In 1875, the future Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith went on a Reading Party with some friends to St Andrews and discovered the joys of golf, which he would play for the next half-century. At that time, as Roy Jenkins wrote in his biography of Asquith, golf was “so little developed that he and his modest-living student companions were able to hire the services of the British Open champion to carry their clubs” – that is, to act as caddie for one of them.