The sports editor of one of Britain’s biggest newspapers charged today that more than half of the country’s private golf clubs discriminated against Jews, and asserted that some of his colleagues would make that estimate even higher.
J. L. Manning, sports editor of the London Daily Mail, made his charges in an article commenting on reports that a group of London Jews planned legal action to have a non-discrimination clause inserted in the ground lease of the Moor Park Golf Club, in Hertfordshire. The club is accused of discriminating against Jewish players by denying them membership. It has denied the charge and its president asserted that the club has some Jewish members. The club leases public lands for its course.
“My belief is that more than half of Britain’s 1, 926 private golf clubs discriminate against Jews,” the London Daily Mail sports editor asserted. “Some of my colleagues with a greater knowledge put it as high as two-thirds.” He added that no one knew the exact number “because there is no official index of Jew-baiting clubs. It is done by stealthy attitudes and whispered conventions. Some clubs won’t have any Jews. Others — even more repugnantly — fix a quota.”
The Race Relations Board, he said, takes the position that, where a public course is involved, it would be reported to the local conciliation committee. “The very use of the phrase, ‘conciliation,'” he added, “makes the true sportsman wince.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
