History Of Strathtay Golf Club - pt I
Many towns in Scotland, even quite small ones, will have their own golf course. It is a popular game here - after all, the people who claim to have invented it are more or less obliged to like it; or perhaps it can be argued that golf particularly suits the Scottish temperament. This proliferation of golf courses, big and small, may even suggest a democratic principle at work. It makes golf available to just about anybody who wants to play it. Golf clubs in other countries are liable to have the reputation of being bastions of snobbery and social exclusiveness, and in truth this is a phenomenon not unknown in Scotland; but so long as plenty of golf courses exist at a local level, it remains a fairly rare one. Golf in Scotland is still very much the people's game.
Perthshire is thus typical of golfing Scotland. If you set off north from Perth itself (which has three courses), you soon come to Dunkeld, where there is a course; then Pitlochry (likewise); then Blair Atholl (likewise). Turn off the A9 at Ballinluig - which once boasted a golf course of its own - and head west to Aberfeldy, and yet another golf course appears… and so on. Find a centre of population and you are almost certain to find a golf course. But on the ten-mile stretch of road between Ballinluig and Aberfeldy there is something unexpected. The A827 passes through the Perthshire countryside so much admired by tourists - farms, the occasional house standing by itself, fields flanking the River Tay, hills looking down on either side of the road: not very many people, quite a lot of sheep. Yet here, at the half-way point on such a quiet bit of road, is a nine hole golf course. It would be an exaggeration, and it would outrage the inhabitants of Grandtully and Strathtay village, to describe it as a golf course in the middle of nowhere. But these two little communities facing each other over the Tay, and joined by a narrow bridge, hardly make up a decent-sized village between them -although, to be fair, some additional building has appeared over the last few years. The surprising appearance of a golf course here cannot help raising questions in the mind of the visitor who comes across it. Where - with all those other golf courses so close nearby anyway - does it get enough people to play on it from? How on earth does it manage to keep going as an enterprise? And whose idea was it to have a golf course here in the first place? Scotland may very well be the Home of Golf, but golf courses do not spring up spontaneously from the very soil, and not in such an unlikely spot.
A detailed or comprehensive answer to this last question is unfortunately impossible. The existing minutes of the dub date only from 1927: an account of the early years, if notes were in fact kept, is unforgivably and unaccountably lost. A great deal changes, a great deal is forgotten, over a century; a whole generation with good memories of these years has passed on. We certainly know that Strathtay Golf Club was founded in 1909 by Captain John Malcolm Steuart of Ballechin, the fourteenth and last owner or laird of a great estate or 'barony' on Tayside. The Steuarts of Ballechin had held sway (jealously preserving their own spelling of the famous Highland surname) for some four centuries, playing their part in Scotland's turbulent history and - in more peaceful times -supplying their full share of officers in Britain's army. Captain Steuart served in the Boer War. It is easy to imagine such a man, as the laird of an imposing estate, deciding one day that he wanted a golf course and setting his retainers and tenants to work to satisfy his sudden whim. But photographs of Captain Steuart show an unassuming man with no hint of arrogance; on the contrary, he has an air of melancholy. He does not look like someone who would decree the existence of a golf course just to suit himself; and in any case he was not entirely in a position to do so.