[Gutenberg 44623] • The Golf Courses of the British Isles

LONDON COURSES (1).

Some dozen or fifteen years ago the historian of the London golf courses would have had a comparatively easy task. He would have said that there were a few courses upon public commons, instancing, as he still would to-day, Blackheath and Wimbledon. He might have dismissed in a line or two a course that a few mad barristers were trying to carve by main force out of a swamp thickly covered with gorse and heather near Woking. All the other courses would have been lumped together under some such description as that they consisted of fields interspersed by trees and artificial ramparts, the latter mostly built by Tom Dunn; that they were villainously muddy in winter, of an impossible and adamantine hardness in summer, and just endurable in spring and autumn; finally, that the muddiest and hardest and most distinguished of them all was Tooting Bec.

All this is changed now, and the change is best exemplified by the fact that although the club has removed to new quarters, poor Tooting itself is now as Tadmor in the wilderness. I passed by the spot the other day, and should never have recognized it had not an old member pointed it out to me in a voice husky with emotion. The ground is now covered with a tangle of red houses, which cannot be termed attractive, and such glory as belonged to it has altogether departed. Peace to its ashes! it could never, by the wildest stretch of imagination, have been called anything but a bad course, and yet it held its head high in its heyday. Prospective members by the score jostled each other eagerly on the waiting list, and parliamentary golfers distinguished the course above its fellows by cutting their divots from its soft and yielding mud. I still recollect the thrill I experienced on first being taken to play there; it was a distinct moment in my golfing life. It was exceedingly muddy, but it was not so muddy as the course at Cambridge on which I usually disported myself, and on the whole I thought it worthy of its fame; people were not so difficult to please in the matter of inland golf in those days.

Tooting is no more, but there are many courses like it still to be found, most of them in a flourishing condition, near London. Meanwhile, however, a new star, the star of sand and heather, has arisen out of the darkness, and a whole generation of new courses, which really are golf and not a good or even bad imitation of it, have sprung into being. Here are some of them, and they make an imposing list—Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Woking, Worplesdon, Byfleet, Bleakdown, Westhill, Bramshot and Combe Wood. The idea of hacking and digging and building a course out of land on which two blades of grass do not originally grow together is a comparatively modern one. The elder ‘architects’ took a piece of country that was more or less ready to their hand, rolled it and mowed it, cut some trenches and built some ramparts, and there was the course.

CONTENTS

London Courses (1)

London Courses (2)

Kent and Sussex

The West and South-West

East Anglia

The Courses of Cheshire and Lancashire

Yorkshire and the Midlands

Oxford and Cambridge

A London Course

St. Andrews, Fife, and Forfarshire

The Courses of the East Lothian and Edinburgh

West of Scotland: Prestwick and Troon

Ireland

Wales

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

St. Andrews

Sunningdale

Walton Heath

Woking

Mid-Surrey

Stoke Poges

Cassiobury Park

Sandy Lodge

Northwood

Romford

Blackheath

Wimbledon Common

Mitcham Common

Sandwich

Sandwich (“Hades”)

Deal

Prince’s

Littlestone

Rye

Eastbourne

Ashdown Forest

Westward Ho!

Bude

Burnham