France is fair and free, but the game is played in Europe where the
times and conditions are not at all the same. There is golf in Russia,
and to it there was added a new course but recently. At the first
thought it seems a little odd that such a peaceful game should be played
in holy and revolutionary Russia even by Britishers. They have had two
courses in Russia for a long time past--one near Moscow and the other at
Mourino, a small village a few versts out from St. Petersburg. The men
who play here are of a hardy, determined strain, fine men for pioneers.
To get their golf they have to drive thirteen miles out from the capital
over bad roads; and in order to obtain a fair amount of satisfaction
from their game they have to returf their putting greens almost every
year, owing to the extreme sandiness of the soil. The Kaiser is
encouraging the game in Germany, and has given prizes for it; there are
eight clubs in Italy; and others in Austria, Holland, Belgium, and all
the rest. The game has flourished for twelve years past in the dominions
of the Sultan of Turkey, that is to say at Bagdad, and the golfers
there are pleased to tell you that their course is no miniature affair
as are so many at the outposts of the empire of St. Andrews, but that it
consists of full eighteen holes, and that, in the desert, they are very
sporting indeed.
It goes without saying that the game flourishes greatly in all the
Colonies. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the
others there are little booms of golf in progress, each of its own kind.
At Pretoria and at many places at the Cape the greens consist of
diamondiferous gravel, smooth and sparkling, and the first local rule of
the Kimberley Club startles the newly-arrived golfer from the homeland,
for it tells him that “It shall be lawful for a player to level the
ground on the putting green in any manner he pleases.” In India there
are some forty flourishing clubs, and that at Calcutta, with its five
hundred members and two courses of nine holes each, having been
established for nearly eighty years, takes rank as one of the premier
clubs of the world. There is the Aden Club in Arabia, the Royal Bangkok
in Siam, where an old and very imposing Siamese temple does duty for
clubhouse, and others all over Asia, as one might almost say. There are
many golf clubs in the Argentine Republic and the other South American
States. The Sandwich Islands are full of the game, for there are five
clubs there. In the East Indies there are three, and in the West Indies
there are eight. Wherever the Britisher goes he leaves his trail of golf
behind him. There is a story of Captain Adair holding a golf competition
in his camp when pitched on one of the passes leading into Thibet, at a
height of sixteen thousand feet above the sea-level. I have no
information about the game having been played in the North Polar
regions; but I am told that when the recent British Antarctic Expedition
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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