History of St Andrews Golf Co.

Before steel shafts and modern manufacturing, golf clubs were made one at a time.

A hickory club brought together a wooden shaft, a forged iron head and the judgment of the person who made it. No two were entirely alike. Players came to know the weight, flex and character of their own clubs, and learned to shape the game around them.

In late nineteenth-century Scotland, clubmaking grew alongside the game itself. St Andrews and the Fife coast became home to makers whose clubs travelled far beyond the links and the shores where they were made.

Among the names that endured were George Nicoll and Tom Stewart. Today, 8 Golf Place is home to St Andrews Golf Co., carrying forward the Nicoll and Stewart names, marks and clubmaking traditions.

Tom Stewart opened his cleekworks on Argyle Street in St Andrews in 1893. Trained as a blacksmith, he specialised in one of the most exacting parts of hickory clubmaking: forging the iron head.

With Stewart, the details mattered - the shape of the head, the line of the neck, the weight and balance. His reputation came from getting those things right consistently.

His signature was the clay pipe, stamped into the back of his heads. The mark became one of the best-known cleek marks of the hickory era and can still be found on Stewart irons played and collected today.

Stewart supplied heads to many of the leading clubmakers of his time, including Old Tom Morris’s shop in St Andrews, and his irons were used by players including Bobby Jones and Francis Ouimet.

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George Nicoll began making golf clubs in Leven, Fife, in 1881. A blacksmith by trade, he brought an inventive streak to Scottish clubmaking and built a business that remained in the Nicoll family for generations.

He was interested in making clubs work better for the golfer. His designs included an early swan-neck putting cleek and, later, Indicator irons marked with approximate playing distances - an early attempt to make a matched set of clubs easier to understand.

Nicoll’s open-hand mark became known as the Helping Hand of Golf. Stamped into his iron heads, it became a familiar signature of the maker and remains one of the most recognisable marks in hickory golf today.

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Visit 8 Golf Place to see the story up close

Original George Nicoll and Tom Stewart clubs sit alongside restored pieces and newly made hickory clubs based on historic patterns. Look for the hand and pipe marks, handle the clubs, and see how these traditions continue today.