Golf Club Atlas
GolfClubAtlas.com => Golf Course Architecture => Topic started by: John Challenger on October 23, 2022, 11:16:41 AM
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Old Elm, Harry Colt and the Start of the Golden Age in America
There is a straight line from Old Elm to Pine Valley and to the true onset of the Golden Age that goes directly through Harry Colt and his 1913 visit to North America.
In the same way the Depression and WW2 erased the memory of the Golden Age and its principles of golf course design for decades until Pete Dye came along, World War 1 obscured and later erased the memory of how the Golden Age originated in the United States and Canada.
Colt’s Second Journey. In April and May 1913, Harry Colt travelled to North America on the second of three visits. At the beginning of the journey, he worked for nine days on the creation of Old Elm and created a complex routing and drawings for each hole. At the end of his journey, Colt labored at Pine Valley for seven days. Perhaps it's hyperbole, but Colt’s 1913 visit might be the most critical step in the history of golf architecture in the United States. When will the historical impact of what Colt created on his journey to the U.S. and Canada in 1913 get its due?
Old Elm History Once Lost. The history of Old Elm’s creation was forgotten after WW1 and then miscast after the Depression and WW2. The club thought it was a Donald Ross design until the beginning of the 21st century.
Roles of Harry Colt and Donald Ross at Old Elm. In the beginning, Old Elm distinguished clearly between what it expected of Harry Colt and what it expected of Donald Ross, who was paid at $50 per day. Old Elm paid Colt 25 guineas a day or at $5.11 per guinea, i.e. they paid him more than double - just over $127 per day.
Harry Colt – First Golf Architect. Colt was a British lawyer who was responsible for carving out golf course design from the responsibilities of the golf professional and creating a new profession: golf architect. Like C.B. MacDonald, he was an amateur turned golf course architect who changed the paradigm. During the three weeks Colt spent in Chicago, first at Old Elm and then on visits to Chicago Golf, Indian Hill, Glen View, and Exmoor, he must have talked to Ross about his decision to leave his role at Sunningdale and go into full-time course design.
Donald Ross, the Reincarnation of Old Tom Morris. When Donald Ross was hired at Old Elm, he was still employed at Essex C.C., He epitomized the golf professional in the Old Tom Morris mode: a golfer, teacher, clubmaker, organizer of tournaments, and greenskeeper. For some years, he had been laying out courses, but he was more of a golf course constructor than a designer. Old Elm hired him for his expertise in construction when he was still a traditional blue collar golf professional, though he had already created a number of golf courses and was on the fast track to becoming the nation’s top full-time architect/designer.
From 1907-1912, Donald Ross was evolving from Boston’s into America’s Old Tom Morris. He had begun his career as an apprentice in Old Tom’s shop in St. Andrews. He was liked and admired by everyone. In Boston and Pinehurst, he had worked at and succeeded in every golf task and role. He received constant recognition in the media of the day as the consummate American golf professional.
Transition From the Victorian Age to the Golden Age – 1907 to 1912. Until 1910, Ross' approach to the laying out of golf courses, like that of other golf professionals, was traditional. In 1910, Ross followed Walter Travis’ and C.B. MacDonald’s lead and visited Scotland and England to better understand golf course architecture there. He returned and began to apply his learnings at Essex CC and Pinehurst. It is an interesting question whether what Ross learned was in the C.B. MacDonald vein of analysis of the structure of the greatest holes in the U.K., what Keith Cutten calls "evidence-based" design, or in a deeper understanding of the strategic design conceptualizations of Hutchinson, Low, Colt and Darwin.
Second Generation of U.S. Golf Professionals. Donald Ross was a member of the second generation of golf course designers in the U.S.. In the 1890s and 1900s, golf courses in Chicago had been laid out by the Foulis brothers, H.J. Tweedie and Tom Bendelow, among others. They were golf professionals. Like Donald Ross, they played in tourneys, taught golf, made clubs, and some of them laid out courses. In Boston, as a golf professional, Donald Ross worked in a similar manner to these Chicago professionals.
Golf Professionals and Amateurs. The U.K.'s next generation of golf professionals, individuals like Willie Park Jr. and J.H. Taylor, hoped to become successful at the business of designing golf courses too. They were having a difficult go of it because amateurs and college-educated men like Colt, MacKenzie, Simpson, and Fowler were getting the best jobs. Ox-Cam changed everything in the U.K. but there wasn't as powerful a force of change in the U.S.. Like Donald Ross, Willie Park Jr. and countless other golf professionals came to the greener fields of the U.S. to get jobs. American amateurs such as C.B. MacDonald, Walter Travis, and Devereux Emmet did secure many design jobs, but the golf boom was underway and there was room for everyone with a design knack, amateur and professional.
Harry Colt, The “Thomas Edison” of Strategic Golf Course Design. Like Willie Park Jr., Donald Ross may have been reading Horace Hutchinson, John Low and others in regard to naturalistic and strategic golf design. The new design ideas they had conceived and were promoting were in the wind. It was Harry Colt, the “Thomas Edison’ of strategic design, who first and most successfully put these ideas into practice. Before Colt’s 1913 U.S. journey, it is safe to say that Donald Ross and other American golf course designers had not fully integrated the strategic, Golden Age design framework into their golf course layouts.
Old Elm - A Colt Classic. Like all golf courses, Old Elm was a collaboration, but Colt was undoubtedly the designer and Ross the constructor. Ross did make some changes in Colt's precise plans as he built the course, and Colt did want Ross to have a “free hand,” but Colt wouldn't have wanted too much change in the location, size and shape of the greens, bunkers, tees and corridors. Colt was meticulous and resolute about his routings and course designs. In his instructions, Colt says, “Everything is marked out on the land and with this book of plans and with the accompanying blue print there should be no difficulty in carrying out the work.”
Colt Designed Old Elm on the Ground and in Drawings. Colt made his Old Elm plans and drawings as he walked over the grounds and worked out the design. He didn’t draw the plans for Old Elm later from memory in the summer/fall at his desk from his home in England. Donald Ross had never made drawings before, but he learned the technique and the professional value of making them from Colt. If the war and life had not intervened, Colt would certainly have returned to edit and make improvements to his Old Elm masterpiece.
Colt’s Impact on History Lost and Rewritten. Colt never came back to Chicago and only briefly to Detroit and Toronto in 1914. The ideas he brought on his three pre-war trips to North America went viral. The history of his impact was rewritten by the winners and those who remained. Colt was the messenger who initiated and carried the fundamental principle of the Golden Age of golf course design, the theory of naturalistic and strategic design for inland golf, and put it in the ground in North America at Old Elm, Pine Valley, Toronto Golf, Hamilton, and the Country Club of Detroit, among others.
New Design Framework. Armed with first-hand experience, Donald Ross capitalized on the opportunity and the design framework he had witnessed Harry Colt creating at Old Elm. Ross saw how “the attitude of golfers as a whole (had) undergone a big change” and how “everywhere, now, the prime object of the leading men in different golf and country clubs is to have their courses up-to-date…and oblige the golfers to improve their standard of play to cope with the difficulties involved.”
Ross’ Career Skyrocketed After Old Elm. After Old Elm, Ross’ career took off into the stratosphere. He "took the ball and ran with it" building and remodeling courses by the dozens in the war years, not only in the northeast and southeast, but now around Colt’s former foothold in Chicago and Detroit.
Courses Designed by Donald Ross. As his business grew, Ross followed Colt’s lead, turned over the construction of those courses to his associates, donned the hat of the full-time architect, and realized his career calling. The primary construction experts and partners Ross collaborated with and relied upon throughout his career to manage the building of his designs are not seen as co-authors of his courses today, although Ross would certainly have given them freedom in the field too. Colt, Ross and the great architects of the 20th century are given full credit for their designs even though they were often not present during construction when vital decisions such as green contours were being made.
Old Elm Club and The Golden Age – H.S. Colt, the Author. Old Elm is a pure H.S. Colt creation. As the Golden Age of Golf Architecture emerged in North America, Colt’s three journeys to North America in 1911, 1913 and 1914 might be the most influential force in causing the changes in the golf architectural landscape that were fully realized after the Great War ended.
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John, thank you for contributing this to the DG. It's been a while since there's been something substantive to mull!
No doubt the throughline of Old Elm, Bloomfield Hills, Country Club of Detroit, and Pine Valley is a vitally important chapter in early American golf design. I selfishly wish Colt had spent more time stateside, and that we could have more designs of his.
I am not, however, convinced by your central thesis:
Colt’s 1913 visit might be the most critical step in the history of golf architecture in the United States.
It was Harry Colt, the “Thomas Edison’ of strategic design, who first and most successfully put these ideas into practice. Before Colt’s 1913 U.S. journey, it is safe to say that Donald Ross and other American golf course designers had not fully integrated the strategic, Golden Age design framework into their golf course layouts.
As the Golden Age of Golf Architecture emerged in North America, Colt’s three journeys to North America in 1911, 1913 and 1914 might be the most influential force in causing the changes in the golf architectural landscape that were fully realized after the Great War ended.
My hunch is that Colt's time in the United States was too brief to be able to claim he is the most indispensable architect for ushering Golden Age tenets into American design. More important for my counter argument is that, by 1912, the National Golf Links of America and Merion East were built, both without direct associations to Colt. Though Macdonald and later, Raynor, utilized template holes, Wilson and later, William Flynn, shaped holes harmonious with natural landforms. Wilson and Flynn's work can be similarly categorized as what Colt had brilliantly done earlier at Swinley Forest, Sunningdale, etc., but I do not see a direct lineage here. Instead I see a more contemporaneous zeitgeist from the cross-pollination of those from Scotland and England coming to America, and the select Americans who traveled back to the British Isles to study courses.
Transition From the Victorian Age to the Golden Age – 1907 to 1912. Until 1910, Ross' approach to the laying out of golf courses, like that of other golf professionals, was traditional. In 1910, Ross followed Walter Travis’ and C.B. MacDonald’s lead and visited Scotland and England to better understand golf course architecture there. He returned and began to apply his learnings at Essex CC and Pinehurst. It is an interesting question whether what Ross learned was in the C.B. MacDonald vein of analysis of the structure of the greatest holes in the U.K. or in a deeper understanding of the strategic design conceptualizations of Hutchinson, Low, Colt and Darwin.
I'm not a historian, and hopefully Sven or Mike Cirba might be able to weigh in on this, but the above paragraph referencing a 1910 trip back to the UK for Ross doesn't seem right. He was a Scot and at minimum knew Royal Dornoch and The Old Course intimately before his 1899 move to the US. Nor would I ever associate Ross to a Macdonald "vein of analysis" since Pinehurst, Oakland Hills, Seminole, Essex, etc. do not feature templates.
New Design Framework. Armed with first-hand experience, Donald Ross capitalized on the opportunity and the design framework he had witnessed Harry Colt creating at Old Elm. Ross saw how “the attitude of golfers as a whole (had) undergone a big change” and how “everywhere, now, the prime object of the leading men in different golf and country clubs is to have their courses up-to-date…and oblige the golfers to improve their standard of play to cope with the difficulties involved.”
Out of curiosity, who is being quoted here?
No one can deny Colt's stature as one of the most influential architects, and in England he was unquestionably indispensable. But considering him also as the lightning rod for American design seems to be an overreach compared to Macdonald and members of the Philly School.
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Thank you Michael for your thoughtful responses.
I believe that MacDonald's evidence-based approach to golf course design based on templates was a significant development in the underpinnings of the Golden Age but it was not as foundational as the naturalistic and strategic principles conceptualized, defined and put into practice by Low/Hutchinson/Colt/Darwin. Hugh Wilson was deeply influenced by MacDonald. Flynn came later but I agree that his design ethos was as nimble as Colt's.
I could be wrong but I think that Ross made two trips to the British Isles in 1910. He played in the Open Championship and performed quite admirably especially because he had been playing and practicing less frequently due to his increased responsibilities. Bostonians were surprised because his brother, Alex, was considered the better golfer, although many thought Donald had the more beautiful swing.
I think Ross went back over later in the summer to learn more about the golf courses. Upon his return, I don't think he ever overtly built template holes, but his learnings may have been more evidence-based than theory-based.
Those quotes are from Donald Ross just days after he returned from Old Elm. They appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript on May 7, 1913.
Like MacKenzie's visit to Australia, Colt's visits to the U.S. just before the war were of high impact. Colt was widely considered to be the top golf architect in the world because of his golf course transformations in the British Isles. He carried the message to the leaders of the golf community that the top golf courses in the U.S. were out-of-date, and that he knew how to build them properly. He explained the design principles of strategy, variety, beauty, and thrill. Bernard Darwin also visited Chicago in September 1913, just before Ouimet's victory, and after heaping praise on the still raw Old Elm, he cemented Colt's message and mostly condemned Chicago's top golf courses in a series of articles on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, including Onwentsia, Glen View, Homewood, and to a lesser extent Chicago Golf. He urged the principals and the golf-crazed public to modernize and leave penal golf behind.
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Thanks for the additional context. I should've been clearer on my end about your 1910 trip paragraph--wasn't questioning whether or not Ross made the visit, rather the phrasing seemed to imply it was a trip like other Americans' grand tour of links courses, when we can assume Ross had plenty of exposure beforehand as well. Not a big point to belabor though.
You're right, the difference between template design and more naturalist techniques is key to your argument for Colt's legacy in America. I don't have this information, but my mind wanders to what Newport, Myopia, Brookline, and others looked like in the years coinciding with Colt's US visits.
These two threads come to mind, though I haven't combed through them closely myself:
https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,68159.msg1632276.html#msg1632276 (https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,68159.msg1632276.html#msg1632276)
https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,57954.0.html (https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,57954.0.html)
I'm not at all attempting to discredit the value Colt and even later his associate, Alison, contributed to American golf. I'm merely skeptical about how much of a linchpin Colt's time in America was as you portray it to be. You propose a fascinating and welcome argument though, and I hope others will contribute better than I can.
As an aside, I've played DeVries (or CDP's) restoration of Colt's Bloomfield Hills and it's a wonderful, sporty members course, with a similar ethos I could feel at Swinley Forest and St. George's Hill. Thoughtful golf that is elegant but understated, where finesse is appreciated in both one's game and the way club and course are presented.
And by all accounts that I've seen and heard, Old Elm is presented exceptionally well, and that the club is doing great work preserving Colt's legacy there.
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Would love to play Bloomfield Hills and see the CDP restoration. Indian Hill Club, which has Colt/Ross/Langford roots, just hired CDP to design a master plan. Attaching the Colt design for Indian Hill's 15th and 16th holes. It appeared in Golf Illustrated in April 1917. Can't seem to attach it...I am a newbie and it won't load! Off to dinner. Will try tomorrow.
(https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/blob:https://www.golfclubatlas.com/90b2a7c3-0c67-4c05-80cc-55fdb3a2e4b3)
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John,
Fascinating and thought-provoking stuff. I'm glad you mentioned the series of essays Darwin penned for the Tribune. Those stories opened a lot of eyes at the time, I'm sure.
Tim
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John,
Great contributuion. After seeing Colt’s individual hole plans for Old Elm I strongly believe that Ross learned how to become a prolific architect from Harry Colt. Colts individual hole drawing showed such great detail and like he mentioned in his letter, the club should have no problem putting his plan in place with the details laid out in his drawings. Ross had only drawn full course layouts up to that point, never getting into the details of each specific hole. By borrowing the individual hole drawings on graph paper, Ross was able to move around the country more freely while his courses were under construction allowing him to accomplish more work without being on site as often. That’s not to say Ross mailed in these designs, but he was able to reduce the number of visits by including more detailed designs, much like Colt did at Old Elm, Pine Valley or Detroit. One look at Ross’ graph paper drawings and it’s easy to see the similarities between his and Colt’s plans. Later on you would see the same graph paper drawings from Stiles and Van Kleek, Flynn, and other architects who clearly didn’t all come up this concept on their own. Other architects would use plasticine models and it may be an indicator of where their influence came from: Macdonald or Colt?
Ross did make a tour of courses across the pond in 1910. Although he grew up in Scotland he didn’t necessarily look at every hole with an architect or constructor’s eye when he was younger. Much of the enlightenment of the Golden Age opened many peoples eyes to what constituted interesting golf or a well constructed golf hole. Many architects made the pilgrimage back after growing up on those courses, to see what they might have missed or to pick up new ideas on how the game of golf should evolve.
Donald Ross was a great architect, but he wasn’t always the leader of the pack, he evolved into that, over many years of practice. Ross may not have advertised the use of templates like Macdonald and Raynor, but he certainly held on to certain concepts and strategies that made golf courses interesting and or strategic. You can’t say you have never seen more than one Volcano hole from Ross or the short Par 3 with pearl necklace bunkering, or a long, generally benign Par 3. These are concepts he used more than once. As good as Ross was, he didn’t exactly come up with a new concept every time he designed a golf hole. He used tried and true methods, whether they were his own or some idea he saw elsewhere to create his courses. Even if you don’t use templates, there was a lot to learn from going overseas, because the game was more evolved there than it had been in the states. A good example of this would be Marion Hollins making the same trip for her Womens National Golf Club in 1923. She had already played courses overseas, but she made a special trip with the eye of an architect rather than as a player. Macdonald too, had played Royal Liverpool since the 1880’s, but he still made a special tour in 1906 while preparing to build NGLA.
In a sense the early architects were trying to create great golf holes in the States so that in time, someone building a new course wouldn’t have to make the trip overseas, they could simply make a trip around the States to find these tried and true concepts. Many times Raynor or Macdonald would send their American-born constructors to visit NGLA, Piping Rock, Shinnecocok, Pine Valley and Merion and for a fraction of the time and cost the new courses would have remnants of courses across the pond. If you were designing courses you may still want to make the trip, but if you were building them, you didn’t need to invest quite as much time and money in the trip.I think another aspect we often overlook is that many of the men who built the courses for Raynor and Ross were Scottish or English and they had grown up playing these holes or concepts they were asked to recreate.
I think Colt was influential in the dawn of Golden Age in America, but it may have been more indirectly attributed to him rather than directly. He made a star out of Donald Ross, or I should say Donald Ross likely became a star, by borrowing at least one key idea from Colt and that was how to be prolific.
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According to both Cornish and Whitten and Adam Lawrence, it was Colt who devised the idea of green detail and probably hole detail plans, as he was unhappy with many aspects of his Detroit projects. He felt that better plans would get a better product given he couldn't visit the site frequently.
I agree that Ross copied him closely and then most others followed.
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Adam Lawrence did a nice piece on Old Elm in 2015:
https://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/content/a-legendary-collaboration-at-chicagos-old-elm-club
The Colt/Ross collaboration in Chicago did not begin and end at Old Elm, as I am sure you know, John...;-)..and as I'm sure Adam NOW knows... ;D (Contrary to his article.)
But, the funny thing is that, until 10-15 years ago, Old Elm saw little to no love at all. It was an over-treed, over-watered course where "old men played with their fathers".
Now, it is arguably in the "top 3" in Chicago with Chicago Golf Club and Shoreacres with most guys I know ranking it above SA every time.
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A big welcome to John Challenger and thanks for the great thread. I can’t remember a better first post on the DG. Hopefully it continues to develop. :)
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As John knows from reading my earlier Old Elm architecture report and seeing the preliminary design mock-up just last Monday, I am in the process of finishing a book for the club on the history of the Old Elm Golf Course. It will cover the unique collaboration between Donald Ross and Harry Colt and how Old Elm was the game changer for golf architecture in the Chicago area.
I was hired by the Club a few years back to do an architectural history of the club detailing how the design and construction of the course happened and how the course has evolved over its now 108 years of life. At the time, most members still considered it a Ross course, although many in the know there, especially Kevin Marion knew about Colt's role. I was hired to give it an research look and delivered them a detailed report. It should be a pretty interesting take on the collaboration and the ongoing restoration of the course as well as the impact Old Elm had on other Chicago area courses. I have also provided information I have found on Colt in Chicago to several other Club including Chicago Golf Club.
How and when Ross adopted golden age ideas could be an entire project in itself, but I feel his was already well on his way already by the time he worked with Colt in Chicago. Travis had already been in his ear years earlier, and his 1910 trip included study of many of the links courses in Scotland. An interesting aspect of the Old Elm hole plans is that they didn't include plans for green contours-it appears Ross built them in the field. One exception was mounding around the 12th green which was recently "restored" by Dave Zinkand who did a great job interpreting the drawing left by Colt.
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Looking forward to Dan's history of Old Elm and to learning more about the only time these two giants of the 20th century worked in-person together. Dan's book will be a must read for anyone interested in golf history in North America!
In his drawings, Colt numbered every bunker. He was very specific about the green size, shape and orientation. In his written instructions Colt added even more detail. For example, on Hole 4, Colt wrote, "Plateau Green 2'6" high with three large low features in it." As the constructor, Ross would have necessarily built the green contours.
It may not make sense or be fair, but constructors are not often given authorship credit for golf courses. Old Elm paid Ross significantly lower fees to build the course. It is clear from Colt's instructions that he wanted Donald Ross to build the course as it was designed. An argument of co-authorship could be used on most of the courses Donald Ross designed in his extraordinary career too. The constructors are often sharing ideas on the course with the architect during the design phase. Through the fog of war and for decades, and like many other courses, Old Elm once thought it was a Donald Ross.
Today, through the efforts of Curtis James, Kevin Marion, and Dave Zinkand and others, Old Elm might just be the greatest Colt restoration of our era. By all accounts, Bloomfield Hills by CDP extraordinary too.
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One exception was mounding around the 12th green which was recently "restored" by Dave Zinkand who did a great job interpreting the drawing left by Colt.
That 12th hole is one of my favorite holes in Chicagoland. The restored mounds are brilliant.
I've realized that I'm a sucker for holes in back corners of properties.
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Peter, Hole 13 coming out of the same corner is my favorite.
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The renovation/restoration work done at Old Elm over the years has been nothing short of remarkable. Transformational is the operative term of art here. And each portion of the work was both minimalist in its execution while still eye popping in the effect on the player.
The tree removal was central to reclaiming and exposing the bones of the golf course, but the architects have each paid careful attention to the Dan Moore architectural history of the course while still making the course more challenging at the same time.
This model has been followed elsewhere hereabouts but not as dramatically as the work at Old Elm.
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John:
Your argument is straight forward and well presented. Just what GCA should be. However, Colt's three NA visits as the through point for the Golden Age in NA is a stretch imo. Mr Chadwick's comments are appropriate. I did go back and read the Boston ET article and was more appreciative of Ross's pov than when I read your piece the first time. BTW citations are the meat of the matter for me.
Regarding authorship, which is a topic that seems to go on forever on gca, I have two views. One: the basic idea that if the architect did the routing and the routing is still mostly (75%?) intact then he or she was and is the architect. On that basis OE is Colt's. On the parsing of the details of course we can go way off the main line (and still enjoy the discussion!) Does ANGC get past the MacKenzie/Jones authorship when Perry Maxwell re-does all the greens?
Observations from a review of the comments at the time ie. 1913-17. American Golfer 6/1913: "THE IDEAS OF THE TWO EXPERTS HAVE BEEN COMBINED." American Golfer 6/1914: "C AND R, THEY declared, "THEIR creation, etc." Chick Evans in the Chicago Examiner "TOGETHER THEY made OE the most scientific course ..." C AND R were successful etc. This suggests a partnership. During later visits by Ross with the two club reps (names are in the comments by others) they "... omitted 12 and added 18 bunkers." Not insignificant revisions, but enough for continued co-authorship by Ross?
I have other questions and comments for John and the respondents above.
1) "The Thomas Edison of strategic gc design" Having been raised in Port Huron, Michigan, Edison's boyhood home, I'm sensitive when Edison's name is mentioned, and I must admit I never thought of him regarding golf course architecture. In what way do you mean that Colt was the TE of ...?
2) Regarding fees and Colt's being more than Ross. Was Colt paid for traveling expenses vs Ross being home grown? or is that covered elsewhere?
3) Ross was hired first to advise. Maybe as the Brad Klein of the project originally? Help find the right person/people?
4) Jeff B: "he was unhappy with many aspects of his Detroit projects" I would be very interested in following up on that. Can you give me references re these comments that I can review. He only did the original (actually 2nd) CCD course and Bloomfield in the Detroit area.
5) Comment re green contours: While reviewing the Colt course at Ancaster with the super before Ebert's reno he commented often re the fact that Colt didn't leave much re the internal contours of the greens, so the club had no absolute direction regarding them. This is a problem/discussion regarding all of Colt's NA work, which he basically never saw completed (except thru Alison's reports years later). Not so much an Alison problem, who actually spent months at some courses in Detroit and made several visits over a period of ten years to at least a couple courses that I can document.
6) "OE was the ONLY time C&R worked together in person." What of Winnetka (IHC)? The CCD in Detroit? I'd also include, but can't prove, the DGC.
7) Colt never used plasticine models. Per my research for NA he did for the St Andrews course in Trinidad & Tobago. I annexed T&T from SA to NA for my book ... sorry. And per Adam's own research at least one other course, most likely Bowness in Calgary.
I must say, for a fairly short post John, you've gotten my gray cells going OT.
Thanks for that.
Anthony
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Looking forward to Dan's history of Old Elm and to learning more about the only time these two giants of the 20th century worked in-person together. Dan's book will be a must read for anyone interested in golf history in North America!
Today, through the efforts of Curtis James, Kevin Marion, and Dave Zinkand and others, Old Elm might just be the greatest Colt restoration of our era. By all accounts, Bloomfield Hills by CDP extraordinary too.
John, +1 The restoration work is nothing short of spectacular. One could also argue that OE is one of very few courses in Chicago that can challenge the competitive player yet remain fun for the average player.
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"6) "OE was the ONLY time C&R worked together in person." What of Winnetka (IHC)? The CCD in Detroit? I'd also include, but can't prove, the DGC."
I have a copy of a Chicago Star article from June 27, 1915 that shares a bit of info on this topic. Since I cant effing post the pic, I will transcribe two paragraphs:
(Mr. Ferguson was the president of Glen View Club which is the topic of the full article.)
"Colt and Ross Did the Work" (actual title in article)
The creation of Old Elm and Indian Hill has, of course, served to make Glen View less nearly unique than when it had Chicago Golf as its sole rival in this neighborhood. The changes made in 1913have all been in the way of betterment of the links, and are, in scheme, in the precise spirit of the modern golf architecture of the two new north shore courses
The new aspects of the course represent the work of Colt and Ross, the designers and builders of Old Elm. It was to this admirable team Mr. Ferguson turned over the ideas he had studied and pondered. He caught Colt when the latter was in the country to design Old Elm; and the finishing touches were given by Ross, whose handicraft is to be noted now on every hole.
The graceful, easy curves of Old Elm and Indian Hill can easily be recognized in the revisions at Glen View. Not a spadeful of earth was, in making the changes, dug for the mere sake of creating punitive hazards regardless of the logic of distances and of the mixed measurements of par.
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Gents
An interesting discussion and FWIW I also tend to think it is a stretch to think of Colt's work at Old Elm being some sort of eureka moment for golf course design in the US. I have to think the flow of ideas to and fro via writings in mags, books and visits to one anothers country by the likes of CBM, John Low, Hutchinson, Travis as well as all the GB&I pro's who took seasonal work in the US and travelled back to the UK for the winter meant there was a fairly free flow of information.
Niall
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Gents
An interesting discussion and FWIW I also tend to think it is a stretch to think of Colt's work at Old Elm being some sort of eureka moment for golf course design in the US. I have to think the flow of ideas to and fro via writings in mags, books and visits to one anothers country by the likes of CBM, John Low, Hutchinson, Travis as well as all the GB&I pro's who took seasonal work in the US and travelled back to the UK for the winter meant there was a fairly free flow of information.
Niall
I am certainly not a golf historian, but it is difficult to see the causal through way from Old Elm to Flynn, Tillinghast, Thomas and Thompson, and Maxwell among other Golden Age architects in North America. It seems clear that Colt influenced/mentored/promoted Ross. That by itself changed gca for the better. It is difficult to think of two more both prolific and brilliant architects. That strikes me as more than enough of a claim to impact and import.
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Ira
Two of the great architects as you say and remarkable that they worked together but did golf architecture really change dramatically after Old Elm ?
Niall
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John -
Welcome to Golf Club Atlas and thank you for a very informative first thread.
Old Elm's architectural pedigree is amazing as is the golf course as it stands today.
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There's an underlying assumption in this thread that Colt selected Ross as his second in charge on the Old Elm project. The truth was that Ross was engaged for the project prior to Colt (see the timeline below).
The other assumption being made is that because Colt drew the plans and wrote down the specifications, they all must have been his ideas with Ross being left to implement the plans. I have not seen anything that proves this assertion one way or the other, although most of the press reports from the day suggested more of a collaboration then a designer/builder relationship.
As for whether or not Colt's work at Old Elm lead to the "true onset of the Golden Age," this seems to simplify a movement that had begun in American golf course architecture prior to 1913, and negates the influence and work of the previously mentioned MacDonald, Travis, and Emmet, as well as Wilson, Watson, Tillinghast, Egan, Junor, Collis and Barker, amongst others, as well as the evolving work of many of the early architects like Bendelow, the Foulis Brothers, Tweedie, Findlay, Pryde, Hoare, et al. Even Ross, who has never been really described as Victorian era designer, had already evolved as an architect by this point.
Did Colt have an influence? Absolutely. Was it a direct line? No, the story of the Golden Age involves too much time, too many players, too much of an increase in American wealth, too many changes in the game, too many changes in the clubs and balls, too many changes in construction methods and too many changes in the accessibility of courses to attribute to one person. If you were to make that argument about any one architect, you'd probably have to start with the one who was most responsible for building the game in this country during its early years.
Timeline of Old Elm (hoping Dan or anyone else can add in any additional information):
Jan. 21, 1913 Chicago Examiner notes Donald Ross looking over the grounds preparatory to laying them out in the spring.
Feb. 15, 1913 Glens Falls Daily Times and Feb. 16, 1913 Wilmington Morning Star note Donald Ross discussing a new project at Fort Sheridan.
May 7, 1913 Boston Evening Transcript notes Donald Ross collaborated with H. S. Colt on the new 18 hole course.
June 1913 American Golfer notes Colt and Ross spent a week on the property coming up with the plans and Ross was to superintend the construction.
June 1913 Golf Magazine notes club organized and Colt arrived to plan its construction which will be superintended by Donald Ross.
June 21, 1913 The Evening Post notes Donald Ross collaborated with H. S. Colt in planning the course.
Sept. 25, 1913 Chicago Tribune notes course laid out jointly by H. S. Colt and Donald Ross is under construction which is being supervised by Ross.
Sept. 28, 1913 Chicago Daily Tribune Bernard Darwin article notes 18 hole course the handiwork of Harry Colt.
Nov. 1913 Golf Magazine notes club hired Ross who cleared the forest and then Colt was sent for and the course planned.
1914 SOGG notes construction of new course as laid out by Colt and Ross.
March 15, 1914 Inter Ocean notes course to be opened this season.
May 24, 1914 Chicago Tribune notes 18 hole 6,420 yard course was laid out by H. S. Colt and Donald Ross.
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Arguments can be made and one can reach the conclusion that Old Elm is a Colt course or a Colt and Ross collaboration. There is lots of material that might sway one either way. It is fundamentally a designer vs constructor issue. On April 27, 1913, it was Colt who submitted the plans, notes, and drawings to Old Elm. They weren't submitted jointly by Colt and Ross. The club paid Colt significantly more than Ross, and the difference wasn't to make up for Colt's expenses. But, I am giving you more evidence...
To me, it comes down to this: the fundamental ideas expressed in the design of Old Elm were those of Hutchinson/Low/Colt and Ox-Cam. I believe those new and viral ideas were the original seed of the Golden Age. It's true that those ideas had been filtering into the United States from the early 1900s, and they would have picked up steam in 1907-1908 for a variety of reasons, but they were not fully formed.
The Country Club of Detroit, Toronto Golf, and Old Elm were new courses built in North America that for the first time wholly saw the Ox-Cam Golden Age ideas put into the ground on this side of the ocean.
For good reason, H.S. Colt was recognized as the greatest golf course architect in the world. Colt was the messenger and the carrier of those Oxcam ideas, not Donald Ross, who was still coming into his own as an architect.
The fact that Ross did not for one reason or another faithfully execute those plans should not be grounds for giving him too much credit.
Let's not dilute the impact of Colt's authorship and his achievement, or its impact on American golf architecture, by calling Old Elm a collaboration.
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John,
First, welcome to the board.
Second, I am more than willing to accept that (a) Colt was the greatest architect in the world when OE was designed and (b) that he is the OE architect. However, those two points do not prove the assertion that OE was the fulcrum point for the Golden Age in North America.
Is there any evidence that the leading architects of the Golden Age visited OE and/or stated that it was a major influence on their work?
I have no doubt that Colt had a significant impact on North American architecture. I am just skeptical that OE itself was a major cause of that impact beyond its importance for Ross’s development. As Sven and others have noted, there were too many other courses that helped promulgate the Golden Age to hold out that OE occupies the seminal place.
Thanks,
Ira
PS I grew up in the Chicago area and always have wanted to play OE so my questions are not out of any bias against the course. Indeed, the two UK Colt courses I have played are very high up on my personal list of best I have played.
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Thank you for your kind welcome, Ira. I agree with you and don't think North American-based golf course architects of the time came in droves to Old Elm to assimilate the ideas. I do think that CC Detroit, Toronto Golf, and Old Elm were the first new and fully realized Golden Age golf courses in North America because the original seed idea of the Golden Age was Ox-Cam. Colt was the prime mover and source for putting those viral ideas into concrete form. I also believe Colt's second journey to North America occurred at at time in his life when the combination of his inspiration, energy, knowledge, experience, creativity and hard work were peaking. Whatever Colt touched and created in 1913 should be considered and treated like a Picasso.
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I think Colt’s influence had more to do with the profession than a direct impact on what types of courses were built in the United States. The idea was mulling about between architects and many architects were evolving their designs, but I don’t think many of these architects had teams in place to carry out their work.
Colt had professional architects as the head of his construction projects, , he brought in professional crews that knew how to build golf courses, drain them and irrigate them. He knew what types of turf to use and where you could find it. I’m not saying Ross and Bendelow didn’t know all of this, but they didn’t create the vertically integrated teams that Colt had in place in 1913, they did that later in their career.
Colts visit to America seems to coincide with Carters Tested Seeds becoming a major player in the golf construction business in the United States. They made an imprint in the US when he arrived and several years after he was gone Carters Tested Seeds had greatly influenced the profession of building golf courses.
I’m not sure how much of a relationship Colt had with Carters in 1913, but when Willie Park Jr. arrives, he seems to pick up with Carters where Colt left off. Before Colt, a few courses may have put teams like this together, but they didn’t always carry that expertise on to the next course. This was essentially another asset of working with Colt that would allow a golf architect to get more work done without making as many site visits.
Colt was really the first professional architect who treated his job like a profession. Many of the early influences were amateurs, who had jobs during the day. Ross was a professional but he evolved into that on his own, never really working with other professionals to see how their approach may differ. That’s not to say Colt didn’t learn anything from Ross, because it’s very likely he did.
I think Old Elm is likely one of the first courses built in the Chicago area that was built on modern lines. It was a model course for the Chicago area, as many of the newer model courses were being built on the east coast. If you wanted to see how a course should be constructed on modern lines then Old Elm would have been a great place to visit for any architects or constructors living in the Chicago area. It would be 10 more years before Chicago Golf Club gets its modern facelift that made it the course it is today. 1913 is early as far as Golden Age courses go. Nationa (which had turf problems until they brought in Carters) and Piping Rock we’re built on modern lines but many of the other courses were updated, not built from the ground up. The process for how they built great golf courses seemed to change after this 1913 visit. Whether it was attributed directly or indirectly to Colt, is hard to say, but the golf architect profession in the United States really took off after 1913.
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For good reason, H.S. Colt was recognized as the greatest golf course architect in the world. Colt was the messenger and the carrier of those Oxcam ideas, not Donald Ross, who was still coming into his own as an architect.
An interesting comment, as at this point in their careers Ross may have designed more courses than Colt. At the least, their numbers were comparable.
This was still very early in Colt's career as well, why is one deemed the greatest while the other "still coming into his own."
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I also think that the C.B. MacDonald line of evolution, evidence-based design, emerged in a distinct trajectory. From reading the papers of the time, it seems like the Philadelphia School at this time was trying to answer the fundamental question: "how do we create complex golf courses that will test all the shots, and by doing so create a new generation of golfers that will learn to hit them all?"
Tony Gholz, would it be fair to call Colt Thomas Edison and Ross Henry Ford?
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I also think that the C.B. MacDonald line of evolution, evidence-based design...
Is "evidence-based design" your own coinage?
It seems to be to present a bit of obfuscation in that it confuses the research (or the inspiration) with the result (the ideal).
I'd also be curious as to how you think Myopia and Garden City fit into this conversation, specifically what they meant in moving away from the early geometric/victorian style and how they influenced subsequent courses in the US?
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Sven, In an earlier post, I mentioned "evidence-based" design quoting Keith Cutten, who has written a great book called, "The Evolution of Golf Course Design." Thank you for all of your extraordinary research and insight which is the backbone of GCA. I'm just trying to scratch the surface! I think MacDonald mostly went down his own path on the way towards the Golden Age. His journey to the mecca of golf, the golf courses of the British Isles, to find inspiration, ideas, and the ideal holes, is a pathway that architects like Ross, Dye, and Doak have emulated. It's interesting that Darwin wrote a book titled the same a few years after C.B.'s first trip. Today, the foundation of every architect's education is to see as many courses around the world as possible. I do think the theories of the Oxcam group led by Hutchinson, Low, Colt, and Darwin came first. My guess is that MacDonald, Travis, Leeds, Emmet all read John Low's 1903 book, "Concerning Golf" and it would have informed their work.
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"6) "OE was the ONLY time C&R worked together in person." What of Winnetka (IHC)? The CCD in Detroit? I'd also include, but can't prove, the DGC."
I have a copy of a Chicago Star article from June 27, 1915 that shares a bit of info on this topic. Since I cant effing post the pic, I will transcribe two paragraphs:
(Mr. Ferguson was the president of Glen View Club which is the topic of the full article.)
"Colt and Ross Did the Work" (actual title in article)
The creation of Old Elm and Indian Hill has, of course, served to make Glen View less nearly unique than when it had Chicago Golf as its sole rival in this neighborhood. The changes made in 1913have all been in the way of betterment of the links, and are, in scheme, in the precise spirit of the modern golf architecture of the two new north shore courses
The new aspects of the course represent the work of Colt and Ross, the designers and builders of Old Elm. It was to this admirable team Mr. Ferguson turned over the ideas he had studied and pondered. He caught Colt when the latter was in the country to design Old Elm; and the finishing touches were given by Ross, whose handicraft is to be noted now on every hole.
The graceful, easy curves of Old Elm and Indian Hill can easily be recognized in the revisions at Glen View. Not a spadeful of earth was, in making the changes, dug for the mere sake of creating punitive hazards regardless of the logic of distances and of the mixed measurements of par.
Ian:
Thanks for this. I covered that date extensively last evening in the Chicago papers and discovered the bigger version of this article is from the Chicago Tribune June 27, 1915. It covers your quotes and several more paragraphs re Glen View. Includes hole by hole changes and comments. No question that work suggested by C&R was in fact done in the field. The article also includes comments re Indian Hill as right up there with OE in design. I'll send the article to John directly as I too have "problems" posting pics, no matter how many on this site have tried to help me. And btw thanks for trying.
I'll stay out of the who did what specifically at OE, IHC, or GV. But regarding the larger question of influence: I would say John covered it in his most recent post. If you put Toronto, The Country Club of Detroit, and OE together you could get a pretty good argument that together they had a wide influence. Vardon's trip to the US with his comments about The CCD being the best in America after he played most of our best at the time speaker volumes. He was well quoted throughout the NA press and back in the old country. Bernard Darwin also spread the word on both sides of the Atlantic and he wasn't an unknown at the time. Chick Evans Chicago Examiner articles also cover Colt (and Alison) and these three courses extensively. And Chick very definitely knew his Colt from his Alison.
More recently our fearless leader played Toronto and he was "ecstatic." Says the 147 list will change. I say that's influence, if only 111 years later.
Anthony
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Sven, In an earlier post, I mentioned "evidence-based" design quoting Keith Cutten, who has written a great book called, "The Evolution of Golf Course Design." Thank you for all of your extraordinary research and insight which is the backbone of GCA. It's a privilege to talk with you. I'm just trying to scratch the surface! I think MacDonald mostly went down his own path on the way towards the Golden Age. His journey to the mecca of golf, the golf courses of the British Isles, to find inspiration, ideas, and the ideal holes, is a pathway that architects like Ross, Dye, and Doak have emulated. It's interesting that Darwin wrote a book titled the same a few years after C.B.'s first trip. Today, the foundation of every architect's education is to see as many courses around the world as possible. I do think the theories of the Oxcam group led by Hutchinson, Low, Colt, and Darwin came first. My guess is that MacDonald, Travis, Leeds, Emmet all read John Low's 1903 book, "Concerning Golf" and it would have informed their work.
I'm probably not as enamored with Cutten's book as others might be. Shack's "The Golden Age of Golf Design" seems like a better kick off point for this conversation.
We'll agree to disagree on CBM. I look at him as someone who may have had a singular drive in creating his ideal course, but also someone who was seeking out the thoughts of others on both sides of the Atlantic.
The community of budding architects in America just after the turn of the century wasn't very large, but it contained some names that would remain prominent for a number of years, including CBM, Travis, Emmet, etc. All of them had already produced significant work, written on the subject and most likely shared whatever knowledge they had gleaned along the way by the time Low's book was written in 1903. Not to say it didn't influence them as their design career's progressed, but all of these guys had already witnessed the first great wave of course development in this country by that point. The American Design School planted its roots well before 1903.
We often undersell the influence of the early guys like Davis, Dunn, Bendelow, etc. But these were the guys that did the heavy lifting on course development over here. They essentially created something out of nothing, and we'll leave alone the debate on how substantive that something was for another thread.
Ross can be looked at as a late arriver to this early boom, but he was part of it. Like Dunn and Bendelow, he had a wealth of knowledge as to what a golf course could be from his days in Scotland. And he saw what was being built in the US. He wasn't as prolific as the others early on because that was not what he came here to do. His work balance prior to 1910 leaned more to teaching and playing than it did to building. By 1913 there is no dispute that Ross was considered one of the preeminent designers located in the United States. Not a construction expert, as his teams and networks were only just getting going, but a designer.
I think the best way to look at the evolution of American design is to think of all of the players almost acting in concert. Travis was sharing ideas with CBM, until he wasn't. Emmet was talking to everyone and anyone who would listen. They all stopped in on Donald when they came down to Pinehurst in the winter. Everyone knew Leeds had done something special at Myopia and Fownes was on his way to doing something pretty cool up in Pittsburgh. Tillie was in the background learning and writing, and even guys like George Thomas were on their way to caching away the information they'd need to produce masterpieces down the line. Some of these guys were amateurs, with their focus on one or a few courses only. Others were professionals who were called in as experts on big money projects or filled the void when a course was going to be built without the local knowledge to make it happen. We often draw a line in these parts between the pros and the ams in this realm, but in reality they were probably all drinking from the same cup, one that was first filled by mother nature, later by Tom Morris and his ilk and then further a bit more be each of them in their own way.
This was a spider web of activity, ideas, inspirations and debates. When the market for development truly arrived post-World War I, the web only grew with more players being added on nearly a daily basis. There was room for Raynor and his millionaire CBM connected clients, for Langford and his bold features, for Flynn and his nature-faking, for everything taking place in California, for Willie Park to be the hottest name in town, for the Old Man to shape his greens, for Emmet to plug away into eternity, for Macan and Egan to build the Northwest, for a banker in Oklahoma to shape dirt into rolls, you get my point.
To put all of this on the influence of any one person or any one small collection of courses built in one year seems a bit simplistic. Who's to say Old Elm had more impact on the game in this country than Van Cortlandt did years earlier. I'd venture way more people saw VC than ever saw OE? None of this happens without that initial grab we all felt at one point. Who get's the most responsibility for creating that collective itch in America? I don't know if anyone has the answer to that question, and I don't think the answer is just one name.
Sven
PS - I owe you a call. My apologies, its been a hectic fall.
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Sven, We don't disagree on CB MacDonald. Along with Harry Colt, CBM carved another major highway into the Golden Age. I think he came at it from an "evidence-based" starting point by creating template holes derived from his travels in 1902 - 1904 to the British Isles. Who were the 30 prominent golf figures he interviewed? In Cutten's book, MacDonald's vision is called "trans-Atlantic translation." Interested to explore more about CBM in another thread. Need to read more Mark Bourgeois and Anthony Pioppi and Bret Lawrence on MacDonald/Raynor/Banks. Cutten's book is filled with interesting information and ideas but I haven't read Shackelford's book yet. Shame on me and putting it at the top of my list!
In this transition period from 1906-1912, and even before, as you point out, there were a variety of Americans creating golf courses that were more modern. Makes sense to think of them as the "American School." Started in 1908, Travis created American Golfer, one of the key intellectual platforms. His early design ideas and his reworking of Garden City were foundational. Tillie was perhaps the key intellectual voice for the Phillie school and had been finding inspiration playing Scottish golf courses and from Old Tom Morris from early on. "Budding" amateur golfers turned architect like Leeds and Emmet created early flowers.
What you say about Ross, at this point, being more in the nextgen mode of Davis, Dunn, Bendelow makes sense to me. I don't think Ross had yet created designs that could compare with Myopia, Garden City, Chicago Golf and NGLA. Perhaps, one of the Pinehurst courses or his work on remodeling Essex? What do you think Ross' greatest original design was in this period?
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John
I have to agree with Sven's assessment of Keith Cutten's book, at least in terms of early golf/UK stuff. That might not be representative of the book as a whole as I really don't have much knowledge of the US stuff to pass comment on that, but some of the early chapters are fairly poor. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautifully produced book and I dare say there is a lot of good stuff in there but it seems to me the epic scope of the subject matter was just too much for him to master. Can't comment on Geoff Shackleford's book as I don't have it.
Anyway, very much enjoying the thread.
Sven
Thank you for post 32 which was enlightening and a great read. One very small quibble and that is where you say about Ross - "Not a construction expert, as his teams and networks were only just getting going, but a designer". I've always thought with these early professional/greenkeeper types that the construction/greenkeeping went hand in hand and was the greater part of laying out a course. No doubt his knowledge would expand particularly as he began taking on more and more design and build work with an ever-expanding workforce, but would his early jobs not have come about through his ability to get the course built ?
Niall
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Here are a few interesting articles about Donald Ross throughout the years that may add value to this thread:
Donald Ross as the first golf architect:
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ag323/bretjlawrence/FullSizeRender_euSnhkPwjpjGCe8gk1SGu3.jpg) (https://app.photobucket.com/u/bretjlawrence/a/a262d2bd-f3be-467b-a9cd-2816e5d7d000/p/a7191e70-639e-430c-9135-ac596197e918)
Donald Ross comparing Pinehurst to the Henry Ford Plant:(Starting with two men of vision):
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ag323/bretjlawrence/FullSizeRender_niPA66WQMxQrTK86CspwAk.jpg) (https://app.photobucket.com/u/bretjlawrence/a/a262d2bd-f3be-467b-a9cd-2816e5d7d000/p/700756eb-ae43-4691-bde6-425993d789c6)
Donald Ross after his 1910 tour of courses (Sven’s quote comes from this article):
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ag323/bretjlawrence/FullSizeRender_54sV5qN5oPdkiSVTz7Ubpp.jpg) (https://app.photobucket.com/u/bretjlawrence/a/a262d2bd-f3be-467b-a9cd-2816e5d7d000/p/25a2e909-462c-4052-800a-dd06670ce649)
Donald Ross collaborating with Colt at Old Elm:
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/ag323/bretjlawrence/FullSizeRender_1qgNR8yidmkj4LUvyTHMbQ.jpg) (https://app.photobucket.com/u/bretjlawrence/a/a262d2bd-f3be-467b-a9cd-2816e5d7d000/p/b92b6826-901b-4346-becc-2c079c79a292)
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Thanks for posting these articles, Bret.
"The interesting thing about Donald Ross as a golf architect is not that he stands as the head of his profession - but the fact that he originated his profession."
"You will have some idea of what it meant to be the first golf architect in America."
What happened to MacDonald, Leeds, Tweedie, et al.
Your articles led me to look up Old Elm in the Donald Ross 1930 booklet, "A Partial List of Prominent Golf Courses." Here's what I found. It says "Old Elm Club (Construction) Chicago 18 Holes." It's the only course in the entire booklet that says "Construction." There are many entries that are noted as "Remodeled." All of the other courses are Donald Ross originals. On the title page, it says "Walter B. Hatch J.B. McGovern Associates."
In the 1989 brochure, "A Directory of Golf Courses Designed by Donald Ross," it lists, "Old Elm Club Fort Sheridan 1913." The term "Construction" has been dropped. There are still a number of courses in the brochure that are noted as "Remodeled." There is no mention of McGovern and Hatch, or Colt.
Ok, it's a mad, mad world. We live in a Ross world and history is told by the winners. Donald Ross may be our country's greatest architect, the Henry Ford or Old Tom Morris of U.S. golf history. True to his first mentor, Old Tom, Donald Ross was instrumental in creating Pinehurst, the St. Andrews of the U.S. and the Model T of the American golf community.
But, back in 1913, Harry Colt was the greatest architect in the world and for good reason. He came to North America at the peak of his powers, sparked the Golden Age, and created some of the greatest golf courses of all time. His first, CC of Detroit, has disappeared and so have some others. How fortunate we are to have the handful that still exist. Old Elm, Toronto Golf, Hamilton, Indian Hill, Bloomfield Hills, and Pine Valley all emerged from his groundbreaking trips to North America in 1911, 1913, and 1914.
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Bret Lawrence, In regard to the article you post from November 1910 in NY Tribune, about Ross's learnings from his British Isles trips, where he says, "The British architect of golf links pays little heed to criticism..." It reminds me of what H.S. Colt wrote in 1912 in Sutton's "The Book of the Links."
https://imgur.com/a/g835Sk4 (https://imgur.com/a/g835Sk4)
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John,
The articles I posted were meant to give a barometer of where the US was at in terms of golf course architecture. The Ross articles from the local Pinehurst newspaper show bias towards Ross and Pinehurst, but it demonstrates that influence came from many places. I think there was more than one first golf architect in the US and they covered different regions of the country. Macdonald, Bendelow, Dunn, Tweedie and many others likely ran into the same problems as Ross. They would go to different towns or cities and be confronted with the same problems or difficulties of finding skilled labor. That’s not to say they couldn’t find people familiar with raking or digging or farming, but they couldn’t find anyone that had seen a golf course before, so everything was on the shoulders of the golf architect or expert.
As time went on, each of these first architects found ways to deal with these shortcomings. Some of them started to build a system they could repeat from site to site while others may have struggled on with the original approach. Over time, more courses were built, more experts were created and added to the process. It seemed to be a slow evolution that seemed to kick into overdrive around 1913. By 1913-1915, you may now have an irrigation specialist, turf specialist, architect, engineer, construction supervisor, foreman, superintendent. The list goes on and on. The way the architect designed courses had changed and it involved more expertise. To say one person influenced all of this is not fair to everyone involved in the process. The idea behind the great golf courses is and always has been collaboration of experts.
This idea of collaboration and taking advice from the right people is a common philosophy among Ross and Colt. I think many of the early architects held onto the same beliefs once they started producing their best work. Ross didn’t seem to stop at Old Elm either. He also worked at Seaview and Whitemarsh Valley with other architects/experts. He was reported visiting Blind Brook with Macdonald, Raynor and Findlay Douglas. Maybe he was trying to get as many views on design and construction as possible? I think the chain of influence runs deep in golf course architecture and the best architects then, just as today seek influence from as many places as possible. They may not always agree with each other, but they can still learn from each other.
Bret
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Two quick points:
I agree that in trying to condense history to understandable nuggets, we tend to compress long time periods for simplicity. The history of gca is (to quote Marge Simpson) "just a bunch of stuff that happened." There was a slow evolution, not a few "aha" moments.
As to collaboration and sharing of ideas, that is still true today. A marketing company doing some research for ASGCA was astounded by how helpful we are with fellow architects, and he has studied numerous professions and trades. He thought we were far ahead of any other group he had seen.
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Congrats to all involved. Great to see a (polite) history thread on here its been too long.
Does seem like there's more to be discovered.
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Thank you Jeff Brauer. I do think history evolves gradually through collaboration and sometimes by fierce competition, and it can move quickly forward when there are inventions and breakthroughs. The seeds of the Golden Age started with the ideas of Oxcam and flowed from Europe to North America and around the world.
Demand for new golf courses exploded in the late 1800s and continued to expand rapidly until WW1 slowed the momentum and created a vacuum in North America, and put the growth on hold in Europe. There was a natural competition between the golf professionals who had created the first wave of penal-based golf courses and the new wave of golf amateurs who were creating golf courses based on game strategy. The battle to move beyond penal architecture brought on the Golden Age.
Golf architecture in North America seemed to turn a corner in 1911. The demand for a new type of golf course had reached a crossroads. CB MacDonald was ready to unveil his masterpiece, NGLA. Walter Travis was reworking Garden City. Harry Colt had created masterpieces at Sunningdale and Swinley Forest, and St. George's Hill was underway.
Donald Ross sensed it in 1910 and followed the path of so many others by returning to the source - St. Andrews, North Berwick, Prestwick, Royal Dornoch. When he went to England, he visited Mid-Surrey, the home of J.H. Taylor, his fellow golf professional, who at the time was one of the remaining proponents of building penal golf courses. Is there any evidence Ross met with John Low, whom he had played with in 1898 at Royal Dornoch, or was the gulf between professionals and amateurs too wide? Ross wanted to get off the Dunn and Bendelow train and get into the Henry Ford automobile, which btw was introduced in 1908! I think Ross's masterpieces were still to come.
Harry Colt sensed it too. At the beginning of 1911, he decided to open up new ground in North America. He bypassed the east coast, Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where the competition was stiff, and landed in the Silicon Valley of the U.S. which at the time was Detroit. He also put his stake in the ground in the more congenial city of Toronto.
It's reasonable to think that the Golden Age started in North America in the years just before the war from 1911 to 1914. Perhaps, it started in 1907 in the British Isles. Based on reports in the papers and magazines of the transition period from 1900 to 1910, the general consensus seemed to be that the greatest North American courses were Chicago Golf, Myopia, and Garden City.
What do you think were our earliest great masterpieces of the Golden Age, the golf courses created between 1911 and 1914 in North America?
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The two earliest great masterpieces during the years from 1911 to 1914 were most likely Mayfield and Merion (I am assuming you mean post NGLA). You could probably through Piping Rock, Sleepy Hollow, Interlachen, Wanakah, Hamilton County (Maketewah), Shawnee, Rhode Island, Altadena, Los Angeles, Beresford (Peninsula), Race Brook, Druid Hills, CC of Indianapolis, White Bear, Hillcrest (KC) and Pinehurst #4 on the list of contenders amongst others.
You have one thing not quite right in your second paragraph. Demand for golf courses did have an early boom in the U.S. in the late 1890's, but that demand tailed off after the turn of the century. There was a relatively quiet period from around 1902 to after World War I, when things really took off. Many of the early clubs disappeared, while some new ones did pop up on the scene. It is probably best to look at the first 30 years or so years of golf over here in terms of waves of development, as opposed to a constant expansion.
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I think it is safe to say that one of the defining time periods of the Philadelphia School was the creation of Pine Valley. Most were involved in the design and multi-year construction of the golf course. Yet, George Crump - a friend to many of the Philadelphia School - consulted with Harry Colt when it came down to designing Pine Valley. Colt gets more credit than any of the Phily School architects for the course.
Doesn't that make it difficult to say that Colt didn't have a huge impact on the Philadelphia School. I would imagine that Crump consulted Colt at the recommendations of his friends, who were some of the best architects of the day. I would also imagine that those architects learned something from Colt's work at Pine Valley.
I don't profess to be a historian. Just wondering.
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Sven, Thank you for your thoughts. Is there a thread or a book you think highly of that examines what caused the slowdown in golf course development after 1902? Did the economy go into recession in that year? It's interesting that in the years just before the war, there was constant talk of overcrowding on golf courses. If the building of courses slowed down from 1902 to 1910, but interest in the game and the number of new players continued to expand rapidly, then there must have come a point when the forces and pressures holding back course development were pushed aside. What were those forces and pressures?
Bendelow, Tweedie, and Dunn and others had been strewing seeds everywhere up until 1902. How much did their work slow down in this period, when I assume Spalding and other companies were seeing a boom in the demand for golf clubs, balls, and other golf products? Is it possible that public golf, started at places like Van Cortlandt and Jackson Park in the late 1800s, with its potential for geometric expansion in the number of golfers, finally caused a new boom in 1911, or in some other year just before the war? What did happen inside those years from 1903 to 1914?
Michael, I think when Harry Colt came to North America in 1911 and 1913, and to a lesser extent 1914, it was much bigger news inside the small community of golf course designers, constructors, and journalists than we can appreciate today. The Philly School of golfers and intellectuals would have closely followed everything Colt said and did during those trips. They helped convince Crump to bring Colt to Pine Valley and Colt was the only architect/designer that Crump paid. It was good advice. Look at what emerged!
Bret, With the worker shortages and other obstacles caused by the war, what a lesson Pine Valley must have been in regard to the importance of creating a company of designers, experts and builders to bring the new, much more complex Golden Age golf courses to fruition. They were building modern-day pyramids, just like the Keisers, Doak, Schneider, Zager, and all of the others have done at the Lido today.
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This is a fine thread and I don't want to thread-jack it too much or get into the weeds, because Sven and others are doing a fine job of that. Instead, I will comment by way of comparison to the "Second Golden Age" which I have been living through.
Sven's description of the first Golden Age really resonated with me:
I think the best way to look at the evolution of American design is to think of all of the players almost acting in concert. Travis was sharing ideas with CBM, until he wasn't. Emmet was talking to everyone and anyone who would listen. They all stopped in on Donald when they came down to Pinehurst in the winter. Everyone knew Leeds had done something special at Myopia and Fownes was on his way to doing something pretty cool up in Pittsburgh. Tillie was in the background learning and writing, and even guys like George Thomas were on their way to caching away the information they'd need to produce masterpieces down the line. Some of these guys were amateurs, with their focus on one or a few courses only. Others were professionals who were called in as experts on big money projects or filled the void when a course was going to be built without the local knowledge to make it happen. We often draw a line in these parts between the pros and the ams in this realm, but in reality they were probably all drinking from the same cup, one that was first filled by mother nature, later by Tom Morris and his ilk and then further a bit more be each of them in their own way.
This was a spider web of activity, ideas, inspirations and debates. When the market for development truly arrived post-World War I, the web only grew with more players being added on nearly a daily basis. There was room for Raynor and his millionaire CBM connected clients, for Langford and his bold features, for Flynn and his nature-faking, for everything taking place in California, for Willie Park to be the hottest name in town, for the Old Man to shape his greens, for Emmet to plug away into eternity, for Macan and Egan to build the Northwest, for a banker in Oklahoma to shape dirt into rolls, you get my point.
To put all of this on the influence of any one person or any one small collection of courses built in one year seems a bit simplistic.
I agree with all of that. "Historians gotta explain history," I guess, but it is always oversimplified. As N.N. Taleb pointed out in one of his books, when you look at histories of medicine or aviation or technology, they tend to focus on the Oxford-Cambridge-Ivy League theorists, and leave out the people who tinkered around and made the thing work, because they are written by fellow Oxford-Cambridge-Ivy Leaguers who believe that history is a neat timeline, instead of a spider web. That was my problem with Keith's book, as well. Declaring one guy the most important guy in the Golden Age [or the second] is a study in bias.
But Sven's description matches my own experience in this newer Golden Age. By the time I graduated college and left for Scotland, I had already met Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and Pete Dye and Tom Weiskopf and Deane Beman, among others. I met Dick Youngscap ten years before Sand Hills, and Ron Whitten and Brad Klein before that, and Mike Keiser five years before Bandon Dunes, and Ran Morrissett several years before Golf Club Atlas. And, just like me, guys like Gil Hanse and Mike DeVries and Kyle Franz started meeting these same people very early in their forays into the golf business.
I guess a spider web is a poor analogy, too, though, because one spider creates the web, and there's no fair way to give just one of the people above credit as the leader of the movement. For example, I give Mr. Dye credit for teaching both me and Bill his methods of construction-based design as opposed to plan-based, and we have taught that in turn to everyone who worked for us . . . but our interest in minimalist design is a separate thread from Pete, and something we admired from seeing Golden Age courses and reading books and talking to Ben Crenshaw.
But then there will be someone who comes along a hundred years from now and credits it all to the landscape architecture program at Cornell, because Gil and I both went there.
P.S. I got a laugh out of Jeff Brauer talking about how ASGCA forges such connections. Maybe so, but the spider web I describe above was all outside of ASGCA, and somewhat deliberately so -- one thing all of us had in common, apart from Mr. Dye, was that we were not members of the establishment, which tended to look down on "construction guys" back then.
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Tom, In this thread, one of the things I have been writing about really has been the idea that "declaring one guy the most important guy in the Golden Age (or the second) is a study in bias." I think that the fog of war and time, the marketing prowess of Ross and the organized nature of his legacy, and the human tendency to reduce the past to a simple "neat timeline" has led historians, even today, to give Ross too much credit for what happened in the past, especially in the years just before the start of WW1, the first stage of the Golden Age. I believe that Harry Colt was instrumental in sparking the Golden Age in North America when he made three lengthy trips to North America in 1911, 1913 and 1914. MacDonald was just as important, perhaps Tillinghast and Travis too. Agree with you that there isn't too much point in trying to assess each one's relative impact.
I believe Ross's most influential impact is in the second (the war years) and third phases (the post-war boom) of the Golden Age. He started creating masterpieces midway through WW1, perhaps from 1916 to 1921, when he (and his golf course building organization of experts and artisans) was the one putting the paint on the canvas. These include Plainfield, Scioto, Oakland Hills, Inverness, and Oak Hill. He did create others later in his career such as Seminole and Aronimink and there were the long term projects at Essex and Pinehurst 2 and 4.
In 1913, during the nine days he spent at Old Elm, Ross took a masterclass from Harry Colt in the design and construction of golf courses, just like you and Bill and others with Pete Dye. It was the catalyst and turning point in Ross's meteoric career. It didn't take long for Ross to assimilate Colt's ideas and start his own run of brilliance. In the same way that the design principles of Colt's new golf courses were based on Oxcam, Tillinghast's and Flynn's ideas sprouted out of the Philly School. I think Colt was construction-based too. Before he arrived in Detroit and Toronto in 1911, he had spent years tinkering on a daily basis in his lab and in the ground at Sunningdale working out how to build a great golf course.
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John,
In reading all of your posts, my conclusion is that you think that Ross gets too much credit as the force behind the Golden Age and that Colt does not get enough credit. But this strikes me as a bit of a Straw Man debate. I do not remember people overselling Ross’s influence. As many have pointed out, he was one of many architects that prompted and produced the Golden Age. Nor do I remember people underselling Colt’s role, especially given Pine Valley. The reality and common understanding is what Sven, Tom, and others have stated: there were quite a few architects who interacted directly and indirectly to construct the greatest era of gca that the US has ever seen. Some architects probably get too much credit and some too little. However, I am not aware of any claim that Ross is the Father of the Golden Age.
Ira
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It’s probably true that Donald Ross gets too much credit for the Golden Age, and Harry Colt not enough.
The reason for that is just that Ross built 400 courses whose members want to put him on the pedestal, and Colt built only a handful in the USA. Plus there is Pinehurst Resort touting Mr Ross 24/7/365. I think the actual historians are less sold on Ross’s preeminence.
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The primary idea I had hoped to put forward in this post was that Harry Colt's 1913 trip to North America, and also his 1911 and 1914 trips if we think of the three visits as one, was a landmark in our golf architectural history that has been hidden in plain sight for a century. I hope my main thesis does not get obscured because I have focused too much on Donald Ross's role at Old Elm or his work in pre WW1 gca history. I believe Ross is the Old Tom Morris or Henry Ford of the U.S. and his contributions were great.
I believe we have lost sight of Colt's importance to the Golden Age in North America and of the golf course masterpieces Colt created during that brief and diminished moment in time.
Of course, it's not completely true. We now know that Pine Valley emerged from Colt's 1913 visit. It isn't that long ago, however, that Colt did not receive as much credit for Pine Valley, so there has been in one way or another a growing recognition of his impact on creating the U.S.'s greatest course. In Golf Magazine's recently announced rankings, Pine Valley is #1 and it's listed as "Crump/Colt" and not "Crump" or "Crump et al."
If what Colt did at Pine Valley is any indication of what he was capable of at this fertile period in his life, we should know much more about what else he accomplished in his work in North America. He wasn't a one-hit wonder!
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We now know that Pine Valley emerged from Colt's 1913 visit.
And here's the crux of the issue. Pine Valley was in the works prior to Colt's involvement, and there are a slew of other names who influenced Crump (Fowler, MacDonald, Travis, etc.) or contributed to the final product (Tillinghast, Flynn, Toomey, Wilson and Maxwell).
The way you describe just doesn't tell the whole story.
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We now know that Pine Valley emerged from Colt's 1913 visit.
And here's the crux of the issue. Pine Valley was in the works prior to Colt's involvement, and there are a slew of other names who influenced Crump (Fowler, MacDonald, Travis, etc.) or contributed to the final product (Tillinghast, Flynn, Toomey, Wilson and Maxwell).
The way you describe just doesn't tell the whole story.
Of course this is true. PV would have happened without Colt. But it is fair to ask what it would have been like.
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Where did we ever get to with the great blue line/red line drawing debate?
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Thanks Marty! Let's not get thread-jack this into the whole PV morass.
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We now know that Pine Valley emerged from Colt's 1913 visit.
And here's the crux of the issue. Pine Valley was in the works prior to Colt's involvement, and there are a slew of other names who influenced Crump (Fowler, MacDonald, Travis, etc.) or contributed to the final product (Tillinghast, Flynn, Toomey, Wilson and Maxwell).
The way you describe just doesn't tell the whole story.
Of course this is true. PV would have happened without Colt. But it is fair to ask what it would have been like.
Adam, that's not the point.
No one is trying to undersell Colt or his influence at PV or elsewhere. And I don't think, as John has asserted, any of us around here think his visits to the US didn't have an impact or have "been hiding in plain sight."
Just like the Golden Age itself, PV had many players.
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No one is trying to undersell Colt or his influence at PV or elsewhere. And I don't think, as John has asserted, any of us around here think his visits to the US didn't have an impact or have "been hiding in plain sight."
I will say, it never really occurred to me that Colt's influence on golf design in America was nearly as important as Ross's or MacKenzie's or Tillinghast's. I came to that idea mostly on the basis of volume.
But I will agree that the impact of personal connections is very important, and trumps the common belief that certain courses have an outsized impact on what everyone else is building.
In the modern era, it's some of both. Sand Hills is not nearly as influential as people say it is, because there aren't many other properties where you can build a course like that. However, the "frilly bunkers" at Sand Hills and Pacific Dunes have been much-imitated by designers in the past 20 years, just like the waste bunkers and island greens of the TPC at Sawgrass were copy-catted by Jack Nicklaus, Arthur Hills, and others in the 1980's and 90's.
By the same token, the fact that Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and I have been friends for decades, and so many of the people we've worked with have gotten to know each other and work together, has been a big impact on a lot of courses in this era. I'd like to think that depth of understanding is more important than the frilly bunkers others copy.
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Tom, What you say makes sense. Colt did not have much volume in North America. WW1 saw to that. Colt did come to North America with the message that copying even the best features and holes of other courses, i.e. template holes, was wrongheaded. It can't have been all wrong because that design philosophy became the underpinning for some of the greatest courses ever built.
When Harry Colt arrived in Chicago in April of 1913, the April issue of "Golf" had just been published. The Editor of "Golf" was Max Behr, who later authored his famous essays laying out his ideas on "permanent architecture" and "hiding the architect's hand." It was the rival magazine to Walter Travis' American Golfer.
Everybody in the golf world in North America - architects, intellectuals, constructors, golf club board members, and golfers - read these two magazines from cover to cover. Behr was an excellent golfer who had lost twice in the finals of the New Jersey Amateur in 1907 and 1908 to Jerry Travers. It seems likely that Max Behr leaned towards Philadelphia and Walter Travis towards Long Island. After the Amateur Championship in 1904, Travis was not enamored of the British and, as mentioned in an earlier post, he was aligned with Ross. Is it possible that Colt was forced on Ross, who had previously visited Old Elm (and Glen View Club) in February 1913, and on Crump by the persuasion of his friends? Perhaps, Colt hoped Ross or even Crump might be a good partner and collaborator in North America, but it was not to be. Too bad he didn't find Stanley Thompson when he was in Canada.
In his April 1913 issue, Behr chose for his long lead article, "Golf Architecture" by the Englishman Harry Colt. The second installment appears as the lead article in the May 1913 issue. The timing of the two articles coincides exactly with the dates of Colt's groundbreaking North American journey which started in April at Old Elm in Chicago and ended in May at Pine Valley in New Jersey.
During Colt's time in North America in 1913, his ideas about golf course architecture would have been on everyone's mind. Max Behr, who went to Lawrencevile in New Jersey, would have known everybody in the Philadelphia and New Jersey golf world. No wonder Colt found his way to Pine Valley.
There is one photo that precedes Colt's April article captioned "Humps and hollows at Mid-Surrey." Colt addresses these humps and hollows immediately; "now we have what is known as the Alpinization of courses, and the few rough mounds which have been made for many years past develop into continuous ranges on every new course. A good idea is worn threadbare in next to no time in golf course construction." It seems to be a distant echo of what you said about frilly bunkers, waste bunkers and island greens.
Colt addresses CB's template philosophy and then distills his own in this lucid and modest statement. "The attempt at reproducing well-known holes with hopelessly different materials is the most futile nonsense of the lot. How often have I seen a piece ground suitable for a good short hole spoilt by a silly attempt at reproducing the 11th hole at St. Andrews (this is the Eden hole). No; I firmly believe that the only means whereby an attractive piece of ground can be turned into a satisfying golf course is to work to the natural features of the site in question. Develop them if necessary, but not too much; and if there are many nice features, leave them alone as far as possible, but utilize them to their fullest extent, and eventually there will be a chance of obtaining a course with individual character of an impressive nature."
It seems like the great architects of today, you and Bill and Ben and Gil and others, and Pete, are descendants of Harry Colt more than C.B. MacDonald. To whatever degree the Oxcam design ideas that Colt developed and put into the dirt around the world and for a brief moment in North America were not lost in the fog and disintegration of time, perhaps they returned triumphant to inhabit the Second Golden Age.
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It seems like the great architects of today, you and Bill and Ben and Gil and others, and Pete, are descendants of Harry Colt more than C.B. MacDonald. To whatever degree the Oxcam design ideas that Colt developed and put into the dirt around the world and for a brief moment in North America were not lost in the fog and disintegration of time, perhaps they returned triumphant to inhabit the Second Golden Age.
Now you're telling me what my own influences are? C'mon, man.
I believe the biggest influence on Ben Crenshaw was C.B. Macdonald. That's whose work he talks about the most.
Both Bill and I would credit Pete Dye for teaching us how to build golf courses, but I don't think either of us would say he was the biggest influence, stylistically. For me, it was Alister MacKenzie. For Bill, it is Perry Maxwell. For that matter, I heard Pete more than once describe the influence of Donald Ross on his work, and also Seth Raynor and MacKenzie and Maxwell and even Bill Langford, but I never heard him mention Colt as an influence.
That's not to say we don't admire (and borrow from) the works of many different architects, from Old Tom Morris to Mr. Dye. We do. And our work has evolved over time; mine looks less like MacKenzie's than it used to. But if you grew up in America, Harry Colt is probably not going to be your main influence.
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Tom, Forgive me...just reached too far!
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John
It seems to me you are trying hard to show Colt's visit as a eureka moment for gca in the US and in the process almost discounting what went before. Can I suggest that you look up an old thread on here on the Oxford Cambridge Tour to the US in 1903. There is some great stuff from Bob Crosby and others on Low etc. That thread alone will show you the connections running between the two countries, that were long established before Colt arrived in the US.
Niall
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Thanks Niall. I will read that one...next. For the last 2+ hours, I have been reading the "Was Charles Blair Macdonald really the father of Golf Architecture in America" thread. I'm less than half way through. As a newbie, I can only say "wow."
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It seems like the great architects of today, you and Bill and Ben and Gil and others, and Pete, are descendants of Harry Colt more than C.B. MacDonald. To whatever degree the Oxcam design ideas that Colt developed and put into the dirt around the world and for a brief moment in North America were not lost in the fog and disintegration of time, perhaps they returned triumphant to inhabit the Second Golden Age.
Now you're telling me what my own influences are? C'mon, man.
I believe the biggest influence on Ben Crenshaw was C.B. Macdonald. That's whose work he talks about the most.
Both Bill and I would credit Pete Dye for teaching us how to build golf courses, but I don't think either of us would say he was the biggest influence, stylistically. For me, it was Alister MacKenzie. For Bill, it is Perry Maxwell. For that matter, I heard Pete more than once describe the influence of Donald Ross on his work, and also Seth Raynor and MacKenzie and Maxwell and even Bill Langford, but I never heard him mention Colt as an influence.
That's not to say we don't admire (and borrow from) the works of many different architects, from Old Tom Morris to Mr. Dye. We do. And our work has evolved over time; mine looks less like MacKenzie's than it used to. But if you grew up in America, Harry Colt is probably not going to be your main influence.
Tom -
This was the best post I've read on here in some time. Thank you.
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As someone new to this online community, I hope you all might permit me, and I am asking for a lot of forgiveness in advance, to make some observations about this community because I am experiencing it for the first time.
There are some third rails here that I have touched upon. Two that I have run into are 1. saying something that could be perceived to be critical about Donald Ross and 2. examining the authorship of Pine Valley. I am sure there are more. It's healthy, isn't it, for a community to understand the subjects to be avoided, especially if we want to avoid groupthink and to determine what happened in golf history?
There is a hunger here for more history. In reading the debates about architecture from 2000-2010, and how heated they became, I can see why the history posts were so magnetic and why they have become more infrequent. Those were the early days of online conversation and rules of civility were ignored. Those "rules" are absent in open online communities like twitter but they can be managed in closed communities.
Also, it seems like many of the historians are for the most part not engaging. When I make an assertion such as "I think Behr leaned towards New Jersey and Philadelphia and Travis leaned towards Long Island," a Travis expert isn't responding "no; here is what I know and how I think about it." Where are the MacWoods and why aren't they participating as often? Is it all about the money or did they all stop posting as much when the debates became overly emotional? There isn't some other forum for open sharing of gca information and fierce debate. Golf Club Atlas, which has and will have its place in history in its own right, is where a search for historical truth of golf history can best take place today. Of course, the history has not all been written or locked in stone.
Writing about history is by definition going to be reductionistic. We pick out certain events or forces and look for themes. I know when I talk about Colt's trips and assert their lost importance to the history of golf architecture in North America, perhaps making an assertion that has not been made in quite the same way in this forum, then it is by definition ignoring all of the other people and trends that were developing pre and during the period 1911-1914.
Certainly there is more to be discovered about the history of the Golden Age, and the Second Golden Age, especially in this era of the digitization of newspapers and magazines. I have come to this history, perhaps in a fresh way, because I am relatively new to the subject and have been buried in the newspapers of 1913. I am grateful to Ran and Tom, and all of you that are passionate about golf history, to have a place to talk about it. When I talk about the history at my golf club, most people's eyes glaze over.
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John:
Tom MacWood passed away a while back. A few others [including Sven] have stepped up to fill his role here.
The thing I struggle with about history is that most historians have a premise going into their research to find some sweeping narrative, instead of allowing that history might be made by lots and lots of people [both famous and not] making little contributions to progress.
It's very much the same way that a great golf course is built. You've got lots of people contributing good ideas, but the architect usually gets too much credit, and then years later some self-appointed record-keeper tries to prove that contributor "D" [out of ABCDEFG who all contributed] was really the key guy behind the project.
Meanwhile, we're living in an age where history is being made in the field of golf design, and no one is doing a good job of documenting who did what, right now! There are tons of people trying to grab more credit than they are really due for this project or that, because their future earnings depend on it. I am doing as best I can to try and document who helped with my own work and where, but most other architects do not.
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John:
Tom MacWood passed away a while back. A few others [including Sven] have stepped up to fill his role here.
The thing I struggle with about history is that most historians have a premise going into their research to find some sweeping narrative, instead of allowing that history might be made by lots and lots of people [both famous and not] making little contributions to progress.
It's very much the same way that a great golf course is built. You've got lots of people contributing good ideas, but the architect usually gets too much credit, and then years later some self-appointed record-keeper tries to prove that contributor "D" [out of ABCDEFG who all contributed] was really the key guy behind the project.
Meanwhile, we're living in an age where history is being made in the field of golf design, and no one is doing a good job of documenting who did what, right now! There are tons of people trying to grab more credit than they are really due for this project or that, because their future earnings depend on it. I am doing as best I can to try and document who helped with my own work and where, but most other architects do not.
Tom
Its almost impossible not to present history as a sweeping narrative if we want to avoid getting bogged down. I think people naturally try to link a narrative to what they know or have experienced. I think (at least I hope) everybody understands that a relatively small amount of golf and any history is not fully understood, partly because people either don't know which questions to ask or which threads to pull. History is really just a bunch of loosely related data points. Its the narrative/PoV which brings the story to life. Some things won't be accurate, but thats ok so long as the author is willing to learn along the way.
Ciao
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John:
Tom MacWood passed away a while back. A few others [including Sven] have stepped up to fill his role here.
The thing I struggle with about history is that most historians have a premise going into their research to find some sweeping narrative, instead of allowing that history might be made by lots and lots of people [both famous and not] making little contributions to progress.
It's very much the same way that a great golf course is built. You've got lots of people contributing good ideas, but the architect usually gets too much credit, and then years later some self-appointed record-keeper tries to prove that contributor "D" [out of ABCDEFG who all contributed] was really the key guy behind the project.
Meanwhile, we're living in an age where history is being made in the field of golf design, and no one is doing a good job of documenting who did what, right now! There are tons of people trying to grab more credit than they are really due for this project or that, because their future earnings depend on it. I am doing as best I can to try and document who helped with my own work and where, but most other architects do not.
Tom
Its almost impossible to present a sweeping narrative wigthout getting bogged down. I think people naturally try to link a narrative to what they know or have experienced. I think (at least I hope) everybody understands that a relatively small amount of golf and any history is not fully understood, partly because people either don't know which questions to ask or which threads to pull. History is really just a bunch of loosely related data points. Its the narrative/PoV which brings the story to life. Some things won't be accurate, but thats ok so long as the author is willing to learn along the way.
Ciao
I like that Sean, maybe reality is similar to a quilt with each of us adding a patch. Without many patches the quilt is never formed. We have to be willing to accept other people's views and although we may not agree it adds to the narrative and knowledge. I mean threads are great, but we all know when some of us get together and bore any non-golfer to death with geeked out GCA talk.
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There are some third rails here that I have touched upon. Two that I have run into are 1. saying something that could be perceived to be critical about Donald Ross and 2. examining the authorship of Pine Valley. I am sure there are more. It's healthy, isn't it, for a community to understand the subjects to be avoided, especially if we want to avoid groupthink and to determine what happened in golf history?
John, a proper discussion group should never have third rails where worthy topics would be considered off-limits. I highly disagree with your suggestion of such, nor do I think your points #1 and #2 have even occurred in this thread. No one has rebuffed your claim that Old Elm should be considered a Colt design and Ross construction. At most, a few people might interpret a co-design from the primary sources (I don't, it's a Colt for me), but absolutely no one has commented on you being unfair or overly critical of Ross. It isn't until Reply 46 that you claim Ross gets credited for too much in the past, and yes, your club and Bloomfield both failed--for a period of time--to recognize their Colt heritage.
As for Pine Valley, Sven corrected you primarily because of the language of your claim, that PV "emerged" from Colt's 1913 visit. PV would've existed had Colt visited or not. The extent to which his involvement influenced what PV is today, however, is completely fair game.
Also, it seems like many of the historians are for the most part not engaging.
Your thread has received detailed contributions from Sven, Anthony Gholz, Bret Lawrence, Dan Moore, and others. And by all accounts, everyone has accepted part of your central thesis, that Colt's visits to America formulated an important--and once overlooked--moment in American golf history. Where the community seems to remain unconvinced, however, pertains to your repeated assertion that Colt's visit can be designated as "the Start of the Golden Age in America" per your thread's subject heading. In the original post you write, "Perhaps it's hyperbole, but Colt’s 1913 visit might be the most critical step in the history of golf architecture in the United States." All I've seen through this rewarding, educational, and thoughtful thread are community members informing you that, yes, this claim of yours is hyperbole, and you may want to rephrase the (agreed upon) significance of Colt's time in the US.
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I first want to say I've thoroughly enjoyed this thread since it started. While I appreciate John's chronology of events to support his claim of Colt having ushered in the golden age of golf course architecture, I disagree with it for reasons previously stated by others in addition to one that's yet to be mentioned and that's the growth and influx of money during this period, which led to the formation of the upper and middle classes that made it possible.
The U.S. economy saw a boom like no other in its history during the 1910's and 1920's (the Industrial Age). There was a new millionaire being minted every day seemingly during this period. Golf, while still in its infancy in the U.S., became the sport of choice of the rich and well to do. Anyone with money and influence wanted a golf course, if not several, built in their backyards. This led to the unprecedented growth in the sport and untold opportunities for architects of all manner and ilk. Anyone competent and capable in the art form that wanted work, had work - Donald Ross being the biggest receipient as a result of his ability to churn out courses from topographical maps and hire crews capable of successfully executing his plans without him being on-site. The explosion of golf course development across the country during this period enabled architects such as Mackenzie, Thomas, Raynor, Langford, Park Jr., Tillinghast, Allison, Watson, etc. to establish territories in which they thrived. Each brought their own unique style and talents to the craft, which were influenced and informed by where they came from, what they had seen/experienced and who they networked with.
To assert Colt's influence above everything that took place before him in the golf architecture space is giving him too much credit, while diminishing the work of the great U.S. golf architecture pioneers that preceded him. Harry Colt no doubt left an indelible mark on the vocation that's felt to this day. His influence echoes and resonates with many of today's modern age architects. However, to give Colt top-billing as the impetus behind the golden age of golf course architecture seems to be based a bit more in fandom than reality, as this would have occurred with or without him.
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John,
This is a terrific thread. You had the guts to offer a bold thesis. Some of the best historians on this board thought it worthy of multiple detailed responses. They may not have agreed fully with your thesis, but the purpose of the discussion is to evaluate and amend based on the best available evidence. There really are no third rails here.
Ironically enough, to the extent that there has been a Colt v Ross undertone to the thread, I remember well another thread where Tom Doak stated that of the architects who designed more than a hundred courses, the two on which he would be glad to put his name are Colt and Ross.
Long way of saying, you should not shy away from posting. And others will not shy away from disagreeing. That is what makes threads like this one so engrossing.
Ira
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Thank you Ira and Michael C and Mike B! Hope it's ok not to close the book on this period from 1911 to 1914. Sven set me on reading Shack's book, "The Golden Age of Design" which a friend just lent to me.
In the first pages of the book on p.15, he says, "The first full-time architect to leave a lasting impression on the game was H.S. Colt, who...was also instrumental in the early planning stages of Pine Valley Golf Club, perhaps the benchmark design of the Golden Age."
It is reductionistic to say that Pine Valley is the benchmark, which is different than the high point, of the Golden Age. Do you agree with Shackelford or do you think NGLA led the way?
If the Golden Age started between 1911 and 1914 and we want to look at those first years of the Golden Age with a wider lens to identify the top golf courses that were launched or started up in this period, we could add Merion and perhaps Oakmont. Those four courses are really the primary ones we can see from our vantage point today. Chicago GC, Myopia, Garden City, Brookline, Essex County, Ekwanok, and Onwentsia all sprung out of the earlier era.
If we examine the newspapers and golf magazines from those four years, what other courses did the cognoscenti and the futurists of the time identify? It seems important because it would help to identify what we can no longer see as clearly.
Another question: what golf course was the benchmark of the Golden Age in the British Isles where the Golden Age might have started a little earlier? North Americans looked to the British Isles for the source code, firstly St. Andrews, and for an understanding of what was most current and state-of-the-art in new golf course design.
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John -
This is a great thread - thanks for starting and maintaining it.
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John -
This is a great thread - thanks for starting and maintaining it.
Here, here!
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John -
This is a great thread - thanks for starting and maintaining it.
Here, here!
Hear, hear.
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John:
Why start at 1911? Copied below are a series of articles (sampled from what I have readily available as there are plenty more on this subject available from this time period) describing the transition of thought on golf architecture in America from the more penal school of design to a more natural and/or strategic thought process. I particularly noted the description of what CBM was doing as a retention of "principles" as opposed to the formulation of templates, as I believe that more accurately describes the intentions and practices inherent in the development of his "ideal course."
There are also hints as to some of the more stoic architects evincing their own evolution. The 1903 Spalding article was most likely penned by Tom Bendelow, who edited that publication. In just about every article, the thought that you should work with what the land gives you is presented, and that natural features should be used in the most advantageous way.
Finally, the Emmet article included at the end has perhaps the best post mortem I've read on the evolution of the Golden Age of Golf Course Architecture. Not only does he discuss a date earlier than 1911 as the impetus of the Age, but he spends some words on how courses should be accessible to all classes of players, perhaps suggesting that the zenith of course design isn't those courses that we see at the top of the rankings, but those that invite the weaker player to improve his game while still presenting enough challenge for the better player to hone his.
The term "Golden Age" in the world of golf really has two meanings. The most obvious is the period of time when golf course construction was at its peak, which in the US was the 1920's. But the exercise of an idea always follows its conception, and the articles above show when those ideas were first bantered about.
Let us not confuse when courses were being built from when the ideas that went into the designs of those courses first evolved.
April 29, 1897 The Amateur Athlete -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Course_Layout_-_The_Amateur_Athlete_April_29_1897_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Course_Layout_-_The_Amateur_Athlete_April_29_1897_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Course_Layout_-_The_Amateur_Athlete_April_29_1897_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Course_Layout_-_The_Amateur_Athlete_April_29_1897_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
Feb. 1898 Golf Magazine -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(1)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(1)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(2)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(2)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(3)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(3)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(4)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Ideal_Course_(4)_-_Golf_Magazine_Feb._1898.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
Nov. 1902 Golf Magazine -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Travis_Remodeling_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1902_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
1903 Spalding Official Golf Guide -
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Nov. 1903 Golf Magazine -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/American_Courses_-_Golf_Magazine_Nov._1903_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
Jan. 1906 Golfers Magazine -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Noted_Holes_-_Golfers_Magazine_Jan._1906.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Noted_Holes_-_Golfers_Magazine_Jan._1906.png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
Oct. 1910 Golf Magazine -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Bunkering_-_Golf_Magazine_Oct._1910_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
Aug. 1917 Golf Illustrated -
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(1).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(2).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(3).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(4).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(4).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(5).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds) (https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/cc435/snilsen7/Emmet_Economy_-_Golf_Illustrated_Aug._1917_(5).png?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds)
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Sven, In complete agreement with you that the underlying ideas of the Golden Age and their evolution preceded the building of new courses and that the Golden Age peak was the 1920s. I do believe the first Golden Age courses were launched or started before WW1 intervened and postponed the eventual explosion. NGLA, Merion, Pine Valley are most obvious examples. Oakmont was probably still too penal.
Hope you and others might consider posting about these questions:
In the actual newspapers and golf magazines of 1911 - 1914, what golf courses were the experts identifying as the best of the "new new thing" in golf course design? What did they identify as the best courses in those years, especially when they weren't looking to the earlier era?
Also, what golf courses started or launched in Europe between 1907 - 1914 were the benchmark courses of the Golden Age there, both in terms of what is visible today and in the newspapers and golf mags of the time?
The articles you posted are really extraordinary. It's great to read the Walter Travis article about the "good and weak" holes from November 1902. Is this the famous article from the early GCA debates about whether Travis preceded MacDonald in conceptualizing ideal holes and putting them into the ground? The Best Holes Discussion series started 2.15.1901. It does seem like Travis, whose career was mostly in remodels, is writing about how to upgrade old-fashioned courses rather than about building a course of ideal holes. It is an interesting question and is and has been worthy of its own thread.
Almost fell out of my chair when I read the Bramston article from November 1903. Could he really have been viewing the land Pine Valley eventually was built upon? Has this article been discussed elsewhere?
As you suggest, the pieces from Bendelow in 1903 and Emmet in 1917 seem to have a similar spirit and theme. Let the natural land dictate the golf course, bring down the expense, create more golfers. Do you think Emmet is reacting to Walter Travis' expensive remodels, esp Garden City?
Harold Hilton seems to be writing about the point Tom Doak made earlier. Bunkers became such a fad that many architects stopped using them judiciously. They overbunkered and indiscriminately spread them out all over the course and in the wrong places.
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John
It seems to me you are trying hard to show Colt's visit as a eureka moment for gca in the US and in the process almost discounting what went before. Can I suggest that you look up an old thread on here on the Oxford Cambridge Tour to the US in 1903. There is some great stuff from Bob Crosby and others on Low etc. That thread alone will show you the connections running between the two countries, that were long established before Colt arrived in the US.
Niall
I found the thread that Bob Crosby started in December 2008. It is a terrific and relevant read that ties together several themes and questions raised in the current thread.
Niall, thanks. I wish I knew how to post it here.
Ira
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Ira:
Just go to that thread and make a new post, and it should come back up to the top of the discussion board - unless threads from that far back are somehow blocked?
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Or go to the post, press and hold on the title and you’ll get to copy the link to the post which you can then paste here…
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https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38023.msg786147.html#msg786147 (https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38023.msg786147.html#msg786147)
Thanks. I think it worked.
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Thanks Niall and Ira. Here are my open questions and one more.
1. In the newspapers and golf magazines of pre-WW1, what courses either launched or started up from 1911 to 1914 were identified by experts of the era as the top golf courses in North America?
2. Shackelford said that Pine Valley was the benchmark golf course of the Golden Age. Do you agree or think that it might have been NGLA? What other new pre-WW1 courses would you put on a broader list?
3. What golf course (or courses) was the benchmark of the pre-WW1 Golden Age in Europe?
4. Do you think if C.B. MacDonald, the father of U.S. golf, had designed golf courses in pre-WW1 Europe that his courses would have been revered then and now?
5. Did Bramston really see the land for Pine Valley from the back of a train in 1903?
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Thank you for this link to the August/September 1903 Oxcam vs US matches.
The evolution of ideas that led to Golden Age was in its opening stages. In the 2008 Bob Crosby thread, he says, "people were trying not terribly successful at first - to articulate the basic organizing principles of good golf design. And the starting point for those discussions was - quite naturally the great holes...people were trying to tease out what made them (the best holes) so good."
My contention, and it is reductionistic as is all history, is that the idea stage of golf course design evolution from the penal to the strategic phase, from the Victorian to the Golden Age, started in 1903 when John Low published "Concerning Golf" and laid out the new design ideas.
Bob Crosby says, "It was a landmark book. No one before or since (my italics) has expressed so clearly and forcefully the basic principles of strategic golf design." Perhaps, the next landmark book on golf course design, "The Links," was written by Robert Hunter in 1926 at the peak of the Golden Age. According to Cutten, "In 1912, Hunter was on family trip to Britain when he met Harry Colt; who, in turn, introduced him to Alister MacKenzie. On the same trip, Robert Hunter invested six important months in studying the great courses of the British Isles."
John Low and Harry Colt were as close as brothers. There was nobody Colt respected more than Low. If John Low was the father of the idea stage of the Golden Age, Harry Colt was the father of the golf course architecture phase of the Golden Age. CB Macdonald was the father too, but as you know I am working on the Colt case!
Many of the 1903 Oxcam amateur golfers were the very same architects who won away the top architectural jobs from the penal-style professionals when the business of building new courses started back up in the British Isles later in the decade. These Oxcam architects were new wave and fundamentally Low-inspired. The relationship between the British and the Americans was extremely contentious in the years 1903 to 1910. In 1904, one year after the 1903 Oxcam trip to the U.S., Walter Travis won the Amateur Championship. Travis felt he had been shabbily treated at Sandwich. Darwin later called Travis "a rat in a cage." The contentiousness of 1903 turned into a full-blown American-British feud.
During the 1903 matches, The American editor of Golf, van Tassel Stuphen, was incensed at Horace Hutchinson for claiming that the Americans didn't show the proper sportsmanship. The British claimed the Americans were too serious and competitive with a lack of spirit for playing the game for the game's sake. Stuphen was also "apparently...imbued with some pretty heavy national pride" and felt the Oxcam players were unfairly chosen and far more experienced than the Americans. The British said they brought in a team that did not include their top amateurs, such as Ball and Hilton.The British trounced the Americans hurting their national pride. A few months later, in Golf Magazine, JAT Bramston of the Oxcam team presented a balanced but quite critical report on the American courses the team had played on and identified Myopia as the "finest wine." Sven posted the article above.
The bad feelings were still not resolved in 1910, seven years later, when the final stages of Travis' grudge battle over the Schenectady putter came to a head. The argument divided the Americans and broke up the friendship between Travis and CB Macdonald. Based on a January 1911 newspaper article posted by Mike Cirba in GCA, at the "sensational" annual USGA meeting, the delegates worked out a compromise agreeing to adhere to the R&A rules of golf without the rule on the "form and make" of clubs, which allowed use of the Schenectady putter in the U.S.. At the meeting, before the official board debate about the putter, the slate of officers was "rushed through" and Silas Strawn of Chicago was elected president.
Earlier, in the "room where it happened" at a luncheon in the office of Silas Strawn, the lawyer, the compromise was worked out. My speculation about what happened is this: Led by Silas Strawn, Chicago and Western delegates joined with Travis-led Easterners in a majority coalition and agreed to support Travis' position on the putter and to elect Strawn without any debate. Travis felt vindicated, though it seems like he never gave up his grudge for the British. CB Macdonald was enraged. Again, he was thwarted: he was not elected president, and not even as an element of the compromise. The board did line the resolution with statements of reliance on the R&A as the ruling body of golf.
In the official board meeting, the Garden City delegate, perhaps a Travis ally, put up a public show of support for CB Macdonald's position to adhere to the R&A rules and the Chicago delegate from Homewood provided a rationale for the board not to ban the Schenectady putter. Macdonald had spent his life building relationships in the British Isles and with the members of the R&A. In a few years, it would be time to put aside toxic nationalism and petty argument.
Is it possible that the enmity between American and British golfers that started up in the 1903 Oxcam matches and that broke into open recrimination during the 1904 Amateur Championship, never dissipated from 1905 to 1907 and turned into a flat-out war from 1908 to 1911 over the Schenectady putter? Was CB Macdonald, who perhaps was more of a diplomat than he is given credit for, the one left holding the bag to smooth over the damage with the R&A and the Oxcam community? Who were the allies of Walter Travis? Perhaps, Donald Ross and H.H. Barker, and many others, in the golf professional world. As Ross and Barker sought to build their careers into golf courses, Walter Travis was an essential connector because of the marketing value of his publication, American Golfer. Who were the most powerful amateurs in the East on Travis' side?
In this era, identities were so tribal and the divisions so intense. I was reading a history of Onwentsia and the author, David Sweet, quotes Hobart Chatfield-Taylor who wrote, "That year of '96 (1896) was, in the parlance of the streets, the 'fiercest' year golf has known in the West. 'Chicago Society' was divided by the rival camps of 'Wheaton' and "Onwentsia.'...feelings rans so high that families were divided, and the members of the rival clubs were scarcely on speaking terms." They were competing for the golf championship of the West.The lines between people in the golf world, the splits and feuds, and the fierce competition was everywhere, and it wasn't just on the golf course.
Amateur vs Professional: This split didn't begin to heal until Walter Hagen and Inverness in 1920. Chick Evans and Francis Ouimet who grew up as caddies were caught in the middle and fought their entire lives for their amateur status and dignity. The savage wrangle over the definition of an amateur and a professional carried on for years.
England vs Scotland: In his new book, Stephen Proctor reverently describes how John Ball's wins in 1890 brought this golf rivalry of the 1880s and 1890s to a head.
England vs U.S.: The 1903 Oxcam visit, Travis' 1904 win, and the Schenectady putter controversy.
North America vs British Isles: Ouimet's win was as monumental in 1913 as John Ball's in 1890.
East vs West and the USGA vs the WGA. CB Macdonald vs Walter Travis. Walter Travis vs Devereaux Emmet. Walter Travis vs Max Behr. American Golfer vs Golf Illustrated. It seems like it was the competitive and wildly obstinate expat, Walter Travis, who owned the bully pulpit, American Golfer, not CB MacDonald, the USGA's diplomat to the R&A, who always fought the hardest and was the most unrelenting.
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In 1934, Alister MacKenzie wrote about how the transition from the Victorian and penal era to the strategic era, which we now define as the Golden Age, occurred.
"In the old days courses were designed by prominent players...In the Victorian era fifty years ago, almost all new golf courses were planned by the professionals, and were incidentally, amazingly bad...There was an entire absence of strategy, interest and excitement...The first person to depart from these principles was the late Mr. John L. Low."
"John L. Low wrote a book over thirty years ago entitled Concerning Golf...and it is still the most illuminating, instructive, and original book written on the subject."
"Mr. H.S. Colt, who was a great friend of John L. Low, held similar ideas. When he was secretary of Sunningdale, he put the ideas into practice, completely revolutionizing (my italics) this famous course. He altered the long holes and changed entirely the short holes. In so doing he added the necessary strategy and interest, turning it from a dull insipid course into one which was as inspired as the old one had been tedious."
There were two main strands in the idea stage of the Golden Age in the British Isles as it pertained to golf: the arts & crafts movement led by Horace Hutchinson, whose platform was Country Life, and the strategic golf course design revolution led by John Low. It was Harry Colt who first grafted the two together in practice and created the new rose.
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In 1934, Alister MacKenzie wrote about how the transition from the Victorian and penal era to the strategic and arts & crafts era, which we now define as the Golden Age, occurred.
"In the old days were designed by prominent players...In the Victorian era fifty years ago, almost all new golf courses were planned by the professionals, and were incidentally, amazingly bad...There was an entire absence of strategy, interest and excitement...The first person to depart from these principles was the late Mr. John L. Low."
"John L. Low wrote a book over thirty years ago entitled Concerning Golf...and it is still the most illuminating, instructive, and original book written on the subject."
"Mr. H.S. Colt, who was a great friend of John L. Low, held similar ideas. When he was secretary of Sunningdale, he put the ideas into practice, completely revolutionizing (my italics) this famous course. He altered the long holes and changed entirely the short holes. In so doing he added the necessary strategy and interest, turning it from a dull insipid course into one which was as inspired as the old one had been tedious."
Dr. MacKenzie, to be fair, was not one to under-state his case. I quote an article by Low from the Athletic News in December 1901, on Sunningdale:
"Little is required to make the course one of the best in England. The little, however, includes the very important matter of the placing of new hazards and the alteration of some of the teeing grounds. The Sunningdale Club have been more than fortunate in securing the services of a golfer so well qualified as Mr. H. S. Colt for this difficult work. No one in England is better able to judge the merits of a golf course and see where they may be magnified, or to find the faults and make the course free of them, than the secretary of the Sunningdale Club."
I would also be interested to hear from the MacKenzie researchers if they know when the Doctor first saw Sunningdale.
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John
I admire your enthusiasm even though it's hard to hold down a full-time job and keep up with your posts at the same time !
I should say to you in relation to the questions you pose in post 79 that I'm Scottish and living in Scotland and that is where my prime interest and knowledge lies, so can't really address the US-centric stuff. I will say about CBM however that his idea of copying the best holes was fairly regularly commented on in the UK golfing press. Most of the time, perhaps all the time ?, he was ridiculed for trying to build exact replicas when in reality he was copying ideas. So how would a UK course of his have fared ? I suspect after initial scepticism and assuming the course was any good he'd have got due recognition. Mind you if he built it prior to WWI it would have been comprehensively tinkered with if it was still around.
Niall
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Adam
I don't have a ready answer to your question on when Mac first saw Sunningdale, which I assume he did at some point, and I'm not sure there is a ready answer. If I was to guess I'd suggest it was some time between meeting Colt at Alwoodley and the start of WWI ?
Niall
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Adam
I don't have a ready answer to your question on when Mac first saw Sunningdale, which I assume he did at some point, and I'm not sure there is a ready answer. If I was to guess I'd suggest it was some time between meeting Colt at Alwoodley and the start of WWI ?
Niall
That would be my guess too, and if true begs the question of how he could possibly have known that the course was 'dull and insipid' at the outset.
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Adam
The obvious answer as I imagine you will agree is that he was boosting his pal while exhibiting his consistent bias against professional golfers as architects. There did tend to be a good bit of the old pals act amongst the Oxcam set when writing about each others work, and also a fair degree of snobbery towards professional golfers.
Niall
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Now you're telling me what my own influences are? C'mon, man.
I believe the biggest influence on Ben Crenshaw was C.B. Macdonald. That's whose work he talks about the most.
Both Bill and I would credit Pete Dye for teaching us how to build golf courses, but I don't think either of us would say he was the biggest influence, stylistically. For me, it was Alister MacKenzie. For Bill, it is Perry Maxwell. For that matter, I heard Pete more than once describe the influence of Donald Ross on his work, and also Seth Raynor and MacKenzie and Maxwell and even Bill Langford, but I never heard him mention Colt as an influence.
That's not to say we don't admire (and borrow from) the works of many different architects, from Old Tom Morris to Mr. Dye. We do. And our work has evolved over time; mine looks less like MacKenzie's than it used to. But if you grew up in America, Harry Colt is probably not going to be your main influence.
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Tom - I don't profess to know all of your influences, but I do think you underestimate the influence that Colt had on you. In the past, you would regularly discuss the importance of the Dreer Award and seeing the great clubs in Great Britain and Ireland on your career. It is hard to argue that, along with Old Tom Morris, Harry Colt had the greatest impact on golf in Great Britain and Ireland. Personally, much of the work that I see from Bill Coore and yourself often reminds me of the origins of golf in these countries. It is why I enjoy it so much.
While we debate the most important architects in US history, I don't think there is much debate in Great Britain and Ireland, as Old Tom Morris and Harry Colt kind of run away with it......unless you want to credit God with some designs! And while we laud about the golden age of architecture in the US, it emanated from Great Britain and Ireland. MacDonald, MacKenzie, Ross and others all directly pointed to the influence of the courses in these countries on their work. Hell, the MacDonald templates mostly derive from there! And doing so naturally goes back to Old Tom Morris and Harry Colt.
Obviously, your career has spanned a long time and I am sure today all that you say is true. Who is anyone to tell another what influenced them or not. I am sure that MacKenzie had the largest influence on you, as you say. So I apologize for being presumptuous. However, even MacKenzie started with and learned from Colt!
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It is hard to argue that, along with Old Tom Morris, Harry Colt had the greatest impact on golf in Great Britain and Ireland.
Huh, I thought James Braid held that distinction?
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Reading MacKenzie's 1934 writings in "The Spirit of St. Andrews." He seemed to emerge from the idea stage of the Golden Age at nearly the same time as Colt. He had a hard time breaking through and getting recognized. As a self-proclaimed design "revolutionary," he put strategy, as defined by John Low, first. He believed the penal approach of the golf professional architects was outdated and dull. I think it was less a case of snobbery and more one of rejection. In those pre-WW1 transition years, the professionals struggled to prevent their penal approach to golf course design from becoming obsolete.
In regard to landscape design, MacKenzie's philosophy seems to have been less based on, especially in the early days, the wish to create beautiful arts-and-crafts parkland jewels that would be showcased in Country Life. Despite the fact that he went to medical school at Cambridge and was a member of the R&A (Colt's introduction), and the fact that his career breakthrough occurred when his new hole design was selected by Country Life in 1914, MacKenzie came into the Golden Age down a parallel but distinct route.
The pre WW1 Country Life competition of 1914 was a English/U.S. collaboration and alliance between the Oxcam and R&A leaders (Horace Hutchinson, Bernard Darwin, and Herbert Fowler) and the diplomatic-minded C.B. MacDonald, who donated the grand prize.
MacKenzie's landscape design philosophy was more based on his study of camouflage in the Boer War. They (the Boers) made "the best use of the natural features of the landscape, and by constructing artificial fortifications (landforms) indistinguishable from natural objects." Just like he later did of St. Andrews, MacKenzie says "I made a close study of the subject." He had a flash of insight that changed his life. "It struck me than inland courses could be improved in a similar manner by imitation of the features so characteristic of sand dune courses."
Returning to his home course at Leeds in 1905 "not only was little notice taken of my ideas, but when my name was suggested as captain of the club, the committee refused to nominate me, because they said I had such weird ideas regarding golf courses that I would want to alter theirs, bringing in a lot of strange, newfangled ideas which must be wrong, as not a single professional in the world agreed with me."
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It is hard to argue that, along with Old Tom Morris, Harry Colt had the greatest impact on golf in Great Britain and Ireland.
Huh, I thought James Braid held that distinction?
and here was me thinking it was the introduction of the railways !
Niall
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John
On your suggestion on the ideas stage, can I suggest you go back and have a read of Willie Park's book from 1896. Like Low his book is generally an instruction book and while both books have 12 or 13 chapters in each case only one deals with elements of design. Park's writing is perhaps a little stilted in comparison to Low's neat turn of phrase but there is some good stuff in there and some similar ideas to Low. What makes Low's book stand out is the explicit mention of playing a shot with a view to how it affects the next shot. In other words strategy. Not only that but it shows from that how the design of the course influences strategy.
Note however that Low didn't invent strategy. Players were already intuitively or indeed consciously making strategic decisions on play. Low wrote about that and linked it with the design of the course or specifically the placing of bunkers. You could argue that the likes of Park in his book implicitly did that, and I'd probably make that argument, but Low was I think the first to explicitly do that. That's what makes his book a landmark IMHO.
However my overall point here is that Concerning Golf wasn't the start of the ideas stage. The conversation on course design had started long before then.
Niall
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John
On your suggestion on the ideas stage, can I suggest you go back and have a read of Willie Park's book from 1896. Like Low his book is generally an instruction book and while both books have 12 or 13 chapters in each case only one deals with elements of design. Park's writing is perhaps a little stilted in comparison to Low's neat turn of phrase but there is some good stuff in there and some similar ideas to Low. What makes Low's book stand out is the explicit mention of playing a shot with a view to how it affects the next shot. In other words strategy. Not only that but it shows from that how the design of the course influences strategy.
Note however that Low didn't invent strategy. Players were already intuitively or indeed consciously making strategic decisions on play. Low wrote about that and linked it with the design of the course or specifically the placing of bunkers. You could argue that the likes of Park in his book implicitly did that, and I'd probably make that argument, but Low was I think the first to explicitly do that. That's what makes his book a landmark IMHO.
However my overall point here is that Concerning Golf wasn't the start of the ideas stage. The conversation on course design had started long before then.
Niall
Niall -- yeah, I'm interested to see more research on when the conversations about strategic golf started. I had this discussion with Bob Crosby a few weeks ago. ‘Concerning Golf’ was a distillation of what Low had been saying for a couple of years, and there are hints of this in his columns in 'Athletic News'. Bob's belief is that criticism of the ‘Victorian' school of design started mid 1890s. Which would make sense: new theories are formulated first by finding things wrong with existing theories. I have a piece of Colt writing from 1894 that reads very Victorian (except in the matter of blind holes).
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Adam,
Agreed. Historians do tend to concentrate on the writings of Oxcam set to the detriment of the likes of Park firstly because their writings were well written and more abundant, and secondly because the Oxcam set were dismissive of professionals who designed courses and that seems to have been taken as being an accurate reflection of what was being designed rather than perhaps an underlying snobbish attitude towards the working class.
The other thing, newspaper and magazine articles do tend to get over-looked when there is a wealth of good stuff in there.
Niall
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Thank you Niall. Will read Park's book. Seems like I read somewhere that it was very similar to Hutchinson's writings at the time. MacKenzie does seem to criticize Park's efforts at Sunningdale. You might be right about the snobbery but as I was reading his book, it seemed to me that MacKenzie who came from the north wasn't quite part of the artsy London crowd. When he came back from the Boer War armed with his new ideas about landforms, he felt rejected by the golf professionals and his subsequent negativity towards them was more in anger.
He says, "Looking back, it is amazing how seriously we took our disputes. We fought over them not only at committee meetings but every time we met. The fate of the British Empire could have been at stake. When the Great War came, how trifling all these things seemed....The trouble in those early days was that all golfers except a very small handful of pioneers belonged to the penal school."
"Twenty years ago (1914), owing to the influence of John L. Low, and other pioneers, new British golf courses were designed by men of education, the professional player having entirely dropped out of the picture. Today (1934), owing to intriguing advertisements, professional players...are again beginning to plan golf courses....But if one analyzes these recent courses there is a complete absence of variety, strategy, and interest, and a failure in planning them to make the best use of the natural features." He does mention "other pioneers" and maybe Park was one of them.
Also, MacKenzie was an average golfer. Maybe he felt some insecurity around professionals. He relates a story where a friend says this to him!! "You are just off to Australia to lay out courses. For God's sake don't let them see you play or you will never get another job."
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John
The other thing I meant to add, at least in a UK context, is that professional golfers as designers didn't simply go away after 1903. Park continued to be a fairly busy architect and then Braid soon got in to his stride. You also had the likes of Taylor/Hawtree, Willie Fernie, Tom Williamson etc. I don't have any evidence to hand but I think it would think that most courses designed or altered up to WWI and perhaps even WWI were probably done so by professional golfers.
You should also note that a lot of work was done just after 1903 as the effects of the Haskell led to a lot of course changes.
Niall
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John
We crossed posts.
Re MacKenzie and the artsy crowd. You've clearly been reading Tommy Mac's Arts & Craft essays and while they are quite interesting to read about the Arts & Crafts movement generally they are, in my opinion, complete nonsense in terms the central idea that the movement had a bearing on golf course design. Just because Horace took a couple of Arts lessons it doesn't really prove much of anything. Again that's just my opinion.
Neither was it geography that brought these guys together, unless you count Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews.
With regards criticism of Park's work at Sunningdale, Colt was compelled to write to Park and express his opinion of how good his work at Sunningdale was and giving him permission to use the letter in any way he saw fit, which Park did by having it published in Golf Illustrated (?). I seem to recall Adam posting a copy of it on another thread recently.
If you get a copy either of the Braid books (Braid and his 400 courses and the Divine Fury of Braid) they have listings of his courses which generally date from 1900 on. And as I said in a previous post, he wasn't the only professional golfer designing courses.
Anyway, back to the day job. More tonight.
Niall
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One spect about these debates is TOC. Certainly by no later than 1900 and more likely by 1890, that course was very similar to what exists today. If TOC is strategic masterpiece today, it must also be true that this was the case 125 years ago. The Oxbridge set used TOC as a model of design...no? It wasn't like they invented strategic architecture. There were examples of the concept spread about. I guess what I am saying is the for the guys who were into this stuff, the ideas were floating around pre-1900. I agree that Park Jr's and Low's works (I would add Hutchinson's 1901 Golf Illsutrated article) articulated the concepts in a neat package. Just as there is no aha moment in US gca, the same is true of GB&I gca except that TOC existed. What I find very interesting in all of this, is that CBM didn't harp on strategic concepts in the same way other well informed and educated archies did. When CBM breaks down his ideal course it comes out nearly 70% on turf, soil and undulations. CBM had no qualms about a penal hole if it was challenging and exciting....in other words good golf.
Ciao
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John is, I think, abundantly correct on MacKenzie. Though he was friendly with Colt after 1907, and though he was a Cambridge man, he was NOT part of the Oxbridge ‘set’ that clustered around Low, Colt, Arthur Froome, Alison etc. Throughout his life MacKenzie was an outsider: born in Yorkshire but saw himself as Scottish (though he never lived in Scotland); not that great a golfer -- Low, Colt, Alison were all among the elite of amateur golfers in Britain; and imo a bit of a chip on his shoulder (we Yorkshiremen are often characterised as chippy :) ).
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Sean,
The last significant change (I'm not counting adding back tees, the slight flattening of part of a green or indeed Sir Michael Bonallacks ultimately failed attempt to introduce trees to the course) was the bunkers put down the right side of the course on the way out which was done at the suggestion of Low. That itself was a reaction to the removal of the gorse that had widened the playing corridor. Clearly wide fairways and gorse removal was not the type of Victorian architecture that Low approved of.
Width didn't seem to be a concern for Park which makes you wonder if a lot of modern architects have more in common with him than they do with Low ?
Niall
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John is, I think, abundantly correct on MacKenzie. Though he was friendly with Colt after 1907, and though he was a Cambridge man, he was NOT part of the Oxbridge ‘set’ that clustered around Low, Colt, Arthur Froome, Alison etc. Throughout his life MacKenzie was an outsider: born in Yorkshire but saw himself as Scottish (though he never lived in Scotland); not that great a golfer -- Low, Colt, Alison were all among the elite of amateur golfers in Britain; and imo a bit of a chip on his shoulder (we Yorkshiremen are often characterised as chippy :) ).
Yes MacKenzie was a bit of an outlier in some respects but he was a professional gentleman who had been to Oxford/Cambridge and who was a member of the R&A. I think that was more of a connecting influence rather than where they were all domiciled.
Niall
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John is, I think, abundantly correct on MacKenzie. Though he was friendly with Colt after 1907, and though he was a Cambridge man, he was NOT part of the Oxbridge ‘set’ that clustered around Low, Colt, Arthur Froome, Alison etc. Throughout his life MacKenzie was an outsider: born in Yorkshire but saw himself as Scottish (though he never lived in Scotland); not that great a golfer -- Low, Colt, Alison were all among the elite of amateur golfers in Britain; and imo a bit of a chip on his shoulder (we Yorkshiremen are often characterised as chippy :) ).
Yes MacKenzie was a bit of an outlier in some respects but he was a professional gentleman who had been to Oxford/Cambridge and who was a member of the R&A. I think that was more of a connecting influence rather than where they were all domiciled.
Niall
I'm not putting MacKenzie in with the pros at all: in his outlook he clearly had more in common with Low et al. But he was socially NOT part of that set. He was not an R&A member until 1913, for example, more than twenty years after Colt had joined.
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I have wondered whether the Oxbridge (won't use the term Oxcam going forward) judges, Hutchinson, Darwin, and Fowler, knew that it was MacKenzie who designed the hole they selected to win Country Life's 1914 prize or whether it was a blind competition.
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The Country Life contest was done blind. There's a June 20, 1914 article announcing the contest which describes how it was done.
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John is, I think, abundantly correct on MacKenzie. Though he was friendly with Colt after 1907, and though he was a Cambridge man, he was NOT part of the Oxbridge ‘set’ that clustered around Low, Colt, Arthur Froome, Alison etc. Throughout his life MacKenzie was an outsider: born in Yorkshire but saw himself as Scottish (though he never lived in Scotland); not that great a golfer -- Low, Colt, Alison were all among the elite of amateur golfers in Britain; and imo a bit of a chip on his shoulder (we Yorkshiremen are often characterised as chippy :) ).
Yes MacKenzie was a bit of an outlier in some respects but he was a professional gentleman who had been to Oxford/Cambridge and who was a member of the R&A. I think that was more of a connecting influence rather than where they were all domiciled.
Niall
I'm not putting MacKenzie in with the pros at all: in his outlook he clearly had more in common with Low et al. But he was socially NOT part of that set. He was not an R&A member until 1913, for example, more than twenty years after Colt had joined.
I agree 100%. Dr Mac was a peripheral figure of the Oxbridge set. He didn't get anything close to the commissions Colt did. I think Fowler is another example of such even though he didn't attend Oxbridge...he was certainly from that societal stock.
Ciao
Ciao
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I saw today Old Elm was listed on Golf's Top 100 at #116 which is deserving but dare I say still underrated!?
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John is, I think, abundantly correct on MacKenzie. Though he was friendly with Colt after 1907, and though he was a Cambridge man, he was NOT part of the Oxbridge ‘set’ that clustered around Low, Colt, Arthur Froome, Alison etc. Throughout his life MacKenzie was an outsider: born in Yorkshire but saw himself as Scottish (though he never lived in Scotland); not that great a golfer -- Low, Colt, Alison were all among the elite of amateur golfers in Britain; and imo a bit of a chip on his shoulder (we Yorkshiremen are often characterised as chippy :) ).
Yes MacKenzie was a bit of an outlier in some respects but he was a professional gentleman who had been to Oxford/Cambridge and who was a member of the R&A. I think that was more of a connecting influence rather than where they were all domiciled.
Niall
I'm not putting MacKenzie in with the pros at all: in his outlook he clearly had more in common with Low et al. But he was socially NOT part of that set. He was not an R&A member until 1913, for example, more than twenty years after Colt had joined.
I agree 100%. Dr Mac was a peripheral figure of the Oxbridge set. He didn't get anything close to the commissions Colt did. I think Fowler is another example of such even though he didn't attend Oxbridge...he was certainly from that societal stock.
Ciao
Ciao
Sean
I think what we are nitpicking over is a small point but have to say MacKenzie probably did more than any of the other guys from that set other than perhaps Colt but then Colt had a longer design career plus he had design associates.
Adam
In case you were in doubt my reference to Mac being a professional was in relation to his medical qualifications.
Niall
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SeanA, It is puzzling how TOC seems to transcend the the penal and the Golden Age design styles. It really isn't a Golden Age OR a penal style golf course. It was born before the penal era and yet for some reason, it isn't even more primitive, it is more evolved. It would suggest there might have been an earlier Golden Age lost in time that existed before the penal era and the Golden Age of the early 20th century. :D
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You’ve stumbled on the idea of “found” courses v. constructed. The early penal courses were most often built on land not naturally suited for the game. Where nature didn’t provide hazards, man had to build them.
Those early penal courses were not big budget projects. No one was spending extravagant amounts on projects back then. The easiest way to build a course, and the cheapest, was to follow simple bunkering schemes on the parts of a parcel that were easiest to negotiate.
There’s more to this concept including the tools available at the time and the land that was accessible.
It didn’t take long to move on to bigger projects, more remote courses, massive earthmoving and courses that could embrace many natural features without having to avoid them.
I think we exagerate the idea of a penal movement a bit. Its not hard to presume that the early course builders would have done whatever they could to emulate places like the Old Course. But not every site allowed for that type of re-creation.
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You’ve stumbled on the idea of “found” courses v. constructed. The early penal courses were most often built on land not naturally suited for the game. Where nature didn’t provide hazards, man had to build them.
Those early penal courses were not big budget projects. No one was spending extravagant amounts on projects back then. The easiest way to build a course, and the cheapest, was to follow simple bunkering schemes on the parts of a parcel that were easiest to negotiate.
There’s more to this concept including the tools available at the time and the land that was accessible.
It didn’t take long to move on to bigger projects, more remote courses, massive earthmoving and courses that could embrace many natural features without having to avoid them.
I think we exagerate the idea of a penal movement a bit. Its not hard to presume that the early course builders would have done whatever they could to emulate places like the Old Course. But not every site allowed for that type of re-creation.
Sven
I agree with the general gist of what you say regarding the penal movement being overblown. Presumably though your commentary is more aimed at golf development in the US ?
Niall
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You’ve stumbled on the idea of “found” courses v. constructed. The early penal courses were most often built on land not naturally suited for the game. Where nature didn’t provide hazards, man had to build them.
Those early penal courses were not big budget projects. No one was spending extravagant amounts on projects back then. The easiest way to build a course, and the cheapest, was to follow simple bunkering schemes on the parts of a parcel that were easiest to negotiate.
There’s more to this concept including the tools available at the time and the land that was accessible.
It didn’t take long to move on to bigger projects, more remote courses, massive earthmoving and courses that could embrace many natural features without having to avoid them.
I think we exagerate the idea of a penal movement a bit. Its not hard to presume that the early course builders would have done whatever they could to emulate places like the Old Course. But not every site allowed for that type of re-creation.
I agree, so called Victorian architecture was a blip on the radar. Hoevery the issue of penal architecture is a long surviving matter which we still wrangle with today. I believe the Oxbridge boys blew up the importance of strategic architecture at the cost of some good penal architecture. Forced carries were seen as poor architecture and worse if blind. I give CBM credit for not buying wholesale into strategic architecture. He was able to recognise that strategic and penal did not equate to good and bad.
Ciao
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Interested to hear how others would sort out this quick attempt at distinguishing these categories and eras of early golf architecture:
1. "Found.". The original golf courses were "found" on the linksland. "Found" doesn't refer to rediscovered courses but ones where the holes were laid out on land that pre-existed. The land was not worked on by man, or it was worked on by man in a minimal way. TOC was a "found" course but it was worked upon and changed by man. Cutten notes that "Between 1848 and 1850, Allan Robertson completed several significant alterations." Are Pacific Dunes and Sand Hills modern "found" courses? Old Tom Morris is the most recognized "found" architect.
2. "Penal." As a design approach, it refers to course design where punishment increases as the quality of the golf shot decreases. As an era, it refers to courses designed by golf professionals in the 1890s and 1900s. It has persisted as a design philosophy based on building courses that put a priority on creating challenges for the top players. Perhaps, the USGA's design philosophy for the U.S. Open and RTJ's heroic designs are iterations of this approach to course design.
3. "Golden Age." The Golden Age has been defined fundamentally as the era of "strategic" golf design, but also perhaps as the era of "anti-penal" design. Landforms were created by the architects to imitate nature, to craft beautiful large-scale natural objects, and to create variety and interest for players of all abilities. A defined time period for this era might be 1907 to 1939. I would suggest the first golf courses appeared in 1907 in the British Isles and in 1911 in North America, and that the idea stage started in 1903 with John Low's "Concerning Golf." Selecting dates is categorical by definition.
4. "Victorian." This refers to the period widely from the 1840s to the end of the century. It refers to courses that were constructed with penal and old-fashioned hazards, mostly outside the linksland.
5. The early "American School." Designers like Tweedie and Bendelow laid out the hundreds of courses in the U.S. to meet the growing demand for a nearby place to play golf.
6. "Oxbridge (referred to often in this thread as Oxcam)." The core were members of the Oxford Cambridge Golfing Society. They were the leading pioneers of the Golden Age. They were were prime movers and key agents of change.
7. "Ideal and Template Hole" design. This approach was led by CB MacDonald who sought the principles in the great holes of the British Isles and translated them into the ground in North America.
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In reference to TOC being neither purely Penal, Victorian, nor Golden Age I think that it is important to consider the two iterations of the course and how people would have looked at it in across the two eras. Prior to Old Tom's widening of the course in the 1880's the narrow fairways necessitated play directly over the existing bunkers en route to the single pinned greens. As the whins were cleared out of the ocean side of the course and new bunkers cut along the right side going out the course became the strategic course we are familiar with. As per Robert Kroeger's book "The Golf Courses of Tom Morris" these changes to the course were not universally applauded with many players of the time believing that the course was being made easier. It is possible, if not likely, that the Victorian steeple-chase style of GCA owes as much to the earlier version of the Old Course as the golden age inspired work of Dr Mac, Colt, et al owes to the widened/strategic version.
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Interested to hear how others would sort out this quick attempt at distinguishing these categories and eras of early golf architecture:
1. "Found.". The original golf courses were "found" on the linksland. "Found" doesn't refer to rediscovered courses but ones where the holes were laid out on land that pre-existed. The land was not worked on by man, or it was worked on by man in a minimal way. TOC was a "found" course but it was worked upon and changed by man. Cutten notes that "Between 1848 and 1850, Allan Robertson completed several significant alterations." Are Pacific Dunes and Sand Hills modern "found" courses? Old Tom Morris is the most recognized "found" architect.
2. "Penal." As a design approach, it refers to course design where punishment increases as the quality of the golf shot decreases. As an era, it refers to courses designed by golf professionals in the 1890s and 1900s. It has persisted as a design philosophy based on building courses that put a priority on creating challenges for the top players. Perhaps, the USGA's design philosophy for the U.S. Open and RTJ's heroic designs are iterations of this approach to course design.
3. "Golden Age." The Golden Age has been defined fundamentally as the era of "strategic" golf design, but also perhaps as the era of "anti-penal" design. Landforms were created by the architects to imitate nature, to craft beautiful large-scale natural objects, and to create variety and interest for players of all abilities. A defined time period for this era might be 1907 to 1939. I would suggest the first golf courses appeared in 1907 in the British Isles and in 1911 in North America, and that the idea stage started in 1903 with John Low's "Concerning Golf." Selecting dates is categorical by definition.
4. "Victorian." This refers to the period widely from the 1840s to the end of the century. It refers to courses that were constructed with penal and old-fashioned hazards, mostly outside the linksland.
5. The early "American School." Designers like Tweedie and Bendelow laid out the hundreds of courses in the U.S. to meet the growing demand for a nearby place to play golf.
6. "Oxbridge (referred to often in this thread as Oxcam)." The core were members of the Oxford Cambridge Golfing Society. They were the leading pioneers of the Golden Age. They were were prime movers and key agents of change.
7. "Ideal and Template Hole" design. This approach was led by CB MacDonald who sought the principles in the great holes of the British Isles and translated them into the ground in North America.
John
I characterize penal as architecture lacking options. One option (forced carry, play between two hazards) being the far end of the architecture spectrum. Strategic architecture offers options not based purely on length and requires a certain amount of width to provide meaningful options. For instance, a forced carry is a forced carry. It doesn't matter if it can be carried in 1 or 10 strokes. Strategic architecture may see that carry on a diagonal which offers unlimited carry distances, but also offer options to avoid the carry.
There should be no value judgement as to which end of the spectrum is better. Both are good and valuable approaches to design. It's more a matter of striking the right balance within the spectrum given the land and design brief.
Ciao
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SeanA, It's true if whoever provides the brief doesn't mind if his/her golfers lose ten balls in a row or expect the architect to build a golf course on a tiny, hilly parcel of land filled with cliffs. Some might want cop bunkers and a steeplechase course too, or for that matter, a golf course that meanders through a housing development. Architects do have to be responsive to their customers' wishes.
Putting aside the fact that there is a way to play the hole safely, do you think the 16th at Cypress is the ultimate example of a great penal design? MacKenzie says, "Players get such a tremendous thrill driving over the ocean at the spectacular 16th and 17th holes at Cypress Point that this also is well worth the risk of losing a ball or two."
Niall, In regard to the Arts & Crafts philosophy and its impact on the Golden Age, I ought to go back to Hutchinson and find some of his most relevant writings, but I don't know those well enough. And this is a thread on Colt! But, hope you might dwell upon this from Alister MacKenzie on beauty in golf architecture. He wasn't just a blood and guts military type. It is the best description I have read yet of one of the fundamental elements of the Golden Age.
"Often one hears players say that they 'don't care a tinker's cuss' about their surroundings, what they want is good golf....The chief object of every golf architect or greenskeeper worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from Nature herself."
"A beautiful hole appeals not only to the short but also to the long handicap player, and there are few first rate holes which are not...in the grandeur of their undulations and hazards, or the character of their surroundings, things of beauty in themselves."
"My reputation of the past has been based on the fact I have endeavored to conserve the existing natural features and, where these were lacking, to create formations in the spirit of nature herself. In other words, while always keeping uppermost the provision of a splendid test of golf, I have striven to achieve beauty."
"on deeper analysis it becomes clear that the great courses, and in detail all the famous holes and greens, are fascinating to the golfer by reason of their shape, their situation, and the character of their modeling. When these elements obey the fundamental laws of balance, of harmony and fine proportion, they give rise to what we call beauty....in the course of time he (the player) grows to admire such a course as works of beauty must be eventually felt and admired."
Jim Sherma, Interesting idea of yours about TOC. I was trying to think of some analogy to TOC outside of golf architecture. Maybe the Magna Carta, which some think was "the greatest constitutional document of all times."
In regard to the blind contest in Country Life won by MacKenzie, the timing is interesting. Adam notes that MacKenzie was accepted into the R&A in 1913. One year later, he won the contest judged by the Oxbridge and R&A leaders, Hutchinson, Darwin and Fowler. It doesn't seem infeasible that there was some degree of orchestration inside the R&A in regard to how to approach the rapidly growing American market. If there was a group coordinating matters more generally, who were the key members of the braintrust: Hutchinson, Colt, Low, Darwin, and Froome?
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Sean,
Yes, I have read a good bit of MacKenzie going on about beauty and any artificial work appearing natural; as well as economy in design/construction; municpal golf; the perils of bolshevism etc. He did tend to get a wee bit repetitious (don't we all) on those subjects.
The Arts & Crafts was mainly about the decorative and fine arts. As a movement it was a loose grouping of ideas, that was rebelling in part against machinery and mass production. MacKenzie was all for mechanism in building golf courses. And if I remember correctly William Morris was a socialist so Mac at least wouldn't have been too keen on that.
In terms of Hutchinson, I can't recall reading anything that cried out Arts & Crafts. If you read his essay on how to lay out a links which was in one of the early golf annuals he gives advice on how to build a cop bunker and also advocates if necessary shoring it up with timber. Not much chat in there about features looking natural. His big thing seemed to be more length of holes. He was a great believer that holes should be either two or three full shots length so that the "foozler" couldn't get on in 2/3 to match his opponent who had hit every shot perfectly. I doubt he'd be a fan of short par 4's.
Niall
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Speaking of foozles, how can you not like Harry Colt when he leads off one of his writings about golf architecture with this:
"Fashions in golf courses, as in ladies' clothes, seem to be so frequently hopelessly exaggerated. We have our latest Parisian styles and they are adopted for every form and every contour, quite regardless of the land to be dealt with."