Mystery Green

[Bryan Izatt]

Can you guess which green this is?  If you can, when did it change to its current configuration?

[Marty Bonnar]

Turnberry 18. Maybe pre-MacKenzie Ross reno?

[Bryan Izatt]

FBD,


That's no fun.  You had home field advantage. 


The green looks so much smaller now and so much more benign. The green seemed to come forward of the left bunker and be closer to the right bunkers than is currently the case, although the current bunkers on the right are well short of the green.  There seem to be more of them in the old picture too..


I'm guessing that the alterations were done in the 1949-50 time frame.  The old picture might be from around 1939.

[Ally Mcintosh]

That old photo is really cool.

[Peter Flory]

Hard to believe that they actively dampened those features. 

[Adrian_Stiff]

That old photo is really cool.

+1

[Ted Sturges]

Wow!...great photo.  The old version of the 18th green at Turnberry looks so much more interesting than the current version.


My one beef with Turnberry is that the greens are too benign for the spectacular setting there.  That photo shows that at one point, perhaps the greens were more interesting...and someone came in and toned them down.  Does anyone know that history?


TS

[Tony_Muldoon]

Turnberry 18. Maybe pre-MacKenzie Ross reno?

Great spot, good Scot.
Cool picture Bryan.


If memory serves it was 'renovated' after the WWW11 by Suttons. During the war the course was an airfield and post war there was a great amount of mechanical work done to get it into shape,  including turfing huge areas.


Seems like the green was moved back to add length and the bunkers left where they were?


 

[Bryan Izatt]

The area around the Ailsa 18th green was largely destroyed making an airfield during WW II.  The course was rebuilt by Mackenzie Ross circa 1949-50.  The area around the 18th was rebuilt rather than sympathetically restored - too bad.  The sequence of historical aerials below show the transformation.


The 1930 photo shows the Ailsa 18th closest to the small clubhouse.  The green to the left and the tee next to it were presumably for the number 2 course, supposedly Braid circa 1923.  Interesting looking green and bunkering for a number 2 course.  The 1930 Ailsa green looks well bunkered to the right and that lines up with the old ground level view posted earlier.  You can click through the picture to get a full scale rendition. 




The aerial from 1947 shows that the area of the 18th green has gone to seed or been built over during WW II.  There look to be some remnants of the bunkering to the left of the 18th green number 2 course.



In 1953 the 18th Ailsa green has been rebuilt in a totally different shape and without bunkering - far from a sympathetic restoration.   The 18th green for the number 2 course is totally gone - sad.

[Ally Mcintosh]

Remind me, who was the architect for 1930 Turnberry?


That overhead looks really interesting, both courses.


Was 1930 a better course than 1950? Were there significant changes between 1950 and 2015 or was the course we knew (prior to Trump / Ebert) as designed by Ross?


Are there more pictures from 1930ish?

[Bryan Izatt]

The course was modified quite a lot over the years it seems.  It started with Willie Fernie in 1900, followed by Major Cecil Hutchinson in 1938, Mackenzie Ross in 1949-50, Mackenzie and Ebert in 2006 and Ebert again recently with the major redo.


There are a few more aerial pictures from 1930 and 1936 but they all focus more or less on the hotel and a couple of the lighthouse.  You can see them on Britain from Above.


I can't answer your other questions, although based on the posted photos of the 18th green area it looks like the pre-war course was more interesting.


It seems that the rebuild after WW II was a major undertaking as the airfield had flattened and destroyed any natural features of much of the course. Perhaps the holes along the shore survived more or less intact.

[Ally Mcintosh]

Thanks Bryan,


Those bunkers look artistic, unlikely from Willie Fernie in 1900. If Hutchinson wasn’t there until 1938, there must have been some golden age influence in the 20’s, surely?

[Sean_A]

It's C Hutchison and H Hutchinson. Potentially confusing.

Ciao

[Ally Mcintosh]

So I remember part of this now. Surely someone has the history?:


It was rebuilt immediately after WW1 as well as WW2. The Arran was also introduced and if that is the 2nd green, the bunkering looks equally interesting.


So who was responsible for the “Between the Wars” courses? Was that Hutchison? He was later, wasn’t he - not around in 1919/20?


I do remember reading once that the pre-WW2 course was superior to the post-WW2 course. I can imagine it looking at those photos.

[Thomas Dai]

As an aside Turnberry was also used as an airfield during WW1. Grass runways but even they, and the various other facilities that go with servicing military aircraft, likely need to be pretty flat.
atb

[Niall C]

Ally

As Bryan says Willie Fernie did the initial course which had a similar routing but didn't take in the land comprising the current first four holes. Colt was there in 1909 but in between times the green keeper/pro AN Weir would have made tweaks and might have started the second course (can't recall).

Subsequent to WWI Braid laid out (anew ?) the second course and I expect might have given the main course a makeover in terms of bunkering which as you know was his thing. Tom Fernie (Willie Fernie's son) who took over had a hand along with the new greenkeeper.

I suspect I've got various bits of that muddled up but there is a pretty good course history by Jack Boyd that outlines very well the development of the course from it's inception. Somewhere in the archives there is a thread on the evolution of the course that has copies of the plans in the book. The plan for the Fernie course is based on a contemporary description rather than a plan, however there is a plan of that course in Ed Oden's thread and the two are fairly similar.

The plan of the CKH course is again based on description rather than a contemporary plan. I've never been able to find a contemporary plan anywhere of that course and you'd think there would be one somewhere even though the course didn't last long.

Niall

[Bryan Izatt]

Here is a link to the 2006 thread about the evolution of Turnberry that Niall alluded to.


https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,27257.msg516215.html#msg516215


It doesn't appear to add anything to the evolution between the WW's. 


From other sources I've read, Braid was engaged in 1923 to redo the No. 2 course.  The left hand green in the image above is presumably his. 


The RR bought out the hotel and golf course in 1926.  Some sources say that Hutchison was retained in 1926 to redo the Ailsa course.  A new professional, James Macdonald, was also added in 1926 by the new owner. Since it is reported the CKH completed the redesign in 1938, it appears to have taken 12 years to complete the work.  However, another aerial from 1930, following, shows that the four CKH holes south of the road, which were new from the Fernie routing, existed in 1930 and appeared to be in fine nick.  It would seem that CHK was completed with a lot of his work well prior to 1938.


It is astonishing in these aerial photos to see conditions that appear to be very good even by today's standards.  Also the width of the fairways seems quite wide by today's standards.

You can click through the photo to get a larger version.