16th Revision of the Dr Alister Mackenzie Chronology

[Neil_Crafter]

Our small Dr Mackenzie research team is very pleased to announce that we have completed the 16th Revision of the Mackenzie Chronology, after many, many hours of research and contributions by a number of people.

The 16th Revision is considerably advanced over the 15th, with over 400 new entries and a number of previous entries modified or expanded. This revision contains a good deal of timeline information regarding Mackenzie's early years, about his family, as well as his education and WW1 service.

Through the particular efforts of Niall Carlton in Scotland we have delved into the British golf magazines of 'Golf Illustrated' and 'Golfing' unearthing much about Mackenzie along the way, including many of his writings and also his golf records at the Leeds Golf Club in the period of 1901 to 1903.

Sean Tully in San Francisco and Bob Beck in Santa Cruz have been most diligent in researching Mackenzie's time in the USA, and Bob has unearthed records from Cypress Point that show when Mackenzie stayed overnight in the clubhouse and even what he ate for his meals! It is staggering that 80 or more years on we can get down to this level of detail about the life of Alister Mackenzie.

Another delightful gem was the discovery that the renowned golf writer Bernard Darwin went up to Leeds in late February 1922 and stayed for three days with Mackenzie at his home Moor Allerton Lodge. Mackenzie drove Darwin around to show off a selection of his courses and they visited Alwoodley, Moortown, Ilkley, Pannal, Starbeck and Oakdale, playing at some of the courses along the way and looking at others. Darwin wrote about his experiences in Leeds with Mackenzie in two of his columns in 'Country Life' the following month.

Accordingly, we believe the wait since the 15th Revision was released back in August 2010 has been well worth it, and trust that you will agree when you peruse this substantial document.

Thanks must go to Nick Leefe, the Secretary of the Alister Mackenzie Society of Great Britain for his encouragement and contribution, and to Sean Tully, the golf course superintendent of the Meadow Club and early Californian golf researcher extraordinaire, who contributed significantly to the 16th Edition before handing over the reins to me late last year.

Also thanks to Mark Rowlinson, Mark Bourgeois and Nick Norton of our research group, and to all the other historians and researchers around the world who contributed. The names of our many contributors are listed in the final page of the document.

Please feel free to disseminate the document to friends and colleagues, we only ask that if anyone uses some of the information within it in any writings or websites that you give a credit to this document. The document is available as a PDF download at the following link https://www.yousendit.com/download/M3BseVdqY1N0TWxBSXRVag

We trust you enjoy the 16th Revision and we know this will be hard to top when time comes to start on the 17th!

cheers Neil

[Matthew Mollica]

Brilliant work Neil, Sean, and all involved. Big thank you for linking this.

Matthew

[Craig Van Egmond]

Wow!  Amazing work.  That Alister sure got around.

Thanks!

 

[Jeff_Mingay]

I wish you hadn't posted this, Neil... I had plans for other things this morning, now can't stop reading the chronology!

Fascinating.

Very, very interesting work by all involved. Thanks.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Neil, et al.

Nice work. A real labor of love.

[Neil_Crafter]

Thanks everyone for the kind words. Sorry to disrupt your morning Jeff!

[Marty Bonnar]

Neil,
again wonderful, wonderful work. So happy to play a teensie role.
Can't help wondering as I read, what the old fella would have made of it. Think maybe the ego would have liked the attention!
v best,
MB.

[Neil_Crafter]

Marty
Thanks, yes I imagine the ego would have been stroked a little. Would probably have suggested some corrections saying "I was never there at that time!". Appreciate your contributions too of course.

[Marty Bonnar]

Neil,
don't know what got me to thinking, but I don't recall ever seeing any movie footage of the Dr. Have you any knowledge of such a thing? Be very cool to see him 'in motion'.
cheers,
MB.

[Neil_Crafter]

Marty
I haven't seen any movie footage of Mackenzie, perhaps some exists somewhere - Shangri La maybe? 

[Mike_Cocking]

Hi Neil,

Great work to you and the other contributors. 

In your latest research did you uncover any letters or plans for the courses he consulted to in Australia - other than those which are more commonly known e.g. those reproduced in the newspapers (metropolitan, kingston heath) or the other 'known' ones such as the maps at royal adelaide and royal melbourne. 

Courses such as Bonnie Doon, Royal Queensland, Indooroopilly, Flinders, Victoria, Barwon Heads etc..

Many thanks,



Mike Cocking

[Neil_Crafter]

Thanks Mike.
Interesting question. The timeline for Australia has changed little over the last couple of years and I haven't been able to add too much to our knowledge of Mackenzie's time in Australia.

There are very few Mac plans known for Australia. Royal Adelaide is the best as it's in colour and there is a B&W plan of Flinders. There is a pencil sketch of Royal Melbourne clearly drawn by Mackenzie that Dr John Green found a few years ago and we wrote it up together in a past issue of Golf Architecture. There are newspaper plans of RM and Kingston Heath, nothing in Sydney or Brisbane that I have ever heard of. There is a small sketch but its really just stick outlines for the changes to Brisbane GC put out by the committee. Reports are known for Kingston Heath, Royal Sydney and Manly and extracts from a number of other reports of his were published in the papers of the day.

Barwon Heads do not have a report but have a notebook where one of the committeemen wrote down Mackenzie's recommendations. No plan though :-( I did find at Barwon Heads a few years ago a copy of Mackenzie's book which had been signed by him and inscribed to Barney Mann, the Barwon Heads captain. Worth a fortune and was just sitting on their bookshelves where anyone could have purloined it! I got them to put it in one of the locked display cabinets for safe keeping. 

I know of nothing for Victoria, and RQ mention a few extracts from his report on their website, but whether they have a copy of the report or simply quoted some from the newspaper reports I don't know. With your firm's contacts there it would be appreciated if you asked the club about the possibility of them having a copy.

There's generally not much, sadly. I have found a great deal of letter to the editor correspondence in the Adelaide papers concerning the implementation of Mackenzie's plan for Royal Adelaide - quite the controversy amongst the membership! I plan to write this up for an article possibly to go in the next issue of GA.

happy to discuss this further with you, probably best by email.
cheers Neil

[Jeff_Mingay]

I got myself back on track this morning, Neil 

Thanks again for all of this. Fascinating stuff.

[Neil_Crafter]

that's good to hear Jeff, wouldn't want to be held responsible for a downturn in the Canadian gross domestic product!

[Patrick_Mucci]

Neil,

Will you publish your efforts and product ?

[Matthew Mollica]

I have found a great deal of letter to the editor correspondence in the Adelaide papers concerning the implementation of Mackenzie's plan for Royal Adelaide - quite the controversy amongst the membership!

So not much has changed in 80 years Neil....

[Neil_Crafter]

Pat
No plans to publish this. It's kind of an 'open source' effort with lots of contributors and we are happy seeing it distributed like it is for the present.
Personally I have been working on detailed research on all the Mac courses that we've been able to find links to, and one day I have in mind possibly publishing this, which would include a lot of historical photos, plans, aerials etc. Lots still to do.

Matthew
Yes it would appear that not much has changed - especially when an architect has a second go at implementing Mac's plans for RA after the initial attempt was only partly successful.

[Tim Martin]

Fascinating stuff and congrats to all involved. Very hard to pull away from once you become immersed.

[BCrosby]

This is an important addtion to the literature of golf architecture. Very impressive work Neil.

Ironically, one of the strenghts of your timeline is that you do not plan to publish it in book form. Keeping it open soucrce is exactly how it should be maintained. As long as you give researchers access to to it by way of a website or some other format.

Ideally, Cornish & Whitten's monumental 'The Architects of Golf' should also be maintained as an open source document. Unless such reference books are continuously updated, they age pretty quickly. Like old encylopedias, at some point they cease to fucntion as current reference books and become old books for collectors to collect.

Perhaps I missed it, but has anyone done a bibliography of MacKenzie's published writings?

Bob
 

[Dónal Ó Ceallaigh]

Neil:

Very impressive work. Well done to everybody involved.

I didn't see Galway mentioned; have you any info on Mackenzie's involvement?

The Cork GC centenary book has very little on Mackenzie. An Irishman by the name of Jack Fleming (1896-1985) is said to have carried out the work at both Cork (late 1924) and Muskerry for the Mackenzie brothers. The book also mentions that he worked on Cypress Point and that there's a 9-hole course in SF named after him.

[Bill_McBride]

I'm interested in the September 1923 note that Littlestone approved Mackenzie's plan "except for #2, 12 and 13th...".   I thought it was Mackenzie's plan that cut the notch in the big dune in front of the green at the second.  

[Sean_Tully]

Donal-

Fleming came over to work at Meadow Club in 1926 and worked on most if not all of his courses here in California and I do have mention of him at St. Charles. He went to work for the City during the depression first working at Sharp Park and adding the holes across the freeway in 1941. He would go onto designing his own courses here in Northern California most notably is his work at McLaren Park. As it turns out through my research MacKenzie and Hunter did an 18 hole routing for McLaren Park in 1928 and it would be very interesting to see it compared to what Fleming put into the ground. The same can be said for the 9 hole course that you mention that is at Harding Park. Turns out that MacKenzie also drew up plans to convert the existing 6 hole practice course to 9 holes in 1929, but this work was not done at that time and Fleming is given credit for the work that was done later. Have not found the MacKenzie plans for Harding to compare it to what was eventually built, but we can see a pattern here!

Sean

[Sean_Tully]

Bob-

Along with the Chronology we are compiling a list of courses that MacKenzie was involved with. We started with the listing from the DSH book on AM and have added greatly to it. Neil has been working on that and can give a more detailed response. We are also working on a bibliography of his writings and that too is a work in progress.

Neil has added the link to the download and in the past we had the Chronology available on the Alister MacKenzie Society of Great Britain and Ireland found here...

http://www.alistermackenzie.co.uk/history.php

It needs to be updated of course.

Our research group has looked into the idea of a dedicated website for the Chronology and maybe that will happen at some point?

Sean

[Sean_Tully]

Here is a nice article I found that mentions some of the courses that Bobby Jones played while in California for the USAmateur at Pebble Beach. To have been able to have played those courses--all of them in their prime just gives me goosebumps. Love how he describes Cypress Point and it really gives some insight into what his thoughts were as early as Sept 1929! I have not been able to find similar mentions by Jones in other articles from the same period.

This mention is from the Sept. 13, 1929 SF Call-Bulletin
I have been looking at all of the different papers in SF and the Call-Bulletin was by far the best in covering the golf scene.

Tully

[BCrosby]

Great find Sean.

Jones was posting some incredible scores on courses he had never seen before. Note that the only course on which he was over par was Max Behr's Lakeside. A course he later revisited for the filming of some of his instructional shorts in '31 and '32.

Knowing how well Jones was playing makes his upset loss in the US Am at Pebble that summer all the more surprising.

Bob