The History of Golf - Essay Example

Golf was largely confined to Scotland until the second half of the nineteenth century and it evolved in similar fashion from an ancient and casual game to a more highly organized and competitive sport. The key factor here seems to have been the adoption of both games by new and powerful middle-class elements. This is particularly evident in golf. The game in its modern form developed at Edinburgh and St Andrews at the historical moment when clan power had been decisively broken and a distinctive administrative, academic, and mercantile lite took the reins of power in Scotland. So golf as the 'good walk spoiled', gentle exercise for the harassed business or professional man, goes back further than expected. This association is well illustrated in the records of the Glasgow Golf Club, which was formed in 1787 and by 1789 had twenty-five members, all of whom were merchants with the exception of two surgeons and four army officers. (Gruneau R., 23-29) These were mostly the 'tobacco lords', the Virginia and West Indies traders who dominated the government of the growing city. Of forty members joining the club between 1810 and 1831 whose occupations have been traced, twenty-six were merchants and most of the rest engaged in associated employment such as insurance broking and warehousing. The west of Scotland business connection has been overlooked in the history of a game that tends to be commonly associated with St Andrews to the detriment of Prestwick, Troon, and Turnberry. The wider point to consider here is the way in which an old activity had adapted before the Victorian period. What at first sight might appear to be little more than a casual ancient game - James I is said to have played 'golf' on Blackheath - was taken up by the new wealth of trade in clear distinction to the clan sports of the Highland Games. Scotsmen like to reflect upon the robust popular heritage of golf, disparaging the effete and litist tendencies of their English counterparts. But such enclaves of City money as Wentworth or Sunningdale have more than a little in common with the early merchants' clubs of central Scotland in terms of social composition. Its pleasant parkland setting and moderate physical demands made golf the perfect sport for the middle-aged and middle class of both sexes. From a handful of courses outside Scotland there were around a thousand in Britain by 1914. Even in quiet rural areas golf began to spread. Five new clubs were formed in Somerset in the 1890s and there were twelve by 1910.( McIntosh P.C., 15) The collapse of agricultural prices had made it possible to acquire the hundred or more acres of farmland required for a course without too much difficulty in the late nineteenth century but competition from inter-war housing estates changed the picture. Initially the cost had been easily within the reach of the committees of middleclass men, who had normally financed the purchase through the issue of debenture stock, i.e. capital loaned to a company (the club) upon which only interest was paid for a fixed period. Club subscriptions would cover interest payments while a larger sum was accumulated to pay off the long-term loans. Debentures provided an excellent financial means for those with small capital surpluses to acquire a share in a large piece of real estate, access to which would have been beyond their means as individuals. Builders began to see the potential for combining superior residential property with recreation. The golf club became the preferred embellishment of the high-class housing estate, where the 'nine-to-five' commuters could meet at the weekend. St George's Hill, Chipstead, and Edgware were among those founded in this way. Stanmore on the wealthy fringe of north London was originally part of the Gordon estate and the golfcourse was designed for the enjoyment of friends of the family. But the restrictive aristocratic ethic quickly gave way to the selfgoverning and incorporated private club based upon the principle of shareholding and providing collective access to a landed style of life. What more appropriate structure and setting for 'the open ite' of modern England could there have been Hence the importance of the club-house. In Scotland the course itself took priority over social facilities whereas in England almost the reverse seems to have been true. Leeds Golf Club spent 3,500 on new facilities in 1909 and this was modest in comparison to the 8,000 spent by Royal Liverpool in the 1890s; golf and country clubs around London began to spend very substantial amounts. Walton Heath was opened in 1904 at a cost of 30,000 and the Royal Automobile Club at Epsom, which included a golfcourse, ran to 70,000.( Robbins K., 96-99) Lord Eldon's mansion at Shirley Park near Croydon was similarly transformed into an exclusive country club including a golf-course. John Lowerson has traced the occupations of over 400 directors of registered companies running golf clubs before 1914 and found 62 from a landed, church, or army background, 135 from the liberal professions, and 153 from commerce and industry with a further 50 white-collar or skilled tradesmen. This was a world governed by the broad swathe of the male 'middle-middle' and 'upper-middle' class with a fair sprinkling of blue blood and a nod in the direction of the petty bourgeoisie. Women were admitted to the world of golf in significant numbers with the proviso that a degree of internal segregation was accepted. Areas of the club were reserved for each sex and woe betide the woman who wandered accidentally into the men's bar - that a woman might intentionally cross the threshold was too preposterous to contemplate. The ladies had their own 'section' and most clubs would not permit the few women with shares to vote or hold office. However, unlike the members of the artisans' sections, which were formed to raise income and give manual workers restricted access to the sport without diluting the social tone, women were separate but equal in status to the men. There was no shortage of middle-class women with time to spare.( McCrone C.E., 23) There were 1.3 million domestic servants in 1931. During weekdays ladies might outnumber the men at the club with bridge, whist, and afternoon tea as alternatives to trudging around the course. Suburban woman, armed with a 'daily' and new labour-saving machines, was a lady of some leisure who might reasonably aspire to break a 100. Golf offered a kind of half-shared, half-segregated suburban activity rather like the bourgeois family in which a strict division of labour coexisted with an emphasis on the companionship of the couple. More importantly, golf fostered a new kind of community life in the suburbs. As Walter Besant wrote in 1909, the suburbs 'have developed a social life of their own; they have their theatres, they have their lawn tennis clubs, they have their bicycle clubs'. In the Home Counties, in particular, the golf club helped consolidate the new routines of suburban life. Its trees, fairways, and greens epitomized rus in urbe. Calling in at 'the club' for tea or a drink after the shopping or a drive in the car was part of a new middle-class style of life. These were the sort of people who patronized Mr Edwards's sports shop in inter-war Tunbridge Wells, beautifully evoked by Richard Cobb, where the owner, always in a blazer, attended to the sporting purchases of the wealthy inhabitants and gave golf and tennis lessons too. He seemed incongruous standing behind the counter of his own shop; indeed, he was not quite a shopkeeper, certainly not just a shopkeeper . . . Mr Edwards looked like, and spoke like, a gentleman; but he wasn't one. However, he was very much in demand as a tennis coach even with mothers of young girls . . . Mr Edwards gave the appearance of being a free man, l'homme disponible, ever ready to step into the breach, and make up a fourth in mixed doubles. There were rumours, he was generally disponible for other games as well. (Cobb. R, 141) So much attention has been paid to the structure and dissolution of working-class communities that the careful building of networks of neighbours, friends, and acquaintances within the supposedly private and individualistic world of the middle class has been overlooked. Golf clubs were worlds within worlds, business contacts and mutual reassurance for the reasonably well-off, islands of sociability within the unfathomable seas of domestic privacy. (http://www.heartoscotland.com/Categories/Golf.htm) Comfortably ensconced behind a gin and tonic at the 'nineteenth hole' or lining up a vital putt in the monthly medal, the golfer could forget the troublesome outside world and settle down to enjoy his or her modest affluence. The Depression, the poor, wars and rumours of wars, the dispiriting progress of socialism were temporarily forgotten. And if one felt the urge to set the world to rights, there was never a shortage of orthodox political economists whose opinions on trade unionism or rising taxation were happily similar to one's own 'common-sense' view of things. In London, anti-Semitism, veiled but unmistakable, made up the nastiest of these topics of conversation. The full story of golf and society class dimension cannot be told here. My purpose here has been to account for the rise and consolidation of middle class around golf and change of golf from upper-class sport to mddle class one. There was the huge extension of golf in all areas of social life of middle class that came about as a result of the 'familiarity means welfare' principle. If golf was 'a good thing' to keep necessary contacts and have wondeful free timr, then it should have been use by business elite of Great Britain along with other means of doing bsusiness. Bibliography 1. Gruneau R., Class, Sports and Social Development,Amherst, 1983, 23-29. 2. Hargreaves Jennifer, "Playing like Gentlemen while Behaving like Ladies: Contradictory Features of the Formative Years of Women's Sport", BJSH, 2, May 1985, 68. 3. Inglis F., The Name of the Game: Sport and Society, London, 1977, 78-82. 4. McCrone C.E., "Play Up! Play Up! and Play the Game! Sport at the Late Victorian Girls' Public School", Journal of British Studies, Spring 1984, 23. 5. McIntosh P.C.,"The History of Sport and Other Disciplines", in Aspects of the Social History of Nineteenth Century Sport: Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the BSSH, 1982, 15. 6. Robbins K., Nineteenth Century Britain: integration and diversity, Oxford, 1988, 96-99. 7. Cobb R., Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood, London, 1984, pp .141. 8. http://www.heartoscotland.com/Categories/Golf.htm Read More