unique character. It was already known as a national pastime before King James IPs abortive efforts to ban it by Act of Parliament in 1457. By 1552, January 15 precisely, the citizens of the town of St. Andrews were given, by charter right, the use of the links for 'golf, futball, shuteing at all times with all other manners of pastime.' The game of golf as we know it today didn't emerge from its crude beginnings on the east coast of Scotland until it began to become organized about the middle of the eighteenth century. The first golf club for which there is definite proof of origin is the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, instituted in 1744.
There have been claims from other clubs that they are older than the Leith club, for example the Royal Burgess in Edinburgh and the Royal Blackheath in England, but no evidence to substantiate their claims has been found.
Among those instrumental in drawing up the first set of rules was John Rattray, an Edinburgh surgeon who won the first Silver Club in 1744. His golf was interrupted when he was called from his bed to act as surgeon to Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops at the Battle of Prestonpans.
He followed the prince, some say reluctantly, on his march to Derby and thereafter to the defeat at Culloden, where he was taken prisoner. It was only the intervention of his fellow Leith member, Duncan Forbes, that saved him from the gallows and allowed him to resume his duties as captain of the club in 1747.
The game witnessed some early movement out of Scotland to other golfing outposts. It was taken by royalty to England as far back as 1608, by Scottish merchants to India, where the Royal Calcutta Golf Club dates back to 1829, and by the armed forces to South Carolina, where golf was played long before the Apple Tree Gang founded the first American golf club at Yonkers in 1888.
However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, professional golf was still very much in its infancy. Money matches became the forerunners of the tournaments of the present day, and it was as a result of these matches that professional players came into being. The oldest championship in the world is the Open, first played at Prestwick, Scotland, in 1860. For the first thirty years of the Open, none but a Scot took the title. Not until the great English amateur John Ball from Hoylake won the Open in 1890 did the Scottish stranglehold on the famous claret jug loosen.
The rise of the gentleman amateur and the golf boom of the 1880s was a result of the same emerging, wealthy middle class that was so drastically altering the fabric of society. More people had more money and leisure time, and a measure of the demand for new courses is indicated by the number built in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1864 there were about thirty golf clubs in Scotland, while England had only three. By 1880 it is estimated that there were sixty clubs in Britain. The British Amateur Championship was inaugurated at Hoylake in 1885 by the Royal Liverpool Golf Club and the number of golf clubs continued to increase. By 1890 there were 387 and by 1900, Britain had 2,330 golf clubs.
Perhaps the biggest appeal about golf is that when brought right down to its basics, it's between you and your golf ball. Courses have changed over the centuries, as have innovations in equipment, but the skill of the player still matters most. The story of the devout Catholic golfer who crossed himself before he putted and holed his putts every time is a case in point. His opponent asked him, 'Does it help?' and the Catholic replied, 'No. Not if you can't putt.'
[6] Five thousand pounds is equal to approximately five hundred thousand pounds today, or $785,000.
[7] In the early Victorian era,
Society looked askance at the nouveaux riches or arrivistes, although in the end, new money talked. When H. G. Well's fictional uncle, Edward Ponderevo, exchanged his chemist's shop for a lordship, he found the local vicar a useful bridge into country society.
[8] By the late Victorian period, the process of assimilation-the marriage of land and capital, gentry and haute bourgeoisie-was clear for all to see and new money was calling the shots. 'Nowadays,' observed the Countess of Cardigan, 'money shouts and birth and breeding whisper!'
But of the three props that supported the ruling elite-money, land, and title-it was the possession of a hereditary peerage that was the clearest determinant of class and the most obvious focus of ambition. In the mid- Victorian period, the House of Lords remained a difficult hurdle for new money. Not until the 1880s did both Liberal and Tory governments surrender their patronage to the market. By 1890 the proportion of business and commercial families achieving peerages was twenty-five percent and rising. Between 1886 and 1914 about two hundred new peers were created, at least half from nonlanded backgrounds.
This rise of the bourgeoisie to titled status did not occur without resistance. Many of those in power were offended by 'the rustle of banknotes,' and native English gentry took affront that social control of London 'is now divided between the Semite and the Yankee.' Anti-Semitism ran high, as did mockery of the 'trans-Atlantic Midases,' referred to as peltry or pork kings. But by 1899, the peerage included fifty American ladies; by 1914 seventeen percent of the peerage and twelve percent of the baronetcy had an American connection, frequently through marriage to an heiress. 'Failing the dowries of Israel and the plums of the United States,' noted Escott with realism, 'the British peerage would go to pieces tomorrow.'
I became aware of the disdain directed toward American heiresses not only in the memoirs of numerous heiresses who had been treated abominably by their husbands' families, but in particular while touring the Duke of Roxburghe's family seat in Kelso, Scotland, when I was researching
