It might appear ridiculous to the man on the Clapham omnibus that a chap can clearly go round in 67

It might appear ridiculous to the man on the Clapham omnibus that a chap can clearly go round in 67 and then be disqualified on a technical infringement. However, those rules are important when it comes to the monthly medal at the golf club, where they don’t have television cameras.”Nevertheless, steps have been taken to help ensure that a similar business does not recur. At Troon there will not be such a m?e in the recorder’s hut, where the players officially post their score. And the recorders will henceforth be from the R&A, rather than volunteers from the host club. “But I should add that the players sometimes don’t help themselves,” Dawson adds. “They don’t always take kindly to being asked, ‘Is this your scorecard?’ They can get quite abusive.”To return to his point about the Rules of Golf being similarly applied whether in the Open Championship at Troon or a monthly medal at Pott Shrigley, this is also true of technology.

Let us turn instead to another issue which fuelled the accusation that golf is hidebound rather than enhanced by tradition, the disqualification from last year’s Open of Mark Roe and Jesper Parnevik, for failing to swap scorecards. To say that one half of one per cent is having any influence on what is happening at golf clubs up and down the country is arithmetically unsound.”He is being, I venture, just a tad disingenuous. The half of one per cent includes the R&A, which wields more influence than all the other clubs added together “Yes, but we don’t run women’s golf The LGU [Ladies' Golf Union] exists. Now, I don’t know whether the MCC is a better or worse or different place for having done it [accepted women] I’m not a member of the MCC. What I do know is that I get 500 calls from the media every year about this and four from the general public It’s a media issue.”Fair enough. And he is highly personable, in my experience not always a virtue associated with golf club secretaries.Personable as he is, though, he administers a game which is widely held to be institutionally stuffy, as the head of an institution considered by some to be one of the stuffiest things about it.

I am interested to hear how he defends golf from the charge of stuffiness, and with it the R&A – which unlike even the Marylebone Cricket Club, still does not accept women members.If he is irritated by the question, the genteel Edinburgh vowels do not betray it. You don’t hear about drugs scandals or gambling scandals or cheating in this game. “There are issues like dress codes, which could be modernised here and there. But I put it to you that golf is administered in a way that many other sports would envy. “I have never found golf to be particularly stuffy,” he says, equably. “He sometimes gets a bad press, but he has done a super job, he really has done this job extremely well,” says the secretary of the captain, non-treasonably.Still, I don’t expect Dawson ever dishes out praise where it doesn’t belong, even to royalty. Moreover, he is clearly a man of considerable competence himself, more than capable of filling Bonallack’s capacious boots.