The Golf War

Trevor Royle, Sunday Herald, 11 July 1999

Looking back at St Andrews from the coast road which necklaces Fife's East Neuk coastline, time seems to have left the ancient university town unscathed. Spires dream, the ribs of the cathedral still stand guardian (its cause long lost) and the old grey sandstone shimmers in the evening sun. Beneath a big summer sky (only a dullard would call it blue) the place seems unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable.

But wander down the dusty byways which intersect the rich farmland on the 500-acre Kingask estate and another St Andrews lurches into focus, a town torn apart by the quietly insistent claims of its inheritance and the increasingly strident counter-claims of the international conglomerates which organise leisure time for high-rolling business executives. For it is here, on green acres with one of the best views in Scotland, that the latest battle in the local Golf War has been fought and, depending on one's side in the conflict, won or lost.

The winners, for the time being at least, are the backers of the St Andrews Bay Development Company, which has secured Fife Council's approval to change Kingask's rich agricultural land into a £50 million resort complete with two 18-hole golf courses and 208-bedroom hotel and leisure centre. To the US-based company this is progress and satisfying at that, a facility bringing jobs and money into a part of Scotland which owes its existence to golf and, to be honest, to precious little else.

The losers, those who put history and tradition before commerce and the loutish demands of the recreation industry, are equally adamant that this is a step too far. To them Kingask is a tacky and unwelcome development, symptomatic of a world which demands instant gratification and one which is as welcome in St Andrews as a plague of divots. Worse, far worse, in a town which has nurtured a line of poets from Gavin Douglas through Andrew Lang to Robert Crawford, the decision is simply the short end of a wedge to turn St Andrews into a golfing theme park, a kind of northern Disney-on-the-Links.

Ah, the dreaded D-word. No sooner had it been uttered by opponents of the scheme than it was transmogrified into something else, something altogether more quintessentially Scottish than anything the great Walt could have dreamed up - the fear of the Kailyard, Balmorality and all the horrors of tartan-kitsch. Does St Andrews really want that, a make-believe golfing Brigadoon on the beautiful Kingask slopes while the town already has six courses which are patently the real thing?

For the man behind the development, Dr Don Panoz, the answer is obviously, yup. He has already masterminded similar developments in the United States, using a subtle mix of commercial hard-headedness and sporting savvy (Jack Nicklaus is an associate) to create dreamlands such as the Diablo Grande resort in California, a community apparently so in tune with itself and nature that it is dedicated solely "to preserving timeless beauty, amazing vistas and wide-open spaces".

For the people behind the protest the certainties are less evident. One of their leading lights is Dr Frank Riddell, a mild-mannered but steel-spined academic who is chairman of the local community council. Throughout a difficult week he remained effusive yet determined in the face of cross-questioning for he knows full well that two further golfing developments remain on the table at Feddinch and Scooniehill on farming land to the south of the town.

"Once you ignore planning policies, it opens the floodgates," he insists. "Kingask had the most grounds for rejection out of the applications. Why not locate the golf courses in areas of Fife where there's an unemployment problem?" As deeper concerns emerge, the war starts to fall in on itself, for it does not just embrace a straightforward battle between old and new, between the dignity of the past and the raucous demands of an uncertain future. It is, in many fundamental respects, a tussle for the soul of St Andrews.

When the Kingask venture was first broached last April it sent alarm bells ringing and opponents started corralling in a list of powerful supporters including Scottish Natural Heritage and Historic Scotland. According to Dorothea Morrison, chair of St Andrews Preservation Trust, their aim was quite simple: "To preserve the jewel in the crown of Fife's tourism industry."

Their endeavours appeared to have been rewarded in February when the East Area Development Committee of Fife Council rejected Dr Panoz's plans on the grounds that the project failed to meet local planning guidelines. In other words Kingask's unwanted denizens would clog up the traffic, ruin the local environment and strangle the town in return for a miserly few hundred jobs (the figure remains inexact).

Round one to the traditionalists, but the visionaries were not to be denied. Fife Council then decided that the application had strategic implications and, backed by the superior firepower of Fife Enterprise, Fife Chamber of Commerce and the Kingdom of Fife Tourist Board, the council's 12-strong strategic development committee gave the project the green light on the grounds that traffic and environmental concerns could be overcome. None of the councillors represents the St Andrews area.

However, the mighty affair is by no means over. The battle has ended but the war goes on and in the best military traditions the sniping has already started. In this tight little town where everyone knows everyone else's business and where there are carefully honed groupings, social or golf-oriented, there is a tendency to take up entrenched positions.

For everyone who deplores the decision - either, as Dr Riddell, does because planning policies appear to have been ignored or, as many do, because they resent the intrusion of councillors from socially disadvantaged and industrially challenged west and central Fife - there are others who believe that the protesters speak for a privileged and out-of-touch minority.

"They worry that cars will destroy the town's historic fabric and argue that it has to be preserved for future generations," argues one douty St Andrean who knows full well that anonymity has its advantages. "But what about the real St Andrews, the run-down city centre with shops that come and go and buildings which are rapidly being run down? They're the real jewels in the crown."

She has a point. Take away the golf, the university (Scotland's oldest and the source of much-needed income) and the historic piles maintained in pristine purity by Historic Scotland and St Andrews looks remarkably like any other Scottish town. In the two main drags, Market Street and South Street, there is a high turnover in shops and the houses above them, once owned by local shopkeepers, have been turned into gimcrack student flats. It is not a pretty sight.

Even in Queen's Gardens, where quiet town houses once offered gracious living to the town's professional and academic community, the filthy windows and cheap closed curtains speak of a less elegant style of living for the students who pay high rents for questionable facilities. However disagreeable it might be for traditionalists, there is no denying the fact that many prosperous St Andreans now live outside the city centre. True, some city-centre buildings have retained their style as family homes but, all too often, all too many are being rack-rented for their owners' profit.

It is not to be wondered that some people believe that the preservationists should turn their attention to the decay which is gnawing away at the heart of St Andrews and not worry themselves overmuch about a project which will attract money and jobs into the town. Although there is much to recommend that line of thought the local squabbling pales when the wider picture is viewed, once the forces of historical change begin to kick in.

For the truth is that the St Andrews of today is very much a creature of its own making. In spite of years of local in-fighting (the spats concerning the doings of the all-powerful St Andrews Links Trust would require a book) the town has been united (well, almost) in its desire to market itself as the Home of Golf and in so doing it has prospered. Forget for a moment the rival claims of Leith Links or Musselburgh or, indeed of the Netherlands, and the gimmick has worked well enough to send the cash registers ringing.

Locals might complain about the ravaging tourists (they do) but hardly a cheep is heard about the bawbees. And it's not just golf which is part of that package. The castle and the cathedral, both central to the nation's history, are also magnets and well-preserved ones at that. With their crisply mowed lawns and visitors' centres the ruins are clearly attractions of the first order but it is hard to avoid the impression that they are also, well, historical theme parks.

Visitors might gaze at the PH set in the stoned pavement outside St Salvator's but can they really imagine the pain and the fear as the avenging flames burned to death Patrick Hamilton for holding reformist religious beliefs? It seems doubtful.

As St Andrews faces up to the threat of further invasions by the golfing prospectors and the accompanying carpetbaggers, that is both the problem and the challenge. Having sold themselves to the world as golf's home, with the must-play courses and the cute historical backdrop, the town and its people now have to live with the consequences.

Why else have the courses been extended and the infrastructure created to support them? No-one seems to have raised an eyebrow but while Kingask was creating a stink the university managed to push through almost unnoticed a slick museum and visitors' centre on a greenfield site at its North Haugh campus.

These bodies will not welcome the suggestion but those who have given the nod to St Andrews' golfing heritage centres and the rest of the town's marketing paraphernalia have their noses in the same trough as Dr Panoz and his cohorts. They had better make the most of it while the sun still shines.