The Firm & Fast Golf Podcast · Shane Derby

Looking Back, Moving Forward: The R&A Golf Heritage Conference 2025

·1 hr 22 min·5 clips

The British Newspaper Archive now has about 2,500 newspapers and 100 million pages.

Shane Derby opens the chat by welcoming Mike Morrison and framing the golf heritage conference due in St Andrews on 11 and 12 March. The event is tied to a partnership between the R&A Golf Museum and the British Golf Collectors Society. From there, the discussion widens into the practical work of golf history, collecting, and storytelling. Mike is presented as a respected golf historian and researcher who knows the ground well. His presentation title is golf club history research in the digital age. That gives the conversation a clear centre. He explains that hundreds of golf club histories have been written over time. A lot of that work was tied to centenary books. Many clubs were formed long before those books appeared, so the writing arrived in a later wave. Much of that work happened before the internet and the web existed. Mike points out that there was little or no online information for many clubs back in the 1990s and earlier periods. That meant historians had to do the hard work in person. Libraries mattered. So did patient searching through older sources. The conversation then shifts toward the wider stewardship of heritage material. There is talk of looking after valuable assets and making sure they are valued, insured, and protected from fire, water damage, or theft. The show draws a useful distinction between front-office, middle-office, and back-office work around a club's history. The middle office is where the risks sit. The back office is where archivists, historians, catalogers, digitization, conservation, and the writing and research that help turn scattered material into a usable club history all come together. The golf heritage committee is part of that picture too. Richard Williams comes up as a mutual friend who is facilitating a what-can-we-do-with-our-history section. He is described as honorary secretary of the British Golf Collectors Society and archivist at Royal Blackheath. The conversation keeps returning to the idea that heritage only matters if it is cared for properly. Mike offers hints, tips, and perspectives on the do's and don'ts of collecting, researching, and storytelling. Shane also steers the chat toward the great English golf boom. That leads into a particular Irish question from his own research. Alongside those broader threads, Mike talks about his current focus on the histories of Hunstanton Golf Club in Norfolk and the Seniors Golfing Society. It is a conversation that treats golf history as something to collect, research, and preserve carefully, with the conference, the society, the archive work, and the older club stories all in view.

As heard by us

A thoughtful look at how golf history gets gathered, protected, and told.

This episode presents a golf heritage conference preview from St Andrews, with Mike Morrison offering practical detail on archives, digitization, research, and the work of preserving club history.

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Why you'd press play

St Andrews, golf heritage, and the practical work of keeping club stories alive.

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