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Neil_Crafter

  • Karma: +0/-0
Dear Christoph
Good to hear from you and many thanks for posting this advert. Yes, it does give a slightly earlier timeframe - late 30/early 31, compared to the late 31 advert that Ulrich posted. I have not found any further reference to the ISGA but will report back on this thread if I do.

Bob
?? Not sure where you got that impression from. I don't think that would possibly be a requirement of a design society - then or now.


Phil_the_Author

Neil,

I got the same impression as Bob did, that the Association would not allow its members to charge or get paid. That is based, and I'm assuming this is what bob is also refering to the following:

My final reference is from The Spirit of St Andrews, p 101 of the trade edition, where Mackenzie writes:

"The International Society of Golf Course Architects prohibit their members giving or receiving commissions."

Tilly never mentions this organization and I would have imagined that they would have wanted him as part of it and took the above as the reason he wasn't since he charged for his services...

Could you explain what was meant by Mackenzie?

Christoph Meister

  • Karma: +0/-0
Neil,

I got the same impression as Bob did, that the Association would not allow its members to charge or get paid. That is based, and I'm assuming this is what bob is also refering to the following:

My final reference is from The Spirit of St Andrews, p 101 of the trade edition, where Mackenzie writes:

"The International Society of Golf Course Architects prohibit their members giving or receiving commissions."

Tilly never mentions this organization and I would have imagined that they would have wanted him as part of it and took the above as the reason he wasn't since he charged for his services...

Could you explain what was meant by Mackenzie?


Hi,

The German language advert I posted today says "fees charged according to the minimum rate set by the International Society of Golf Architects scale of fees" ...

Greetings

Christoph
Golf's Missing Links - Continental Europe
 https://www.golfsmissinglinks.co.uk/index.php/wales-2
EAGHC European Association of
Golf Historians & Collectors
http://www.golfika.com
German Hickory Golf Society e.V.
http://www.german-hickory.com

BCrosby

  • Karma: +0/-0
Neil - I got that impression from your post above where you quote MacK saying in SofSA:

"The International Society of Golf Course Architects prohibit their members giving or receiving commissions."

Sounds to me a little like an economic  suicide pact for architects.

Then I thought, hmmm..., maybe because gentlemen architects like Simpson were involved, the idea was to have an organization for only architects who designed courses strictly as an avocation.

Bob



Neil_Crafter

  • Karma: +0/-0
Bob
I am quite confident that when Mackenzie is referring to "commissions" he is not referring to fee paying projects, but rather to the taking of commissions or kickbacks for specifying certain suppliers or contractors.

It was not intended to be a society for "amateur" architects who worked for nothing - Mackenzie would certainly not have been one of the promoters if that was the case! He was fond of a pound, a guinea and a dollar!
cheers Neil

Bart Bradley

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He was fond of a pound, a guinea and a dollar!
cheers Neil

Of course he was....he was a physician!

 ;)

Bart Bradley, M.D.

Neil...there seems to be a fair amount of speculation about how being a camouflage expert affected MacKenzie's golf work.  How do you think his background as a physician changed his attitudes towards golf architecture?
« Last Edit: January 24, 2009, 10:29:12 PM by Bart Bradley »

Neil_Crafter

  • Karma: +0/-0
Bart
Takes one to know one!

Mackenzie wrote a bit about the relevance of golf to health but I'm not really sure how being a former physician would have impacted on his architectural philosophies. Here's an article he wrote on Golf and Health that was published in The Dunlop Book in 1926.
Neil





TEPaul

Neil:

This is off the subject of this thread but not off the subject of Mackenzie.

I just ran across some correspondence that states that it was Robert Hunter who was responsible for getting Mackenzie out to the Del Monte Peninsula.

Did you know that?

Neil_Crafter

  • Karma: +0/-0
Tom
I think it is fairly common knowledge that Hunter was the man who got Mackenzie to come to California. Doak et al refers to this on p 104 of "The Life and Work of Dr Alister Mackenzie". Perry Maxwell was another who encouraged Mackenzie to come to the US for work. I'd be interested to see the correspondence you mentioned if that's OK?
cheers Neil

Tom_Doak

  • Karma: +2/-1
Neil:

Interesting to see the pamphlet on "Golf and Health".  Of course many of the paragraphs are verbatim from Dr. MacKenzie's book(s); it's amazing to see how economical he was in his p.r. work!

Dr. Bradley:

My co-author on the MacKenzie biography, the late Dr. James Scott (a professor of medicine), concluded that Dr. MacKenzie was not much of a physician and probably that he never wanted to be ... he just went to med school following in his father's footsteps. 

Dr. Scott was intrigued to find out about MacKenzie to begin with because he constantly saw him referred to as a "famous doctor," but nobody he knew around Leeds remembered much of anything about MacKenzie as a doctor.  He never had more than a small practice, and devoted much more time to his various hobbies.  I remember Dr. Scott commenting that it probably didn't do MacKenzie's practice much good, if every time someone came in to his office complaining about their ills he just recommended that they take up golf!

Neil_Crafter

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Tom D
Yes, he certainly was economical with what he wrote and the material he recycled. There is an article in Golf Illustrated from 1925 which is also a reply to the criticisms of golf by Dr Lieb, and the text of this article is naturally quite similar to the Golf and Health article that appeared in The Dunlop Book.

Thanks for the insights into Dr Scott. Clearly golf architecture and camouflage were Mackenzie's two main passions that drove him, and medicine, while probably still remaining an interest, should be separated I think from the practice of medicine, which I feel sure he never missed once he stopped. What Mackenzie witnessed in South Africa in the Boer War was life changing for him I feel certain.

Did you come across any info about the ISGA in your research for the book?
Neil

Tom_Doak

  • Karma: +2/-1
Neil:

The "research" was really all Dr. Scott's ... I was just supposed to write about the golf courses, although I wound up editing a lot of the biographical stuff in order to make the book flow together.

Dr. Scott did not have any info on the ISGA.  I do remember seeing one or two of the references to it by Dr. MacKenzie which you have already cited.

Tony_Muldoon

  • Karma: +0/-0
Bob
I am quite confident that when Mackenzie is referring to "commissions" he is not referring to fee paying projects, but rather to the taking of commissions or kickbacks for specifying certain suppliers or contractors.


From when you first posted this I wondered if it was a shot at Colt and his connection to Suttons.  From 1909 on Colt was paid an annual sum by Suttons and he agreed to promote thier seeds.  When he dealt with a club he would make it clear he had a commercial relationship with Suttons but that he didn't recieve commissions against any particular job.

Suttons were convinced their main rival Carters were paying kickbacks and that was why other Architects worked with them.

Neil have you come accross any reference to Hunters Seeds who were based in the North of England and I believe worked closely with MacKenzie?
Let's make GCA grate again!

Neil_Crafter

  • Karma: +0/-0
Tony
Those are all interesting points re the connections to Suttons and Carters by a number of architects. Whether the reference in "Spirit" re commissions is a jab at old Harry I don't know. Certainly could be.

I have never heard of Hunters Seeds before now and would be interested in any connections to Mackenzie that you may know of. Where were Suttons and Carters based?

Tom
Thanks for info re Dr Scott and his research. There must be some more info on the ISGA out there somewhere......

Tony_Muldoon

  • Karma: +0/-0
Carters were at New Malden in SW London, and Suttons were at Reading (so close to East Hendred).

When I remember where I heard of Huter's I'll forward it to you.
Let's make GCA grate again!

Ulrich Mayring

  • Karma: +0/-0
I believe this interpretation of "commissions" is correct. Spalding used to do the same thing, they had Tom Bendelow on their payroll. Bendelow would travel around the country and design courses inexpensively, making sure that the Pro Shop would be stocked with Spalding clubs and balls.

Ulrich
Golf Course Exposé (300+ courses reviewed), Golf CV (how I keep track of 'em)

Rich Goodale

If true, this business model of designing/developing courses for minimal fees and then making the real money on sales of recurring items (seed, golf equipment, remodelling(?), etc.) is an early minifestation of the King Gillette strategy of "Give them the razors and sell them the blades!"  Or Kodak ( cameras and film) or Microsoft (operating systems and applications/maintenance), etc., etc.  Maybe a lot of these ODG's were not really in it for the soul of the game but for the money?

PS--I like the tyop "minifestation" and I'm keeping it.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2009, 05:47:45 AM by Rich Goodale »

Tony_Muldoon

  • Karma: +0/-0

 Maybe a lot of these ODG's were not really in it for the soul of the game but for the money?


Are you trying to upset us?

  It’s been known for years that Colt was on a retainer – because he told everyone he was- and now Bendelow too.  Does anyone else know of other such payments or even direct commission paid?  I suspect it was more gossiped about than actual, but without any hard proof I can’t see the point of further speculation. Hence my thought that MacKenzie was just jealous of Colt’s earning power. (OK I take that back, afterall it’s a bit Rich!)

I do believe in some cases Carters were approached about a job and they paid the architect out of their earnings, but that involved a turnkey Design and Build operation. They used to advertise “the Carter’s System.” 
Let's make GCA grate again!

Mark Bourgeois

Rich

At least in Mac's case, I think the appropriate business model was vertical integration.

I don't know about the seed angle, it could have been a source of income, but Mac didn't write nearly as much about that (honestly can't remember him writing directly about seed merchants at all) as he did about construction.

Mac railed against green committees' unwillingness to pay for a service like design. He called it a false economy as designer-less designs lacked finality - more work was needed to fix problems a professional designer never would have made.

But at some point he must have acknowledged this is the way committees worked and integrated downstream into construction and took his profits there.

Of course, the most-stated reason given for integration was control, a legitimate rationale behind integration in any industry. Mac didn't trust greenkeepers or committees to carry out his designs, and this distrust manifested itself not only in construction tieups but in design partnerships as well.

Mark

TEPaul

Neil:

Until now I hadn't closely followed this thread but I just read it and the question seems to be if there was a connection between architects and seed companies and such. There certainly was and it seems to have gone pretty far back with some particularly the GB architects such as Colt. William Gordon who apparently became the foreman for Toomey and Flynn in 1923 had represented the Petersen Seed company and then became the superintendent of the Carters Tested Seed Co's construction division in 1920. (It should be noted that these major seed companies back then were involved in more than just golf).

What I can contribute to this subject is how the USGA (and the US Dept of Agriculture) looked at this situation and how it apparently to some extent inspired the creation of the USGA Green Section. The ceation of the USGA Green Section is a pretty long and involved evolution that spanned almost twenty years until it became completely formalized somewhat as we now know it. All those years it worked very closely with the US Dept of Agriculture for their grass research work.

Over those early years the major players in the effort were Walter Harban, DC, Macdonald, Hugh and Alan Wilson, Philadelphia, E.J. Marshall, Toledo Ohio from the club side and Piper, Oakley and Carrier from the government side.

It is pretty clear to see that those men above felt that golf generally in agronomy, construction etc had reached (perhaps by the early 1920s) a total national cost of $25,000,000 and that up to a third of that was waste via mistakes made and the poor seed products of what they referred to as fraudulent seed-merchants.

The correspondence that initiated the setting up of the USGA Green Section is literally a few thousand letters and it seems the two most responsible for this effort from the club side were Hugh and Alan Wilson of Philadelphia (Alan was the first USGA Green Committee chairman). The USGA Green Committee was apparently charged with setting up the USGA Green Section. Initially their intention was to raise and endowment fund of $1 million dollars of which the yield would run and fund the Green Section and the government agronomic research. I do not believe that goal was ever reached but to prepare for it a Pennsylvania corporation was created in the early 1920s called The USGA Green Section Endowment Fund, Inc. It was set up to create tax deductibility on contributions.

There is no question at all most all these fellows were imbued with a pretty intense "amateur" ethic about the game and various involvements with it. To say they were originally pretty "anti-commercial" would definitely not be an overstatement.

By the way, perhaps around 1925 there is correspondence between Alan Wilson (representing the USGA) and the US Government (Dept of Agriculture) about the idea of the professional architects setting up their own association or society (the professional architects in America were apparently making noises to that effect) and Alan Wilson's advice was to just let them do it on their own without any involvement from the USGA and certainly not from the US Dept of Agriculture. Their only assistance would be just mentioning it in the USGA Green Section Bulletin, if that, even though Alan Wilson did allow as a professional architects association would probably be good for golf somehow.

Actually, if the likes of the Wilsons, Macdonald, Marshall, Vanderpool et al from the USGA seemed anti-commercial, the men from the US Dept of Agriculture, Piper, Oakley were even more so. Ironically, in the early 1920s their best researcher, Lyman Carrier decided, to go over to the commercial side creating true disappointment. They talked about the need to pay him enough money to get him back to the US Dept of Agriculture/USGA Green Section side but that did not happen.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2009, 10:11:00 AM by TEPaul »

Mark Bourgeois

Tom

Good stuff - but Taylor (and Bender) deserves a bigger role than you've given him, yes?

Mark

TEPaul

Mark:

It's a very large subject and there were consequently a lot of people floating around it. I'm only mentioning the ones I see mentioned in these correspondences.

By the way, these letters which are mostly on other things such as golf agronomic research do shed some pretty interesting light on the opinions of some of the participants on other subjects.

When the USGA Green Section was getting going their "Bulletin" printed monthly was very important to them and certainly including its content. Piper wanted to get into articles on golf architecture as well as agronomic research and he wanted particularly Hugh Wilson to write about it. For various reasons Hugh Wilson refused and Alan claimed Hugh was overworked and not well enough to do it. Alan Wilson told Piper that the Green Section should just stick to what they knew well----agronomic research and not get into golf architecture or they might be criticized. However, in this particular correspondence Alan did allow that if they had architects on their committee of the stature of England's Colt or Alison then they might be justified in asking them to generate articles on golf architecture.

Both Hugh and Alan Wilson really liked Alison, perhaps not just for his ability as an architect, but because they both thought he was a very fine fellow! Alison was planning on stopping in to the US Dept of Agriculture to see Piper and Oakley and I guess their Arlington Virginia research station and they wrote back allowing as Alison most certainly was a fine fellow and a real gentleman who was extremely facile in availing himself well in any social situation. ;)

They also mentioned that he was in DC to try to get the contract on the Edward MacLean golf course project in Washington. Edward MacLean, by the way, was the owner of the Washington Post and I believe the farther-in-law of Washington Post owner Martha Graham. His famous wife was the last private owner of the ill-starred Hope diamond!   :o
« Last Edit: January 26, 2009, 10:41:43 AM by TEPaul »

Christoph Meister

  • Karma: +0/-0
The Toronto Terror includes an extract from the Canadian Golfer of September 1928,

"Dr Mackenzie is deeply interested in the formation of an International Association of Golf Architects, and while in Toronto consulted with Mr. Stanley thompson, who is strongly in favour of such an organization. All the leading golf architects in Great Britain and the States have already promised their support and the association will be launched during the next month or so."

Was it formed in 1928? And who were its members?




Hi Neil,

I think you are going to like this one:

There is an interesting article in the Italian magazine "Golf" from September 1934 in an article written by C. Noskowski and A.Dubrulle - I quote:

"Una associazione di architetti di golf, sorta in Londra nel dicembre 1928, ha proclamato l'incompatibilitià assoluta tra professione di architetto e quella dell'imprenditore...."

I translate: "An association of golf architects was established in 1928 in London in oder to resolve the complete incoherency between golf course architect and contractor (or: entrepreneur)"

Not bad, isn't it?

Christophe Noskowski was a French golf course architect of Polish origin whos most famous course is the championship course at Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) which he designed during the 1930s. He also designed
the first nine holes at Dellach (Austria), the new 18-hol course at Vienna-Prater (Austria, defunct) and the 18-hole course at Divonne-les-Bains (France). His redesigns included Hendaye (France) and St. Barbe (France).

Until now he remains one of those forgotton continental golf architects from the 1920s and 1930s - but I have been on his track for a while allready...

This almost certainly means that Noskowski was one of the (founding?)members of the ISGA.....I just bought the new Colt book a few weeks ago and will see if I can identify  at least Karl Hoffmann on the photo with the golf architects....

Below you find two advert for Noskowski's "Office technique du Golf" in Paris from 1930/31

I would be most glad to hear from anyone who has more information about Noskowski!

Regards from Germany,

Christoph




Golf's Missing Links - Continental Europe
 https://www.golfsmissinglinks.co.uk/index.php/wales-2
EAGHC European Association of
Golf Historians & Collectors
http://www.golfika.com
German Hickory Golf Society e.V.
http://www.german-hickory.com

Christoph Meister

  • Karma: +0/-0
Neil,

there is also a quote regarding the fees in Noskowsiki's 1934 article:

"Per nobilitare la professione se è specificato che un architetto di golf non deve riscuotere nessuna percentuale sulle fornitore o sui lavori, ma soltanto gli onorari che gli competono"

and now this in English:

"To ennoble the profession it has been decided that the golf architect shall not receive any royalty (or profit-sharing) from the suppliers of his work, but only the (architectural) fees he is entitled to."

I hope things are clearer now...

Regards to Australia,

Christoph




Golf's Missing Links - Continental Europe
 https://www.golfsmissinglinks.co.uk/index.php/wales-2
EAGHC European Association of
Golf Historians & Collectors
http://www.golfika.com
German Hickory Golf Society e.V.
http://www.german-hickory.com

Alfonso Erhardt

  • Karma: +0/-0
Christoph,

Sorry to correct you but the proper translation is not that they have set up to resolve, but that they have resolved the incompatibility between architect and entrepreneur.

Regards,

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