Doubly transitive permutation groups with abelian stabilizers

Summary We prove that any doubly transitive permutation group with abelian stabilizers is the group of linear functions over a suitable field. The result is not new: for finite groups it is well known, for infinite groups it follows from a more general theorem of W. Kerby and H. Wefelscheid on sharply doubly transitive groups in which the stabilizers have finite commutator subgroups. We give a direct and elementary proof.