Obituary: Dr David Malcolm, golf historian

In 1963, while on a scholarship in the United States, the twenty-four-year-old David Malcolm decided to hitchhike along Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles. Stuffing a few dollars inside his shoes, he set off. Not long underway, an elderly lady and her daughter drew up and offered him a lift. They passed the steering wheel to him and promptly went to sleep in the back seat, while he drove - blissfully ignoring the fact that he had no licence - to a trucker depot a few hundred miles down the route where he cadged another lift to his ultimate destination.

It proved a cash-spinning success for him. In a series of wins at pool with some well-heeled medical students, he bought an old red and pink Chevy open top, resplendent with white wall tyres and headed back along Route 66.

It's a tale Dr Malcolm - widely and affectionately known as Doc Malc - told with relish and it epitomises some of his most endearing characteristics: a spirit of adventure coupled with a whiff of serendipity leading towards the realisation of a long-cherished dream.

Malcolm's life was to become a successful route of passionate, varied and enthusiastic interests that embraced science, agriculture, journalism, teaching and golf, in which he was to become one of its foremost historians.

Born in Coaltown of Balgonie in Fife in 1939, much of his childhood was spent at his maternal grandparents' farm at Craigiewells near St Monans, where he developed a life-long fascination with agriculture and the rural way of life in the East Neuk. He could lead a team of Clydesdales, work a swing plough and drive a tractor perhaps with more lan than proficiency.

It was a time he recalled with great affection, which he marked symbolically in later life by having two rusty ploughs and a neep shredder installed in his garden in St Andrews. True to this backdrop, he was also a great Burns aficionado, a long-term member and president of the St Andrews' Burns' Club during its bicentennial year.

Not, by his own admission, the most tractable of pupils at Waid Academy in Anstruther, he nonetheless heeded the advice of one of his teachers to continue his studies at the East of Scotland Agricultural College in Edinburgh where, at the age of 16, he gained a National Diploma in Agriculture and was awarded the Watson Medal before going on to research work with the Danish Institute of Animal Husbandry.

Malcolm went on to study at Edinburgh's Medical Faculty of Human Sciences from which he graduated BSc in Genetics in1964. Selected to attend John Hopkins' University to develop tissue-typing procedures, further post-graduate research on the human genome took him to Cambridge, Pittsburgh and Madison.After gaining a PhD in RNA/DNA Relationships in the Mammalian Genome, he carried out post-doctoral research in a number of German universities.

Returning to St Andrews in 1972, he worked in the department of zoology at the university, before becoming an inspirational science teacher for 20 years at Madras College, where he ran the school golf club taking pupils to the US and Japan.

The pun is pardonable: Doc Malc's driving passion was golf. Although a member of the New Golf Club in St Andrews for 53 years, its captain in 1993 and becoming a life member in 2005, as well as being an accomplished single-figure handicap player, it was specifically the history of the game that inspired him to acquire an unrivalled knowledge of it.

He was fundamental in researching the early history of the Kingsbarns golf course, beginning in the 1790s, culminating with the courses' expansion and reopening in 2000 as Kingsbarns Golf Links.

He scoured national libraries and archival collections both in the UK and abroad, most frequently in the New York public library which, after his beloved links in St Andrews, was his spiritual home. In the New York's Links' Club, he spotted and was instrumental in identifying an important golf painting in its possession by Sir Francis Grant RA, The First Meeting of the North Berwick Golf Club. The painting depicted people playing golf as opposed to figures standing with clubs in hand.

While his artist wife, Ruth, sought out galleries and flea-markets in downtown Manhattan, Malcolm pored over material that would bring to fruition his lengthy research into golf history. His unflagging zeal and insistence on pin-point accuracy resulted in the handsome volume and seminal work, co- authored with Peter Crabtree, Tom Morris of St Andrews The Colossus of Golf 1821-1908, which I was privileged to proof-read.

It won the USGA's 2008 Herbert Warren Wind Book Award, and also the British Golfers' Society 2009 Murdoch Medal. A one-off special issue was bought by Sir Nick Faldo at a Help for Heroes charity auction during the 2010 Open for 15,000. A similar book on the St Andrews golfer David Strath, who emigrated to Australia in 1879 at the height of his prowess and whose unmarked grave Malcolm located, will be a posthumous edition and as rigorously researched as its companion.

On the strength of his compendious knowledge of the sport, Doc Malc was hugely popular both in the UK and US as a consultant and public speaker on the subject. In January 2010, he travelled to Bangladesh in a joint project organised by the R&A, St Andrews Links Trust, The Old Course Hotel and Links Golf.For several years he wrote a weekly column online and contributed articles to the Guardian, Golf Weekly, the New York Times and the Scots Magazine.

Beyond these many attainments and lurking behind a formidable intellect, was a warm-hearted, fun-loving, colourful personality with all the mischief and irreverence of a true maverick; a reader of poetry, Scots literature, an avid supporter of Arsenal and an impromptu singer, he enjoyed controversy and heated debate.

He was a devoted husband to Ruth, exceptional father to Jamie and Toby and step-daughter Sophie and loving grandfather to Tom and Zosia. His death is a grievous loss and diminishes all of us who knew him.