While at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Jan staged an exhibition about the life of the "golfing surgeon" who put his name to the rules of golf. Subsequently, much of the research undertaken then formed an article submitted jointly by Mr Colin Strachan FRCSEd and Jan to The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press).
Related articles:
The Banning of Playing Golf on a Sunday
John Rattray
Rattray, John (1707-1771), golfer and physician, was born on 22 September 1707 at Craighall Castle, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, the second son of Thomas Rattray (1684-1743), Scottish Episcopal bishop of Dunkeld, and Margaret (c.1690–1737), daughter of Thomas Galloway, second Baron Dunkeld. In 1728 he was apprenticed to John Semple, a practitioner surgeon in Edinburgh; he completed his apprenticeship in 1735. In 1740 he passed the four examining sessions of the Company of Surgeons of Edinburgh and was subsequently admitted a freeman surgeon. On 7 May 1742 he married his first wife, Christian, the daughter of George Main, an Edinburgh jeweller; the couple had three sons and three daughters. After her death he married Margaret, daughter of the politician and Jacobite sympathizer George Lockhart of Carnwath, with whom he had one daughter.
In addition to his medical studies Rattray was a keen and skilled sportsman. In 1731 he became a member of the Royal Company of Archers; he was four times winner of their silver bowl (1732, 1735, 1740, and 1742) and twice—in 1735 and 1744—received the company's highest award, the silver arrow. He was also the leading golfer at Leith links near Edinburgh, the setting for the first printed book devoted to golf, Thomas Mathison's The Goff (1743) in which he appears:
Rattray for skill, and Corse for strength renowned,
Stewart and Lesly beat the sandy ground.
(Mathison, 4)
In the year after The Goff's publication the regular players at Leith, including Rattray, moved to establish an annual golfing competition for a silver club presented by the city of Edinburgh, equivalent to the silver arrow donated to the Royal Company of Archers in 1709. The city corporation noted that the newly formed Company of Gentlemen Golfers had drawn up regulations for play, consisting of twelve generic articles or rules plus one specific to Leith links, which they approved in March 1744. In April Rattray was victorious in this first ever golf tournament and so earned the title ‘captain of the goff’ for winning the £15 silver club. Rattray, as captain, had the authority to settle disputes between fellow golfers and was responsible for superintending the course in the year of his captaincy. Debate surrounds the authorship of these regulations, which were signed by Rattray and which—on matters of order of play, outside interference, water hazards, holing out, making a stroke, and the stroke and distance penalty for the loss of a ball—remain an integral part of the modern game. Rattray's sole signature does not guarantee that he was wholly responsible for them, though his prominence within the company and Edinburgh society at large makes him the most likely candidate. Under these rules he went on to win the silver club for a second time in April 1745.
Rattray was prevented from defending his captaincy in the following year because of his role in the Jacobite rising of 1745 as a surgeon to Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. From a family long sympathetic to the Stuart cause, Rattray became involved with the Jacobite campaign in the aftermath of the victory at Prestonpans (September 1745). Summoned from his house at 1a South Foulis Close, Edinburgh, by Laurence Oliphant, sixth laird of Gask, Rattray rode to the battlefield with a fellow surgeon, George Lauder. From there he accompanied the Jacobite army into England (whether voluntarily or under coercion is unknown) and then followed the Young Pretender's forces as they retreated from Derby in the spring of 1746. Rattray surrendered to Cumberland's army following the defeat at Culloden. He was subsequently rearrested in Edinburgh in May and sent to London under house arrest before being released in 1747 as part of a general amnesty once he had signed an oath of obedience.
Having sworn his allegiance to the Hanoverian regime, Rattray returned to his life as an Edinburgh surgeon and golfer. In 1751 he won back the silver club and captaincy (his third and final victory), but did not compete in the following year. The last reference to him in the company's archives is 1759, the year in which he described himself as a ‘cripple’. Bills for service to Lord Milton show that he continued to practise as a surgeon until at least 1766. He died at Leith Walk, Edinburgh, on 5 July 1771. As an episcopalian and a nonjuror his burial record has been erased from the Edinburgh register.
COLIN J. L. STRACHAN and JAN BARKER Sources T. Mathison, ‘The Goff’: an heroi–comical poem (1743) · ‘Regulations for playing for the city's silver club’, minutes, Edinburgh town council, 7 March 1744 · Scots Magazine, 6 (1744), 197 · Records of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1740) · J. Gilhooley, A directory of Edinburgh in 1752 (1988) · K. G. Chapman, The rules of the green: authority of the rules of golf (Chicago, 1997) · A. J. Johnston and J. F. Johnston, The chronicles of golf, 1457–1857 (Cleveland, 1993) · J. S. Lawson, The original rules of golf (1981) · O. M. Geddes, A swing through time: golf in Scotland, 1457–1743 (1992) · M. M. Whittet, ‘Medical resources of the 'Forty Five’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 44 (1961), 1–41 · W. A. Macnaughton, ‘Medical heroes of the Forty Five’, Caledonian Medical Journal, 3 (1897–9), 82–93, 155–62, 208–13 · NL Scot., Lockhart of Lee MSS · parish register, Edinburgh, 1742 [marriage to Christian Main] · NL Scot., Milton MSS Archives Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, records and book of intrants Likenesses portrait; formerly at Craighall, Fife [now stolen]
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© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved Colin J. L. Strachan and Jan Barker, ‘Rattray, John (1707-1771)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64814] (subscriber access)