Two or three years before The Evangelist of Golf was published I saw the article Henry Whigham wrote about his father-in-law Charles Macdonald just after Charlie had passed away. It is framed, under glass and hangs just to the left of the front desk at The National’s clubhouse.
The 3,200+ word article was written as a eulogy and cited the many deeds of Macdonald.
Reading it I came on a paragraph about the courses CBM and Raynor were involved with over the years.
I’ll post some it below and I’ll include a paragraph or so before and after the paragraph in question so you can see it is not taken out of context.
What caught my attention was the following:
“The Macdonald-Raynor courses became famous all over America. Among the most famous are Piping Rock, the Merion Cricket Club at Philadelphia, the Country Club of St. Louis, two beautiful courses at White Sulphur, the Lido (literally poured out of the lagoon), and that equally amazing Yale course at New Haven, which was hewn out of rock and forest at an expense of some seven hundred thousand dollars.”
(These are all courses Macdonald had major input on)
I called Gil (Philadelphia) and Tom Paul (same) and perhaps called Mike Cirba (can’t remember) and asked them if there was anything at Merion that could be construed as the work of Macdonald/Raynor.
They both answered that there was nothing there that could be traced to their work.
At the time I knew little about Merion and certainly did not know what had transpired over the years at Merion and how it evolved into the magnificent course it became.
My sole interest was to follow through on what I read in the Whigham piece.
I’ve got 90 - 100 courses to review and Merion, to me, was another course on a long list (at the time).
Loosely kept records abound at most of these clubs, and as anyone knows who has researched clubs and course knows, it is hard to get a lot of facts straight and find out what actually hit the ground at these clubs.
My research is and has always been and my course reviews has always been about the original courses - the original concept of the architect.
What happens over the years beyond what was originally there, I’ll leave to someone else to figure out.
So there I was with “Merion Cricket Club” - no answer, until lately (a million words later)
I’ve turned up about 35 courses Raynor never got credit for and a couple Macdonald never got credit for (whatever that means) so this was just added to a list of “possibles.”
Here are a few paragraphs from the Whigham article and you can do with it whatever you please.
Article in part:
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“I went out with Macdonald to ride over the land which is now the National, and on coming back to the Shinnecock Club for lunch we found four elderly members awaiting us with dire prophecies of what would happen if we selected a site so near their own club, one of the first three golf clubs in America and the most fashionable. Yet on that first Saturday of September in 1907 there were only four old members in their sixties or seventies in the clubhouse, and they confessed that they had to contribute a pretty penny each year to keep things going.
The very next year on the first Saturday of September I counted over fifty players at Shinnecock, many young people among them. The fame the National had spread so far beyond Long Island that golfers from everywhere came to took over the project, and Shinnecock, instead of being hurt by the proximity of the National, had taken on a new lease of life.
Clubs all over the country asked Macdonald to remodel their courses. Since he was every inch an amateur, golf architecture for him was entirely a labor of love, and it was quite impossible for him to do all that was asked of him. So he used to send Seth Raynor to do the groundwork, and he himself corrected the plans.
Raynor had an extraordinary career as a golf architect. He was a surveyor in Southampton whom Macdonald had called in to read the contour maps he had brought from abroad. Raynor knew nothing about golf and had never hit a ball on any links, but he had a marvelous eye for a country. Having helped lay out the eighteen great holes on the National, he was able to adapt them to almost any topography. The Macdonald-Raynor courses became famous all over America. Among the most famous are Piping Rock, the Merion Cricket Club at Philadelphia, the Country Club of St. Louis, two beautiful courses at White Sulphur, the Lido (literally poured out of the lagoon), and that equally amazing Yale course at New Haven, which was hewn out of rock and forest at an expense of some seven hundred thousand dollars. From coast to coast and from Canadian border to Florida you will find Macdonald courses. And in hundreds of places he never heard of you will discover reproductions of the Redan and the Eden and the Alps.
Not only did the great links spring into existence by the magic of the Macdonald touch, but others were started independently with the idea of emulating the National. Pine Valley is almost a contemporary. The late George Crump discovered a curious outcrop of sand dunes in New Jersey only forty minutes out of Philadelphia and immediately set out to build a super-links out of his own inner consciousness. He did ask Macdonald to look it over in its early stages, and followed a few of his suggestions, but to all intents and purposes Pine Valley was a George Crump creation and a noble work of golf architecture.
Twenty years ago Pine Valley was the chief rival of the two outstanding Macdonald creations, the National and the Lido. “ it continues on
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Now, Henry Whigham was a brilliant man:
for 25 years - 1910 - 1935 - he was the editor-in-chief of Town & Country magazine
a 2-time U S Amateur Champion
He wrote 4 books
1. How to Play Golf (1898)
2. The Persian Problem
3. Korea and Manchuria
4. The New Deal: English and American
Henry Whigham was born in Scotland and graduated from Queen's College, Oxford 1893
C B Macdonald knew his father and urged Whigham to come to US in same year 1893 for Colombian Exposition
Whigham, H J Tweedle, Robert Foulis, and James Foulis designed Onwentia Club at Lake Forest, IL
1896 Whigham was drama critic at Chicago Tribune as well as teacher of English & Economics at Lake Forest College
1898 to 1905 correspondent - Spanish American War for Chicago Trib & London Standard
1906 to 1907 correspondent - Boer War, Boxer Uprising and Russo-Japanese War for London Morning
1907 assisted Macdonald in design of the National
He worked with his father in law on a few other projects
In 1907 Henry married Francis Macdonald, Charlie’s daughter
.... and was very often one of Macdonald’s a traveling and vacation companion (along with Judge Morgan O’Brien)
On the main wall in National’s library are three very large portraits:
Charlie, obviously the largest, centered over the fireplace, Morgan O’Brien to the left of CBM and Henry Whigham to Macdonald right (a place of honor?).
So aside from being “family” Henry Whigham was held in high regard not only by his father-in-law but in the world in general.
I include this Whigham information in this thread to show he was not someone on the fringe of all these years of events and when he mentions the Cricket Club, what should someone believe?
"The Evangelist of Golf" was the title of the Whigham article/eulogy which is where I got the title for my book.
My book was published in 2002 so I probably happened across this Whigham article three years before that.
The entire article is in the back of my book beginning on page 263 if anyone cares to read it.
I DO NOT intend to be drawn into this lengthy discussion about Merion. You fellas can continue the “food-fight-for-facts” - I won’t go there.