The golf ball... ‘a symbol of colonial exploitation’

...says exhibition at the game’s spiritual home

IT is known to sports fans across the globe as the spiritual home of golf.

But now an exhibition in St Andrews has described golf balls as a symbol of colonial exploitation and oppression.

A public display at the University of St Andrews exploring the legacies of the British Empire includes a section on golf and its links to imperial rule.

The Re-Collecting Empire exhibition – part of a trend of academic ‘decolonisation’ that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement – claims the game was ‘imposed’ and ‘spread around the world’ by the British Empire, with enthusiasts founding clubs from Hong Kong and South Africa to Canada and Malaysia.

It presents the game as being responsible for ‘exploitation’ because ‘gutta-percha’ balls, or ‘gutties’ – created by former St Andrews student Robert Adams Paterson – were made using rubber tapped from Malaysian gutta-percha trees.

The exhibition, which runs until October 22, also highlights financial ties between St Andrews and figures who profited from slavery.

Cricket, too, was an imposition, according to text accompanying the display, because natural resources from colonised territories were ‘exploited to make sporting equipment’.

The text appears next to the Karachi Golf Club Cup, a prize given by one of the many Britishfounded clubs in India.

The exhibition at the Wardlaw Museum is associated with the University of St Andrews and funded by Museum Galleries Scotland, which supports a review of the country’s connection to the slave trade.

Re-Collecting Empire is led by Dr Emma Bond, who sits on the Decolonising Advisory Board of V&A Dundee, as well as academics from the university’s School of History and the vice-principal for collections. Miss Bond, a visiting fellow at the university’s School of Modern Languages, said: ‘The Re-Collecting Empire exhibition opens at a time when museums and galleries across the UK and beyond are rethinking how best to care for objects in their collections that were acquired during periods of colonial rule.’

Dr Catherine Eagleton, director of Libraries and Museums, said the exhibition is the result of ‘a lot of careful thinking and consultation about how we tackle the colonial legacies in our collection’.

She added: ‘It’s an attempt to explore these stories publicly and trial new ways of telling them, with the voices of those who have often been excluded at the forefront.’

But Leo Kearse, the comedian and former candidate for the antiwoke Reclaim Party in Scotland, told the Mail: ‘It’s a sign that the wokeists who hate the West are scraping the barrel for things to condemn us for that they’ve now reached “relaxing leisure pastimes” as an example of white supremacist atrocities.

‘Golf originated in Scotland in the Middle Ages – a long way removed from any colonialist derring-do. St Andrews University is actively poisoning young minds to hate the West and destroy liberal democracy from within.’

The university says it will continue ‘examining the legacies of Empire in our collections and exploring how we can build a more equitable future’.

The Old Course in St Andrews is considered to be the birthplace of golf – it was first played on the Links in the early 15th century.

‘A lot of careful thinking’