Opening Doors

In the wake of the tournament, women were allowed to access a portion of the building, but it was only in 2012 that the final pieces of the jigsaw were slotted into place, with all the women elevated to full membership status.

Yet for Audrey Briggs, a longstanding member of this famous club, there was no more telling moment than when she realised that her days of trying to explain to the junior girls that they could not join the boys in the main room were over. "Even five years ago," she said, "I would have to sit the girls down and tell them that it was just one of the club rules, but they didn’t get it." This former GB&I international golfer says that she was not even vaguely surprised by their mingled astonishment and disbelief.

Peter Dawson, the R&A’s CEO, admitted at the March conference that the scale of the newspaper attacks on Muirfield prior to last year’s Open had played its part in encouraging the various R&A committees to push for the same mixed membership as that at Hoylake, Lytham, Birkdale and Turnberry. The hostile publicity had been as awkward for them as it was for Muirfield, for the Open, of course, is owned by the R&A.

Nothing, perhaps, was more poignant than the green-keepers’ plight. The men had prepared a course par excellence yet they scarcely got a mention. (In fairness, though, if any of the writers had been dispatching glowing reports about the greens while their competitors were grabbing headlines with their equality stories, they would have been out of a job.)

The R&A were in no position to suggest that Muirfield should think about changing its all-male ways, largely because their own situation did not sit well with the world at large. However hard they tried to explain that their governance wing had the odd woman on board and that their all-male membership wing was something entirely different, outsiders were never going to get to grips with so complex a state of affairs.