Beguiling BERKSHIRE GC Red Course

[Sean_A]

Is there a minute concerning the 666 configuration? Were the long 4s and 5s contrived to come to 6 par fives as a leftover vestige of bogey score or was that an original par setting?

Ciao

Surely in the 1920s "par" had yet to be a thing? The 666 would have originated based on the bogey score. Presumably when par took over they simply carried on with the 666 configuration because by then it was a notable feature of the course which no-one wanted to change.

Six bogey 5 holes would not have been out of the ordinary in 1928. Even Cavendish had six of them! 

The unusual aspect of the the 666 configuration is the six bogey 3's.

There wouldn't have been six bogey 3s. Never heard of a bogey 3!

The card is weird because the yellow tees should be a par of 68 and the back tees 72. It's interesting that four of yellow tee par 5s were never lengthened to par 5 length. I suspect the club wants to retain the 666 from either tee. Which made me wonder if it started that way?

Ciao

[James Reader]

Is there a minute concerning the 666 configuration? Were the long 4s and 5s contrived to come to 6 par fives as a leftover vestige of bogey score or was that an original par setting?

Ciao

Surely in the 1920s "par" had yet to be a thing? The 666 would have originated based on the bogey score. Presumably when par took over they simply carried on with the 666 configuration because by then it was a notable feature of the course which no-one wanted to change.

Six bogey 5 holes would not have been out of the ordinary in 1928. Even Cavendish had six of them! 

The unusual aspect of the the 666 configuration is the six bogey 3's.

There wouldn't have been six bogey 3s. Never heard of a bogey 3!

The card is weird because the yellow tees should be a par of 68 and the back tees 72. It's interesting that four of yellow tee par 5s were never lengthened to par 5 length. I suspect the club wants to retain the 666 from either tee. Which made me wonder if it started that way?

Ciao

When scorecards used to show both par and bogey scores for each hole, there used to be lots of bogey 3s.

[Sean_A]

Is there a minute concerning the 666 configuration? Were the long 4s and 5s contrived to come to 6 par fives as a leftover vestige of bogey score or was that an original par setting?

Ciao

Surely in the 1920s "par" had yet to be a thing? The 666 would have originated based on the bogey score. Presumably when par took over they simply carried on with the 666 configuration because by then it was a notable feature of the course which no-one wanted to change.

Six bogey 5 holes would not have been out of the ordinary in 1928. Even Cavendish had six of them! 

The unusual aspect of the the 666 configuration is the six bogey 3's.

There wouldn't have been six bogey 3s. Never heard of a bogey 3!

The card is weird because the yellow tees should be a par of 68 and the back tees 72. It's interesting that four of yellow tee par 5s were never lengthened to par 5 length. I suspect the club wants to retain the 666 from either tee. Which made me wonder if it started that way?

Ciao

When scorecards used to show both par and bogey scores for each hole, there used to be lots of bogey 3s.

Sorry, I didn't explain myself well. There weren't par 2s with bogey 3s. The bogey score would only go up to a 4 if anything. Usually it was par 4s to bogey 5s.


Ciao

[John Mayhugh]

Really enjoyed seeing so many pictures from the Red. It's now even higher on the list of "want to sees" for the next time I'm in England. I had seen pictures of the 10th, but your tour shows so many fine green sites. Presentation of the course looks very good as well. Do you know if they have an architect they are working with?

[Adam Lawrence]

Really enjoyed seeing so many pictures from the Red. It's now even higher on the list of "want to sees" for the next time I'm in England. I had seen pictures of the 10th, but your tour shows so many fine green sites. Presentation of the course looks very good as well. Do you know if they have an architect they are working with?

Tim Lobb has worked there quite a bit over the years but at the moment I think the club is in the Mackenzie and Ebert camp.

[Sean_A]

Adam - how much do you think Fowler Simpson was a business partnership rather than a design partnership in the mould of Coore and Crenshaw ? We've all seen the Charles Ambrose sketch of Fowler standing looking over Simpson shoulder as he did a design however are there many examples of them actually working in tandem on a design ?

Niall

I honestly don't know the answer to that question. We can speculate on lots: Sean has on a number of occasions highlighted Fowler’s lack of attachment to a particular design aesthetic (I still don't understand how the same man could build Beau Desert and Delamere Forest, the one with wild greens and the other with extremely flat ones, at virtually the same time), and there's no doubt that Berkshire has a number of flourishes that scream Simpson -- the front bunker on Blue 13 for example, still looks like a Simpson bunker -- but with no evidence of his involvement, do we have to assume that he influenced his older partner? Neither Simpson nor Fowler strike me as the sort of men who were necessarily that good at taking advice -- Simpson in particular smells of 'my way or the highway' a mile off.

But it is all speculation.

Do you think the placement and number of the bunkers reflects Simpson? My impression is these bunkers, while very handsome, are really straight forward in their locations. There also seem to be many more bunkers than I associate with Simpson.