This post is partly a followup on a previous thread on Royal Montrose. In researching the book on the club's bicentennial - it is the only club after St. Andrews to play for 200 years on the same golfing ground (albeit with changing routings) - we unearthed at last the true and rather fascinating story of Harry Colt's involvement at Montrose. The book will be published later in the year, but it is only fair that GCA members (who are always so extremely generous with their advice and information) get a sneak preview. The following is still in draft form so I'd appreciate it if you didn't make copies. There are also likely references in the excerpt that may be confusing if you haven't read what's gone before. But, in any event, here is, for the first time anywhere, the true story (or part of it at least) of perhaps the only election campaign dominated by a golf course architect!
‘A Revolution on the Course’—The Harry Colt controversy
....Most of those assignments were still ahead of Harry Colt in 1913 but he was accomplished enough to have been asked to design the Eden course at St Andrews. The favourable publicity surrounding that project led the Town Council to ask him, in the summer of 1913, to visit Montrose and ‘report on the condition of the principal course’.
After walking around the course twice, Colt instead made far-reaching recommendations that would change golf in Montrose forever. Eleven entirely new holes needed to be built, he reported, and the rest should be revised. Most controversially, the first four holes should be laid out on the ‘top of the bents’, the highest part of the sandy dunes next to the sea. These would offer magnificent views but had long been thought too wild to sustain golf holes.
Colt’s report, which was printed in its entirety in the local press, was a bombshell.
The Montrose Review was having none of it. In an editorial, it said the proposals amounted to ‘a revolution on the course’ and would be a colossal waste of money:
It will come as a great surprise to most local golfers and to most of the strangers who have played on the course, that it is such a poor inferior thing, and needs as much re-modelling as Mr Colt's report implies.
If Colt had struck a nerve, it was not surprising, for his report was frank about the course’s shortcomings:
The present course contains many interesting holes, but at the same time there are several without any distinctive natural feature owing to a portion of the Links being laid out on dead flat land. I have attempted to omit such ground and have in consequence been obliged to layout several entirely new holes. The alterations may appear at first sight to be somewhat extensive, but in my opinion they are absolutely necessary if the land be used to the best advantage for the game of golf.
An added bonus of the Colt plan was that the holes that were no longer needed could be used to extend the auxiliary course (now the Broomfield) to 18 holes.
Colt by no means entirely critical. He praised the ‘beautifully fine turf’ on the putting surfaces, and said that ‘where the daisies and other weeds have been exterminated, the putting greens are, I think, as good as any that I have seen’. But he also noted that ‘the natural undulations have been flattened out too much’ and despaired over the new bunkers that had been introduced, calling them ‘intensely artificial’.
For three months the debate over Colt’s proposals raged: in letters to the editor, at Town Council meetings and no doubt in the golf clubs themselves.
The Royal Albert held a special meeting to express support for the plan but that didn’t carry the kind of weight it would have a generation earlier. Joseph Foreman, a former Provost still on Council, said the Royal Albert’s views should be ignored ‘because the members were mostly resident outside Montrose, and in any financial obligations which Montrose undertook they would have no say and no responsibility’.
Foreman said the vast majority of golfers in Montrose were against the changes and he reminded his fellow councillors that they had recently wasted another £2000 in a botched job of ‘tar-macadamizing’ on Murray Street. He demanded a public meeting on the golf question. The Council demurred, no doubt afraid of inflaming passions any further.
In January 1914, the Council at last voted on a proposal to implement the architect’s plans. Provost Thomson said that the golf course was one of the town’s greatest assets and that ‘it was only by going forward that we can expect to keep Montrose in the front rank, either as a golf centre or as a place for summer visitors’.
Councillor Milne went further. Invoking Shakespeare, he declared the Colt plan was an opportunity that must be grasped: ‘There was a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’
None of this (not even a Shakespearean quote) impressed ex-Provost Foreman but the motion passed over his furious objections. The Review was equally livid:
The town council, one would almost think out of bravado, have rushed with break-neck speed into action and are leaving the thinking to be done some other day. . . . They have shown in this matter a tendency to embark on a large undertaking without thought, and in a spirit of reckless adventure which bodes no good to the town if allowed to go unchecked
If the Council thought the affair was over, they were mistaken.
The onset of war did cause the plans to redevelop the course to be put on hold. But almost as soon as peace was declared, the wheelbarrows were rolling in earnest over the links. An exhibition match between two of the legends of the age, Harry Vardon and George Duncan, was scheduled for October 1919, and the new course needed to be ready in time.
‘A howling wilderness’—The Golf Course Election of 1921
The strains of a weak post-war economy no doubt played their part but work on the new course was a struggle from the start. Montrose had never before engaged on a golf construction project of this magnitude. A letter to the editor complained that the pace of change was too slow and that, with only weeks to go, none of the bunkers Colt had specified were being built.
And the challenge of developing greens and fairways on top of the bents proved to be immense.It seemed particularly so on the 4th hole, designed to be a spectacular 500-yard
par-5 running from the right of today’s 3rd green across the dunes to today’s 5th green. An otherwise sympathetic writer in the Review noted that ‘it has apparently been found impossible this season to level the ground there to ensure that a well played tee shot gets a good lie’.
The visit of Vardon and Duncan went off smoothly. As they were being paid for their appearance, it was hardly surprising that they would praise the new layout as a great course in the making once the wrinkles were ironed out. And local golfers were no doubt willing to give the new holes a year to settle in.
But as the summers of 1920 and 1921 passed with little signs of improvement, golfers grew restless. After three years, many of the new greens and fairways were obviously still in dismal condition. At the Mercantile—by now the town's largest and most active club—a rebellion was in the works. A representative of the club informed the Dean of Guild that the Mercantile was ‘unanimously in favour’ of abandoning the new course and reverting to the old.
The Caledonia more or less sided with the Mercantile (though they would retain two Colt holes), leaving the Victoria and Royal Albert alone to defend the new course. The two clubs conceded that the 4th hole and the 15th hole (a par 3 played from near the current 15th green to a hole somewhere on the current 5th fairway) could be sacrificed, and the 16th greatly changed, but otherwise felt that the bulk of the Colt layout should be retained.
A week later, in October 1921, the Dean of Guild presided over a town meeting on the question. The event proved to be a public relations triumph for the Mercantile position. The popular Alexander Keillor, a former greenkeeper and a legendary golfer and footballer, called for a show of hands. By a margin of 70-16 those present voted to scrap the new layout entirely, even if it meant that the new auxiliary course would need to revert to 9 holes.
The resolution was non-binding of course, but to add to the pressure on the Town Council at least two Mercantile members—A.M. Clarke and D.M. Hogg—put themselves forward for the municipal elections in November. The traditional ‘Heckling Meeting’, at which voters were given a chance to grill the candidates, drew a boisterous, standing-room-only crowd at the Burgh Hall. According to the Montrose Review, they heard Clarke give a scathing, humorous and well-received analysis of the golf course issue:
Mr Clarke said...they used to have a beautiful course in Montrose, second to none in Scotland. They had spent £2000 to £3000 on a new course and made a howling wilderness. . . . It was useless dumping down black earth (in the bents). That sand simply swallowed up hundreds of loads of it. . . . If carrots had been suggested it would be more useful. . . . If council mismanaged the golf course in that way what might they be doing in other departments. In conclusion, he hoped that as he had been the last speaker on the list he might be the first in the poll (laughter and applause).
While Clarke didn't top the poll, he was easily elected, garnering more support than two incumbents. And Hogg, the 1914 Mercantile club champion, missed being elected by only a handful of votes. It must have sent a shock through the political establishment in the town.
As far as the Review was concerned the town meeting, and Clarke's victory, had sealed the fate of the new course:
The Colt plan is doomed and the only good thing about it is to make it an object lesson of what to avoid in the future. . . . Mr Clarke, who was one of the two new candidates returned, probably owed in greatest measure his election following what was recognised to be a lucid and practical exposition of the views held by the bulk of the local exponents of the game.
The survival of the course we know today hung by a very slender thread. But then, at the swearing in of the next council, a formidable new protagonist emerged.
‘Outravelling this tangled skein’
Thomas Lyell, a 35-year old solicitor, and Secretary of the Royal Albert, was nominated to be the new Dean of Guild. In making the nomination, Baille Jolly sounded a note of desperation as he addressed his fellow councillors:
They could not shut their eyes to the fact that there was dissatisfaction in connection with the golf courses. . . . He was sure that they would all hope that Captain Lyell would during what would no doubt prove a strenuous year succeed in out-ravelling this tangled skein and making things right all round.
Lyell had certainly known ‘strenuous’ years before. Serving in the Black Watch, he had earned a Military Cross in the Great War and many young Montrose men who survived had been grateful to serve under him. One soldier recalled that Lyell ‘could talk tactics with old Regulars, law with business men, turnips with farmers, and he always had a cheery word for his subordinate officers’. But it remained to be seen whether these skills would help in the new battle that lay before him.
The first skirmish went decisively to A.M Clarke. Within a month of being elected a town councillor, Clarke had persuaded the Dean of Guild’s committee to endorse his campaign platform of abandoning virtually all the new Harry Colt holes. And they did so over the objection of the new Dean of Guild himself!
Lyell, and the new golf course, had only one more chance – at the Town Council meeting in three weeks’ time. Normally, the Council rubber-stamped the recommendations of the Dean of Guild’s committee. But this time, as the Review reported, when ‘the great golf question came up’ there was ‘a very long and intricate discussion’:
Councillor A. M Clarke, in moving the recommendation of the Dean of Guild's Assessors said:
They had spent all their time upon the bents to the detriment of the other parts of the Links with the result that they had not a single decent course to play on. They had made Bolsheviks of the golfers, who were ...refusing to pay the tariff. By adopting the recommendation they would be losing nothing, but simply cutting off a diseased member which was mortifying the whole. . . . At least 80% of the golfers wished the change. . . . The golf course was driving away visitors more than a manure works or knackery would. (Laughter)’
In a highly unusual move, Dean of Guild Lyell was forced to move an opposing amendment to the motion of his own committee. His reasoning, the Review reported, was that:
The only fault generally with the present course was the fourth hole, and to remedy that all that was required was to play from the present tee down to the old third green. If they did that they would take away the cause of discontent and keep the course as a first class one. ……if they scrapped these holes in the bents they would ultimately have to go back to them, and be faced with the same expenditure as when they adopted the scheme.
Lyell's last-ditch appeal had its desired effect. Even ex-Provost Foreman, who had railed against the plan in 1914, grudgingly agreed to give Lyell ‘another year or two’, though he said he had not changed his mind about the ‘stupidity of the Colt Scheme’.
The Council voted to overturn its committee's recommendation and back Lyell. The editorial writers at the Montrose Review were flabbergasted by this surprising turn of the events and unleashed one last burst of vitriol at the Town Council:
It is fairly certain that the result will not remain long unchanged. . . . The holes in the bents were palpably a weird delusion. They will swallow up a mint of money, and then they can never be otherwise than a poor, sandy strip…The last word in this controversy has not been said.
The Colt course had been given a stay of execution but Lyell was under enormous pressure to improve conditions and turn the ‘weird delusion’ into a playable golf course. To help him in this formidable task, he turned to Robert Winton.
Winton was a member of the famous clubmaking family that still had a workshop near the first tee (Robert had by this time sold the firm to his brother William). A crack golfer, Robert had represented the Victoria Club on the golf course committee for some time when, in January 1923, Thomas Lyell proposed that he be made a part-time ‘golf superintendent’ at a rate of £1 per week.
For once the Montrose Review was pleased, calling Winton the ‘the right man in the right place’. Work on the course picked up noticeably after Winton’s appointment, aided by a new ‘triple horse mower’. There was a flurry of activity in dressing greens, rearranging bunkers, and creating multiple tee boxes on several holes (a recommendation Colt had made). New sprinklers were purchased and those daisies on the greens were finally addressed—Winton hired six women (with a man supervising) to spend a week weeding all the greens at a total cost of £80. Sheep would also no longer be allowed on the course for winter grazing.
Play and revenue on the Championship course inched upwards. A ballot for tee times—begun in the busy summer months before the War—was reintroduced, with names to be submitted by 4 p.m.the previous day.
By 1924 Lyell was confident enough to suggest that Montrose should hold an annual amateur open tournament on July 28 and July 31. There would be no charge for entrants but there would be a prize of x guineas with five guineas for a cup. The Montrose Open Week was born.
From the Town Council minutes it is clear that Lyell and Winton worked closely together to gradually bring the Championship course into a condition that would once again do credit to the town. They must have played a part in course design as well, creating the present 7th hole, reorienting the 8th hole, changing the 5th into a par 4, and shortening the 16th into a par 3.
Robert Winton died in 1926 but by then the course was very much as it is today. The notable exceptions were the Long and Wilderness holes. It was only in 1974 that Harry Colt’s way of seeing those two holes would prevail, when the 15th was at last being extended into a par 5 and a new double-tiered green was built on the now shorter 14th at the instigation of greenkeeper Willie Ritchie.
Thomas Lyell would live another twelve eventful years. When he died suddenly in 1938, his funeral at St Peter’s and St Mary’s Church was reported to be the largest that anyone could remember in the town. Since defusing the golf course controversy, Lyell had become one of the town’s most famous worthies, serving as Provost and taking on senior volunteer roles in an astonishing number of organisations including the Boy Scouts, the British Legion, the local library and Dorwood House. He was one of the leading Freemasons in Scotland and, of course, a Captain of the Royal Albert and its Secretary for several years (he was even Secretary and treasurer of the Ladies Club!). A tribute in the Standard said that Lyell
stood for all that is best in Montrose, or Angus, or indeed Scotland – the sturdy trustworthiness of the plain Scotsman, the personification of good fellowship.