Can British Golf Clubs survive many more non-summers?

[Duncan Cheslett]

For the second year running Summer simply didn't arrive in many parts of the UK. In my area of inland northern England it has rained more or less constantly since May with only the occasional half-day of blue skies. Even normally well-draining golf courses such as my own are saturated and most parkland courses are reduced to unplayable muddy fields.

I have had several conversations recently with keen golfers of many years standing who complain that they are simply not enjoying the game any more. Their year has always revolved around the golf season of March - October when conditions could reasonably be expected to give good sport on even the most unpromising terrain. For this they were happy to pay their yearly club membership and settle for winters of occasional rounds on temporary tees and greens. It is on golfers like these that most clubs rely for their survival.

I am sensing a discontent among many however, that threatens to see many of these guys giving up the game entirely, save possibly for the occasional trip away to the coast or the continent. For many, club membership invloves a self-imposed commitment to play once or twice a week in order to get best value for their money; once these outings become an ordeal rather than a pleasure it starts to throw the whole pastime into question.

Conditions this year have really been that bad. Very good players who hit the ball prodigous distances through the air are relatively unaffected; it is the mid-handicap hackers who comprise the backbone of the game and who are reliant on getting at least a little run on their ball from even a slightly fat shot who are struggling. Disillusionment with spending so much of their time and money on a hobby which is nowhere near as enjoyable as it once was is definitely setting in.

Mainstream British golf clubs are already in a parlous state. Overall membership has been falling for years and much more of this weather could cause it to fall off a cliff. Why pay to belong to a golf club for 12 months a year when conditions for enjoyable golf comprise in total maybe 50 days, scattered unpredictably throughout the calender?

Of course, it could all change and we get a succession of dry summers; I think most of us suspect however, that the wet conditions of recent years is something that we are going to have to get used to.

Will golf retreat back to the linkslands and heaths? Was parkland golf an anomaly of the 20th century, in northern England at least?









 

[Brian_Ewen]

Lucky its only been two.

Its been going on for so long up in NE Scotland its the norm.

Look back in the archives and you will find me starting a similar thread, which must be around 10 years ago.

[Jon Wiggett]

Duncan,

I can understand where you are coming from and if the next couple of summers are as bad in your neck of the woods then it might put off some members from renewing. I think that club's are in danger of paying the price for over inflated subs. If the membership cost £400-£600 then most would take the weather on the chin but as subs are usually getting above the £750 mark and often close to the £1000 mark it is not an inconsiderable part of the yearly income for many.

Brian,

yes, the NE of Scotland has been hit by god awful weather. I looked at a site just outside Stonehaven but the unbelievable slow planning office put me off in the end. I was grateful to them in the end as the weather around Stonehaven during my construction phase and grow-in was so horrendous I doubt I would have got any work done. At the same time the weather up here (Dingwall area) was blue skies and not a drop of rain for months on end (did have some snow though)

I would point out to the board that not all of Britain was wet. NW Scotland was in suffering drought conditions and the Moray Firth and Cromarty areas had a reasonable if not overly sunny summer. Membership up here is usually around the £300 mark

Jon 

[Carl Nichols]

Has it been cold and rainy or just rainy? 

[Mark Pearce]

Has it been cold and rainy or just rainy? 

Rainy doesn't do this summer (sic) justice.Where I live we have on at least four occasions had a month's worth of rain in 24 hours.  On one occasion we had a month's rain in 2 hours.  The ground is now so wet that almost any rain causes water to lie and there is no prospect of it drying out until the spring.  I don't think it has been cold.

[Mark Chaplin]

We had virtually zero rain in Deal during July and August. In June when everywhere was flooding it rained at night but not during the day, hence the thick rough as it was warm and sunny during the day.

You'll notice Brian was talking about watering in another post!

The point about the heaths and links is well made. Free draining sandy soil is (IMO) the best surface for golf and that is usually found at the heath and links courses.

Jon - the subs you quote are for the "wet" north not most southern clubs, so your wet weather discount is already built in. 

[Mark_Rowlinson]

It has been very wet in the Manchester area since March. It has been cool. It has also been exceptionally dark. Wilmslow has been closed on several occasions this summer because the course was so wet, with standing water on fairways and greens, that play was impossible (unheard of at Wilmslow in the summer, and only very occasionally in the winter). The rough got out of hand and became un-cuttable. Our fees are £1,300 a year.

I don't know the figures but income will be down as many visiting parties will have been unable to play, or the course will have been so soggy that they probably won't return next year - particularly if they came to grief in our ball-swallowing rough.

Allied to this will be the effect on bar and restaurant takings. It's not just the visiting societies, but members with perhaps 50 turning up for a Tuesday or Thursday morning roll-up most of whom would normally have a drink afterwards and most probably a soup-and-sandwich lunch. What do you do with all that wasted food? Who pays for it?

I rather suspect that some of the normal summer maintenance tasks will have been neglected when green staff (of which there are six) have had to improvise pumping water off the course. I don't know if there have been any injuries to staff or players on our steep banks which can be very treacherous in wet weather. Playing for the club seniors at home and away I have frequently sought relief when I have been unable to take a stance on the fairway because it has been saturated. Winter rules were frequently invoked this summer.  

It is raining heavily as I write (4.15 pm). The weather was lovely this morning, but as it had rained overnight, our local heath where we walk the dogs, is saturated.  

[Mark Pearce]

Mark,

The rain we have had has closed many links.  In June even TOC was closed by rain and there has been a recent thread showing a very closed Carnoustie.  Also, it is I think, something of a myth that the heathland courses are fast draining.  My experience is that many heathland courses are relatively slow draining.

[Adam Lawrence]

IMO people overstate the drainage qualities of the heathland courses. Yes, they're better than clay-based courses, but it's pretty common for them to be quite wet, in winter especially, and they're nothing like so good as links for drainage. Any low-lying or flatter bits - places that have to rely on subsurface drainage to get the water away - tend to be soft. The first hole on the Red course at the Berkshire has been very soft indeed on a number of occasions I've been there, and the same's true for the area down by the railway at Woking.

[Adam Lawrence]

Major rain events will flood virtually any course, it doesn't matter how well they drain. Someone posted a picture of the Barry Burn at Carnoustie overflowing its banks; well, if there's that much water coming down a watercourse, where is it going to go? The test of drainage is how long it takes to get the water away.

[Niall C]

Duncan

A while back I started a thread that was entitled along the lines of was the average british club course fit for purpose or something like that. The discussion descended into the economics of the situation when realy what I was driving at was whether a lot of old pre-war courses were now becoming obsolete interms of safety issues due to restrictive sites, overly short holes in this modern age and lastly and simply that the courses are knackered. By that last comment, I was referring to the fact that a lot of those courses were laid out nearly a hundred years ago in some instances and that the drainage was largely of that era and likely needed an overhaul. Add into the equation the build up of thatch and the soil losing its structure with heavy use etc and its perhaps no wonder courses are a lot wetter than maybe they once were.

Now I'm no agronomist and might be talking rubbish but I recall a few years ago they dug up the side of the 7th green at Glasgow Gailes because it was so wet, thinking there must be a leaking irrigation pipe. In fact what they found was that below the surface the ground was like black like a peat bog almost (my description, not the greenkeepers) and that was on a course built on sandy soil to start with. They filled up the hole they dug with fresh sand and replaced the turf and its been dry ever since.

If you think that maybe going back 20 years or so many courses got very little winter play whereas now they are busy at all times of year whenever the course is open. No wonder many courses turn into mud heaps.

Niall 

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Niall,

You remind me of my early days in golf in the 1960s. I played with my father at Lilleshall Hall in Shropshire, a late 1930s Colt Course. No one there had leather golf shoes, you had rubber. The ball plugged on every shot (even driver) and quite often you lost a ball simply because it had rolled over in its own pitchmark and couldn't be seen - the ground was rich clay, incredibly heavy, muddy and everything got covered in reddish-brown slime. In winter they covered all fairways with coke ash from the Black Country furnaces to provide some chance of balls not sinking into oblivion - golfers, too, for that matter!

After our time there they had to spend a lot of money on drainage.

[Tony_Muldoon]

Now I'm no agronomist and might be talking rubbish but I recall a few years ago they dug up the side of the 7th green at Glasgow Gailes because it was so wet, thinking there must be a leaking irrigation pipe. In fact what they found was that below the surface the ground was like black like a peat bog almost (my description, not the greenkeepers) and that was on a course built on sandy soil to start with. They filled up the hole they dug with fresh sand and replaced the turf and its been dry ever since.


Niall 

Not saying this is the case but they re-did a green at Seacroft because it was always wet.  Exploring why they discovered the original builders had put in a peat layer, probably to hold water.   Whether it compressed over time, which is quite possible, I don't know.  But it’s a similar situation to the one you describe at GG, and this may have been more common than we know.


When we played Cleve Hill recently the pro said they hoped for a wet warm winter as their free draining site would attract a lot of local players. They’d had a terrible summer for visitor play and he's not the only pro who's told me that recently.  Of course with the vagaries of British weather he feared a harsh winter as snow could lie on their high ground for weeks on end.

Winters are also more unpredictable of late!

[Adam Lawrence]

Now I'm no agronomist and might be talking rubbish but I recall a few years ago they dug up the side of the 7th green at Glasgow Gailes because it was so wet, thinking there must be a leaking irrigation pipe. In fact what they found was that below the surface the ground was like black like a peat bog almost (my description, not the greenkeepers) and that was on a course built on sandy soil to start with. They filled up the hole they dug with fresh sand and replaced the turf and its been dry ever since.


Niall 

Not saying this is the case but they re-did a green at Seacroft because it was always wet.  Exploring why they discovered the original builders had put in a peat layer, probably to hold water.   Whether it compressed over time, which is quite possible, I don't know.  But it’s a similar situation to the one you describe at GG, and this may have been more common than we know.

Several of the older courses in the Netherlands (Royal Hague in particular) had a layer of clay built into the greens for the same reason. That worked for a while, but after 60 years of top dressing the clay was so far down the greenkeepers couldn't break it up. Hence the recent Frank Pont-led green rebuild

[Duncan Cheslett]

Mark R,

If normally well-draining courses such as Wilmslow and Reddish Vale have been at saturation point all summer, what must conditions be like at the low-lying Mersey courses or the clay-based suburban tracks such as Heaton Moor or Bramall Park?

I know the answer to this because many of their members have been coming to Reddish Vale to get a game, meaning that our green fee income has actually remained stable. Perversely, the current state of affairs presents us with the opportunity to recruit members from other local clubs whose courses are not just difficult to play on, but impossible. Our greens staff are busy installing new drainage from our major problem areas down to the river, which as a large natural drain is definitely our major asset right now - when it doesn't decide to flood! This work should hopefully be self-financing as more membership and visitor income is attracted to the most playable course in the area in wet conditions.

Mark P,

It is interesting to hear that the North East has been similarly affected. I wasn't sure whether it was just us on the normally far wetter western side of the country who had been experiencing these abmormal conditions. Or are they the new normal?

Niall,

I think your point about 'knackered' courses is a good one. Drainage systems installed a century ago are inevitably going to fail at some point, and this year's weather is going to test many to breaking point. Who really knows how many hundreds of crumbling clay pipes are all that lie between a dry fairway and a muddy bog on the average inland golf course? Where will the money come from to renew these systems in the event of catastrophic failure? Most clubs are completely skint!

Adam,

I haven't a lot of experience of heathland courses - Manchester isn't well blessed with them! However, I did play Sherwood Forest a couple of weeks ago and was bowled over by the perfect playing conditions - at a time when the Mansfield area had been experiencing the most rain anyone could remember. Please don't disillusion me and say that all heathland courses are not like this!

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Duncan,

The point you make about the clay-based courses is the reason why so many Cheshire and Midland-based players become country members of Welsh links courses for their winter golf. OK, it's a long way to travel for a game, but many acquire caravans or weekend cottages and take the family down for the weekend. Abersoch is known locally as Wilmslow-on-Sea. Country memberships of the Welsh courses are comparatively inexpensive and the Welsh Nationalists are no longer burning Englishmen's second homes in quite the number they used to!

I didn't play yesterday, but I walked from the overflow car park to the clubhouse over the grass in front of the 12th tee. I regretted it - it was immensely soggy.

I'm looking forward to Monday - a match between the Seniors and the Juniors. That should be fun.

Mark.

[Duncan Cheslett]

Abersoch is known locally as Wilmslow-on-Sea.

Ii's always been known round these parts as 'Bramhall-on-Sea'!  

Being from Hazel Grove and therefore consiiderably more down-market, we always holidayed on Angelsey...

 

Very annoyingly, my parents sold their very nice holiday home just outside Caernarfon three years ago, just before I took up golf. I could have had it for a song, but saw no reason at the time to be a regular visitor to the area.

Doh!!

[Niall C]

Adam

Putting a layer of clay under greens to help hold the water was a common method back before course irrigation became the norm. I know that Silloth was one course that had it, or rather has it. I believe that what they did a while back was puncture through the clay hardpan to assist with drainage.

Mark

I was also brought up on a clay course and my brothers still play there. They reckon they are now down to a 3 or 4 month season of decent golf. For the rest of the year, losing balls from plugging, even on the fairway, is not uncommon. Like where you are, up around the Glasgow area, many golfers go down the coast for their winter golf.

Duncan

One benefit of this economic downtun might be to focus the minds of club committee members, on what really counts and thats the course. No point having a swanky clubhouse if members are bailing out because they can't get a game for most fo the year.

Niall

[Sean_A]

Its hard for me to gauge how wet "average" courses are around me because I simply don't play them and I avoid the good parkland courses in the winter/spring months - Little Aston being a surprisingly good exception (it drains at least as well as the top heathland courses).  As Mark stated above, I have long held country membership(s) to avoid wet play and made the final break some 5 years ago when I let my local membership lapse - and it is one of the best drained parkland courses I know of.  That said, at Edgbaston about a month ago there were more than a few wet areas - very unusual for that time of year. 

I have cancelled more golf this year than probably the last 4-5 years combined.  Its been harsh, but thank goodness I have a country membership or I could easily have seen myself become a "part-time" golfer.  I don't know how some of these perennially wet courses who play on temps a ton will survive if the weather stays like it has.

Ciao

[Dan Herrmann]

We've had the exact opposite issue in much of the USA this year, but yielding similar results.  It's been so hot and muggy that it became very difficult to play any time after noon. 

[Marty Bonnar]

Many of you may have noticed my recent post re my new membership at a links course. Balbirnie and Thornton - the two local courses we play most - have become more and more bog-like over the past couple of years. Even today I ended up wearing an old pair of golf shoes as I didn't want to get my nice new ones grotty. Yes, my feet/socks were soaking within about four holes.

Aside that, is there anything better in life than changing your wet socks for dry ones?? I think not...

F.

[Marty Bonnar]

Brian,
I have been a total stupid for twenty-odd years. Spurning the fifteen-minute drive to Leven in favour of a ten-minute one to Balbirnie? What was I thinking? Whit an eedjit!
Hoping to host as many GCAers as possible...
F.