A new book explains how, where and why golf took off in England in the late 19th century.
Not many books on sport are written about who came second, but that is what this one is about. England was the second country in the world to take to golf in a significant way. It did not catch on quickly – golf had been played in Scotland for centuries with virtually no interest expressed in it south of the border. In the mid-19th century, by which time golf was acknowledged as the national sport of Scotland, the English remained stubbornly unmoved by the game, with the distinct possibility that it might not gain traction there at all.
Even when other sports such as football, cricket, rugby and tennis were taking off in England in the 1870s, golf was still only played by a small minority in a scattering of places around the country. Eventually interest in golf began to grow and by the end of the 1880s there were a hundred clubs in England, still less than in Scotland, which had only one-sixth of the population.
“England quickly overtook Scotland as the country where most golf was played”
But then the great boom happened. Between 1890 and the commencement of the First World War, 1,200 golf clubs came into existence in England. Put another way, one new club was formed nearly every week for a quarter of a century. In the process, England quickly overtook Scotland as the country where most golf was played. This was not just a well-timed sprint, the resilience of these clubs has been quite remarkable – there are over 750 of them still in existence and they account for nearly half of all the golf clubs in England today.
