The golf bag began as no bag at all: early caddies simply carried a handful of hand-made wooden clubs bundled together or tucked under one arm, since golfers of the old Scottish links needed only a few clubs and had little to carry. Leather and canvas bags appeared by the later nineteenth century, and the design kept changing from there, through steel shafts, a fourteen-club rule, and on to the slim Sunday bag you see today.
We are Links & Oak, and we make engraving-style golf artwork, including a plate that shows that slim Sunday bag. Here is the fuller story behind it, and where we could not be sure of a fact, we have said so.
How did golfers carry their clubs before golf bags existed?
The early game did not need a bag. A golfer of the old Scottish links played with only a small number of clubs, each made by hand from wood, with a long, slim head and a shaft that had no steel anywhere near it. There was simply not much to carry.
What there was, the caddie carried. The word itself is usually traced back to the French cadet, a younger son or junior, and there is a well-worn story tying it to Mary, Queen of Scots, who played golf and is said to have had such helpers around her. Treat that as the traditional account rather than settled fact. What is not in dispute is that by the time golf was an established pastime, a caddie was the ordinary way to have your clubs taken round the course.
And the way they took them was simple. Clubs were held together in the arm, or in a bundle, or tucked under one elbow. Picture it and you can see the trouble. Wooden clubs were fragile, and a set that knocked together all afternoon, then got dropped on a wet green, would not last. Any caddie who cared for his golfer’s clubs would have wanted something better, and any golfer who cared for his clubs would have wanted the same.
Part of the answer was a change in the ball. For a long time golfers played with the feathery, a leather case packed with feathers, which was costly to make and easily spoiled by wet. The gutta-percha ball arrived around 1848, and it was cheaper and tougher. A cheaper ball made the game more widely played, and a ball that could take a beating changed how players wanted to hit it. It also encouraged a wider range of clubs, because the new ball sat differently in the turf and some shots called for a different tool. More clubs meant more to carry.
The first bags
This is where the record gets thin. Golf bags were plainly in use by the later part of the nineteenth century, and they were made of what a Scottish caddie or club-maker would have had to hand: leather, canvas, and stout stitching. Beyond that, accounts differ on who made the first one, where, and exactly when, and we are not going to hand you a neat inventor’s name that we cannot support. If you find one stated flatly in a book or on a museum label, it is worth asking where the claim comes from.
What we can say with confidence is what the job of the bag was. It had to keep the shafts from clattering together, keep the heads from being chipped, keep rain off the grips, and give a caddie something to hold. Early bags were narrow tubes, and you can still see why: a golfer of that time carried a handful of clubs, and the bag needed to be only as wide as the handful. A tube of canvas over a leather base, with a strap, would do the job.
Then there was the matter of the bag being carried by a person, over the shoulder, all day, across ground that could be rough, steep and wet. So the design pressure was always the same. Make it hold what the golfer needs, make it light enough to carry, and make it hard-wearing. That pressure has not gone away, and it is the reason the bag’s basic shape has stayed recognisable for well over a century.
Why are golfers only allowed to carry fourteen clubs?
The next change came from the clubs themselves. For generations the shaft was hickory. In the 1920s steel shafts began to be approved: the USGA allowed them in 1924, and the R&A followed in 1929. Steel could be made to a consistent standard, which meant a maker could produce a matched set, and a golfer could reasonably think of their clubs as a family, each one a step from the last.
Numbered sets were a big change, and they had a knock-on effect on the bag. Players carried more clubs, and some carried a great many. By the 1930s the number in a golfer’s bag was a talking point. The stories vary, and some are surely tidied up in the retelling, but the general picture is well recorded: there was no limit, and bags were filling up.
That ended with a rule. The number of clubs a player could carry was capped at fourteen, brought in by the USGA in 1938 and by the R&A in 1939. Fourteen is not a magic number so much as a settlement. The authorities wanted to stop the game being decided by who could carry the biggest arsenal, and to keep the skill in the choosing and the playing. It is one of the few rules in golf that shapes the bag directly. Every full-size bag you see today is, in a sense, built around that number.
It also gave the bag a fresh job. With a limit set, a golfer had to decide what earned its place, and the bag became a record of those choices. Opening a bag tells you something about the person who packed it.
What is a Sunday bag in golf?
Which brings us to the slim one. The Sunday bag, sometimes called a pencil bag, is exactly what its nickname suggests: a light, narrow bag for a golfer who is not carrying a full set. It is for a casual round, for a quiet evening nine, for someone who wants to walk and think rather than haul.
We should be honest about the origin of the name. We have not found a reliable source that pins down when the term “Sunday bag” first appeared, or who first used it, so we will not pretend to. The idea, though, is easy enough to understand. It is the bag you take when the round is for pleasure. You leave the heavy set at home, choose a handful of clubs, and walk.
There is something quietly satisfying in that, and it is a fair description of why the shape endures. The Sunday bag looks back to those early narrow tubes. A few clubs, a strap, and a walk across the turf. Golf has gone through steel, then graphite, then titanium, along with carts, trolleys and bags with stands, dividers and more pockets than anyone can remember. Through all of that, the slim bag has stayed, and it has never quite gone out of fashion. It is the game reduced to what matters.
There is a wider point here too. The history of the golf bag is not really about the bag. It is about how much a golfer chooses to carry, and how much a caddie, or your own shoulder, is willing to take. Each time the equipment grew, the bag grew with it. Each time somebody wanted to get back to the simple game, the bag shrank again.
What our plate shows, and what it doesn’t
Our plate of the Sunday bag is a piece of digital engraving-style artwork. We want to be plain about that. It is not an antique, it is not a hand-engraved original, and it is not a picture of any real named course. It is our own drawing, made in the manner of the old engraved plates, and it shows the scene as we imagined it: a slim bag, a few clubs, and the easy quiet of a round played for its own sake.
We chose the Sunday bag because it holds the whole story in a small space. There is the caddie’s bundle in it, and the canvas and leather, and the fourteen-club settlement, all softened into something you would happily carry on a Sunday afternoon.
If the history above has made you fond of the slim bag, you will find the plate on our site, printed to order on clothing for people who love the old game. Have a look, and take your time over it. It is that kind of picture.
See it in the collection: The The Sunday Bag design
