How golf found a worthy home in St Andrews after humble beginning

At that time, it didn't seem important that, after the first 12 events had been held at Prestwick, a new home had been found.

This only came about, it is claimed, because Prestwick had become keen to "ease the burden of continuously organising the event" so, after a year without an Open Championship, St Andrews stepped in and thus began a process that saw the tournament shared between it, Prestwick and Musselburgh for nearly 20 years.

Yet that first event at St Andrews, a town that had been run down until Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair, had licked it into shape in the 1840s, was notable for the players who weren't there, the majority of the 26 competitors having been amateurs and only a handful of them being non-St Andreans. A rain-sodden event was won by Tom Kidd, one of the locals, whose total of 179 was the highest winning aggregate over 36 holes.

With Prince Leopold, the fifth son of Queen Victoria, in attendance, after he'd been installed as captain of the Royal and Ancient at the start of the Autumn Meeting - the event was held back then in October - the second Open at St Andrews, in 1876, was a controversial affair. Davie Strath, the local favourite but representing North Berwick, had three 6s in his last four holes but, at the end of what was described at the time as "an unruly and disorganised day's play" the outcome was declared "under protest" as tie between him and Bob Martin, the runner-up at Prestwick the previous year. However, Strath refused to take part in an 18-hole play-off the following day and Martin, who went out and walked the course on the Monday, became the champion golfer of the year.

For the 1879 Open, the entry was up to 46 and, on this occasion, Jamie Anderson of St Andrews claimed the distinction of winning three successive championships, only the second player to achieve this feat after Young Tom Morris, whose unfortunate death at the age of just 25 in 1875 prevented him from winning an Open in his home town.

The first non-St Andrean to win on the Old Course was Musselburgh's Bob Ferguson, whose triumph in 1882 also saw him claim the Claret Jug for a third straight year and almost made it four, losing to Willie Fernie in a play-off 12 months later at his home course.

In 1885, St Andrews attracted a record field of 51 and, by then, the Open was starting to gain attention.

During the week, 11,000 words were telegraphed out by St Andrews Post Office to newspapers, the final chunk of those reporting on a historic feat as Martin became the first double winner at St Andrews, a feat subsequently accomplished by James Braid, J H Taylor, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.

Defying local belief - his short game was described in the St Andrews Citizen as being "deficient" - Jack Burns, who was born and bred in St Andrews but was working down in England, won in 1888, pipping Ben Sayers by a shot, while the last two-round event on the Old Course, in 1891, saw Hugh Kirkcaldy beat a field of more than 80, including his brother, Andrew, who tied for second place.

At that time, all but one of the Open Championships held in the 'Auld Grey Toon' had been won by St Andreans but, after the face of the event was changed in 1892 - Prestwick had written to the Royal and Ancient and asked for the event to take on a new and wider basis - the successes soon dried up. In fact, not since Willie Auchterlonie triumphed at Prestwick in 1893 has a St Andrews-based golfer lifted the Claret Jug.

Yet, paradoxically, the Open became more and more synonymous every time it returned to the Fife town, with no one looking forward to that more, it seemed, than JH Taylor. A member of 'The Great Triumvirate' along with Harry Vardon and James Braid - between 1894 and 1914 they won 16 of the 21 Open Championships - Taylor, a Devon man, won for the first time on the Old Course in 1895 before repeating the feat five years later, when he won by eight strokes from Vardon, with Braid a further five shots adrift.

Not to be outdone, Braid, the Fifer who also stamped his mark on the game with the plethora of courses he designed, also achieved a St Andrews double, a crowd of 4,000 excited locals cheering him to victory in 1905 before he secured the honour of winning the 50th Open Championship five years later - his fifth title in ten years.

While grooves have been a real issue in the game in recent years, it is nothing new. In 1921, Jock Hutchison, who was born in St Andrews but had lived in the United States from an early age, returned to his home town and lifted the title, beating Roger Wethered in a play-off. Hutchison drew gasps of astonishment from the crowd due to the amount of backspin he could put on a ball due to the deep square grooves on his clubs, which were soon banned. It was at the same championship that a young Bobby Jones tore up his card. After going out in 46, he took 6s at both the tenth and 11th and chucked it. At that time, the American probably never wanted to find himself back at St Andrews.

But he was there in 1927 and, to the delight of huge galleries, the amateur triumphed by six strokes. His love affair with the town was cemented three years later when he also won the Amateur Championship, crushing Wethered in the final.

The Americans were starting to get the hang of Open Championship courses and Danny Shute's triumph at St Andrews in 1933 - he beat compatriot Craig Wood in a 36-hole play-off - was the tenth in a row for Uncle Sam's boys and, while Englishman Dick Burton won in 1939, the last championship before the Second World War, Sam Snead started a new period of American dominance in 1946.

Reckoned by many to have possessed the most fluent, rhythmic and classical swings of all time, this was the only occasion Snead was to figure in the latter stages of an Open Championship, though that certainly couldn't be said of the man who followed him on to the St Andrews roll of honour in 1955. That was the first year the event was covered live on television while a four-figure winner's cheque of 1,000 - this year's first prize is 850,000 - was another first.

Having become the first Australian to lift the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale the previous year, Peter Thomson arrived in Fife as one of the pre-tournament favourites and justified that tag, holding off the challenges of Johnny Fallon, Frank Jowle and Eric Brown to chalk up the second of his four successes.

Two years later, as the event made a quick return to St Andrews, Edinburgh-born Brown gave another good account of himself, finishing third behind Bobby Locke, the South African having to withstand a protest after the presentation ceremony that was lodged on the basis that the winner had marked his ball a couple of putter heads to the side on the last green for his playing partner but then hadn't replaced it in the correct position.

There was no such controversy when Kel Nagle won the 100th Open Championship at St Andrews, the Australian seeing off Arnold Palmer, the world's best player. Palmer had arrived in Scotland for his first Open appearance on the back of wins in The Masters and US Open and came close to taking a third step towards a Grand Slam, losing out by a single shot to Nagle. "Unfortunately for Arnold I got in his way," reflected the Aussie.