Gordon Lucy: Ulsterwoman who was said to be the foremost lady golfer in the world

Rhona Adair, as we will see, demolishes this mildly amusing theory.

Is golf an Ulster-Scots sport?

Some contend that Hugh Montgomery, of Hamilton and Montgomery fame, established the first golf course in Ireland at Newtown (now Newtownards) in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

The course was attached to the school which he had founded in the town.

Two centuries later, officers of Royal Lanark Militia, based at the Curragh in County Kildare, founded the first golf club in Ireland in 1858 – the Royal Curragh Golf Club – although it was laid out six year earlier by a David Ritchie from Edinburgh.

Other Irish clubs too have a degree of military origin. For example, Sligo Golf Club at Rosses Point was founded in 1894 by Lieutenant Colonel James Campbell of the Sligo Militia.

The first non-military golf club to be founded in Ireland was founded on 9 November 1881.

Some credit the club’s foundation to Thomas Sinclair, the prominent Ulster Liberal (and subsequently Liberal Unionist) politician and future organiser of the Ulster Unionist Convention of 1892 and author of the Ulster Covenant of 1912.

Sinclair, a proud Ulster-Scot, had witnessed golf being played at St Andrews and was hooked there and then by the game.

Others give the credit to George Baillie, a Scot who taught English at Belfast Royal Academy, the longest established school in Belfast.

As Thomas Sinclair was the first President of the Club and George Baillie was the club’s first honorary secretary, this argument is slightly preposterous. Probably, Sinclair enlisted the Scot’s support to establish the club.

Originally named Belfast Golf Club, it became the Royal Belfast Golf Club after the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) visited the club in 1885.

The prince also became the club’s first patron. Only four Irish clubs have been honoured with the prefix ‘Royal’.

By 1891 there were ten golf clubs and courses in Ireland, nine of which were in Ulster.

The Golfing Union of Ireland was founded on 12 October 1891 and is the oldest Golfing Union in the world. Two years later the Irish Ladies’ Golf Union was founded.

It is the oldest Ladies Golf Union in the world.

Rhona K. Adair was the most famous Irish golfer — male or female — at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘The Illustrated Sporting News’ even described her as ‘the foremost lady golfer in the world’.

Born into a Presbyterian and Ulster-Scots family on 2 September 1881 at Glenavon, Cookstown, Co Tyrone, she was the youngest daughter of Hugh Adair and Augusta Adair (née Graves). Rhona had two older sisters, Augusta and Connie, and three younger brothers, John, Thomas Louis Napoleon and Hugh.

Hugh Adair senior owned a linen mill and was reputedly the largest employer in Tyrone. Many of the family were golfing enthusiasts, her father being one of the founders of Killymoon Golf Club in 1889.

Rhona started to play before she was 10 and was elected to membership of Royal Portrush as early as 1892.

She was only 17 when she contested the first ever British Ladies’ Amateur in 1895. She won that competition twice: in 1900 and 1903. She won the Irish Ladies Golf Championship in four consecutive years: in 1900, 1901, 1902 and 1903.

In 1903 on her return to Cookstown she was given a rapturous reception.

Seated in the family carriage and preceded by two bands, she was hauled in triumph by the local football team all the way from the station to the family home.

She played several golfing exhibition matches on a tour of the United States in 1903.

There she befriended Genevieve Hecker (1884 -1960), who was twice the US Women’s Amateur champion.

Hecker invited her to contribute a chapter on British golf to her book ‘Golf for Women’ (1904), the first book ever written exclusively for female golfers.

Throughout this period her rivalry with fellow Royal Portrush member May Hezlet was a significant feature of her career.

For a time Adair and the Hezlet sisters (May and Jackie) dominated the ladies competitions in Ireland, to the extent that in 1907 T H Millar, then vice-president of the Ladies Golf Union, sent a team of four men to Portrush to play them. The supremacy of the Portrush players was confirmed when all four men were comfortably beaten.

May Hezlet held her rival in her very high esteem and wrote of her: ‘She is a very powerful player and is renowned for her absolute steadiness and her capacity to play up better the more she is pressed.’

In 1907, Adair married Algernon Cuthell, an officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own), which was stationed in Belfast.

He was an enthusiastic cricketer and a prominent member of the North of Ireland Cricket Club. Rhona gave up her career in competitive golf to raise her two children.

Cuthell was killed in action at Suvla Bay on 22 August 1915 during the Gallipoli campaign.

As Major Cuthell has no known grave, he is commemorated on the Helles Memorial to the Missing.

After living in Aldershot for many years, she returned to Ulster in 1924 and settled in Portrush. Although she did not play competitively, she continued to take a keen interest in women’s golf.

She was President of the Irish Ladies Golf Union, 1932-3, and was Life Vice-President from 1934 onwards.

Drama was another passion and she became President of Ballymoney Drama Festival.

During the war she immersed herself in the work of the Women’s Voluntary Service whose purpose was to enrol women to assist with Air Raid Precautions.

(After the war the organisation reinvented itself, becoming providers of Meals on Wheels and engaging in work with the elderly, the housebound and the lonely.)

Rhona Adair died on 27 March 1961 in hospital in Coleraine.