Successful workers or exploited labour? Golf professionals and professional golfers in Britain 1888–1914

Abstract

Golf was one of the fastest growing recreational sports in Britain before 1914. It created a market for professional golfers as shopkeepers, teachers, greenkeepers and craftsmen. A database of 3000 players was used to examine their social and economic experience at club and competitive level, and this experience was then compared to that of professionals in horse racing, cricket and football. Golfers were the first sportsmen to permanently organize themselves with the establishment of the Professional Golfers’ Association in 1901, which provided welfare services and promoted tournaments, thus actively and uniquely assisting the development of the industry within which its members worked.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A lower limit to the number of professionals can be determined from those listed in the Golfer’s Handbook. These total 679 in 1907 and 941 in 1913. An upper limit would be set by the number of golf clubs in existence – estimated by Lewis at 161 in 1885, 959 in 1895, 1939 in 1905 and 2844 in 1914 – though not every club had a course of its own and not every club with a course employed a professional (Lewis 1995, 8).

2. The figure for league cricket professionals is an ‘educated estimate’ following discussions with Neil Garnham, Jeffrey Hill and especially Jack Williams, all of whom have written academically on league cricket.

3. The number of owners was based on a count of registered colours (compulsory from the 1890s) in the Racing Calendars (1913). Football club estimates are from Russell (1997, 45) and the Scottish Football Annual (1913–1914). The cricket figures are based on estimates by Jack Williams (personal communication).

4. On football, see Lanfrachi and Taylor (2001), Russell (1997), Taylor (2005); for cricket, see Birley (1999) and Sissons (1988); and on horse racing, see Huggins (2000), Vamplew (2000) and Vamplew and Kay (2005).

5. Harding (1991) which makes use of earlier work by Dabscheck (1979).

6. The numbers in the following tables fall short of this figure as information on some players was inadequate for the particular statistical purpose.

7. Of some 400 histories consulted, 207 yielded useable information. A further 86 pieces of information containing contractual data were obtained by contacting the clubs that employed the foundation members of the PGA.

8. That three of them also came from Jersey is less easily explained.

9. Given the weaknesses of establishing kinship, it was felt that detailed sampling of pre-1914 material would serve little purpose.

10. The career lengths of those whose ages are given in Table 4 are clearly longer than the larger numbers dealt with in Table 5. They are a skewed cohort, in the sense that we know more about them.

11. This was the first occasion in which private enterprise, apart from golf clubs themselves, had given golf professionals from all over the country a chance to compete for a national prize.

12. The French Open began in 1906, the Belgian in 1910, but the German event was run for only two years from 1911. The other British victor was J.D. Edgar, who migrated to the United States and won the Canadian Open but was later murdered in a robbery.

13. Once the PGA was set up, having the exclusive right to the profits from the sale of golf balls at a club was made a condition of membership.

14. For fuller details see Holt, Lewis, and Vamplew (2002, 1–10).

15. Cousins had access to the early minutes of the PGA which have since gone missing. A simpler version appeared in The Golfers’ Year Book 1905, 249 which stated that the objectives were ‘to promote the interests of professional golfers by holding tournaments for the encouragement of younger players, to assist those who are out of work in obtaining employment, and to relieve cases of distress by the establishment of a Benevolent Fund’.

16. Passing references in Golf Illustrated give membership numbers as 1901 = 70, 1902 => 300, 1908 = 574 and 1914 = c800.

17. At one stage, in 1908, another form of collective action was considered, that of a golfers’ co-operative trading society. The underlying idea was that bulk purchasing could lower costs and hence raise profits. However, at the time, less than a 100 professionals expressed interest and the idea was shelved for a decade or so (“Minutes of Midlands.” PGA, September 16, 1908; “Minutes of PGA.” January 23, 1921).

18. There were earlier experiences in mid-Victorian cricket. Professional cricketer William Clarke founded the All-England Eleven, which toured the country playing matches for a share of the gate-money. Clarke’s success spawned other itinerant teams and over two to three decades, the professional cricketer helped popularize the sport and further his earning power. However, the touring teams were in competition with each other and not part of an overall collective. The economic experiment ended when first-class county cricket became organized, in which amateurs and professionals played alongside each other but with amateurs firmly in control in the committee rooms (West 1988). The others concerned overseas cricket trips, to the United States and Canada in 1859 led by George Parr and to Australia in 1861 under Heathfield ‘H.H.’ Stephenson. Both were successful commercial ventures organized by professionals (Light 2005, 70).

19. Different sources offer different estimates (Harding 1991, 85; Taylor 2005, 141).

20. Hill (1987, 74) has argued that local esteem would be high and incomes could be greater than in county cricket, but there was no mass migration of first-class professionals to the leagues, which suggests a preference for the first-class game.

21. For a discussion of mobility of football players within Britain, see Lanfrachi and Taylor, (2001, 38–45).

22. George Ulyett, the Yorkshire professional cricketer, was an extreme example, who, during his career, travelled an estimated 258,000 miles, of which 157,000 occurred in his five tours to Australia (Sissons 1988, 115).

23. For details of these calculations and their deficiencies, see Vamplew (2004a, 227–238).

24. For a general discussion on the role of etiquette in the evolution of rules in sport, see Vamplew (2007).