Golf Within Reach of London

London golfers have always had to travel for their game. In 1910 Bernard Darwin devoted two long chapters of The Golf Courses of the British Isles to the courses within reach of the capital, and he opened them with a reminder of how quickly things had changed.

Fifteen years earlier, he said, there was not much to describe. There were a few courses on public commons, such as Blackheath and Wimbledon, and a great many fields broken up by trees and man-made ramparts, muddy in winter and rock-hard in summer. Almost as a footnote he mentions a course that “a few mad barristers were trying to carve by main force out of a swamp thickly covered with gorse and heather near Woking.”

Those mad barristers turned out to be pioneers. The tour that follows, in the first and second of Darwin’s London chapters, describes a world that had just discovered heathland golf.

The star of sand and heather

Tooting Bec, once the grandest of the muddy inland courses, had already disappeared under red-brick houses by the time he wrote. In its place a new kind of golf had arrived, on sand and heather. He lists the new courses: Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Woking, Worplesdon, Byfleet and others, built out of pine forest and heather that had never grown a decent blade of grass.

The older course-makers had simply rolled and mowed whatever ground was handy. The new architects could study what made the old links good and bad, and then build on purpose. Landowners, meanwhile, discovered that their heaths were worth a fortune once there was a course on them, and houses went up all around the fairways.

Darwin was enthusiastic, but he kept his sense of proportion. “Nothing can ever quite make up for the short, crisp turf, the big sandhills and the smell of the sea,” he writes. Seaside golf would always come first. But the best inland golf, he thought, was no longer a poor second.

Sunningdale and Walton Heath

Sunningdale, laid out by Willy Park, had been fearfully long in the days of the gutty ball. Darwin suggests it may be the only course in the world that was actually improved by the rubber-cored ball, which brought its two-shot holes back within an ordinary golfer’s reach. Those two-shot holes were its glory, and the short holes its weakness. He enjoys the fifth, where you drive from a height and nearly always hit too hard out of sheer excitement, and the tenth, with a hut behind the green selling ginger beer and apples to anyone who earned a four.

Walton Heath was the work of Herbert Fowler, whom Darwin calls perhaps the most daring and original architect of all, and a ferocious one. The course looked wild, bleak and windswept, and its long holes took time to tell apart. The short holes, though, were unforgettable, especially the sixth, ringed with deep bunkers and sloping ground that drew the ball towards them. Darwin watched the professionals struggle there during a tournament, rarely getting both balls of a pair safely on the green. He found it “really a most cheering and satisfactory spectacle.”

Harry Vardon, writing in The Complete Golfer, agreed about both courses. He thought Sunningdale the best inland course he knew, and wished more clubs would copy Walton Heath’s deep bunkers.

Woking, the oldest of them

Of all the heathland courses, Darwin had a soft spot for Woking, the oldest. It lacked the scale of Sunningdale or Walton Heath, but nobody could call it dull. The club had only one medal day a year and no bogey score, and any visitor who asked for one would get a withering look. Its bunkers were the work of a small, secret committee who reshaped the course while the members were away on holiday. The members grumbled, then admitted that the changes were very clever.

The most famous change was a small bunker dug by Mr Stuart Paton in the middle of the fourth fairway, exactly where a good drive would land, with the railway line on the right. Darwin reports the endless arguments it caused and gives a mock dialogue between two golfers that ends, he says, in language unfit to print. He finishes his account of Woking simply: “there is no more delightful course whereon to play golf.”

Parks and commons

Not all London golf was heather. At Mid-Surrey, in the Old Deer Park at Richmond, the ground was as flat as a pancake and every bunker was man-made, but the greens were nearly perfect, and so many people managed a weekday round that Darwin concluded none of us is indispensable. Stoke Poges had been cut from woodland in a matter of months, with a short hole over a brook where Darwin had once seen only trees. Cassiobury Park was beautiful, with avenues of elms, limes, chestnuts and beeches, and a pit in front of the third tee that inspired one of his funniest stories.

Then there were the commons. The Royal Blackheath club traced itself to 1608 and still played seven holes on hard ground, past footballers, nursemaids and old gentlemen on benches. Golfers wore red coats as a warning and were preceded by a fore-caddie. A medal round was three times round the seven holes, twenty-one in all, and the record stood at 95. At Wimbledon the gorse and birch-filled ravines were natural, and the atmosphere was all friendly foursomes arranged over lunch. At Mitcham, despite the trams, there was still some lonely beauty, and on a dry weekday no pleasanter golf so close to town.

The long handicap man

Darwin’s book contains one more London chapter, A London Course, written anonymously by a long handicap man about the club where he plays on Saturday afternoons. It is a lovely counterweight to all the talk of fours and threes. He describes the starter, the muttering of the couple behind, the hedges, the ditch with the heap of cut grass, and a long hole once done in fourteen. In winter the course is a mud heap. In summer, he insists, it is delightful.

He ends his round with “the proud consciousness that we have not been passed, and that we have faithfully replaced every divot.” Many weekend golfers within reach of London, then and since, would recognise the feeling.