Two
LADIES ON THE LINKS
READERS of Edinburgh's Caledonian Mercury awoke to news so shocking on 24 April 1738 that it would be reprinted in papers as far away as London and the American colonies. 'Early last Tuesday morning,' the report read, 'two married women of the city stept out to Bruntsfield Links to a concerted match at golf, followed by their husbands carrying the clubs. Curiosity led thither a great crowd, who were charmed with seeing the half-naked viragos tilt the balls so manfully, and their dexterity in holing. Considerable wagers were laid; but Charming Sally carried the prize.' The mind reels with questions about this curious report. How did men in that male-dominated society come to be carrying clubs for their wives? Had they lost a bet? What was meant by half-naked? Had those two domineering women - virago, after all, means 'female warrior' - played without a corset or a proper hat? Truth is, not much can be known with certainty, beyond that women playing golf in public was rare enough in 1738 that the story would be picked up by the Daily Gazetteer and Read's Weekly Journal in London and across the Atlantic in the South Carolina Gazette.
This much can be safely inferred: women had wanted to play golf from the moment men took up the game. It is worth noting that the match reported in the Mercury took place six years before the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith staged the first formal competition in 1744, playing for a silver club donated by Scotland's capital city. Reports of women playing golf continued to crop up regularly through the years. The Statistical Account of Scotland mentions women and children playing over the links at Musselburgh during the 1790s. In December 1810, members of the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club voted to donate a prize for a competition among the town's fishwives. Evidence of women playing over the links at St Andrews surfaced early on, too. In 1855, Mrs James Wolfe-Murray, daughter of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club's revered leader John Whyte-Melville, scandalised the town by boldly taking to the course, playing alone with two clubs.
A dozen years later, women would get the first golf course of their own, designed by the man who did more than any other person to spread love for the Scottish game, Tom Morris of St Andrews. The ladies' links he created, however, was something entirely different from courses played over by men. By the early 1860s, women in town had taken a fancy to putting, a brand of golf Victorian society considered far more appropriate for ladies than Mrs Wolfe-Murray's forays on the St Andrews links. Women played their games over a handful of short holes near Old Tom Morris's shop, which caddies had laid out to pass the time as they awaited a bag to carry. Caddies didn't appreciate women invading their space, although they were savvy enough to keep quiet about it, and gentlemen of the R&A didn't want their wives mixing with ruffians. They asked Morris to lay out a proper course for the women of St Andrews, leading to creation of the Himalayas putting green, a rollicking 18-hole adventure that has changed little over a century and a half and remains among the most popular attractions in town.
That same year, 1867, saw the formation of the oldest women's golf club in the world, still thriving as the St Andrews Ladies' Putting Club. Morris showed his commitment to welcoming women into the world of golf by doing double duty for the next 30 years as keeper of the ladies' green. The club's first competition, conducted on 5 October 1867, was a roaring success, drawing a substantial crowd of upper-crust ladies and gentlemen as well as 22 entrants, among them women with the most famous surnames in St Andrews - Moncrieff and Chambers, Tulloch and Boothby. The prizes were the club's Golf Medal and silver pebble brooch, both of which are competed for even today. Newspapers lapped it up, with fawning coverage appearing in the St Andrews Gazette, the Fifeshire News, and even the national newspaper, The Scotsman, which described the event as a 'most novel, interesting and excellent competition'.
Over the years, the Ladies' Putting Club came to play a significant social role in St Andrews, one that would remain part of the game through the ages. In those days, gentlemen could join the club as associate members. That provided an outlet for courting in an informal atmosphere, a rarity in the Victorian age. Men and women could play alongside one another in monthly medals. During the spring and autumn events, restricted to ladies only, men could tag along as markers or caddies. The Ladies' Putting Club also made one other social contribution that will forever remain part of the game. In a way that ancient golf societies for men had never done, it made the game a family affair, one children would be introduced to by their parents, as is so often the case today. In July 1888, the St Andrews Citizen announced plans for the first Children's Golf Club. It was open to boys and girls, ages five through 13, whose mothers belonged to the Ladies' Putting Club, as well as to the children of visitors who swelled the club's ranks every summer. By September, the club had been formally launched, with 134 children as members.
The experience of one famous family - the Taits of Edinburgh, frequent visitors to St Andrews - demonstrates the impact the Children's Golf Club would have on developing young players. In 1895, a band of travellers that came to St Andrews every summer and were popular with the townspeople donated two prizes for a competition among members of the Ladies' Putting Club, a claret jug for first place and a medal for second. The best of 60 scores was the fine 105 turned in by Edith Tait, the older sister of a youngster who would grow up to be one of Scotland's most famous and beloved golfers. Her brother, Frederick Guthrie Tait, would get his first taste of glory over the Ladies' Putting Green as well. In September 1881, aged 11, Tait took first place among 42 players in a Children's Club tournament, with a score of 107. It was an early sign of the great champion he would become, with victories in the 1896 and 1898 Amateur Championships before his tragic early death in 1900 during the South African War. Even today, the Children's Golf Club remains an institution in St Andrews, hosting putting competitions that introduce new generations of boys and girls to the royal and ancient game.
UNMATCHED ENTHUSIASM
In its report on that first competition of the Ladies' Putting Club in the autumn of 1867, The Scotsman confidently predicted that this new pastime 'will become a favourite game, not simply among the ladies of St Andrews, but throughout the kingdom'. The newspaper's correspondent, however, would never have guessed that the next ladies' golf club would be formed not in Scotland but England, at Royal North Devon, better known as Westward Ho! Truth is, that might have been expected, given that North Devon's founders, Isaac and William Gosset, had close ties to St Andrews. The year after Tom Morris laid out the Ladies' Putting Green, Westward Ho! built one nearly identical to it on Northam Burrows. The North Devon Ladies' Golf Club was founded that same year, 1868, with 35 women as members and a number of gentlemen as associates. It was followed in 1872 by the London Scottish Ladies' Golf Club at Wimbledon, with 14 original members. Neither of those clubs would last, disappearing after a few years and being reconstituted in the 1890s. They were, however, an early sign that English women would embrace golf with unmatched enthusiasm. It would not be long before they wanted more than mere putting.
By the 1880s, English women were forming clubs that played over courses which required genuine golf. Some had links of their own, others competed over the men's course, sometimes using forward tees. So many women took up the game that they played a significant role in the great golf boom that swept England before the war, according to new research by historian Michael Morrison. By 1894, England had 44 ladies' clubs, more than twice as many as Scotland. The membership of those clubs, however, by no means reflected the number of women playing golf. Scores of men's clubs had a ladies' section, so English women actually were playing at more than 100 golf clubs by the middle of that decade. By 1889, some 3,700 women had taken up the game, one of every 10 golfers in England. When war was declared in 1914, women accounted for one of every four golfers and their number had swelled to 73,000.
It was during this frenzy of growth that a pivotal figure in the history of women's golf - Issette Pearson - would fall in love with the game and under the spell of Dr William Laidlaw Purves. Issette was born in Devon, on 2 November 1861, to Thomas and Mary Pearson. Her father was a landed gentleman, although when Issette was still a toddler, he made a bad investment that nearly ruined him. Pearson moved his family to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, and opened an insurance business. His firm proved so successful that in 1887 Pearson decided to expand in London. It was there, on Barnes Common, that 25-year-old Issette caught the fever for golf. Tall and sturdy, with a decidedly stern countenance, Pearson looked matronly even as a young woman, in part because she always wore her dresses buttoned...
