I am currently on a family weekend in St. Simons Island, GA. Yesterday, while browsing a second-hand bookstore in town, I came across two volumes of Bernard Darwin - Golf Between Two Wars and Green Memories. I went ahead and got both.
Here is a passage from Darwin's piece "Architecture" in GBTW. His description of this hole made me wonder whether George C. Thomas had visited it during any of his travels in England. Sounds like inspiration to me...
"The hole, as many people know, is but the length of a drive and a pitch...There is apparently most ample room in which to drive from the tee. The green is narrow, guarded in front by a pond and having one bunker eating its way into the right-hand side of the green and another guarding the left flank. The whole point of the hole is in the angle at which the green is placed. Only the player who holds his tee shot well to the left-hand side, almost skirting the rough, is ideally placed for his second, having the length of the green in which to pitch. He who goes straight down the middle or drives to the right is faced with a shot in which is intensely difficult to keep on the green. An apparently simple hole is in face extremely subtle."
Darwin is describing the 8th at the New Course at Addington (NLE) by John Frederick Abercromby. Sounds strategically quite similar to a certain shameless harlot, does it not?
TOM