Colt in the Caribbean 1935-40

[Anthony Gholz]

To All in the Colt & Alison world:  Need help


I'm reviewing a couple of outlier courses from the C&A oeuvre.  One of them is the St Andrew's GC course (1 of 4 for the club) outside of Port of Spain in Trinidad & Tobago, West Indies. 


Cornish & Whitten lists this course as a Colt and Morrison design from 1940.  My research indicates that this 18-hole course was the 3rd of four courses for this club which was founded in 1891.  This Colt course is NLE (as C&W state) and the current course is on a different piece of property far north of town.  Ronald Fream designed the current course and did field work when working for Peter Thompson and his partner.  Maybe 1975+/-?


The story goes that a member of the club went back to England in 1935 and in a cold call convinced Colt to design the course for property the club purchased in 1934.  Colt agreed to do it for nothing!  He eventually accepted fifty guineas(sp?)  According to the story, from a topo map, he developed a plasticine model of the course and the members directed local labor, building it following the model.  The first 9 was opened in 1935 and the second in 1936, though Whitten says 1940 for the full course.  My info says the course was just under 6000 yds, but played across ravines in hilly countryside and was quite challenging for the best players.  The most recent independent (non-club) article I have is from 1967 (fifty years ago!).  Fream wrote a bit of club history that you can find on-line and he doesn't give a specific date, but it seems a new course date of 1975+/- would go along with a 40 year life span for Colt's design.  Also I only have info that says it's a Colt design.  I can't confirm Whitten's comment "with Morrison."  Or for that matter Alison.  Did everything out of the English office during the depression and before the war involve Morrison?  (I need to re-read Hawtree's Colt & Co. book)


I know this shows a lack of discipline on my part, as this course is technically in South America off the coast of Venezuela, and so not on my C&A in NA radar.  However, since it's the only one I can find in SA, and on the VERY north side (ha, ha) I'm adding it to my NA list.  Maybe I'll call it C&A in the Western Hemisphere .....


I can't find much on this course and can't identify the specific site for it, though I can for the other three courses for this very old club. My question(s) is, does anyone have any further information to add for this, in the middle of nowhere, golf course?  A specific site?  Or can anyone confirm or deny any of the information I've come up with to date?


Thanks for your help.
Anthony

[Tom_Doak]

I have never run across anything about that course.


It's amazing how stuff like this turns up today.  I guess if you are going to "design" a course by doing a routing and never going there, then this was a Colt design.  Huntingdale, in Melbourne, was supposedly designed by Alison in the same manner.  But it is hardly an exemplary piece of his work.


I've done routings for lots and lots of pieces of land where we never wound up building a course ... I plan to include some of the more interesting ones in my routing book.  But I've never done one that got built after the fact by someone else.

[Anthony Gholz]

I'm going to add this item from Hawtree's Colt & Co before I agree that this thread has dropped like a stone.


This is re the plasticine model version of design and construction at a distance.  It turns out this may have been a regular thing with Colt.  C&Co. p64


"He [farm hand looking for work in depression] was interviewed in the dining room where a detailed relief model of the Effingham GC occupied the table.  Colt used the boys from the village school ... to set out the pins to contour these models as part of their education and rewarded them with boxes of apples from the farm. The models were cut in half and then transported to the site for reference."


Hawtree goes on to discuss the relative merits of how expensive normally this sort of model was and the difficulty of maintenance of the model over time.


Thanks to Tom for his comments.  I have to believe there is someone out there who remembers this course as it appears to have been played into the late 1970s.


Anthony