19 July 2013
Muirfield Golf Club, where the Open is being played near Edinburgh, has enraged modern thinkers from Lynne Truss to Nick Clegg with its ban on women as members.
The club is proud of its conservative reputation, especially when it blackballed the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy, the author of several books on miscarriages of justice, in the Seventies. Scottish judges and lawyers, many of them members of Muirfield, were furious with Kennedy for revealing judicial complacency, particularly over Timothy Evans’s wrongful hanging in 1950.
Sir Ludo wrote of his Scottish ancestry in his memoir, On my Way to the Club, but he became so upset by the crusty advocates of Muirfield that he and his wife, Moira Shearer, had to move from Edinburgh to Wiltshire.
