AS SCOTLAND’S VENERABLE MUIRFIELD GOLF CLUB VOTES TO ADMIT WOMEN MEMBERS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 273 YEARS, WE ASK… Have gentlemen’s clubs had their day?
THERE is an old Harry Enfield sketch, in which a spoof 1940s public information film urges: “Women: Know Your Limits!” It’s funny because it’s so ludicrous – the very idea that half the population should be considered inferior, unable to understand man-talk, banished from the boardroom and the gentlemen’s club, is clearly absurd in these more enlightened times.
And yet… there remains a section of society in which women really are considered unworthy to mix with the men.
“A good club,” wrote Anthony Lejeune in his 1979 book The Gentlemen’s Clubs Of London, “is much more than a mere catering establishment. It should be a refuge from the vulgarity of the outside world, a reassuringly fixed point, the echo of a more civilised way of living.” The vulgar world being in this context of course the world in which women are present, in all their screeching, hormonally charged, handbagobsessed horror.
How could a chap expect to enjoy his “civilised way of living” with such distractions present? How could a fellow indulge his taste for a good lunchtime port or a leisurely round of golf or an enlightening discussion on the restoration of the British Empire with the worry that at any time an actual lady might appear, with their hair and their perfume and their pretty ankles, twittering on about… whatever it is they twitter on about. Good God, no! Women: know your limits!
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing is not that some so-called “gentlemen’s” clubs continue to remain fiercely men only – but that so many of them do.
MUIRFIELD, home to the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, is (or was) by no means exceptional in considering women second best. Barely an hour from those now-sullied greens is the Royal Burgess Golfing Society where lady members remain verboten.
In London a host of historic clubs – including The Garrick, White’s, Brooks’s, The Turf Club and Boodles – entertain a parade of aristocrats, politicians and well-heeled gents, all happy to keep the fairer sex in the kitchen and the bedroom and firmly away from a safe
YESSO WOMEN have won the right to nudge a putter at Muirfield: well, bully for them. To each their own but it is beyond me why they should want to. Another bastion stormed, another privilege claimed as their own and all to win the right to stand around in the freezing cold with some blokes who don’t want them.
Is this what the suffragettes fought for? Forget the vote and equal wages: it was all for the right to play golf?
Why do some women do this? There is a certain type of lady who cannot see an all-male club without demanding the right to join: for pity’s sake why? You don’t see men doing this. They don’t demand the right to make jam with the WI.
But when it comes to boys being boys, some girls always but always demand a piece of the action and nowhere does this apply more than sports.
The BBC is woefully underrepresented in the female department in almost every area bar one. Sports reporters. Every time you switch on the radio there’s some aggressive female badgering some hapless football manager and it is a matter of time by the way before women start targeting
NO‘These institutions are by definition sexist’