History

Sam Beckett represented DUGC as a student. 

The other major player in the birth of the golf club and subsequently the Society was Cecil Barcroft, who was the first secretary of the golf club and the DUGS.  The Trinity golf club was to play a major role in the development boom in Irish golf as its members brought the game home with them on holidays and after graduation. 

There were a number of champion golfers in Trinity who were to become the backbone of the original society. The most notable being Lionel Munn. He was Irish Close Champion in 1908/11/13/14 and Irish Open Amateur Champion in 1909/10/11.  Incredibly he was still good enough to be the losing finalist in the British Amateur Open in 1937 in his fifties, having given up the game for sixteen years in the meantime.

The DUGS was seen as a necessary development by 1909, partly because the golf club, with about a hundred members, was still being represented in matches by graduates and staff, including the very competitive Provost!  If undergraduates suffered because of this, it was clearly a problem.  However the Society, in its original constitution, allowed for and still allows for, undergraduate members as well as graduates. Unfortunately the Great War had a catastrophic affect on all sport and brought a sad end to what was a golden era for Trinity golf.  Not only did the society and the club go into hibernation but the Royal Dublin links, which was virtually the unofficial home club for Trinity golfers, was to become a training ground for the military for the duration of the war.

H.A. Boyd in the bunker on the 12th, Portmarnock.

(Photo courtesy Portmarnock G.C.)

In 1926 the society was reformed. Three men in particular are responsible for the initiative in 1926.  Anthony Brutus  Babington, by now  Unionist MP for South Belfast , was on the founding committee of DUGS in 1909 and was to be co-opted  to the new committee in 1926.  Apart from being an active barrister and on his way  to becoming Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland in 1938, he was also involved in the foundation of Belvoir Park Golf Club in Belfast in 1926.  Born in 1877 in Londonderry he was a member of North West Golf Club and was a close friend of fellow member Lionel Munn. He won the DUGS Captain’s Prize in 1928, played at Craigavad.

The second golfer of note at the reforming of the society was Harry Thrift. A highly successful sportsman, Thrift was to be President of DUGS for thirty years until his death in 1957. He was a good enough golfer to have tied with fellow DUGS member D J Collins for the best score in the open stroke competition held in connection with the Irish Open Amateur Championship in 1924.  He was mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses as a competitor in a cycle race in College Park on Bloomsday (16th June 1904).  As well as being President of DUGS he played regularly, probably more than anyone else in the first ten years after the revival.  He became a firm friend of Bernard Darwin and would have been instrumental in the inauguration of the fixture with the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society.  He was the College accountant as late as the 1950’s. However by far the most important of the three was to be Denis Pringle who was Honorary Secretary from 1926 to 1972, when he became President.

The old 6th at Portmarnock.

(Photo courtesy Portmarnock G.C.)

Denis Pringle ran the society virtually single handed as secretary.  In the later period he was assisted by Frank Purcell.  His meticulous records give us details on all matches played by the society.  He was to become a well respected judge whose sense of duty led him to become a judge in the Central Criminal Court in the 1970’s, after his well earned retirement. There he was confronted with various IRA cases, notably Rose Dugdale’s trial.  Naturally this was a dangerous time in his life. He had police protection and when playing at Carrickmines his bodyguards used to hide behind the gorse bushes.  The legal careers of Denis Pringle and his friend Anthony  Babington make an interesting overlapping comparison in a country that was divided by the Government of  Ireland Act of 1920.  Although they were separated by 27 years they both lived exceptionally long lives and were very similar in their meticulous approach to their work, whether it was in the legal field or in the organisation of golf. 

Pringle kept a scrap book of his and his peers sporting exploits in school at Hailebury  and in Trinity.  His heroes in school appear to have been the rugby and cricket teams but he kept a record of all the school’s sporting activities including  fives, boxing and shooting, in which pursuit he himself excelled, representing Haileybury at Bisley.  Moving to Trinity, on a scholarship, he played on the 1st VI at tennis, the 3rd XV at Rugby as well as gaining his colours at golf.  In the newspaper cuttings of matches he is attributed a handicap of 7.  Not surprisingly he was secretary of the golf club in 1924 and in 1930 took on the role of President of the club.

The subsequent success of the Society in not just surviving, but flourishing, was due in large part to Pringle and Thrift and a loyal group of players and committee members such as Louis Werner, Frank Horne, Douglas Figgis, John Wisdom,  Simon Pettigrew, Jim Beckett, Desmond Collins, A B Babington and the ubiquitous Rev. J R McDonald who was the Societie's Captain as late as the Jubilee year of 1959.  The link with the 1909 founders was carried on by the occasional appearance of H A Boyd and J F Jameson.  James Henderson, later a President of the GUI and captain of Trinity in the Irish Senior Cup win in 1911 was not sure the society would thrive.  Writing in his own newspaper, The Belfast Telegraph, of the revival in 1926, he said that that it would be a better idea to create an Irish Universities Golfing Society.  He added however that he wished to be excluded from the business of organising such a society as he had “quite enough to do in that line already”.  His name does appear on DUGS team sheets in subsequent years so we can only presume he was delighted by its success.

DUGS won the Dublin United Golfing Societies Association Cup in 1927 and repeated that in 1930.

(Photo courtesy Portmarnock G.C.)

The main activities of the Society were regular, usually annual matches, with prominent clubs, Dublin University and UCD Past and Present which was so named until the UCD Golf Society was founded in 1945. Participation in the Dublin Societies Cup continued until 1951 without further success. The AGM of 1952 decided to opt out of this competition for financial reasons.  The Dublin Societies Committee had put the entrance fee up to £3!  The DUGS balance was standing at a precarious £5 at the time and the only income was the 10 shillings that new members paid for life membership.  Denis Pringle appears to have taken an almost perverse delight in running the society on such a shoestring.  In 1952, for example, there were only six new members, and even if two of the newcomers were luminaries such as Charlie McCaw and Brian Overend, the annual income was just £3.

In the first twenty years after the revival of the Society there were frequent matches against Royal Dublin, Portrush, Milltown and Foxrock.  The “Clarke” Cup was played for with Foxrock from 1944 onwards. Two noted Dublin surgeons, Seymour Heatley and Nigel Kinnear were behind this fixture.  This was a major highlight of the season but ceased after the match in 1964. After that DUGS were not in receipt of a further invitation.  However the fixture was revived for two years in 1996 and 1997.  Foxrock had virtually kept the society going during the war through their generosity in making available an easily accessed course in a time when travel was difficult.  The Trinity connection with Royal Dublin was severed in the early 1950s and Portmarnock took over as a spiritual home from then on and has been used for many Captain’s Prizes and fixtures with visiting teams.  Fixtures with Carrickmines, beginning in 1946, Greystones, Rathfarnham, Royal County Down and the Leinster Ladies Alliance, ( 1954 ), were added.  Derek Robinson remembers Charlie McCaw and himself playing against the two great Ladies of Irish golf,  Philomena Garvey and Mary McKenna.  The “Lionel Munn Putter” is the trophy for the annual match between the society and Portmarnock, which started in 1988.  DUGS venues usually reflected the presence of members of the society as prominent  members of the accommodating club.  It is not surprising then that over a period of time some clubs disappear from the fixture list and others take their place.  Among the most prestigious are the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society and the Scottish Universities Golfing Society.

The O and C G S (known simply as "The Society") was founded in 1898 – the first group of like minded souls to establish such a society – without a golf course – with the purpose of playing matches with each other and against other similar societies. Web site - http://www.ocgs.net

The Scottish Universities Golfing Society (SUGS)  was founded in 1906. Web site - http://www.sugs.org

The hundred years that have passed since the foundation of DUGS has seen such momentous changes that the world of 2007 would seem completely alien to Anthony Traill or Cecil Barcroft .  Today the best golfer in the world is black and Germany successfully stays out of any wars that are on offer.  An astronaut has swung a golf club on the moon, there are 414 golf clubs in Ireland and the country needs immigration of 80,000 a year to sustain a level of economic growth which has outstripped the UK and Germany over the last fifteen years.  Some golfers today can hit drives 350 yards and Americans elect Presidents who think Latin is spoken in Latin America and one who gives himself “mulligans” off the tee. 

At least we can study the Dublin of 1909 and discover that a large percentage of people lived in misery and probably never travelled much further than Dollymount in their entire lives. In 1909 the Sinn Fein party under Arthur Griffith was a minor political grouping who had as part of their solution to the “Irish Question” the recognition of King Edward VI as the King of a separate Ireland .  In 1907 there were riots inside and outside the Abbey Theatre because John Millington Synge had mentioned  women “in their shifts” in the “Playboy of the Western World”.  Today we have performances of something called “The Vagina Monologues”.  There is just laughter.  The Lionel Munns of the time led the  privileged life of Corinthian sportsmen but the trenches beckoned.  Which world would you prefer?

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