GOLF.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 141, 19 May 1925, Page 5

GOLF.

Members are requested not to start playing matches in the B. and A. and McLennan Cup competitions until next Saturday, as it lias been found that the draw in each competition, as published, was wrong, some names having been left out, and therefore a fresh draw has to be made."

THE BRITISH AMATEUR CHAMPION

The situation which has arisen over the nationality of tho British amateur champion, Sir Ernest Hoklcrness, is still acute. He has played for England against Scotland in the three internationals since the war, and has just been elected president of the English Golf Union, which he was one of tho most active in creating, so that it waa o something of a bombshell when it was discovered that under the regulations governing tho entry for the new English championship he would not be eligible to compete. At first it was universally assumed that his was one of the anomalous cases which are almost sure to arise in the practical application of any cast-iron definition, but a fuller investigation of tho facts makes it clear that Sir Ernest is not an Englishman—in the restricted sense —at all. It is necessary to go back to his grandparents to get a definite link with any of the three kingdoms, and even then his English connection is on his motherlg side only. On the father’s side he is of Scottish descent, which explains his remark when he won his first championship at Prestwick, that “I believe I am more than half Scotch.” Sir Ernest is the first of the Britons, and the discovery is one of the most important that has been made for some time in British sport. So says Golfing in the March number. He himself was born in India, and his father, the late Sir Thomas Holderness, in Canada, his mother in India. Scotland’s claim upon him is remote, England’s no less remote and on the distaff side. It may do no harm to the sport of tho Empire to discover that it is possible to be merely British and nothing else. The tightening up of the national definition for the English championship lias brought into the limelight another curious case. Dr. H. D. Gillies, who was first reserve for England in the match against Scotland last year, and who had previously played in the English team, is the son of a Scottish father and was born in New Zealand. He, however, will not he excluded from the English championship, because his mother was born in England and this is sufficient to satisfy tho official rule, which reads: “No person is eligible to enter . for the championship unless he is a British subject, who was either himself born in England, or is the son of parents, one of whom was born in England.”