Fifty Years of Golf

by Horace G. Hutchinson

The first architect of the inland courses, when golfers began to learn that inland courses might, in some large measure, give them the game that they wanted, was Tom Dunn. He went about the country laying the courses out, and as he was a very courteous Nature's gentleman, and always liked to say the pleasant thing, he gave praise to each course, as he contrived it, so liberally that some wag invented the conundrum. "Mention any inland course of which Tom Dunn has not said that it is the best of its kind ever seen."

His idea—and really he had but one—was to throw up a barrier, with a ditch, called for euphony's sake a "bunker," on the near side of it, right across the course, to be carried from the tee, another of the same kind to be carried with the second shot, and similarly a third, if it was a three shot hole, for the third shot. It was a simple plan, nor is Tom Dunn to be censured because he could not evolve something more like a colourable imitation of the natural hazard. A man is not to be criticized because he is not in advance of his time.

Moreover, these barriers had at least the merit that they were uncompromising. You had to be over them, or else you found perdition, and if you only hacked the ball out a little way beyond the first barrier with your first shot you could not carry the second barrier with your third. You were like a hurdle racer who has got out of his stride.

The course, constructed on these lines, on which I used to play most, from London, was Prince's at Mitcham—the most convenient of access of all, before the days of motors. I used to have great matches here with Jack White, before Sunningdale was made and he went there in charge.

Subsequently the mantle of Tom Dunn, as course constructor in chief, fell on the shoulders of Willy Park, and his ideas were more varied. He was also a good deal more thorough, more elaborate and more expensive in his dealings with the inland courses. He was the first to advocate the wholesale ploughing up of the soil of the course, and the re-sowing. He architected Broadstone, Sunningdale and a host more, and when he had finished with the Sunningdale green he had certainly produced the best thing in the way of an inland course that up to that time had been created. He did his work well, but it was not entirely or even mainly due to him that Sunningdale was so good. The soil was more light and sandy, more like the real seaside links, than that of any other inland course.

They had done wonderful things at New Zealand, where Mr. Lock-King, with Mure Ferguson aiding and abetting, had fastened mighty engines to pine trees and dragged them up by the roots, fashioning a golf course out of a pine forest.

That was pioneer's work in a double sense, for it not only engineered this particular course where the trees had covered all the land, but it also showed to other people how possible it was to make a course out of forest in other places. It is not only possible, but it is also a good deal less laborious, to grub up the forest trees than it is to get rid of a very dense growth of smaller undergrowth, such as there was to deal with at Le Touquet, in France, for instance. Then the soil in all this pine forest country, such as we see about Woking and Byfleet, is very light and sandy, as the inland soils go, so that it was fine natural material for golf when once the trees had gone. The latest construction of the kind is at St. George's Hill, near Weybridge, where the trees had been much better cared for for generations and in consequence were far larger and more difficult of up-rooting than at New Zealand. There they had to blast the boles of the trees with dynamite before they could get them out of the ground. But of course the bigger timber was of greater value and helped to pay the labour bill.

These forest courses have done another thing for us, they have taught us the value of a tree as a golfing hazard. Our forefathers would have scoffed at the idea of a tree on a golf links, although there was for many a long year opportunity for the golfer to find trouble in the trees which came out threatening the course at a certain point at North Berwick. But then they did not have their actual roots in the soil of the links itself. They were outside it, over the boundary wall. But as for the opportunities which the tree hazard gives for those subtleties of slicing and pulling round, or of cutting the ball up with a very vertical rise, let those who have seen Harry Vardon on a course of this tree-beset kind bear witness. And the tree has at least this virtue: that it is permanent. It does not get trodden down and hacked out of existence by a niblick as the faint-hearted whin does.

At Woking the natural trouble on the ground was heather rather than trees, and a fine course they have made of it. But of all, that at Sunningdale has always seemed to me just about the best of the inland ones—certainly the best of the earlier made ones. Then I was at Walton Heath, as a guest of Mr. Cosmo Bonsor's kindly hospitality, when that great inland green was opened. Harry Colt had by that time gone to Sunningdale, and was making improvements on the original plan of Willy Park, but Walton Heath was a monument to the skill of that other of our amateur course constructors, Herbert Fowler. He made a very good thing of it, as the wonderful success of that Club has testified since. But it soon passed out of the hands of Mr. Bonsor, and for how much the energy of Sir George Riddell, who acquired the chief interest in it, counted in its popularity it would be very hard to say. Assuredly it counted for a great deal. Then they had James Braid, importing him from Romford, and his attractive personality and great fame helped the Club. Another like him, our old friend Taylor, was by this time established at Mid-Surrey, and the Club there was a power, by reason of the goodness of its green, its numbers and the strong players belonging to it.

It would be a very dull and futile business to go into all the development of the inland golf which went on during these years. Enough has been said. But you could not draw anything like a full picture of the golf of the last fifty years without noticing this development. The inland Clubs, and especially those about London, have become a force. As their members go forth to play from the big City which is the common centre they are the better able to make their opinion felt; and their word has become of importance in modern golf. It is possible that it is destined to have a larger importance yet. But I have no business with prophecy.