Kerosene, Arsenic and Goldfish: How Golf Fought the Mosquito, 1920s–1940s

The Short Answer

Badly at first, then brutally. In the 1920s the standard cure was to pour kerosene on the water hazards. The better-run clubs moved on to goldfish, top minnows and a dusting of arsenic-based Paris green, put up apartment blocks for purple martins and drained the swamps they had been calling hazards. Golfers rubbed citronella oil, thickened with mineral oil or lanolin, into their own faces. And within three years of the end of the Second World War, the trade press was advising clubs to dust the whole course with DDT from an airplane. All of it in the service of a game played in a collar and tie.

A Gentleman's Game in a Swamp

Golf liked to think of itself as a game of manners: honour on the tee, silence over the putt, a jacket in the clubhouse. The mosquito had not read the etiquette. In June 1927 the trade magazine Golfdom warned that at the height of the season a course could lie almost deserted for many days, and that a mosquito summer could decide whether a club made an operating profit or a loss. This was not a nuisance column. It was a balance-sheet item.

The USGA's Green Section said much the same in 1930. Greenkeepers fretted about June beetles and ants, it noted, but to the player trying to hole a putt a swarm of mosquitoes was far more distracting, and green committees owed their members protection from these small tormentors as much as they owed them good turf.

The mosquito was also golf's most convenient excuse. In 1916 the professional at Seaview in New Jersey, a course beside the salt marsh, left in the middle of a three-year contract after falling out with the owner, and, too polite to say so, blamed the mosquitoes, according to Trenham Golf History.

The Kerosene Years

The first weapon was the oil can. Kerosene spread on still water forms a film that suffocates the larvae, the wigglers, when they come up to breathe. The US Department of Agriculture's 1932 bulletin Mosquito Remedies and Preventives gave the dose: about an ounce of kerosene for every 15 square feet of still water.

Golfdom called this "the old standard treatment" in 1927, and then listed what was wrong with it. The smell was unpleasant. The oily film collected dust and soiled the grass at the pond's edge. And, most important of all in the magazine's view, a golf ball hit into the pond could not easily be recovered. The members could live with the stink. They could not live with losing the ball.

The USGA was blunter about the ponds themselves. Its 1930 bulletin mocked the puddles of stagnant water that some clubs dignified with the name of water hazards, and called oil spraying a temporary and expensive measure next to proper drainage and filling.

Goldfish on Duty, Arsenic in the Pond

The respectable alternative, according to Golfdom, was biology with a dash of poison. Deepen the pond edges, strip out the weeds so the larvae had nowhere to hide, and stock the hazard with goldfish, silver fish or top minnows to eat them. Kerosene and fish could not be combined: the oil film killed the fish exactly as it killed the wigglers.

For the water the fish could not reach, the magazine suggested a mix of 1 per cent Paris green, an arsenic compound, and 99 per cent road dust or sand, a few handfuls sprinkled on at frequent intervals. It also sent greenkeepers hunting through the sunken hose boxes beside the greens, the fire buckets, the septic tanks and the roof drains, and told them to turn the bottles and cans on the club dump upside down. Even the hoof prints of cattle in the neighbouring pasture held enough water to breed mosquitoes, so the club was to ask the farmer to dig drainage ditches.

Against the adult mosquito, the answer was birds. Clubs were advised to put up martin houses, each built for 20 to 100 pairs, on tall poles near the clubhouse. Picture it: the members' bar, the bay window, and outside on a pole a block of flats full of swallows, kept on as pest control.

The Clubs Were Breeding Their Own

The most uncomfortable finding of the era was that the enemy was often home-grown. In 1926 J. A. Le Prince of the Gorgas Memorial Institute, named after William Gorgas, who had cleared mosquitoes from the Panama Canal Zone, wrote in the USGA Green Section Bulletin that one southern city's golf club was raising a fine mosquito crop on its own grounds. He called the mosquitoes that bred in clubs' waste water and septic tanks man-created.

Le Prince passed on a Massachusetts group's three stages of emotional development in mosquito control: first you just swear; then you swear that somebody ought to do something; finally you swear that you are going to do something yourself. He also warned that salt-marsh mosquitoes from the eastern end of Long Island rode the breeze into western counties that had already cleaned up, and urged the eastern golf clubs to band together.

By 1930 the USGA was openly promoting the Gorgas plan, which named every golf course as a target, and printing photographs of a breeding pond before and after a horse team filled it in. In the same article, Boy Scout squads armed with sponges found that 42 per cent of 3,000 homes in a wealthy suburb were breeding their own mosquitoes. Money, it turned out, was no protection.

The Jelly: Citronella Grease and the Jam Boy Legend

What did a golfer of 1932 put on his skin? The USDA's Farmers' Bulletin 1570 rated oil of citronella among the best repellents, good for several hours. Its favourite formula mixed citronella with spirits of camphor and oil of cedar. Its other recipe was one ounce of citronella oil to four ounces of liquid petrolatum (mineral oil) or lanolin, the greasy fat from sheep's wool, rubbed onto the face and hands; the grease slowed the oil's evaporation. Camphor, pine oil and oil of pennyroyal worked only for a time. Veils and gloves were recommended after nightfall in bad districts.

So the picture of a well-dressed gentleman on the first tee, collar starched, face shining with lemon-scented wool grease, is not a joke. It was government advice. DEET, the repellent most golfers reach for now, did not exist for him: the EPA says the US Army developed it in 1946 and it was registered for public use only in 1957.

There is a story that goes further, and it has a name: the jam boy. In the version passed around online and in golf joke glossaries, wealthy golfers in British India or South Africa hired a second boy alongside the caddie and smeared him with jam, so the insects would go for him instead of the player. It is the perfect gentleman's-game joke, and it is a legend. We looked for it in the greenkeeping magazines, the USGA bulletins and the government advice of the period and found nothing, and the people who have gone looking in colonial records report no diary, photograph or account behind it either. What the record does show is uglier in its own way: the gentleman did not need a boy covered in jam, because he was told to grease his own face.

Blame the Location, Not the Greenkeeper

By 1941 the tone had turned wry. Ray Hutson of Michigan State College, in a paper printed in Golfdom, put the insects that attack players in a class of their own: black flies, greenheads, deer flies and mosquitoes. He recommended cutting back trees, shrubbery and heavy rough so the wind could sweep through, where the pests rested between meals, and dusting or spraying the worst spots with pyrethrum or nicotine. Then he admitted the limit of science: often the only recourse was great diligence in persuading members that the nuisance came from where the course was, not from how it was kept.

The same paper dealt with wasps by recommending calcium cyanide, applied at night "to eliminate the chance of retaliation by the victim". Golf's genteel surface, in other words, rested on a groundsman creeping out after dark with cyanide.

From Smoke Screens to DDT by Airplane

The war changed the scale. In January 1946 the USGA Green Section reported that DDT had controlled flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and bedbugs at the clubhouse, and in the same breath warned that it was poisonous to fish, that it should be classed with arsenicals for toxicity to the user, and that breathing much of it was dangerous. That August, Golfdom's news column noted that the shipbuilder Todd had turned its wartime smoke-screen generator into an insecticide fogger and used it with success against mosquitoes in New Jersey.

By April 1948 an Iowa State entomologist, Dr H. H. Knight, was telling a turf short course that for the golf course the answer was an airplane spreading 5 per cent DDT dust, at one-fifth of a pound of actual DDT per acre, when mosquito numbers peaked. Twenty years earlier the argument had been about whether kerosene spoiled the chance of getting your ball back. Now the fairway got the crop-duster.

What It Says About the Gentleman's Game

The polite version of golf history is tweed, honour and the nineteenth hole. The version in the greenkeepers' own magazines is kerosene slicks, arsenic in road dust, goldfish conscripted into the hazards, cyanide by night and DDT from the sky, with a gentleman in the middle of it, citronella grease on his face, swearing in three stages.

Most of the remedies were ugly, several were dangerous, and the best of them, drainage and fish, were the least dramatic. The clubs that drained their ponds and stopped breeding their own mosquitoes did better than the clubs that simply poured something on top. The repellent in your bag today is a great deal kinder than anything on offer in 1932, and nobody will ask you to stock the water hazard with goldfish.

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