When I was at Beau Desert north of Birmingham in October, the club secretary was nice enough to give me a copy of the club's history book.
The club was designed by Herbert Fowler for the young Marquess of Anglesey in 1912 on 161 acres of hilly land at Cannock Chase. The construction cost 18,000 pounds, a lot of money at that time, but not a problem for the Marquess, whose income amounted to 250,000 pounds a year!
So the construction of the course postdated Bernard Darwin's "Golf Courses of the British Isles" by at least a couple of years.
The club's history book has this quote:
"Bernard Darwin, the most respected of all the early golf writers, played at Beau Desert in the 1920's, and was sufficently impressed to mention the course favourably in his book, 'The Golf Courses of Great Britain (sic),' published in 1926."
In the foreward to the 1988 publication of the original 1910 volume, Herbert Warren Wind mentions that Darwin updated the book in 1926. I have never seen a copy of this 1926 book (and wish someone would publish it like the 1910 original).
If anyone has a copy, could you please post an excerpt or summary of Darwin's remarks on Beau Desert? I found it to be an exceptional course in routing, features, and particularly the wildly contoured greens, and am curious about what Darwin would have had to say about it.
After we played there, Craig Disher, Mark Bourgeois, Sean Arble and I were discussing how much more interesting the greens were at Beau Desert were than those at Delamere Forest an hour away (if you can follow the directions correctly
).
Reading the club history, this may be explained in part by the fact that Beau Desert is routed over old mining works and quarried areas of the hills. The club records discuss many incidents of subsidence, where the shifting of underlying soils may have accentuated and added to Fowler's contouring of the greeens. Plans are mentioned to flatten almost every green. Fortunately (for the greens) not much of this work was done, as the history of the club is one of a membership that consistently declined to step up and fund anything, from taking debentures to buy the club from the Marquess (for only 2,000 pounds!) to declining to build a new clubhouse until 1970!
By the way, Beau Desert is an outstanding place to play these days, as they have built a very nice 3-bedroom Dormy House and offer a package of B&B and golf for 75 pounds.
