I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a.
Bride egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday, Frida Egg brid Egg Frida Egg bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course GAG. Welcome to the fridaygg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today, for the third installment of our Great Courses series, we're discussing the old course at Sunningdale Golf Club, which is
about an hour southwest of London, England. It was designed by Willie Park Junior and it opened in nineteen oh one, after which it was extensively revised by Harry Colt, and according to my guest today, it might be the most important course in the history of modern golf architecture. That guest is Adam Lawrence. Adam is the editor of Golf Course Architecture magazine and the author of an upcoming biography
of Harry Colt. For this episode, I've decided to do a somewhat extended introduction because I just have some thoughts on Sunningdale and its era and this general subject in golf architecture that I've been wanting to sort through and get out there. So that's coming up along with my interview with Adam Lawrence. But first, a quick word from our sponsor for this episode, Club Champion. Club Champion helps golfers of any skill level play better golf through custom
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Club Champion is offering is this right now. You can use the code Frida Egg to get fifty percent off the cost of your fitting with the purchase of a club. So go to club Champion dot com and book You're fitting today. Again, that's code Frida Egg all one word, all right. So let's talk a little bit about Sunningdale and why I think it's such an important course and why I find its whole time in golf architecture that first decade of the twentieth century to be so interesting.
So if you can picture this, I just got home from visiting family for Christmas, and it's twenty sixth right now, and I'm sorry to record this, and I have my notes in front of me. You might hear some wrestling of paper because I actually wrote them on the plane flight back here. I decided to do this introduction pretty recently, and so it's going to be a little rough and ready, but I think I basically have the idea of what
I want to talk about. So, you know, Sunningdale is probably the least known of the courses that we're going to cover in this series on Great Courses, and I think the main reason for that is that it hasn't really hosted a notable televised tournament for a long time, and so people just aren't familiar with what it looks like, how it plays. Another reason for its relative obscurity is that it's just more private than most courses in the UK.
Now in the UK, compared to a lot of private courses in the US, Sunningdale is fairly easy to get on and I think that most people could figure it out if they really decided to take a trip to
this area. But you know, compared to the Old Course for instance, or most Links courses in Scotland as well as Ireland and England, Sunningdale is just a bit more private, So if you don't have a clear idea of what Sunningdale looks like, then I would highly recommend going and finding the Shell's Wonderful World of Golf episode that features Greg Norman and Nick Faldo playing Sunningdale in it's like
the mid to late nineties. It's an incredible episode. They got a beautiful day of weather and the course really looks pretty awesome, so i'd recommend that. I believe it's on YouTube, so it should be pretty easy to find. In any case, Since Sunningdale is less famous than most of the courses that we're going to cover in this series, I wanted to talk a little bit about why I chose it and why I consider it so important to
the history of golf architecture. Sunningdale really stands at the beginning of a new wave in golf architecture, and this new wave redefined what an inland golf course looked like, and it also really set the mold for what just modern golf courses looked like. Period. We are very much still living in a world that this design at Sunningdale helped to create. So what was different about Sunningdale One big factor I want to focus on is just the
cost of building it. Simply put, Sunningdale had a much bigger construction budget than any previous course that these numbers are that I'm about to cide are based on research from Michael Morrison. Michael has been on the podcast before and written about the what he calls the Great English golf boom. Sunningdale took eighteen months to build. At one point, Willie Park had seventy men, thirty horses and ten plows
working on the course. In total, it costs about four thousand pounds to prepare the course, and then the clubhouse cost an additional eight thousand. Now these numbers might not sound and all that big now, but to put it in context, you have to know something about how golf courses were built before Sunningdale. For starters, they weren't really built in the way that we would understand that word now. I think the more appropriate words would be designed or
laid out. This is true of both the seaside courses and the inland courses that existed in Great Britain and Ireland in the eighteen hundreds. And it isn't to say that these courses were poor or unsophisticated. Many of them were anything but but Compared to Sunningdale and most of the well known modern inland courses that were built after Sunningdale, nineteenth century courses were designed on an absolute shoe string budget, you know, nowhere near four thousand pounds, like it just
didn't get even close to that. Links courses, because of this, had a couple of key advantages over inland courses. One, they were set on land that was very well suited to the game. In fact, Lynk's Land is what inspired the game in the first place. So it's kind of even funny to say that that Link's Land was well suited to golf, because it's really more like golf was, in the first place, suited to Lynksland. So obviously creating a golf course on links Land didn't require nearly as
much investment or intervention from the hand of man. The second advantage that links courses had, I would say, aside from the land, was that many of them had just been around for a long time, and so they had had a chance to be refined and tuned by you know, sort of gradual improvements over time. And the old course at Saint Andrews is the perfect example of this. We talked about it in the episode that I did with
Scott Macpherson. You know, that course evolved over a huge amount of time and it just kind of got better and better over the course of the eighteen hundreds. So it's not that links courses were better funded or designed with a different and more advanced philosophy than inland courses. It's more that they were on better land and had
been there for longer, all right. So now you look at inland courses from the eighteen hundreds, what they were like before Sunningdale, before the turn of the twentieth century. Most of them were in England, first of all, and most of them were built in the midst of an incredible craze for golf in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. England went absolutely nuts for golf during this time, and English people found themselves very undersupplied with courses near population centers.
So to meet this new demand, courses were constructed very quickly on whatever land was available, and they were created cheaply because golf was a brand new pastime for many people in many places, and for all people knew it could just be a passing fat so they weren't necessarily going to spend a bunch of money right off the bat. That would have been too much of a risk. One of the leading architects of this period was Tom Dunn,
who was a Scottish golf professional. His process was basically to visit a site for a day or two, give recommendations on where to cut the holes and maybe where to dig a few hazards, and then he would leave. Obviously, the courses that were built through this method were always going to have some issues, drainage issues, functionality issues, and generally they were going to lack the artistry that we've
come to expect from modern golf course design now. Because of all this, Tom Dunn became a bit of a boogeyman to the next generation of golf architects. Alistair mackenzie mentioned him a couple of times. Other architects would write about Tom Dunn with a little bit of disdain, but if you look at him in the context of his period,
you can't really blame him for what he did. He couldn't have had any concept that a golf course would eventually be expected to even have a significant construction budget, or to take years to build he was just responding to the opportunities and possibilities that the market contained at the time in the eighteen eighties and nineties. Now, when money came into golf course development at the beginning of
the twentieth century, starting with Sunningdale, everything changed. Suddenly it became relevant to talk about not just laying out a golf course, but actually building a golf course. And suddenly golf course designers started to think of themselves as golf course architects. Right with the possibility of building a golf course building, it came the desire to think more deeply
about the science and philosophy of creating golf courses. There started to be much more discussion of what constituted an excellent or ideal golf hole, and there was much more investigation of golf course agronomy. This is really when modern ideas of greenkeeping started to be formed, along with modern
ideas and philosophies of golf course architecture. Now, it wasn't a coincidence that wealthier and more extensively more formally educated people started to take an interest in golf course design around this time. The infusion of money into golf architecture had made the whole discipline a higher status pursuit and a form of art. The most influential voices in golf course design therefore, were no longer those of working class
Scottish professionals. Instead, they were well off and usually Oxford or Cambridge educated Englishmen like Harry Colt, John Lowe and Bernard Darwin and their contemporaries. These men brought their tastes and reference points into golf architecture. One of these reference points you'll hear Adam Lawrence mentioned later in this episode,
which is the Arts and Crafts movement in building architecture. Basically, this was a style that valued naturalism and a sense of place in building architecture, and indeed that influence became very important in golf architecture in this new era, because you had people who were familiar with arts and crafts and familiar with the philosophy behind it suddenly applying these kinds of ideas to golf architecture. Now, of course, there
is a downside to these developments. The greater amount of money that was suddenly in golf course development made some wonderful art possible, obviously, but it also caused a raising of standards and expectations that has resulted in golf becoming more expensive and less accessible. This was it turned into an absolute spiral, right and it probably would have started without Sunningdale. But there's no doubt that Sunningdale was one of the very first courses, maybe the first to explore
that high end of financing a golf experience. And so when we say that Sunningdale is the first modern golf course, we mean that it was, you know, an unusually artistic and well worked out, an impressive inland course, and so it was modern architecturally, but it was also modern financially and that has not all has been a positive thing. And this is this is a complexity of being a golf architecture fan as well as somebody who likes affordable
golf courses. You know, good golf architecture doesn't have to be expensive. But when you look at the history, you come away with a clear idea that the invention of modern golf architecture that really started with Sunningdale set the game on a path toward becoming more expensive. And you know, history is always complicated like this. We can celebrate great achievements.
You know, Sunningdale was a great achievement National Golf Links, which we talked about in the last episode of the series, was an incredible achievement, but they also represented a new era of golf course design and golf consumption overall that has seen the game become unaffordable for many people, especially as compared to the eighteen hundreds when most golf courses were just free to play, if you can imagine that. All right, So that's basically what I wanted to say
about this era. I'm still working out those thoughts, but I hope that you found them interesting. And with that, we're going to toss it to me and Adam Lawrence talking a little more specifically about Sunningdale and about the people behind it. Let's get to that, all right, Adam Lawrence, Welcome to the podcast, Thanks for being here, Thank you
for having me. So before getting into the Sunningdale project specifically, maybe we could just talk about the general area where Sunningdale was and where many of the great English golf courses ended up being south of London. What was this area like and why was it opened up in this way for golf construction.
So Sarah was a very rural county into the early middle part of the nineteenth century. If you look at the population starts for the town of Working, for example, it was tiny, minuscule in the early nineteenth century, and then the railways came. And as London grew and the railways came, the city in the area around the city became less suitable in the eyes of affluent people or where they wanted to live and where they wanted to bring up their families. They moved out, they became commuters,
they became suburbanites, and that's how suburbia developed. Suburbia followed the railways. And it's not coincidental that so many of the golf courses in Surrey have railway lines very close to them because the guys used to go there by train. Sunnydale has a railway station three minutes walk away. Working is further away, but the railway goes straight past it. People took trains out there and then they used to fight like hell from the stations of the golf course.
So it grew up in the second half of the nineteenth century as the railways got established, and golf followed that because the people who were moving to Surrey were affluent and they wanted leisure, and as they discovered golf, golf became popular.
And it just so happened that some of the land that was available out in Surrey was sandy heathery.
It is it's the most amazing johincidents. But absolutely that is true. There was no great Oh my god, look at all this beautiful sand out here, we must build dozens of great golf courses. That never ever happened of certainly at that time it was there are people here, we need land. Here is land and coincidentally it was fantastic land for golf.
It did take a little bit of investment to make the land golf ball though, and that's what other funny things about it.
Absolutely for sure, and that was part of the issue. The one hundred pounds golf courses were impossible as soon as you went onto those heath sites because there was no grass. It was all heather, It was all gorse. They had to be cleared, they had seeded. They had to be built in ways that the previous golf courses never did because and this is one of one of
the most fundamental changes. All the golf courses of the nineteenth century were formed using existing turf and in many ways on sites where the turf is good, naturally good. That's a brilliant thing because you end up with turf which is suited to your site, but it's setting there. For example, there was no turf, so it all had
to be seeded and selling those. As far as I can tell, was the first golf course ever to be entirely seeded, and that's why it was so much more expensive than anything that came before it.
Right, This was such an important moment in golf architecture because you know, for the first time golf courses were truly being built in the modern way that we understand golf courses to be built. And so of course it was a huge advance, not with the.
SEME equivalent, but there would be the soil was being prepared, seed was being sown, they were waiting for it to grow, they were putting it, they were refining it, blah blah blah, and then they went to planet Yeah.
And you know before that, golf courses were sometimes really amazing. Obviously, if they were on excellent land like seaside links land, you know that the land would determine the quality of the course. But if a cheap course is built inland on a site that's not particularly well suited to it. It's probably not going to be particular early good. And so that's that's what happened to this day. If you have a site that has heavy soil, you're gonna have to spend some money on it if you want to
make it good golf. All right, why don't we get into the Sunningdale project specifically? How did the project get off the ground?
So there were two brothers, there were the Roberts brothers, and they built a house at something now and there had been according to there's a history of the sending the old club called the sunning the Old Story. It was written in the late fifties by Guy Bennett, who was next secretary of the club, and was revised ten or twelve years ago by John Churchill, who was a long term member of the club, and basically the club
is his story. According to that, there were a few there had been a small attempt to play golf in the area, and there were a few holes on what is now the setting their Ladies course, and the Roberts built house bursts in their station and they decided to build the golf course and it was essentially a piece of land speculation. It wasn't the sort of master planned
golf estate that we know nowadays. But the land was owned and still is owned, most of it by Saint John's College, Cambridge, and they got they acquired the rights to build on the land from Saint John's and they started trying to build some houses along with the golf and obviously the area was growing apple and people were
moving there. It was a pretty good proposition. They hired Willie Park to build, but not only to design but also to build the golf course, and the value of the contract was three eight hundred pounds, which it would be way, way, way more than ever been spent in a course. At that point. They had a company called the Ridgemont Estate Company which took large scale leases from Saint John's for land clots of land in the area
on which they could build the houses. So, as I say, it was essentially an anspecabation project, but just andrew more of their golf clubs in.
The world, and they raised far more money than had really ever been raised for a golf course project. As you say, I what allowed them to do that.
Because these were affluent people who could see a return irrespective of the golf. They were able to bring significantly, massively larger sums of money to bear on the project than had previously been the case. And you know, money has always followed money. If you have money, you can raise more, and they could see a return, so they were able to raise the money.
Who was Willie Parker Jr.
At this point he was already pretty damn well established and he'd only opened twice. He was a very go getting fella. He was very entrepreneurial and he clearly saw in Sonnydale a big opportunity. He built Huntercom in Oxfordshire pretty much at the same time as Sonningdale, and he was essentially the owner at Huntercombe. And it was Huntercomb going bust in nineteen eight or whenever it was that basically destroyed park financially.
So he had a number of things going on. Suffice it to say that he had built a few golf courses, but certainly nothing on the scale and ambition of Sunningdale or Huntercombe.
Nobody had done anything on that scale, well, not part not done not anybody.
Yes, And he turned out to be the guy I know. And he had written about architecture previously. I know he had written one of the very early sort of chapters that there was a chapter in his book. I forget what the book is called, but there's a chapter in his book on the art of laying out golf courses. And this was one of the first times that somebody had really written something like this that went into detail about golf architecture. But certainly to him, even to him,
this was something quite new. So what do we know about the construction process at Sunningdale, how that played out, who was involved that sort of thing.
I've never seen a good description of how many people were involved, but it was a big job. There is a very nice description in the Sunningdale story. There was a chap called Bert Chapman who grew up in the Sunday Sunningdale area and he worked for the club for six So this is from the Sunnydale story. There is moreover another servant of the club, but Chapman, who is still in service after more than sixty years. His story told to me some years ago when I met him
going down to the villages and follows. I used to work for Greener Rest in the village. Now, one day one Saturday, I wanted to go to the Cup final with the pan the Powell. I asked me Boston. He said, you can't go, but I went. I turned up as usual on Monday Monday, but he packed me off, said he didn't want me any more. One day I met a Powell and he says to me, Illo, Bertie out of a job? Yes, says I, I got the sack. Look here, says he. They're making a golf course or
something up on the Common. There's the man who's making it. And he pointed to a man smoking a big cigar. It was mister Woody Park. I went up to him and said, excuse me, sir. He yeah, they're making a golf course or something up on the common. Hey, chance of a job for me, he said. I going up there and you'll see my fallen mister mclin and ask him. I went along and I sees old Matt. Are you mister McLean? Says I. Yes, He says, have you got a job for me on this golf course you're making?
Can you dig? I can do anything, says I. Then carry on, says he next Tuesday, Slobin here fifty years. Yeah. If they were hiring people who's walked in like that, right, it was a big job.
So they recruited local laborers to help and and all that, like this is confirmation of that.
Would all it would all have been manual, or the greens would all have been dug out, and whatever that was moved was moved by hand.
And just to put a finer point on this, no golf project Inland or anywhere really had required this degree of manual labor efforts. And so absolutely not. This was something something pretty special. So you know, when Sunningdale opened, do you have a sense of what was different about it or whether golfers noticed that there was something new happening with this golf course.
So John Lowe, in his newspaper column in December nineteen hundred and one and the course opened earlier in nineteen oh one, reported that founders life membership shares in the club, which had sold originally for one hundred pounds by that point six months after a doubled trading fo one hundred and fifty, So you know, it was clearly a hell of a success very quickly. In the same article, Loewe
said they were talking about a second course. Now that didn't happen for twenty odd years, but they were talking about it even then.
Now in the course's early days. Perry Colt, who is somebody that you know a great deal about, probably more than anybody else. Harry Court Cross Paths with Sunningdale Golf Club became involved. So can you tell me that story? How did he get involved in this project?
Well, so Colt had played golf, he'd been captain of Cambridge University and he continued when he was He was from a family. His father was a lawyer, his brother was his older brother was a lawyer, and clearly law was the family business. So Colt studied law hemorrhage. It was pretty obvious that he intended to be a lawyer. So he graduated, he became a lawyer, and he moved down to Hastings in the South Coast and started practicing law.
The same time the Right Club opened, he joined that he was involved, that he was very fundamentally involved in not the creation of the original Right Course actually, but the creation of the second Rite Course, which was done almost immediately after opened. And that over a period of about five years, they're say in ninety three and ninety four, so a period of about five years. He played a
lot of golf. He was made he became a member of the RNA in the early eighteen nineties, he traveled around playing golf a lot, and he spent pretty much all his spare time playing golf. In eighteen ninety eight, the Oxyden Cambridge Golfing Society was founded essentially by John Lowe, but not exclusively, and it seems to me that playing with the society made cult realize golf people are much more fun than law people, and it seems to me that at that point that he decided I'd like to
spend my time in golf. People of colts class did not work in golf at the time. The only people who made a living from golf were people of lower class as their professional golfers were caddies, were greenkeepers, blah blah blah. Middle class educated people did not work in golf. They played golf, then they went to do their actual work. You annoyed that time, the RNA decided for the first time to employ a paid secretary. This is eighteen ninety
nine nineteen hundred. Holt applied for the job and unsurprisingly it was short list, but he didn't get the job, and he assembled its astonishing package of testimonials. When he applied for the RNA job. The most amazing one was from Arthur Balfa, who at the time was I think his tuitle was Chief Secretary of the Treasury. But he was essentially the number two in the British government because the Prime Minister of the town was Lord Saltivery, who was in the House of Lords. So Balfour was the
number one in the Commons. And he became Prime Minister a year or two later. And Balfour was a member of Ryan He knew Colt very well, and so Balfa wrote, I have known mister Colt now for some years, and chiefly in connection with a Rye Golf Club. As honorary secretary of that institution, he has undoubtedly conferred immense services upon it. He has the great advantage of not only being an excellent man of business, but an admirable golfer.
His personal popularity is a matter of common knowledge and is most thoroughly deserved. Horace Hutchison wrote a testimony of a cult. James Ogilby Fairley, who was the son of the guy who created the Open, wrote a testimony for cult. He had this amazing sheath of testimonials, and he didn't get the bloody John. It astounds me actually that Colt didn't get hired by the RNA at that time. But he didn't, but that had clearly made cult think I'd
like to work in golf. And when the Sunningdale Club was formed, they advertised for a secondary and he applied. There were four hundred and thirty five applications and they shortless and six and Cole got the gig. And that was in July nineteen oh one.
And so part of Colt's purview at Sunningdale was not only kind of serving as the as the club secretary as we would currently imagine it, but he also had some input on the golf course and oversaw some changes to the golf course. Do we have a sense of what those were?
All was essentially, I don't want to use a phrase of it, he was the dictator. He was clearly very popular with the members, and the members believed in him and they let him do whatever he wanted. John Lowe said that Sunningdale was wonderful course from the opening, but other people said other things about it. Darwin was quite rude about a lot of the holes that were creating the opening. He said, in particularly the part three holes were very poor, and Colt rebuilt a lot of sunning
down This is Darwin in nineteen hundred and eight. Many critics of golf courses, the writer this writer among them, have always had three serious objections to the Sunningdale course as originally laid out. In the first place, it's short holes seemed poor. In the second place, the seventh and eleventh holes seemed too blind and fluky, and in the third place, the last two holes, especially the seventeen, seemed feeble.
Then two years later, in the golf course of the British Isles, Darwin repeated some discriptions, but in general was much more positive. And that was because in those two years Colt had done quite a lot. He built a substantial proportion of the golf course. And although the course remains in its routing and it's fundamentals parks, but a lot of the detail is cold. There are some very
interesting individual things. So the thirteenth hole, which is now nice but not especially exciting, downhill Part three, at the time Darwin referred to as one of the very worst holes in the world. It was a Part three that was basically completely blind, straight over a hill. Cold built it and built the downhill hole. Interestingly, he put a bunker pot bunker right at the front and almost entirely surrounded by the green, and the bunker got the nickname
of Holt Poe. Now a poe in course English English is a chamber pot, a pot that you would keep under the bed to go to the good to the bathroom in at night.
So people may not have been a particular fan of that.
I think it was. It was significantly more popular than the previous toll. It was just a rude name. You know, you spent time with English English people, and you know that we take the mickey out of things that we love.
So Colts changes to Sunningdale, you know, he made a number of specific changes, redid some holes. I'd like to get a general sense of how the course kind of looked different after Colt was done with it. My general sense, and I don't know if you can confirm this or not, is that the style of Park's architecture when it came to how the bunkers were shaped or even how the greens were contoured, was a little bit different from what
Cult ended up putting in at Sunningdale. Sunningdale by you know, the end of the decade, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century looks to me quite a bit like a hairy cult course when it comes to how the bunkers are shaped and all that. So what was going on with that?
It's my opinion that Park was very much a transitional golf architect. He was very very important in the history of golf architecture. But we have to realize that it was only from about eighteen ninety eight eighteen ninety nine that John Lowe, who was really the creator of the concept of strategy golf design, started to write about that subject.
So in nineteen hundred and eight I haven't been able to trace the actual clippings, but there was clearly a series of articles in newspapers that said Fault was responsible for selling Dell and so. Foult then sent Park a letter to which he copied to the newspap So, dear sir, from a letter appearing in this week's since you have Golf illustrated, it seems that a statement has been made in the press taking away from you the credits of
laying out the Sunningdale golf course. I write to tell you that if this weisode was done without my knowledge in any shape or form. The above mentioned letter gives you every credit for laying out the course, which is your due, without a shadow of doubt. And if I'm may be allowed to say so, no one appreciates your work at Sunningdale more than myself or know all the difficulty of forming the framework or a really good course. Please make any use you would like of this letter
yours truly. Hs cold Park got a lot right, but esthetically he was an eighteen nineties designer. There is still to this day landforms on the old course at Sunningdale that when you walk around the course you think that looks strange. That's not natural, and what they are is manned things that were created built by Park. The first hole had a essentially a mound built in front of it. You've heard about the steeple Jess spunkers of the eighteen
nineties and not have you. It was something along those lines. Colt removed a lot of it and made it possible to hit a running shot onto the first green. Park's seventh hole at Sunningdale was a blind drive, which the whole still is and a blind second shot. Hold left the driver as it was, but built a new green in a new location which made the second shot visible. Obviously, he removed the blindness on the thirteenth hole. He did a lot of small things around Sunningdale that made it
a more modern golf course. One of the things that I discovered while researching my Colt book was that Colt, by nineteen hundred and seven nineteen hundred and eight, before he had ever started to practice as a golf course architecture, had a strong reputation in the small golfing community of the day as one of the great experts on golf courses. And that's how his career started. His career started because of what he did at Sunningdale.
And part of what he did at Sunningdale you've alluded to. He built features that simply looked more natural than what park had originally built. And so there was a kind of new style of golf architecture entering the stage at Sunningdale. And so I want to spend a moment just talking about that new more naturalistic style of inland architecture that the cult seemed to be at the forefront of.
This is the thing. There are two thing that's going on in golf architecture around the tenants fron of the century. There is strategy and there is naturalism, and they're not the same. And you can look at it this way and say Bark got strategy, but he didn't get naturalism, or he didn't understand how to create things that were natural, And that really is the issue. You can build a strategy golf course and it cannot be natural. You look at the see them Donald golf courses, instances, you look
at the rain of courses. You look at quite a lot of similar golf courses in the UK. They're highly strategic, but they're completely unnatural, and so naturalism and strategy are not the same thing. They just happened to develop around the same time.
And I would say Cult is an enormously influential person in bringing naturalism into architecture.
Absolutely, and Cult wrote wrote, you know, Cult wrote about that a lot, and he was always highly committed to making his work look as natural as possible. Now, the old course, that's something goes It's very interesting. We said we wouldn't go too much onto the new courses something ago.
But if you compare the new and the old, the new is more naturalistic because it was done twenty something years later by an architect who had spent a lot of that twenty years learning how to build golf features that look natural, whereas the old was built by a Scottish pro who had never never really had to think about that before.
Where do you think Colt's idea that golf features inland should look and feel natural came from? Was there like a philosophical source for this, for this notion that a golf course should even attempt to be natural in this way?
There's there's a definite strand in Victorian thinking that arts with the Romantic movement. And if you look at what happens in late Victorian England and Britain with the attitude to hill walking. For example, nobody went into the hills in the early nineteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century walking in the hills, climbing the hills is all
the rage. If you look at the development in buildings, architecture and interior design and esthetics generally of the Arts of Grass movement in the last part of the nineteenth century, they are hugely into naturalism and I think that is very influential in the way that Fault bought There is no significant evidence that I have seen of people talking about natural golf courses prete cult but there's a lot of evidence of people talking about how important nature is. I think that's the connection.
Okay, So there were some different strands of thought kind of entering into golf. At this point. You mentioned the Arts and crafts movement, which the writer, the late writer Thomas mcwood has established was an influence on golf course design at the time. And that's a very interesting set of articles.
If you look at the key the key people in the Arts and grass and most importantly William Morris. Morris was usually influential on how middle class Britain thought in the latter latter years of the nineteenth century, and Colt was Paul was a middle class Englishman. There was there was nothing great in Cole's family, bragger and his father was a lawyer, but a fairly anonymous lawyer. And then by the time that he was he builds Swimley Forest in nineteen ten he's working hand in hand with some
of the most high pro farm man in England. So Hold is an example of how golf can make you uply mobile socially speaking. At the same time you have this sort of aspirational another class attitude to design its broadest sense, which comes from Morris and the rest of the Arts and Crafts and the pariraph lives. It's Thomas Wood's piece on arts and crafts. The arts and Craft's influencing golf is, in my opinion, one of the most amazing thing is people have written. Anyone has written, it's very,
very very insightful. His general third trust arguing that the arts and crafts movement have a big influence on golf is in my opinionaturally spot on.
Yeah, And people can read that piece on golf club at Liss. That's that's where that's.
Several pieces, I believe. I think it's like, I think it has like four or five substantial chapters. My impression I didn't know to but mind prison told me is that he didn't really know when to stop writing.
Yeah, he produced. He produced quite a bit, and it's been really influential in the way a lot of people think about this time in golf architecture. Now. Another factor that's different about Colt and his contemporaries. And when I talk about Colt's contemporaries, I'm talking about men like Hugh Allison, Alistair Mackenzie, Herbert Fowler, Tom Simpson, Abercrobbie Krum. This whole kind of set of golf course designers who popped up
in England at this time. One, they were English primarily, whereas most of the previous golf course designers had been Scottish. Even those designers who practiced primarily in England were Scottish pros. And second of all, many of the people in Colt's circle and who practiced golf architecture in a way that was influenced by Colt or similar to Colt, many of these men were middle class as opposed to working class. And so that's that's also a difference, right.
Absolutely, And it's fundamentally about how golf developed. You know, you have to realize there was essentially no golf in England before the eighteen sixties. Roll Off Devon was founded if I remember riding in eighteen sixty four. Now it wasn't the first golf club in England, but it was in a sense the first English golf club because the
London Scottish Club was obviously found about Expant Scotts. Black Heat, which goes back a long, long long way, was created by Expand Scotts and golf only starts to spread in England from the eighteen sixties and the eighteen seventies, and it's a slow process in those early years. And Pott was born in eighteen sixty nine and he was essentially the one of the first generation of English people who
was able to discover golf as a kid. When golf moved to England, it became a middle class game in a way that it had not originally been in Scotland. That's changed somewhat over the proceed over the century and a half since then, but not completely. But golf became aspirational. Golf became an extent to sign something that only fairly affluent people who could play certainly could only join clubs, and people like Cold Got did well off the bank of that.
Yeah, And you know, part of this middle classification of golf, or this turning of golf into more of an affluent person's sport, was that the golf architecture changed. There was a little bit of a lag in that, but you know, a place like Sunningdale, with how much money they spent on it compared to previous golf courses, certainly has to be considered part of that movement of the game entoingland.
Absolutely, and it becomes even more obvious when you go forward from Sea a few years and you see the creation of Swiney Forest. Swennly was created fundamentally because people couldn't always get a game on Saturday morning and Sittingdale because it's too damn popular. They wanted the course. It was quieter. Rich people wanted to course. It was quieter, and as that part of England grew, it naturally became more affluent. And if golf grows in that area, it
is also going to be affluent. Golf in an area where land is becoming more expensive is going to become more expensive because it requires quite a lot of land.
So then how would you describe the influence of Sunningdale on the future of golf architecture forward from that point and by extension, cult's influence on where golf course design ended up going.
I've always felt that Sending Now was the most important golf course in the world as far as golf architecture is concerned, because it's essentially the founding document of golf course architecture. Everything that existed before it was done, not Higgeldy Piggldy, but it certainly wasn't done in anything like such a systematic and thought through where Senningdell was. It's important to understand just how small the world of golf
was before nineteen fourteen. In the First World War, everybody knew everybody, and that's true across the Atlantic as well. You know, there's a lot of criss crossing between the American golf community and the British golf community. George Windeler, who was president of the USGA and I think nineteen hundred and three, was an Englishman who moved to Boston and kept crossing the Atlantic on business. There was a lot of cross fertilization between the two and everybody knew everybody.
And so if Sunningdale is regarded as Bobet, people are going to want their courses to be more like Sunningdale. If Cult is regarded as the person who was pretty fundamentally important in making SUNNINGDL the best, they're going to want Cult to help and make their cost life more like sunning now.
And it was Colt who built many of the courses in the Heathlns and expanded and his protegees right and people who were influenced by him, who included Allison and Mackenzie and many others, and so, yeah, it's it's something that it's kind of a hypothesis that I have that I haven't totally proven yet, but it's almost like Sunningdale set the mold for what a golf course looked like, for what a modern golf course looked like, and we still are sort of under the influence of that idea.
I agree. I think Sunningdale is the first modern golf course. You know, there's there's no doubt in my mind that's true.
And that's not to discount the influence of Links, golf courses, or Saint Andrews or any of the great.
Courting everything that Colt and his followers and his friends and the people who were around him and doing the censor of thing as him at the time. Everything they were doing was trying to bring the links and specifically the old course and Surnaridrews that were trying to create something that resembled that.
Yeah, and that's something that we maybe didn't talk about enough in the in the past, you know, hour or so, that a huge influence on the way that Colt thought about how a golf course should function and how it should look was of course his experience playing links golf courses, especially the old course at Saint Andrews.
Without a shadow, without a shadow of down. But it must be realized that cult didn't grow up on Lynks. His first experience of links golf would have been at Cambridge. Now, admittedly he only started playing golf a year or so before he went to Cambridge, but he grew up inland on early inland courses. The course at Cambridge on which he played most of his university golf was dreadful.
Well there isn't there a book that was written about it that's called the worst in the World.
My friend Michael Morrison.
Yes, yeah, that's right. Michael Morrison has been on the podcast.
With Dowey Dowey who christened it there and you most early early inland golf was pretty bad, but it was golf, you know, and that and that's the fundamental point. If all you have is bad courses, a band course is better than no course if you like gold.
All right, well, Adam, this has been really informative. Thank you for coming on the podcast and talking about signing down.
I had I Agret who so thank you so much for having me.
Garet appreciate it.
Yeah, Thanky, good night.
This episode of the Frida Egg Golf podcast was produced by Matt Rusius. Thank you, Matt. If you've been enjoying the Great Courses series, then I think you would really like CLUBTFE. That's Frida Egg Golf's membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and you get all sorts of cool things with it, including exclusive content like course
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