AbstractIt is shown that a problem which arose in the scheduling of two simultaneous competitions between a number of golf clubs may be reduced to that of 4- colouring the edges of a certain bipartite graph which has 4 edges meeting at each vertex. This colouring problem is solved by an analysis in terms of directed cycles, which is simple to carry through in a practical case and is easily extended to the problem with 4 replaced by 2^m. The more general colouring problem with 4 replaced by any positive integer is solved by relating it to the marriage problem enunciated by Philip Hall and to the latin multiplication technique of Kaufmann but, in practical applications, this approach involves severe computational difficulties.