Interesting thread. One of the best examples of Stalag golf was created by British architect Major C K Hutchison who was a prisoner of war in WW1. Text below from Tom Macwood's article on the Three Majors from Golf Architecture magazine issue 9. Also a sketch of the course.
cheers Neil
Hutchison retired from the Army just prior to the war, but luckily he was able to rejoin his Coldstream unit soon after the outbreak. This luck ran out early in 1915 when he found himself in a trench surrounded by Germans—he was interned for the duration of the war at Clausthal in Switzerland.
The playing of games was an important part of the lives of prisoners of war—football, hockey and tennis were popular diversions. In that vein, Hutchison thought a putting green might be well-received and set out to build one. His attempts to establish grass having failed, he then discovered that ordinary soil passed through a sieve and then combined with crushed granite became quite malleable when water was added, and with this material he was able to mold an artificial green. Hutchison built six holes in all—from 60 to 15 yards in length.
The golf course was an enormous hit, Hutchison recalled a particularly memorable match, “The match being halved, the players had to go to the nineteenth hole. Now, this hole was about the most difficult on the course. The ball had to be pitched over a nasty bunker with just sufficient strength to run up on to a small plateau green, exasperatingly difficult to stay on. The player with the honour struck his ball perfectly, and lay stone dead. The match looked as good as over; but the opponent went one better, and actually holed out in one. The shout that went up could have been heard a mile away. The expression on the faces of the sentries standing near by was a study. They must have thought the mad ‘Englanders’ had reached the limit of madness that day.”
