Colonel Bogey and the Bogey Competition
Before par, there was bogey—and bogey was not a number on a card but an opponent. The C&RBGC’s official format, match play against Colonel Bogey, is not an invention; it is a revival of how ordinary club golf was scored in the 1890s, and the Colonel himself has a service record.
The word before the game
The Colonel arrived in golf already carrying four centuries of menace. “Bogey” descends from Middle English bugge, a frightening specter or scarecrow attested in the late fourteenth century, by way of a family of northern dialect goblin-words: Scots bogle (about 1500), boggart (about 1570, out of Lancashire and Yorkshire), Welsh bwg. The OED is candid that the deeper history cannot be pinned down, and it dismisses outright the popular derivation from Slavonic bog (“god”) as “a mere fancy from the similarity of form.” The equally popular story that the word came home with sailors who had met the Bugis seafarers of Sulawesi fails on chronology alone: the bogey/bogle/bugge cluster was in ordinary English use for centuries before Europeans reached Southeast Asia.
By the 1830s the word had settled into the nursery as a name for the Devil (Old Bogey, alongside Old Scratch and Old Nick) and thence into the shapeless nursery bogeyman summoned to frighten children into obedience. That is the figure the golfers borrowed: not a monster with a description, but an invisible presence who is always somehow already there.
The ground score
In 1890 Hugh Rotherham, secretary of the Coventry Golf Club, proposed fixing a “ground score” for each hole—the score a good golfer should make on it—so that a member could play a standardized match even without an opponent of the right caliber. The idea spread quickly because it solved a real problem: medal play punishes one disastrous hole forever, while a match against the ground score resets at every tee.
The name came at Great Yarmouth, in 1890 or 1891; reputable sources give both. Dr. Thomas Browne, R.N., the club’s honorary secretary, was playing a match against the ground score alongside Major Charles Wellman, to whom the system was new. Thinking of a music-hall song of the moment, Wellman exclaimed that this well-nigh invincible opponent who never made a mistake was a regular bogey-man. The remark stuck: the ground score became the bogey score, and the phantom became “Mr. Bogey,” the imaginary member who never missed.
Golf and etymological sources alike name the song “Hush! Hush! Hush! Here Comes the Bogey Man.” That title belongs to Henry Hall’s 1932 recording, four decades too late to have been in Wellman’s head, and its lyric even contains the anachronistic self-reference that the bogeyman “will think it’s Henry Hall.” What was actually popular in Britain in 1890 was one of a family of Victorian “Bogie Man” numbers, most plausibly “Hush! The Bogie!"—words by George R. Sims and Henry Pettitt, music by Meyer Lutz, sung by E. J. Lonnen in the Gaiety Theatre burlesque Faust up to Date (1888). Their shared refrain ran “Hush, hush, hush, here comes the Bogie Man… he’ll catch you if he can.” The 1932 record pilfered the older title and refrain wholesale.
The commission arrived in the spring of 1892, when Great Yarmouth’s secretary carried the idea to the United Services Golf Club at Gosport, whose honorary secretary was Captain Seely-Vidal, R.E. Every member there held military rank; they could not measure themselves against a mere mister, nor have one as a member. So the invisible, never-erring opponent was gazetted with a rank befitting his steadiness. Mr. Bogey became Colonel Bogey, and the name stuck across Britain.
The earliest print sightings date to exactly this moment. On 2 January 1892 The Field reported that “a novelty was introduced in the shape of a bogey tournament for a prize… Fourteen couples started, but the bogey defeated them all,” and that March the Royal Cornwall Gazette carried a Royal Cornwall Golf Club “Ladies vs ‘Colonel’ Bogey” competition. The OED dates the golf sense of the noun to 1892.
The “Colonel Bogey March” is a separate work, and later. Frederick Joseph Ricketts composed it in 1914 at Fort George near Inverness, publishing under the pseudonym Kenneth J. Alford because serving officers were discouraged from commercial activity. The story that a golf-playing military man inspired it by whistling a descending minor third instead of shouting “fore,” the two-note interval that opens each line, comes from his widow’s recollection decades afterward. Well-attested tradition; not contemporary documentation.
From good score to one over
Bogey originally meant what Americans now call par: the score of a sound, unhurried golfer. This is the single most misunderstood point in golf’s terminology, and for decades the two words coexisted without conflict. Par is in fact the older of the pair. The writer A. H. Doleman borrowed it from the stock exchange, where par is a security’s normal value, and applied it to Prestwick around 1870; it simply named the same idea from a different angle. The drift began when British bogey ratings and American par ratings pulled apart: the livelier rubber-cored ball and better equipment tightened American standards by yardage, while bogey stayed attached to the slightly easier old figure. Par became the expert’s standard, bogey settled one stroke above it, and an opponent became an epithet. The change was chiefly American and surprisingly late: Etymonline dates the one-over-par sense to 1946 and the verb, to bogey, to 1948. Britain held the older meaning longer, but by the steel-shaft era the Colonel had everywhere been demoted from “what a good player shoots” to “one worse than expected”—a small tragedy of modernization in miniature.
The format outlived the meaning. Bogey competition survives in the Rules of Golf to this day as a recognized form of stroke play scored like match play: against a fixed score on each hole you are up, down, or halved; once you can no longer win or halve a hole you pick up; your result is your margin in holes, not your total. Its virtues are exactly what the medal lacks. Every hole is self-contained, a blow-up costs one hole rather than the round, it works identically over three holes or thirty-six, and it suits foursomes, since the side plays the phantom as one.
The Colonel and the Club
The C&RBGC’s Standing Rules restore the Colonel to active duty. The Bogey Standard holds that bogey is the target—every hole playable to bogey, regardless of actual difficulty—and that Colonel Bogey scores bogey on every hole of every course, without effort or joy. The bogey competition is the Club’s official format, the margin against the Colonel is the Club’s only arithmetic, and the founding motto—“We can make bogey here, right?"—names the target hole by hole rather than as a fixed total, since a single number only ever described one length of round. The season-long ledger of those margins is The Colonel’s Cup.
This is the older orientation of the game in working form: a walking match against a steady phantom, decided hole by hole, with the score kept in stories. See Golf’s Original Constraints and Recovering Golf’s Original Orientation for the argument running underneath it.