One of the most poignant spots in British golf is the entrance to the course at Brancaster, where you go through the war memorial gate (shown elsewhere on GCA) saluting the fallen of both the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club (officers) and the Brancaster Village Golf Club (other ranks). Interestingly, war memorials of this kind were almost unknown in the UK until the 1920s.
One of the most famous accounts of the Western Front remains Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. The latter had been a junior member at Harlech, where the Graves family owned a large house just to the north of the little town, and it was the founding secretary of RStD, William Henry More who played a key role at the outset of Graves' military career. Graves recalls in his celebrated semi-memoir that 'I had just finished with Charterhouse and gone up to Harlech, when England declared war on Germany. A day or two later I decided to enlist...The Harlech golf club secretary (More) suggested my taking a commission instead of enlisting. He rang up the nearest regimental depot - the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at Wrexham and told the adjutant that I had served in the Officer Training Corps at Charterhouse. The adjutant said 'Send him right along' ' and thus are celebrated military (and literary) careers born. This, incidentally, is the same More described by Bernard Darwin as 'just about the best golf club secretary in the world'.
Very sadly the golfing pride of Harlech at that time, Henry Stokoe, a recent Oxford Blue who had swept all before him in the RStD summer meeting of August 1914, immediately prior to the outbreak of war, was killed at Ypres in October 1915, just after his twenty-first birthday, when a rifle grenade exploded prematurely. This was the sort of sad story that can be traced across the honours boards of all too many of the historic golf clubs of the British Isles (remembering that large numbers of men from what is now the Republic of Ireland also served).