I too am very interested in finding out a great deal more about Colt, his courses, contributions to others and also very much Hugh Alison due to some very interesting documentation involving him at Pine Valley.
There seems to be somewhat of a mysterious aura to Harry Colt, to me, however, maybe even more than somewhat mysterious, most particularly involving Pine Valley.
Tom MacWood mentions; 'you would think his contributions to Pine Valley would merit more attention', for instance. Why should his contributions merit more attention? All the evidence of his involovment at Pine Valley seems available and has been for many decades. There are a number of "rumors" about Colt and Pine Valley that have also been extant almost since the beginning of the club. It appears to me at this point that those "rumors" have always been just that, "rumors". Exactly why they remain so strong may very well be a much more interesting story than what his actual contribution was.
Colt's contributions to Pine Valley are not so much of interest as to what is actually available there documentation-wise from him but how it was later handled, acted on, or more particularly not acted on or altered following his on-site time and participation.
This documentation (and his participation) is a bit odd in that it's not really the available evidence of his hole drawings, for instance, but how you analyze them, and although they have been analyzed (by Jim Finegan) maybe they should be analyzed in more detail.
It's not easy to do actually, because there has never been any corresponding documentation from Crump himself. Finegan is an excellent historical researcher, often more in the personal and playing histories of golf clubs than the actual architectural evolution. Finegan is also quite "polite" in the way he characterizes various things and my take on his conclusions of Colt's actual contributions to Pine Valley is that it probably was far less ultimately than it has always been rumored to be!
There is, of course, Colt's remark, written in a magazine in 1914 or 1915 something to the effect that he had the honor to "lay out" Pine Valley, but all the available evidence would indicate that was not what it would seem to indicate. It looks to me as if Crump was a very clever marketer and he understood how to both solicit and also use Harry Colt's name and fame to further the cause of "popularizing" Pine Valley (soliciting notice and members). And that both of them may have had some sort of unwritten agreement to do just that and furthermore to "perpetuate" a perception of Harry Colt's involvment!
So the only way to track Colt's actual architectural contributions there is to very carefully analyze what was done there following his departure against the available evidence that was left there by him (the hole drawings). The fact is they just don't match much. But more detailed analysis should be done as to how they match at all.
Maybe, it's just me but this seems to be a bit of a common thread with Colt. I even tried to analyze Colt's contributions at Port Rush last summer with a person at the club who was known to know the most about the course. Colt did the course, no doubt, but again the details were unusually hazy. Same thing at Royal County Down, except there was no detailed mention of contributions at all.
Colt was no doubt one helluva solid and talented architect but there seems to be a mysteriousness about the details of his work, even his whereabouts sometimes. Why is that? What am I missing? Did he write, did he kept solid records, or were they lost?
Regarding Pine Valley, actually Hugh Alison's contributions (at a later date) are more straight forward and probably easier to document if or how they were actually put on the ground. The curiosity there however, is they appear to have never really been analyzed at all. The reasons, I believe, is they fall into an odd window of time for research that happened to just precede the first aerial photographic evidence of Pine Valley. So the only way to do it is to analyze it on the ground vs what was there previously (which of course is not easy to do). But Because Alison's drawings are interestingly pre and post recommendation it may not be that difficult to do.
But as I said in a previous post on this topic, I would love to know more about Colt and Alison because they and their work seems so interesting but I for one hope that the truth of Colt's actual and ultimate contribution to Pine Valley will become more clear so that the record can finally be set straight and these decades old "rumors" can be put in an accurate context.