Opening Doors

Troon, who is staging the 2016 Open, is currently not budging from its present position. It is an all-male club which sees no reason to change at the moment. In a statement which will have had the tabloid press pricking up their ears anew, David Brown, the club Secretary, claims that their situation is different from that at Royal St George’s and Muirfield in that they have a ladies’ course and a clubhouse on their land. (This is roughly akin to the All England Club saying, which they never would, that their lady members were free to use the lodge and the outside courts. In fact, it is the lady members at Wimbledon who are called upon to ‘open’ the Centre Court and Court No 1 on the Saturday before Wimbledon.)

The only Open Championship course not mentioned about is Carnoustie. Up there, they are as St Andrews in having a number of private clubs around a public course, only in their case those all-male clubs hauled themselves into the 21st century some years ago.

Today, only one club in the town remains single-sex - and that, would you believe, is Carnoustie Ladies’. Founded in 1875, it is the oldest functioning ladies’ club in the world and is far and away the most picturesque of Carnoustie’s links-side buildings. Indeed, the façade has never changed since the day the club opened its doors.

There is no question of the women having decided to give the men a dose of the treatment which was meted out to them for the first hundred years and more.

"To be honest," laughs Pat Sawers, the first woman Chairman of Carnoustie Links, "I don’t think that we have had any male applicants. What we offer doesn’t really suit the men. We don’t do soup and rolls and we can’t offer a pint at the end of a round."

How Cotton, who won at Carnoustie in 1937, would have revelled in putting himself forward as the Ladies Club’s first man …