Golfer in the Royal Family

As golfers today we are lucky and now have the luxury of having clubs custom built and custom fitted to our exact specifications including swingspeed, our height, our swing mechanics and more.

What you probably won't know is that the first recorded set of custom built golf clubs was in the 16th century. At that time King James IV reigned in Scotland and he ordered  one of his bowmakers to develop a set of golf sticks which were shaped and made primarily of wood.

Clubheads at this time would have been made from a very hard wood, something such as wood from a beech or a holly tree. At this time golf shafts were not made of hickory but usually a combination of ash and hazel.

Even at this time making a club was perceived as a very fine art form and therefore the cost of these handmade golf clubs and equipment was well outside the reach of the everyday person. This equipment was really only afffordable to royalty and the gentry.

The hickory shafted club was introduced when a scottish clubmaker discovered this material from America. He found that the wood was extremely strong but also contained an element of torsion (flexibility and twist) which was a great help in stopping vibration going through to the hands.

This clubmaker from Scotland. Robert Forgan was his name, started the trend in the mid 19th century and many others began using this material.

Scotland is famous for its roots to golf and this stems from a number of very well known professional golfers like James Braid and Willie Park Junior setting up their own workshops to develop and build clubs which they exported all around the world.

In the way in which hickory had changed the face of golfing clubs in terms of shaft technology, then persimmon, another product from the USA would change the face of how clubheads were manufactured and how they would perform.

Persimmon is an extremely hard and durable material which is still used today. I even have a friend who uses a persimmon headed driver because of the sound it makes off the tee. Everybody to their own I say.

In the very early 1900s, clubmaking was an art and with these different materials being used, the performance and durability improved as did the scoring in tournaments.

One of the key moments in golf technology history relates to the introduction of steel shafts to the game. Many skilled ironsmiths and blacksmiths had played with the development of steel shafts but it had never taken off. The R&A would not allow the use of steel shafts in competition so of course it would take a monumental change of thinking for steel shafts to be recognised as a golf club component.

What the R&A did not bargain for was the intervention of a member of the royal family in England.

Back in 1929, the then Prince of Wales showed up at the Old Course sporting his newly designed set of golf clubs complete with steel shafts. This put the R&A in a very awkward position. Did they ban the prince from playing? Or did they enforce their rules regarding golf club materials.

As with this article the rest is history, The prince played and that, in many peoples eyes was the death of the clubmaking industry as it was known.

Steel shafts could be mass produced and bought down the cost of owning golf clubs significantly.

These historic happenings have now helped in moving the game forward and have probably led to the development of various golf club components which explains how differences in size of grip and flex of golfshaft can have a major effect on your game

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