Ian Murray had to pause when he read the words on the tombstone of Robert Stanley Weir.
It read “The unforgotten are not dead”.
“I thought isn’t that ironic?” said Murray, who for the last year has been doing research on Weir, who besides being a noted Canadian jurist and poet and the author of our national anthem was Canada’s first golf writer.
It is for that latter accomplishment he is little known, so little known, in fact that even Murray’s descendants weren’t aware of it.
He wrote about the greats of his era, like Harry Vardon and Canadian George S. Lyon and everyone who knew him held him and his writing on the game in high esteem.
When Max Baer founded Golf Illustrated in 1913, he put Robert Stanley Weir in charge of reviewing all books on golf for the magazine.
Murray noted that Baer said of Weir at that time ‘He has perhaps the most complete knowledge of any writer in America of the various theories of play that have been advanced in the past and consequently he is in a unique position to act as a critic.”
Murray rediscovered Weir while doing research for a book he’s writing about his grandfather, Canadian golf Hall of Famer Albert Murray.
“I was just staring at an article in Canadian Golfer Magazine, that had my grandfather in it, about gripping the club, and it was by Judge Weir,” said Murray who considers himself a golf historian but had no idea who this Judge Weir was.
“I ended up getting into the USGA site and found they had archival material from golf periodicals including Golf Illustrated so I just started searching from there.”
What he found shocked him.
“I kept finding articles by R.S. Weir,” he explained. “They just kept coming and coming and the further I went back I still kept finding articles by him.
“The oldest story I found from him was a 1902 article, Pioneer Golf in America in the Golf Magazine of the USGA. And he continued writing about golf for the next 23 years.”
Murray says Weir was easily Canada’s first golf writer.
“I have done a lot of research and I have not found anyone else that was writing as early and as regularly on golf for a North American audience,” Murray states.
“Walter Travis wrote Practical Golf in 1901 and it got rave reviews from the New York Times. That was the start of the interest in golf in North America and Robert Stanley Weir was right there, as a Canadian starting to write about the why and the wherefor of golf. He was Canada’s first golf writer but he was also there with Travis and A.W. Tillinghast in being frequent writers of golf in North America.”
Weir was born in Hamilton in 1856 but moved to Montreal with his family at an early age.
He became a noted judge, wrote about golf as well as poetry and penned the (English) words to our national anthem in 1908.
His fascination with golf went beyond writing about it. He was an avid golf who was good enough to play in the Canadian Amateur Championship a number of times and he served on several committees of the Royal Canadian Golf Association (now Golf Canada) along with George S. Lyon and Sir George Drummond, the first president of the organization.
Weir died in 1926 and his golf writing has become largely forgotten.
“A lot of the icons of Canada from that era, we have very little history about,” said Murray. “They tended not to leave a lot behind after their death. Even his descendants say that most of the material they got about him came from his wife’s diary.”
