The Himalayas, as the St Andrews Ladies’ Putting Club is known the world over, was designed by Old Tom Morris, a four-time winner of the Open and “keeper of the green” in St Andrews from 1864 to 1904. It was in 1867, the same year he won the fourth of those Opens, that Old Tom put the finishing touches to the first and easier nine holes of this famous putting surface. The scary ups and downs of the additional 18 holes (there are 27 in total) were to follow.
Many reasons had been advanced as to why such a facility had become a necessity for the wives and daughters of R&A members.
In the first place, the women had been making trouble by hanging around the R&A clubhouse while their menfolk were out on the links. As for the species of trouble they were creating, that had most to do with their penchant for trying their hand at putting on what was the caddies’ putting area on the site of what is now the Rusacks Hotel.
The caddies did not want the women on their territory any more than they wanted the town’s young blades descending on the green to flirt with them. Inevitably, those young men claimed to have the women’s best interests at heart: they were merely helping to retrieve golf balls from the holes because they, unlike the women, were not dressed in bodices, petticoats and crinolines.
It was down to all of the above that the instruction issued by the R&A members was that the women’s green should be “out of harm’s way.” Old Tom duly selected the area between the far end of the first hole on the Old Course and the West Sands. And, when the time came, he revelled in making the most of the additional 18 holes, the longest of which can be 40 yards on any given day. The undulations, meanwhile, contributed not just to the title of Himalayas but to the overall par of 54. (Small wonder that Paul Lawrie, the 1999 Open champion, was proud of his 41 in the impromptu round he had with his wife, Marian, last year.)
Twenty-two women played in the opening competition on the Himalayas, on October 6, 1867, with further information in the record books detailing that only one of them was single.
No doubt it was the done thing, but marital status was still included in the membership numbers for 1904. By then, there were 670 members: 240 unmarried women, 230 married, and 200 classified gentlemen associates.
When the Equality Act of 2010 came into play, these gentlemen associates had to step aside. The Putting Club ladies, like members of the women’s St Rule Club on the far side of the Old Course, did not have the finances to add matching facilities for the men and, in any case, they felt that it made more sense to stick with their single-sex arrangement. Perhaps because of the old emphasis on marital status, Dr. Eve Soulsby, the club’s historian, suggested that the departure of their male associates was a bit of a pity when “many matches would have been made” between the single ladies and the gentlemen.
It was in 1971 that an annual competition was started between captains past and present of the R&A and their Himalayas equivalents, and who better to capture the nature of the occasion than Chris Hilton, the R&A captain in 2018-19. Hilton played in the match on five occasions and, though he is not 100 percent sure of his facts, he thinks that the women won every time. “The men,” he said, “aren’t nervous; it’s more a case of them being apprehensive at the idea of getting another beating.”
The event is played over 36 holes, with a break after the first 18, at which point the women have a whisky cake at the ready in their clubhouse. The general consensus of opinion is that the cake does little to help the men to negotiate the humps and hollows any better in the second round.

According to Hilton, the women tend to putt better than the men, a) because they know the course inside-out, and b) because of their pace of play: “There’s no fuss attached to their putting styles. They put the ball down, they hit it, and if it’s not in the hole, it will be very close.” In keeping with which, Graham Duncan, another R&A man, discovered in the course of a friendly game that the putters the women were using on the Himalayas differed from the ones they would take to the golf course. Quite how, he has yet to discover.
During a dinner at Augusta in 2016, Hilton was the recipient of a lovely story from Tom Watson about his experience of the Himalayas. On the day after his last Open over the Old Course, the 2015 edition, he had looked out of his hotel window at the busy putting green and been unable to resist strolling across to see if he could have a turn. When he found a lone lady sitting on a bench, he asked whether she would be good enough to play a few holes with him.
The good lady, who seemed to know little of golf, excused herself on the grounds that she was simply waiting for her husband and son to finish their game rather than looking for one for herself. Also, she had a shopping bag which she did not like to leave under the bench. Watson found a solution to both problems. As the man collecting the green fees would advise, her family members still had a long way to go, while he was prepared to keep the shopping bag under his desk.
You wonder how the nonagenarians whom Soulsby had in mind might react were they to read “The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sport,” originally published in the late 19th century and reprinted in 2016.
The astonished lady members, who were playing in a shotgun medal, had their president approach Watson and ask if he would be kind enough to present prizes to their winner, along with the two ladies who’d had holes-in-one. (You have to think that the hole-in-one prizes, consisting as they did of vouchers for an afternoon cup of tea, would not have gone down well with the LIV brigade.) Watson was happy to oblige. He described the experience as “pure fun” and told the ladies that he planned to include something akin to the Himalayas alongside his next course design.
It was the late Joyce Wethered, the four-time British Ladies Amateur champion in the 1920s, who said that there was nothing she cherished more about St Andrews than the way you would meet the same people in the streets as on the course. That much has never changed and, as Soulsby explained in her most recent treatise, there is nothing even now that would strike one as rare about a lady in her 90s walking through the town centre carrying a putter and heading for the putting green.
You wonder how the nonagenarians whom Soulsby had in mind might react were they to read “The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sport,” originally published in the late 19th century and reprinted in 2016. In it, one Miss A.M. Stewart made mention of how, not too many years before, “a damsel with even one modest putter in hand was labelled a fast and almost disreputable person, definitely one to be avoided.”