At four minutes past noon on October 3, 1933, a yellow Rolls Royce pulled up to the clubhouse of the Royal North Devon Golf Club at Westward Ho! Someone had suggested that something unusual might take place that day at the English Women’s Amateur championship, and the press were there to see. Out of the car emerged the tall, slender figure of Gloria Minoprio, wearing a navy blue beret, turtle neck sweater and black trousers. After her first drive she doffed the red suede jacket she also had on, handing it to her caddie. As Malcolm Crane wrote in The Story of Ladies’ Golf, “She never said a word, and handed two clubs to her caddy; she never played with more than one club in a round and the caddy’s job was to carry the spare.” Using that single club, she was said to sport a four handicap. Miss Minoprio’s real claim to fame was that she was the first woman to wear slacks on a British golf course.
In a very interesting blog post from 2015, Rhod McEwan explained that her caddie, a local by the name of Shangle Taylor, carried her jacket, a bag of balls, and “a yellow duster to polish Minoprio’s cleek [2-iron] between strokes, and a cone-shaped rubber contrivance on which her ball was to be teed up.” Dorothy Minoprio (“Gloria” was a later addition) was born into a family of wealthy Liverpool merchants of Italian origin. “Her father died from TB when she was a baby, her mother suffered a mental breakdown and she and her sister were brought up by a grandmother and two aunts near Hampton Court. It was an all-female household, which might be significant, for none of the men in her life were exactly suitable.” She would marry William Gavin, a con man who employed Minoprio as a secretary after she completed finishing school in Paris. Gavin passed himself off as her uncle, but they were actually married in Paris in 1929, when she was 21 and he 64. It was then that she took up golf.
A former conjuror’s assistant, Minoprio joined the Littlestone Golf Club in Kent in 1931 but had never entered competitions there. Instead, she always entered the slightly more competitive English Close Championship. Her play that day in the 1933 English Women’s Amateur was undistinguished. She lost her match to Nancy Halstead, not saying a word to her opponent, and afterwards went straight to her car. Like Greta Garbo, she wanted to be alone. The legendary Henry Longhurst captured her departure by declaring, “Sic transit Gloria.”
The women of the Ladies’ Golf Union were shocked by the irreverence displayed by this lady showing up in pants. The chairman issued a statement: “I much regret that there should be this departure from the unusual golfing costume at this championship.” Lewine Mair described the events in One Hundred Years of Women’s Golf, quoting Enid Wilson, the great English champion and Curtis Cup player. Wilson claimed that in the modern age, Gloria’s tactics “would be dismissed instantly as the ingenuity of a master-mind behind a commercial concern wishing to promote something new in sports clothing. But in the 1930s such an idea was absurd because big business had not turned its attention to golf promotions.”
Twelve months later Minoprio returned to compete in the same event at Seacroft, playing Betty Sommerville in the first round. Betty was told what to expect, but recalled being shaken when she saw her opponent, who was “dressed as a stage demon” and carrying her one club. “It was like playing a supernatural being,” she told Enid Wilson. “The effect was enhanced by Miss Minoprio’s curious mannerism of waving the club to and fro above the ball instead of addressing it in the conventional manner.” The Daily Mail reported the match under the headline, “‘Opponent Upset by ‘Fancy Dress.’” It described Gloria as wearing “tight fitting, beautiful creased dark blue trousers, strapped under suede shoes to match; a pullover; a close-fitting blue hat; and gloves.” She beat Sommerville 2 and 1 before losing in the next round to Mary Johnson.
As Glenna Collett wrote in her book Ladies in the Rough in 1928, the women of her time were “making improvements in every line of athletics,” and that progress “kept pace with the curtailment of habiliments. Examples are the one-piece bathing suit, the sleeveless tennis costume, the boyish figure of the golf attire. The more comfortable the clothes have become, the more marked the improvement in sports.” But skirts were still the accepted woman’s attire, and in the future slacks and Bermuda shorts would both be controversial. I posted earlier a memo the USGA issued at the 1972 U.S. Women’s Open, which allowed players “to wear Bermuda shorts, slacks or skirts, but short-shorts, hot pants, or similar attire” were not permitted.
Minoprio was quoted in a 1936 Boston Globe article, saying “Trousers are freer than skirts, and they aren’t blowing around in the breeze and taking my mind off a shot.” She also said that she used the principle of an Indian Yogi to enable her to concentrate easily on any type of shot, although she didn’t elaborate on exactly what that principle was.
Mary Holdsworth, a former president of the LGU, played against Minoprio and never forgot the white gloves she wore. “The thumb was cut out from one hand and from it there protruded a long, talon-like nail, painted red. Her eyes were steely grey.” All agreed that she was “a singularly good-looking woman.” As to her play, Holdworth said that “She was keeping the ball down the middle – and when she was doing that, she was very effective. Her putts would jump a bit but were well judged.”
Gloria last played in 1939, and after marrying a Polish man named Stefan Godlewska, moved to Vancouver and later to Nassau, in the Bahamas, where she died from a blood disease in 1958.
