Simply Majestic
Charting golf’s long-term relationship with royalty
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews—the R&A—may boast no fewer than six kings and princes among its list of past captains, but over and above club captaincy, back in its Scottish infancy, golf itself might never have advanced beyond the cradle had it not been nurtured by royalty. The key to this process of popularization was the game’s eclectic appeal—to folk as diverse as laborers, traders, soldiers and landowners—but the vanguard of this movement was royalty. Golf gained their approval and everyone else followed their lead.
When Mary, Queen of Scots strolled out for a round only a couple of days after the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, in 1567, her apparent indifference was seen as callousness rather than a self-defining, cathartic act on the part of a wretched woman. However, it inflicted no more harm on golf than bans by a trio of her ancestors—James II, III and IV—a century or so earlier. The reasoning behind those sanctions was that the men of Scotland who would normally make up the army in the event of an invasion were neglecting to practice their archery skills in favor of ‘gowf.’ Once the Treaty of Glasgow between England and Scotland was signed in 1502, though, James IV immediately lifted the ban.
In 1608, King James I (Mary, Queen of Scots’ son and also James VI of Scotland) brought golf to England— specifically, to Blackheath in southeast London—when he moved his court to the Royal Palace at nearby Greenwich. His entourage included several golfing noblemen but it took nearly two and a half centuries for the club they formed to receive Queen Victoria’s assent. Following the invention of the automobile and the opening of the A2 highway across the middle of the heath, Royal Blackheath relocated in 1923 by merging with a nearby club and adopting as its clubhouse the 17th century mansion, Eltham Lodge.
After an uneventful 18th century, the British monarchy revived its interest in 1833 when Lord Kinnaird, captain of the Perth Golfing Society in Scotland, met William IV during a trip to London. The King duly ennobled the Perth citycenter body even though it didn’t have its own course. To this day, its members use the nearby public layout at North Inch on the banks of the River Tay, designed by ‘Old’ Tom Morris. In his additional capacity as Duke of St Andrews, William IV was later persuaded to confer similar patronage on the Society of St Andrews Golfers. Thus was born the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and the genie, so to speak, was out of the bottle.
Horse racing may be the sport of kings, but the bloodline of golf’s royal patronage shows similar affinity to the sport of ‘the King.’ Arnold Palmer dined with royalty on many occasions and as a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews he was keenly aware of the British Royal Family’s influence on golf’s evolution from a peculiar post-medieval pastime to the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today.
Paul Trow reflects on this regal romance
The men of Scotland were neglecting to practice their archery
skills in favor of ‘gowf’
The R&A reciprocated the honor by appointing a royal captain and in 1863 the Prince of Wales, nicknamed Bertie and later to become King Edward VII, took the reins. Regrettably, the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 21 at the time, missed his own drive-in off the 1st tee on the Old Course.
Bertie never visited St Andrews (he vacationed in places like Biarritz in southwest France and the Czech spa town of Marienbad) but he grew fond of golf in late middle age. He laid out a course in the grounds of Windsor Castle and played regularly at Royal Cinque Ports in Deal on the Kent coast, where he was club president from 1905-07.
Prince Leopold, the youngest of Queen Victoria’s sons, served as R&A captain in 1876 but unlike his brother he actually showed up to drive himself into office. “The Prince’s stroke was a very good one—the ball being lifted over the heads of the crowd and down a good distance on towards the hole,” reported the Fifeshire Journal. As a hemophiliac, he had been encouraged by his doctors to play golf but was not long for this world and passed away ten days shy of his 31st birthday in 1884. Still, he was the first Royal Family member to visit St Andrews in person since Charles II, more than two centuries earlier.
ROYAL & ABDICATE
The Royal Family did not provide another R&A captain until 1922 when the grandson of Edward VII, son of George V and later to become Edward VIII drove himself in. With rain lashing down on more than 6,000 spectators, his low, miscued pull off the tee was an inauspicious way to usher in a golden era for British golf. In the years prior to the Second World War, the sport became rapidly more visible and accessible.
This particular Prince of Wales was a genuine golf fanatic, despite never reducing his handicap to single figures. However, his appetite for the game and the company of golfers was insatiable. In the decade and a half between his spell as R&A captain and his ill-fated year on the Throne in 1936, he served as captain to many prestigious clubs, including Royal St. David’s in north Wales, the Royal Burgess Golfing Society in Scotland, Royal Mid-Surrey, Royal Wimbledon (where he once had a hole-in-one on the 6th which was then a 265-yard, par-4), Royal St. George’s (venue for next year’s [British] Open in Kent), Sunningdale, St George’s Hill and Luffenham Heath.
At the time of his father’s death, Edward was patron of the Society of London Golf Captains and the captain at Walton Heath. Within a year, sadly, his associations
with the game had dried up in the wake of his decision to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson—a hugely controversial move at the time—and to abdicate the Throne.
To be fair, Edward always had a soft spot for North America. In 1924 he donated the Prince of Wales Trophy to the National Hockey League (now presented annually to the Eastern Conference playoff champions), and later confided to one of his hosts: “I like coming here for golf—America’s one vast golf course these days.”
His younger brother (another Bertie, who replaced Edward as King, George VI) was also a keen golfer [pictured above]. On September 24, 1930, as Duke of York, he became the first R&A captain to drive into office using a steelshafted club. Pausing only to remove his jacket, he whacked his ball more than 200 yards down the fairway.
Another son of George V—Prince George, Duke of Kent—took up the R&A captaincy in 1937, but after hitting the ground before the ball his drive barely scuttled 100 yards. “In his eagerness he dropped his right shoulder,” was the euphemistic verdict of the St Andrews Citizen.
It might be regrettable that the club’s most recent royal captain is Prince Andrew, the current Duke of York, who served during the year of the R&A’s 250th anniversary in 2003-04. His association with the late, disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has resulted in Prince Andrew withdrawing from public life. The Royal Family’s links with the R&A were further underlined in 2015 when Princess Anne was granted honorary membership, although as a former Olympic equestrian competitor, riding horses has always been her preferred sporting activity.
Of course, royalty’s involvement with golf is not confined to the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. Special mention goes to Hassan II, who was king of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. Early in his otherwise tyrannical reign he identified golf as a potential tourism driver and translated his hunch into an extensive investment, which included engaging Robert Trent Jones, Sr., to design the three Royal Dar Es Salam courses in the palace grounds of the capital city, Rabat. Several other Moroccan courses, headlined by Royal Marrakech, designed in 1927 by Arnaud Massy, France’s only winner of the [British] Open, also bear a regal title.
The Belgian monarchy has also liberally spread its favors across the fairways with no fewer than 11 of its 90 or so courses bearing the royal moniker, most notably Royal Waterloo.
In 1930 the Duke of York became the first R&A captain to drive into office with a
steel-shafted club
Of the nine golf clubs that currently stage the [British] Open, six have been royalized: Royal St. George’s, host of next year’s postponed Championship, Royal Portrush, Royal Lytham & St Annes, Royal Liverpool, Royal Birkdale and Royal Troon.
Approaching 200 clubs across the world have acquired royal status since Perth Golfing Society became the first such honoree in 1833. Of the 66 clubs of definite British origin, England has 19, Scotland 10, Australia eight, Canada six, Ireland five, South Africa four, Wales two and the Channel Islands two. Royal Montreal in Canada and Royal Melbourne in Australia are genuinely great golf courses and both are Presidents Cup venues.
A few ‘Royal’ clubs exist in far-flung outposts of the former British Empire—like Harare in Zimbabwe, Colombo in Sri Lanka and Calcutta in India—where the enhanced status was in effect a reward to intrepid citizens who had left the mother country to oversee the process of colonization.
While the building of golf courses extended British culture amid the colonies, the process at times brought out the tenacity and brutality prescribed to subdue a potentially hostile indiginous population. Hence the grim disregard of the founder members of Malaysia’s second oldest club, Royal Selangor in Kuala Lumpur, where the early rules stated: “You cannot ground your club in addressing the ball, or move anything, however loose or dead it may be, when you find yourself in a grave.” Part of the course had been built on an old Chinese cemetery, with scant regard for the sacrilege. Naturally, it was treated as a hazard.
Two of the six most recent clubs to be honored by the monarchy are about as far removed from the Commonwealth, or its parent, the British Empire, as possible—Marianske Lazne (formerly Marienbad) in the Czech Republic and Royal Homburger near Frankfurt in Germany—but both sneaked below the radar because they were regular haunts of Edward VII. The other four are Royal
Wellington and Royal Auckland in New Zealand, Royal Mayfair in Edmonton, Canada and Royal Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.
The concept of royalty might seem an anachronism to some, but the chances are that more clubs will be recruited to this most exclusive of golfing families, such is the cachet conferred.
After the R&A the club with the strongest ‘connections’ is Royal West Norfolk Golf Club at Brancaster on England’s East Anglian coast, with four royal captains. Ironically, the Crown’s very own club—the Royal Household, which was opened by King Edward VII in 1901 at Home Park in the grounds of Windsor Castle—has had only one.
Officially, clubs must apply for the royal title and only the sovereign has the authority to grant it. Furthermore, the granting of a royal title and royal patronage are separate honors. Royal Liverpool Golf Club, renowned for hosting the first Amateur Championship in 1885 and due to host its 13th [British] Open Championship in 2023, has a particularly interesting royal story in that respect.
In 1871, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught and seventh child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, happily accepted the title of club president. Later that same year, the club added ‘Royal’ to its name, as evidenced by a medal presented to the club in 1872 known as the Duke of Connaught Star. But upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the club wrote to the Home Office asking permission to keep using the royal title. To its overwhelming delight, not to mention sparing its blushes, Edward VII was “graciously pleased to comply with the request.”
So one wonders… with so many non-British clubs on the royal roster, could there ever be, say, a Royal Riviera or a Royal Pebble Beach? Now Harry and Meghan, aka the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are resident in California and sprinkling largesse across the Golden State on a daily basis, why on earth not?