Book review: Social links: the golf boom in Victorian Britain

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Social Links: The Golf Boom in Victorian Britain', by Donald M. Cameron (Social Links Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-0-956-23960-0).

As an organised sport, golf was slow to expand into England from its Scottish roots. In 1860, when Prestwick Golf Club introduced its Open Championship, the only English locations where golf had been introduced included Birmingham, Blackheath, Malvern, Manchester, Norham in North Devon and Southampton, and most of these involved Scotsmen. Even in 1879 there were just over 20 clubs in England. It was only from the late 1880s that the new game began to be widely diffused across England, and England experienced what John Lowerson in 1983 called the ‘English golf boom’. By 1898 there were 1,460 clubs in Britain, with over half in England. By 1901, when the Professional Golfers Association was formed, golf had become a key middle-class sport. But despite several academic golf history overviews there is still precious little of a scholarly nature on the early stages of the cultural diffusion of golf across England, and Cameron's book tells its story from the 1850s to 1887 when the Royal St George's Golf Club, which was to become the most influential in England, was founded at Sandwich.