St Andrews golf club on brink of admitting female members

St Andrews Golf Club has warned members that it could face prosecution under equality laws for failing to allow women to join.


Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 April 2011 19.17 BST
Article history



One of the largest men-only golf clubs in St Andrews, the spiritual home of golf, is on the brink of allowing women to become full members, abandoning one of the sport's most contentious traditions.

The committee at the St Andrews Golf Club, which is run from a handsome Victorian mansion overlooking the greens and fairways of the fabled Old Course, has written to its 2,000 male members recommending that it admit women to the club. The club, founded in 1843, has warned its members that under the new Equality Act, the club could face prosecution for failing to allow women to join. Keeping the ban would be a "retrograde step" as it would mean women would also have to be barred from its clubhouse as guests.

Its past club captains and trustees had decided that allowing all members, regardless of their gender, to have full access to all its bars and facilities would be "the best way, in their opinion, of safeguarding the long-term wellbeing of St Andrews Golf Club", the members were told.

The proposal was welcomed by women's rights campaigners, who have repeatedly called on the major clubs such as the Royal and Ancient (the R&A), which is the sport's most prestigious and influential club and sets the game's rules, to admit women members.

Agnes Tolmie, chair of the Scottish Women's Convention, said: "This is an absolutely fantastic initiative. We shouldn't have any area of the sporting world where women are excluded. It will send out a message in the area, particularly to the R&A, that it's time they thought again."

The R&A, which has 2,500 members around the world, has resisted calls to admit women as full members.

It provoked criticism from Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, and the Labour party when it refused to extend honorary membership to the latest principal of St Andrew's University, Dr Louise Richardson, because she was a woman, in 2009.

But the main women's golfing organisations were much less enthusiastic. Shona Malcolm, chief executive officer of the Ladies Golf Union, which has 3,000 affiliated women-only clubs, said: "We have absolutely no problem with single-gender clubs at all. We're very supportive of single-gender clubs: what it does is allow golfers the freedom to choose what kind of club they want to join."

Sheila Hartley, company secretary of the Scottish Ladies Golfing Association, which has 442 affiliated women-only clubs, said many female golfers had experienced more unfairness and sexism when their previously male-only clubs admitted women as full members.

Hartley said she was comfortable with single-sex clubs: "It appears to be only an issue to the public when it's male-only clubs. There are female-only clubs and that doesn't appear to be an issue."

• This article was amended on 29 April 2011. The original showed a photograph of the Royal & Ancient, not St Andrew's golf club as captioned.