When Britain brought home the Ryder Cup to Moortown in Leeds

But nowhere was the excitement of breaking new ground more keenly felt than in the north Leeds suburb of Moortown.

It was there on the last weekend of April that the Ryder Cup, the biennial transatlantic men’s golf tournament, was first staged on British soil – and these pictures from the archive are a unique record of the occasion.

It was only the second outing for the competition, the first having been in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the air of expectation was extraordinary.

The second day’s play brought out the largest crowd to have ever attended a golf tournament in Britain, some 15,000 strong.

It was a golf writer named Kolin Roberston who had brought the Ryder Cup to Yorkshire. A member of the Moortown club with a single-figure handicap, he worked for the old Yorkshire Evening News but his name was known worldwide and his negotiating powers apparently unparalleled.

Months was spent bringing the course up to championship condition, and despite the forecast of unseasonal heavy snow, the two captains – Britain’s George Duncan and the American Walter Hagen – arrived on time with their respective teams.

The match itself went down to the wire, with the climactic round between the two captains swinging the result in Britain’s favour.

The Ryder Cup has returned to Yorkshire only once since then, when the first post-war European tournament was mounted at Ganton Golf Club, in the Vale of Pickering. By then, the Americans had begun their long era of dominance.

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James Mitchinson