Carnoustie Ladies Golf Club members took a weekend step back in time on the putting green of the town links.
And they did it in fine style beside the town’s world-famous Championship links.
Members donned period dress to emulate their sporting forebears of 150 years ago when the historic club was formed.
It is still going strong and can proudly claim to be the world’s oldest surviving ladies’ golf club.
Anniversary programme
An anniversary book reveals the first competition was staged in Friday August 22 1873.
Several members of Dalhousie Golf Club organised the event.
It was effectively a putting competition, played over a strip of the links allocated to the ladies for the inaugural event.
They played for “a splendid putter, silver mounted and having beautifully carved on the face of it, a Scottish thistle, cross clubs and the golfers’ motto”.
It led to a meeting just a few days’ later when eleven ladies met to to elect Mrs D Dickson as their first Lady President.
Original home still in use
The original clubhouse on Links Parade is still their home.
And on Saturday the putting surface opposite staged the anniversary event.
Long dresses, straw hats and hickory putters were de rigueur for the day.
Followed, appropriately, by afternoon tea for the current crop of players who carry forward the proud tradition.
Golf’s history books show St Andrews Ladies was founded in 1867 and is still going strong – but has always been a putting club.
Westward Ho and North Devon (1868), Musselburgh (1872) and Wimbledon (1872) all disbanded at some point in their history.
So it makes Carnoustie the oldest in the world which has been in continuous existence and where the members play the full game of golf.
Photographer Kenny Smith’s pictures capture the action at the anniversary event at Carnoustie Ladies Golf Club.
