattie Gale of Niagara-on-the-Lake” (cited in Kansas City Star, 11 September 1895, p. 4)
At least Hattie Gale was from Niagara-on-the-Lake (or Niagara-on-the-Lakes). In many reports carried in newspapers across the United States, however, Madeline Geale was reported to be just another of Chicago’s top golfers:
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Chicago Women Play Golf
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., Sept. 9 – The international golf tournament closed with the ladies’ single competition. There were several competitors in this event, which finally simmered down to a contest between Mr. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, of Chicago, and Miss Geale, of Chicago. The struggle between these two was notable one, Miss Geale finally winning by a score of 65 to 71. (Champaign Daily Gazette [Illinois], 9 September 1895, p. 2)
Although in Buffalo they knew that the International Championship Trophy had been kept “under the Union Jack,” people in most of the other states were told that it resided under the Stars and Stripes (Buffalo Commercial, 10 September 1895, p. 12)
Laureate Golf Career
As a result of her big win in the first International Golf Championship, Madeline Geale became wellknown in small world of North American golf in the mid-1890s. From this point of view, note that the photograph that she gave to her admirer and mentor Charles Hunter contains her autograph.
Figure 26 Autograph of Madeline Geale, circa 1895.
One wonders if the two photographs above that show her holding golf clubs were taken precisely for the purpose of distributing autographed copies of them as occasion required (whether to individuals or to newspapers such as Toronto’s Mail and Empire).
Geale was almost single-handily responsible for the taking up of the game by the first generation of women golfers in Buffalo: “Tennis and bowling on the green continue to be popular, but golf has the call with the fair sex. Many Buffalo ladies are becoming enthusiastic golfers and have the advantage of the coaching of Miss Madeline Geale, the secretary of the Niagara Golf Club, who is probably the cleverest woman golfer in America” (Buffalo News, 6 July 1896, p. 40). Geale had at least eight Buffalo pupils at the beginning of the summer, and probably had a good number more as the summer passed and word of her success as instructor spread.
In the spring of 1896, the Niagara Golf club proudly claimed that Geale was “probably the best woman player on this side of the Atlantic” (The Globe [Toronto], 19 June 1896, p. 10). And, as we have seen, the Buffalo News described her that summer as “probably the cleverest woman golfer in America” (6 July 1896, p. 40).
And so golf fans were very interested to see a rematch between Geale and Chatfield-Taylor, the Toronto Golf Club proposing to insert its own champion into such a contest: “A ladies’ golf match is also on the lapis [that is, “on the schedule”], and Mrs. Chatfield Taylor of Chicago has been invited to play on the Toronto links … Miss Geale of the Niagara Golf Club, and Miss Ethel White of the Toronto Golf Club, for a trophy which has been offered by the Niagara Club” (Saturday Night [Toronto], 12 September 1896], p. 2).
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I find no evidence that such a match ever occurred, but in the spring of 1897, Madeline Geale and Ethel White engaged in a match-play contest on the Toronto links (White’s home course): it ended in a draw (The Globe ] Toronto], 18 May 1897, p. 10).
And within a year Geale had become a member of the executive committee of the Niagara Golf Club: “This is probably the first time in America that a lady has been elected Secretary-Treasurer of a golf club, but Miss Geale … is a lady of great executive ability and business capacity and has always taken the greatest interest in golf at Niagara” (The Globe [Toronto], 19 June 1896, p. 10).
She was thereby in charge of the budget for laying out the new eighteen-hole golf course on the Fort George Common:
This year, at the annual meeting held on the 13th [June], several hundred dollars were voted towards having the course put in the best possible order – a resolution which the executive committee lost no time in setting in motion. The Fort Mississauga links have been given up and a very beautiful eighteen-hole course completed on the Fort George commons. (Buffalo Commercial, 20 June 1896, p. 13).
In fact, the resolution to lay out the new eighteen-hole course and the election of Madeline Geale as secretary-treasurer occurred at the same meeting, so it is clear that the Niagara Golf club wanted the “lady of great executive ability and business capacity” in charge of this important project.
Figure 27 The 450-yard 6th hole (called “Half Moon Battery”) of the course on Fort George Common. Golf, vol 6 no 4 (April 1900), p. 299.
One sees to the left (as it appeared during the 1899 season) the green of the 450-yard sixth hole of the new course. It was called “Half Moon Battery.” The work of naming the holes on the new golf course confirms Geale’s thorough involvement in the project: “Charles Hunter, one of the enthusiasts and president of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club, and Miss Geale, another enthusiast and the honorable secretary and treasurer of the club, probably the first woman in America to hold such a position in a club, finished naming them only the other day” (Buffalo Morning Express, 25 July 1896, p. 7).
Hunter may have insisted on naming the 270-yard fifteenth hole: it was called “Geale’s, named after Miss Geale, the hole being directly in front of her home” (Buffalo Morning Express, 25 July 1896, p. 7).
We read at the end of July in 1896 that “The new 18-hole course … laid out on the Fort George Common in June … is now in excellent condition and the greens are receiving special preparation for the tournament” (Buffalo Courier, 25 July 1896, p. 9). Geale’s management of these matters was not just on behalf of the Niagara Golf Club, but also on behalf off the committee in charge of the (bigger and better) second International Golf Tournament scheduled for September.
As a clear sign of the wide respect that Geale enjoyed in the Canadian and American golfing communities after her big win in 1895, she was appointed in the summer of 1896 to the committee organizing the second International Golf Tournament: “The big golf tourney will be in charge of a committee composed of Charles Hunter, Capt. R.G. Dickson, E. Langdon Wilks, Charles B. MacDonald, Edwin A. Bell, Dr. H.Y. Grant, Miss Geale and Stewart Houston, honorary secretary” (Buffalo Commercial, 5 August 1896, p. 7)
For her victory the year before, the Buffalo Courier reported that “Miss Gaele’s [sic] prize was a fine coffee set, valued at $40” (8 September 1895, p. 11). Given that one month later, Horace Rawlins would receive $100 for winning the first U.S. Open, Geale’s prize would seem to have been a relatively substantial one. But if Madeline Geale aspired to add to her silverware collection with a win in the 1896 international competition that she was helping to organize, her hopes were dashed. There would be no women’s championship in 1896:
The international golf tournament held on the Fort George links Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday of last week was one of the most successful things of the season. Only two things failed – the weather and the ladies.
Mrs. Chatfield Taylor, who played so well last year, and whom Miss Madeleine Geale defeated by only seven strokes in the contest for the championship, is on the other side of the ocean and consequently was unable to be present.
No one from the Rosedale Club of Toronto entered, and all the best players of the Toronto Club were either ill or away.
Several other clubs entered, but the committee decided that it would be better to postpone the event until a little later in the season. (Saturday Night [Toronto], 12 September 1896, p. 3)
And so, Madeline Geale remained international champion for another year.
​
Yet she did not rest on her laurels. She was soon off to Toronto to compete against a higher-class of opponents.
Inter-Club and Inter-Provincial Golf
I suspect that by 1897 Madeline Geale had moved to Toronto.
On the one hand, we have an item that she contributed to a magazine late in 1897 that seems to describe a journey from Toronto back to the Niagara region: a newspaper recommended that readers peruse the “very graphically written sketch of a trip from Toronto to Chippawa from the pen of Madeleine Geale” published in the Canadian Home Journal (Ottawa Citizen, 22 September 1897, p. 6). Chippawa was a village on the Niagara River not far from Niagara-on-the-Lake.
On the other hand, her golf matches in 1897 were all conducted with the Rosedale Golf Club as her home base. At Rosedale, she will have encountered (and probably played golf with) future Canadian amateur champions George S. Lyon and Vere C. Brown. In the spring of 1897, she led the spouses of the latter two men, along with other women members of the Rosedale Golf Club, when “the fair ladies of the Rosedale Golf Club met their sisters of the Toronto links … at the Toronto Golf Club” (The Globe [Toronto], 18 May 1897, p. 10).
A month later, Geale was a member of the Ontario team in “the match between Toronto and Rosedale versus Quebec and Montreal” played at the Toronto Golf Club (the Quebec team “won by three holes”) (The Globe [Toronto], 2 June 1897, p. 7).
Madeline Geale was becoming a prominent figure in Canadian women’s golf.
But then – like a horse and carriage – along came love and marriage.
Golf Literature
Madeline Geale generally set the events referred to in her golf poems and golf stories on the Fort George Links of the Niagara Golf Club. Although she never names the Niagara Golf Club or the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in any poem or story, she refers explicitly or implicitly to certain well-known golf holes on the Fort George Links: she refers to the “Willows” by name and she refers several times to balls lost in the thorn tree of “Hawthorn.”
Each story or poem has a character in it that represents the author. She is represented in the poem reproduced above, “Two Kinds,” not by the man-hunting woman described in it, but rather by the woman who is the true devotee of the game:
A blouse of blue, and a skirt of tweed,
A glimpse of an ankle, trim and neat,
And stout, spiked shoes on the shapely feet,
A dimpled face, sun-browned and fair,
And a gleam of gold in the wind-blown hair.
She is represented in “Fore!” not by the by the “little old maid” who “lifted the clubs the girl had laid on the table, and deliberately dropped them out of the window,” but by the little girl who brought the clubs – “young and fresh, with soft, windblown hair, and the brown roses of the sun glowing through the pink and white of her dimpled cheeks.”
In three other works that are set on golf courses, we find a woman protagonist also representing Geale’s golf values, and in each of them this character faces a situation in which a man is pursuing her hand in marriage. We have seen above Madeline Geale’s pity for the old woman who forsook a suitor because she mistakenly thought he had cheated at golf. And we have seen her indictment of women who scorn golf but pretend to play the game in order to attract the attention of a potential suitor. But in one way or another, it seems, the subject of romance between a woman and a man is a focus of each of Madeline Geale’s poems and stories about golf.
In “Two Down,” she combines poetry and prose to tell the story of a woman golfer to whom a man intends to propose marriage at the conclusion of the golf match between them. The man believes that he is a better golfer than she is, but he has reason to suspect that if he defeats her, she may be so upset as to refuse his offer of marriage. So, he resolves to lose to her by hook or by crook.
​
Madeleine Geale Windeyer presents this work as spoken by a male narrator, who is telling some friends about the outcome of the golf match between the man and the woman in question – a narrator who begins by telling the tale as a poem:
“Your honor,” she said
With a toss of her curly head,
And strangely enough he teed
With a heart of lead.
“Never have lost a match,”
He had heard her boast.
He, too, loved victory well,
But he loved her most.
“Which will it be?” he mused,
As he stooped for sand.
“Fame at the Royal sport,
Or a small brown hand?
“One, like a puff of smoke,
Fades in a day;
The other”—his heart beat high –
“Would be mine for aye.”
Both she will never grant;
One I must lose.
A game, or a woman’s heart –
Which shall I choose?
(Golf, vol 7 no 1 [July 1900], pp. 34-35)
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But then, after several more verses of this sort, one of the listeners speaks up: “‘Rubbish!’ interrupted an impatient and matter-of-fact voice. ‘Stop grinding that out in verse, and tell us how it ended’” (p. 135).
Well, as the man was two down with three to play, “he topped a couple of balls, foozled a bit, ploughed up the turf when she was looking his way, and kicked his ball into a bad lie when she wasn’t”; still, “it was nip and tuck at the last hole, in spite of his best efforts to lose, but he managed several putts so skilfully that her ball went down in 6 to his 7” (p. 135).
And so,
The game was hers. She looked elated and triumphant, and thinking the opportunity a favorable one, he proposed.
“No,” she said, emphatically. “I have no opinion of a man who plays as you have played from the fifteenth. I’m 1 up. At the fifteenth, I was 2 down…. I have no respect for a fellow who is 2 up at the fifteenth and loses the game.
” The man groaned. Was this the end of his scheming? Was it for this he had lost? Desperately he grasped at a straw and trusted his fate to a bold stroke.
“What!” the girls exclaimed, with blazing eyes. “You dare to say you gave me the game, when I caught you deliberately cheating to try and win! Don’t interrupt me. There is no use in denying it. I saw you. You tried to hook it out of the road, and you only succeeded in getting it into the rut, and twice, over by the thorns, you tried to kick your ball into a good lie when you thought I was not looking. Bad enough to foozle and top and pull as you have been doing, but to try and steal from me the credit of my victory against such odds is contemptible. I could have forgiven you if you had beaten me in a fair game, but to stoop to such littleness as cheating, and then trying to make me believe you lost on purpose is unpardonable.” (p. 135)
The narrator concludes with a relatively feminist verse:
Gathering up her clubs she swept scornfully past her dumbfounded opponent, and five minutes later as she totted up her score, she sang gayly to herself,
“Never have lost a match.
May I never lose!”
While a man flushed red at his boast,
“Which shall I choose?” (p. 135)
Madeline Geale Windeyer seems to have regarded a man who would use golf as an instrument of his romantic designs with as much scorn as she expressed in “Two Kinds” towards women who did the same thing.
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Authors generally insist that the fiction they write is a work of imagination, and not disguised autobiography, but readers often nonetheless wonder if a writer’s work is based on events in her own life. And so, after reading “Two Down,” one might wonder whether Madeline Geale herself had received some sort of marriage proposal from a man who had presumed to manage her feelings in the same way as the character in her story had tried to manage the woman golfer’s feelings.
Perhaps the most autobiographical of her works about golf is her short story “The Winning Stroke.” It involves a young man whose marriage proposal to the golf club’s champion woman golfer is thwarted by gossip, the consequence of which is that he never marries, and neither does the woman golfer, who, having become “an old maid,” ever afterwards “tenderly dusted her bundle of rusty golf clubs once a week, and wondered…why the only man she had ever loved once stopped in the middle of a game, and half proposed, and never finished” (Golf, vol 4 no 3 [March 1899], p. 165).
The club champion, Cassie Morris, resembles Geale herself: a woman with a “trim little figure,” “brown hair,” and “soft, sunburnt face,” she has shot a record score of 50 for nine holes, she has been able to “walk off with all the prizes, and the credit of the links,” and she has been “puffed up in the papers, and made much of by the other clubs, and invited here, there, and everywhere as the star”of the club (Golf, vol 4 no 3 [March 1899], pp. 161-63).
But mean girl Bessie Morton tells a group of women gathered in the women’s room at the clubhouse that she has seen Cassie Morris cheat when playing golf, and after detailing two instances of cheating, she asks: “Isn’t that a pretty good explanation of a fifty-stroke round?” Bad Bessie then smiles with satisfaction as she sees she has been overheard by Cassie’s boyfriend Richard Warning, who (devastated to learn that the woman to whom he has “half proposed” is “A cheat! … Cassie Morris a cheat! As well a thief as a cheat, and both lie. A liar and a cheat and a thief”) immediately disappeared through the front entrance and “strode down the steps of a golf club for the last time” (p. 163).
Richard Warning had not listened long enough to the conversation of the women to hear Bessie Morton contradicted completely and convincingly regarding her accusations of cheating. “All right. I apologize,” says Bessie: “Cassie doesn’t know anything about it, and you are all satisfied it was a mistake. Let the thing die” (p. 164).
But, as we know, Cassie becomes an old maid, and Richard Warning became a kindred spirit of the old woman in “Fore!” as he “developed as years went by into a crusty old bachelor with a deeply rooted prejudice against everyone who played golf” (p. 164).
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It is possible that the romance between Madeline Geale and the man she would marry, Walter Windeyer, had been complicated by gossip of the sort depicted in “The Winning Stroke,” but that Walter Windeyer (unlike Richard Warning) subsequently cleared the air by talking to Madeline about the whole matter.
From this point of view, the story can be seen as Madeline Geale’s fantasy about what might have happened if Walter had failed to believe in her integrity.
If so, one wonders if the 1903 poem “On the Links” is Madeline Geale Windeyer’s representation of the moment that “the only man she had ever loved once stopped in the middle of a game, and half proposed.”
The poem begins with a serious woman golfer urging her male companion to tee his ball quickly on the last hole so that they can complete their round of golf before the sun sets. She is just like the young Madeline Geale who would rather play than eat. She is such an enthusiastic devotee of the game, thinking of golf before all else, that she has been slow to notice that her male companion’s attitude has become romantic:
On the Links
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“The sun sinks low n the west
Where the clouds lie gray,
Already the shadows fall
And we’ve one to play.”
“Tee quickly,” she urged, and turned
With a childish frown,
Then blushed as her blues eyes met
The eyes of brown.
“Tee quickly,” she said again,
“We have ‘one to go.’
”But a smile had replaced the frown,
And the words came low.
​
“And then? What then?” he asked,
“When the last is won
Will we go our separate ways
With the setting sun?
“Will it end as it started, sweet,
In a summer’s game?
Will life for you or for me
Be ever the same?
“Say ‘one to go,’ sweetheart,
Not ‘one to play,’
And the one I would have you go
Is love’s long way.”
The shadows stole through the hills,
And the sun sank low,
The game was finished, and still
They had “one to go.”
(Ladies Home Journal, vol 20 no 8 [July 1903], p. 24)
Another of Madeline Geale Windeyer’s poems, “Love’s Awakening”(published in Ainslee’s Magazine in the same month that “On the Links” was published in the Ladies Home Journal) might be read as a depiction of the woman golfer’s experience immediately after she and her male companion had gone their different ways home after their round of golf had concluded:
Love’s Awakening
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My eyes were wet with tears,
I scarcely knew why,
Except I saw you going, and the sky
Changed suddenly from blue to gray,
And far away
The hills that had been flushed with sunset gold
Loomed grim and cold.
(Ainslee’s Magazine, vol 11 no 6 [July 1903], p. 120)
Husband
In mid-July of 1899, Madeline Geale’s eighty-year-old father became “very ill” (The Times [Niagara-onthe-Lake], 21 July 1899, p. 5). He lingered for a week but died on July 28th . His youngest child, thirty-four-year-old Madeline, was scheduled to get married less than four weeks later.
She had probably met her future husband, Toronto resident Walter French Newmarch Windeyer(1871- 1941), in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
The latter’s brother, Richard Cunningham Windeyer, had joined the 36th (“Peel”) Regiment of the Canadian Militia in 1890 and began attending summer militia training camps at Niagara-on-the-Lake. His younger brother Walter seems also to have joined the 36th (Peel) Regiment at some point; he was a provisional Lieutenant in this regiment in November of 1915. If he had also come to Niagara-on-the-Lake for training in the late 1890s, it may have been on the links of the local Niagara golf course that Madeline and Walter met (as I have speculated above in autobiographical interpretation of her poems and short stories about golf).
Whatever he might have thought about golf, however, Walter Windeyer – “’Watty’ as he is known to his friends” – was certainly passionate about sports in general (Daily Standard [Kingston], 8 July 1922, p. 9). For instance, when he was young, he was one of the best lacrosse players in Canada, being “a member of the first twelve of the Old Toronto Lacrosse Club in the stirring days when big lacrosse was played by only Montreal, Shamrock, Cornwall, Ottawa, and Toronto” (Kingston Whig-Standard, 7 January 1929, p. 2). As such, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, he regularly played before thousands of spectators.
In the winter, his sport was hockey: “In his youth, Mr. Windeyer was a well-known hockey star” (Edmonton Journal, 21 June 1941, p. 6). We find reports of his “brilliant rushes” in the newspapers and magazines as late as 1897 (Saturday Night [Toronto], 20 February 1897, p. 6). He also seems to have served as a hockey referee from the mid-1890s to the early 1900s.
Like Madeline Geale, he was also interested in the arts, but as a performer rather than as a writer: in fact, he became “one of Toronto’s leading amateur actors” (Kingston Whig-Standard, 7 January 1929, p. 2)
Walter Windeyer had entered the world of work in the 1890s as a clerk in a financial business, gravitating ultimately towards the insurance business: “He began his insurance career in the [Toronto] office of the oldest and most conservative fire company in the world, the Sun Insurance Office of London, England. Later he went into manufacturing and mercantile channels, being the Canadian manufacturer for Claudius Ash and sons, Limited, of London, England” (Daily Standard [Kingston], 8 July 1922, p. 9).
But then World War I broke out in the summer of 1914.
Figure 28 Major W.F.N. Windeyer, 234th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Sault Star, 11 January 1929, p. 7.
After service during the pre-war years in a unit of the Canadian Militia, Windeyer joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the rank of Captain but was soon promoted to the rank of Major. And “In 1916, Major Windeyer was gazetted second in command of 234 O.S. Peel Battalion C.E.F.” (Daily Standard [Kingston], 8 July 1922, p. 9).
When the 234th Battalion’s commanding officer resigned to pursue another appointment in December of 1916, Major Windeyer “subsequently succeeded to the command” of the battalion, which had a strength of between 400 and 500 men, its headquarters being the Ravina Park Barracks in west Toronto (Daily Standard [Kingston], 8 July 1922, p. 9). He commanded the battalion for two months.
By 1916, volunteers were no longer enlisting in sufficient numbers to maintain the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force at the strength required, and so Windeyer was heavily involved in recruitment efforts, speaking widely throughout the Toronto and Niagara regions, cajoling (and even shaming) young, single men to enlist – warning that the federal government would soon impose subscription.
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Before the 234th Battalion was sent overseas in 1917, “a younger man replaced” Major Windeyer (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 21 July 1941, p. 4).
And after sustaining an injury while cranking the engine of an automobile, he was “struck off the strength of the C.E.F.” in May of 1917 (Globe [Toronto], 26 May 1917, p. 14). He remained in the Canadian Militia after the war and throughout the 1920s, and he was an active member of the Canadian Military Institute.
As “Captain W.F.N. [sic] Windeyer” in January of 1916, during a recruitment speech, he had invoked his wife as an example of how Canadians could be persuaded to support the volunteer effort by pointing out to them the atrocities committed against the citizens of the neutral country Belgium by the German army:
Captain Windeyer stated that his wife had refused him permission to enlist at first, declaring that the man next door had not gone yet. “But when I told her what I knew of the rights of the war, she turned on me and stated that I should have gone long before,” he declared.
“If only the facts of the case, the urgent need, was put up to the women properly, we would have no trouble at all with the mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Canada has been very lucky. If it was Canada, instead of Belgium, that was the buffer state, we would have the same horrors here, but Canada would not have been able to have resisted the great war machine of Germany as the brave Belgians did. Put yourself in Belgium’s place.” (St Catherines Standard, 15 January 1916, p. 2; 17 January 1916, p. 8)
Madeline seems to have been sufficiently convinced of the justness of the war by Walter’s arguments that she threw herself into volunteer work in support of the troops.
First, she joined the Sunshine Circle, established in 1915 to raise money for the Red Cross Society. The next year, she ran one of the booths at a colossal “Sunshine Fête” in Toronto (Globe [Toronto], 24 June 1916, p. 10).
And as of the spring of 1916, she also served as “First Vice-President” of the Battalion Auxiliary of the 234th Battalion. The Commander of the Battalion had asked the Auxiliary “to help him in recruiting, as well as in the more material ways of raising funds and providing comforts” for the soldiers” (Globe [Toronto], 24 May 1916], p. 4). The Auxiliary hit the ground running: “Already the 234th Battalion is assured of a band, the Battalion Auxiliary, just formed, having bought the instruments. The Auxiliary’s next move will be to furnish a sergeants’ mess and men’s mess in the Ravina Barracks” (Globe [Toronto], 24 May 1916], p. 4).
In 1919, “at the conclusion of the war, Major Windeyer returned to the insurance business” (Daily Standard [Kingston], 8 July 1922, p. 9). He served as president of the Insurance Brokerage firm Windeyer and Donaldson as of 1917, and he became president of the Pilot Automobile and Accident Insurance Company in the late 1920s.
Figure 29 W.F.N. Windeyer, Toronto Daily Star, 26 November 19120, p. 26.
But for all his success in recruitment efforts during World War I, and for all his success as a businessmen from the 1890s to the early 1940s, Walter F.N. Windeyer is perhaps best remembered today as a successful yachtsman – successful not just within Toronto’s Royal Canadian Yacht Club, but also as Canada’s representative in international races on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Indeed, at a memorial service in Toronto after his death in a yachting accident in 1941, it was said even then that “it is as a lover of clean sports and as a yachtsman that he will be best remembered” (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 31 July 1941, p. 4).
Walter Windeyer’ passion for yachting was one that Madeline Geale would come to share.
Married Life
Madeline Geale Windeyer (the name she generally used when she published poems and short stories after her marriage) settled into life in Toronto as “Mrs. Walter F.N. Windeyer” (in the early twentieth century, women were generally referred to in newspapers by their husband’s name). Married 23 August 1899, the couple had just one child, Walter Cunningham Geale Windeyer (1900- 1964), who was born 19 June 1900. As might have been expected, we find Mrs. Windeyer attending and hosting receptions, teas and bridal showers in the world of Toronto’s upper-middle-class matrons. A newspaper might note what she wore when presiding over the pouring of tea: “Mrs. Windeyer … was in soft grey, with yoke of lace and large toque” (The Globe [Toronto], 6 January 1903, p. 5). In the first year of World War I (now almost fifty years of age), she was still hosting what was called a “miscellaneous shower” for a young bride-to-be (Toronto Daily Star, 12 December 1914, p. 12).
Figure 30 Ward's Hotel, Ward's Island, Toronto, Ontario, circa 1900.
As a young family, the Windeyers spent their summer holidays at Ward’s Hotel on Ward’s Island in the Toronto Islands.
This was their summer resort for a decade, and it was here that both Madeline and her son learned how to sail. (Young Walter was out on the yachts at two years of age.)
After her marriage, Madeline Geale Windeyer remained active in Toronto as a poet, regularly publishing in a wide variety of magazines.
In 1909, she published her children’s poem “Dorothy’s Dream.” In 1910, she published a witty poem about an article of clothing: called “In Memoriam,” it treats the final folding away of a blouse as though it were the funeral of a friend!
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Signing herself “Madeleine Geale Windeyer,” she addresses the blouse as though it were a person, using the tried and trusted style of poetic apostrophe, and she elevates the elegiac mood with archaic poetic diction (for instance, using “thee” instead of “you,” “hast” instead of “has,” “wert” instead of “were,” and “’Tis” instead of “it is,” although no one in Canada spoke this way in 1910):
In Memoriam
It is with pain I part from thee, my blouse,
Who hast been more to me than friend, or spouse;
Who shared my past ‘neath ever-changing skies,
Attached to me and mine by common ties.
Thou wert so lovely in thy palmy days,
I scarce know how, this night, to sing thy praise;
So shabby now, so pinched at every seam, ‘
Tis hard to think that thou wert once a dream.
And yet thou hadst thy faults, thou straight-laced thing,
Like every rose its thorn, or jest its sting;
For thou wert padded, and wert satin-faced,
And like a fawning fop didst clasp my waist.
Ungrateful one am I to turn my back
Upon thy faded charms, and on the rack
To toss thee, with the thoughtless gibes and jeers
The world is wont to give to creatures of the years.
But still I love thee, passé as thou art,
With hollow chest, and seamed in every part;
For thou and I have travelled pleasant ways,
Arm linked in arm, as sweethearts passed their days.
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Ah, well! ‘Tis true life does not always yield
The richest harvest to the widest field;
And thou, with thy light sheers, thy frills and lace,
Hast often lent me what I lacked in grace.
And so I now forgive thy puffed-up pride,
Thy vain attempt my softest charms to hide;
And, with the gentleness thy life hath won,
I lay thee on the shelf. Thy day is done!
(Munsey’s Magazine, vol 53 [April to September, 1910], p. 258)
She also wrote lyrics for songs. In 1907, she wrote the lyrics for “Love’s Dawn,” a song performed at Conservatory Hall in Toronto by a new young Canadian singer (The Globe [Toronto], 24 June 1907, p. 12). And in January of 1913, a musical composition called “A Miniature” – “words by Madeleine Windeyer, music by J.D. Freeman” – was officially copyrighted (Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1913 Compositions, part 3, new series, vol 8 no 1 [1913], p. 1266). Freeman had also provided the music for “Love’s Dawn” in 1907. There may be other works by them that have not been recorded.
As Mrs. Windeyer, Madeline continued to visit Niagara-on-the-Lake to spend time with friends and relatives. In 1907, the local newspaper reported that “Mrs. (Major) Windeyer” was staying in the Oban Inn, which overlooked the Fort Mississauga links (Times (Niagara-on-the-Lake],21 June 1907). She attended the marriage of a niece in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1913 that was described by the local newspaper as “one of the most brilliant social events of the season”: “Among the guests present were Miss Katie Geale and Mrs. Windeyer, aunts of the bride, and a number of other former residents of Niagara” (The Times [Niagara-on-the-Lake], 13 June 1913, p. 5).
Figure 31 Buffalo Morning Express, 2 August 1919, p. 16.
The Windeyers also remained quite materially connected to Niagara-on-the Lake, for they came to own its grand Queen’s Royal Hotel. Just when they acquired it is not clear, but we can see by the advertisement shown to the left that by the summer of 1919 they had decided to sell it.
And so, Madeline Geale’s golf history in Niagara-on-the-Lake seems to have culminated with her owning not just the Queen’s Royal Hotel, which had sponsored the International Golf Championship that she won in 1895, but also with her owning the golf clubhouse that was part of the hotel’s buildings – the clubhouse for golfers on the Fort Mississauga Links.
Yachtswoman and Family
In one of those strange coincidences in which history seems to delight, a man whose very name – “Windeyer” – implies that he is one who is an “eyer” (that is, an “observer”) of the wind, Geale’s husband became a competitive yachtsman who represented Canada in international races over three decades.
Walter Windeyer had been sailing competitively in the Royal Canadian Yacht Club (of Toronto) since the early 1900s, and he became by the beginning of World War I one of its best racers. Of the hundreds of people sailing competitively in Toronto in the early 1920s, we read that “Royal Canadian yachtsmen, Windeyer and [William] Walker, are considered the cracks” (Canadian Motor Boat, vol 18 no 9 [July 1922], p 37).
Skipper Windeyer was easy to recognize, for “he invariably wore one red and one green sock, for port and starboard” (Buffalo Evening News, 23 July 1941, p. 18).
Windeyer’s virtuosity as a sailor was demonstrated clearly in a 1922 dinghy competition between several Ontario and Quebec yacht clubs in which the fifty-year-old skipper and his crewman had to sail each of the eight different competing boats in a succession of eight races. Windeyer and his crewman Townsend won each of the races with a different boat:
The crews had to change boats after every race in order to eliminate differences between the boats. If there was any difference between the boats, it made no difference to Windeyer and Townsend, for a boat would make a poor showing in a race and then in the next race she would be brought in an easy winner by the Toronto cracks, for they never seemed in danger of being beaten after the first leg of the first race. (Canadian Motor Boat, vol 18 no 9 [July 1922], p 37).
The Windeyers became increasingly important members of Toronto’s Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Two months before the outbreak of World War I, we read, “Mr. and Mrs. Windeyer gave a dinner at the R.C.Y.C. last night” (Toronto Daily Star, 2 June 1914, p. 10). After the war, they transformed yacht racing on Lake Ontario when they “brought the R-class boat” Scrapper II to Toronto from Nova Scotia in 1920: “Major Windeyer came into his own as a skipper … and proceeded to win six of the nine races he sailed’ that year (Globe [Toronto], 21 July 1941, p. 4).
Introduced to yacht racing by her husband, Madeline Geale Windeyer became a competitive yachtswoman herself.
Figure 32 A skiff, with its characteristic square bow, rigged for sailing.
Her first recorded victory came in 1909, at the annual sports day for the residents of Hanlan’s Point and Ward’s Island, where the Windeyers had been spending their summer holidays since 1900: she won the women’s “skiff race” (Toronto Daily Star, 16 August 1909, p. 5).
Madeline also served as a skilled crew member on the yachts that the Windeyer family raced in intramural competitions of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, as well as in competitions between Lake Ontario based yacht clubs. She was described by Toronto’s Globe as “a keen yachtswoman” and “an expert handler of canvas” (30 March 1923, p. 9).
Although Walter F.N. Windeyer and son Walter Geale Windeyer regularly raced individually in dinghy competitions, and raced larger boats with various crews (both as skippers and as crewmen), the three Windeyers often raced as a family on “20-rater” yachts, a classification determined by a formula involving a complex calculation of the length of the boat at the waterline, total sail area, beam, chain girth, difference between chain girth and actual girth, and so on.
Not many Great Lakes yacht owners also served as skippers when the their boats were raced: the financial skills that afforded them yacht ownership were seldom matched by the sailing skills required to race the boats competitively. But Walter F.N. Windeyer was an exception: the Royal Canadian Yacht Club authorized his standing as skipper of his own yachts from the early 1920s to the early 1940s, by which point he had become the club’s oldest active skipper.
The Windeyer family owned and raced two yachts successively before World War I and in the early 1920s, each skippered by Walter F.N. Windeyer: first, the Ptarmigan (raced before and during World War I), and second, the Scrapper II (raced during the early 1920s). Toronto’s Globe observed of Madeline Geale Windeyer that “With Mr. Windeyer, she frequently sailed Ptarmigan and Scrapper” (30 March 1923, p. 9).
Both yachts are seen below on Lake Ontario sometime in the 1920s (the Windeyers may well be the crew observable on Scrapper II, which they owned from about 1920 to 1923).
Figure 33 Scrapper II in the centre on the photo, Ptarmigan on the right, on Lake Ontario in the 1920s. Jack Braidwood, Never Lose Steerage Way (Picton, Ontario: Picton Gazette Publishing, 1976), pp. 22-45.
Scrapper II was the yacht with which the Windeyers achieved their best results in competition. Thirty-eight feet long, it had been built in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 1912 by celebrated Boston designer George Owen.
Figure 34 Scrapper II, no date.
Scrapper II was first raced by Frederick W. (Casey) Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell’s partner in hydrofoil and aviation development and manager of Graham Bell Laboratories from 1909-32. In regattas held at various yacht clubs throughout Nova Scotia from 1912 to the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914, Baldwin won several races with Scrapper II. He owned the yacht until the end of World War I, when the Windeyers purchased it.
He raced well with it in the international George Cup competition in 1921, leading a journalist to refer to the yacht as “Major Windeyer’s handy little George Cup boat” (Canadian Motor Boat, vol 18 no 9 [July 1922], p. 38).
For competitions, sometimes skipper Windeyer assembled a crew of friends and rivals from the Royal Canadian Yacht Club; sometimes he included his wife and son Walter junior as crew members.
Figure 35 Walter Geale Windeyer (1900-1964), circa 1960.
The Windeyers’ son, Walter Cunningham Geale Windeyer (1900-1964), started sailing as a two-year-old with his parents “in their sloop Bessie, on Toronto Bay,” and “as a big boy of five he was one of his father’s crew in the keel sloop Grayling; later in Ptarmigan and Scrapper” (Democrat and Chronicle, 19 July 1932, p. 17). “Dark, slight, strong, active and modest of mien,” and known familiarly as Walter, junior, or Wally, he learned well from his parents, winning his first big competition in his late teens, and thereafter winning many international competitions in various sailing categories, being named to Canada’s Olympic team for the Rome Olympics of 1960 (although a heart attack prevented him from competing), and being elected to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1972 (Democrat and Chronicle, 19 July 1932, p. 17).
The Windeyers, senior and junior, “were inseparable sailing pals” (Democrat and Chronicle, 19 July 1932, p. 17). When Scrapper II narrowly lost in its race for the international George Cup in 1922, they were both widely celebrated for their heroic effort to complete the fourth of the six match races in the midst of massive equipment failure:
It is fortunate for organizations like the R.C.Y.C. that they have men of the calibre of Walter Windeyer, jun., Frank Geoffrey and Atwood Fleming. The pluck and skill displayed in the fourth race, in the face of almost insurmountable difficulties, was inspiring. Skipper Windeyer stuck to the race, working toward home inch by inch, while his son remained aloft in an insecure perch forty feet above the deck, making it possible to finish the race in the time limit and gain the one point allowed for completing the course within the stipulated time. Were it not for that one point, Scrapper would have been out of it. (The Globe, cited in the Daily Standard [Kingston], 21 July 1922, p. 11)
Although she figures in no newspaper accounts of matches involving Scrapper II, Madeline Geale Windeyer was described by the Globe as “a keen yachtswoman”who “seldom was absent from important racing fixtures” (30 March 1923, p. 9).
In fact, when she died unexpectedly in the spring of 1923, the Globe announced her death with the headline, “Death of Mrs. Windeyer Is Loss to Yachting”: “In the death of Mrs. Walter Windeyer, of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the sport of Yachting loses one of its most enthusiastic devotees” (30 March 1923, p. 9).
A hundred years after Madeline Geale Windeyer’s last voyage on her, Scrapper II still exists: she is being lovingly and faithfully restored by Kids & Classics Boatshops Museum.
Figure 36 Scrapper II, circa 2020.
In 1941, Walter Windeyer, senior, was still racing yachts on Lake Ontario as a 69-year-old when he died in a yacht-racing accident, the first fatal yachting accident suffered by a Royal Canadian Yacht Club member for more than 50 years:
Yacht Skipper Sinks to Death
Slips From Deck
Windeyer Lost Near Mouth of Niagara River
Figure 37 W.F.N. Windeyer painting his yacht. Le droit, 5 June 1940, p. 13.
Toronto, July 21 – When he slipped from the deck of the yacht “Iolanthe,”Walter F.N. Windeyer, oldest skipper at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, drowned in Lake Ontario’s turbulent waters Saturday evening [July 19th].
Witnesses said he sank instantly in heavy seas more than two miles northeast of the Niagara River. The crew could not reach him. Although only a short distance behind, those aboard a second yacht, the “Bernice,” were also powerless to effect a rescue.
The “Iolanthe” was preparing to round the inner buoy, which stands off the mouth of the Niagara River to guide steamers, when the accident occurred.
Five others aboard the trim yawl were reluctant to discuss the incident and could only supply meagre details of the tragedy.
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The accident occurred in broad daylight about 7 p.m. but a stiff breeze was blowing, and the lake was rough. A veteran yachtsman expressed the opinion Mr. Windeyer was engulfed by a heavy wave and sucked under water without chance of escape. (Windsor Star, 21 July 1941, p. 9)
Despite an intensive search, it was one week before the U.S. Coast Guard recovered the body:
Sportsman’s Body Taken from Lake
The body of Maj. Walter F.N. Windeyer, 69-year-old sportsman widely known among Rochester yachtsmen, was recovered last night about five miles northeast of the mouth of the Niagara River. Major Windeyer was drowned last Saturday night when he was lost overboard from his yacht, Iolanthe, on the way to the Lake Ontario Yacht Racing Association Regatta at Youngstown.
Coast Guardsmen found the body three miles beyond the point where Major Windeyer slipped from the deck of the Yacht.
Rochester yachtsmen joined with other sportsmen from Canadian and American clubs on Lake Ontario at the memorial service for Major Windeyer Wednesday at the Shrine of Foam on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River. The shrine was erected to sailors who have lost their lives on Lake Ontario. (Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 27 July 1941, p. 51)
At a memorial service held in Toronto, the eulogist affirmed: “we know that he is safe in the arms of the Great Pilot” (Globe and Mail [Toronto], 31 July 1941, p. 4).
Death's Denouement
Madeline Geale Windeyer died unexpectedly 23 March 1923 after a six-day battle against influenza that developed into pneumonia. She was fifty-seven years old.
During the early months of that year, although Lake Ontario was frozen, the Windeyers had been extremely busy with yachting matters. They had organized a syndicate of Royal Canadian Yacht Club members to build a new racing yacht for the club:
Canadian yachtsmen will be much interested in the announcement that another boat is to be built by the Royal Canadian Yacht Club of this city [Toronto] for the international races to be held off this port for “R” craft next summer. Walter Windeyer is head of a syndicate of members of the club who are supplying the funds for the construction of the new yacht.
The boat is designed by a Canadian, built by a Canadian, and will be sailed by a Canadian crew. (Ottawa Citizen, 8 February 1923, p. 2)
As a consequence of their involvement in this project, the Windeyers decided to sell Scrapper II.
Figure 38 Reverend Dr. R. Bruce Taylor (1869-1955).
The man who purchased the famous yacht at the beginning of February, 1923, was the Principal of Queen’s University, the Reverend Dr. R. Bruce Taylor (the last Presbyterian minister to serve as the university’s principal). He sailed out of the Kingston Yacht Club, and, like Windeyer, skippered his own boats in competition.
The plan was for Taylor to come to Toronto when the sailing season opened in the spring, and then for the Windeyer family to sail Scrapper II one last time to Kingston with its new owner.
Alas, Madeline was not to make that voyage.
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But her husband and son did:
Arrives With Scrapper
Principal R. Bruce Taylor, accompanied by Major Windeyer and Walter Windeyer, Toronto, arrived in Kingston on the yacht “Scrapper” on Tuesday afternoon, after sailing from Toronto in the newly-purchased craft. The trim vessel attracted a great deal of admiration around the local yacht club. (Kingston Whig-Standard, 30 May 1923, p. 2)
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The Windeyers were entertained that evening by the Kingston Yacht Club, with Major Windeyer expressing in a speech “the hope that the new owner of the yacht would have great success” (Kingston Whig-Standard, 30 May 1923, p. 14).
Among those who greeted Scrapper II at the Kingston Yacht Club and helped to entertain the Windeyers was Taylor’s regular crew: his three daughters. But Taylor would soon lose his crew to love and marriage.
By 1925, when he won an international race at Belleville, Ontario, his crew had been reduced by one:
A lusty cheer went up when good old Scrapper of Kingston, owned by Dr. Bruce Taylor of Queen’s University, and sailed by Dr. Taylor and his two daughters (there used to be three, but Kid Cupid broke up the trio), finished in front in the twenty-foot division…. Scrapper was well handled and won with plenty to spare. This is Dr. Taylor’s first win in many seasons…. The gallery was quick to recognize the situation and Scrapper was given a bigger reception than a Canada Cup winner. (Lou Marsh, Toronto Star, cited Kingston Whig-Standard, 7 August 1925, p. 9)
The seeds for a slow-motion mutiny had been established at Christmas in 1924, when Principal Taylor invited two young men to spend the holidays with his family in Kingston: “Major Windeyer and Mr. Wallie Windeyer, Toronto, and Mr. Gordon Anderson, Montreal, spent Christmas with Principal R. Bruce Taylor and the Misses Taylor, Queen’s University” (Daily Standard [Kingston], 26 December 1924, p. 2).
Figure 39 Twenty-year-old Lois Arnott Taylor, Daily Standard [Kingston], 1 May 1926, p. 2.
The young men visiting that Christmas, Anderson and Windeyer, would each soon marry one of the Principal’s crew.
First, it was announced that “Margaret Rachel, daughter of Principal R. Bruce Taylor,” would marry “Mr. Alexander Gordon Anderson, of Montreal”: “The bride will be attended by her youngest sister, Miss Lois Taylor, as bridesmaid…. Mr. Walter Windeyer, Toronto, will act as best man” (Montreal Star, 26 January 1925, p. 2).
And then “Wally” married Lois, with Principal Taylor performing the ceremony, himself. Sailors all.
When Wally Windeyer had become the leading yacht racer on Lake Ontario in the early 1930s, involving him regularly in racing at Rochester against the local yacht club’s best racers, the city’s Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester introduced him to readers:
Figure 40 Madeline Mary Geale’s granddaughters, Madeleine and Diana Windeyer, sailing, undated.
[Walter Windeyer, junior] met Dr. Bruce Taylor, then principal of Queen’s University, and his three sailing daughters…. Real life yachting romance developed.
Walter Windeyer and Lois Taylor were married and lived happily ever afterward….
Now there are babies, Madeline and Diana, two-and-a-half and five…. All three ladies of the Windeyer name are ready and willing to haul and hike out. (Democrat and Chronicle, 19 July 1932, p. 17).
My question is whether Madeline Geale Windeyer had met Taylor’s daughters and knew, perhaps, that her son was already attracted to the youngest one.
Figure 41 Wally Windeyer, undated. Lois Windeyer, Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], 8 October 1933, p. 15.
With their yacht sold by the beginning of February of 1923, had Madeline conceived the final family voyage to Kingston on Scrapper II with a view to matchmaking?
Was Madeline Geale Windeyer the ghostly skipper of this last voyage?
Was it her invisible hand on the wheel that steered her only child toward Kingston in the company of his future father-in-law?
Conclusion
Madeline Geale was a pioneer in Canadian golf.
First, she helped to establish the women’s game in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Then she helped to popularize competition between the women’s teams ofthe Rosedale Golf Club and the Toronto Golf Club. And she helped to develop interprovincial competition, too, playing for a team of Ontario golfers against a team of Quebec golfers.
Geale was also an international golf pioneer.
She not only won the first International Golf Championship held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1895; she also served on the international executive committee that organized the 1896 International Golf Tournament at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
And this committee work was pioneering, too.
When she was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Niagara Golf Club in the spring of 1895, the fact was widely reported as likely the first time in North America that a woman had been appointed to such a position.
Her poems and short stories about golf were also important.
Apart from any particular theme or storyline in her poems and stories, they can be seen as significant for normalizing the image of women on the golf course and in the clubhouse. They also display women’s serious and intense interest in sporting competition, and they foreground women’s love for the beauty and integrity of golf as the game of games.
One can see that Madeline Mary Geale deserves more than the footnote to which she has hitherto been confined in the story of the development of golf in Canada.
© Donald J. Childs 2023