The Claret Jug: History, Traditions And Every Detail

The engraver sits with the trophy in front of him while the last group is still on the seventeenth. He has the letters roughed out in his head, the tools laid on a cloth, and perhaps twenty minutes of certainty to work with. By the time the champion walks off the eighteenth green, the name is in the silver. It is the only major where the trophy is finished in front of the people who will watch it handed over, and it is a good place to start, because almost everything odd and specific about the Claret Jug follows from the same instinct: do the thing properly, do it by hand, and do not fuss about explaining it.

Formally, the object is the Golf Champion Trophy. Almost nobody calls it that.

The Challenge Belt and the boy who ended it

The Open began in 1860 as a competition run by Prestwick Golf Club, and the prize was not a cup at all. It was a belt: red morocco leather, mounted with silver plaques and a silver buckle, made in the style of a prizefighter's championship belt. That comparison is not accidental. Professional sport in mid-Victorian Britain took its ceremonial cues from boxing and from pedestrianism, and a belt was simply what a champion wore.

Prestwick paid for it and set the condition that gave it away. Win the championship three years running and the belt became yours outright.

For eight years that rule looked safe. Then Young Tom Morris — Tommy, son of Old Tom, the finest player of his generation and dead before he was twenty-five — won in 1868, in 1869 and again in 1870. Under the rule as written the belt passed permanently into his possession, and it did. It remains with his family's descendants and has been displayed at St Andrews.

Which left Prestwick with a championship and no prize. There was no Open in 1871. That gap in the record is not a war or an epidemic; it is an administrative problem, and the only year between 1860 and the First World War when the championship simply did not happen.

What the belt actually was

It is worth being precise about the object, because "belt" gives a modern reader the wrong picture. This was not a strap. It was a broad band of red leather, tooled and mounted with silver panels bearing golfing scenes, closed by a large decorated buckle — an item of ceremonial dress that a champion could conceivably have worn, and which was displayed rather than used. Prestwick commissioned it locally and it was, by the standards of a small Ayrshire club in 1860, a serious expense.

The competition it was made for was equally small. The first Open was played over three rounds of Prestwick's twelve-hole course in a single day, with a field in single figures, all of them professionals and most of them employed as clubmakers or greenkeepers. Amateurs were admitted from the second year, which is where the "Open" in the name comes from. The championship's early scale is easy to underestimate: this was a private club's invitation event that happened to endure, and the mechanics of how it grew into a global championship are traced on the page about the Open's origins.

Commissioning a new trophy, and who paid for it

The solution took the form of an agreement between three clubs. Prestwick, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers each put in a share towards a replacement, the whole recorded at the time as costing thirty pounds. The arrangement carried a condition that shaped the next century and a half of the championship: because three clubs had paid, the championship would rotate between their three courses. That is the origin of the venue rotation, and the reasoning behind how it has since expanded is set out on the page explaining the Open Championship rota.

The commission went to Mackay Cunningham and Company, silversmiths in Edinburgh. What they produced was not a cup and was never intended to look like one. It is a lidded ewer on a spreading foot, with a shaped handle and a pouring lip, the whole thing standing at a height that a person can hold comfortably in one hand — an important practical detail, given what champions subsequently do with it.

The decision to make the prize a permanent, returnable trophy rather than another giveable object was deliberate. There would be no repeat of 1871. Whatever a player did, the trophy stayed with the championship.

The first name and the first pair of hands

Here the record splits, and the split is the source of most of the confusion around the jug's early history.

The new trophy was not ready in time for the 1872 championship at Prestwick. Young Tom Morris won that too — a fourth consecutive title, a run nobody has matched — and was presented with a medal instead. When the silver was finished, his name was engraved at the top as the champion of 1872. So the first name on the Claret Jug belongs to a man who never received it.

The first champion actually handed the trophy was Tom Kidd, who won at St Andrews in 1873. Kidd is a considerably less famous figure than Young Tom, which is presumably why the question keeps being asked.

Year	Champion	What he received
1860–1870	Various, ending with Young Tom Morris	The Challenge Belt
1871	No championship played	—
1872	Young Tom Morris	A medal; his name engraved on the new trophy
1873	Tom Kidd	The Golf Champion Trophy itself

Why the informal name won

A claret jug, in Victorian usage, is a decanting vessel: a glass or silver ewer used to bring claret to the table and pour it. Middle-class British households had them. The trophy's shape is a direct copy of that domestic object, scaled up and executed in silver, and golfers described it in the only terms available to them.

The choice of form was not arbitrary. A cup in 1872 would have signalled a sporting prize in the general mould of every other cup being commissioned across Britain in that decade. A claret jug signalled a dinner table, hospitality and the drinking of a toast, which is a fair description of what a golf club actually did with a trophy when one arrived. Whether Mackay Cunningham and Company or the three commissioning clubs made the decision is not recorded in any form that settles it.

The nickname spread quickly and then simply took over. It is now used by the R&A, by broadcasters, on merchandise and in the championship's own materials, while "Golf Champion Trophy" survives mainly in formal citations and in pub-quiz answers. The champion's official title took the opposite path: the winner is announced as the Champion Golfer of the Year, a phrase that has never been shortened or replaced, and that is read out at the presentation in exactly the same form every July.

The engraving, and the man doing it

Most sporting trophies are engraved afterwards, in a workshop, weeks later. The Claret Jug is engraved during the championship, on site, by hand.

The engraver works from a portable setup near the eighteenth. He watches the golf like everyone else, and at some point in the final hour makes a judgement that the result is settled — a two-shot lead standing on the last tee, say — and begins cutting. The work is done freehand with a graver, letter by letter, into a trophy that has been receiving names since 1872 and has limited room left on its original surfaces. Additional bands have been added over the years to accommodate the list.

For many years the work has stayed within one Scottish engraving family, passing from father to son, which suits the general character of the thing. The margin for error is unforgiving in a way that has no equivalent elsewhere in sport: there is no undo, the object is irreplaceable, and roughly a hundred million people will look at photographs of the result within the hour.

Occasionally the timing goes wrong. A collapse on the last, a birdie from nowhere, a playoff nobody expected. The convention is to hold off on the surname until the outcome is beyond argument, which is why the engraver's decision about when to start is the most quietly stressful call anyone makes on Open Sunday.

Why it is done this way at all

There is no rule requiring it. The R&A could perfectly well engrave the trophy on Monday morning in a workshop, and every other major does the equivalent. The reason it persists is that the presentation happens within minutes of the last putt, on the green, in front of the crowd, and a trophy handed over blank would be a diminished object. The Open's ceremony is deliberately fast and deliberately unfussy — no interval, no stage built elsewhere, no gap in which the moment can cool. Engraving in real time is what makes that possible.

It also produces one of the championship's better images: the finished lettering, still bright against the older, duller names above it, photographed within the hour. The contrast fades within a year or two as the new engraving oxidises to match, which is a small physical record of how recently a champion was crowned.

The format of the final round itself, including how playoffs are resolved when the engraver's judgement fails, is set out on the page covering the Open Championship format.

Original, replica, and what actually goes home

Until 1928 the champion took the genuine 1873 trophy away for the year. That practice ended after Walter Hagen's win that season, and the R&A has retained the original ever since. The reasoning was straightforward: a piece of Victorian silver carrying every champion's name since Young Tom Morris was becoming too valuable and too fragile to spend twelve months in the boot of a car.

What happens now runs in three stages.

Object	Who holds it	For how long
The original trophy	The R&A	Permanently; travels to the championship for the presentation
The full-size replica	The reigning champion	One year, returned before the next championship
A smaller-scale replica	The champion	Kept permanently

The champion is handed the replica at the presentation ceremony and keeps it until the following July, when it is returned in advance of the next championship — traditionally at a small ceremony early in championship week. The permanent keepsake is a reduced-size copy, which is what sits on a mantelpiece or in a clubhouse cabinet for the rest of a player's life.

The replica is a genuine replica, not a token: made in silver, engraved with the same list of names, and to the eye indistinguishable from the original in any photograph you have ever seen of a champion holding it aloft. This catches people out. Almost every famous image of an Open champion with the trophy — on the eighteenth green, on a beach, in a clubhouse — is an image of the replica. The original appears in the presentation itself and in official portraits, and then goes back into its case.

Nor is the arrangement unusual by 1928 standards. Several major British sporting trophies of comparable age went the same way in the same period, as the objects became too valuable to circulate and the events became too large for a lost trophy to be a private embarrassment. What is unusual is how little the substitution has cost the Open in atmosphere. The ceremony works because everyone in the crowd knows the replica carries the same names, and because the champion is genuinely being handed a piece of silver rather than a certificate.

Where the original lives between championships

St Andrews. The trophy is kept in the R&A's care in the town and is displayed publicly at the golf museum there rather than shut in a safe — the point of the thing is that people can look at it and read the names.

It leaves for the championship each summer, appears at the presentation, is photographed with the new champion, and goes back. It also makes occasional appearances at exhibitions and R&A events. That an object of this significance spends most of its life behind glass in a small Fife town is exactly right for a championship whose administrative centre has never moved.

The relationship between the trophy and the town is not incidental. St Andrews hosts the championship more often than anywhere else and is where the milestone editions are staged, and the R&A's administrative headquarters sits a few hundred yards from the first tee of the Old Course. How that Scottish institutional centre came to govern a game played across England as well is a longer story, sketched out in the English golf history timeline.

Reading the names

The most rewarding thing about seeing the original in person is not the silver. It is the list. The names run in chronological bands, and the shifts in the game are legible in the sequence without anyone having to explain them: a run of Scottish clubmakers, then the Triumvirate years, then the American arrivals of the 1920s, the wartime gaps, the Commonwealth players of the 1950s and 1960s, and so on. Lettering styles change with the engraver of the day. Spacing tightens as room runs short.

Names are recorded with the year and, in the older sections, in a compressed form that assumes the reader already knows who is meant. There is no room for embellishment and never has been.

Two absences are worth noticing. The championship was not played during either world war, and those years appear as gaps rather than as anything explanatory — the trophy does not editorialise. And 1871 is missing entirely, for the reason set out earlier. A visitor who works out why that single Victorian year is blank has understood the whole story of how the jug came to exist.

What champions have done with it

The Claret Jug's second career, the one that happens after the presentation, has produced a body of folklore that most sports trophies would envy.

The lid comes off, which is the root of most of it. Champagne is the obvious use and has been for a century. Guinness has been poured into it. At least one champion has eaten breakfast cereal from it, which sounds like a joke until you consider that a man who has just won the Open is not going to leave the thing in a cupboard. Others have taken it to their home clubs and let every member in the bar drink from it in turn, which is arguably the tradition's purest form: a professional trophy passed around a room of amateurs on a Tuesday evening.

Shane Lowry, after winning at Royal Portrush in 2019, has spoken openly about the trophy picking up a dent during the celebrations that followed in Ireland. He was not the first and the R&A's response was, by all accounts, resigned rather than furious. The replica is designed to be lived with.

There is a limit, though, and it is a practical one. The champion is responsible for the replica for the year and expected to return it in a condition that allows the ceremony to happen. Insurance arrangements exist. Nobody publicises them.

The wider convention is that the jug goes where the champion goes for twelve months, and champions have generally taken that literally. It has been carried onto aircraft as hand luggage rather than checked into a hold, taken to weddings and christenings, photographed in kitchens and on beaches, and produced in bars in a dozen countries. Compared with the security cordon that surrounds trophies in most professional sport, the arrangement is remarkably relaxed, and the R&A has shown little appetite for tightening it.

The handback

The return happens quietly at the start of the following championship week, usually on the Monday or Tuesday, with the outgoing champion handing the replica back before play begins. It is a short ceremony and a slightly melancholy one — the only occasion in golf where a player publicly gives up a title before anyone has taken it from him on the course. Champions have described the moment in almost identical terms across decades, which suggests the feeling is genuine rather than performed.

From that point the replica is the R&A's again until Sunday evening, when it is presented to whoever has just finished on the fewest strokes.

British champions and the jug's visits to England

England's relationship with the trophy is longer and more complicated than the recent record suggests.

Harry Vardon won six Opens, more than anyone, though he was a Jerseyman rather than an Englishman — a distinction that matters if you are counting properly. J.H. Taylor, born in Northam in Devon, won five and was one of the players who made professional golf a respectable occupation in England. Both belonged to the group known as the Great Triumvirate alongside the Scot James Braid, and between them they dominated the championship on either side of 1900.

Henry Cotton won three: at Royal St George's in 1934, at Carnoustie in 1937 and at Muirfield in 1948. His 1934 win ended a long run of American victories and is generally credited with changing the standing of the British professional in his own country. Max Faulkner won at Royal Portrush in 1951, the only Open played on the island of Ireland for the next sixty-eight years.

Then a long wait. Tony Jacklin's win at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 1969 was the first by a British player since Faulkner, and the reception it received says a good deal about how much the drought had been felt. Lytham's role in that afternoon is part of the course's identity, and the layout that produced it is described in the Royal Lytham course guide. Nick Faldo then won three — Muirfield in 1987, St Andrews in 1990, Muirfield again in 1992 — with a game built around control rather than flair, which was a very English way to go about it.

A fuller account of English success across all four majors, including the near misses that shaped careers, sits on the page about English major winners in golf.

English or British champion	Wins	Venues
J.H. Taylor	5	Sandwich, St Andrews, Hoylake and others
James Braid	5	St Andrews, Muirfield, Prestwick and others
Henry Cotton	3	Royal St George's 1934, Carnoustie 1937, Muirfield 1948
Nick Faldo	3	Muirfield 1987, St Andrews 1990, Muirfield 1992
Max Faulkner	1	Royal Portrush 1951
Tony Jacklin	1	Royal Lytham and St Annes 1969

Braid was Scottish and is included because the Triumvirate cannot sensibly be split up; the point of the table is the pattern of venues rather than a nationality count. What it shows is that British champions have won across the whole rota rather than at home courses, which is one of the more persuasive arguments against the idea that local knowledge decides an Open.

The homecomings

A British champion's year with the jug tends to follow a pattern. The home club first, then the county, then the schools and junior sections, then a run of dinners and testimonials. Clubs that have produced a champion mark it permanently — a board in the hall, a photograph in the bar, occasionally a hole renamed. For a small club, a week with the trophy on the premises is the single largest event in its history, and members plan it for months.

Damage, repair and moving a piece of Victorian silver

Silver dents. It also tarnishes, and the joints between a handle, a body and a foot are the places where repeated handling eventually tells.

The original trophy has been repaired and maintained over its lifetime, as any working object of that age would be. Conservation of a piece like this is a specialist business: cleaning without abrading the engraving, stabilising joints, and resisting the temptation to make an object from 1873 look new. The list of names is the trophy's real value, and an over-enthusiastic polish is a genuine risk to it.

Moving it is a logistical exercise rather than a dramatic one. The trophy travels in a fitted case, accompanied, and its appearances are scheduled. The R&A does not discuss the arrangements in detail, which is sensible. What can be said is that the original's public appearances are controlled and that the object the champion carries through an airport is the replica.

The Silver Medal, the Gold Medal and the rest of the prize table

The jug is not the only thing handed out on Sunday evening, and the other awards are older and more interesting than casual viewers realise.

Award	Who receives it
The Golf Champion Trophy (replica)	The Champion Golfer of the Year
Gold Medal	The champion, in addition to the trophy
Silver Salver	The runner-up
Silver Medal	The leading amateur completing 72 holes
Bronze Medal	Other amateurs completing 72 holes

The Silver Medal is the one worth dwelling on. It goes to the leading amateur who completes all four rounds, which means an amateur has to survive the cut to be eligible — no small thing in a field of that quality. The award has a long history of identifying players who went on to substantial professional careers, and the presentation puts an amateur on the same stage as the champion, in front of the same crowd. How amateurs qualify for the field in the first place, and what the medal has meant to the players who have won it, is covered on the page about amateurs at the Open and the Silver Medal. The eligibility rules themselves sit under the Rules of Amateur Status, which the R&A maintains jointly with the USGA and which have been revised more than once in recent decades.

The Gold Medal to the champion is a survival from the era when medals, not cups, were how golf marked achievement — the same instinct that gave Young Tom Morris a medal in 1872 when there was no trophy to give him. It is presented quietly, usually overshadowed by the jug standing next to it, which is a fair summary of how the Open's ceremonial hierarchy has always worked.

The Silver Salver for the runner-up is a peculiarly British piece of consolation: a substantial object, engraved, handed over on the same green, and rarely mentioned again. Players who have collected several of them over a career tend to have a dry line ready about it.

The one prize that is not an object

Alongside all of this sits the exemption. A champion receives a long-running exemption into future Opens, and that has arguably shaped more careers than any medal. It means a player who wins once, however unexpectedly, has a guaranteed place in the field for years afterwards, with everything that follows from it in terms of scheduling, sponsorship and standing. The categories that govern who gets into the championship, including what the champion's exemption covers and how long it runs, are set out in the R&A's published conditions of entry and explained on the page about Open Championship exemption categories.

That is the real difference between the Open's prize table and a display cabinet. The jug goes back after a year. The exemption does not.

For readers coming to the championship for the first time, the England golf hub collects the rest of this section, and the wider golf coverage runs beyond the Open into the domestic game.