History Of Strathtay Golf Club - pt V
There were thus unexpected benefits in being a small, informal and picturesque course where as a rule people could play an unhurried round in a friendly atmosphere, and where membership or green fees were so modest. It was only in 2005 that the annual membership fee crept up to a three-figure sum: after some debate in the committee, it was fixed at £100. It might seem that we were short-selling ourselves; one new member of committee proposed that we doubled our fee on the spot. But it has always been seen as logical that Strathtay should be affordable. People in the community interested in playing golf should not find the cost a burden. Many regular visitors just paid the membership fee anyway. They enjoyed this connection with the club and with the village that always made them welcome, and it gave them the chance to play a few holes at a time, or go out to practice, while they were here. Another knock-on advantage of our low fee structure was that more ambitious golfers in the area who took out membership at the longer and in some ways more demanding 18-hole courses (Pitlochry, Taymouth Castle, etc) were quite happy to maintain a membership at Strathtay. Another advantage ensued. European visitors - in particular, Swiss and Germans - would enquire about membership, and promptly pay up. Then we began to receive similar enquiries from their friends and relations in Frankfurt, Hamburg or Zurich - people who had never been to Strathtay or to Scotland in their lives. It would have been truly flattering to suppose that Strathtay's attractions were becoming world-famous, but we soon cottoned on to the realities involved. Golfing facilities were limited and often exclusive in these countries. Clubs demanded some kind of guarantee of competence from potential members, or even from visitors who proposed to pay for a round; and similar restrictions are in place at the better and more famous courses at holiday resorts in Spain and Portugal. Obviously membership of a Scottish golf club, when it cost only £100, was a useful thing to boast of - it might only be little Strathtay, but you could make it sound like Gleneagles in places where nobody knew any better. The committee were obliged to consider the ethics of this development. Was this some kind of shady deal, like going into the false passport business? Were we licensing absolute beginners to create havoc - to spend ten minutes on a first tee trying to hit the ball, or rip famous fairways to shreds as they hacked their way round? But in fact those Germans and Swiss who did appear at Strathtay were acceptably good at golf and aware of golfing etiquette. There was no reason to doubt their assurance that friends back home were equally competent and knowledgeable. We never received any furious complaints from Quinta do Lago or Valderrama. It seems that we were only doing well by doing good. Our Foreign Legion have been good and valuable friends to the club, and their visits are always a source of interest, and often education to us
Nevertheless as the year 2000 approached there was a growing feeling within the club that we must take stock of our situation. Not everyone was happy with the status of Strathtay as a club whose principal attraction was to provide a blast from the past We were in no position to scrap our wooden clubhouse and put up some kind of palatial roadhouse in its place. There was no available terrain to expand our golfing facility to 18 holes, even if we wanted this. But we could not go on taking it for granted that the standard of the course was somehow all right, and would continue to be acceptable, to members and visitors alike, in the twenty-first century. The rickety little tees were getting beyond a joke. We still teed off on a level bit of fairway at the second hole. Too many parts of the course were subject to wet and squelchy conditions whenever it rained heavily. The greens could only just pass muster. There was something wrong with the recently installed new second green: the grass was growing in a straggly, unhealthy manner. The fifth green was permanently wet, as if it was minded to revert to peat bog. The eighth green had for too long constituted a ridiculous hazard. Situated on the reverse side of a ridge as you approached it, it faithfully followed the downward slope and refused to take an approach shot played to it. The ball either stuck at the top of the green (when you tried to be extra clever) or ran down the whole length of it, when you had to chip it back on again. A putt from above the hole was a hair-raising lottery. If the player missed the hole, it was two putts back up the hill - and any further error repeated the process. This was an original "natural" green - no human imagination, however perverted, could have designed it; and despite an argument that it should be preserved as an eccentric feature of the course, it was felt that here - as in various other places on the course - some long overdue improvement was called for. It was not that the course as ft stood was badly looked after; but things could not go on as they were without some fundamental changes - not with the year 2000 only months away.
It was a matter of good fortune that when the course was ripe for change the circumstances were favourable for the necessary action. A new treasurer with substantial professional experience of financial matters had recently been appointed, who immediately set about enquiring what form of funding in the way of grants could be attracted. Applying for a grant might seem, theoretically, a simple enough matter: you ask for a sum of money, and the funding body says yes or no. In practice, however, it becomes necessary to provide a wealth of detail on the club's recent financial history and future projection, to price and justify any intended improvements, and even to instil confidence that the work will be properly carried out - things best done by someone who speaks the language of accountants and is accustomed to negotiation (or unfazed by initial refusal). It was also useful to have the club's affairs under a degree of financial control it had never previously experienced, even if this regime seemed, in its early stages, somewhat too rigorous to those of us more used to a mood of cheerful amateurishness in the matter of expenditure. In the event, the club benefited from wholly unconditional grants from more than one source. It said as much for our treasurer's persistence as for his fundraising skills that we gained enough to do what we wanted.