A Forgotten Founder | Golf Histories

Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club historian Bruce McDonald mentioned to me one day that it is a great shame that so many of the documents associated with the earliest days of the Club were lost when the original clubhouse burned down in 1962: “There are interesting questions that those old records might have answered!”

Still, a great deal of excellent work by a succession of Club historians has put together quite a comprehensive account of how today’s Club emerged from the initial sporting and social pursuits of hunters with hounds almost 120 years ago.

Figure 1 W.Y. Denison.

Figure 2 Eddie MacCabe.

Figure 3 Des Clair.

Figure 4 Sam Kucey.

Figure 5 Bruce McDonald.

In 1931, thinking less of posterity than of the many people coming to Ottawa to attend the 1932 Canadian Open at the Hunt and Golf Club, long-serving Club secretary William Young Denison wrote a short history of the Club for inclusion in the tournament programme. Fortunately, this document circulated well beyond the Club and so was beyond the reach of the 1962 fire.

Of those who have contributed to the Club’s history since, four of the most important historians have been Eddie MacCabe, Des Clair, Sam Kucey, and Bruce McDonald.

In 1983, after extensive research, availing himself of his extensive knowledge of local historical resources, and interviewing virtually every early Club member still alive, MacCabe produced The Ottawa Hunt Club: 75 Years of History, 1908-1983 (Ottawa: Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, 1983).

This pioneering work was supplemented by Desmond C. Clair, Club historian from 1985 to 1997 who “unearthed … much of the early history of the Hunt Club” (Bruce A. McDonald, “The Ottawa Hunt & Golf Club at Beechwood Cemetery: A Century of Golfers Laid to Rest,” The Beechwood Magazine, vol 23 [Winter 2023], p. 6).

He produced many illuminating essays on individuals and incidents related to the early years of the Club.

Helpfully reproducing some of the best work by predecessors MacCabe and Clair in his book The Ottawa Hunt & Golf Club, Our First Century: A History, 1908-2008 (Ottawa: Ottawa Hunt and Holf Club, 2008), Sam Kucey dedicated two years to the creation of an exhaustive (and beautifully produced) account of all aspects of Club history over the previous 100 years.

Present Club historian Bruce McDonald not inaptly calls Kucey’s extraordinarily comprehensive work “The Bible.”

For all the great achievements of his precursors, however, McDonald has nonetheless produced a good number of his own well-researched and insightful essays that extend and deepen our knowledge of many early figures associated with the Club.

And he continues to do so, showing no signs of slowing down – let alone stopping – any time soon.

Having for many years been interested in the history of golf clubs throughout Eastern Ontario, I had never researched the origins of golf at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, being under the impression that there was nothing left for a local amateur golf historian such as myself to do: Denison, MacCabe, Clair, Kucey, and McDonald had done it all!

But Bruce mentioned to me two questions that he felt had not yet been adequately addressed, and these questions immediately struck me as something I could sink my teeth into:

There are certain areas surrounding Willie Park’s golf course design at the Hunt Club and his visit here in 1920 that remain a mystery.

How was he chosen to do the design?

Who in fact made the decision to hire him?

Other than a few newspaper articles about his visit and a table outlining the holes, there is little to go by.

(email to the author, 20 August 2024).

The following essay attempts to answer these questions.

Amalgamating Horsemen, Motorists, and Golfers

An Ottawa Hunt Club had existed in various iterations since 1873. In 1908, after two years as an informal hunting club that gradually acquired more members and moved from using an unmanageable scratch pack of hounds (untrained for fox hunting) in 1906 to using properly trained dogs acquired from Toronto and Montreal by the end of 1907, the latest version of the Ottawa Hunt Club decided to incorporate.

Also in 1908, after purchasing the 185-acre Upton Farm, initially using its farmhouse as a clubhouse (but using nearby Bowesville Hall for entertaining large numbers), the Club built a new clubhouse on Bowesville Road (now North Bowesville Road).

Figure 6 The clubhouse of the Ottawa Hunt Club circa 1909. The caption under a virtually identical photograph published in the Ottawa Citizen reads: “The premises of the Ottawa Hunt Club, where the Hunt Club and the Motor Club will keep house together, catering to the tastes of motorists, horsemen, golfers and sportsmen in general” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1919, p. 11).

For the first six years of its life in its magnificent new clubhouse (seen above in a 1909 photograph), the Hunt Club thrived:

The huntsmen secured hunting privileges over nearby territory and were much encouraged by the presentation to them from the Duke of Manchester of a splendid pack of hounds.

For six years, regular meets were held and hunting had another short but glorious career in the Ottawa District. (Ottawa Journal, 10 December 1935, p. 21)

Figure 7 Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster (1879-1953), circa 1907.

It was actually the Duke of Westminster (one of the wealthiest people in the world at that time) who, in the fall of 1907, presented the pack of hounds in question.

The well-trained fox hounds arrived from the Westminster Hunt Club in May of 1908 and were “used in the first run of the year in September” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 May 1908, p. 8).

But then, in August of 1914, World War I broke out and the 250-member club suspended operations: “the splendid premises … were left vacant when the war took away all physically fit horsemen to hunt the Hun instead of the fox [“Hun” was a derogatory name for German soldiers during WWI]” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1919, p. 11).

When the Hunt Club’s secretary W.Y. Denison (who would be instrumental in negotiating amalgamation in 1919 with the Ottawa Motor Club) looked back in 1931 at the early development of golf at the Club, he pointed to a clause in the Club’s 1908 charter – about the right “to acquire certain property … and to lay out and prepare the same for riding, driving, hunting, horse racing, golf and polo” – and observed, “It is possible that those who were responsible for the word ‘golf’ foresaw the possibility of what came to pass a decade later” (cited in Kucey p. 12). Perhaps so, but “golf” was almost always included as an option in the charter of any landowning sports club or country club that obtained a charter in the late 1890s or early 1900s – regardless of whether anyone associated with the club was interested in golf at the time the charter was drafted.

In his 1931 history of the Club, Denison immediately followed the above statement about golf with an observation about the beginning of golf at the club: “In the late summer of 1919, the first game of golf was played over a temporary course” (Kucey p. 12).

Denison thereby scants the role of the Ottawa Motor Club in the origins of golf at the Club.

It turns out that “the amalgamation of the two clubs [had] been before the members at different times during the past three years” (1916-19), but every proposal was apparently voted down by the Hunt Club. And so, when amalgamation was announced in 1919, “Mr. Denison laid emphasis on the fact that the proposition to amalgamate emanated from the Ottawa Motor Club” (Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1919, p. 7). For at least three years, it seems, the horsemen had been led to water but could not be made to drink.

In retrospect, however, amalgamation seemed natural, if not inevitable:

Curiously, … the great majority of the shareholders of the Ottawa Hunt are also members of the Ottawa Motor Club.

The shares of the Ottawa Hunt are widely scattered, three being the limit. Their largest shareholders, in fact, have been active workers in the Ottawa Motor Club and have been enthusiastic in their efforts to bring the two organizations together.

(Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9)

Formed in 1907 as the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association, the renamed Ottawa Motor Club had about 300 members during World War I (in a city where there were about 2,000 registered motor car owners), but this club had no permanent place in which to meet, let alone dine and dance.

There were rumours throughout 1918 that rather than proposing amalgamation, the Motor Club was trying to purchase the vacant clubhouse of the moribund Hunt Club, leading officials of the latter organization finally to issue a press release in January of 1919:

Contrary to rumors that have been heard frequently of late, to the effect that the Ottawa Motor Club has entered into negotiations with the Ottawa Hunt Club with a view to purchasing and taking over the latter’s club house, it was stated officially … by an official of the Ottawa Hunt Club that no proposition of this nature has been made by the Ottawa Motor Club.

(Ottawa Journal, 15 January 1919, p. 1)

As we know, however, rumours of this sort were smoke from a fire that had been slowly burning for three years.

The Motor Club seems to have become impatient with the Hunt Club’s reticence about committing to amalgamation. Early in March of 1919, the Motor Club appears to have used public talk of alternatives to the Hunt Club’s facilities as a way of prompting the horsemen to become more serious about amalgamation:

QUESTION OF A CLUBHOUSE

We want a clubhouse!

This is the consensus of opinion expressed amongst the members of the Ottawa Motor Club.

To achieve this it will of course be necessary for the club to have a very much more extensive membership than exists at present to take care of the financial end of the undertaking. The clubhouse would have to be up to date, a sort of social center for motorists, somewhere within easy reach of the Capital, and equipped with a golf course and all the privileges usually to be found in well equipped clubs.

The golf question is somewhat of a responsibility on the shoulders of the management committee, as it has invariably found that golf and automobile associations do not blend together well. It would mean, for one thing, an enhancing of the present membership fees of the club, a hardship on the small motorist, that is to say, the one with limited means, and they are legion.

An offer of a site on the Eardley Road has been received by the executive; the question of buying the property of the Hunt Club has been mooted; but it is felt a site on the proposed route of the Ottawa-Prescott highway would be the real thing.

(Ottawa Citizen, 8 March 1919, p. 8)

Three months later, on 10 June 1919, precisely at noon, an agreement to amalgamate the Ottawa Hunt Club and the Ottawa Motor Club was reached.

It was announced the same day that the new club planned to build an 18-hole championship golf course. It also emerged that the Motor Club had already done its research on the suitability of the Hunt Club’s property for development as a golf course: “the property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined some time ago by Karl Keffer and Davie Black, pros respectively of the Royal Ottawa and the Rivermead Golf Clubs, and was pronounced splendid for golf” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9).

From the beginning, the one club wanted not just the other’s clubhouse, but also its property – and it wanted that property for golf.

In its quest to develop a proper golf course on the Hunt Club’s property, the Motor Club had begun by seeking the advice of local golf course architects Keffer and Black. Determining within weeks of amalgamation, however, that the new Club must have not just any old course but rather an 18-hole championship course that would be one of the best in the country, the first chairman of the Golf Committee soon resolved to have this course laid out by the best architect in Canada – whoever that might prove to be!

At that point, he did not know that the architect in question would turn out to be a member of one of golf’s Royal Families: the Parks of Musselburgh.

Willie Park, Jr: Golf Royalty

Figure 8 Left to right: Willie Park, Sr (Open champion 1860, 1863, 1866, 1875) and his younger brother Mungo Park (Open Champion 1874).

The Club would soon choose as its architect Willie Park, Jr, the second of four sons born to four-time Open Champion Willie Park, Sr (1833-1903), and the nephew of 1874 Open Champion Mungo Park (1836-1904).

Known as “Young Willie” (as opposed to his father “Auld Willie”), he was shaped virtually from his birth in 1864 by the environment of professional golf, as he later recalled: “I commenced playing golf when I was in skirts and have been playing and working my entire life in this line of work” (Ashville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17).

“My first recollection of golf,” he was fond of relating, was “when my elder brother with a golf stick in his hand ready to swing, told me to gonna out of the way, and as I didn’t move, I had a lick on the chin” (Ashville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17). Barely out of “skirts,” Young Willie worked in his father’s golf shop, hammering patterned creases into the smooth surface of gutta percha golf balls (so that they would fly truer) and, when he had a moment to spare, practising putting marbles across the brick floor of the shop (https://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/content/Willie-Park-Jr).

Park’s environment certainly nurtured his interest in golf, but he came to believe that more than a golfing milieu was responsible for his lifelong love of the game. Writing in Golf Illustrated in 1922, he endorsed the idea that the “law of heredity” played an important role in producing golfing prowess. And so, he liked to trace the family’s interest in golf back beyond his father’s generation, claiming that his grandfather James Park (1797-1873), who was a ploughman at a time when the game was confined to the gentry, had nonetheless also played golf. But James Park’s great-great-grandson (Young Willie’s great-nephew), Mungo Park, speculates that James Park probably did not play the “long game” (the “noble” version of the game associated with the gentry), which required expensive, professionally crafted golf clubs, an expensive feathery golf ball, and a well-maintained golf course, but rather the “short game” (or the “common” game) in which golf was played on a rudimentary short course with crude equipment, such as a roughly fashioned stick used as a club (https://golfclubatlas.com/feature-interview/feature-interview-with-mungo-park/).

As further evidence in support of his thesis about the role of heredity in transmitting a talent for golf, Young Willie lived long enough to see one of his daughters, Doris Park (born 1901), become an accomplished fourth-generation Park-family golfer.

Figure 9 Doris Park, 1933.

In 1922, she represented Scotland in an international match. After her father’s death in 1925, she represented Scotland internationally another twelve times, she represented Great Britain in matches against France three times in the 1930s, and she represented Great Britain and Ireland in the first Curtis Cup match against the United States in 1932. In Scotland, she won the Midlothian Ladies Championship five times in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she won the East of Scotland Championship in 1933, she was runner-up in the Scottish Ladies Championship in 1929, 1930, and 1931 and won it in 1936. She reached the semi-finals of the Ladies’ British Open Amateur Championship in 1929 and 1933 (posting the lowest qualifying score in 1933) and reached the Championship’s final match in 1937. In 1950, as Mrs. Aylmer Porter (in her fiftieth year), she shot a 74 in the South-Eastern Women’s Golf Championship at Sunningdale (Daily Telegraph [London], 5 June 1950, p. 3). Dad would have been proud.

Figure 10 Left to right: Old Tom Morris (1821-1908) and Young Tom Morris (1851-1875), circa 1872.

The Park family of Musselburgh and the Morris family of St. Andrews were the two Royal Families of nineteenth-century Scottish golf: between them, they won fifteen of the first twenty-nine Open Championships (including the first one, won by Willie Park, Sr, in 1860). They played in many other tournaments for professionals as well, and they played in dozens of challenge matches against the best players of the day, with Old Tom and Young Tom often playing matches for high stakes against Mungo and Auld Willie.

The latter was certainly a great match play competitor, and “Young Willie” upheld the family’s golfing honour in this regard, acquiring a reputation for virtual invincibility in match play during the 1880s and 1890s (he was said to have published for twenty years in a London newspaper a standing offer to play against any person on any links course for a prize of £100).

And the Park and Morris families were also fierce competitors in business: Old Tom Morris manufactured golf equipment (particularly balls and clubs) and laid out golf courses, and so did Auld Willie, Mungo, and Young Willie, as well as a number of the Parks’ siblings in each generation.

Yet for all the apparent rivalry between the families, there may have been an emotional connection between Old Tom and Young Willie, for just as the former’s son young Tom had witnessed the death of his wife in childbirth in 1875, so had Young Willie witnessed the death of his first wife Mary Taylor Sime in childbirth in 1887. As Young Willie’s great-nephew Mungo Park observes:

It is interesting … to see how many photographs show Old Tom and Willie Park, Junior, standing or sitting together, particularly after the death in childbirth of Willie’s first wife Mary ….

Figure 11 In this 1890s photograph of golfers in front of the St. Andrews clubhouse, Willie Park, Jr, and Old Tom Morris sit side-by-side (in the front row, 4th and 5th, respectively, from the right side).

It is reasonable to speculate that Tom had sympathy for the son of his ‘great rival,’ a feeling that might have been borne of Willie’s golfing ability but also of his tragic loss.

(Mungo Park, https://golfweek.usatoday.com/lists/mungo-park-willie-park-british-open-qa/)

Young Willie certainly had great golfing ability.

He would play in his first Open Championship in 1880, when just sixteen years of age. He played in his last in 1910, when he was 46. As a twenty-three year-old, he on the 1887 Open Championship at Prestwick, and then he won it again in 1889 on his home course at Musselburgh.

Figure 12 Willie Park misses a short putt on the 18th hole of the 1898 Open to lose by one stroke to Harry Vardon.

He would finish in the top ten of the Open Championship twelve times.

In 1898 (as seen in the photograph to the left), on the last hole of the Open tournament, he missed a short putt that would have earned him an 18-hole playoff against winner Harry Vardon, who thereby won the second of his six Open Championships.

In 1919, aged 55, Willie Park, Jr, played in his one and only U.S. Open at the Brae Burn Country Club (in Newton, Massachusetts), crossing swords with some of the greats of the new generation, such as professional Mahor winners Walter Hagen, Jock Hutchinson, and Jim Barnes, as well as recent amateur winners of the U.S. Open, Francis Ouimet and Chick Evans. American golf writer John G. Anderson was impressed:

Here was a former champion of other days and the Old World, Willie Park, courageous enough in heart to try his fortunes against the cream of the country’s best…. We find him still the wizard with the putter but slowed up on account of the necessity for long carries both on the drive and the second shots.

At that, his total … was better than some of the younger pros.

(John G. Anderson, Sun [New York], 15 June 1919, p. 19)

This was just ten months before he would make his first visit to Ottawa.

Figure 13 Willie Park, Jr, circa mid-1880s.

Young Willie had caddied as a boy at Musselburgh, of course, and was said to have skipped meals to find time to play the game for himself. He was apprenticed to his uncle Mungo at the Alnmouth Golf Club (in northeastern England, not far from the Scottish border) by age 14. Two years later, in 1880, Mungo arranged for the sixteen-year-old to work as the golf professional and greenkeeper at the Tyneside Golf Club near Newcastle, England.

In 1881, Young Willie won his first professional tournament at Alnwick.

But in 1884, he returned to Musselburgh, apparently to assist with the management of William Park and Sons, perhaps because his father’s health had begun to decline, a development that led two years later to Young Willie’s first golf course design, as he completed a layout that Auld Willie had been forced to abandon because of illness.

Young Willie did this architectural work for free on condition that the new golf club’s members buy balls and clubs from William Park and Son. The twenty-three year-old had discovered the business strategy of the “loss leader.”

An anecdote long told in Musselburgh suggests that Young Willie also recognized early in his business career the potential importance to sales of William Park and Sons golf equipment that a celebrity endorsement might have:

Park is a legendary figure in Scotland. They tell the story of Park’s meeting with Princess Victoria shortly after he had won the British Open in 1887.

Figure 14 Princess Victoria (1868- 1935)

Figure 15 Willie Park, Jr, circa 1890.

The Princess [a daughter of the future King Edward VII, and so a granddaughter of reigning Queen Victoria] … took a keen interest in golf.

It seems that Victoria wanted to play a round at Musselburgh but found that the royal brassie had been mislaid.

Park promptly offered his own brassie as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.

Now Willie would have rather lost an eye than that brassie, since it was the club chiefly responsible for his winning the championship.

By some happy chance, Willie’s brassie survived a hectic session at the fair hands of Her Royal Highness. Upon completing the round, she stopped in front of Mr. Park, holding the brassie, and kept looking from him to the club without saying anything.

Willie saw his cue.

“Will Your Highness accept that brassie with my respectful compliments?” he inquired, the words almost choking him: “It is my favorite club.”

“In that case,” replied Victoria graciously, “I should not think of taking it from you, though I admit it pleases me.”

“Were it not my favorite club, I would not think of offering it to Your Highness,” responded Park, with an inspiring gallantry worthy of Sir Walter Raleigh.

(Brooklyn Eagle [New York], 5 July 1925, p. 41)

The spread of this anecdote by word of mouth was no doubt worth more than a little “brass” to William Park and Sons: “Please, Mr. Park, will you make me a brassie such as you gave the Princess?”

Park also knew how to capitalize on his own celebrity. After his first Open Championship, “his business developed rapidly and his catch-the-eye trade proclamation – ‘If you want a good club, get a good golfer to make it’ – was known the world over” (Daily Record [Glasgow, Scotland], 25 May 1925, p. 17).

Figure 16 A “bent neck” putter by Willie Park, Jr. Its offset feature became a staple of putter design ever since.

Young Willie’s quick wit in his conversation with Princess Victoria and his catchy business motto are happy instances of an alert mind and an irrepressibly creative imagination that expressed itself in many other ways throughout his career – as, for instance, in his invention of a large array of golf clubs over several decades.

As Douglas Mackenzie notes on his website, Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland:

Ideas flowed from him.

He invented the bulger driver in 1885, a patent lofter in 1889, a patent driving cleek in 1891, a patent compressed driver in 1893, and the patent bent-neck putter in 1894.

He also contributed a golf ball with 56 hexagonal sides which he thought slowed its motion on the green. T

remendously inventive, he always seemed to have his pulse on what technology might be in demand.

In 1913, he patented a “stepped-face” iron to impart more backspin to the ball, a thriving area for innovation until such clubs were banned in 1921.

(D. Mackenzie, Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland, https://www.antiquegolfscotland.com/antiquegolf/maker.php3?makerid=31)

From the beginning, the world of business had appealed to Willie Park, Jr, and he immediately demonstrated that he had a knack for it.

In fact, by the 1890s, Young Willie’s business concerns would displace playing golf as his primary focus. According to great-nephew Mungo Park,

Willie Jnr … started a separate business from his father [in 1884]; he said that they were not in partnership until 1893.

This explanation may have been invented to avoid liability for Willie Jnr’s mounting debts falling on his father.

After 1893, the two businesses certainly became one, and Willie Jnr built it up to become a highly successful enterprise, employing 80 people.

(Mungo Park, https://golfclubatlas.com/feature-interview/feature-interview-with-mungo-park/)

In the 1880s and 1890s, golf began to gain popularity in England for the first time, as Park would explain to the New York Times in 1895: “It may not generally be known in this country, but golf is comparatively new in England. The English did not take it up with any great ardor or enthusiasm until sixty-five years ago, but in the past ten years it has grown wonderfully, much faster than it has in Scotland” (New York Times, 28 April 1895, p. 27).

Figure 17 Willie Park, Jr, circa mid- to late1890s.

Figure 18 Detail from a photograph of Park's 1920 design pad. Kucey p. 60.

Park astutely exploited the opportunities that arose as golf became popular throughout Great Britain and Ireland. He not only opened branches of William Park and Sons in Manchester and London, but he also laid out golf courses for dozens of new golf clubs springing up at this time in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

Some of these courses were laid out on traditional links land, as in the case of Gullane No. 2 near North Berwick in 1898, but others were laid out on inland sites, as at Sunningdale and Huntercombe in England (in 1899 and 1900, respectively) – heathland locations long thought unsuitable for golf.

Park’s innovations in golf course design at these inland sites would lead directly to his claim printed at the top left corner of the architectural design pad that he used to depict the golf holes to be laid out at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club in April of 1920: “The ORIGINATOR of the MODERN SYSTEM OF GOLF COURSE DESIGN.”

Park’s claim was endorsed in 1952 by golf architect and historian Sir Guy Campbell in A History of Golf in Britain: calling Park “the doyen of golf architects, as the term is understood today,” he asserts that Sunningdale (Old) and Huntercombe are “two courses of quality and continuing charm that … may be said to mark the springboard of modern practice” (A History of Golf in Britain [London: Cassell and Company, 1952], pp. 92-112).

Park’s early thinking about inland golf course design was no doubt stimulated in part by his experience of inland golf course design and construction in the United States in the mid-1890s.

It was just a few years before this, as we know, that Americans began to play this new game, which needed golf courses on which to play it, equipment with which to play it, and instruction from golf professionals on how to play it. Recognizing another business opportunity, Park travelled to New York City in the spring of 1895 to open a branch of William Park and Sons, but since the arrival in the United States of the best golfer ever to visit the country prompted great interest in many cities, he prolonged his stay.

During the several months he was in America, he was induced to play exhibition matches and challenge matches against virtually every amateur or professional golfer of any standing then playing golf in the United States. The New York Sun noted: “Park is a hard worker. He visits some golf course daily and is always ready to play the club’s professional for fun or money. So far, he has not been beaten” (Sun [New York], 14 May 1895, p. 5).

Figure 19 Willie Dunn (1865-1952), circa 1894. Dunn wears the medal awarded for his victory in the 1894 Open Championship of the United States (held before the creation of the United States Golf Associaton).

Figure 20 Willie Davis, 1861-1902). Golf, vol 2 no 5 [May 1898], p. 1).

Three matches against Scottish golf professional and golf course architect Willie Dunn, resident pro at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club since 1893 and the winner in 1894 of the first open professional championship of the United States, stimulated great interest.

Hundreds of spectators from high society came out to watch their winner-takes-all matches for significant purses, leading the New York Times to observe:

It is only proper to state that beside the naturally growing interest in golf, the presence of Willie Park in this country has contributed not a little to stimulate enthusiasm in the game.

Those who have been fortunate enough to see him play in some of his recent tournaments have gone away charmed and surprised at his masterly knowledge of the game.

Willie Park has surely aided golf materially in this country, and there are few prominent links in this vicinity which he has not visited and played over.

(New York Times, 20 June 1895, p. 6)

In the end, the only match that Park lost was his last one, played against Willie Davis of the Newport Golf Club.

Davis, who had resided in Canada and the United States since becoming the first golf professional to work as such in North America when he was hired by the Royal Montreal Golf Club in 1881, regarded this victory as his greatest.

Park attributed his defeat to the fact that this contest was the only one in which he had forgotten to place his fiancé’s photograph “‘for luck’ in the breast pocket of his red golfing coat …. He would say it made him ‘keen to play,’ for she would ‘cut him dead’ unless he made a good record in America” (Philadelphia Record, 5 August 1895, p. 7).

Willie Park married fiancé Margaret Sinclair Inglis (1865-1940) immediately upon his return to Scotland – a fact that American newspapers were happy to report:

Figure 21 Philadelphia Record, 5 August 1895, p. 7.

Willie Park, the professional golf champion, who was in this country for several months this year and made many friends, was married today at the Inveresk Parish Church, Musselburgh, Scotland, to Miss Maggie Inglis, a handsome and attractive young woman, daughter of a widow and heiress to considerable property.

The marriage is an outcome of a love match while both were attending public schools many years ago.

Park recently bought a fine house near Inveresk in which he invested nearly $25,000.

While in this country, he carried a photograph of his betrothed as a mascot, and it is said to have never failed him.

(Akron Beacon Journal [Akron, Ohio], 18 September 1895, p. 2)

In addition to playing high-stakes golf matches, Park laid out several golf courses in the American Northeast, especially for wealthy families.

He stayed with John Jacob Astor IV, for instance, on his “recently purchased” Lombard estate at Rhinecliff, New York (New York Times, 27 May 1895, p. 5). He not only laid out a nine-hole course for the Astors but also taught them how to play golf:

Figure 22 Ava Lowle Willing, alias Mrs. Astor (1868-1958); John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912). The latter went down with the Titanic in 1912.

Park returned [to New York] yesterday after passing a week at Rhinecliff, where he was employed in laying out the links and in giving lessons to Mr. and Mrs. Astor and their house party.

“Mr. Astor was too busy laying out a new road through the property and in superintending other improvements,” said Park, “to give much time to golf, but we were on the links Saturday. Mrs. Astor is very enthusiastic about the game. She played at Newport last summer for the first time and promises to make a good golfer. She swings in a most graceful style, and in golf, swing is everything.”

(Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5)

Park was pleased with his layout for the Astors (“one of the best private courses he has seen”) and left instructions for maintenance (“the entire course is to be sprinkled with sand to thicken the grass”) (Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5). Never one to forgo an opportunity to advertise either his skills or his connections, Park wrote a description of his layout for an American newspaper (“To some extent, it may be a guide to owners of country places who may wish to play golf”):

From the starting tee, in front of the house, to the first hole is 250 yards. The hazards are large trees on the right and left, and a ditch. The hole is on a little plateau.

To the second hole from the tee is 245 yards. There are trees on the left side and the wide park road makes a nice hazard.

The third hole is at the foot of a hillock, 256 yards from the tee, reached through scattered trees, which require straight drives.

From the fourth tee to hole is 230 yards. The course is past a clump of trees on the right and the hole is in a basin-like hollow behind a small hill, which calls for lofting play.

A drive over a ditch and between two clumps of trees is the approach to the fifth hole: distance 300 yards and [the hole is] on the slope of a hill.

Play for the sixth hole is on top of the hill, which commands a grand view of the Hudson [River]. It is 230 yards from tee to hole, which might be made 440 yards if wanted. It is all uphill work, with trees on the right and a swamp on the left. The sixth is the far hole.

The seventh is the same distance, 230 yards, with the same hazards, but the play is downhill, and a good player might make the putting green in one stroke.

To end the round, the players make a long drive of 310 yards to the eighth hole, which is on a hillock, guarded by a group of trees. It is a very sporty hole.

The ninth hole is near the house and 200 yards away. The play is through a hollow, along a hillside, finishing on a very pretty putting green on the lawn.

The entire measurement of the links, computing the distance from the tees to the holes, is 2,251 yards.

(Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5)

Although he had no formal schooling beyond the age of fourteen or fifteen, Park discovered in writing course descriptions like the one above that he had a gift for clear and succinct writing about golf.

It may have been the American appetite for his teaching and course design that led him, on his return to Scotland, to write The Game of Golf (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1896). Reputed to have been the first book written by a golf professional, it provides early insight into Park’s theorization of the art and science of golf course architecture – the pursuit that would increasingly become the focus of his career. (This book will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.)

Figure 23 Left to right: Willie Park, Jr, and Harry Vardon (1870-1937). 1899.

Young Willie’s loss of the 1898 Open Championship by a single stroke stung him. And it left him frustrated: he felt that he was Vardon’s equal. So did many of his fans. Consequently, after months of protracted negotiations, a 72-hole challenge match was arranged between them for 1899. Vardon refused to play Park on the latter’s home course at Musselburgh (having been warned by his friends that no one knew the course better than Park), so they agreed that the first 36 holes would be played at North Berwick and the second 36 holes would be played on Vardon’s home course at Ganton, in Yorkshire, England. At North Berwick, 10,000 spectators watched the first 36 holes, the largest crowd ever to watch a challenge match. Vardon led by 2 holes. At Ganton, Vardon dominated, winning 11 up with 10 to play.

In retrospect, one can see that the lop-sided result of this match effectively ended Park’s reputation as one of the most formidable of match play opponents

Park turned increasingly to golf course design, with his work on the Sunningdale course in 1899 and his own Huntercombe course in 1900 being the making of his reputation as one of the greatest of architects. As excellent as were his previous layouts on links land in Scotland (such as at Gullane), Park was in these cases working in a familiar way with the well-known requirements for designing a proper test of golf on such land. No one had yet worked out how to provide an equivalent challenge and playing experience on parkland, pastureland, and heathland. At Sunningdale and Huntercombe, however, Park undertook to demonstrate that the rolling hills and the natural contours of heathland, with its gorse, heather, and similar vegetation, and with its heavier and less sandy soil, could provide a strategically challenging and compelling golf experience.

At the same time as he designed and built Sunningdale, Park purchased Huntercombe Manor and 724 acres of land around it (which he later augmented with the acquisition of another 204 acres). He established his own development company: the plan was to build an eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by a housing development. He and Margaret invested what was for them a large amount of money in this project (£11,500). Park completed the golf course in seven months and it was immediately and almost universally acclaimed as a brilliant achievement.

Figure 24 Willie Park at Huntercombe with his 1901 Daimler.

But Park’s development plans were beset by problems from the beginning. On the one hand, the golf course was not well-patronized, for it was located inconveniently far from the nearest railroad station. He bought a big Daimler so that he could personally transport golfers from the train station to the golf course. On the other hand, he had gambled that the local water table would be sufficiently high to provide the water necessary for the development, but drilling yielded no adequate supply.

Consequently, neither the clubhouse nor any of the houses was even started.

Parked spent six years trying to make good on his investment at Huntercombe. Yet despite his income from other architectural work, cash flow became a problem that he could not resolve. And so, in 1906, the Norwich Union Life Insurance Company foreclosed on him. In due course, the Norwich Union sold Huntercombe and under its new owner it became the success it remains today. Its celebrated golf course is probably the least altered of any Park design that still exists.

Park’s contemporaries had nothing but sympathy for his reversal of fortune at Huntercombe:

Of the many fine course laid out by Willie Park, the outstanding examples are Sunningdale and Huntercombe.

The latter was a private venture financed by Park himself, and, through no fault of his, it was in this venture that he lost the greater part of the fortune that his golf had earned.

Huntercombe was one of the earliest of the great “Country Club” courses and has since, in other hands, become a success.

(Tunbridge Wells Courier [England], 25 August 1916, p. 4)

But sympathy did not help with the bills. Park had poured all his time and energy into Huntercombe, and the foreclosure by the Norwich Union did not alleviate his financial difficulties. The only way forward seemed to be to design as many golf courses as possible as quickly as possible.

Figure 25 Willie Park, Jr, early 1900s.

As great-nephew Mungo Park notes:

This was a difficult time ….

After Huntercombe was lost, he poured himself into work, and before the First World War, he was at his most active and influential.

Among a long list, he worked at Royal Wimbledon in 1907, West Lancashire, Temple, Laufer and Biggar in the Borders, and Grantown on Spey further north.

Neuport Bains, Mont Angel (Monte Carlo) and Royal Antwerp were also carried out in this period, and Killarney in 1911.

(Mungo Park, https://golfclubatlas.com/feature-interview/feature-interview-with-mungo-park/)

By 1911, forty-seven year-old Park was still regarded as one of the top competitors among the new generation of golf professionals in the United Kingdom, but he had also now come to be regarded both as one of the country’s top architects and as one of its busiest:

Golf courses are springing up like the proverbial mushroom …. Our leading golf architect, Willie Park, twice Open Champion, is loud in his praises of the spread of the game.

Park was the greatest power in the game more than a quarter century ago: he is still in the front line of our professionals, and there is no one more calculated to speak on the game than the Musselburgh man.

Park is the most widely travelled of golfers, and he has spent many months of the rapidly dying year in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, in addition to traversing quite a score of circuits of the British Isles.

"There is no end to the game,” he says: “The old can play it as well as the young, and it will soon be the greatest of all games.”

(Coventry Evening Telegraph, 14 December 1911, p. 4)

By 1912, Park’s pace of golf course design had become fodder for ironic commentary and implicit criticism in the Birmingham Post:

Mablethorpe, … of which Willie Park is the architect, is said to promise the very best of golf. It should be so, as Park has had more experience than most in links-planning.

It is stated in a northern contemporary [publication] that he once designed no less than fourteen courses in the neighbourhood of the metropolis in ten days!

How he accomplished this feat of endurance is discreetly left to the imagination, but one can picture him careering over the virgin soil on a bicycle, followed by a series of panting and perspiring green committees. On foot he could hardly have done it in the time!

It is to be hoped for Park’s own reputation and that of the courses he thus rapidly sketched out that the writer quoted has made a mistake in his figures.

(Birmingham Post [Birmingham, England], 2 February 1912, p. 10)

Yet for all the great quantity of high-quality work that he did up to 1912, Park could not overcome the debts with which he had been burdened by the failure of Huntercombe.

His finances became acutely constrained at the beginning of 1912 as post-dated cheques paid to him for his design of the golf course for the St Peters (Mablethorpe) Golf Club in Lincolnshire proved to be worthless:

I entered into a contract with people in England for the laying of a course at Mablethorpe.

I was to receive £6,000 and plan and make the course. It would be very difficult for me to form any estimate of what it would cost to form the course, but I calculated that my profit would be about ten per cent, and I had therefore the prospect of making £600.

When the first payment fell due, they gave me £ 345 in cash and £385 in post-dated cheques, which were not met.

These post-dated cheques were handed to different creditors of mine and are in their hands.

(https://www.golfsmissinglinks.co.uk/index.php/england/central-east/lincolnshire/633- lincs-mablethorpe-golf-club-lincs)

Because these post-dated cheques bounced, Willie Park, Jr, was declared bankrupt in the spring of 1912.

He seems to have had nothing more to do with St Peters (Mablethorpe) Golf Club, Limited, which became bankrupt in due course, but an 18-hole course was in play at Mablethorpe by the spring of 1914.

Figure 26 Photograph from a resort advertisement in The Sphere (London, England), 27 June 1914.

One wonders if this links course, which Park thought possessed dunes similar to those at Prestwick, was built according to Park’s plans. (After a fitful existence, the course was abandoned during World War II.)

Rather than being deterred by his financial problems, Park was all the more motivated to design as many golf courses as possible in the years that followed, but just two years after his bankruptcy, World War I broke out in August of 1914.

Figure 27 An unexploded bomb dropped on Edinburgh during the Zeppelin raid on the night of 2 April 1916 is displayed in Scotland's National Museum of Flight. Two Zeppelins attacked. 13 people died and 24 were injured.

Over nine million soldiers would die over the next four years.

In such a context, the collapse of the golf industry in Great Britain during the war is small potatoes, of course, but it explains the decision that led to Willie Park’s eventual arrival in Ottawa:

Golf Hard Hit by War

The war raised havoc with golf in Europe, according to Park, and caused him to close up several stores which he had located in different parts of England and Scotland.

It is very near impossible to get a golf club made in England today, according to Park.

Two days before starting for America this year, he was in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the first Zeppelin raid was made by the German forces.

(Minneapolis Journal [Minnesota], 3 December 1916, p. 27)

Furthermore, virtually no golf course construction occurred after the outbreak of war.

Park was left with no opportunity to express an architectural genius that had become universally acknowledged and very well-remunerated. And so, early in 1916, he decided to move to a country not involved in World War I– a country where golf course construction was booming: the United States.

Figure 28 S.S. St Paul, early 1900s.

When, on 1 April 1916, Willie Park, Jr, boarded the S.S. St. Paul in Liverpool for its one-week voyage to the United States, he knew, of course, that his destination was New York City.

What he could not have known was that his new career in North America would lead to his living in Montreal in 1919 and to his working in Ottawa in February, April, and August of 1920.

But the story of Willie Park’s architectural adventures in the United States and Canada is for later chapters.

A Long Forgotten Founder

Figure 29 Left: Hector K. Carruthers (1879-1950); right: W.Y. Denison (1879-1961).

Willie Park, Jr, was not on anyone’s mind when the agreement to amalgamate the Hunt Club and the Motor Club was announced on the evening of 10 June 1919.

In connection with this announcement, several executive officers from each club were mentioned as having participated in the merger talks: “Mr. W.Y. Denison and Dr. R.F. Webster conducted the negotiation for the Hunt Club and Mr. Frank Jarman, Mr. H.K. Carruthers and Mr. J. Moffatt Ross for the Motor Club” (Ottawa Journal, 11 June 1919, p. 8).

Understandably, the secretaries of each club were singled out for special praise: an employee of the Department of the Interior (in Topographical Surveys), “H.K. Carruthers, Secretary of the Ottawa Motor Club, [was] a hard worker on the amalgamation”; a chartered accountant who served as City of Ottawa Alderman from 1919-20, “W.Y. Denison, Secretary of the Ottawa Hunt Club, [was] one of the prime movers of the new organization” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1919, p. 11)

Yet, Moffatt Ross, a past president (1913-16) and past secretary (1916-1919) of the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association and its renamed successor the Ottawa Motor Club (he had resigned as secretary of the latter at the beginning of 1919 “owing to pressure of business,” but only after what Motor Club president Frank Jarman called “yeoman service”), was the person who received the lion’s share of the credit.

The day the amalgamation was announced, it was reported that “the plan was originally introduced by Mr. J. Moffatt Ross who has worked tirelessly to bring it to a satisfactory completion” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9). Similarly, six weeks later, when the new Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club officially opened its clubhouse at the end of July 1919, the newspapers noted that Moffatt Ross was the one “to whose efforts the amalgamation of the clubs is largely due”: “ The project of amalgamating the two clubs was discussed for nearly a year – as soon as the Motor Club announced its decision of obtaining a club house, when J. Moffatt Ross, past president and secretary, took the matter up” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1919, p. 11).

The latter observation was made again a few days later in a discussion of the opening day’s events:

The two busiest men on the place yesterday afternoon were J. Moffatt Ross, past president and past secretary of the Motor Club, and H.K. Carruthers, secretary of the club today….

The whole scheme is largely due to these two gentlemen ….

Mr. Ross started the ball rolling … when he announced a year ago that the Motor Club was looking for a club house and completed the negotiations ….

On Mr. Carruthers has fallen a heavy share of the immediate organization, his team mate being Ald. W.Y. Denison, secretary of the Hunt Club.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 July 1919, p. 5).

Figure 30 J. Moffatt Ross. Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5.

And a decade later, an observation to the same effect was made in an article on Moffatt Ross in a series of profiles by the Ottawa Citizen about people the newspaper deemed to be “Believers in Canada”:

[A] landmark of today had its origin in Mr. Ross’s fertile brain.

He was the founder of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, that popular organization on the Bowesville Road.

(Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5).

It was unanimous: according to the various people involved at the time, the person who was seen to have been more responsible than any other for the amalgamation of the Ottawa Hunt Club and the Ottawa Motor Club was John Moffatt Ross.

Focused on Golf Even Before the Beginning

In 1930, Moffatt Ross was also identified as the person most responsible for developing golf at the Hunt and Motor Club:

Few there were when the proposals were first made who could vision the splendid course of today rising out of the sandy wastes of the old Hunt Club property.

Indeed, it took a great deal of optimism even to embark on the project.

Yet today there are no finer links in all of Canada, the club is flourishing, and the membership [is] large and enthusiastic.

It took great courage and optimism to assume the responsibility for such an undertaking, but Mr. Ross possesses these to a high degree.

(Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5)

When did Moffatt Ross “assume the responsibility” for the golf course project?

He was presumably the one who arranged for the Hunt Club’s property to be assessed regarding its potential for golf – an arrangement made sometime during the three years of negotiations between the two clubs, for the work of Keffer and Black was referred to in the past tense the day the amalgamation was announced: “The property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined some time ago by Karl Keffer and Davie Black … and was pronounced splendid for golf” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9, emphasis added).

Figure 31 Sapper Karl Keffer, Canadian Reserve Engineers Battalion, circa 1917.

How long ago was “some time ago”?

It was only in mid-April of 1919 that Keffer returned to Canada from England, where he had nearly died of the Spanish Flu in February as arrangements were being made to end his military service during World War I so that he could return to Canada to look after his son, for Keffer’s wife (and the boy’s mother), Evelyn (Freeman) Keffer, had died of the same affliction the previous October.

In mid-April, Keffer returned not to Ottawa, but to Toronto, where his son was living with Keffer’s mother.

On April 14th, it was said that Keffer would enjoy a “short rest” in Toronto and would then “come back to Ottawa in a fortnight or so to resume his duties at the local course” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1919, p. 9).

In mid-April, Davie Black was still at the golf club in Santa Barbara, California, where he worked during the winter months. On April 14th , it was said that he would “return shortly” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1919, p. 9).

And so, in the spring of 1919, with Keffer not back in Ottawa until about May 1st , he and Black could not have been on the Hunt Club property together assessing its golf potential any earlier than the first week of May – about four weeks before the amalgamation was announced. It is doubtful, one would think, that the first thing that Keffer did when he got back to Ottawa was spend a day or two wandering about the Hunt Club property; his priority would have been to organize his Royal Ottawa pro shop (which had been unattended since his wife’s death the previous fall) and make every effort to see to the needs of long-neglected members.

Given that it was June 11th when the newspaper item was published that says, “the property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined some time ago by Karl Keffer and Davie Black,” a question arises: would one refer to this examination as having occurred “some time ago” if it had happened at most about four weeks before?

That is, if the property had been examined within the last four weeks, would one not have said, instead, that “the property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined recently by Keffer and Black”?

And so, it may well be that Moffatt Ross had Keffer and Black examine the Hunt Club land around the time that the first merger talks between the clubs began – that is, sometime before Keffer left Ottawa for Europe on 12 April 1917. From the point of view of 11 June 1919, the spring of 1917 would certainly have been spoken of as “some time ago.”

In its efforts to secure for itself a permanent headquarters, the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association opened negotiations with the Hunt Club in 1917 for the purchase or lease of its clubhouse. Moffatt Ross, Secretary of the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association at that time, and afterwards regarded both as the main negotiator of amalgamation and as the person responsible for creating the golf course, is presumably the officer quoted anonymously in the following item from that time:

One officer of the Motor Association proposes that they should lease the grounds and the building from the Ottawa Hunt Club; also that they should secure, if possible, an option on the property with a view to purchasing it eventually ….

Ultimate Golf Course

The Ottawa Hunt Club has several hundred acres of valuable land and the Motor Association officers think they would transform a section of it into a first-class golf course. This, of course, could not be tackled for several years [presumably because of the war].

A meeting of the Motor Car Association will likely be held shortly to discuss the proposition and if it materializes, the plans will then be laid before the officers and shareholders of the Ottawa Hunt Club.

(Ottawa Citizen, 10 October 1917, p. 2)

Since Moffatt Ross had envisioned a golf course laid out on the Hunt Club property by 1917 (and perhaps even earlier), one might be forgiven for suspecting that an important reason for promoting the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club was to build himself a golf course.

The Keffer-Black Report

Figure 32 Davie Black (left) and Karl Keffer at the 1907 Canadian Open held at the Lambton Golf Club, Toronto, Canada. Detail from a photograph in the collection of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.

Appropriately enough, as the golf professionals of Ottawa’s only two golf clubs at that time, Royal Ottawa and Rivermead, Karl Keffer and Davie Black were asked by Moffatt Ross to examine the 185-acre property of the Hunt Club and render a verdict on whether it could be developed into a proper golf course.

Moffatt Ross seems to have asked for a written report, and we can glean some of its conclusions – and probably some of its language – from direct and indirect allusions to it in the local newspapers.

The report was thoroughly encouraging.

The first paraphrase of its contents appears on 11 June 1919 when the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club was first announced in the newspapers:

The property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined some time ago by Karl Keffer and Davie Black … and was pronounced splendid for golf.

It is drained naturally, being of a sandy character, and it will not cost much to have pipes laid from the Rideau River so that greens may be kept in the best of shape.

(Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9)

Obviously, Keffer and Black had studied the soil, the drainage contours of the property, and the available water source, including in their report an opinion about the cost of irrigation pipes.

A more extensive paraphrase of their report appears in a newspaper article less than three weeks later. The following words are those of Moffatt Ross himself:

[A] feature of this golf course that will appeal to all golfers, particularly during the past wet spring, is the fact that it will be dry and free from mud the moment the snow is off the ground.

No expense is required for drainage, which is a big item on most courses.

Another continual worry on many excellent courses is the very heavy growth of clover, timothy and dandelions, practically all of which are absent at the Hunt Club.

A water system, with a standpipe, located on one of the elevations overlooking the Rideau River, will be immediately installed, so that nice soft water can be distributed throughout the season to all the greens.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1919, p. 19).

Unless Moffatt Ross was an expert on North America’s native grass varieties and weeds, one presumes that in his interview with the Ottawa Citizen reporter, he was passing along some of the salient points of the report he had received from Keffer and Black.

And he seems to cite the report once more about two weeks later when the Ottawa Journal asked members what they most looked forward to as a result of the amalgamation of the clubs: “Mr. J. Moffatt Ross was optimistic regarding the future of the club. He stated that the soil was particularly adaptable for golf. ‘In a few years we will have the finest golf course in Canada,’ he said” (Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1919, p. 7). Again, Moffatt Ross was not an expert on the adaptability of soil for golf; Keffer and Black were.

When Moffatt Ross later called Willie Park to Ottawa in the middle of February 1920, he no doubt gave him a copy of the Keffer-Black report. Asked by the Club to provide an estimate on the cost of constructing an 18-hole golf course (and having it ready for play as quickly as possible), Park will have needed all available information to help him to understand the snow-bound features of the 185-acre property he was being asked to imagine as a championship layout.

Who Was this Moffat Ross?

When he died unexpectedly in his 63rd year in 1937, Moffatt Ross was remembered as a “prominent Ottawa real estate agent, clubman, and sportsmen” and as “one of the leading figures in many Ottawa circles” (Ottawa Journal, 23 April 1937, p. 2). He was “an important figure in the business life of the city” and “one of Ottawa’s outstanding public spirted citizens” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1937, p. 15). A descendent of Scottish pioneers, he was said to have “made his way to his … place in the community solely through his own efforts and foresightedness” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5).

His grandfather, also named John Moffatt Ross, had been born in Scotland and then settled briefly in County Longford, Ireland, before coming to Bytown in 1827 as a bookkeeping clerk for Sherwood and Thompson, the firm responsible for building the Rideau Canal. He afterwards moved to Murphy’s Falls (now Carleton Place) and then walked to Toronto to secure 200 acres of land near Pakenham. He next moved to “First Chute” on the Bonnechere River (today’s Castleford), where he rented a sawmill. Then he acquired farmland near Douglas, which was then known as “Third Chute,” where he established the first sawmill in the district. His grammar school education had allowed him to work in Ottawa as a tutor, and it meant that he subsequently would serve both as justice of the peace and as doctor in the Douglas area, where he eventually acquired 800 acres of land on which to settle his four sons, including William, the father of our John Moffatt Ross.

Figure 33 David Livingstone (1813-73) being charged by a lion. Heroes of Britain (London, circa 1860). Courtesy Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage Images/Science Photo Library.

Figure 34 Annual Circular 1893- 94, Ontario Business College, Belleville, Ontario.

The latter was born 12 October 1875.

His mother “was Mary Graham, who was born in Argyllshire, Scotland, and who was [through her mother] closely related to the late Dr. David Livingstone, noted African missionary and explorer, whose finding in the heart of the dark continent by H.M. Stanley was an event of world-wide sensation at the time” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5). Alas, when John was just four years old, his mother died after giving birth to her fourth child, so she will not have had the chance to regale her son with the tales about his famous relative that had preoccupied the world’s newspapers in the early 1870s.

After his education in the public schools of Bromley Township in Renfrew County, young Moffatt Ross enrolled in the Ontario Business College at Belleville in the mid-1890s. After graduation, he came to Ottawa around 1899:

Entering the wholesale grocery business, he remained about four years in the employ of a big local firm [Cochrane, Castle and Co.]. Then he branched out on his own account and represented, as broker, many large manufacturing firms of food products [such as the Quaker Oats Company].

In this, he was eminently successful and, foreseeing the rapid development of Ottawa realty, … he from time to time invested in various properties and rapidly became a substantial holder of real estate, both in Ottawa and also on the Quebec side of the river.

In 1906, Mr. Ross decided to confine all his efforts to his rapidly growing real estate business and consultative work, and for the past 30 years, there have been few major property operations in which he had not taken part. His advice was always eagerly sought and looked up to in development work.

(Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1937, p. 15)

In 1904, just before he set out full-time in the real estate business, Moffatt Ross married a young woman from Fallowfield named Amelia (“Amy”) McLennan Davidson (1877-1956).

Figure 35 John Moffatt Ross, circa 1907. Ottawa Journal, 29 January 1916, p. 12.

Amy shared her husband’s passionate interest in sports and outdoor activities. As often as possible, they spent time at their cottage at Wolf Lake, Quebec, where they enjoyed hunting and fishing. He “was a crack shot” and “made hunting trips into the woods every Fall” (Ottawa Journal, 23 April 1937, p. 2).

They both took up golf at Rivermead in 1916, when they were each about forty years of age. This game became their passion (although curling was their winter sport) and they maintained their active participation in Rivermead’s golf life and social life until they died.

John played regularly in the new Hunt and Motor Club’s competitions in the early 1920s, but Amy played almost exclusively at Rivermead, where she won prizes in club competitions, represented the club in inter-club competitions, competed in the Ottawa City and District Championship from the 1920s to the 1930s, and played to a 25 handicap well into her sixties.

She served as vice-president of the Ottawa City and District Ladies Golf Association in the mid-1920s. Amy helped to operate the scoreboard at a tournament held at the newly named Hunt and Golf Club in 1924, and in 1922 she partnered her husband in a mixed-two-ball foursome competition at the Club.

Their marriage survived the latter experience, but they had no children.

Figure 36 J. Moffatt Ross. Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 7 (November 1919), p. 418.

Over the thirty years of Moffatt Ross’s career in the real estate business, local newspapers regularly published his letters to editors, as well as several essays by him, in which he offered advice on many development questions: how the city of Hull might reduce its costs by quadrupling the size of a planned subdivision, how the city of Ottawa would benefit from building affordable housing, how gas stations for cars could be made safer by placing gas pumps curbside rather than within the garage, how tourism in the Outaouais could be increased by building better roads and hotels, and so on.

Said to have been “one of the first in Ottawa to actually own a horse-less carriage,” Moffatt Ross was also one of the first to recognize the transformation that would come to the city “when the automobile first began to supersede the horse as a means of transport” (Ottawa Journal, 23 April 1937, p. 2; Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1937, p. 15).

Naturally enough, he became “one of the outstanding pioneer members” of the Ottawa Motor Club:

In its various undertakings for roadway improvement, directions and traffic recommendations, he always took an active part.

He played a large part in every phase of its work and was one of its first secretaries.

He also served on several of its committees and occupied at one time or another all its honorary offices, including that of president….

(Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1937, p. 15)

In 1916, when Moffatt Ross was president of the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association (soon to be renamed Ottawa Motor Club), it was said:

He lives in the motor car office. He is at the disposal of motor owners night or day. He is a compendium of motor and touring information.

Visitors to town look him up, and tourists going out of town ask him, if there is any accurate information they want [that is, lack].

(Ottawa Free Press, 3 June 1916, p. 17).

In an Ottawa Citizen series of profiles about people that the newspaper celebrated as “Believers in Canada,” the article on Moffatt Ross credited him, more than any other, with the development of the Prince of Wales highway:

Figure 37 John Moffatt Ross. Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1937, p. 15.

Perhaps J. Moffatt Ross’s outstanding work for Ottawa was his successful efforts to secure the construction of the Prince of Wales highway from Ottawa to Prescott…. Mr. Ross foresaw the importance this link with our neighbours to the South would be in the future development of the Capital.

In every possible way, he strove [for ten years!] for the accomplishment of his objective and was the first to organize a strong body of men to aid in the promotion of the scheme and the impressing upon the Ontario Government the need of a high class paved roadway to the Fort town from Ottawa.

Many obstacles had to be overcome, and it is to the credit of Mr. Ross that he possesses the quality of persistence and did not lose heart when difficulties were the greatest.

It is safe to say that when the historian of the Ottawa Valley chronicles the efforts made in behalf of this incalculably valuable highway, Mr. Ross’s name will find a high place in the story.

(Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5)

The development of the golf course at the Hunt Club was not his only venture into golf course development, for in the late 1920s he facilitated the development of the Seigneury Club and its Stanley Thompson golf course (today known as Montebello, but then known as “Lucerne-in-Quebec”):

Mr. Ross’s assistance was sought by Canadian Pacific Railway and large New York interests in introducing the Lucerne-in-Quebec development to the people of Ottawa.

That he was chosen by the great railway company to carry on this work speaks well for this Ottawa real estate expert, and the success of his efforts is to be seen in the magnificent holiday wonderland on the northern banks of the Ottawa River some forty miles east of the Capital.

Here a magnificent playground has arisen from the virgin forest lands, many fine homes have been erected, a commodious hotel, a clubhouse, golf course, and everything that goes with the modern summer land for the tourist and summer-home maker.

(Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5)

The Ottawa Citizen concluded its profile of this “Believer in Canada” with a hymn praise:

Mr. Ross is a high type of citizen, and to the youth of today, his career has in it much to commend.

It is the story of a young man from a small village who, alone, wrought out independent status [by means of] his conscientious dealings and rugged stick-to-it-iveness, partly the result of his Scottish ancestry, but mainly through a fine personality, levelheadedness, and altogether good citizenship.

(Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5)

Quite an encomium!

The First Architects

As we know, a nine-hole course to be laid out by Keffer and Black was announced the same day that the amalgamation itself was announced: “A nine-hole course will be put in readiness for play at once” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9).

A few weeks later, Moffatt Ross wrote to his fellow club members about this golf course: “Immediately the club house is opened, the professionals of the Royal Ottawa and Rivermead Golf Clubs will proceed to lay out a first class course and immediately trim up and whip into shape the 1st nine holes, so that for this season, at least, the game can be played on temporary greens” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1919, p. 19).

Figure 38 David Lambie Black, with the P.D. Ross Cup, having won the 1920 PGA Championship at Royal Ottawa. Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 5 (September 1920), p. 383.

Three weeks later, the nine-hole course had been laid out.

The Ottawa Journal attributed the course to Black alone, without reference to Keffer: “Mr. David Black, the golf professional of the Rivermead Golf Club, has laid out a temporary nine-hole course” (Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1919, p. 2).

But the Ottawa Citizen reported in September 1919 that the temporary nine-hole “course was laid out with the assistance of Keffer and Black, both of whom are thoroughly experienced golf architects” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 September 1919, p. 8).

And in 1939, Ottawa Journal sports columnist Walter Gilhooly confirmed that Keffer had indeed been the co-designer of the course, noting that, according to the recollection of longtime head pro Harry Towlson, when the latter came to the Club in 1920, “There was no course except a brief nine-hole affair that Karl Keffer and Davie Black had laid out” (Ottawa Journal, 14 June 1939, p. 17).

Davie Black may have been the one described in 1919 as having “laid out” the “temporary nine-hole course” because he had physically laid it out as the construction manager. He had previously built several golf courses designed by others.

David Lambie Black (1883-1974) had been born in Troon, Scotland. As a teenager, he became an apprentice of Troon’s famous former Open Champion Willie Fernie (who was defeated in a famous challenge match at that time by Willie Park, Jr). Fernie taught Black the art of club-making, but he also taught him how to play golf. As a young assistant professional, Black established the Troon course record of 68. Toward the end of his six-year apprenticeship, nineteen-year-old Black entered the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1903. (He missed the cut by four strokes after two rounds, trailing eventual winner Harry Vardon by 24 strokes.)

Figure 39 A caricature of Davie Black putting. Montreal Star, 5 June 1905, p. 10.

Late in 1904, Black’s application to serve as golf professional at Montreal’s Outremont Golf Club was accepted. Early in 1905, Montreal newspapers reported that “his testimonials are of the first order,” but it seems to have been Fernie’s testimonial in particular that earned twenty-one-year-old Black his appointment: “Comparing his pupil with the famous Campbells of Boston and Stewart Gardner of Garden City, who have also graduated from his links at Troon, the veteran Willie Fernie says that Black ‘is quite the equal of any of them, and a first-class golfer’” (Montreal Star, 30 March 1905, p. 2; Montreal Gazette, 19 January 1905, p. 2). Black had also supplied the hiring committee with photographs of his golf swing: “Our pictures of Black in action show that he uses the open stance and the interlocked grip.

His easy stance at the finish and the absence of pronounced body action show that he must get his power chiefly by wrist action and good timing” (Montreal Star, 30 March 1905, p. 2). He had also been brought to Outremont to serve as greenkeeper, the expectation being that Willie Fernie and his assistant, brother George Fernie, had passed along to their protégé Black the greenkeeping knowledge of experts: “The Fernie boys are … fine green keepers, the greens at Troon not being surpassed even by Hoylake, whose reputation is worldwide. The chances are that the Outremont Club have been fortunate in their selection” (Montreal Star, 30 March 1905, p. 2).

From the moment of his arrival in Montreal, Black was also interested to study the differences between golf course design in Scotland and golf course design in Canada. He was surprised by many things at his first Canadian Open, held at the Toronto Golf Club in 1905. On the one hand, “three thousand was a small gallery for a championship event in Scotland,” he observed, “whereas a couple of hundred was the total spectators on Saturday” (Gazette [Montreal], 4 July 1905, p. 2). But Toronto’s parkland style golf course was a bigger surprise. He was pleased to find “the Toronto greens … to be fully as fast as those of the old country,” but he was not pleased by certain of the hazards employed on the course: “some of the hazards he was inclined to think too sporty. Trees immediately in front of the teeing [ground] was a thing unknown on the other side” (Gazette [Montreal], 4 July 1905, p. 2).

In 1908, Black left Outremont for Montreal’s new Ranelagh Golf Club (which succeeded the bankrupted Victoria Golf and Country Club). Here, Tom Bendelow laid out an 18-hole course that August. When laying out a new course, Bendelow would take the resident golf professional with him to ensure that his instructions would be understood and carried out during the construction process. When Bendelow returned to the course in the spring of 1909 to inspect the course, he was impressed by Black’s work:

Figure 40 Thomas Bendelow, undated photograph.

LINKS PLEASED BENDELOW

Golf Expert Found Ranelagh Course In Good Shape

Tom Bendelow, the golf architect, who was in Montreal making new plans for the golf course at Beaconsfield, left yesterday for the Caledonia Springs to lay out a course close to the C.P.R. hotel.

He took the opportunity while in Montreal of visiting Ranelagh Country Club, which course he laid out last year, and expressed himself as being delighted with the way his instructions were carried out. The drainage system had worked perfectly, and he was gratified to find that after the recent heavy rain there was comparatively no water on the links.

(Gazette [Montreal], 20 May 1909, p. 2)

Given Bendelow’s approval of Black’s work at Ranelagh, it is no surprise that Black was hired to build Bendelow’s course for the Caledonia Springs Hotel:

The C.P.R. Co. is spending between $35,000 and $40,000 this spring in improvements at Caledonia Springs and in beautifying the grounds….

Another attraction will be the new golf links, which have been laid out by Bendelow, the champion golfer, who is authority for the statement that they rank amongst the finest in America.

The grounds are being put in shape by Mr. David Black, the well-known golfer.

(Gazette [Montreal], 31 May 1909, p. 11).

And George Cumming asked Black to accompany him as he laid out the first 18-hole course for Rivermead in August of 1912:

George Cumming, the professional of the Toronto golf Club, is now in Ottawa laying out the eighteen-hole course of the Rivermead Golf Club. For two years, pending the preparation of the balance of its grounds, the club has been playing on nine holes….

Cumming and Davie Black, the popular Rivermead professional, are now staking out the course.

(Toronto Star, 29 August 1912, p. 14)

In 1919, Karl Keffer (1882-1955) had more experience as an architect than Black.

Figure 41 Karl Keffer, aged 14, at the Toronto Golf Club, 1896.

Keffer’s life in golf had involved the typical journey from caddie to apprentice to golf professional. It was an unusual story, however, insofar as he had been born in Canada, as opposed to most of his professional peers at the beginning of the twentieth century, who had followed the path from caddie to apprentice to golf professional in their native Scotland or England.

Living near the Toronto Golf Club in the mid-1890s, Keffer had become a caddie as a teenager to help with the family finances after his carpenter father’s death. Working in a candy factory, Keffer played in the Canadian Open in 1905, and then agreed to work as an assistant professional under the Toronto Golf Club’s head pro George Cumming, who taught Keffer how to make golf clubs, how to teach the golf swing, how to maintain a golf course, and how to design one.

Figure 42 Karl Keffer putting on a sand green of the Donald ross course of the Jekyll Island club, whose members were said to possess one-sixth of the world's wealth. Spalding Official Golf Guide 1915 (New York 1915), p. 172.

Keffer won the Canadian Open in 1909 when still an assistant pro, and then won it again in 1914, by which time he had been appointed head pro both at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club (where he served in the summers from 1911 to 1943) and at the Jekyll Island Club in Georgia (where he served in the winters from 1910 to 1942).

Before his work at the new Hunt and Motor Club, Keffer had already gained a good deal of experience regarding golf course design and construction.

He oversaw the introduction to play at Jekyll Island of the club’s nine-hole Donald Ross course in 1910. In 1911, he supervised the creation of Royal Ottawa’s nine-hole short course (known today as the Royal Nine). Two years later, in 1913, he accompanied Harry S. Colt (who would come to be regarded by many as the greatest golf architect of all time) around the Royal Ottawa property as Colt staked out his redesign plans for a new championship course.

And beginning in 1913, Keffer designed and built a nine-hole course to be added to the nine-hole Ross course to create the Jekyll Island Club’s first 18-hole championship course (opened with much fanfare in the spring of 1923). Before he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I, he had completed (and opened for play to excellent reviews) the first three holes for this course.

And so, in 1919, when asked to lay out a proper golf course, both Keffer and Black knew what to do, but Moffatt Ross had asked them for just a “temporary” course.

And he had asked that it be playable almost immediately.

The Keffer-Black Nine-Hole Course

The 2,500-yard “temporary” Keffer and Black nine-hole course would be used from 1919 to 1922.

Work on this course was to occur at a frantic pace: “The clubhouse on the Bowesville Road, it is expected, will be opened on July 19. A temporary golf course, of nine holes, will be ready for use within two weeks and a professional has already been engaged to begin work” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 July 1919, p. 9).

Figure 43 Dr. D.M. Robertson. Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1946, p. 7.

One of the keenest golfers at the Club, Dr. D.M. Robertson, played this temporary course just over a week after construction began: “A temporary golf green with nine holes has been laid out and has already been played around by one enthusiastic golfer in the club, Dr. Robertson” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 July 1919, p. 9). For several years prior to amalgamation, Robertson had been a director of the original Hunt Club.

We read on July 26th, less than two weeks after Black’s construction work began, that “A nine-hole golf course is being laid out and horse-driven lawn mowers have been working continuously for the past several days” (Ottawa Journal, 26 July 1919, p. 5). Black probably had to teach the new grounds crew how to mow golf course fairways, tee boxes, and putting greens.

Club members played the first semi-official round of golf that same day, 26 July 1919:

Figure 44 Four men in white shirts play on the 9th green, left to right: H.K. Carruthers, preparing to putt; J. Moffatt Ross putting; J. Donaldson, Dr. D.M. Robertson. Behind, left to right: an unidentified girl, 3 unidentified women in white dresses, Frank Jarman (behind Donaldson). Ottawa Journal, 28 July 1919, p. 1.

Part of the golf course was used Saturday, as much for the sake of establishing history as anything else, as it is rather in the rough, but it will be in very good shape by the end of the week ….

H.K. Carruthers, secretary of the club, … found time to have a short round of golf….

A photograph was taken of the putt on the last green, which will doubtless form one of the club’s most precious historical documents.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 July 1919, p. 5)

Still, there was much more work to do before the course could be officially opened, so we read the following in mid-August:

“The nine-hole golf course … laid out by Dave Black, the Rivermead professional, is being perfected. The grass on the fairways has been cut and the putting greens are being rolled and watered at frequent intervals” (Ottawa Journal, 9 August 1919, p. 26).

The Ottawa Citizen described the course the day before the official opening round (played by Moffatt Ross, Keffer, Black, and Frank Jarman):

The course has been laid out for nine holes, approximating 2,500 yards and is in very good condition.

The greens have been fixed up temporarily and [fair]ways given every possible attention and the driving tees looked after.

The course was laid out with the assistance of Keffer and Black, both of whom are thoroughly experienced golf architects.

(Ottawa Citizen, 3 September 1919, p. 8)

As for the routing of the nine holes, early member (and Club captain in the early 1920s) James L. Melville recalled in 1972: “The original course was 9 holes and played from the area of No. 1 tee, then around the clubhouse in a N.W. direction” (James L. Melville, “Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club” [one-page handwritten note, June 1972]).

It would seem, then, that most of the holes were on the west side of Bowesville Road. If so, this may explain why the first nine holes of the Park course to enter play (on 1 July 1922) were on the east side of Bowesville Road: completion of the five holes on the west side of Bowesville Road (opened in September of 1922) was delayed by several months in the interest of maintaining the viability of the nine-hole temporary course until the first nine Park holes could replace it.

The Keffer-Black course received its fair share of attention.

A report at the end of November 1919 looked forward to an improved temporary course in the spring: “Good progress has already been made on the course and early next spring it will be greatly improved” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 November 1919, p. 9).

And in the spring of its third year of service, we read: “The Ottawa Motor and Hunt Club [sic] now has a first-class nine-hole course” (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1921, p. 11). As construction of the permanent course was underway throughout 1921, the temporary course received compliments: “The temporary course is in very good shape, the greens especially being in A1 condition” (Ottawa Journal, 11 May 1921, p. 15). Members certainly enjoyed it:

The captain and committee of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club have arranged for three golf competitions on Victoria Day ….

The enthusiasm among the members has never been so keen and noticeable as it is now.

The captain has spared no effort to have the temporary 9 hole course in excellent shape for these competitions.

(Ottawa Journal, 21 May 1921, p. 29)

From 1919 to 1921, paying attention to this course only made sense: “play this year [1921] has been entirely confined to the temporary course” (Ottawa Journal, 28 October 1921, p. 13).

In fact, it was not until July of 1922 that the first nine holes of the new course were opened. And so, only then was it that “The temporary course was altogether abandoned” (Canadian Golfer [July 1922], vol 8 no 3, p. 265).

The “temporary” course of Keffer and Black, then, was in play for four seasons.

Head pro Henry (Harry) Towlson set the nine-hole and 18-hole course records in the same round in May of 1921: 31 + 30 = 61 (Ottawa Citizen, 25 May 1921, p. 9).

After 25 years at the club, Towlson recalled his arrival in 1920 when the “Hunt then had only a nine-hole temporary course and they were waiting on Willie Park … to complete the layout”: “It didn’t exactly answer the description of a golf course at that time, but it was the start of a grand course” (Ottawa Journal, 26 October 1944, p. 18).

The Keffer-Black 18-Hole Course?

It seems likely that Keffer and Black had planned an 18-hole course – even if only on paper.

The day the amalgamation was announced, it was also announced that “A nine hole course will be put in readiness at once and later in the season this will be extended to the regulation eighteen” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9). This seems to imply that the nine holes laid out in June were the first of 18 holes planned by Keffer and Black.

It may be that Moffatt Ross had asked the two golf professionals to plan an 18-hole layout from which nine holes could be immediately developed as a temporary course.

Figure 45 Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 7 (November 1919), p. 419. Photograph captioned: "An historical event. The team which played the first game on the new links of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club. Reading from left to right: J.M. Ross, J. Donaldson, J.E. Wilmot, Jas. N. Brownlee, Dr. D.M. Robertson, Frank Jarman.” They are shown on the 9 th green of the Keffer-Black course on 26 July 1919.

When interviewed at the end of June 1919, Moffatt Ross seems again to allude to an 18-hole Keffer-Black layout: “Immediately the club house is opened, the professionals of the Royal Ottawa and Rivermead Golf Clubs will proceed to lay out a first class course and immediately trim up and whip into shape the 1st nine holes” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1919, p. 19, emphasis added). Moffatt Ross implies that “the 1st nine holes” are indeed a subset of holes within a larger “first class course” that he commissioned Keffer and Black to lay out.

In the same interview, he also implies that it is possible there will be more than nine holes ready for play during the Club’s first season: “The big official opening will no doubt be announced in the near future when it is hoped to have at least nine holes of golf in full swing” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1919, p. 19, emphasis added).

The likelihood that Keffer and Black were commissioned to identify where 18 holes would be laid out is further suggested by the fact that the club undertook a reforestation plan that was carefully designed so as not to interfere with an implicitly 18-hole course:

In order to improve certain sections of the grounds it is planned to commence reforestation on a small scale.

Groves of pine, cedar and spruce will be planted in the bare stretches ….

Care will be taken that the reforestation does not interfere with the golf course.

(Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1919, p. 2).

It was a simple thing not to put trees on the nine-hole temporary course that Black had just about completed at the time of this announcement. But how could those in charge of the reforestation have been confident that some of the “bare stretches” in which they intended to plant “groves of pine, cedar, and spruce” would not be part of a future 18-hole course? They must have had an indication of where future holes had already been planned – and these holes could only have been planned by Keffer and Black. Presumably, then, the reforesters were guided by a map of future holes provided by Keffer and Black.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when Keffer and Black played the course for the first time in September of 1919, they spoke to the Ottawa Journal in such a way as to suggest that they imagined that in due course their nine-hole layout would become part of an 18-hole course:

Rain spoiled the official opening of the Ottawa Motor and Hunt Club [sic] golf links.

A friendly foursome with Mr. Frank Jarman and Davy [sic] Black opposed to Karl Keffer and Mr. Moffatt Ross developed splendid golf.

Both professionals were very much pleased with the new course and declared that when it was enlarged to 18 holes it will compare favorably with any in the country.

(Ottawa Journal, 8 September 1919, p. 14)

At the time of this official opening of the temporary course, the Ottawa Citizen also seems to have assumed that this nine-hole course would be part of the future 18-hole course: “The second nine holes will be finished as soon as possible and next summer the Ottawa Motor and Hunt Club members will have one of the finest courses in the country” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 September 1919, p. 8).

The newspaper items cited above, all appearing between June and September of 1919, support the idea that Keffer and Black had been asked “some time ago” both to assess the property’s potential for development as an 18-hole golf course and to draw up an 18-hole layout for its 185 acres.

If Keffer and Black’s 1919 report indeed drew up plans for 18 holes, one wonders whether Willie Park incorporated any of their ideas into his 1920 design.

First Word of Another Architect

Moffatt Ross was not going to repeat the mistake made by many a golf club before World War I: having a course laid out by people not up to the job.

Figure 46 Ralph Reville, editor of Canadian Golfer, circa 1920.

As Ralph Revile, editor of Canadian Golfer magazine, observed in the spring of 1919 in his syndicated golf column published in the Ottawa Journal:

The days of the local green committee, composed of bankers, merchants, lawyers, journalists and a general hodge-podge of anything and everything are fortunately over.

But unfortunately, their works live after them, as evidenced still by dozens of links, scattered over the country, which from a golfing standpoint are nothing but abortions.

(Ottawa Journal, 21 June 1919, p. 38)

Moffatt Ross only had eyes for proper architects such as Keffer and Black.

For all the talk in Ottawa in the spring and summer of 1919 implying that an 18-hole Keffer-Black design was in the offing, there is a counter-current in other reports that indicates Moffatt Ross planned to use a different architect to design a permanent 18-hole course.

As early as the day the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club was announced, we read in the Ottawa Journal of a plan to hire this architect:

The land will furnish an excellent site for a golf course and it is planned to immediately lay out a nine hole course to be completed to the regulation 18 hole course as soon as possible.

The club intends to hire a golfing architect to lay out the course which will be one of the finest in America.

(Ottawa Journal, 11 June 1919, p. 8).

The Journal, as was its wont, seems to have provided a slimmed-down version a a press release from the new Club that the Ottawa Citizen presented more fully:

The property of the Ottawa Hunt was examined some time ago by Karl Keffer and Davie Black … and it was pronounced splendid for golf …. A nine hole course will be put in readiness at once and later in the season this will be extended to the regulation eighteen. A well-known Canadian architect will lay out the course.

(Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9)

These poorly written articles in the Citizen and the Journal of reports from the hours-old new Club about its golf course plans can both easily be misinterpreted as indicating that the golf course architect in question (“the club intends to hire a golfing architect”; “a well-known Canadian architect will lay out the course”) will have something to do with the temporary nine-hole course.

We know, however, that the nine-hole course was to be laid out not by “a” golf architect, but rather by two. And they are both mentioned in the Ottawa Citizen paragraph cited above: Keffer and Black. The anonymous architect in these newspaper items seems to be someone other than Keffer or Black. Note that neither of them would have been described by anyone in 1919 as “a well-known Canadian architect.”

I believe that the reporters for the Citizen and the Journal each conflate two pieces of information: the first, about the present temporary nine-hole course; the second, about the future permanent 18-hole course. The course to be laid out by a yet-to-be-hired well-known Canadian architect refers not to the present temporary course but rather to the future permanent course.

If so, who might have been the “well-known Canadian architect” that Moffatt Ross had in mind in June of 1919 as the one to lay out the permanent course?

I suspect that it was George Cumming

George Cumming

Figure 47 George Cumming, 1912 Canadian Open, Rosedale Golf Club.

In 1919, the most “well-known Canadian architect” was George Cumming (1879- 1950). And his work was well-known to Moffatt Ross insofar as Cumming was the one who had laid out Rivermead’s first 18-hole course in 1912 – the course on which Moffatt Ross learned the game in the spring of 1916 and the one on which he was playing in the spring of 1919. The full course was not available for play until 1915, and it still remained under construction between 1916 and 1919, as bunkers were added and holes were lengthened in an attempt to have the course recognized by the Royal Canadian Golf Association (R.C.G.A.) as of championship calibre (it would be the site of the 1920 Canadian Open).

Born in Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, Scotland, where he caddied for course designer and head pro Willie Campbell, Cumming arrived at the Toronto Golf Club from Scotland in the spring of 1900, where the twenty-year-old immediately became ex officio the most important golf professional in Canada.

Within ten years, he placed across Canada the first generation of Canadian-trained golf professionals: Charles R. Murray, Albert Murray, Karl Keffer, Frank Freeman, William Freeman, William Bell, and so on. He was the “doyen” of Canadian golf professionals, graduating over thirty assistant pros from his pro shop over the fifty years he was at the Toronto Golf Club. In 1919, Canadian Golfer called him “Daddy of them all” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 6 [October 1919], p. 341).

Figure 48 Stanley Thompson. Star Weekly [Toronto], 24 May 1919, p. 36.

Note that Stanley Thompson was not yet known as an architect. He returned to Canada from World War I only in the spring of 1919, being demobilized on May 12th. Having studied landscaping at the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph until 1915, when he abandoned his studies to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he had not yet established himself as a golf course architect. Late in 1919, however, he formed with Cumming and Thompson’s older brother, Nicol, the golf architecture and landscaping firm called Thompson, Cumming, Thompson.

At the beginning of 1920, Stanley was definitely the second Thompson in that company’s name.

Before World War I, Charles and Albert Murray were each laying out courses in the Montreal area and parts of eastern Ontario. Nicol Thompson was laying out courses in southwestern Ontario, the Muskokas, and across the border in Niagara Falls, New York. But none of them matched the geographical range or the volume of their mentor’s work.

And so, between 1900 and 1919, Cumming was Canada’s most prolific golf course architect. He extended and modified the Toronto Golf Club’s course a number of times (1900, 1906, 1909). He laid out nine holes at the Hamilton Golf Club in 1902, and later that year laid out a private nine-hole course in Petrolia, Ontario. He was off to St John, New Brunswick, to lay out nine holes in 1903. With Percy Barrett, he laid out nine holes for the Mississauga Golf and Country Club in 1905, added nine more holes in 1909, and then redesigned the whole course in 1913. He did the 18 holes of the Oshawa Golf Club between 1911 and 1913. He laid out courses for the Sarnia Golf and Curling Club, the Scarboro Golf and Country Club, and the Rivermead Golf Club in 1912. He laid out 18 holes for the Summit Golf Club in 1914 (although construction was deferred until the conclusion of World War I). The same year, he laid out nine holes in North Halton (Georgetown) and was back to do further work in February of 1919. He laid out nine holes at Couchiching (Orillia) in 1915. In 1916, he added nine holes to the London Hunt Club’s golf course. During World War I, he laid out several courses in the Muskoka District. Early in 1919, he laid out a golf course for the Lakeview Golf Club in Toronto, laid out another course in Sault Ste Marie, and remodelled the course in Barrie.

I assume, then, that the “well-known Canadian architect” that Moffatt Ross initially had in mind to lay out the Club’s permanent course was Cumming.

If so, however, Cumming remained the apple of Moffatt Ross’s eye for no more than a few months, for increasingly entering the awareness of serious Canadian golfers throughout 1919 was another architect – one with much more than a national fame.

And he happened to reside in Montreal.

First Word of Willie Park?

The Citizen and Journal reports that confuse and conflate talk of the temporary course and talk of the permanent course were published June 11th , the day after the amalgamation was announced.

The same mistaken connection between the initial nine-hole course and a future 18-hole layout was implied in another report six weeks later: “Mr. David Black, the golf professional of the Rivermead Golf Club, has laid out a temporary nine hole course which the managing committee intend to improve to a first-class permanent 18-hole course” (Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1919, p. 2).

There was never an intention to “improve” the “temporary nine-hole course” into “a first-class permanent 18-hole course.” The intention was always to replace the temporary course with the permanent course.

This sort of confusion on the part of reporters who knew little – if anything – about golf is understandable, especially if there was talk of both an 18-hole temporary course and an 18-hole permanent course. In gathering their information from Club officers and Club members as they emerged from meetings in in the spring and summer of 1919, reporters might well have thought they were hearing talk about a single 18-hole course even though people at the Club were talking about two different courses.

But the relationship between the temporary and permanent courses begins to be disentangled in a July 12th newspaper item published the day after more than 60 members of the new Club emerged from a meeting at the Chateau Laurier organized to finalize certain details of the amalgamation agreement:

Extensive plans have been made for the present season and next spring….

A temporary golf course, of nine holes, will be ready for use within two weeks and a professional has already been engaged to begin work.

Next spring a permanent course will be laid out, one of the best architects in the Dominion being retained to draw up the plans.

(Ottawa Citizen, 12 July 1919, p. 9)

Here, news of the present temporary course is clearly distinguished from news of the future permanent course.

The person described as the “professional [who] has already been engaged to begin work” on the temporary nine-hole course is recognizable, of course, as Davie Black. The purpose of “one of the best architects in the Dominion” will be to design a new course in the spring of 1920: the permanent course.

Yet the most interesting information revealed here is that the architect of the 1920 permanent course has already ben “retained”: “Next spring a permanent course will be laid out, one of the best architects in the Dominion being retained to draw up the plans” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 July 1919, p. 9, emphasis added).

Who is the person who is now described not as “a well-known Canadian architect,” but rather as “one of the best architects in the Dominion”? Is this change of phrasing significant? Is the architect in question not a Canadian? Is he, rather, a person of another nationality who nonetheless resides within the Dominion?

We know that Moffatt Ross was supremely confident of what the unnamed architect would do, for when he emerged from that meeting on 11 July 1919 at which members of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club worked to finalize terms of their amalgamation agreement, he spoke of in no uncertain terms of the quality of the future permanent course:

Mr. J. Moffatt Ross was optimistic regarding the future of the club.

He stated that the soil was particularly adaptable for golf.

“‘In a few years, we will have the finest golf course in Canada,” he said.

(Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1919, p. 7).

I suspect that Moffatt Ross had already retained the services of Willie Park, who, in July of 1919, was without doubt the best architect in the Dominion, and one of the best in the world: the chairman of the Golf Committee knew the quality of golf course that could be expected from Park.

Willie Park in 1919, the First Part

Figure 49 Willie Park, circa 1916.

How could Moffatt Ross have “retained” Willie Park by early July 1919 “to draw up the plans” for the permanent course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in the spring of 1920?

What put Park on the radar of Moffatt Ross?

It was announced late in December of 1918 that Park would serve as head pro at Montreal’s new Mount Bruno Country Club during the 1919 golf season. Before the new golf course had even opened, he would represent this new club as a competitor in the 1919 U.S. Open, the first national championship held since 1916.

As Moffatt Ross began to consider the question of which architect he should choose to design the permanent golf course for the new Hunt and Motor Club, he will have become increasingly interested by the cascade of press reports throughout 1919 about Park’s work in Canada and the United States.

The Ottawa newspapers printed many items about Park, and so, of course, did Canadian Golfer magazine, to which Moffatt Ross seems to have had a subscription (he would later correspond with editor Ralph Reville).

Throughout the year, in various publications, there was monthly reference to new courses that Park was laying out, progress on courses laid out by him under construction since 1917 or 1918, and courses that he was said to be on the verge of redesigning.

In his syndicated column on golf that was carried by many newspapers, including the Ottawa Journal, Reville observed in January:

Already indications are plentiful that this year will witness the most remarkable “boom” in golf ever recorded in Canada.

One of the outstanding features of 1919 will be the formal opening of the Mount Bruno Golf Club, situated at St. Bruno, some 15 miles from Montreal. This course, in the years to come, promises to become one of the most famous on the continent….

The celebrated Willie Park, ex-Open Champion of Great Britain, laid out the links and no expense has been spared to make them second to none. They are of championship calibre, having a length from the back tees of some 6,600 yards.

It is expected the whole course will be ready for play by the middle of June.

(Ottawa Journal, 4 January 1919, p. 17)

Toronto golfers were very much aware of Park, too. In January, the Toronto Star reported a rumour about a coming project: “The golf course at the Toronto Golf Club is to be reconstructed and it is said that Willie Park, who is to be professional at the Mount Bruno Club, Montreal, will be asked to handle the job. Park is a golf architect with a wide reputation” (Toronto Star, 10 January 1919, p. 24).

At the end of March, Reville wrote:

Willie Park, the celebrated golf architect and ex-Open champion of Great Britain (1887 and 1889), arrived in Montreal from New York this week to take up his new duties at St. [sic] Bruno Golf Club.

He writes me that he is “very enthusiastic about the outlook for the Royal and Ancient [game] in Canada the coming season.”

It is a great thing for golf to have an expert like Willie Park take up his permanent residence here.

(Star Weekly [Toronto], 29 March 1919, p. 39)

In one of his first ventures in the spring of 1919, Park was at Laval-sur-le-lac “planning an 18-hole course” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 3 [July 1919], p. 140). This bastion of French-Canadian golf in Montreal had decided to expand its nine-hole Albert H. Murray course into a regulation 18-hole layout. Today, the club claims that Park was such a supporter of the club that he agreed to add nine holes on a pro bono basis.

In mid-April, Park was off to Chicago, having been “secured by the Olympia Fields Country Club to put the finishing touches on the third of their eighteen-hole courses. He will also inspect the first and second … [and] visit several of the other Chicago courses” (Chicago Tribune, 15 April 1919, p. 20).

In the spring of 1919, if Moffatt Ross were to have contacted the president of the R.C.G.A., David R. Brown, to ask for advice on architects working in Canada, and perhaps to inquire in particular whether the hype about Park was merited, he would have received a well-informed and entirely positive opinion about Park, for Brown was also the president of the Beaconsfield Golf Club, which had just hired Park to redesign its course in advance of the 1920 Canadian Amateur Championship to be held at Beaconsfield.

According to Brown, “after careful inquiries as to the best expert to employ, the Board retained Willie Park to advise them regarding the changes for the improvement of the course” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 12 (April 1920), p. 733).

I pause at this mid-1919 point in my review of Willie Park’s media presence in Canada that year because it was precisely at the end of June and beginning of July that five directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club may have encountered Park’s work at Mount Bruno.

They may even have met the famous man for the first time.

A Drive to Mount Bruno?

If it is true that Willie Park had been “retained” by 11 July 1919 to lay out a permanent golf course for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in the spring of 1920, how had this arrangement come about?

It may well have occurred at the end of June 1919 when five officers of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club did something that was rather extraordinary at that time: they travelled to Montreal by automobile.

Moffatt Ross, of course, was one of them.

He had long been fond of long drives – not just with a golf club, but also with an automobile:

My first little adventure was a trip to Prescott and Ogdensburg with a little beetle-back “Ford” roadster, all decked out with brass….

Out of Ogdensburg, I had the pleasure of a first experience of driving over American state roads.

That delightful sensation got such a grip on me that I have been boosting for good roads ever since.

During subsequent years, I have taken long tours over the American state roads all the way from Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo right around to Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston.

(Ottawa Journal, 21 June 1919, p. 34)

He had served at different times as president, vice-president, and secretary of the Ottawa Valley Motor Car Association (and its successor the Ottawa Motor Club) both to encourage recreational and social activities by Ottawa area car owners and to “boost” (that is, promote) the development of good roads in Canada.

Note that in 1919, access to Ottawa by road was very limited. Construction of the highway from Prescott, Ontario, to Ottawa was just beginning that year. Before its completion, there was no good road access from the United States to Ottawa. And in 1919, the 130-mile drive from Montreal to Ottawa took ten hours, at best. The journey was over a patchwork quilt of roads of wildly varying quality with many crossroads encountered and few signposts. And the possibility of even a ten-hour trip was contingent on good weather, for during periods of heavy rainfall, certain areas were impassable. Winter travel over this route by automobile was out of the question.

And so, as part of a campaign “to hurry the construction of a modern highway between Montreal and Ottawa,” officials of the Ottawa Motor Club and the Eastern Ontario Good Roads Association supervised the 1919 Ottawa Journal Inter-City Highways Reliability Automobile Tour to Montreal.

Figure 50 At 9:00 am, 26 June 1919, in front of The Journal Building in downtown Ottawa, officials prepare to send off the first car in The Ottawa Journal Inter-City Reliability Tour. Ottawa Journal, 26 June 1919, p. 1.

Competing to reach checkpoints in prescribed times, to demonstrate the mechanical reliability of their automobiles, to demonstrate their automobile’s hill-climbing ability, and so on, individuals and families drove all day on June 26th to Brockville (where vehicles were ferried across the river to Ogdensburg for the night), drove all day on June 27th to Malone, and then drove until the afternoon of June 28th, when they finally arrived in Montreal.

The return trip, whether by the direct Montreal to Ottawa route over a poor hodgepodge of roads or by the original three-day route, would not begin for several days afterwards: “The tourists will then be able to go sightseeing on Sunday, June 29, and over until Tuesday, July 1, if desired” (Ottawa Journal, 5 June 1919).

Figure 51 "Frank Jarman, executive of the Ottawa Motor Club, who is an active official on the board of The Journal Tour." Ottawa Journal, 21 June 1919, p. 24.

Among the “officials in charge of the run” were five “representing [the] Ottawa Motor Club: H.C. Carruthers, A.A. Dion, F. Jarman, Dr. Mark McElhinney, J. Moffatt Ross” (Ottawa Journal, 7 June 1919, p. 18). At the time of the trip, all were directors of the Ottawa Motor Club, and all were founding members and directors of the new Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

By the end of July, each would also be serving on one or more of the new club’s committees, including the Golf Committee led by Moffatt Ross.

I suspect that at least one of them, and perhaps all five of them, visited the Mount Bruno golf course before they returned to Ottawa.

The reason I am confident that at least one of them visited Mount Bruno in 1919 is because of what Moffatt Ross wrote to the editor of Canadian Golfer in April 1920 when he announced that the Club’s executive committee had authorized Park’s hiring at a meeting held 16 March 1920.

In his letter, he also mentioned that the hiring of Henry Towlson as head pro had been approved, and he went into relatively granular detail about a few other decisions made by the executive committee: the clubhouse was to be improved with electrical conveniences; more lockers were to be procured “for both men and lady members,” and so on (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 12 [April 1920], p. 746). The item that catches my eye, however, conveys the following oddly specific piece of information: “An order was placed for a complete set of the most modern sand and water boxes, similar to those of the St [sic] Bruno Golf and Country Club, Montreal, with special holder at the back for four golf bags” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 12 [April 1920], p. 746).

Figure 52 Bulletin of the Green Section of the United States Golf Association, vol 1 no 12 (16 December 1921), p. 250.

The wooden tee peg not yet having come into use, a “sand and water box” was placed at each tee on a golf course to provide a handful of sand (as well as water to moisten it) so that a little cone of wet sand could be shaped as a tee for the golf ball.

Seen in the photograph to the left is a three-legged version of a sand and water box endorsed by the United States Golf Association in 1921.

On this box, sand is accessed through one port; water, through the other; and players wash and dry their hands after the tee making business is done. The hole number and yardage are printed on the side.

Moffatt Ross writes as though he is personally familiar with the “modern sand and water boxes” at Mount Bruno to which he refers.

If he was not personally familiar with them, Moffatt Ross had presumably been told about them by someone who had been to Mount Bruno and was extremely persuasive in singing the merits of the sand and water boxes in question.

And so, it seems that at least one member of the new Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club had visited Mount Bruno the season before Moffatt Ross wrote his March 1920 letter to Canadian Golfer.

This person (or these people) probably played the 16 holes then open at Mount Bruno, placing a golf bag on the holder at the back of these contraptions at each tee, and being so impressed by it all at the end of the day that they came back to Ottawa convinced that the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club must have these modern devices, too.

Figure 53 Montreal Star, 26 April 1910, p. 10.

Figure 54 The R & W. Kerr sand and water box on Royal Ottawa’s 10th tee appears in the bottom right corner of this greatly enlarged detail from an undated photograph, probably from before World War I. Collections Canada.

Moffatt Ross is not likely to have simply found an image of this “modern sand and water box” in an R & W Kerr Company advertisement and then decided to buy it because such an advertisement listed the Mount Bruno Country Club as an organization that used it.

For R & W. Kerr promoted their sand and water boxes by listing many important Canadian golf clubs that used them, as in the example from 1910 shown to the left.

By 1919-20, the same golf clubs listed in the advertisement seen here were probably using the new “modern sand and water boxes.” And it is likely that there will have been even more clubs for R & W. Kerr to have added to such a list (the Mount Bruno Country Club being just one of them).

Now, in March of 1920, given the greater prestige that clubs in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto enjoyed over the still relatively unknown Mount Bruno Country Club, there would have been no reason for Moffatt Ross to have said that seeing the name of the Mount Bruno club on the list of prestigious club’s using the new sand and water box was what made him order it for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

It would seem, instead, that his (or his fellow Club members’) personal experience of this product’s convenient functionality at the Mount Bruno golf course was what led Moffat Ross to describe it for Reville as something he associated with the Mount Bruno Country Club.

Would these five directors of the new Club have known that they could visit the Mount Bruno Country Club at the end of June and that doing so might be worthwhile?

Through his magazine Canadian Golfer, on the one hand, and through his syndicated column on golf (carried by coast to coast by various newspapers, including the Ottawa Journal), on the other, Ralph Reville promoted from December 1918 onward both awareness of Willie Park as an exceptional architect and awareness of the Mount Bruno golf course as an exceptionally important one:

FAMOUS PLAYER AND GOLF ARCHITECT

Has Accepted the Position of Professional for Mount Bruno Golf Club

Golfers of Canada will hear with a great deal of interest that Willie Park, the celebrated golf architect and player is coming next season to Canada, having accepted the position of professional at the Mount Bruno Country Club, the very prominent new club near Montreal, which will be formally opened the coming year….

Montreal is to be congratulated on having such a notable all-round golfer and celebrated golf architect take up his residence there.

(Canadian Golfer, vol 4 no 8 [December 1918], p. 440)

A month later, Reville wrote about the Mount Bruno golf course:

Willie Park, the former open champion of Great Britain, and golf architect of international reputation, for the past two years a resident of New York, laid out this course of championship calibre.

Work was commenced in June 1917.

Sixteen holes are completed. The two remaining holes, which will involve much labour, will be finished during the course of next season.

It is expected that 16 holes will be in condition to play upon by July 1st next….

[T]his most interesting course, … when completed, will rank amongst the finest on the continent.

(Canadian Golfer, vol 4 no 9 [January 1919], pp. 469-70)

By March 1919, Reville anticipated the opening of the Mount Bruno course with growing excitement: “The formal opening of Mount Bruno’s magnificent new course it is expected will take place in June. This will be one of the golfing events of 1919” (Canadian Golfer, vol 4 no 11 [March 1919], p. 612).

He next reported that Willie Park had returned from vacation in Scotland and had arrived at Mount Bruno at the end of March. Apparently, one of the first things that Park did upon his arrival was to write to Reville himself with an update on the condition of the course (which had been seeded in June 1918): according to Park, “Mount Bruno has stood the winter well and everything indicates fine greens and fair greens [that is, “fairways”]” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 1 [May 1919], p. 54).

This relentless hype is likely to have caught the attention of one such as Moffatt Ross who had been working since 1917 to gain access to the property owned by the Hunt Club and then to build on it what he intended to be one of the best golf courses in Canada.

The directors of the new club, and Moffatt Ross in particular, had caught a lot of grief from naysayers who pooh-poohed the vision of a championship golf course laid out on what was regarded by golfers who knew no better as exceptionally unpromising land:

When, two years ago, a combination of golfing optimism and hard-headed business acumen in a few Ottawa citizens induced them to try to translate the old Ottawa Hunt Club into a modern golf and country club, the pessimists, who are always with us, simply jeered.

They conjured up all the obstacles they could summon: said that Ottawa could not support three golf courses; that any attempt to construct a third would come to financial grief; and that, last but not least, the grounds of the Hunt Club were a veritable Sahara desert, as foreign to grass as the icefloes of the Arctic.

(Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22)

Figure 55 One of the posters produced to advertise the 1936 David O. Selznick motion picture, The Garden of Allah.

The supposedly unpromising original state of the property that Moffat Ross overcame was remembered for years:

“The land then was little more than a great sand dune. There were very few trees and only sparse vegetation”; it “was a sandy plain where only the hardiest weeds could thrive”;

“it resembled a movie set for the shooting of one of the desert scenes in the Garden of Allah”

(Ottawa Journal, 19 June 1958, p. 9; 14 June 1939, p. 17; 14 June 1939, p. 17).

As opposed to those who naively assumed that sandy soil was unsuited to growing golf course turf, Moffatt Ross could point, on the one hand, to the Keffer-Black report’s assurance that the soil “drained naturally, being of a sandy character,” and was, in fact, “particularly adaptable for golf,” and, on the other hand (and perhaps just as importantly), to an interesting letter that Willie Park wrote to Ralph Revile at the beginning of 1919:

It is my opinion that the Mount Bruno Golf Club will have a golf course equal to any in any part of the world.

The location is, indeed, most exceptional and I have noticed that even in the hottest summer weather, one always gets a pleasant breeze.

The character of the land is all that can be desired, being of a nice undulating and sporting character with no hill climbing.

Since the soil is of a light sandy nature, it will not be very difficult to develop a very fine golfing turf, which will, of course, assist in providing an excellent test of golf.

(Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1919, p. 7; Ottawa Citizen, 11 June 1919, p. 9; Canadian Golfer, vol 4 no 9 [January 1919], p. 469).

Moffatt Ross may have thought to himself: “Hmmm … we have almost 200 acres of soil of a light sandy nature!”

When Moffatt Ross began planning for his participation in June’s Ottawa Journal Inter-City Reliability Tour, I see him recalling a point made by Reville in his January 1919 Canadian Golfer article introducing his readers to the Mount Bruno Country Club: the golf course was “ideally situated at St. Bruno, P.Q., some fifteen miles east of Montreal …. A first-class macadam road … connects this very fashionable suburb with the city of Montreal” (Canadian Golfer, vol 4 no 9 [January 1919], p. 469).

A first-class road!

“Gentlemen,” I hear Moffatt Ross saying to his four travelling companions (and Hunt and Motor Club directors), “when you pack for the Reliability Tour, make sure to bring your golf clubs!”

If Moffatt Ross and his fellow directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club did indeed visit Mount Bruno Country Club at the end of June 1919, there is a good chance that Willie Park was there for the opening of sixteen holes that weekend. On the one hand, he was preparing to travel to Halifax the next week to advise the Brightwood Golf Club about improvements to its course, and so he may well have been at his Montreal residence preparing for the trip. On the other hand, he probably wanted to be on hand for the start of play on this new course, for he had taken a more personal interest in the Mount Bruno layout than for any other course he had worked on in Canada or the United States: “What the designer thought of his product, and its possibilities, may be realized when it is known that he spent several months at the work superintending the original layout and supervising the work as if he had been an ordinary foreman” (Montreal Gazette, 29 July 1922, p. 15).

The Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club directors would have found at Mount Bruno’s relatively treeless layout an intimation of what their own sparsely vegetated desert property might become in the hands of Willie Park.

Figure 56 An early photograph of the golf course of the Mount Bruno Country Club. Note that the clubhouse that appears at the top of the photograph did not yet exist in 1919 (it was built in 1920).

And so, it may have been a drive to Mount Bruno at the end of June 1919, and perhaps even an encounter at the end of the road with Willie Park himself, that produced the news in Ottawa less than two weeks later that “next spring, a permanent course will be laid out, one of the best architects in the Dominion being retained to draw up the plans” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 July 1919, p. 9).

Willie Park in 1919, the Second Part

If there was any doubt on the part of Moffatt Ross and his fellow Club directors about the wisdom of having retained Park’s services, the accounts of Park’s work during the second half of 1919 will have allayed them.

In the first week of July, Park was in Halifax, planning improvements for the Brightwood golf course. Then he went to Manitoba:

Renowned Scottish Golf Architect to Survey ‘Peg Course

Willie Park Will Come Here Soon ….

With a view to improving its already fine course, Winnipeg Golf Club officials have made arrangements with Willie Park, noted British golf player and golf architect, to go over the Birds Hill course and submit recommendations for improvements.

(Winnipeg Tribune, 8 July 1919, p. 13)

While in Winnipeg for several weeks in July, Park also laid out 18-hole courses for the Winnipeg Hunt Club and the Southwood Golf Club.

At the beginning of August, the Ottawa Journal observed Park’s next move:

This week, Willie Park, the well-known golf architect, who has just returned from a most successful trip to Winnipeg, is going over Beaconsfield [Montreal] with a view of suggesting improvements to the course in connection with the [R.C.G.A. amateur] championships of 1920.

The directors and members of the club are determined to have everything quite up to modern standards and to attain that end will expend several thousands of dollars in course of improvements.

(Ottawa Journal, 9 August 1919, p. 27).

In September, the New York Times marvelled at how productive Park had been and how busy he had become:

Park to Build Five New Courses for Chicago Club

Wiseacres in the golfing world have put up a candidate to run against President Carranza, Senator Lodge, and others for the busiest-man-in-the-world championship. He is Willie Park, the veteran and truly renowned architect of links.

Park has rarely passed a single season without drafting, planning, bunkering, teeing, and greening a course which has eventually become one of the most likeable in the hemisphere.

But his reputation and his record of many successes have kept so many jumps ahead of him that this year he is up to his neck in work.

The Metacomet Golf Club of Providence, R.I., … has recently contracted Park to construct a new links.

Out in Chicago … Park has been the architect selected to lay out five new courses for the new Olympia Fields Country Club.

(New York Times, 14 September 1919, p. 112)

Also in September, Park was called in by a new Montreal club:

Still another golf club is to be added to Montreal’s lengthy list …. The new club, which will be known as the Riverside Golf Club, will locate on the north side of the island of Montreal, six miles from Cartierville, and will open with a full eighteen-hole course, including many interesting water holes and natural hazards….

Willie Park, golf architect and British Open Champion in 1887 and 1889, has already been engaged to lay out the links and supervise construction. Mr. Park considers that the new prospect offers every opportunity for the construction of a championship calibre course.

(Montreal Gazette, 24 September 1919, p. 13)

In mid-September, he was off to Battle Creek, Michigan, to lay out an 18-hole course. In mid-November, he was laying out traps at the Rolling Road Golf Club in Baltimore, Maryland. Also in November, Reville reported that the Whitlock Golf Club in Hudson Heights, Quebec, had just hired Park to add nine new holes to his original nine-hole layout there.

And in December, Reville reported on Park’s progress at Beaconsfield:

Thanks to unusually propitious weather conditions [in] the months of October and November, a great deal of construction has been completed this season at Beaconsfield, Montreal, in carrying out the extensive programme of improvements to the course as outlined by Willie Park, who has worked out a very comprehensive and complete championship course – one in every way worthy of the Canadian amateur tournament next summer.

(Calgary Herald, 17 December 1919, p. 18)

But Park was no longer in Quebec in December of 1919: on December 3rd, he had sailed for Scotland.

Having been since 1916 one of the most prolific golf course designers in the United States, Park had become in a single year the most prolific golf course designer in Canada.

He was now the premier architect within the Dominion.

The Problem for Park to Address

While Park was laying out the Hunt and Motor Club’s course at the end of April 1920, he explained to an Ottawa Journal reporter the kind of architectural theory that he followed and the kind that he abjured:

Every effort will be made by him to produce a championship course of about 6,500 yards, much longer than the average Canadian links, and so constructed that it will be pleasing to all players.

He is not a believer in the system of laying out a course to penalize the short driver.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Although the reporter did not know what Park was telling him, one can see that Park was articulating both his dislike of what is called “penal design” or “penal architecture,” on the one hand, and his antidote to it, on the other: designing a golf course that players of all levels of ability could enjoy.

With golf courses laid out at Sunningdale and Huntercombe between 1899 and 1900, Park had revolutionized golf architecture for inland courses. But the revolution was slow to take hold, and it had much to overcome in the way of the prevailing precepts of penal golf course architecture. That is why he was still talking about the need to overcome this kind of architecture when he was in Ottawa.

Figure 57 A golfer prepares to play backwards out of a Tom Dunn style cross bunker. J.H. Taylor, "The Evolution of the Bunker," in Joshua Taylor, The Art of Golf (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1913).

English golf professional Tom Dunn (1849-1902) has often been called “the father of penal golf course design.” He was a leading figure in developing heathland and parkland golf courses far from the traditional home of golf on seaside links land. He was particularly instrumental in the building of new golf courses around London as the popularity of golf spread from Scotland to England in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. His designs were distinguished by his tendency to construct a bunker across an entire fairway perpendicular to the line of play (they came to be called “cross bunkers”).

Golf historians suggest that the rudimentary cross-bunker hazards for which he became famous – and then infamous when they went out of fashion – were the simplest and most economical way for him to introduce hazards onto the generally featureless land where he was asked to build the majority of his golf courses:

Tom Dunn's courses were rudimentary given the lack of earth moving equipment available at that time.

His standard design feature was to lay out a ditch or bunker on the near side of the green, often right across the course, which had to be carried from the tee.

It was the same kind of carry for the second shot, and if the player had to hack out of the first bunker, the next hazard was in reach.

(Famous North Berwick Golfers http://www.northberwick.org.uk/dunn.html).

One of Tom Dunn’s apprentices was his much younger brother Willie, with whom he built a golf course at Biarritz in 1889. Willie Dunn (1864-1952) came to the United States in the spring of 1893 to work at Shinnecock Hills, where he extended the 1891 nine-hole Willie Davis course to eighteen holes by 1895. He also began designing many dozens of golf courses throughout the United States, all of them featuring penal design, and most of them featuring the Dunn family’s cop-bunkers as cross bunkers.

A shallow trench (perhaps a foot deep and six feet wide) was dug across the width of the fairway, with the soil and sod from the trench heaped up into a wall at least three feet high on the side of the trench closest to the green. Perhaps designed to mimic the effect of a sod-wall fairway bunker on a links course (from which players often had to play out sideways or backwards), cop-bunkers prevented a player landing in them from advancing the ball very far – if at all.

Figure 58 Two of Willie Dunn's cop-bunkers at the Westbrook Golf Club, Long Island, New York, circa 1895.

The idea behind penal theory was to punish golfers who could not get the ball into the air. The general conviction, at a time when championship golf was almost exclusively decided by match play, was that it was unfair on a two-shot hole, for instance, to allow players first to top a drive (say), and then skull a fairway shot (say), and yet still roll the ball onto the putting green with their two bad shots, thereby having a chance to be “level” with the player who had reached the green with two perfect shots. Park himself disdained these holes as “what has not inaptly been termed ‘levellers’ – that is to say, the ball can be driven on the green in two strokes by anybody” (Willie Park, The Game of Golf [London: Longman, Green and Co., 1896], p. 200).

And so, golf architects made sure to arrange for each hole at least one hazard (whether natural or artificial) stretching across the entire width of the fairway. A ditch, gully, creek or small pond might well serve as a fairway-wide cross bunker, but when nature failed to provide such an obstacle, the Dunns built a cop-bunker. On a two-shot hole, a second fairway-wide hazard would be placed in front of the putting green. There would be an additional fairway-wide hazard to be crossed on a three-shot hole. A person playing a golf course for the first time could tell the par of any hole by counting the number of cross bunkers on it: par equals the number of cross-bunkers plus two strokes for putts.

By the late 1890s, because of Dunn’s influence, building a golf course in North America according to any other philosophy than that of “penal” design was not easily conceivable. For instance, in his advice on how to build a golf course in his 1898 book Golf, Garden G. Smith writes as though “penal” design is the only design possible:

Supposing a hole be 250 yards in length measured from the teeing-ground, there should be a hazard of some sort extending right across the line of the hole, about 100 or 130 yards from the tee.

Beyond this the ground should be good; but, guarding the hole again, and some 30 or 40 yards in front of it, there should be another hazard which the player would have to carry before reaching the putting-green.

(Garden G. Smith, Golf [New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co, 1898], p. 10)

Similarly, in the 1897 second edition of Wright & Ditson’s Guide to Golf in America, there is a new section on how to build a golf course, and in it we see the same penal assumptions. First, golfers must always be required to carry the golf ball over hazards: “the hazard to be surpassed … should be sometimes near the teeing-ground and sometimes at nearly a full drive’s distance from it”; but “there should be always some hazard or bunker to trap a poorly played drive.” The Guide explains that “where nature, by some oversight, has forgotten to provide hazards or bunkers, they should be built by man.” The kind of obstacles recommended shocks a modern golfer: one option was “wooden hurdles with sloping sides” (a problem being that the obstacle does not always work, for “the ball often strikes them and bounds over on the other side”); another option was “building hedges of branches, such as are used in hurdles of steeplechasing” (the problem being that “the ball is apt to be lost in them or creep into such a nook as to be unplayable”). And so, the Dunns’ cross-bunkering system is preferable:

The best [hazards] are made by building a pile of earth work, about waist high and with sloping sides….

The trench behind the mound should be filled with loose sand, if possible, as … it is less unpleasant to play a ball out of sand than out of the mud that is sure to collect in such a place in wet weather.

This bunker may be either in a straight line across the course, or in a zig-zag pattern like the lines of a fortification.

(Guide to Golf in America, Wright and Ditson, 2nd ed. 1897, pp. 29-35).

An example of the “zig-zag pattern” – called a “bastion” – could be found at Shinnecock Hills by 1894.

Figure 59 The "Bastion Bunker" at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Southampton, Long Island, New York. Illustrated American, vol 16 no 236 (25 August 1894), p. 229.

This “bastion” style of cop-bunker was quickly duplicated at other American golf courses.

A widely published 1901 newspaper article called “Bunker Building on American Links” (comprising “suggestions by an expert on constructing hazards”) shows how the Dunns’ version of penal golf course architecture had become gospel:

Take a 150-yard hole …. If there are no natural hazards, it is advisable to place two copbunkers 110 yards from the tee, side by side clear across the course. About one-fourth of the bunker in front should overlap one-fourth of the other, leaving a path [for golfers] running sideways, and not straight for the hole, to prevent balls rolling through.

Figure 60 The 8th hole at the Flushing Country Club, Long Island, New York, designed in 1901 by John Duncan Dunn (a nephew of Tom and Willie Dunn) and Walter J. Travis. Note the pathways to allow golfers through the bunkers. Golf (New York), vol 9 no 1 (July 1902), p. 11.

Each of these bunkers should cover one-half of the width of the course. The trap should be twenty feet wide and two and one-half feet deep, while the height of the cop should be three feet….

For a hole 340 yards long, the theoretical arrangement of artificial hazards would be:

Place two bunkers two feet deep, end for end eight[y] yards from the tee, with cops eighteen inches high to catch topped or foozled drives….

For variety, and in order to add to the picturesqueness of the course, mounds [instead of cop bunkers] are sometimes erected to guard the green. They should be placed 285 yards from the tee, and built about six or eight feet in height, twelve feet wide, and extending almost across the course. The end of one mound should overlap the other with a patch between, running sideways [for golfers to walk through] ….

The player who can consistently negotiate a 500-yard hole laid out as follows in anything like bogey figures should make a dangerous opponent:

Build a cop in two sections about three to five feet high, with a shallow bunker in front, extending across the course about fifty yards from the tee….

About 240 yards from the tee, it would be advisable to place a cop bunker twenty feet wide, three feet deep, and as long almost as the width of the course will permit. This bunker should be built in the shape of a half moon and have two paths running through it [for golfers] ….

Within fifty yards of the hole, an ordinary cop-bunker should be placed clear across the course to protect the green.

(Inter Ocean [Chicago], 19 May 1901, p. 49)

During his visits to the United States in 1895 and 1896, Willie Park played over countless cross-bunkers of the Dunn family style.

When he next returned to the United States in 1916, after a twenty-year absence, golf courses designed according to penal design theory were legion. A regular part of his work was to redesign such courses.

When he returned to Scotland in the fall of 1919 for a vacation after three years of architectural work in the United states and Canada, he discussed with the editor of Golf Monthly what he had been doing in North America for the previous three years: “A great part of my work concerned the reconstruction of links which had been ruined by bad designing” (Golf Monthly, cited in North Mail, Newcastle Daily Chronicle [Tyne and Wear, England], 26 January 1920, p. 5).

It should be no surprise, then, that when he talked with reporters in Ottawa as he was designing the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club course at the end of April 1920, he expressed his disapproval of penal design: “He is not a believer in the system of laying out a course to penalize the short driver” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Park's Emerging Modern Strategy

Figure 61 Willie Park, 1890s.

As we know, Park visited the United States in 1895 and again in 1896. Apart from tending to business at the New York office of William Park and Sons, he spent is time playing in famous challenge matches and occasionally laying out golf courses, and so he saw more than his fair share of the Dunn family’s cop-bunkers.

He may well have returned to Scotland inspired to work out a system of inland golf course design that did not use cross bunkers so mechanically and so unaesthetically.

In 1896, he published The Game of Golf (1896), in which he begins to articulate his alternative to penal design.

Park was among the first to recognize that a golf course needed to welcome newcomers to the game, not punish them for being beginners. As we know, he told Ottawa reporters in 1920 that “Every effort will be made by him to produce a championship course … so constructed that it will be pleasing to all players” and not “penalize the short driver” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19). He had turned in this direction in 1896:

It is to be kept in view … that the links are to be laid out for the use of a certain class of golfers.

If all are beginners, it is a mistake to make the course too difficult at first, as it will diminish their pleasure and possibly disgust them with the green [i.e. golf course] ….

[B]ut as they get more expert, the links can be made more difficult by lengthening the holes and similar devices.

(The Game of Golf, p. 201)

Park developed the strategy of building two tee boxes per hole, one significantly in advance of the other. It was initially conceived as a way to preserve shot values when the course was heavy (wet) or fast (dry): the course could be lengthened in dry weather so that approach shots did not become too easy because of drives running out a long way on hard fairways. But of course it was also a design feature that allowed players to play from the tee box most suited to their abilities.

Park also recognized the need to reconceive hazards.

The architect should not “trap” a player with invisible hazards: “all hazards should be visible to the golfer when he stands at his ball playing his stroke” (The Game of Golf, p. 203). And no hazard should be inescapable: “there should not be any hazard out of which the ball cannot be extricated at the loss one stroke” (The Game of Golf, p. 203). Observing that rectangular hazards (such as the sand pits excavated in front of the faces of cop-bunkers) presented corners from which balls tucked into them could not be played, he recommended against such angles: “It should not be possible for a ball to lie in such a position in a bunker that a stroke at it cannot be made so as to play the ball out in one direction or another, and the corners should not therefore be sharp and angular but rather rounded off” (The Game of Golf, p. 203).

This latter practice meant that Park’s bunkers did not appear as rigid geometrical insertions into a natural landscape but rather as features that might have been produced by nature.

A variety of hazards is important, Park observed, and varying their location is important. There is no need to place the same type of hazard at the same place on every hole of every golf course to trap every bad shot in the same way:

The placing of hazards is a matter of great difficulty, and their positions should be such that a golfer who is playing a good game should never visit them.

The positions should be varied.

There should, for example, be at certain holes hazards that must be carried … from the tee; these should be placed at such distances from the teeing grounds that while a well-hit shot will carry them, a topped or half-topped stroke will get in.

At other holes, the hazards should be placed so as to punish badly played second strokes; at others again, the hazards should guard the putting-greens in front, and there may also be placed some hazards behind the greens.

(The Game of Golf, p 204)

And if cop-bunkers are to be made, Park clearly does not approve of the exaggerated forms – such as the bastion bunker – that he encountered in the United States:

When bunkers are made, it is very usual to form the soil taken up into a cop in front, or behind, and sometimes in the middle.

When such a thing is done, the cop should not be made high, but rather broad, and it should not have steep sides.

(The Game of Golf, pp. 203-204).

Park is describing the kind of bunker that has since become familiar on golf courses everywhere: a bunker with a base a foot or more below the level of the surrounding ground and a brow (especially on the side facing the green) raised a foot or more above the level of the surrounding ground.

And so, when he spoke in April of 1920 to a reporter about the bunkers he was laying out for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, it is no surprise to find him explaining: “All fairways and bunkers will be so constructed as to blend with the surroundings” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

In his reconceiving of the function of hazards, Park was the first to do away with cross-bunkers:

There is a great cry nowadays that every hole should have a hazard in front requiring to be lofted over, but I think it is possible to carry a system of this kind too far.

It ties players down to pitching all their approaches instead of making them exercise their judgement as to whether the ball should be lofted or run up.

No golfer will deny that there should be hazards in front of some holes, but I think that at others there should be a clear road, with hazards judiciously placed on either side to punish wild shots.

To loft a ball with an iron is comparatively easy to any player except an absolute novice, but it is not easy to keep to the proper course.

Erratic play should always meet with punishment, and I would counsel hazards being laid down on each side, not of the putting-greens alone, but also of the line to the hole, to catch pulled or sliced balls.

(The Game of Golf, pp. 204-205)

Twenty-four years later, Park, who was always expansive when explaining his thinking to club officials who accompanied him while he laid out a course, used precisely these terms to explain his strategy to members of the Royal Montreal Golf Club in 1920, when he redesigned their original 18-hole course at Dixie (laid out in 1899 by none other than Willie Dunn, himself) and replaced it with two 18-hole courses (dividing the original layout between the two new courses):

The present course had been designed in accordance with the practice of the period, which was to place obstacles across the path of the player.

The new courses have been planned with the modern practice, which aims at giving the player a clear way to the green, laying traps and punishments for those who deviate from the straight.

(Gazette [Montreal], 1 November 1920, p. 15)

Park employed the same strategy at the Mount Bruno Country Club when he laid out its 18-hole championship course in 1917:

Willie Park designed the course to leave an open gate for the straight player, and his pots and traps and patches of rough lying in wait on either side do penalize the unfortunate who wanders to left or right.

A trip to the side off the direct line invariably costs a stroke.

(Gazette [Montreal], 10 June 1922, p. 16).

It was old-fashioned cross-bunkers placed as obstacles to catch mis-hit tee shots that he had in mind in Ottawa in April of 1920 when he said he was “not a believer in the system of laying out a course to penalize the short driver” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Park also reacted against the late-nineteenth-century fashion of building flat, level putting greens. In 1895 and 1896, he had noted the preference among many golfers in North America for putting greens that were as flat as a billiard table. Park recommended instead that they be designed with undulations.

The variety of places on which they [putting greens] can be formed is infinite.

They may be on the level, or in a natural hollow or basin, provided it be sufficiently large and shallow, or they may be placed on the tops of large “tables.”

All of these are good positions, and the more variety that can be introduced, the better.

The putting greens should be as large as possible, and while the ground should be comparatively level, it is not desirable that it should be perfectly flat like a billiard-table but should rather be of a slightly undulating character.

(The Game of Golf, p. 202)

Over the next twenty-five years, Park came to plan these “undulations” ever more meticulously. Their contours were mapped carefully, with his instructions specifying elevation changes in feet and inches.

In April 1920, he described his green design philosophy to a reporter from the Ottawa Journal:

His putting grounds will be along the most modern lines and all the greens will be of the undulating type.

Every effort will be made to produce a masterpiece of individuality at every green, and there will be none of the stereotyped square greens that have been constructed in the past.

Although the work on the greens will be artificially created, the architect’s idea is to produce as near as possible a perfectly natural course.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

This aspect of his work at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club left the Ottawa Citizen’s golf writer (Brian Devlin) marvelling at Park’s architectural genius:

no two [putting greens] are constructed in the same way – each is absolutely individual in outline.

There are … eighteen varieties of surface contours, and the slope towards the spot from where the shot to the green should be played differs in every instance.

Practically every putt will have to be carefully thought out – and that’s not all!

The shot to the green, long though it may be, should always be played with a clear idea of what side of the pin it must come to rest. Otherwise, the player may find himself with a putt almost impossible to lay dead.

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1922, p. 30)

Park’s greens were famous from the beginning, and he increasingly designed large, rolling greens that would stimulate the interest of good golfers and improve the abilities of all players.

This feature of his architecture no doubt grew out of the fact that he was perhaps the best putter on earth. According to seven-time Major champion Harry Vardon, “Willie Park was the finest putter he ever saw. ‘He played all his putts with a little “draw,” and in laying the ball absolutely dead or else holing it time after time, he was in a class by himself’” (The Cornishman, 2 April 1924, p. 6). According to eleven-time Major champion Walter Hagen, “Park was a putter of no mean reputation and he showed it even in his last days over here in America. Once down in Florida, I played a four-ball match with him and he was holing from all sides of the green” (Boston Globe, 30 June 1925, p. 12)

Figure 62 Willie Park demonstrates his putting grip. Willie Part, The Art of Putting (Edinburgh: J. and J. Gray and Co., 1920).

Beginning in the late 1800s, Park quickly extended his preference for designing artificial hazards so that they would look natural to the idea of trying to make his golf holes themselves look natural – sticking as closely as possible, that is, to the lie of the land that the golf club had provided and that nature had made.

His determination to find a golf course within the nature of the land he was given is clear from the description of his work that emerged in 1916 from the village of Goshen, New York, where he laid out his first course in North America:

Willie Park, ex-champion golfist of the world, was here yesterday and completed the preliminary laying out of what will be the largest inland golf course in America….

The natural formation of the ground is admirably adapted to golf….

Each hole will have a character of its own so that they will dwell in the minds of the players….

This course is the first which Willie Park has laid out in America and authorities are loud in their praises of its natural adaptations.

(Middletown Times-Press [Middletown, New York], 11 May 1916, p. 8)

Adopt the natural formation of the land whenever possible, and, as necessary, adapt nature to the requirements of golf.

In the fall of 1916, he spoke to a reporter in Asheville, North Carolina, about his similar approach to the land he found there:

The ground lends itself to the making of one of the very finest courses in the world, it being beautifully wooded, with a number of plateaus which are ideal for the putting greens, and after these plateaus are taken in hand and bunkered or trapped, [they] will be [of] a very sportive character and quite up to date.

The hazards will be mostly sand traps, with a ravine here and there to play over.

For instance, take the seventeenth hole across the ravine a hundred and sixty yards. If a player plays the stroke properly, he can get this hole in two. Should he not, it might take him ten. This is what we call a death or glory hole!...

There is a good deal of wooded land, and building the course on natural lines will be followed, and many of the trees will be left, adding to the picturesqueness and beauty of the links.

(Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17)

Less than four years later, when he visited Ottawa, Park spoke of the same interest in working with the existing nature of the Club’s property: “It is almost a natural course, says the golfer, and will require much less work to perfect it than the majority of courses” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Park's Return to the United States in 1916

When Park came to New York in the spring of 1916, the Brooklyn Eagle was excited to think of the work to come:

Willie Park a Great Golf Architect

Those who believe that in links architecture the amateur designer [such as Harry Colt, for instance] is the salt of the earth will have their faith sadly shaken when they contemplate the achievements in golf course construction of Willie Park….

Park is the latest of the British professionals to leave the United Kingdom, where golf is practically dead on account of the war, to live in the United States. Park is now past the age when he might be expected to do war duty and thus can leave his native heath without casting doubt upon his patriotism….

On entering the field of golf construction, he … blazed the way, being the first designer to take on the contract of laying out a course on heath land, which had always appeared to the general eye as peculiarly unfitted for links. The result of Park’s originality was the great Sunningdale course which was the pioneering of the many courses of this character now to be found in England.

(Brooklyn Eagle [New York], 4 May 1916, p. 20)

At Sunningdale, he undertook to demonstrate that the rolling hills and the natural contours of heathland, with its gorse, heather, and other vegetation, and with its heavier and less sandy soil, could provide a strategically challenging and compelling golf experience.

His success at Sunningdale was universally acknowledged, and so, when he arrived in the United States, his reputation as a modernizer preceded him:

Park is the father of the modern system of golf course architecture, being the first man to do away with the old style of cross bunkers and to provide two different shots from the same tee.

He was also the first designer to make the hazards blend in with the landscape as much as possible.

(The Sunday Oregonian [Portland, Oregon], 8 July 1918, p. 28).

As a modernizing architect, Park certainly had his work cut out for him in North America. It was not just that twenty-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet’s electrifying playoff victory over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in the 1913 U.S. Open had led to an enormous increase in golf’s popularity and a corresponding increase in golf course construction; it was also the case that after Park left the United States in 1896, twenty years of golf course design according to the tenets of penal golf course architecture meant that hundreds of golf courses needed to be modernized when he returned.

Figure 63 Golfer's Magazine (June 1916).

Park was attracted to New York not just by the prospect of working in golf course design in a country not yet involved in World War I, but also by the prospect of working with a company that would handle golf course construction from the time of laying out the course to opening day.

In the early 1900s, as a matter of course, golf course architects aligned themselves with grass seed companies.

At Apawamis in Rye, New York, Willie Davis had worked with the venerable J.M. Thorburn and Company in the early 1900s. When Harry Colt came to North America ten years later, he worked with the equally venerable Sutton & Sons (as would Stanley Thompson in the 1920s).

Park worked with Peterson, Miller & Sinclaire, Incorporated, “the exclusive agent in America of Carter’s Tested Seeds (Battle Creek Enquirer [Michigan], 25 September 1919, p. 2).

Figure 64 Golf (New York), vol 37 no 2 (August 1915), p. 100).

Note that from the moment he arrived in New York City, Park’s business address, seen in the advertisement above, was the same as that of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, as seen in the advertisement to the left: “25 West 45th Street.”

Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller was effectively the New York branch of the Carters Tested Seeds company of Raynes Park, London. The latter made its Boston branch its main American branch until 1920, when it moved to “25 West 43rd Street” – two blocks from the offices of both Park, on the one hand, and Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, on the other.

By reporters not interested in the formal relationship between the companies, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller was often simply called Carters.

But Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller was also much more than a seller of Carters’ seeds, fertilizers, weed treatments, pest treatments, and so on. It built golf courses.

The president of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller was Arthur Davis Peterson (1890-1946), who founded the company in 1915. Peterson described himself as a seeding and greens construction specialist. His partner Robert Oakes Sinclaire (whose first love was rifle and pistol target shooting) would work for Carters his entire career. He began as a construction specialist and the editor of the company’s journal, The Golf Course, which published essays on golf course design, construction, and maintenance by industry leaders such as architect A.W. Tillinghast. Carters advertised this journal as its own: “Send us your name to receive our monthly service bulletin, ‘The Golf Course’” (Golf Illustrated, vol 5 no 1 [April 1916], p. 41). Thomas Henry Riggs Miller (1887-1939) was the company’s secretary and field manager.

Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller would build 67 golf courses between 1915 and 1923. But the company also advised golf courses on a variety of matters, from architecture and construction to seeding and maintenance. During these years, Riggs Miller himself would visit more than 400 golf courses in an advisory capacity.

Figure 65 Willie Park, circa 1916.

Park had presumably worked with Carters Tested Seeds of London before World War I. By then, the company had a wellestablished reputation as producing excellent golf course turf for some of the best golf clubs in the British Isles, and the company was also beginning to establish an excellent reputation as golf course builders:

While Carters Seeds enjoy world-wide fame, they are fast making a similar reputation as makers of golf greens [that is, golf courses].

One of the offices at Raynes Park contains two hundred or more small glass vases, containing samples of soil from golf courses all over the country, as well as abroad.

(The Observer [London, England], 11 February 1912, p. 14)

In the United States and Canada, in conjunction with Carters Tested Seeds, Inc., architect Willie Park and course builders Peterson, Sinclaire, & Miller were pioneering a new comprehensive golf course design and construction programme.

Sinclaire wrote in an editorial in The Golf Course:

A poor Golf architect means a poor layout;

inexperienced supervision of construction work means many unnecessary mistakes which often cost thousands of dollars to correct;

grass seed and fertilizer of unknown quality mean an initial saving at the cost of poor turf which is a Green Committee’s most trying and expensive problem;

and, finally, when a course is completed, lack of intelligent maintenance may spoil all the good work which has been done.

No one recognizes these facts more fully than most club officials, and from everywhere comes the cry, “We want the best of everything, we are willing to pay for the best, but we must be sure we are getting it.”

(The Golf Course, vol 1 no 11 [November 1916], p. 1)

Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller promised to provide the best of everything, beginning with the architect.

Park’s name was the one that attracted attention to Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller. And that name attracted a lot of business – quickly. By the fall of 1916, after less than half a year in the United States, Park had received more requests for his services than he could accept:

I came to America five months ago and have been kept busy every day since I arrived.

I have, during that time, laid out or re-planned courses at Baltimore, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Brittian, Meridian, Plotsville, Reidsville and Boston and have in hand five courses at and around Detroit.

I have had to decline quite a number of engagements as I have contracts way ahead that keep me on the go for several years.

(Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17

For each golf club, Park would lay out a golf course and furnish detailed drawings of the design. And that might be the end of it, the golf club undertaking to build its own course. But Park he always implicitly lobbied for Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller with his message for each club that hired him: “While the laying out is the most important thing in a golf course, the proper supervision while in the course of construction is quite as necessary” (Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17).

Figure 66 T.H. Riggs Miller. Kansas City Star (Missouri), (28 May 1934, p. 6

When Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller undertook to build a Willie-Park design, the company in every case installed a construction manager such as Riggs Miller. These managers understood Park’s architectural philosophy in general, understood his vision for a particular layout, knew how to interpret his drawings and the blueprints made from them, and knew how to shape land so as to turn Park’s vision into material reality.

Riggs Miller had been brought to the United States by Harry Colt in 1912 and was placed in charge of constructing the famous Pine Valley golf course. In 1915, C.B. Macdonald had him build the almost equally famous Lido Links on Long Island, New York. He graduated from this august architectural company to supervise construction of Park’s first course in the United States and would eventually become an architect himself, designing courses in both Europe and the United States.

Park worked only with the best.

Riggs Miller’s story is typical of many of the more than a dozen golf course construction supervisors that Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller employed over the years. Like Miller, many of them graduated from their work with the company’s great architects, such as Park (as well as A.W. Tillinghast, W.H. Fowler, and even Donald J. Ross), to become architects themselves.

They not only worked for Park; they learned from him.

Almost ten years after Park’s death, for instance, we can detect in the way his disciple Riggs Miller explained his own architectural philosophy to a Kansas reporter both echoes of his talks with Park and evidence of the lessons learned from him:

He [Riggs Miller] is a foremost disciple in the modernization of golf courses ….

His theory of what a golf course should be is profound and it quite appeals to the logic, and when we heard him berate the old method of constructing bunkers, we scored him a point.

In his scheme, there is no steep, flat wall to the modern trap ….

“That isn’t the idea of a trap at all,” he says. “A good bunker should be one that exacts a half-stroke and not a stroke penalty. Not something to cause an unplayable lie”….

Many, many years ago, it was thought golf could only be played near the seaside …. These were natural courses, such as the one at Sandwich or St. Andrews.

Then came … the beginning of artificial courses, and compared to the modern ones, they were rather crude. One could always tell the par of these holes at a glance. If there was one bunker stretched across the fairway, the par was 3, two bunkers meant a par 4 hole, and three bunkers a par 5 hole.

Then, in 1900, was built near London the Sunningdale course, the first modern course in golf. It started the era of strategic golf.

Of almost primary importance, Miller says, in the building of a course, is beauty. Its layout should be pleasing to the eye. The attempt should be made to avoid any appearance of artificiality. The bunkers should be built to conform as nearly as possible to the sand dunes of Scotland.

“No bunker should be a punishment to the golfer,” Miller says. “It represents a problem for him to work out. Each hole should be that way, a separate and intriguing problem. The hole should be so constructed as to reward perfect play, but the bunker should not form an impassable barrier. The golfer may prefer to take a way around it at his own expense.”

A compliment which pleased him most … was the comment of a member. “You’ve put that new green in an ideal spot,” the member said. “It’s built for that green.”

Miller didn’t tell him, but a great deal of building had been required to make that new green appear natural.

(Kansas City Times, 22 November 1934, p. 10)

It should be no surprise to learn that when Willie Park arrived in Ottawa on 26 April 1920 to lay out an 18-hole championship course for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, he was accompanied by members of team Carters:

In addition [to Park] there are two representatives of the Carters Tested Seeds, Inc., of Boston, Messrs. J.G. Kanter and H.V. Hyrons, the latter being the Canadian manager of the Carters Company, which is the chief builder of golf courses in America.

The latter two gentlemen are here in an advisory capacity and are not charging for their services.

The company supplies seeds, fertilizers, etc., for practically all the chief golf courses in America and has been in business for a hundred years….

After the course is designed, the Carters Tested Seeds, Inc., will give a price on the total cost of the course.

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3)

It turns out that this was J.G. Kanter’s third visit to Ottawa in three months to talk golf course construction with the Club’s directors

What to Do With a Set of Park Drawings

If I am correct in assuming that it is Willie Park of whom we hear when the news emerges on 11 July 1919 (from a meeting to work through certain amalgamation details) that “next spring a permanent course will be laid out,” with “one of the best architects in the Dominion being retained to draw up the plans,” then it is likely that at this point, Park had been retained simply to lay out an 18-hole course and to provide detailed drawings for it (Ottawa Citizen, 12 July 1919, p. 9).

That is, it is unlikely that any plans for contracting a company to build the course had yet been considered, let alone decided.

For laying out a course and providing drawings, Park charged approximately $2,600. This was the fee paid by the Bay Shore Country Club of Miami Beach (now known as the Miami Beach Country Club) in the spring of 1920, two weeks before Park visited Ottawa for the first time.

The golf professional who was hired there to direct all golf operations and to build the course, Lee Nelson, raved about the promise contained in Park’s drawings:

Figure 67 Lee Nelson, circa 1925.

We paid Park $2,600 for his services.

It was worth it….

When the new championship course is completed, if it isn’t the best in the south, I’ll begin club making and never look a fair green in the face again….

When you see those elevated greens, three to six feet, tricky and sporty fairways, and the whole plan, you’ll say those $2,6000 were well spent.

Park has really done some remarkable work in making courses renowned in this country, but, and I say this without reservation, for us at the Bay Shore, he has excelled himself.

(Miami News [Florida], 7 May 1920, p. 13)

Park’s plans were detailed enough to give an experienced golf professional like Lee confidence that he could follow them faithfully and produce the course conceived by the architect.

Just two months after his work in Miami, Park laid out an 18-hole championship golf course both for the Weston Golf Club of Toronto and for Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, so we know that his drawings at Miami, Ottawa, and Toronto will have been of a piece.

Unfortunately, although “the minute blue prints for the Weston golf links … signed by Willie Park” still exist, the blueprints for the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club’s course do not (Star Weekly [Toronto], 7 May 1921, p. 21).

Figure 68 Detail from Willie Park’s drawing of the 5th hole of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club course, circa April 1920. From Kucey p. 60.

All that remains of Park’s plans for the Hunt and Motor Club course is his drawing of the 165-yard par-3 5th hole and some of his instructions for building it.

Shown to the left is a detail from his rendering of the hole on his architectural drawing pad: it shows the green, a steep drop at the back of the green, two bunkers (a large one in the shape of the letter “L” on the left and a smaller one on the right), a creek in front of the green complex, and 100 yards of rough between the tee box and the fairway immediately fronting the creek.

His directions for construction read as follows:

A & B – Sand traps running into green. Raise floors of traps 1’ 6”.

Green – Raise whole green 1’ 6” above present level. Raise back of green 3 ft above new level & slope to 0 (zero) at front.

Divert creek to front of green as shown.

Raise approach & fairway around green 1’ 6” above present level.

A – Raise left & front [1ft]. Slope to 0 (zero) [at] 9 ft.

B – Raise right and front 1 ft. Slope to 0 (zero) at 9 ft.

Park also indicates that there are “Additional notes below on A & B,” but these additional notes on the bunkers for the 5th hole have been lost.

The Weston Golf Club possesses Park’s drawings (from the same architectural pad) for all 18 of its holes. On them, Park marks the location and height of mounds to be raised around greens; the location, depth, and height of all edges of bunkers surrounding greens; and both the location of ground to be lowered near greens and the depth to which it is to be lowered.

His instructions for the building of Westons greens are generally more detailed than his instruction for building the relatively simple 5 th green at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Here are his instructions for building Weston’s 17th green: “Raise back 2 ft & slope to 0 (zero) at front…. Raise long mound down centre of green 1 ft high at highest point.” For the 9th green: “Raise left side of green 2 ft. Lower right side 2 ft. Raise ground in front of green 8 yds. Raise back 1 ft & slope to 0 (zero) at front.” For the 8th green: “Cut down right side of hill gradually about 6 ft. Dump soil on left side at front to extend green. Raise left side of green 3 ft.” And for the 3rd green:

Raise front 3 ft. & slope to 0 (zero) at back.

Make long grade at front of green to 12 yds back toward tee.

Green is to be same level as at right side.

Raise swell along back of green 1 ft. high. Do not raise any swell along right & left sides.

Make catch pit behind green & tile below green into old ditch.

(All instructions above are on Willie Park’s drawings for the Weston Golf Club contained in the collections of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame)

His instructions for building the largest of the elevated greens and the most dramatically contoured greens at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club will have been similarly detailed.

The Bay Shore Country Club in Miami Beach had left construction in the hands of its golf professional (who hired local landscapers to construct the greens, grade the course, and plant both palm trees and grass seed), and it all worked out well:

Gene Sarazen, national open champion, played the first round of golf by any player on the new championship course of the Bayshore Golf Club this afternoon….

Speaking yesterday of the Miami Beach golf course, Sarazen said …. “I have sent a telegram to the golf editor of the New York Tribune to spread the news that there is a perfect Florida course now open – that course right here in Miami Beach.”

(Miami News [Florida], 15 November 1922, p. 13)

The Bay Shore Country Club seems to have done a very good job in interpreting Park’s blueprints, but Park always told clubs seeking his advice that “While the laying out is the most important thing in a golf course, the proper supervision while in the course of construction is quite as necessary” (Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17). And he always informed clubs that there was an excellent alternative to building the course themselves: they could have Person, Sinclaire & Miller, exclusive agents for Carters Tested Seeds, handle everything from the initial inspection of the property and laying out of the course right up to the beginning of play on the new course.

And so, for Moffatt Ross and his fellow directors, after retaining Park at the beginning of July 1919, there was another decision to be made: would the club build the course – either by finding its own contractor or by leaving the matter to its own greenkeeper – or would it hire Carters Tested Seeds / Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller to do it?

Park Abandons His Holiday to Come to Ottawa

At the end of 1919, after four golf seasons in New York, Willie Park returned to his home in Musselburgh, Scotland, for a vacation:

Willie Park Returns

Willie Park, the ex-open champion, after being four years in the States and Canada, returned on Wednesday [December 10th] to Musselburgh.

Park, who designed several of the best inland courses in this country, has laid out and altered a great number of American links. At present, he has seventeen links in the States under construction.

The famous professional will return there after a three months’ holiday at home.

(Western Mail [Cardiff, Wales], 11 December 1919, p. 7)

Park had left New York on December 3rd and arrived in the United Kingdon on December 10th . Park’s wife Margaet resided in Musselburgh throughout the year rather than accompanying him to New York (or, later, Montreal). Park had informed Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller that he would return to North America at the beginning of March 1920.

But as Scotland’s most famous poet, Robbie Burns, observed in 1786: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”

Park’s holiday certainly did not go as planned.

He was welcomed home as a living representative of the days of golf’s great nineteenth-century challenge matches: “Willie Park may be a back number in some respects, but there is no denying the fact that there is a glamour about his name. One almost has to think with awe of the days when he was a giant in Open Championships” (Grimsby Evening Telegraph (Lincolnshire, England], 20 December 1919, p. 2).

Golf Monthly interviewed him about his architectural experience in North America, providing an interesting perspective on his business philosophy just a month before he would make his first visit to the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club:

American golfers are prepared to spend very large sums, I should say enormous sums, in contrast to what is spent in this country, on their links, but they are not going to spend it uselessly. They must have value. [Note that Park used the word “America” to refer to the United States and Canada together.]

America has learnt what golf is and it wants the best. It is prepared to pay for the very best, and the man who goes from this country, be he player, links architect, or trader in golf balls or golf clubs, must be the goods. The old label, that he hailed from the home of the game and therefore was bound to be “right,” was a good enough recommendation ten years ago, but it won’t pass now.

In 1896, golf in the United States was confined to a few places, it was certainly gaining rapidly in popularity, but those who were in the game then, or who were taking up the game, knew comparatively little about it, and they were readily to be guided by any man from the Old Country who had sufficient assurance to assume the mantle of golfing knowledge.

But the state of affairs is changed: the American knows what a golf course should be, and now he does not accept [just] anything.

A great part of my work concerned the reconstruction of links which had been ruined by bad designing.

There are now a number of very excellent links in America, and several of these links, notably the National Links on Long Island, have holes which are modelled on the best examples of holes to be found in England and Scotland.

[But] the American does not want copies of our holes. He knows about the “Eden” and the “Redan” and “The Alps” at Prestwick, but he does not want slavish copying, especially on ground he knows may not be suited by its configuration to take on the appearance of those famous holes.

They want original holes worked out on their own land as it lies before the architect.

(Golf Monthly, cited in North Mail, Newcastle Daily Chronicle [Tyne and Wear, England], 26 January 1920, p. 5)

When Park sailed to Scotland in December of 1919, he already had a full 1920 schedule. But almost as soon as he left for home, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller began to receive requests for consultations with their chief architect: these consultations were wanted as soon as possible.

Figure 69 Carl G. Fisher, circa 1920.

And these requests were from substantial clubs in Miami Beach, Pittsburgh, and Ottawa.

Perhaps the most important request for Park’s services came from the fabulously wealthy Carl G. Fisher (1874-1939). In the early 1900s, he had sold a patent for automobile headlights for the equivalent in today’s terms of about $300,000,000 and just before World War I undertook to invest much of his fortune in developing a national east to west highway and then a national north to south highway, the latter running from Minneapolis to Miami Beach. And in Miami Beach, he decided to develop real estate on a grand scale – including a golf course.

His request to Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller that Park be sent down to Miami Beach as soon as possible seems initially to have been met with the response: “Sorry, no can do; Park is on holiday in Scotland and will not be back to work before mid-March, and even then, he is rather busy….”

Regarding what happened next, references to Park’s subsequent work in Miami Beach are illuminating. Later that spring, the person in charge of golf operations at the Bay Shore Country Club said, “We brought Willie Park from England to lay out this course” (Miami News, 7 May 1920, p 13, emphasis added). As the course was about to open two years later, we read: “The course … was laid out by Willie Park, celebrated golf authority, who was brought to Miami Beach from England by Carl G. Fisher for the special purpose of devising one of the best courses in the country” (Miami News [Florida], 12 September 1922, p. 21, emphasis added).

Clearly, the story in Miami Beach was that Fisher had brought Park south not from New York, but “from England”: Fisher, that is, seems to have insisted that Park cut his holiday short and come to Miami Beach according to Fisher’s schedule, rather than Park’s own schedule or that of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller.

And so, on 18 January 1920, 45 days after he left New York and 45 days before he was supposed to return to New York, Park left Musselburgh for London, and the next day he travelled to Southampton, where he boarded a ship for his return to New York:

PARK LEAVES FOR AMERICA

Willie Park, of Musselburgh, left London yesterday morning and embarked on the Mauretania at Southampton later in the day for New York.

He has returned to the States earlier than anticipated as his services in golf course construction are urgently required.

(Birmingham Gazette [England], 20 January 1920, p. 6)

Park arrived in New York on 26 January 1920.

Immediately, he had to prepare for a journey: he would be on the road for at least three weeks, travelling from New York to Miami Beach to Pittsburgh to Ottawa. After several days of preparation at the offices of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, he left for Florida on 3 February 1920, arriving in Miami Beach on February 4th . He spent a week laying out an 18-hole championship course for Fisher: now known as the Miami Beach Country Club, it was known at the time as the Bay Shore Country Club.

And then he was off to Pittsburgh.

The Shannopin Country Club, formed in January 1920, had brought in Park to lay out a championship 18-hole course. Accompanying him was Joseph G. Kanter, the representative of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller who would calculate the cost of constructing Park’s layout. Park had completed his work by February 12th or 13th and Kanter was still negotiating construction terms with the club when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sent out its golf reporter to inspect the 6,700-yard layout that Park had staked out. The reporter also explained the “innovation” in golf course construction that the new club was contemplating:

The Shannopin Club has under consideration an innovation in the method of golf course construction which will awaken the keenest interest of golfers hereabouts.

Briefly, the plan is to turn over to Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, Inc., of New York City, the work of constructing the new course. While this firm … has never built a course in the Pittsburgh area, they have several important courses to their credit throughout the United States. The firm is desirous of leaving in Pittsburgh a specimen of their workmanship as builders of golf courses ….

Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller are successors to Carters Tested Seeds, a firm known to golfers throughout the length and breadth of the land. The Peterson firm built the Detroit Golf Club at Grosse Point, Mich., where the 1915 national championship tournament was held. Just now, they are completing a new Atlantic City course ….

J.G. Kanter, of the Peterson firm, is the special representative through whom negotiations are being conducted. Kanter, with 17 years’ experience in the work, knows personally or by reputation, not only every first-class golf course in the country, but practically every architect or greenkeeper as well.

Willie Park, known to all golfers, is Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller’s headline architect.

Such a firm would bring the new club a prestige commensurate with their reputation for reliability. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 February 1920, p. 23)

Interestingly, accompanying the reporter during the inspection of the proposed Shannopin course was “Emil F. Loeffler, greenkeeper at the Oakmont Country Club” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 15 February 1920, p. 23). Shannopin decided not to have Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller build the course. Today, the design of the course is credited to Emil F. Loeffler, not Willie Park.

Whether or not Park and Kanter returned to New York after their work in Pittsburgh is not clear. If they did, they could not have stayed long, for they were soon on a train to Ottawa.

Moffatt Ross had obviously communicated with Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller well before Park and Kanter arrived in Ottawa in mid-February 1920. Since Park had not planned at the end of 1919 to return to the United States until March, his February visit to Ottawa obviously was not on his 1920 schedule when he left for home. I presume that it was sometime between Park’s departure for Scotland on 3 December 1919 and his mid-January decision to return immediately to New York that Moffatt Ross had communicated to Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller his interest in having this innovative company handle all construction matters for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Like Fisher in Miami Beach, and like the directors of the new club in Pittsburgh, Moffatt Ross probably also communicated to Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller a sense of urgency. While his own mind may have been made up about having this company do the whole job, Moffatt Ross had to convince others of the merits of his plan: first, his fellow Club directors and, second, the membership as a whole.

No copy of Moffatt Ross’s correspondence with Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller exists, but, given that the Club’s first annual general meeting was scheduled for mid-March (when Park had originally planned to return from his holiday in Scotland), Moffatt Ross’s letters must have contained some version of the message: “Please come to Ottawa ASAP, and bring Park with you.”

A February Week in Ottawa

Willie Park and Joe Kanter had arrived in Ottawa by at least February 18th or 19th .

Little snow fell during their visit. The air was so cold that there would have been little moisture in it. Overnight lows were minus 16 Fahrenheit (minus 26 Celsius). At the beginning of their stay, the high was 10 Fahrenheit (minus 12 Celsius). Trudging about the Club’s property on that day would not have been pleasant. Only near the day of their departure did the high temperature reach the freezing point.

On the evening of February 19th , “an officer of the club” – probably Moffatt Ross – told a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen that “Messrs. J.G. Kanton [sic, should be “Kanter”] and Mr. Willie Park, golf course architect, are at present in the city and will probably confer with officers of the club before next Thursday [February 26th]” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1920, p. 9). According to the reporter: “if the prospective plans, as outlined, are gone ahead with, the course will be completed under the direction of Mr. Park within twelve months’ time” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1920, p. 9). Clearly, a good deal of preliminary planning had already been accomplished by February 19th .

Figure 70 Joseph G. Kanter depicted at the opening of the Valley Stream Country club whose course he designed in the early 1930s. Times Union [New York], 13 July 1931, p. 51.

In fact, “prospective plans” having been worked out by February 19th, it may be that Park and Kanter had arrived in Ottawa for conversations with Moffatt Ross even before February 18th .

Kanter had worked with Park from the moment of the latter’s arrival in New York City in 1916, but Kanter had not always been involved in golf course construction.

Born in the Bronx, New York, as Joseph George Kantrowitz in 1881, the son of immigrants Nathan and Rebecaa Kantrowitz (the father from Germany, the mother from France), he had entered the work force as a cloth cutter. During the Spanish-American War in the late nineteenth century, he served in the New York infantry. In the early 1900s, he was recorded in census data as an “electrical salesman.”

By 1915, Kantrowitz was going by the last name Kanter, and he had somehow acquired skill as a soil expert.

After his work for Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, he became a golf course architect in his own right. When he died in 1960 in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, California, his death certificate listed his last occupation as “architect” in the “golf course construction industry.”

In the February 1920 conversation with the Ottawa Citizen reporter mentioned above, the anonymous “officer of the club” (whom, again, I presume to have been Moffatt Ross) also said: “In connection with the laying out of the eighteen-hole course, if present propositions materialize, it will be one of the most modern in Canada” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1920, p. 9).

Moffatt Ross’s plans for hiring both Park, on the one hand, and Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller, on the other, must have become widely known during the week or more that Park and Kanter spent in Ottawa in February, for the Ottawa Journal reported even before the Club’s first annual meeting on February 26th that “improvements to the buildings and the laying out of a golf course will be discussed, and it is probable that both will be approved” (Ottawa Journal, 26 February 1920, p. 16).

For the directors to have been confident that their “present propositions” would be approved suggests that they had circulated these propositions widely before the scheduled February 26th meeting and had already received a good amount of positive feedback about them.

In the end, however, whether it was in December 1919, January 1920, or February 1920 that Moffatt Ross asked Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller to arrange a visit to Ottawa by Park and Kanter is unknown.

But at the beginning of 1920, someone at the Club was certainly keeping Ralph Revile informed of developments, and what he says in February suggests that Moffatt Ross was engaged in correspondence with this New York company early in the winter of 1920, at the latest.

In the February 1920 issue of Canadian Golfer, editor Reville observed:

The Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club last season inaugurated a temporary 9-hole course which was very popular with its members.

The coming season, the club is seriously considering installing on its wonderful property in the capital an up-to-date 18-hole course. The soil is of an ideal golfing character and lends itself to greens and fairgreens quite up to championship calibre.

Club officials are talking, and talking very advisedly, of securing the very best expert advise in laying out the proposed course.

(Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 10 [February 1920], p. 639)

Were Club officials following advice from Reville to secure the very best expert advice available? Had Moffatt Ross perhaps written to Reville to ask for his advice?

Then, in his mid-February syndicated newspaper column, in an item published on February 13th (before Park and Kanter had left Pittsburgh), Reville suggested that the Club had virtually decided to engage the experts in question by then:

New Club for Ottawa

The capital is to have a third eighteen-hole golf course, the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, which last season had a temporary nine-hole course for the use of its members, has virtually decided this year to install an 18-hole course….

In laying out their new links, the members of the Hunt Club are well-advised in engaging the most expert advice procurable.

They will find it money well spent.

(Calgary Herald, 13 February 1920, p. 9)

Together, these items suggest that there was a good deal of correspondence between Moffatt Ross and the New York company (as well as a good deal of conversation among Club directors, and with Reville, too) in January and February of 1920.

There is also an intriguing item published in an Ottawa newspaper early in January 1920 that could indicate that Moffatt Ross was taking advice from Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller even then:

It is intimated that the annual general meeting of the motor section of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club will be held in February ….

During the present winter, preparations are to be made by Motor Club members to extend and develop the facilities at the Hunt Club.

Equipment is to be purchased for the purpose of developing the golf course.

(Ottawa Journal, 10 January 1920, p. 23)

The reporter writes in a confusing way by distinguishing between the “motor section” and the “hunt section” of the new Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club (insofar as “the annual general meeting” held in February would involve both sections), but this item nonetheless indicates that Club directors were taking practical steps by late December 1919 and early January 1920 to prepare for work on the permanent course in the spring: this preparation included purchasing equipment to enable course development.

It may well be that by January, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller had informed Moffatt Ross of the kind of equipment the Club should have on hand for the arrival on site in the spring of one of the company’s construction managers – “if present propositions materialize.”

Gratification Not Deferred, Debentures Issued

It is clear that by 19 February 1920, Moffatt Ross had formulated his “propositions” both with regard to an architect and with regard to a construction firm: on that day, “it was stated by an officer of the club that it was proposed to immediately approve of the construction of a permanent golf course” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1920, p. 9).

The reason Moffatt Ross brought Park and Kanter to Ottawa was to get a proper estimate regarding the cost of immediate construction of a championship golf course. Even though it was the middle of February, Park must have visited the frozen snow-bound property. To help Park understand the land’s features, Moffatt Ross probably shared with him the report on this property prepared by Keffer and Black. And Kanter will have accompanied Park in the capacity of the person who calculated costs.

Kanter provided Moffatt Ross with an estimate that constructing the golf course that Park would lay out would cost somewhat less than $50,000. Such a figure seems to have been the “going rate” in the early 1920s. In Golf Illustrated in 1923, for instance, celebrated architect A.W. Tillinghast cited the same figure: “I have never known of a thoroughly modern course to be constructed for less than $50,000” (cited in Boston Globe, 6 June 1923, p. 15).

Nonetheless, $50,000 was an intimidating figure.

Moffatt Ross had already been told “that any attempt to construct a third [golf course in Ottawa] would come to financial grief” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22). And so, by mid-February, he had already worked out a scheme to raise this amount of money: he would recommend “the issuing of $50,000 debentures” (Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4).

The sum of $50,000, it turns out, would be dedicated not just to golf course construction, but also to clubhouse improvements. In anticipation of the February general meeting, the Ottawa Journal observed: “Improvements to the buildings and the laying out of a golf course will be discussed, and it is probable that both will be approved” (Ottawa Journal, 26 February 1920, p. 16).

Park and Kanter were in Ottawa for the week ahead of the first annual meeting on 26 February 1920. Before this meeting, they apparently met with Club directors to discuss design and construction of the golf course. And before the February 26th annual meeting, Club directors had also reviewed Moffatt Ross’s funding proposal. In fact, they had already decided in favour of “the issuing of bonds”: “This has been decided upon by the directors instead of the sale of stock and will enable the club to go ahead with the development of the golf course and improvements to the buildings” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 February 1920, p. 9).

At the subsequent meeting, directors Frank Jarman and Alfred Alphonse Dion (who, like Moffatt Ross, had travelled to Montreal by automobile the previous June) strongly endorsed the plan that Moffatt Ross had developed:

That the method of raising the money necessary for the building of the new golf course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club will be by the issuing of $50,000 debentures is highly probable.

Figure 71 Alfred Alphonse Dion (1860- 1926). Ottawa Citizen, 8 October 1926, p. 4.

In the report read at the first annual meeting in the Carnegie Library last night by Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, the issuing of debentures was advocated ….

In advocating for the building of the new course through issuing debentures, Mr. A.A. Dion pointed out that if the ordinary fees of members were to be depended upon, it would be many years ere the course would be finished.

“We can not build this proposed course for a song,” said Mr. Frank Jarman.” “And why should we pay for the people who will play on this course 20 years from now?”

The consensus of opinion of the meeting appeared that Mr. Ross’s suggestion for the issuing of 6 per cent or 7 per cent debentures was the best way to act in the matter.

(Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4)

Jarman’s point was that “there was no reason why the members should go to any great expenditure when the players twenty years from now would get the same benefit as the present members” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1920, p. 8). He was persuasive: “the general feeling of the meeting was … that a debenture would be preferable as it was argued that a stock issue at the present time would be more like a gift [to future members] whereas with bonds, the [present and future] members would pay their way” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1920, p. 8).

In May 1920, Joe Kanter provided a tender for course construction that seems to have been close to his February estimate:

HUNT CLUB GETS TENDER FOR 18 HOLE GOLF COURSE

Carters Seeds, Inc., have tendered for the construction of the 18 hole golf course proposed by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club for $43, 338.37.

A tender for this amount was opened at a meeting of the directors of the club last evening.

The meeting was in favor of going ahead immediately with the work and, following endorsation by the membership and the Ottawa Hunt, Ltd. (the holding company), 20-year seven percent debentures will be issued to cover the cost.

The tender stated the material would cost $13,037, while the labor and other items would amount to $26, 935.

The remainder of the cost is made up in commissions.

(Ottawa Journal, 6 May 1920, p. 6)

At a board meeting on 17 May 1920, “It was … decided to endorse the plans of the committee for the construction of a new eighteen hole golf course on the property at Bowesville, and for the purpose of facilitating this, bonds will be issued under the thirty year system” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 May 1920, p. 14).

The Club directors, however, decided to issue 50% more bonds than Moffatt Ross had originally recommended:

PREPARE PLANS FOR NEW GOLF COURSE

One third of the $75,000 which is being raised by Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club for extensive improvements to the club and grounds has already been raised, it was announced at a meeting of the directors last night.

The plans for the new golf course are being prepared by Willie Park, the well known golf architect.

The greens will be built by the Carter Seeds Company.

(Ottawa Journal, 16 June 1920, p. 17)

The promise by Park and Kanter that a nine-hole course could be ready for play in early 1921 was premised on the idea that construction would start immediately in the spring of 1920. The delay in selling sufficient bonds to cover the clubhouse renovation and course construction costs, however, meant that golf course construction would not begin until the end of the summer in 1920.

CLUB’S BOND ISSUE IS IN GOOD DEMAND

An enthusiastic and encouraging meeting … of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club was held last evening ….

It was reported by Mr. Frank Jarman that already $40,000 had been subscribed in connection with the new bond issue. The meeting determined to have an additional $30,000 in before the end of the present week.

The campaign is going exceedingly well and there is not the slightest doubt but that in another week the entire bond issue necessary will be sold for the improvements at the club and the creation of a new golf links.

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 June 1920, p. 14)

When a club official says that “there is not the slightest doubt” that the required number of bonds will be sold within a week, there is often, in fact, doubt.

And in this case, the confidence expressed in June was indeed misleading, for the campaign was still underway at the end of July with success now anticipated at some point in August:

At the present time, the club is finishing the flotation of $75,000 worth of bonds.

As soon as the money is paid in, the club will proceed to let a contract for what promises to be the finest golf course in Canada, a full 6,300 yard course.

Plans are already prepared for this and it is probable work will start next month.

(Ottawa Citizen, 30 July 1920, p. 15).

At the end of August, success was finally announced: “There was no difficulty experienced in obtaining the necessary funds for the work. Bonds to the value of $60,000 have already been sold and an amount much greater than this could have been obtained had the committee thought it necessary” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5).

The day this announcement appeared in the newspapers, Willie Park was on site at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club ready to begin his work.

When the full 18-holes golf course was eventually completed, the Club declared its cost to have been $80,695.53 (Report of the Board of Directors and Financial Statement for the year ending December 31st , 1926 [Ottawa: Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, Limited, 1927], p. 4).

The Progressive Aggression of Moffatt Ross

In his syndicated column on golf matters in Canada, Ralph Reville wrote of the new Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in April 1920: “Mr. J. Moffatt Ross is the chairman of the Golf Committee of the Ottawa Hunt and he and the members associated with him are determined to put the golf end ‘over the top’ this season” (Ottawa Journal, 15 April 1920, p. 19).

Figure 72 Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 10 (February 1920, p. 639).

There was a convergence of interest between Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller and the Club directors.

We read in April of 1920: “The directors are anxious to show the golfing public of Canada that they are able to produce a perfect golf course here without the usual process of evolution that required from 8 to 10 years” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller were also anxious to show that they could produce a perfect golf course in two years. At the very time that their representatives Park and Kanter were in Ottawa meeting with Club directors, the company’s first advertisement of their services in Quebec appeared in Canadian Golfer (it can be seen to the left).

On 26 February 1920, Moffatt Ross delivered a report from his Golf Committee to the first annual general meeting of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club and revealed his “aggressive” determination “to put the golf end ‘over the top’ this season”:

Golf Committee Report

In the report of the Golf Committee submitted by Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, the magnitude of the work accomplished since the formation of the club was pointed out, and the fact that a much more aggressive course is to be pursued during the coming year was made plain.

(Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4)

How was his aggressive course of action made plain?

He announced that “negotiations were under way for the securing of the services of a widely known professional golfer”; he recommended “the laying out of a permanent 18-hole course under the direction of a golfing architect”; he implicitly recommended hiring Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller to build the course and devised a scheme for issuing bonds to raise $50,000 to pay for their work (Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4).

He had been busy planning the development of the permanent golf course and had disseminated knowledge of his plans widely within the Club, sounding the opinions of others, leading the Ottawa Journal to report in advance of the February 26th meeting that his plans were virtually a fait accompli: “Improvements to the buildings and the laying out of a golf course will be discussed, and it is probable that both will be approved” (Ottawa Journal, 26 February 1920, p. 16).

Yet whether Moffatt Ross had actually used the word “aggressive” in his “Golf Committee Report” as cited in the Ottawa Journal item quoted above is not clear (Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4).

For, in its own account of the meeting, the Ottawa Citizen attributed another word to him – “progressive”:

The report of Mr. Ross, chairman of the Golf Committee, stated in part that a much more progressive program was proposed for 1920 ….

It was the intention at once to secure a professional golfer to take complete charge of the golfing end of the club. At the present time, they were in communication with a number of candidates for the position.

The immediate laying out of an eighteen hole course by a golfing architect of wide experience was also recommended. Once the survey and an estimate of the cost was submitted, it was earnestly recommended that the matter be taken up seriously and promptly, with a view to building up within the next year or two one of the finest eighteen-hole golf courses in the Dominion.

The financing of such an undertaking, which would no doubt have to be on a debenture basis, might just as well be done all in one job, rather than spin it out over a number of years. In this way, the future generations would have an opportunity of bearing at least a portion of the obligation, while the present generation who put up the money would get the benefits during their lifetime from such an outlay.

The report concluded that the members had, in the premises of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, great opportunity to develop the finest playground in the vicinity of the capital, and a country home for motorists well worthy of the capital city of the Dominion.

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1920, p. 8, emphasis added)

This presentation by Moffatt Ross was a hit: “The report was unanimously adopted” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1920, p. 8).

Even if it is merely an accident of different reporting by the Citizen and the Journal, to describe the course of action recommended by Moffatt Ross as “progressive aggression” is nonetheless accurate. And no better example of his acting both progressively and aggressively can be found than in his bringing to Ottawa – at least a week before the first annual general meeting – Willie Park, Joseph G. Kanter, and H.V. Hyrons (the latter being the president of Carters Tested Seeds in Canada).

Moffatt Ross would not let the grass grow under his feet.

Moffatt Ross Hires Harry Towlson, A Carters Man

We know that early in 1920, Moffatt Ross was inclined both to have Park design the Club’s permanent course and also to have all construction matters handled by Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller. So enamored of the “Carters” team had Moffatt Ross become that he seems to have allowed them to suggest whom he should hire as the Club’s first golf professional.

In February or March of 1920, Henry (Harry) Towlson (1894-1967) received “a letter from J. Moffatt Ross”: “The First Great War was over and I had come from the old country as a professional to Sherbrooke when I received a letter from Mr. Ross asking me to come to Ottawa” (Ottawa Journal, 26 October 1944, p. 18).

Figure 73 Henry ("Harry") Towlson (1894-1967). Ottawa Citizen, 6 February 1951, p. 19.

As we shall see, Moffatt Ross was acting on the advice of Carters Tested Seeds.

Towlson (spelled Tolson or Tollson by reporters who had merely heard the name and guessed at its spelling) had been born in Old Basford, Nottinghamshire, England, in 1894, but the family had moved to Skegness in the early 1900s, where Harry supplemented the family’s income (his father worked as a bricklayer’s assistant) with caddying fees he earned at the two local golf courses, where he later apprenticed as clubmaker (perhaps in turn at Seacroft and then North Shore). He fondly recalled caddying for superstar Harry Vardon when the latter came to Skegness to play a match. Towlson was appointed an assistant professional at the Thorp Hall club at Southend-on-Sea, Essex, just before World War I broke out.

A month after the declaration of war, Towlson became one of 24 assistant golf pros who gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, in mid-September 1914 to join one of the sportsmen’s battalions contrived at that time for the enlistment of volunteer athletes. He joined the Rifle Brigade of the 13th Battalion: it became known as the “Niblick Brigade.” Towlson later recalled that “fifteen of them were left behind in France” and that, although he survived, “a bullet turn[ed] him to teaching”:

One night in 1916, the 13th Battalion took part in the attack on Contalmaison [during the Battle of the Somme].

Towlson was hit in the left hand by a high explosive bullet and he still carries a piece of it buried behind his second digit. That hit carried away his small finger, rendered the third all but powerless, smashed three metacarpal bones, and ruined whatever ambitions he might have had to become a tournament golfer.

He was in hospital in Surrey until 1918 and whacked a ball about a nearby course with one hand. Got pretty fair at it, too. Before he was released, he could go around batting the ball with his right hand, his left strapped to his chest, in 85. That would do most golfers with the normal equipment of two arms and 10 fingers very nicely.

(Ottawa Journal, 14 June 1939, p. 17)

When he came to Sherbrooke, Quebec, in August of 1919 to serve as golf professional at the St. Francis Golf and Country Club, he told members that he “was ‘gassed’” when in the trenches in France and that it “was recommended on his discharge to come to Canada for the benefit of his health” (Sherbrooke Daily Record [Quebec], 9 April 1920, p. 7).

Figure 74 Harry Towlson. Ottawa Citizen, 21 October 1999, Section C, p. 5.

We know that Towlson was known to Carters because of information that Moffatt Ross himself seems to have supplied to the Ottawa Citizen (and probably supplied to the newspaper by telephone, to judge by the misspelling of Towlson’s name):

Harry Tollson [sic], the well known English golf professional, who has been engaged by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, has arrived in the Capital.

Tollson, who came to Ottawa from Sherbrooke, where he has made his headquarters for the last year, is stopping at the Y.M.C.A. and will make his first visit to the course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club at Bowesville this afternoon, accompanied by Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, chairman of the golf committee.

Tollson was highly recommended to the local enthusiasts by the Carters Company of London.

(Ottawa Citizen, 8 April 1920, p. 9)

The head office of the “Carters Company” was indeed in London. And so, the Toronto branch, Boston branch, New York branch, and so on, were all branches of James Carter & Company of Raynes Park, London, which was known as Carters Tested Seeds, Incorporated.

But Moffatt Ross had presumably received this company’s recommendation of Towlson not from London but from the company’s New York representative – Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller – through which Moffatt Ross will have conducted his correspondence (while Park was home in Scotland) about bringing the company’s representatives to Ottawa.

How soon after apparently retaining Park’s services in July of 1919 Moffatt Ross had begun his correspondence with Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller is not clear, and neither is it clear when he received the company’s advice that Towlson was the man to hire.

By the late summer of 1919, Moffatt Ross had let it be known that his Golf Committee had determined on hiring a golf professional for the next season: “The nine-hole course is attracting plenty of attention and next season the club intends to secure the services of a professional” (Ottawa Journal, 3 September 1919, p. 12). At the end of November, this intention was publicly affirmed once more:

Following a meeting last night of the executive of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, it was announced that they would engage early next season a professional golf coach….

Negotiations with one of the best professionals in Canada will be opened so that he will be here in time for the resumption of play as soon as the snow is off the ground.

(Ottawa Citizen, 25 November 1919, p. 9)

It is unclear whether the item above refers to Towlson: in November of 1919, it would have been a considerable exaggeration to refer to this still largely unknown young man – who had been at Sherbrooke for just four months – as “one of the best professionals in Canada.”

And, of course, Towlson recalled that Moffatt Ross wrote to him in 1920, not 1919.

Moffatt Ross first publicly alluded to correspondence with Towlson in February of 1920 in his Golf Committee’s report to the Club’s first annual general meeting. The Ottawa Journal observed: “he stated that negotiations were under way for the securing of the services of a widely known professional golfer” (Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1920, p. 4). The Ottawa Citizen quoted his report differently: “The report by Mr. Ross, chairman of the golf committee, stated in part that … it was the intention at once to secure a professional to take complete charge of the golfing end of the club. At the present time, they were in communication with a number of candidates for the position” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1920, p. 8).

This correspondence would seem to have begun at least some weeks prior to these newspaper references to it in February of 1920. Towlson had apparently been offered the job shortly after the end-of-February meeting and had accepted it before the meeting of the club directors on March 16th (Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9).

How Towlson had become known to Carters is not clear. Had he worked in connection with them while at an English club, or had he perhaps been involved in course work by Carters at Sherbrooke?

Or perhaps he had become known to the company because he had worked under someone in the golf industry who had subsequently become a Carters employee.

Whatever the case may be, one presumes that it was with a view to the efficiency of its work in Ottawa that Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller advised Moffatt Ross that he should hire Harry Towlson away from the Sherbrooke Golf Club.

For a well-researched account of Towlson’s life and times, see Bruce A. McDonald’s essay, “Harry Towlson: Head Professional, Ottawa Hunt & Golf Club 1920-1950” (revised version 2021).

March Madness

Club directors were persuaded by their conversations with Park and Kanter in February that working with Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller was the way to go. They met a week after their February 26th meeting and let it be known that their minds were made up:

The building of an 18-hole golf course at the clubhouse on Bowesville Road was practically decided upon by the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club [last night] at the first gathering since the annual meeting ….

Mr. J. Moffatt Ross was re-elected chairman of the golf and membership committee ….

The club are now in communication with a celebrated firm of golfing architects and builders of golf courses with a view to having the property of the club between the clubhouse and Rideau River laid out in a first-class course.

The ground, which comprises upwards of 200 acres, is admirably suited to a golf course, being composed of sandy soil with natural drainage to the river….

The club are also arranging for a professional golfer to take charge about April 1.

(Ottawa Journal, 3 March 1920, p. 2)

Within two weeks, the architect was hired, the construction company was hired, and the head pro was hired.

Club directors brought back to Ottawa representatives of Carters Tested Seeds, Incorporated, and Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller to address the board again on 16 March 1920:

Extensive plans and arrangements for the building of an eighteen-hole golf course, the equal of any in Canada, were made at a meeting of the board of directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club held on Tuesday evening ….

Representatives of the Carters Seeds Corporation, of England, addressed the meeting and … every phase of the question [was] gone into ….

Mr. J.G. Kanter, the New York representative of the Carters Seeds Corporation, and Mr. H.V. Hyrons, Canadian agent, addressed Tuesday’s meeting. Both officials outlined the work that would be entailed in the construction of the proposed course and made several recommendations as to the lines that should be followed in beginning the work….

The proposed course is expected to be completed within twelve months so that members of the club may start out over the new links in the spring of 1921.

It is intended to have it so laid out that a match may be started at either the first or the tenth hole with equal ease. It will extend from the back end of the property to the Rideau River.

(Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9)

Willie Park had not come to Ottawa to attend this March meeting, but he was much discussed at it, and he was sitting by the phone – so to speak – awaiting news of the Club’s decisions:

It was decided to secure the best available architect to go over the club’s property and present an estimate of the cost of building a course such as is proposed.

Concurrent with the decision of the meeting, Mr. Willie Park, a golf architect of international repute, was secured.

Mr. Park wired … J. Moffatt Ross yesterday [March 17th] to the effect that he would arrive in the Capital on April 15th [he would actually arrive on April 26th] to begin his survey of the property ….

The securing of Mr. Park to draw up the plans is considered a stroke of good fortune. This architect has the construction of over one hundred courses to his credit and he is reputed to be one of the best in his line….

His estimate will be submitted as expeditiously as possible and, should it meet with the approval of the club, the work will be started immediately.

(Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9)

And there was news of the hiring of a golf professional: “Announcement was also made following the meeting that a professional golfer had been engaged. Mr. Harry Towlson, who is at present at the St. Francis Golf and Country Club, of Sherbrooke, Que., has consented to come to the Capital and take charge of the nine-hole course at the Ottawa club” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9).

To have brought all these matters to a resolution by mid-March, Moffatt Ross must have been sending and receiving letters almost daily over the previous month or two

Park's Four Days of Design

Figure 75 Willie Park on site laying out a course in Asheville, North Carolina. Note that he had a golf club with him, perhaps to try various shots on holes he was creating. If this was a habit of his, perhaps Park was the first person to play his design in Ottawa! Asheville Citizen Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17.

Park had spent a week in Ottawa in mid-February accompanied by Kanter and Hyrons, and the latter two had returned in mid-March to address club members about course construction, but Park’s next visit to Ottawa was on Monday, April 26th, 1920.

He registered at the Chateau Laurier on the day of his arrival and “was in Ottawa four days,” departing on Thursday, April 29th (Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 26).

On the day of his arrival, he “visited the Bowesville course … and under his direction the work of surveying the links was begun” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 16). The next day, Tuesday, April 27th , Park was said to be “hard at work designing a golf course for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3).

In the morning on the 27th, Park once more made a general tour over the Club’s property and then seems to have spoken at some length with a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen:

This morning, Park was taken to the course by Mr. Frank Jarman, president of the club, and Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, chairman of the Golf Committee.

After a thorough preliminary examination, he stated that the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club course-to-be was more like old country courses than anything else he had seen in this country.

Park stated he would lay out the course in such a way as players would not have to drive into the sun but would generally have the sun at their backs.

He stated he could work in three natural water hazards, and there were also many natural sand bunkers. There were also many beautiful pine and fir trees distributed quite generally over the course, and very few of these, he thought, would have to be disturbed in building up the course….

“The course will not be an expensive one to maintain,” said the architect this morning. “For one thing, it will require no expensive drainage. Some courses require thousands of dollars for this purpose alone.”

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3)

Park’s preliminary examination of the property eventuated in an important discovery:

When inspecting the property yesterday [April 27th], Mr. Park fortunately found a bed of black soil that will be used in constructing the sub strata of the putting greens and to surface the fairways.

After the soil is removed, a lagoon will be constructed, having an entrance and outlet to prevent stagnation.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19)

After talking with a reporter, Park got down to business: “Today, Mr. Park is picketing out the bunkers and traps” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3). He may have waited until the afternoon of April 27th to do this because he was awaiting an assistant: “Today, an architect from New York will arrive to assist him in his work” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3). This anonymous person was probably the one who worked up Park’s drawings into proper blueprints: “Mr. Park has completely mapped out the course, and picketed it, and drawings by a draughtsman from New York were submitted” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).

Figure 76 In mud-caked boots, Park at Tumble Creek Country Club, Bloomfield, Connecticut. Hartford Courant [Connecticut], 26 November 1922, p. 36.

Park was accompanied during his work on site by several people.

First, there was Harry Towlson, who seems to have had experience with Carters, but Park would have invited him along, in any event, for architects generally had the local golf professional accompany them during their laying out of the course so that the pro could explain the strategic merit of the architect’s plans to doubting Green Committee members who tended to have a much higher confidence in their own golf IQ than was warranted.

Shortly after Park’s arrival at the Chateau Laurier, Moffatt Ross and Jarman had picked up Park at the Chateau Laurier and driven him to the course in one of their fine automobiles. They probably did this every day during his stay. And since they were the strongest supporters of the plan to have Park and Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller look after the entire course-building operation, they were probably also members of the party that accompanied Park around the property, if only because they would have wanted to be able to speak knowledgeably about his plans to a general meeting called to approve them.

Also accompanying Park were three Club members appointed as a special committee to rustle up answers to any questions the architect might pose: “Dr. D.M. Robertson, Dr. R.E. Webster and Mr. J.R. Buchanan are a committee to assist Mr. Park with such local information as he required” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3).

Robertson, we recall, was the first to play the Keffer-Black nine-hole course in July of 1919, just a week after construction started on it. Webster had been instrumental in organizing the Hunt Club in 1906 and in purchasing its property the next year. He became “master of the hounds” until the organization became moribund during World War I, and upon the Hunt Club’s amalgamation with the Motor Club, he became an enthusiastic golfer. John Robert Buchanan, president and founding owner of Ottawa’s Capital Wire Cloth and Manufacturing Company, would succeed Moffat Ross as chairman of the Golf Committee in the fall of 1920.

And also accompanying Park, of course, were the Carters men: J.G. Kanter, H.V. Hyrons, and an anonymous draughtsman.

Park was used to having a relatively large entourage accompany him as he laid out a golf course. From an account provided by a Michigan reporter, we have insight into how Park worked with his Carters associates as he laid out a course in that state in the fall of 1919, just six months before doing the same in Ottawa. The reporter was clearly thrilled to have observed Park and Kanter going about their business at Battle Creek, Michigan:

Willie Park, pretty well acknowledged as the world’s leading expert among golf course architects, repeatedly said during his stay here last week that he knew of no finer piece of ground for a golf course on the American continent than the 90 acres adjoining Goguac Lake [in Battle Creek, Michigan] …

And this big stretch of picturesque landscape is to be taken in hand by Mr. Park, assisted by other experts in their particular lines, who will devote their talents and long experience, with a considerable expenditure of money, to making of those long, gently rolling stretches some of the finest “fairways” that can be made.

Contours will be changed so as to work quite a transformation at many points. And the change, made with an eye first of all to the requirements of the game itself, will also greatly enhance the beauty of the scene, providing new “surprises” to the eye while making the very most of each stretch of ground marked out to form one of those 18 “holes.”

After going over a projected course with such men as Willie Park and Frank L. James, another man who has spent his life from his boyhood in study of golf and golf courses and in the practical construction of them, and who is taking charge of the construction work here – one begins to see the ground before him from quite a different new point of view and to become impressed with the fact that the laying out of a golf course involves the combination of art and science which is quite distinct from any other.

There is something of the gift of the landscape artist in it, something of the skill of the engineer, but the point of view has grown entirely out of a life-long familiarity with the game of golf.

An engineer would bungle at the job, and a landscape gardener might produce a beautiful park, but it would be as far from a golf course as it would be from a race track.

The golf architect has the eye for beauty, but as the ground before him becomes transformed in his mind’s eye into the new “hole” he contemplates, he is not thinking primarily of beauty at all. It is a playing ideal he has in mind. And yet, such is the nature of an ideal golf hole that it cannot be anything but picturesque, while at the same time it follows principles that are rigidly scientific.

Such were the ideas and impressions caught by at least some among a party that walked over the course the other day with Willie Park, Frank L. James, and J.G. Kanter, representative of the New York house that will supply the seed and undertake the contract for construction of the course.

It was a kind of “sixth sense,” a “golf sense,” that seemed to shape all they saw and dictate all they said.

(Battle Creek Enquirer, 1 October 1919, p. 8)

For anyone with a good knowledge of the game, it must have been equal parts enlightening and exciting to have witnessed Park and Kanter discussing possible golf holes at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club at the end of April 1920.

At some point on Wednesday, April 28th (perhaps after he finished laying out the course), Park gave an interview to an Ottawa Journal reporter, with whom he was expansive in explaining the main tenets of his modernizing design philosophy:

Mr. Park is enthusiastic over the possibilities of the new Ottawa course and is sure that, when completed, it will be second to none in America.

It is almost a natural course, says the golfer, and will require much less work to perfect it than the majority of courses. The fact that the ground is dry will give two more months of golfing and allow a game to be played immediately after a heavy rainfall.

The 180 acres belonging to the club will be ample for the course.

Every effort will be made by him to produce a championship course of about 6,500 yards, much longer than the average Canadian links, and so construct it that it will be pleasing to all players.

He is not a believer in the system of laying out a course so as to penalize the short driver.

His putting grounds will be along the most modern lines and all greens will be of the undulating type. Every effort will be made to produce a masterpiece of individuality at every green and there will be none of the stereotyped square greens that have been constructed in the past.

Although the work on the greens will be artificially created, the architect’s idea is to produce as near as possible a perfectly natural course.

All traps and fairways will be so constructed as to blend with the surroundings.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19)

Park completed his work at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, April 28th .

That afternoon, the Ottawa Citizen announced: “Directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club will dine this evening and hear the report of Mr. Willie Park, golf architect, on the proposed permanent course” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1920, p. 2). Others spoke that evening, but “the feature of the evening was a talk from Mr. Park” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).

In his report, Park seems to have focused on providing details about the course he had laid out: “Mr. Park explained there would be 13 holes on the clubhouse side of the road [Bowesville Road], and five on the other side. There were three natural water hazards. The complete course is 6,500 yards in all, which is the championship length” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).

Figure 77 Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27.

The table seen to the left was “prepared by him” (Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27).

In his lost report, Park probably described in some detail each of the 18 holes, occasionally describing a shot required by one of the holes.

Fortunately, the Ottawa Journal quoted or paraphrased his discussion of six of the 18 holes:

[6] “The sixth hole [today’s South 6] is as interesting a golf hole as I have planned since I left Scotland,” says the golfer.

He describes it as an elbow hole [that is, a dogleg hole] where the driver is not only compelled to negotiate a creek, but also a lagoon, which will be constructed for the first drive.

When this particular hole is finished, it will be one of the finest two-shot holes in America, but it has also been constructed so as not to punish the short driver [that is, players will be able to choose not to try to carry the lagoon with their drive].

The green is of the raised type and closely guarded with traps and mounds.

[8] A short hole of 185 yards is the eighth [today’s South 8], which is to be constructed on the brow of a hill.

The short straight driver will be well treated and the green itself will be inviting to the long driver [who can carry the ball onto it]. Should he hook or slice, he will find himself in one of the many traps surrounding this closely guarded green.

Mr. Park takes particular pride in developing short holes of this character.

[9] A three-shot hole of 535 yards has been mapped out for number nine [today’s South 9]. The green will be prominently on a knoll close to the clubhouse.

Quite frequently, holes of this length are uninteresting, but nature has endowed the course with a wonderful contour. Few changes are considered necessary to put this into shape.

To negotiate the green, the player will have to use an iron club.

[10] Mr. Park considers that in all his golfing experience, he has never planned a hole that offered more natural golfing possibilities than the features presented by the 10th hole [today’s West 6].

It is 165 yards long with a bold sand trap in the face of the hill made by nature. A carry of 100 yards will reach the green. This does not make it too difficult for the player who can land within reasonable distance. Should he fail, he will find himself in a natural trap.

This green will remind the player of the natural seaside courses of Scotland and England and will be, without a doubt, one of the prettiest greens on this continent.

Mr. Park picked out this hole a few minutes after arriving on the site….

[12] The 12th hole [today’s West 17] is the shortest, being only 115 yards, and will be constructed on a hill having quite an elevation [requiring a shot] of the mashie pitch variety….

[15] The 15th hole [today’s West 3] will be parallel with the Rideau River, and it is an extremely interesting one with a natural sand trap.

(Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27)

Club members enjoyed Park’s presentation: “Mr. Park gave a splendid talk…. After the meeting, various members expressed themselves as greatly pleased with the report received” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).

Then Kanter briefly addressed the meeting: “Mr. Kanter, of New York, thought the course would be an ideal one. It had a natural series of advantages equal to any course in the United States” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).

It was said that “Before leaving the city, Mr. Park … arranged all but the minor details of the architecture” (Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27).

Park's Construction Manager

Park returned to Ottawa early in the morning of 24 August 1920 to spend three days supervising the beginning of construction on the course. When he left, installed as his construction manager was one of his most trusted men: “A matter of $60,000 is to be expended on the job and it is being supervised by Mr. David Kay, a Scotsman of international reputation, who has undertaken the laying of greens for some of the best known golf courses in the world” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5).

Kay was said to be from Edinburgh, Scotland, and he indeed learned his golf in East Lothian, but he was actually from the village of Cockenzie, which was about four miles from Willie Park’s home in Musselburgh (both Cockenzie and Musselburgh being on the outskirts of Edinburgh). In 1896, Kay’s departure the year before from East Lothian for the United States, where golf was for the first time taking hold, was recalled with pride in The Golf Book of East Lothian: “David Kay has gone from Cockenzie to the States” (John Kerr, The Golf Book of East Lothian [Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable], p. 343).

He came to the Alpine Golf Club, which had been established in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1894. Here, he engaged in his first golf course building in North America: unimpressed by the nine holes laid out by club members in a cramped space, he laid out a proper six-hole course instead. After five years in Fitchburg, where “he filled the position with such general satisfaction that the club [felt] his departure a great loss,” Kay moved during the summer of 1899 to the golf club in Lake Placid, New York (Fitchburg Sentinel [Massachusetts], 20 July 1899, p. 2). In the winter of 1899-1900, he was the golf pro at Miami’s East Coast Golf Club, where “he won much popularity” (Boston Globe, 15 July 1900, p. 21).

Figure 78 David Kay addresses the ball on a tee at the Bethlehem Golf Club. Boston Post, 5 May 1901, p. 20.

Early in 1900, he moved from Lake Placid to the Manchester Country Club in New Hampshire. Before the end of the season, however, he was off to Bethlehem, Massachusetts, where the golf course of the Bethlehem Park Association was in need of his attention: “the fair green needs a great deal of work yet before it will be in perfect condition, as it is very rocky” (Boston Evening Transcript, 14 July 1900, p. 21).

He was a hit at his new club, where it was said he was “infusing new life into the game at Bethlehem” and where he seems immediately to have begun a programme of design and construction: “Even at this early date, plans are being made to extend and improve the links” (Boston Globe, 15 July 1900, p. 21). His play was also greatly admired: “He plays a remarkably strong game” (Boston Evening Transcript, 1 August 1900, p. 15).

By 1902, he was off to Chicago to work at a summer resort: “The Lake Harbor golf course is this season under the management of the professional golf instructor, David Kay of Massachusetts” (Chicago Tribune, 29 June 1902, p. 39). At this point, he briefly returned to Scotland but soon regretted his decision and tried to get his old job back at the Alpine Golf Club in Fitchburg: “Mr. Kay is back at his home in Scotland but finds his native heath less favorable to his health than the land which he wishes to adopt” (Fitchburg Sentinel [Massachusetts], 11 March 1904, p. 2). But there was no job for him in Fitchburg. Instead, he worked as greenkeeper in England at the Kidderminster Golf Club in Kidderminster, Worcestershire (several miles southwest of the city of Birmingham).

But he eventually returned to the United States. In 1912, after “Tom Bendelow was brought from Chicago to lay out a course” in Michigan for the Franklin Hills Country Club, Kay was installed as the first golf professional. He may well have come from Chicago with Bendelow to build the course. He had apparently been in Chicago long enough to have made a sufficient impression upon the local golf community for his departure for Lethbridge in 1913 to have been noted with regret by the great local amateur golfer Chick Evans (in 1916, he would win both the U.S. Amateur Championship and the U.S. Open Championship):

Canadians Take Golf “Pros” of U.S.

Opening of New Clubs in Dominion Attracts Many Instructors From Middle West

(By Charles “Chick” Evans)

A surprising number of our good professionals have found employment in Canada, where almost everyone plays golf….

Harry Turpie, who … has been identified with so much of Chicago’s best golf, has been engaged by the Calgary Country Club.

David Kay, another well known professional, goes to the Lethbridge Country Club.

(Edmonton Journal, 10 May 1913, p. 21)

By 1916, however, Kay was back in Michigan, now building courses for Willie Park. The latter laid out a nine-hole course in 1916 for the Meadowbrook Country Club of Northfield, Michigan, and Kay was appointed its first golf professional: “he served for a few months in 1916” (Detroit Free Press, 19 June 1938, p. 63). He had probably built this course for Park and stayed on for several months as greenkeeper/golf professional to bring the course into play.

And then in 1916, two members of the new Sylvania Golf Club of Toledo, Ohio, visited Willie Park in Detroit where he was laying out a golf course for the Red Run Golf Club: their object was to persuade him to come to Toledo and lay out a championship course for their club. He obliged them and, after designing their course, explained that Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller could do the whole job for $50,000 – a figure with which we are familiar – and then installed David Kay as his construction manager.

Figure 79 Clearing trees and stumps at the Sylvania Golf Club in 1917. Figure 23 in The History of Sylvania Golf Club.

Clearing and preparing the land (which was densely wooded in certain parts and swampy in other parts) started in 1917, as seen to the left, but proper course construction began only in 1918, with Park spending about 15 days on site getting the work underway, before handing things over to Kay.

The remaining work took two years to complete. (See https://www.jdrewrogers.com/blog/26/from-sunningdale-to-sylvania.)

After his work in Toledo, Kay – described by the Detroit Free Press as “a former associate of Willie Park in the golf architect business” – built Park’s layout for the University Golf and Country Club (about 15 miles from the centre of Detroit): “Construction on the course, which has been under the supervision of David Kay, well known architect, began last summer [1918]” (Detroit Free Press, 6 July 1919, p. 20; 11 May 1919, p. 22).

There was nothing “former” about Kay’s association with Park, of course, and we find him in 1919 building Park’s nine-hole layout for the Automobile Country Club of Pine Lake, Oakland County, Michigan, where he stayed on as greenkeeper for a season:

David Kay, formerly of Scotland, has been employed by the Automobile Country Club, of Pine Lake, as golfing professional and greens keeper of the organization.

Mr. Kay has taught the links game and laid out courses for the last 25 years.

Recently, he has been employed with Willie Park, the Scottish architect, who has built quite a number of courses throughout the United States.

(Detroit Free Press, 22 June 1919, p. 25)

In August of 1920, as we know, David Kay was called to Ottawa: Park had asked that one of his best construction men come from Michigan to build the Hunt and Motor Club course.

And Kay was still in charge throughout 1921:

Mr. David Kay, well known golf course expert, has arrived in the city from New York and will have charge of the completion of the new golf course now being constructed by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Work in connection with the completion of the course will be commenced shortly, and it is expected that a twelve- or thirteen-hole course will be ready by the early part of July.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1921, p. 9)

Since Kay lived with his wife and children in Michigan, I assume that the above description of Kay as having “arrived in the city from New York” indicates that rather than coming directly to Ottawa from Michigan, he had first gone to New York to visit the offices of Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller – presumably to get his instructions for the year’s work in Ottawa.

1920 Construction

When Willie Park was officially engaged in March of 1920 to design the new course, the expectation was that it would be ready for play in the spring of 1921 (Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9).

When Park arrived in Ottawa at the end of April to lay out the course and to work out cost estimates with Kanter, however, he would not promise more than to have the first nine holes ready for play by July of 1921. And so we learn that “In the meantime, the members will use the temporary sporty course constructed last year [1919]” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19).

Of course, Park’s April 1920 prediction did not anticipate that because of delays in arranging the financing of the work, construction would not begin until the end of August. In what seems to have been his only reported visit to the work site, he spent three days (beginning 24 August 1920) organizing work for the late summer and early fall. Although no visits after August 1920 are mentioned in local newspapers, it is possible that he visited the work site after this, for Canadian Golfer editor Ralph Reville reported at the end of the 1920 season that “The course [was] designed by and the construction supervised from time to time by Mr. Willie Park” (Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 9 [January 1921], p. 634, emphasis added). Reville implies that there was more than one visit by Park to the work site in 1920.

In anticipation of the success of its prolonged efforts at financing golf course construction, the Club clearly had men and equipment in readiness for work at the end of August 1920. On August 24th, a newspaper announced: “Mr. Willie Park, the well known golf architect, arrived in the city early this morning and will spend three days here and give his advice regarding the work” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5). The same day, the same newspaper observed: “At the present time there are 25 teams working on the course with all the latest machinery for the laying out of the eighteen greens which will all be properly seeded” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5).

Whether the Club rented these teams of horses or owned them is not clear. On the one hand, Ernest Lecuyer, who in 1921 joined the crew constructing the golf course, recalled many years later that his “brother had a team of horses and he was paid $10 a day for himself and the team” (Ernest Lecuyer in conversation with Eddie MacCabe, cited by Kucey, p. 61). On the other hand, contemporaneously at the Park layout for the Weston Golf Club, where between 30 and 40 teams of horses were used on the course each day, construction supervisor G.F. Clarke observed that buying a team of horses was cheaper than renting them: “We’re running the work here somewhat differently to any other course I have done. We bought our own teams. If you rent them, you are asked $10 a day for a team, whereas the actual cost for maintenance is $4.50 for us” (Star Weekly [Toronto], 7 May 1921, p. 21).

Men hired as day labourers were cheap: “The Hunt Club is paying 55 cents an hour for the labour needed on the new golf links” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 2).

The nature and extent of the work accomplished at the end of the 1920 golf season is not clear – there was only time for ten or eleven weeks of work – but there is indirect evidence that club members were satisfied with the progress being made.

At the annual general meeting in March of 1921, vice-president A.A. Dion commented on a complaint that had been made in 1920:

Last season, he said, a “complaint box” had been placed for use of members who wished to make suggestions for improvements in the club, or to call attention to any matters needful of rectification.

“There was only one complaint dropped in the box,” said Mr. Dion, and it read, ‘Why don’t you provide pen and ink for the purpose of making complaints?’”

(Ottawa Journal, 30 March 1921, p. 2)

And from the United States came an indirect endorsement of the Club’s progress on the development of its new golf course:

That an offer of “$500,000 cash” has been made for the golf course and grounds of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, but that the “American gentleman who made the offer had been informed that the property was not for sale,” was the statement made by [Golf Committee chairman] Mr. J.R. Buchanan at the second annual meeting of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in the public library last evening.

“That gentleman offered to make a deposit in a bank as evidence of good faith,” said Mr. Buchanan, who cited the incident as evidence of the value of the property of the club.

(Ottawa Journal, 30 March 1921, p. 2)

One presumes that Buchanan’s report was true.

But it is also the case that his information about the increased value of the Club’s property was (suspiciously?) timely, for shortly after he had enthused members with the news of the extravagant offer for the grounds made by the anonymous American, the Club president capitalized on the good feeling that Buchanan’s report generated by appealing for funds: “President Jarman urged members to assist as far as possible in selling the forthcoming $20,000 bond issue necessitated to meet improvement expenses” (Ottawa Journal, 30 March 1921, p. 2).

A Visit from Mr. Jackson

During his time in Ottawa, David Kay was not left without support form New York.

In January of 1921, Ralph Reville observed of the 1920 season that “the construction [was] supervised from time to time by Mr. Willie Park” (Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 9 [January 1921], p. 634).

And in addition to having Park visit Ottawa, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller also sent one of their top men from head office at the end of the 1920 season, his task being both to evaluate Kay’s construction achievements on the Ottawa course so far and to explain to the Club the work that would be undertaken in the spring of 1921.

His name was William Congreve Jackson (1890-1973), and his position “then was head of the construction dept. of Carters Tested Seeds, Inc., New York, builders of many courses” (Golfdom, vol 35 no 4 [April 1961], pp. 114-15).

Figure 80 William Congreve Jackson, Class of '09. Virginia Military Institute. Nicknamed "Bill" and "Cronje."

If William Congreve Jackson was not to the manor born, he was at least to the rectory born, for his father was Bishop Henry M. Jackson, of Virginia. But his promising start in life in 1890 was upset by his mother’s death when he was just three years of age, and by his father’s death when he was ten. He was educated afterwards in the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI), acquiring expertise in chemistry and civil engineering.

He did not lack for money: when he got married in 1912, he and his bride spent twelve months on honeymoon in Europe. (The marriage did not last, but a second marriage was a happy one.)

In his mid-twenties, Jackson turned his stint as manager of the dramatic club at VMI to good account: he was employed for two years before World War I as an actor in the repertory company of Frank Morgan, who would become immortal thirty years later as the actor who played the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

When the United states entered world War I in 1917, Jackson served as a 1 st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Infantry from July 1917 to December 1918. He then settled down to more mundane work as a company’s chemist.

And then he joined Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller.

Figure 81 Left to right: W.C. Jackson and Harry Vardon, 1920.

Jackson enjoyed the complete confidence of company president Peterson.

When the latter brought Harry Vardon and Ted Ray to the United States to play exhibition matches across the country in advance of the 1920 U.S. Open, he put Jackson in charge of the day-to-day management of these two international superstars.

But Jackson was also needed in Ottawa.

At the beginning of November 1920, as soon as Vardon and Ray had boarded their ship in New York for their return to the United Kingdom, Jackson was sent to the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club to assess David Kay’s progress on the new Park course.

In November, he addressed the Club’s board of directors: “Mr. Jackson, representing the contractors for the new golf links, reported progress and said that six weeks’ work in the spring would put it in good condition” (Ottawa Journal, 11 November 1920, p. 2).

The Ottawa Citizen got one of his initials wrong, but it provided a fuller account of his report to club directors:

A discussion was held on the building of the new golf course.

Mr. C.R. [sic] Jackson, engineer in charge of building the course, was present and went over the estimates and reported that the course would be finished well within the estimate.

Moreover, work will continue for the balance of the present week and will re-open very early in the spring.

Five or six weeks’ work in the spring will complete the course.

(Ottawa Citizen, 11 November 1920, p. 1)

One suspects that the Citizen reporter is mistaken in attributing to Jackson the claim that the golf course would be completed after five or six weeks of work in the spring of 1921. After all, Park himself had promised just nine holes by July of 1921.

Figure 82 Left to right: W.C. Jackson and Willie Park, Jr, planning the No. 4 Course at Olympia Fields, Chicago, in the spring of 1922.

It was presumably Jackson’s report that the club directors subsequently considered at the beginning of 1921 at their now regular February meeting:

The directors will … discuss the progress that has been made on the construction of the new championship golf links and will plan just what is needed to finish the work and also how soon the new links will be available.

(Ottawa Citizen, 8 February 1921, p. 3)

In 1921, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller sent Jackson to Chicago to supervise construction of the No. 4 Course at Olympia Fields for Park (see the photograph to the left showing Jackson and Park working on site together).

Shortly after the completion of this project in Chicago, Jackson became a golf professional and golf course architect in his own right, laying out over 50 golf courses in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio.

In Willie Park, Jr, W.C. Jackson, and David Kay, the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club benefited from one of the best design and construction teams ever put together by Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller.

A Close Call?

From the creation of Park’s first course since his return to the United States in 1916, his elevated greens were always remarked upon in American and Canadian newspapers.

At the Woodway Country Club, near Springdale, Connecticut, “Every one of the putting greens had to be raised from six to eight feet at the back” (Montreal Star, 29 July 1918, p. 17). At the Bay Shore Country Club in Miami Beach, all were “elevated greens, three to six feet” (Miami News [Florida], 7 May 1920, p. 13). On his design for the Highland Golf and Country Club of Indianapolis, Indiana, “on practically every hole the greens are slightly elevated” (Indianapolis Star, 26 July 1921, p. 36).

On the Mount Bruno greens, “There are nice contours for the player to putt over. These contours have been built up” (Montreal Gazette, 15 July 1920, p. 13). At Winnipeg’s Southwood Golf Club, “the final formation and making of the new greens from designs by the golf architect Willie Park will be proceeded with …. They are principally of the elevated type and comply with all the latest ideas of green planning” (Winnipeg Tribune, 17 December 1921, p. 14). At Montreal’s Senneville Golf Club, “The greens are built up at the back and well-trapped, a typical Willie Park job” (Montreal Star, 29 June 1922, p. 30).

And so, of course, on the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club course “The greens … are all built- and backed-up” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11).

Why is this said over and over again? Why the hullabaloo about “raised,” “built-up,” “elevated” putting greens?

Note that in the 1920s, construction of golf course greens became much more sophisticated and labour-intensive than it had been even a decade before. When Ottawa Citizen golf writer (and mid-1920s club champion at Royal Ottawa) Brian Devlin inspected the development of George Cumming’s 18-hole layout for the new Chaudière Golf Club in 1923, he marvelled at the new modern greens. The course had been laid out in June, with play beginning on temporary greens by the end of that month. By August, some of the permanent greens were taking shape, a development that occasioned Devlin’s hymn of praise about modern green architecture:

Green Construction

This shaping of nine greens in the period since work could be commenced is something more than worthy of mention.

The building of greens nowadays, with the extensive backing-up and contouring necessary to the requirements of modern golf, is not the simple matter it was a decade ago.

Then, the ground merely was cultivated, the line between fairway and green being but a difference in grass texture.

But now, each putting surface is constructed from accurately drawn plans, each conforming to the type of shot required and each having its own individual characteristics.

(Ottawa Citizen, 17 August 1923, p. 11)

In the 1920s, a change that had been a generation in the making had arrived in Ottawa.

Figure 83 George Strath, circa 1890.

Late in the nineteenth century, many of the Scottish golf professionals who immigrated to North America had brought with them a conviction that the site of a putting green should be located on a natural land formation: it should be found, not made. In 1895, for instance, when recently arrived Scottish golf professional George Strath laid out a course for the Dyker Meadow Golf Club in New York, he pointedly celebrated the superiority of his green locations to those of other New York golf courses on which greens had been artificially improved by levelling work:

Mr. Strath spoke in the highest terms of the natural location of the grounds and of their excellent facilities for the game.

“Why,” he said, “the putting greens are the only natural ones in the area.”

“In all the other places, it has been necessary to level off the green – and that is not living up to the strict rules of this field sport.”

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 15 December 1895, p. 21)

According to Strath’s conception of golf as a field sport, one played the ball as one found it, one played the course as one found it, and one laid out the course on the land as one found it.

In The Game of Golf (1896), Willie Park himself agreed that a natural green site was preferable to an artificial one:

If natural putting-greens cannot be made on the course as it stands, then they must be dug up and laid with suitable turf; but this should only be done as a last resource.

It is a very bad piece of ground that will not improve sufficiently to make a fairly good putting-green, under proper care, and with due cutting and rolling and top-dressing.

A strong attempt should always be made to bring the natural turf into condition before resorting to the lifting and turfing of a putting green.

(The Game of Golf, p. 202)

According to Park, even sodding a putting green should be regarded as an artificiality of last resort.

Walter J. Travis later claimed that he had been the first to embellish green sites with artificial undulations:

Figure 84 Walter J. Travis, circa 1920.

The year 1906 marked a new era in golf course construction in the United States.

Up to that time, the natural contour of the ground was followed in the construction of putting greens, little or no attempt at embellishment being made in artificially introducing undulations.

In the fashioning of sites, Dame Nature had not been so kind to us as to the golfers of Great Britain, where, especially on seaside links, greater diversity of putting surfaces obtained.

To remedy this defect, I conceived and carried out the idea of reconstructing a number of greens at Garden City. That was the first start.

(Walter J. Travis, “Twenty Years of Golf,” American Golfer [9 October 1920], p. 4)

But in The Practical Greenkeeper (published in 1916 by Carters Tested Seeds and “mailed free on request”), we can see that in 1916 greens were still not elevated above the level of the surrounding turf:

Figure 85 Practical Greenkeeper, p. 3.

Figure 86 Practical Greenkeeper, p. 3

Figure 87 Practical Greenkeeper, p. 3.

Figure 88 Practical Greenkeeper, p. 3.

Dig to the depth of a spade, turn the soil well over, break up the large clods, pick out all large stones, weeds, roots, etc. Grass being a shallow-rooted plant makes it quite unnecessary to work the soil to a greater depth ….

Peat moss and rotted straw manures should be spread over the surface at the rate of one load per 100 square yards and forked or dug into the soil in such a way that the bulk of it remains within 2 or 3 inches of the surface….

Grass manure should be broadcasted over the surface at the rate of 2 ounces per square yard and raked in….

Prepare the seed bed by breaking up clods, removing large stones, and all weed roots with an iron-toothed rake.

Then roll, rake, and tread the ground until the surface becomes quite firm, true, and fine, and, when walked on, hardly shows the imprint of a foot….

Sow the seed on the raked surface ….

[Choose] a calm, dry day for the work, otherwise much of the seed may be blown away and lost….

Or should the spoil be wet, it will stick to the operator’s boots and in this way the level may be seriously disturbed.

Divide up the ground into strips about 3 feet wide by means of pegs and string …

And divide the seed into as many equal portions as there are strips or squares ….

Sow the seed by hand with the back bent, taking care to spread it as evenly as possible over the surface.

The seed must now be covered to a depth not exceeding onequarter of an inch ….

The ground should then be rolled and cross-rolled with a light roller.

(The Practical Greenkeeper, pp. 2-4)

Figure 89 Practical Greenkeeper, p. 3.

In 1923, George Cumming designed the Chaudière Golf Club’s greens on which Devlin heaped great praise, but Cumming would not have been capable of imagining such elevated green design just ten years before this.

At Rivermead, for instance, he had planned greens in the oldfashioned way when he laid out this club’s first 18-hole golf course in 1912.

And over the course of the eight years that it took to complete the course and make it worthy of hosting the 1920 Canadian Open, the greens had not been re-designed in the modern, elevated way, as we can see from the reaction of Rivermead players in 1923 to their first experience of the green complexes on the Hunt and Motor Club course: “Rivermead golfers … expressed a great liking for the new plan of elevated modern greens that are to be found at the Hunt Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 September 1923, p. 10).

The man who brought this style of modern elevated green construction to Ottawa was Willie Park, and the year he did so, of course, was 1920, when he laid out the 18-hole championship course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Had Moffatt Ross succeeded in acquiring the Hunt Club’s property for development as a golf course as early as 1917, however, the Club’s golf course might have been set back for years, for it is likely that the green construction in 1917 would not have been of the elevated, push-up style developed and promoted by Willie Park.

It would have been a close call, indeed.

Push-up Greens

More than a spade, a rake, and boots treading the ground were required to build a Park green, as we can see from George F. Clark’s description of his work at the Weston Golf Club in the spring of 1921 – at the same time that identical work was underway at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Figure 90 George F. Clark. Sunday News (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), 18 May 1930, p. 10.

Clark (1882-1938), from Leland, Cornwall, England, was trained as a golf professional and worked as such off-and-on over the years, but he also worked periodically in the golf course construction business (often serving as head pro for a year or two at a golf course he had just built). He worked with Donald J. Ross on the construction of the 18-hole course of the Country Club of Havana, Cuba, in 1911-12, the construction of the 18-hole Panorama Golf Course of the Balsam Grand Resort Hotel in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, in 1912, and the construction of the 18-hole championship course of the Shawnee Golf Club in Topeka, Kansas, in 1916-17.

After that, he built the Mount Bruno golf course for Willie Park between 1917 and 1919.

He greatly admired both architects: “My time which I have put in with both Donald J. Ross and Willie Park has been very interesting and instructive. They are both wonderful designers of modern courses” (Canadian Golfer, vol 7 no 6 [December 1921], p. 533).

Clark’s home base was New York City, but whether he was sent out to either Mount Bruno or Weston by New York company Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller is not known. It is clear, however, that he enjoyed Park’s complete confidence, for Park regarded the Mount Bruno course as a pet project and spent considerable time there working on site alongside Clarke: “he spent several months at the work superintending the original layout and supervising the work as if he had been an ordinary foreman” (Montreal Gazette, 29 July 1922, p. 15).

Interviewed by the Toronto Star Weekly in the spring of 1921, Clark explained the making of a Park green:

Making the Greens

A thousand details have to be observed in the making of the green.

“It is the most important part of the links, because the grass has to be so fine,” Mr. Clark explained. “In building the green, you begin by taking off the top soil for a depth of two or three feet, depending on the nature of the earth. This is in order to put in your tile drainage. Cinders are then spread for drainage purposes, too. On top of them comes loam. Next comes six inches of the finest manure, about 20 tons to one green, which takes up an area of 35 feet square, though not square, for no green is exactly round or square. Over the manure is spread a mixture of sand and loam, at least 30 tons. The whole thing is rolled down pretty hard, then scratched over with a fork. Seed is next scattered and rolled in and the elements do the rest.”

“The more irregular, or natural looking, we can get a green, the better,” explained Mr. Clark. “The impression has to be given that it was made by nature.”

(Star Weekly [Toronto], 7 May 1921, p. 21)

This layering of construction materials in Ottawa meant the greens “wintered splendidly”: “The porous soil is a great help to drainage and the fact that all the greens are built up strata after strata and layer after layer was a big help in retaining their condition” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1923, p. 15).

Park’s greens required push-up construction: raising the green above the level of the surrounding ground. Seen below is one of his original push-up greens on the Huntercombe Golf Club’s course (near Nuffield, England), which Park built it in 1900 on land that he purchased and developed himself.

Figure 91 Willie Park push-up green at Huntercombe Golf Club. Photograph courtesy of Huntercombe Golf Club.

The level of the push-up green steadily rises from the front edge to the back edge (in this case, there are also two tiers, one at the front and one at the back), producing increasingly higher shoulders on each side and a dramatic drop at the back edge.

Elevated greens remain a common element in contemporary golf course architecture, with the elevation of the green above the level of the fairway varying from a mild rise of several feet to a dramatic rise of many feet onto a distinct plateau. Today, the entire green complex might be raised on all sides, but in the 1920s, the soil was literally pushed from the front edge to the back edge.

Examples of simpler push-up greens from the 1920s are still found on some golf courses in the Ottawa area.

For instance, the photograph below shows the green of the second hole of the west nine at today’s Sand Point Golf Course in Sand Point, Ontario. It was laid out by Karl Keffer in 1923-24 for the Arnprior Golf Club. The front edge of this green (seen on the left side of the photograph) is level with the fairway, but the green then steadily rises to the back edge which is about four feet (just over a meter) higher than the front of the green.

Figure 92 Karl Keffer's 2nd green designed 1923-24 for the Arnprior Golf Club (today’s Sand Point Golf Course).

Strategically, the push-up green is receptive to a shot played onto the surface from the part of the fairway toward which the green is sloped. Balls played to the side or over the back leave players with difficult recovery shots: the ball lies below the surface of the green and the pronounced slope of the green will require careful calculation with regard to how the ball will break and roll-out when it lands.

The place to miss the approach shot to a push-up green is short and directly in front of it. Of Park’s push-up greens, it is said: “long is wrong.”

At the Chateau Cartier Golf Course (formerly the Chaudière Golf Club), in Gatineau, Quebec, many of the push-up greens that Ottawa Citizen golf writer Brian Devlin celebrated in 1923 still exist. For instance, the photograph below shows today’s 8th green, which was designed in the spring of 1923 by George Cumming.

Figure 93 The 8th green of the Chateau Cartier Golf Course, designed in 1923 by George Cumming for the Chaudière Golf Club.

Today, earth-moving machines do the work of moving and shaping the soil used in the construction of elevated greens, but machines that could move earth in 1920 were not used in golf course construction: they were too heavy, unwieldy, and expensive.

In 1921, mind you, during the construction of Willie Park’s elevated greens at the Bay Shore Country Club in Miami Beach, an innovation was introduced:

Summer work on the Miami Beach Bay Shore property is in full swing.

The new tractors, a big Holt and a little Celtrac, with Troy trailers and scrapers, have been delivered and are in use.

These tractors are great savers of man power on development work. Riding the Celtrac, a man with a scraper can do the work of three teams and a dozen men in rounding up the elevated greens and tees for the new course.

All of the hauling formerly done by mule teams is now done by the big tractor and the train of cars, annihilating big earth mounds and delivering the earth on fills or dumping and spreading on new land without a stop during the working hours.

(Miami News [Florida], 14 April 1921, p. 4)

But at Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, teams of horses harnessed to scrapers and plows were used to move earth – just as they were used contemporaneously at Weston, where Clarke used tractors only for plowing fairways and pulling stumps. At Weston in May of 1921, we read: “men with shovels and teams [of horses] are finishing the grading on one of the 18 greens of the new course” (Star Weekly [Toronto], 7 May 1921, p. 21). Another hole was “being levelled with scrapers and many men” (Star Weekly [Toronto], 7 May 1921, p. 21).

The “scrapers” in question were Fresno scrapers.

Figure 94 An early 20th-century Fresno scraper (photographed circa 1981).

Seen above, the Fresno Scraper came in different widths, depending on how much soil the horse or team of horses could scrape and pull, which in turn depended on the nature of the soil (loam, sand, clay, topsoil, etc.).

Typical methods for the construction of golf greens in the 1920s are described by L.W. Sporlein, who explains construction stages and strategies where greens and green-side traps were to be built with soils from the green site – which was presumably the situation at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club property in the early 1920s.

Using a Fresno Scraper, one began by scraping away the turf and topsoil from the green site. According to Sporlein,

In cases where it is desirable or necessary to save the topsoil at the green site for replacement on the green after it has been roughly shaped up, the surface soil only is removed and piled up as near as possible to the green.

It is placed either directly in front of or to the one side most convenient for hauling back onto the green surface after roughing in with the less fertile soils.

(cited in Michael J. Hurdzan, Golf Greens: History, Design and Construction [Toronto: Wiley, 2004], pp. 23-26).

The “less fertile soils” in question were generally “obtained while building the trap” (Sporlein, cited in Hurdzan, pp. 23-26).

As one had done at the green site, one scraped the turf and topsoil away from the bunker sites that had been marked out around the sides of the green, adding this topsoil to the pile of such soil already waiting for re-spreading onto the top of the green built-up with the soil of inferior quality scraped out of the bunker sites.

As seen below (left), Fresno Scraper teams often worked together in sequence. Assistants led the horses around from bunker site to green site, with the scraper operator scooping rough soil out of the bunkers and depositing it on the green site to build up the green. Also seen below (right), the Fresno scraper operator would push up on the Fresno Scraper handle to make the scraper become vertical and thereby dump its load of soil over the spot chosen (the handle would then be pulled down by means of the rope attached to it).

Figure 95 Photograph left: Harry Colt and C.H. Alison, Some Essays on Golf Course Architecture (London: Country Life, 1920). Photograph right: undated.

The construction crew would level out and smooth the built-up topsoil on the green site with a device called a “Railroad Plow” (or “sturdy plow”). It comprised two heavy metal bars oriented parallel to each other like railway tracks and welded together across a gap of approximately two feet. The operator would direct the horse or horses pulling the Railway Plow around and around the surface of the green under construction.

In the photograph below, a bunker is being excavated in the left foreground by a Fresno scraper and the green surface is being smoothed out with a Railway Plow.

Figure 96 Teams scooping rough soil out of a bunker site with a Fresno scraper and smoothing the green surface with a Railway Plow.

According to Sporlein,

in constructing the green, it is best first to build up the entire surface to a more or less uniform height and to place the high slopes or rolls in afterwards, when the approximate shape is obtained.

By a single adjustment of the spreader bar on the Fresno, so as to cause the load to spread out to a uniform thickness instead of dumping in one spot, the topsoil when ready for placement can be evenly distributed over the green surface.

After the surface has been … dragged with a spike tooth harrow, the hand work of raking into final shape is very much simplified.

(Sporlein, cited in Hurdzan, pp. 23-26).

The property of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club will have been a hive of activity during the construction of the Park course as the Club’s Sahara desert was transformed into an elevated and undulating garden of putting delights.

Park's Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club Greens

Contoured and terraced putting greens had been a feature of Park’s work since he laid out greens at Sunningdale in 1899 and at Huntercombe in 1900. (A famous Huntercombe green appears below.)

Figure 97 A contemporary photograph of the 4th hole of the Huntercombe Golf Club, foregrounding its famous multitiered green complex. Photograph courtesy of Huntercombe Golf Club.

At the end of April 1920, Park had promised unique greens for the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club: “Every effort will be made to produce a masterpiece of individuality at every green” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19). Ottawa Citizen golf writer Brian Devlin’s description of the greens completed or under development by the spring of 1922 makes clear that Park kept his promise:

Though every green is built and backed-up, no two are constructed in the same way – each is absolutely individual in outline.

There are … eighteen varieties of surface contours, and the slope towards the spot from where the shot to the green should be played differs in every instance.

Practically every putt will have to be carefully thought out – and that’s not all!

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1922, p. 30)

In some of the earliest photographs of the greens on the new Park course at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, the multiple contours of the putting surfaces can be detected.

Figure 98 Unidentified putting green at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club. There seem to be many pronounced contours. Photograph undated. Canada Department of the Interior, Library and Archives Canada, Box no. 2760.

Showing an unidentified putting green, the photograph above probably dates from the 1920s or early 1930s, for the plus-four trousers that the golfers and caddie are wearing went out of fashion in the early 1930s and disappeared from local golf courses.

Another photograph dating from the same period shows another unidentified putting green with two or three tiers.

Figure 99 Unidentified putting green of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club. At least two (and perhaps three) tiers are visible. Photograph undated. Canada Department of the Interior, Library and Archives Canada, Box no. 2760.

These photographs seem to confirm Devlin’s warning: “The shot to the green … should always be played with a clear idea of what side of the pin it must come to rest. Otherwise, the player may find himself with a putt almost impossible to lay dead” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1922, p. 30).

The two photographs above helpfully indicate the dramatic contouring on some of Willie Park’s greens at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, but they are less helpful in demonstrating how dramatically Park elevated some of his greens.

The photograph below, for instance, shows Park’s extremely elevated 10th green (today’s West 15) and its numerous surrounding bunkers. Notice the steps (there at least ten of them) that enable golfers to rise from the front bunker up to the level of the green’s apron, which rises still more on the way to the putting surface.

Figure 100 The approach to the elevated 10th green [today’s West 15] of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club circa 1928. See Kucey pp. 60 and 87.

This green was described by Park himself in April of 1920 as follows:

Mr. Park considers that in all his golfing experience, he has never planned a hole that offered more natural golfing possibilities than the features presented by the 10th hole [today’s West 15].

It is 165 yards long with a bold sand trap in the face of the hill made by nature.

A carry of 100 yards will reach the green.

This does not make it too difficult for the player who can land within reasonable distance.

Should he fail, he will find himself in a natural trap.

This green will remind the player of the natural seaside courses of Scotland and England and will be, without a doubt, one of the prettiest greens on this continent.

Mr. Park picked out this hole a few minutes after arriving on the site [the morning of 26 April 1920].

(Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27)

In April of 1920, of course, Park’s 10th hole (today’s West 15) existed only as an act of his imagination, and Park cannot have done much work on it (if any at all) during his three days on site at the end of August 1920, but his description of this hole cited above seems to be in perfect accord with the green complex that we see in the late 1920s photograph above.

David Kay did his work well.

The Royal Ottawa's Willie Park Piggy-Back

The kind of early twentieth-century green construction that Devlin describes as prevailing in Ottawa before the 1920s – “the ground was merely cultivated, the line between fairway and green being but a difference in grass texture” – can be seen in an early photograph of one of the original greens of the 1903 Tom Bendelow design at Royal Ottawa.

Figure 101 Square green at the Ottawa Golf Club, circa 1903-4. William James Topley Photograph. Library and Archives Canasa, Box no. 00596A.

In the example of green construction seen above, the putting surface is not elevated relative to the surrounding fairway and rough. Certainly, there has been no “push-up” of soil from front to back. The difference between the putting surface and the surrounding ground consists of a difference in the texture and length of the grass. And note that there has been no artificial construction of contours on this green.

For many a Green Committee in the late 1890s and early 1900s, instructions regarding the preferred layout of greens were simple: “make them square and level.”

With the relentless buzz in newspapers and magazines throughout 1919 and 1920 about Park’s modern “built up” and contoured greens, one can see why Royal Ottawa also asked Park to visit its course in 1920.

And it was indeed in 1920, according to Ottawa Citizen writer Tom Casey, that Park visited the Royal Ottawa golf course: “In 1920, Willie Park, Jr, the winner of the 1887 and 1889 British Opens, was in the area to design the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, but also provided plans for improvements at the Royal Ottawa” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 August 2000, p. 15).

Park’s visit to Royal Ottawa may have occurred at the end of April: “Mr. Willie Park, the famous golf architect, is in the capital and is registered at the Chateau Laurier. Mr. Park … came here for several purposes, including the laying out of the new course at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 16). Of his “several purposes,” presumably one of them entailed a visit to Royal Ottawa.

As we know, Park was on the site of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club on April 26th and completed the laying out of the golf course at 4:30 pm on April 28th . Park may have visited Royal Ottawa the day he arrived (April 26th), the day he left (April 29th), or either of the days in between.

When Park was on site laying out the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club course at the end of April, he reassured reporters:

Every effort will be made to produce a masterpiece of individuality at every green, and there will be none of the stereotyped square greens that have been constructed in the past.

Although the work on the greens will be artificially created, the architect’s idea is to produce as near as possible a perfectly natural course.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19, emphasis added).

One wonders if Park had just visited Royal Ottawa and had one of its old square greens top of mind as he talked to reporters.

He may also have visited Royal Ottawa during the three days he was in the city in August of 1920, beginning on the 24th.

Royal Ottawa set to work on Park’s plans almost immediately, Canadian Golfer reporting late in the summer of 1920 that at “present Royal Ottawa … is undergoing extensive improvements, two or three of the holes being considerably shortened in the meantime” (Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 5 [September 1920], p. 364). It was reported that “many thousands of dollars are being spent at the Royal Ottawa on building new greens and improving the fairways” (Vancouver Daily World, 21 October 1920, p. 10).

The editor of Canadian Golfer thought that the work Park had recommended for Royal Ottawa in 1920 would take a year to complete: “When the alterations now being made are completed next year, the Royal Ottawa will have links of championship calibre” (Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 5 [September 1920], p. 375). But the club had asked Park to plan work that could be carried out incrementally over several years:

Willie Park … prepared plans under which the links in their present layout could be substantially improved.

These plans were so made as to enable certain improvements being carried out in successive years….

[N]ew greens have from time to time been constructed and planted with Creeping Bent by means of stolon cultivation ….

(Canadian Golfer, vol 11 no 2 [June 1925], p. 147).

Under the heading “Altered Greens,” the following newspaper account from the summer of 1925 (when the fully renovated course was finally completed) provides information in retrospect about the recommendations Park had offered in 1920:

Better treatment, owing to the built-up green, is accorded to an overplayed drive on the second hole at the first corner, and while the third remains unchanged, the new level fairway short of the bunker on the fourth eliminates the chance of an awkward downhill lie, which so often confronted the blameless golfer as a prospect for his second shot.

The sixth green has been altered so that chance of over-running the green has been lessened and the tee enlarged to permit varying distances to be used, while the contours of the lower fairway on the seventh have been remodelled.

A sloping green on the eighth has been designed to make the pitch up the hill less awkward.

The eleventh, which has been made in one more than any other hole on the course, while previously measuring only 105 yards, has been lengthened and iron shots of varying lengths are required to reach the new green under the twelfth tee.

The twelfth and thirteenth have been given built-up greens, and the latter has been lengthened, this feature having been also applied to the fifteenth across the gully.

Shifting the tee back on the sixteenth has constituted an invitation to cultivate long driving and the same may be said of [the] seventeenth, but here with the added incentive for accuracy on the second shot to the hole, which has been placed in closest proximity to the gully.

Long drivers will have no anxiety for the fate of their tee shots on the home hole as the chance of being left with a lie on the side of the slope has been eliminated by placing the tee far back.

(Ottawa Citizen, 26 June 1925, p. 10)

Park’s priority seems to have been to lengthen a number of holes, to build bigger tee boxes, and to build modern “built up” greens for at least seven of the 18 holes at Royal Ottawa.

Moffatt Ross Secures Scotty Miller

Even when he was succeeded by J.R. Buchanan as chairman of the Golf Committee in November of 1920, Moffatt Ross’s supervision of the development and maintenance of both the temporary and the permanent golf courses remained hands-on, as shown by the early 1921 newspaper advertisement that would lead to the hiring of greenkeeper Scotty Miller: “Golf course greensman to take charge of Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club’s new links, must have thorough knowledge of golf course maintenance. Apply J. Moffatt Ross” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 February 1921, p. 14).

Figure 102 Scotty Miller. Photograph courtesy of Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club.

Although diminutive in stature (five feet, two inches tall), Gavin Weir (“Scotty”) Miller, loomed large in the Ottawa greenkeeping community by the time of his retirement in 1956.

He had immigrated from Lanarkshire, Scotland, to work at a golf course in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1903, moved to Royal Ottawa for a while and then Rivermead. Indicating in the 1911 census that he was a farm labourer, he was presumably just another member of the grounds crew at Royal Ottawa and Rivermead in those early days.

When he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915, mind you, he gave his profession as that of “Butcher,” so we know that his employment as a greenkeeper had not been continuous.

Miller was not discharged from the army until January of 1920, when he was deemed unfit for further service. He had been hospitalized for everything from gunshot wounds in the arm and leg, incurred while in action in France, to gonorrhea (soldiers with this affliction were legion during World War I) and bronchitis – caused by mustard gas and exposure to the elements (this bronchitis became a chronic condition). Morrison was gassed at Vimy Ridge in March of 1917 and then wounded in the famous Canadian assault there on April 9th.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given such experiences during the war, Miller was regularly fined for drunkenness!

It was a year after his discharge from the army that Miller responded to the advertisement placed in the local newspapers by Moffatt Ross. He would prove to be a key actor in the construction of the golf course under the supervision of David Kay in 1921.

For a well-researched account of Scottie Miller’s life and times, see Bruce A. McDonald’s essay, “The Search for ‘Scottie’ Millar – The Hunt Club’s First Superintendent” (2018).

1921 Construction

If the following newspaper report is accurate, the first round of golf on the Willie Park course was played in March of 1921: “The golf season for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club opens up next Saturday [March 19th] when a well known and courageous four have arranged a game for that day on the links now under construction” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 March 1921, p. 1).

David Kay might have objected to such a venture as premature, but he had not yet returned to Ottawa to continue supervision of golf course construction:

To Be Ready in July

Mr. David Kay, well-known golf course expert, has arrived in the city from New York and will have charge of the completion of the new golf course now being constructed by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

Work in connection with the completion of the course will be commenced shortly, and it is expected that a twelve- or thirteen-hole course will be ready by the early part of July.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1921, p. 9)

Kay was presumably the source of the information published in a newspaper report two weeks later about the progress of work on the new course:

The Ottawa Motor and Hunt Club [sic] now has a first-class nine-hole course.

This is of course a temporary one, but good progress is being made with work on the new links, which, it is expected, will be ready for play in the course of a couple of months.

New greens are being laid, traps and bunkers being added to make the course a sporty one, and in one place, a fairway is being cut through a clump of tall pine trees, this adding greatly to the architectural beauty.

Work will be rushed and by the latter part of the summer the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club will have one of the finest courses in Canada.

(Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1921, p. 11)

The fairway “being cut through a clump of tall pine trees” was presumably Willie Park’s 13th fairway (today’s West 9), for there was no other stand of tall pines on the course at this time other than the one through which this fairway was routed.

Recall that at the end of April 1920, “When inspecting the property …, Mr. Park fortunately found a bed of black soil that will be used in constructing the sub strata of the putting greens and to surface the fairways” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19). In due course, this resource seems to have been used in the way Park had anticipated. As Ernest Lecuyer (who worked on the construction of the course beginning in 1921) recalled in 1983:

Doing No. 5 was a big job because of the swamp.

So we ditched it and drained it, cleaned it out with horses and big ploughs.

It was all bullrushes and willows and everything, so we stumped it, too, and drew a lot of earth from there for around the course.

(Ernest Lecuyer in conversation with Eddie MacCabe, cited by Kucey, p. 63).

In the long run, the soil that Park had discovered was either insufficient for requirements or not excavated from the swampy areas of the course in time for application to greens and fairways being constructed in 1921, for Scotty Miller later recalled that during the 1921 season, he and the construction crew received “top soil brought from New Jersey” (Ottawa Journal, 3 May 1956, p. 24).

At one time, nine holes were supposed to be ready at the beginning of 1921, but delays in selling bonds scotched that plan, delaying the beginning of construction until the end of August 1920.

Then nine holes were supposed to be ready for play at some point in July of 1921.

But that hope was also frustrated, and the first nine holes were not completed until the fall of 1921, and they would not be opened for play until 1 July 1922.

Which holes were the nine completed by the end of 1921?

They did not include 3, 4, 5, and 6 (today’s South 3, 4, 5, and 6): “the third, fourth, fifth and sixth holes, which were in swamp land,” were “getting their finishing touches” only in the spring of 1923 (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1923, p. 15). And they did not include the five holes on the west side of Bowesville Road, which were added to play only in September of 1922:

Progress on Course

Five new holes of the golf course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club on the Bowesville Road are to be opened for play about September 1st . Announcement to this effect was made this morning by Mr. Moffatt Ross.

At present, only nine of the eighteen holes of the course are being played over, and with the opening up of the new holes, a fourteen-hole game can be played.

(Ottawa Citizen, 2 August 1922, p. 1)

The first nine holes ready at the end of the 1921 season, then, were Park’s 1st, 2nd, 7th, 8th, and 9th (today’s South 1,2, 7, 8, and 9), and Park’s 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th (today’s West 6, 7, 8, and 9).

Yet despite the continual deferral of the completion of the first nine holes, at the closing banquet at the end of the 1921 season, Club members seem to have expressed perfect satisfaction at the rate of construction progress. The following is a press release from the Club after its 1921 Beef and Greens banquet:

After the dinner, a general discussion took place regarding the programme of the new golf course construction and great enthusiasm was shown.

Nine greens and tees are completed and will be playable in the spring of 1922.

The work on the other nine greens and tees is progressing very satisfactorily and it is expected that the members will be playing on the completed course by the fall of 1922.

The enthusiasm was such that a large block of bonds was subscribed for before the closing of the discussion.

(Ottawa Journal, 31 October 1921, p. 13)

The discussion was full of such enthusiasm that members put their money where their mouth was.

Hear! Hear!

And there was great optimism:

While the play this year has been entirely confined to the temporary course, everyone sees something par excellence to play on next year when the new course will be opened for playing on.

This new course has been loudly praised by hosts of our native golfers and some keen golf enthusiasts from the United States as being the making of Canada’s finest.

(Ottawa Journal, 28 October 1921, p. 13)

At the beginning of the year, we recall, one American had bid $500,000 for the Club’s property. How much more might he have bid after a further year of work on the golf course?

The Finish by Foley?

John Foley has long been credited with construction of the Willie Park course at the Ottawa Golf and Hunt Club. As we know, however, in charge of course construction until at least mid-1921 was David Kay, sent to Ottawa in 1920 and 1921 by the exclusive New York agent for Carters Tested Seeds, Incorporated: Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller.

Unfortunately, in his brief history of the Club written in advance of the 1932 Canadian Open, W.Y. Denison wrote a sentence that seems subsequently to have been responsible for confusion about who built the golf course:

Arrangements were made with the late Willie Park, Jr., … to plan and lay out a permanent 18-hole course.

Upon the completion of his work, a contract was let for the construction of the course, which, incidentally, was finally completed under the very able supervision of Mr. John Foley.

(Kusey p. 12).

It seems to have been assumed by some that Denison was indicating that the contract for construction was let to John Foley.

But this is not the case, and this is not what Denison says. Instead, he communicates two separate pieces of information here:

first, that the contract for construction was let (and let, that is, to the New York company which he neglects to name, but it was no doubt secretary Denison himself who told the Ottawa Journal in June of 1920 that “the greens will be built by the Carter Seed company [sic]” [Ottawa Journal, 16 June 1920, p. 17);

second, that John Foley eventually came on board to finally complete the construction begun by others.

The reason Denison mentions that “the construction of the course, … incidentally, was finally completed under the very able supervision of Mr. John Foley” is because the year is 1931: Foley is president of the Club and will continue to be president when the Canadian Open is played the following year. Denison is letting Canadian Open officials, players, and spectators who read this contribution to the Canadian Open programme know whom they should congratulate on the state of the course.

As we shall see, Foley had “finally completed” the construction of the course in 1927. The question, however, is when he began to complete it.

Recall that after laying out the course at the end of April 1920, Park returned to Ottawa early in the morning on 24 August 1920 to spend three days supervising the beginning of construction on the course, and with him was one of his most experienced and trusted construction managers: “A matter of $60,000 is to be expended on the job and it is being supervised by Mr. David Kay, a Scotsman of international reputation, who has undertaken the laying of greens for some of the best known golf courses in the world” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5). And recall that at the beginning of November 1920, another New York man was sent to the Club to assess Kay’s progress and in due course he addressed the Club’s board of directors: “Mr. Jackson, representing the contractors for the new golf links, reported progress and said that six weeks’ work in the spring would put it in good condition” (Ottawa Journal, 11 November 1920, p. 2).

David Kay returned in the spring of 1921, but when he arrived, he suggested it would take not six weeks but nine or ten weeks (that is, all of May and June, and a week or two in July) to have a playable course:

To Be Ready in July

Work in connection with the completion of the course will be commenced shortly, and it is expected that a twelve- or thirteen-hole course will be ready by the early part of July.

(Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1921, p. 9)

There is no report of David Kay’s returning to Ottawa to work on the course in 1922.

Should we assume that at some point during the 1921 construction season, David Kay handed-off the role of construction manager to John Foley?

Whence Honest John?

Figure 103 Ottawa Journal, 6 July 1932, p. 14.

In 1942 obituary newspaper items about John Foley, it was said that he was “one of the founders of the Ottawa Hunt and Holf Club” and that he “had been a member of the club since 1919” (Ottawa Journal, 21 January 1942, p. 1; Ottawa Citizen, 21 January 1942, p. 12).

Yet one month after the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club in early June of 1919, the Ottawa Journal published a comprehensive list of the 185 members of the new Club (including two women, Miss Clara Potter and Miss Sarah Sparks) as of the evening of 11 July 1919, and the name of John Foley was not on the list (Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1919, p. 7).

I doubt that it was golf that initially brought him to the new Club. Foley was interested in many sports – in Ottawa, he supported hockey, lacrosse, baseball, rugby, and football (donating equipment, managing teams, and serving on boards of directors), and he became a curler of such high calibre that he was invited to play for the Canadian team that toured Scotland in 1921 – but I can find no evidence that he played golf anywhere (let alone at the new Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club) before 31 October 1921 when he shows up in a newspaper report regarding the Club’s closing Beef and Greens tournament and banquet that year.

He was about 61 years of age then.

He took to the game immediately, mind you, and must have been on the course frequently throughout 1922, for at the beginning of the 1923 season, he was described as “one of the most enthusiastic players in the club” (Ottawa Journal, 14 May 1923, p. 19).

John Foley was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1860, the year the first Open Championship was contested, but the sports he played in his youth were said to have been cricket and soccer (Ottawa Citizen, 21 January 1924, p. 12).

He “received his early education at the Jesuit school in Edinburgh operated by the Sisters of St. Catherine’s Convent” and entered the business world “at an early age,” working for an Edinburgh company of cement contractors. He married Margaret Anna McLaren of Edinburgh in the mid 1880s. His company sent him to work in Philadelphia in 1888, but he returned to Edinburgh the same year – perhaps because of his wife’s health: she died in 1889. He returned to Philadelphia in 1889 and in 1890 “was brought to Ottawa by the Canadian Granite Company to lay concrete sidewalks in Ottawa” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 January 1924, p. 12). He worked for this company as far afield as Belleville, Napanee, and Kingston, where he laid out the first concrete sidewalks.

A Kingston woman who had recently moved to Ottawa, Annie Elizabeth Linegar, became Foley’s second wife in September of 1891 (they would have a son and three daughters). In the same year, he also formed his own construction company and continued building sidewalks, his biggest project being the construction of a cement bridge in Battleford, Saskatchewan.

In 1907, along with several other Ottawa businessmen, Foley formed the Ottawa Construction Company in an effort to compete in the Ottawa market with the exclusively American companies that had previously paved Ottawa’s streets. Soon, “contract after contract fell to the Ottawa firm in competition with the American firms, which gradually dropped out of the fight” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). In 1913, “seeing the great possibilities of paving business outside of Ottawa,” Foley and one of his Ottawa Construction Company partners, John Gleeson, organized the entirely separate Standard Paving Company “and started after outside business” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7).

Although “neither John Foley nor John Gleeson knew anything more about asphalt than that it was for making better roadways,” through “general adaptiveness, brains, and energy,” they were soon laying pavement in Preston, Belleville, Peterborough, Lindsay, London, St. Thomas, Brantford, St. Catherines, Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). All these contracts were won through competition, but “it may be said that the Standard [Paving] Co. … made such a good name for themselves in Western Ontario that in a number of towns the councils have given them work without calling for competition” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7).

In their partnership, “Mr. Gleeson had the getting of contracts and the handling of finances, while Mr. Foley looked after the construction end” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). Foley’s work for cement companies was said to have given him “no end of knowledge of how to get work done in the most expeditious and profitable manner” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). Furthermore, “he was a natural born handler of men and developed a wonderful way of making friends and business connections” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7).

I wonder whether David Kay rented construction equipment from Foley and Gleeson in 1920 and 1921, for Standard Paving had quite an array of it: “steam shovels, cement mixers, asphalt plants, tank cars, excavators, besides a complete organization of wagons and tools” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). If so, it would perhaps explain how Foley first came to be familiar with the Club and the nature of golf course construction.

Foley was described as “a Scotchman with an Irish name, and an Irish temperament” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). The Ottawa Journal observed: “Mr. Foley was born in Scotland, and so was his father, but his people before that were all Irish, and though he curls like a Scotchman, he never forgets when St. Patrick’s Day comes round” (Ottawa Journal, 17 March 1916, p. 7). Indeed, many people in Ottawa thought Foley was Irish:

In the Contracting Business

The Irish run to contracting. When you see a gang engaged on any work, it’s pretty safe to assume that the fellow bossing the job is an Irishman.

One of the city’s well-known contractors is John Foley. He has laid many miles of streets in the Capital – and they’re good streets….

John Gleeson is another Irishman who has made a big success in this line.

(Ottawa Journal, 16 March 1918, p. 14)

It seems that Foley’s oratory was associated with a supposedly Irish gift of the gab: at one meeting, it was said that “The Irish of John supplied the happy peroration” (Ottawa Journal,13 March 1928, p. 17).

Although it is unclear when Foley first began to work on the golf course, we can see that by the late 1920s, he had come to see the golf course as his baby – it was a child that he was raising: “When John remarked that the course would be like ‘the smiling face of a child,’ he brought the house down” (Ottawa Journal, 13 March 1928, p. 17).

But before Foley became associated with the Club in any way – indeed, before the new Club was even formed – he had a life-changing experience. At the end of 1917, “Foley became suddenly very ill” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). He had contracted Typhoid Fever, and “at one time his life was despaired of” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). He survived, but the fifty-seven year-old businessman immediately showed that his brush with death had impacted him profoundly: “When he recovered, he decided to retire from active business. He sold out his interests in both the Standard Paving Co. and the Ottawa Construction Co. to Mr. Gleeson” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7).

Gleeson successfully ran the two companies for two more years, increasing their value substantially and then selling them early in 1920 to Montreal financiers who reincorporated the companies as Standard Paving and Materials, Limited. The new owners convinced Foley to come out of retirement to serve both as a company director and as the company’s Ottawa district manager, a position that he maintained until his death in January of 1942 at 81 years of age.

Indeed, he was working in the office just a week before he died.

But between his near death in the winter of 1917-18 and his actual death in 1942, Foley had another psychologically significant introduction to death – death on an unimaginable scale.

He paid a visit to No Man’s Land.

Foley in Flanders Fields

Foley sailed for Great Britain on 30 December 1920 as a member of the “All-Canadian” curling team that would spend nine weeks in Europe (Ottawa Journal, 4 December 1920, p. 27). The team played thirty-four matches against various teams in England and Scotland, winning thirty of these contests. The team toured major curling centers, including Manchester and Edinburgh, and then visited London and Paris, but “before returning to Canada, the party visited the battlefields of France, where they spent four days touring” (Ottawa Journal, 7 March 1921, p. 1).

Foley was astounded by the hospitality of the Scottish people. As he told an Ottawa reporter: “It seemed as though everyone in Scotland was trying to show that theirs was the most hospitable of countries and their people the most gracious” (Ottawa Journal, 8 March 1921, p. 12). But it did not take long for him to realize that the Canadian curlers were the beneficiaries of a goodwill earned by others:

The Canadians were met at the Edinburgh railway station by several hundred members of the Royal Caledonian Club and were escorted to their hotel … by a band of pipers….

On the 13th [of January] they were the guests of the City of Edinburgh at a banquet and reception where the Lord Mayor presided.

At this banquet, every speaker spoke in a complimentary manner of the valor of the Canadian soldiers and of their conduct while visitors in Scotland….

(Ottawa Journal, 8 March 1921, p. 12)

Recognizing that a large part of the overwhelming welcome the curlers had received in Scotland was a projection of the people’s appreciation of Canadian soldiers sent to that country during World War I, Foley then visited the part of Europe where the remains of some of those Canadians lie undiscovered to this day:

The Trip to France

The whole party journeyed to France and spent four days visiting the battlefields.

Mr. Foley states that every member of the party who had not previously visited this area was absolutely dumfounded with what he saw.

Every effort is being made and all energies are concentrated on reclaiming land that has been rendered almost useless for peaceful pursuits by the war. Very little, if any, building is going on and people in the large cities and towns that were torn to pieces by German shells are living in huts.

The cities and towns are almost the same as they were two years ago [when the war ended], it was explained….

To the majority of the party, it was an experience never to be forgotten, said Mr. Foley.

(Ottawa Journal, 8 March 1921, p. 12)

When Foley visited Europe, thousands of square miles of battlefields between the trench lines running from the English Channel to the Swiss border remained the muddy, treeless hellscape known as No Man’s Land. Battlefields had been left just as they were when battles ended there in 1916, 1917, or 1918.

Figure 104 After the Battle of Passchendaele (in which 15,600 Canadians died), which ended in November of 1917, the land was left as field after field of blasted trees, water-filled shell craters, and mud.

Figure 105 A 1920 photograph shows the temporary cemetery at Fonquevillers, near Arras, France. Nearly every provisional wooden cross says, "To an Unknown South Stafford killed in action, July 1st, 1916." Foley will have visited this part of France.

When Foley visited the French-Belgian border areas, the land was still being cleared of military equipment, unexploded shells, and decomposed corpses. Everywhere the Canadian party went, they would have seen temporary burial sites (as illustrated to the left) where human remains awaited formal and final interment in the military cemeteries that are ubiquitous in Belgium and France today.

A visit to these cemeteries today is an experience never to be forgotten. It is hard to imagine what these areas would have been like in February of 1921.

I suspect that the four days Foley spent touring the battlefields and shattered towns and cities of France in 1921 played a role in his determination to complete the transformation of the Club’s Sahara desert into a garden: two years after he returned from touring the battlefields, he used this very language when he promised members that “the fairways would blossom as the ‘Garden of Eden’” (Ottawa Journal, 15 October 1923, p. 20).

Foley's Fairways and Greens 1923-1927

Foley assumed a leading executive role at the Club in 1923.

That year, he and his long-time business associate John Gleeson seem to have exercised something of a friendly takeover of the Club. Gleeson was elected president at the beginning of the year (although he did not finish the year as president) and Foley at some point (by at least the late summer) was named a Club director, and, by at least the fall, he had replaced the person who had begun the year (as of March) as chairman of the Green Committee.

Figure 106 John Gleeson. Ottawa Citizen, 23 July 1934, p. 2.

Reacting to a drought early in the 1923 season that severely compromised the health of the grass on the course, Gleeson and Foley purchased a water pump, wired it up themselves, and called the other directors to the pump site in October and donated the pump to the club: “The installation, according to Mr. Moffatt Ross, is worth between $2,500 and $3,000. The new outfit was tested … by turning on 15 of the green hoses and a firehose at the same time. The pressure was sufficient to handle this amount of work with a reserve” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 October 1923, p. 5).

By this point, Foley had significantly supported the club in at least one other way, too.

He had subscribed for at least $15,000 of the Club’s bonds, a fact of which we learn from the announcement of a deal he struck with the City of Ottawa in the fall of 1923:

“[The city] decided to accept from Mr. John Foley, of the Standard Paving Company, $15,000 of Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club bonds in lieu of cash as sufficient security for the usual ‘draw back’ retained by the city in connection with the company’s Bank Street paving contract” (Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1923, p. 3).

The substantial support for the Club that Foley had offered by 1923 seems to have earned him an influential role in the management of the golf course. He would serve as chairman of the Green Committee from 1923 to 1929 (also serving in the latter half of the 1920s as Club vice-president) and he continued to play an important role in the maintenance and development of the golf course even after he was elected Club president in 1930.

He had become the Club’s E.F. Hutton: when Foley spoke, people listened.

And he was easy to listen to, for he was a good orator and charmed club audiences. “In acknowledging with many blushes the gratitude the members expressed to him” for the donation of the water pump, “which insured in future a supply of water not only for the greens but for all the fairways and in addition was a source of protection from fire to the Club House,” Foley assured members “that in the future the fairways would blossom as the ‘Garden of Eden’” (Ottawa Journal, 15 October 1923, p. 20).

It was said that in all things, Foley was a quick study: initially, he “didn’t know anything about asphalt, but what he didn’t know he very soon picked up, and it was not long before he became an expert in the handling of asphalt” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). I imagine that something similar happened at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club: initially, he knew nothing about golf course construction but learned quickly and soon became an expert.

His reputation in Ottawa as a person who could get things done was unrivalled:

Mr. Foley has the reputation of being a man who doesn’t like a job unless it has obstacles in it, and unless it is working against a time limit…. When the contractor “fell down” on the grand stand at the exhibition grounds a few years ago, the city picked John Foley to pull order out of chaos ….

[And] Mr. Foley is a great master of languages. He can make himself understood by Poles, Austrians, Ruthenians [peoples of contemporary Belarus and Ukraine], Italians, Russians, Swedes and half a dozen other sorts all at once.

His “job” language is vigorous, virile, and effective.

(Ottawa Journal, 17 March 1916, p. 7)

After the departure of David Kay in 1921, Foley put this vigorous, virile, and effective “job” language to work on behalf of the Club, bringing nine holes into play in 1922 and the full 18 holes into play the next year.

But Foley was not done: in the mid-1920s, he also presided over significant changes to the length of many holes, the location of two greens, and the order in which holes were played (Ottawa Journal, 21 January 1942, p. 12).

In 1925, it was announced at the Beef and Greens closing banquet that the Club had a significant budget surplus and that it was intended to dedicate this money to golf course improvements. An appeal was made to members present that night to supplement the money available for such work, and so we read:

the club is in a flourishing condition, having had the most successful season of its history ….

A substantial surplus, augmented by contributions from members present, was turned over by [the] treasurer … to John Foley for construction of a practice putting green and improving the fairways which require it.

(Ottawa Citizen, 12 October 1925, p. 12).

Figure 107 Foley's new first tee made in 1926 (shown as it appeared in the late 1920s or early 1930s). Canada Department of the Interior, Library and Archives Canada, Box no. 2760.

Most of the work envisioned in the fall of 1925 was undertaken during the 1926 season.

Just what the improvements to certain fairways comprised is suggested by the Club’s early 1927 review of Foley’s construction work during the previous year: “The course has been lengthened to 6,700 yards and No 1 tee has been moved over to near the clubhouse. Fairways Nos 3, 4, 5 and 6 have been lengthened and their courses changed” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 April 1927, p. 11, emphasis added).

Changing the course of fairways 3, 4, 5, and 6?

What Foley may have done to change the course of fairways 5 and 6 is unclear, but we have a good idea of what he did to the fairways of the 3rd and 4th holes because of what he did to the greens for these two holes.

In 1926, Foley created two new greens, which were introduced into play during the 1927 season: “The Hunt and Golf Club now has a full championship course, 6,770 yards for the 18 holes. Two new greens have recently been added to make it one of the sportiest of golf courses” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 September 1927, p. 10). These new greens seem to have been necessitated by changes made to the length and “courses” of the fairways on the 3rd and 4th holes.

53 yards were added to 3, and 47 yards were subtracted from 4.

It seems that the original Willie Park 3rd and 4th greens are visible on a post-1927 map of the course, as seen below in an enlarged detail from this map.

Figure 108 Edited and annotated detail from a post-1927 map of the course in Kucey p. 43.

What I take to be the old “Park 3 green” is still marked on this map, as is what I take to be the old “Park 4 green.”

The original 370-yard Park 3rd hole used the creek running across the east end of the property as a hazard just beyond the back of the green, whereas the 423-yard Foley 3rd hole required this creek to be carried with the approach shot to the green.

The Park 3rd green was described as “so bunkered that it looks like an island” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22). The approach shot on this 370-yard hole was presumably to be played with a “lofting” iron – the player’s task being to land the ball on the green and hold it there (as opposed to falling short into a front bunker or running, bouncing or flying over the putting surface into a bunker – or even the creek – beyond).

The green that Foley built for the 3 rd hole in 1926-27 can be seen in the photograph below.

Figure 109 A view of the approach to the Foley 3rd green circa 1928. Edited and annotated photograph from Kucey p. 49.

The Foley green is 53 yards beyond the original Park green, which is just to the right of the right-hand margin of the photograph.

The new green seems much less bunkered, and – significantly – it has no bunkers directly in front of it. At 423 yards, the new 3rd hole would have been regarded in the 1920s as a fairly stout par 4, the green having to be receptive to a ball played to it with a relatively low trajectory and considerably less stopping ability than the high trajectory and better stopping ability of the lofting iron expected to played onto the original 3 rd green (which was entirely surrounded by bunkers).

The dogleg for the 4th hole shown on the post-1927 map above seems to have been created by Foley when he shortened the hole by 47 yards and built the new green.

If the review of Park’s 4th hole from a 1922 review of the new golf course is to be trusted, we can infer that the original 4th hole was not a dogleg: “Number four, … a short hole, is easy, providing you play straight ahead. But a topped tee shot leaves you into rough that resembles a jungle, and a slice or a pull finds either thick woods or sand-traps” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22, emphasis added).

Foley’s new 4 th green can be seen in the photograph below.

Figure 110 Edited photograph of the Foley 4th green circa 1930. Kucey p. 66. The original Park 4th green seems to have been beyond this green, probably just to the right of the tall tree on the left-hand margin of the photograph.

Foley built an extraordinary green. It had a low front tier and a high back tier, and the latter seems to have been of the venerated punchbowl style. The elevation, the mounding, and the intimidating bunkering are similar to features of this sort found on the green complexes that Willie Park, Jr, had designed at Huntercombe in 1900.

It is possible, I suppose, that Foley exactly recreated Park’s original 4th green in this new forward location.

The Club certainly seems to have been intent on respecting Park’s intentions for the course.

In their Report and Financial Statement for 1926, President A.H. Fitzsimmons and Secretary W.Y. Denison explained that the process by which Foley’s changes were authorized involved consideration of whether they were consistent with Park’s vision for the course:

During the past year, extensions and alterations to the course were authorized by the Board and approved by the members, the estimated cost of which was between $5,000 and $6,000.

A considerable portion of the work was done last Fall and the cost of same amounted to $1,736.87.

This explains the item in the Balance Sheet “Alterations to Golf Course 1926.”

Before authorizing these changes and extensions, which were strongly recommended by the Greens Committee [chaired by John Foley], the Board investigated the matter very thoroughly, secured outside opinions, and finally came to the conclusion that the improvement in the course, which would result therefrom, duly warranted the expenditure.

As a matter of fact, with very few exceptions, the changes simply amounted to completing the original plan as laid out by the late Willie Park.

(A.H. Fitzsimmons and W.Y. Denison, Report of Board of Directors and Financial Statement for the year ending December 31st, 1926 [Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, February 1927], pp. 2-3)

One might wonder how lengthening to 423 yards a hole that Park had stipulated should be 370 yards, and how shortening to 333 yards a hole that Park had stipulated should be 380 yards, could have been construed by the Club directors as “simply … completing the original plan as laid out by Willie Park.”

Had Park perhaps drawn up these two holes with these alternative lengths should the club prefer such a configuration?

Recall that he had drawn up a hole for the Astors in 1895 that could be constructed in either of two ways: the 6th hole “is 230 yards from tee to hole, which might be made 440 yards if wanted” (Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5).

And recall that in 1896, Park warned that a new club with many beginners should not lay out its original golf course at full length:

It is to be kept in view … that the links are to be laid out for the use of a certain class of golfers.

If all are beginners, it is a mistake to make the course too difficult at first, as it will diminish their pleasure and possibly disgust them with the green [i.e. golf course] ….

[B]ut as they get more expert, the links can be made more difficult by lengthening the holes and similar devices.

(The Game of Golf, p. 201)

The “outside opinions” that the Club directors sought before approving Foley’s recommendations were presumably provided by architects.

Judging by comments made by Foley in 1928, I take it that consulting with an architect had become the regular procedure to be followed when the ever dynamic chairman of the Golf and Grounds Committee came up with proposals for changes:

Hunt and Golf players will be glad to know that the long number 12 hole [today’s West 1], one of the most trying in the Ottawa district, will be shortened by 75 yards.

Number 9 [today’s South 9], another hole that has been productive of more plain and fancy profanity than any other, will be reduced.

Guarding bunkers will be put up on number 12 so that those who like to browse in the sand pits will not be denied their favorite pastime.

John Foley, in his comprehensive outline of what had been accomplished last year, stated that an expert golf architect would be called in to make essential improvements.

(Ottawa Journal, 13 March 1928, p. 17)

I can find no evidence that Foley ever shortened 9 or 12, for these holes were afterwards reported to be the same length they were before they were mentioned in this newspaper item from the spring of 1928 as targeted for shortening. It may be that the architect who was consulted about “essential improvements” recommended against these proposed changes.

The Club’s early directors clearly talked the talk of fulfilling and preserving Willie Park’s architectural intentions.

Whether Park would have regarded them as having always walked the walk is not clear.

For instance, Park intended his 6th hole (today’s South 6) to be a stout 435-yard par 4. And he left no doubt about his high regard for the hole he had planned:

“The sixth hole [today’s South 6] is as interesting a golf hole as I have planned since I left Scotland,” says the golfer.

He describes it as an elbow hole [that is, a dogleg hole] where the driver is not only compelled to negotiate a creek, but also a lagoon, which will be constructed for the first drive. [This lagoon would be built by Thomas McBroom in the early 1990s.]

The green is of the raised type and closely guarded with traps and mounds.

(Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27)

Foley added 95 yards to the hole and changed the par to 5.

Clearly, a 435-yard par 4 and a 530-yard par 5 pose different challenges to the golfer: effectively, they are different holes.

And there was a clear and absolute departure from Park’s intentions regarding the routing of holes.

For instance, Park intended that as a significant test on the back nine of the golf course, players should encounter two consecutive long par-5 holes: the holes Park designed as his 13th and 14th (today’s West 9 and West 1).

But, as we shall see, these two holes have not been played consecutively since 1925.

Rerouting

In 1926, Foley changed the order in which Park’s second nine holes were played. (He did not do this without the approval of the Club directors, mind you, but all proposals for changes to the course emerged from Foley’s Green Committee.)

Figure 111 Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27.

Park had laid out a 6,518-yard course in April of 1920.

The order and lengths of the holes published in the newspaper at that time have been shown above, but, for the sake of convenient reference in this chapter, they are again shown here (to the left).

Note that although the figure given at the bottom of this table for the total yardage is 6,518, adding up the yardages for each of the individual holes yields a total of 6,488 yards.

I suspect that there was a typographical error in printing the length of the twelfth hole.

Printed in the table as 115 yards, the length of the hole was never reported as less than 150 yards (when it was completed in the fall of 1921, for instance, it was 150 yards).

I suspect that Park had written the figure “145” in his table and that either the reporter or the typesetter made a copying mistake.

Reviews of the Park course in April and June of 1922 by Brian Devlin and Michael Grattan O’Leary, respectively, indicate the length and the order of almost every hole in the spring of 1922, although only nine holes were then ready for play.

Devlin, an advertising agent, was also the golf editor of the Ottawa Citizen (an expert golfer, he was the club champion at Royal Ottawa in the mid-1920s). On 16 April 1922, he “made a complete round of the course from first tee to last green” in the company of the Club president, the chairman of the Green Committee, two Club directors, and the club professional Harry Towlson. Devlin struggled to express the extent of his admiration for the design:

Figure 113 Brian Devlin, 1896-1955.

My original intention had been to take the course as a whole, as well as by individual holes, in an effort to analyze its possibilities and probabilities – its strength and weakness – so that local golfers other than the actual members might learn what steps have been taken in the last thirty months towards the making of a golf course.

I now realize that, even were I the wielder of a most facile pen, to do justice to this latest addition to the ranks of the Ottawa links would necessitate covering the same ground many, many times, for the countless features in golf architecture and layout come so fast on the heels of one another that, try as one may, a confused jumble of amazement and enthusiasm is almost sure to result.

Neither the gathering of the salient points nor the writing of the description of them, can be done in one short summing up ….

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 Aril 1922, p. 11)

Knowing that the level of the average Ottawa golfer’s architectural sophistication was not high, Devlin worried that “many” members “even now do not realize what they have in their possession” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 Aril 1922, p. 11).

Devlin discussed two distinct groups of holes.

First, he described “the ones nearing completion”: “the first and second holes, the holes from the seventh to the thirteenth, inclusive” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 Aril 1922, p. 11). These holes are today’s South 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9 and West 6, 7, 8, and 9. These were the nine holes that would be officially opened as a nine-hole course on 1 July 1922.

Second, Devlin discussed in vaguer terms the holes that were still under development throughout 1922: “The unfinished parts of the course are still a bit hazy in my mind,” he confessed. The holes in question were “the third, fourth, fifth and sixth, and the last five” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 Aril 1922, p. 11). The “third, fourth, fifth and sixth” holes to which Devlin refers are today’s South 3, 4, 5, and 6. The “last five” holes he mentions were those on the west side of Bowesville Road, which Devlin called “the upper field” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 Aril 1922, p. 11). These holes were Park’s 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th. Park’s 18th hole has since become the driving range, with only its teeing area intact, and his 17th hole has been reversed and become West 5 (West 4 was not part of Park’s design, instead having been created by Michael Hurdzan in 2013). Today’s West 1, 2, and 3 were Park’s 14, 15, and 16.

Figure 113 Michael Grattan O'Leary, 1888-1976.

On 20 June 1922, Michael Grattan O’Leary, a young editor at the Ottawa Journal, was also given a tour of the course. He was led over the complete 18-hole course by Moffatt Ross.

In his review several days later, O’ Leary declared that the layout “stands foremost among the great courses of the country,” observing that “nerve, concentration and accuracy [are] demanded by an architecture that is the last word in golfing structure” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22). Furthermore, the course has “greens which no course in Canada can excel” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22).

It is clear from O’Leary’s review that by the end of June 1922, a great deal of progress had been made on the nine “unfinished” holes that were a bit “hazy” in Devlin’s mind in April, for O’Leary gives a detailed description of most of these holes.

In combination, these reviews indicate that the order of the holes in the spring of 1922 was just as Park had planned in April 1920 (and the length of the holes was pretty much the same, too, although a few holes were 5 or 10 yards longer or shorter than Park’s figures).

Figure 114 Willie Park's 12th green (today's West 8) circa 1928. Kucey p. 66.

Foley would make Park’s 150-yard 12th hole the 17th hole (today’s West 8), but we can see that this change had not occurred by 1924, for the first hole-inone at the at the Club was made in August of 1924 on this 150-yard 12th (Ottawa Journal, 28 August 1924, p. 12).

And in 1925, reference was made to “a birdie on the short 12th,” so we can see that the Park routing endured into 1925 (Ottawa Citizen, 24 June 1925, p. 1).

But scores made on various holes during a big invitational tournament held by the Hunt and Golf Club in September of 1926 make clear that Park’s 10, 11, 12, and 13 now played as 15, 16, 17, and 18 (today’s West 6, 7, 8, 9) (Ottawa Citizen, 7 September 1926, p. 10).

It is also clear that Park’s 14th (today’s West 1) now played as the 12th.

And tournament play in 1927 reveals that Park’s 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 had become 12, 13, 14, 10, and 11, respectively.

That is, West 1, 2, and 3 played as 12, 13, and 14. West 5, reversed from today’s configuration, was the 10th, playing from the Bowesville Road end toward the Rideau River end, and today’s driving range was the 11th, playing from the Rideau River end of the range towards the Bowesville Road end of the range.

Comparing Park’s 1920 routing and yardages to the 1927 routing, and the 1931 yardages for the latter routing, reveals the following:

10 yds were added to Park 1 (South 1).

26 yards were added to Park 2 (South 2).

53 yards were added to Park 3 (South 3).

47 yards were subtracted from Park 4 (South 4).

43 yards were added to Park 5 (South 5).

95 yards were added to Park 6 (South 6), and the par was changed from 4 to 5.

17 yards were added to Park 7 (South 7).

1 yard were subtracted from Park 8 (South 8).

33 yards were added to Park 9 (South 9).

Park 10 became 15 (West 6), and 7 yards were subtracted.

Park 11 became 16 (West 7), and 10 yards were added.

Park 12 became 17 (West 8), and 10 yards were added.

Park 13 became 18 (West 9), and 19 yards were added.

Park 14 became 12 (West 1), and 2 yards were added.

Park 15 became 13 (West 2), and 11 yards were added.

Park 16 became 14 (West 3), and 1 yard was subtracted.

Park 17 became 10 (now reversed as West 5), and 20 yards were added.

Park 18 became 11 (now the driving range), and 5 yards were subtracted.

Foley’s engagement in the construction of the golf course, probably beginning in 1921 or 1922 and extending to at least 1927, was so intense and intimate that he may have developed a sense of the Park layout as having become his own. Certainly a reporter who talked to him about the 1927 layout formed the impression from the way Foley talked about it that it had been designed by him: “When John Foley, energetic member of the Hunt and Golf Club directorate, planned the course, he intended that it should provide a real test for golfing skill and a real test it proved to be” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 September 1927, p. 10).

Foley had “planned the course”!

Strategic Design

Reviewing progress on the Willie Park layout up to April of 1922, when nine holes were opened for play, Ottawa golf writer Brian Devlin drew attention to features of Park’s design principles that architects and golf historians would soon call “strategic”:

My article … emphasizing the fact that many good golf holes lend themselves to an approach from one particular direction was hardly off the press when it was brought home to me that the views advanced in it might well have been written with the Hunt and Golf Club as a foundation for the main idea.

On practically every hole, a well-placed, well-thought-out tee shot will make the shot to the green one of comparative simplicity ….

A clout played without a thought for what is to follow, even though it may come to rest on some portion of the fairway, will have the player struggling continually to make up for his lack of respect for the line of play that Willie Park conceived when he laid out the hole.

A well-played drive, however, does not permit the player any very great liberties, for, though it opens up the shot to the green amazingly, one who has not a fine shot with which to follow it up is still a long way from being out of the wood, as it were….

The greens … are all built and backed-up so that they “are looking right at you,” inviting warmly any shot which alights on their rolling surfaces.

Should the shot, however, stray …, warmth will be relegated in favor of fever-heat – oh, very feverish!

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11)

Devlin then observed how individual holes exemplified these aspects of Park’s philosophy.

On the first hole (today’s South 1), he noted, Park requires the green to be approached from the left side of the fairway:

It is better to play to the left, for the neck of the bottle-shaped green opens up to a third shot played from this side of the course.

A shot from the right or center, while possible, leaves no latitude for a ball which pitches short, for a great slash-bunker starts at the right-hand side of the green, swinging more than half-way across the front edge.

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11)

On the second hole (today’s South 2), the green complex, “with its sharply cut-away banks and surrounding bunkers,” shows “again … that there is both a right and wrong route to take with one’s drive” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11).

The long two-shot 7th hole (today’s South 7), “if one expects to get home with a brassie [two-wood] second, must be approached from an oblique angle at the left. A bottle-necked green again, but one that may be held with any kind of a full shot if the correct course is taken from the tee” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11).

Proper position on the 9th fairway (today’s South 9) was also the key to creating a scoring opportunity:

Now comes the ninth, a three shot hole if there ever was one.

Five hundred and thirty-five yards long, it is a dog’s-leg, swinging from right to left to right.

It calls for a straight-away tee-shot, a second with a brassie [two-wood] that may bear ever so slightly towards the green, and a firm third with [a long] iron up the open road to the greatly elevated green.

By taking a more direct, though rather dangerous, route, the third shot may be made with a mashie [five-iron].

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11)

On the 11th hole (today’s West 7), proper placement of the tee-shot again determined whether reaching the green would be a matter of a simple shot or a herculean shot:

Three hundred and eighty yards on the eleventh is a nice two-shot distance if – I repeat – IF your tee-shot crosses the hill well to the left.

Then it is a nice long iron or spoon [three wood] to the well-guarded green.

Otherwise, I would suggest some sort of a very accurate, high-powered rifle, for no mere mortal would care to attack the cluster of bunkers and [trees], which bite into the direct line from the right, with any regulation equipment.

(Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11)

In a postscript to this review of the nine holes that entered play in April of 1922, Devlin supplemented his earlier observations:

There are … eighteen varieties of surface contours, and the slope towards the spot [in the fairway] from where the shot to the green should be played differs in every instance….

The shot to the green, long though it may be, should always be played with a clear idea of what side of the pin it must come to rest.

Otherwise, the player may find himself with a putt almost impossible to lay dead.

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1922, p. 30)

Devlin’s review highlights an aspect of Willie Park’s 1920 design philosophy that anticipates the theorizing nine years later of golf course architects Herbert Newton Wethered and Tom Simpson who outline a theory of strategic golf course architecture in The Architectural Side of Golf (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1929).

Wethered and Simpson recommend “strategic” golf course design as preferable to the “penal” style of golf course design that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. They observe a phenomenon with which we are familiar: “in the ‘penal’ school, hazards are placed to catch and punish the ill-executed shot…. The intention is to prevent the player getting off scot free on every occasion when he offends or commits a blunder” (Wethered and Simpson, p. 33).

As noted above, until World War I, few golf course architects could conceive of laying out a golf course other than according to the principles of “penal” design.

As late as 1915, for instance, in his essay on “The Trapping of Golf Courses” in Canadian Golfer, Nicol Thompson (Stanley Thompson’s old brother and early architectural mentor) recommends the principles of penal design when he explains how he would go about designing what at that time was a relatively long par-4 hole:

Figure 115 Nicol Thompson. Canadian Golfer, vol 1 no 1 [May 1915], p. 40.

Take a two-shot hole of 390 to 420 yards.

If the hazards are properly placed, a topped ball from the tee will make it impossible to carry the hazards and reach the green on your second. This is as it should be.

A man who gets off a good tee shot is deserving of the advantage he thus obtains as against his opponent who tops his ball and then gets to the green, or near it, on a fluky second because of the absence of proper hazards.

There should, too, be side hazards to catch the pull and slice, extending along a considerable distance to catch the long and short wild shots ….

The hazards should be so constructed as to always cause the loss of a shot. (Canadian Golfer, vol 1 no 1 [May 1915], p. 40)

In the diagram shown below, Wethered and Simpson illustrate the kind of bunkering preferred by penal architects like Nicol Thompson to achieve a penalizing effect on the sort of long par-4 hole under discussion, with bunkers in front of the tee to catch the high handicapper’s topped tee shot and with bunkers left and right for a considerable distance along the sides of the fairway to catch a tee-shot hit right or left of the centre line of the fairway (whether hit by a short hitting high handicapper or a long hitting scratch player).

Figure 116 Illustration of penal bunkering on a 380-yard two-shot hole. Wethered and Simpson, p. 33.

The bunkers placed across the fairway in front of the tee and the bunkers placed across the fairway in front of the green are the standard cross-bunkers recommended by the Dunns to prevent the poor high handicapper who tops the ball from ever reaching the green in two shots.

These bunkers must be carried, or a one-stroke penalty is almost always imposed, as only a heroic recovery shot will enable the player to make par.

Wethered and Simpson propose to replace this sort of golf course design with a “strategic” architecture.

They explain that “by the ‘strategic’ method … [punishment] is administered in a more delicate and indirect fashion. A fault once committed leads inevitably to a false position which places the player at once at a disadvantage” (Wethered and Simpson, p. 33).

On a strategic hole, a player’s “bad shot is in such a position that unless he brings off a very exceptional shot he cannot reach and remain on the green” (Wethered and Simpson, p. 32).

Instead of being punished for misplayed shots by a bunker, however, as the golfer would be on a hole with penal design, the golfer who misplays a shot may merely be on the wrong side of the fairway for the best angle of approach to the green. The golfer’s difficulty in regard to the second shot is created by the architect through “the orientation of the green and the position of the wing hazards guarding the approach” (32).

Of course, it is precisely this architectural strategy that Devlin observes over and over again in his review of Park’s 1920 design for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club – a design laid out almost a decade before Wethered and Simpson theorized its genius. As they explain, in “strategic” architecture, “to play a hole as it is intended by this method means that certain positions are laid down for opening up play to a green, and if a player fails to reach them, he is faced with certain disagreeable consequences” (Wethered and Simpson, p. 32).

Figure 117 Illustration of a 'strategic" design for a 380-yard par-4 holes. No cross-bunkers required. Wethered and Simpson, p. 33.

In advocating for “strategic” design, Wethered and Simpson argue that high handicappers should always be allowed an “alternative route” to the hole: they should be allowed to work around hazards and find a manageable approach to the green (Wethered and Simpson, p. xii).

From the point of view of “strategic” design:

we would never countenance the placing of fairway bunkers to catch a bad shot.

If … the fairways are properly shaped and the greens and their wing hazards oriented correctly, there is no need whatever for fairway bunkering….

In fact, the view we take is that to plaster a fairway or the rough on either side with bunkers merely assists the good player [to steer his shot and focus on the distance to hit it] and is only effectual in quite needlessly irritating the long handicap man.

(Wethered and Simpson, pp. 32-33).

In the diagram to the left, Wethered and Simpson suggest an alternative design for a 380-yard two-shotter that replaces “penal” design philosophy with “strategic” design philosophy.

To earn an approach shot to the green that avoids having to carry the bunker guarding the green, golfers must place the drive as far up the right side of the fairway as they determine they can without going too far (ending up in the rough) or falling too short (requiring that the next shot carry the bunker). At the same time, the high handicap player can place a drive in many places and then concentrate on placing the second shot somewhere on the right side of the fairway so as to avoid having to play over the bunker guarding the left side of the green, thereby allowing access to the green (and an opportunity for an up-and-down par) by either a simple pitch shot or a run-up shot.

One can see that in 1929, Wethered and Simpson are describing what Willie Park was doing at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in 1920.

Yet for all the perspicacity of his April 1922 review, Devlin also reveals the kind of blind spot that often led Green Committees to compromise a great strategic architect’s design by adding random bunkers here and there. Devlin thought that Park’s fairways lacked bunkers:

It might almost be said that, so far, the question of bunkers has been left unanswered.

None but those which came in as an integral part of a green’s construction have been excavated. Few have been tentatively staked out ….

But have no fears!

When Willie Park comes again to add the finishing touches to his masterpiece, there will be many to say that the practised hand has lost none of its lavishness in this respect.

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1922, p. 30)

Since the theory of “strategic golf architecture” was still awaiting Wethered and Simpson to articulate it, Devlin did not recognize that the genius of Park’s design obviated any such fairway bunkering: there was no need of a second coming by Park.

Devlin concluded his April 1922 review of the first nine holes with a prescient observation: “The members of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club may be justly proud of their links – not only is the course an addition to Ottawa – it is of national importance in the golf world” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1922, p. 11).

Park’s Ottawa layout was an important early articulation – materially and conceptually – of a new dimension of modern golf architecture, as we can see from a twenty-first-century explanation of the origins of “strategic” design:

[Architects associated with strategic design derived their principles] from the intense study of the most famous of all golf courses, the Old Course of St. Andrews.

Here there is not one hole which dictates only one possible line of play or playing strategy. Instead there are always many alternative routes to get from tee to green successfully. Along the way, there are countless hazards of different degrees of difficulty to overcome that demand a conscious decision about the best playing strategy on each shot.

The essential attraction of the game lies in the courage to carry hazards or to pass them as closely as one dares, in order to have the next shot shorter and easier. The freedom of choice to weigh up between risk and reward epitomizes the strategic design philosophy, which gradually superseded the penal design.

The architects that postulated the strategic design philosophy recognized that it was against the target of gaining a broader popularity for the game of golf when inaccurate shots were punished too severely by deep bunkers that allowed only short recovery shots. Therefore, they developed the guideline that it had to be the supreme target of golf course architecture to make the course a stern test, and an interesting challenge for good players, without being exceedingly demanding and discouraging for the weaker players – a guideline which is still valid today.

From it they derived that the hazards, following the principle of risk and reward, should be placed in the vicinity of the landing area of the tee shot which offered the best angle of play for the following shot.

Thereby, the player should be encouraged to play “on position” ….

(“The Evolution of Golf Course Design,” European Institute of Golf Course Architects, 9 May 2009 https://eigca.org/the-evolution-of-golf-course-design/)

Just as Devlin emphasized over and over again the importance of putting shots in the proper “position” on Park’s Ottawa course, so Karl Keffer recognized that Park’s “strategic” architectural genius at Mount Bruno had placed the hazards in the vicinity of the positions that a good golfer wanted to be. After Keffer played at Mount Bruno in the Quebec provincial championship in the spring of 1922, he reported to Devlin: “There do not seem to be many bunkers – few are to be seen around the greens, that is, comparatively few, and the fairways are not by any means thickly strewn – but every time you miss a shot, you seem to find one” (Ottawa Citizen, 1 August 1922, p. 11).

According to the tenets of “strategic” design, it all boils down to position, position, position.

As noted by Park’s great-nephew Mungo Park, Geoffrey Cornish (a disciple of Stanley Thompson and a respected historian of golf course architecture) drew attention to this prescient aspect of Park’s work:

As Geoffrey Cornish wrote to John Adams (The Parks of Musselburgh, Grant Books):

“It is evident to me that Willie Park was practising strategic design in Canada and the US during his 1916-23 years … whether or not the words ‘strategic’ and ‘penal’were being used at that time in relation to design.”

(Mungo Park, Golf Course Architecture, no 14 [October 2008], https://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/content/willie-park-jr)

Park's Passing

Willie Park, Jr, laid out his last golf course in Vermont during the first week of August 1923, when he was hired by the St. Johnsbury Country Club to lay out a nine-hole course.

Figure 118 Mungo Park (1877-1960), circa 1930.

Park was offered “a thousand dollars plus train fare from New York City and room and board for his stay, and some expense money” (Beth Kanell, “Amazing Greens: 100 Years of Notable Golf at the St. Johnsbury Country Club,” The North Star Monthly, 27 April 2023).

As fate would have it, Willie was not able to complete the course because of ill health and so his much younger brother Mungo (1877-1960), also a golf professional and a golf course architect (then residing in Argentina), would complete work on the greens the following spring, when the club paid “$2,480 to Willie Park and his brother for laying out and work on the nine hole golf course, and other smaller sums for repairs to the property, improvements, etc., which he itemized” (Caledonian-Record [St. Johnsbury, Vermont], 17 May 1924, p. 2).

The local newspapers’ accounts of Willie Park’s visit to the club and the characterization of his discussions with the new club’s members provide no hints of ill health in August. In fact, they suggest that he was still conducting business very much as usual:

Over a score of members of the St. Johnsbury Country Club met will Park, the international golf course architect, at the club grounds Sunday afternoon and went over the proposed nine-hole course which Mr. Park has staked out for immediate work. It was unanimously agreed that the work should start at once and there was genuine satisfaction at the excellence of the course as mapped out.

Mr. Park, who has laid out hundreds of courses both in this country and in the British Isles, said he had never before seen a more naturally situated course and one which could be more easily converted into a high-class one.

The course as laid out covers 3, 135 yards. According to Mr. Park’s estimate, it will carry a par of 34…. [Each hole is then described in this article, with the length of required drives and approach shots explained – presumably based on Park’s explanations to the party walking the course with him.]

Mr. Park talked to the assembled club members about the cost of the course that he had mapped out, and, with expert supervision, the cost will be about $6,500, all properly laid out with deep humus and seeded with red top. This will provide for large greens. The fairways will be planted with 125 pounds of grass seed to the acre and will be all trimmed away and cleared for a real high-class course.

One of the unusual things about the course is the fact that there is a plentiful supply of both sand and humus on the property and nearly enough dressing is stocked in the old barns to take care of fertilizing of the greens and fairways.

Mr. Park explained that but for the natural advantages and the supply of materials at hand, the course, which can be built for around $6,500, would cost $20,000 to $25,000 in some localities. There are practically no hazards to be built as the naturally rolling land, with two small brooks, etc., furnishes natural hazards for a high-class golf course.

Mr. Park estimates that he can have the course laid out in 25 days. This does not mean that the permanent greens can be played on this year, as they must be seeded this fall and will be in condition for playing next July. However, the course would be in condition for playing within two or three weeks, as the tees and fairways would be completed and temporary greens and holes for playing. The permanent seeding would be done in the fall.

(St. Johnsbury Republican [Vermont], 9 August 1923, p. 5)

Willie’s brother Mungo later taught the golf course crew how to mow (Beth Kanell, “Amazing Greens: 100 Years of Notable Golf at the St. Johnsbury Country Club,” The North Star Monthly, 27 April 2023).

Figure 119 1923 aerial view of the 9-hole Willie Park layout for the St. Johnsbury Country Club. As promised by Park, substantial progress was made on the course in 1923. Photograph from Beth Kanell, “Amazing Greens: 100 Years of Notable Golf at the St. Johnsbury Country Club,” The North Star Monthly, 27 April 2023.

An account of Park’s conversation with club members virtually identical the one cited above appears in St. Johnsbury’s other newspaper, The Caledonian-Record, suggesting that the Country Club had provided these newspapers with an identical press release. In light of the Country Club’s account of Park’s behaviour at St. Johnsbury, his professional demeanour in general, as well as his expansiveness in his explanation of the design and construction costs of the course he is about to lay out in the summer of 1923, are indistinguishable from his dealings with Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club members in the spring of 1920.

He still seems to have been at the top of his game.

Figure 120 J.A. Park.

But then, suddenly (it seems), “Willie Park … had a complete nervous breakdown in New York” (Gloucestershire Echo [England], 18 January 1924, p. 5).

It was reported that “He returned to Scotland from New York at the end of October” (Daily Record, 19 January 1924, p. 2). It seems likely that Willie’s younger brother John (“Jack”) Archibald Park (1879-1935), the golf professional at the Maidstone Golf Club in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, was able to look after him in New York until their brother Mungo arrived from Argentina to sail with Willie from New York to Southampton.

At the port in Southampton, they were met by Willie’s wife Margaret and the three of them travelled by train to Musselburgh.

Figure 121 Craighouse Mental Asylum (built 1889-94), renamed in 1922 the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders.

At the beginning of January, the news was bad: “his condition has become worse, and he is now in a nursing home for a complete rest” (Gloucestershire Echo [England], 18 January 1924, p. 5).

Mungo Park says that the Registrar in Musselburgh was a longtime friend of the Park family and managed to get a place for his great uncle Willie in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders.

Known until 1922 as the Craighouse Mental Asylum, this hospital was still familiarly called “Craighouse” when Willie was a resident there.

Alas, in the hospital, “his health did not show any sign of improvement” (North Mail, Newcastle Daily Chronicle [England], 25 May 1925, p. 11).

According to great-nephew Mungo, “It is possible that his mental health was suffering from the effects of thyrotoxicosis, which at the time was untreatable” (Mungo Park, “Willie Park, Jr,” Golf Course Architecture, no 14 [October 2008]). Thyrotoxicosis, in which unhealthy levels of certain thyroid hormones circulate in the body, can produce a “thyroid storm” if untreated – possibly producing fever, tachycardia, agitation, altered mental status, impaired liver function, and even cardiac failure.

Willie Park, Jr, died 22 May 1925.

George Trevor (1892-1951), well-known sports writer for the Brooklyn Eagle, and apparently someone who knew Park fairly well, later described Park’s decline in New York:

Willie fell upon evil days and came to America … to recoup his finances.

Too old to take an active job as a professional, Park saw an opportunity to capitalize his knowledge of golf by becoming a links architect.

Willie made good in this exacting profession. One contract after another came his way.

It was typical of his abnormal power of concentration that he became so engrossed in his work that he had no time for outside interests.

Health Give Way Under Strain of Overwork

Always introspective, Park became more self-centered than ever.

His work utterly absorbed him. He thought over problems of construction while he ate and when trying to sleep.

Reticent and retiring to an unusual degree, he now shunned the society of his friends and associates whenever possible. Willie played a lone hand, refusing invitations to dinner and begging off whenever he was asked to address a club directorate on some phase of construction policy.

Park had the gift of being able to visualize in his mind all the little topographical details of any given plot of land which he had previously tramped over.

Strangely enough, he never could “read” a blueprint. Park trusted to memory rather than surveyors’ charts. A blueprint often confused him so completely that he would rush out of his office and walk over the territory under process of transformation in order to revisualize it in his mind….

Gradually his health weakened under the strain.

Unable to relax or to forget his work, Park was … truly a martyr to the game of golf …. Willie suffered a complete nervous and mental breakdown.

He was the victim of the game he loved not wisely but too well. The siren call of golf proved overpowering to a man of his introspective temperament.

Now Park has gone to meet his reward in the mysterious beyond, leaving behind him as fitting monuments to his creative genius … superb examples of golf course architecture ….

We like to think of Willie Park sitting serenely with his friendly briar, safe in that bourne from which no traveller returns, watching with infinite satisfaction as duffer and star wrestle with the bunkers and hazards he gave his life to design.

(Brooklyn Eagle, 5 July 1925, p. 37)

Figure 122 Left to right: St. Michael's Parish Church, Inveresk, and the memorial to Willie Park, Jr, mounted on the church yard wall.

Willie Park, Jr, is buried (with his second wife, Margaret, and two of their children who died young) in the village of Inveresk (on the south side of Musselburgh) in the church yard of St. Michael’s Parish Church.

Dedicated to him, fixed to the wall of the church yard, is the memorial seen above.

Conclusion

By the spring of 1923, John Moffatt Ross had pretty much done it all.

Beginning with an idea arising in his “fertile brain,” he had first proposed, in 1917, that the Ottawa Motor Club somehow acquire the Ottawa Hunt Club’s clubhouse and property (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1930, p. 5). Even then he had a golf course in mind.

Then, late in 1918, he was at it again. He had come up with a new idea and successfully negotiated the amalgamation of the two clubs early the next year.

Both to advance the amalgamation and to attract a new kind of member to the new club, he hired golf professionals Karl Keffer and Davie Black to assess the golf potential of the Hunt Club property and to design a temporary nine-hole course.

Figure 123 John Moffatt Ross, 26 July 1919. Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 7 (November 1919), p. 419.

Bitten hard by the golf bug when he took up the game in 1916, of course he played in the unofficial opening round on the new course on 26 July 1919 and then played in the official opening round on 6 September 1919.

His threesome was the first to play the temporary course in the spring of 1920:

The local golf season was officially opened yesterday when members of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club took advantage of the splendid weather and made their first trip to the clubhouse.

Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, Mr. Frank Jarman, Mr. S.G. Lugsdin and other members of the club went round the nine-hole course and stated that it was in splendid condition.

(Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1920, p. 15)

It was Moffatt Ross, of course, who retained Willie Park, Jr, to lay out the 18-hole championship course.

I presume that golf addict Moffatt Ross was at it again on 20 March 1921 as one of the first to play the Park course under construction: “The golf season for the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club opens up next Saturday when a well known and courageous four have arranged a game for that day on the links now under construction” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 March 1921, p. 1).

Moffatt Ross was the one who hired Harry Towlson. The benefits of that decision endured for the thirty-one years between 1920 and 1951.

He convinced the club to hire as builders the Carters Tested Seeds company (that is, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller), and he also came up with a popular and successful financing scheme that enabled the club to pay for everything.

He hired the first greenkeeper, Scotty Miller. The benefits of that decision endured for the thirty-five years between 1921 and 1956.

A week before the opening of the Park course on 1 July 1922, he accompanied Michael Grattan O’Leary on the round of golf that would be the basis of the latter’s glowing review of the course. Moffat Ross presumably introduced to O’Leary – and probably interpreted for him – Park’s architectural strategies (O’Leary, one of the editors of the Ottawa Journal, was a Rivermead member). When O’Leary described the optimism required to build the course, he knew that he was describing a characteristic of his companion that day, “Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, one of the enthusiasts behind the new Club”: “With an invincible courage, they brushed aside obstacles; sold bonds; secured the best scientific advice that money could buy; and pushed forward toward an objective of as fine a golfing course as nature and skill could provide” (Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p 22).

It was Moffatt Ross who announced to the newspapers late in the summer of 1922 that five new holes would be opened in September and promised the final four holes would be ready for the following spring. He had not been chairman of the Golf Committee for almost two years by this point, and yet the announcement of progress on the Park design was accorded to him.

What more could Moffatt Ross do?

Perhaps demonstrate how to play the new course?

After all, members were having a difficult time working out how to do so. When the regular monthly handicap competition was played in August of 1922, an Ottawa Journal writer noted that although the lowest gross score was 92, “The scores were very fair considering that the players have not yet mastered the intricacies of the Hunt and Golf course” (Ottawa Journal, 14 August 1922, p. 13).

So, Moffatt Ross did just that: showed members how to master some of its intricacies.

In medal play in October 1922, he made the lowest gross score in the season-ending tournament on the 13 holes of the Park course then in play: “J. Moffatt Ross won the cup for the best gross score with an 85” (Ottawa Journal, 16 October 1922, p. 16). It is not indicated which five holes were repeated to form an 18-hole circuit, but holes 3, 4, 5, and 6 were the last to be completed (apparently because they were in the wettest part of the property), so it would have made sense simply to repeat the five holes west of Bowesville Road to make a total of 18.

In match-play between August and October among thirty of the Club’s best players, Moffatt Ross fought his way to the final match in the first competition for the club championship:

J.M. ROSS IS CHAMP OF HUNT AND GOLF

The third of the local golf club championships was completed with the playing of the finals at the Hunt and Golf Club in which J. Moffatt Ross defeated R.A. Fraser decisively in a thirty-six hole match.

The weather was ideal, and the morning’s play, while not productive of anything extraordinary, saw the winner notching a number of par holes, with steadiness as the outstanding feature of his game.

Fraser, though a most promising young player, could not match the experience and evengoing methods of his older opponent.

Fraser hit a fine ball off the tee, being forced to concede little, if anything, in this department, with his distance offsetting the greater accuracy of Ross, but his short game did not hold up in the face of the cavernous bunkers and individually contoured greens which abound at the new club.

(Ottawa Citizen, 6 October 1922, p. 10)

Figure 124 Ottawa Citizen, 23 August 1954, p. 21.

And so, later in October, at the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club’s closing banquet, “J.M. Ross was presented with the P.D. Ross Cup, emblematic of the club championship” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 October 1922, p. 11).

The Ottawa Citizen writer observed: “The competition which has just been completed being the first championship of the Hunt and Golf Club, Mr. Ross will enjoy the pleasant distinction of having his name head off the list of winners of the permanent titular trophy” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 October 1922, p. 10).

Alas, that “permanent” trophy was not permanent enough. The P.D. Ross Cup did not survive the clubhouse fire of 1962.

The wooden base burned, the cup melted, and so did the forty shields on which were engraved the names of the club champions since 1922.

Alas, the name of John Moffatt Ross has not yet been restored to the list of the Club’s champions.

In the spring of 1923, reigning club champion Moffatt Ross was once again elected a Club director. He was also appointed to the Green Committee.

In April of 1923, for the first time, all 18 holes of the Willie Park course were officially opened for play. (Perhaps Moffatt Ross had already unofficially played over the course in March, as seems to have been his wont.)

What a feeling of accomplishment John Moffatt Ross must have felt at that time.

What a surprise that such a person should have been lost to Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club memory.

I hope that this essay will help to bring him back to mind.

Afterword

After his term as 1923 Club director, Moffatt Ross was seldom mentioned in the Ottawa newspapers in connection with Hunt and Golf Club activities. He remained a member of the Club until at least 1929 (he was regularly accorded a handicap by the Handicap Committee), but he played most of his golf at Rivermead.

Did he step back from his leading role at the Hunt and Motor Club to devote his time and energy to the new Automotive Club of Ottawa in 1922?

After the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club in 1919, the Motor Club continued to conduct its own business at the new Club under the title of “Motor Board,” but at the end of 1921, the Motor Board voted to separate from the Hunt and Motor Club:

A special meeting of the Motor Board of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club last night [29 December 1921] … approved of the recommendation to separate the Motor Board from the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.

A resolution was adopted … changing the name of the new club to Automobile Club of Ottawa.

It was felt that the time had arrived when the auto section was becoming so important as a motor body as to warrant a separation.

It was distinctly made clear, however, that in the separation there was nothing that could possibly be construed as ill feeling between the two organizations.

(Ottawa Journal, 30 December 1921, p. 4)

Doth the Automobile Club protest to much?

Recall that the amalgamation of the two organizations was said to have been both initiated by Moffatt Ross and successfully negotiated by him. Less than three years later, was it with equanimity that he participated in this separation?

Whatever the case may be, in the spring of 1924, for the first time in Club history, Moffatt Ross was not elected a Club director. Was this because he had not stood for election? Or had he been snubbed, perhaps prompting him to back away from his former leadership role at the Club?

As we know, even though he was no longer chairman of the Golf Committee, Moffatt Ross had been the one who announced in August of 1922 that fourteen holes of the Park course would be open for play by the end of the summer. Implicitly, at the end of the 1922 golf season, the golf course was still his baby.

But in 1923, Foley became chairman of the Golf and Grounds Committee and, as we know for sure, the golf course was thereafter his baby.

Club members were extremely grateful for Foley’s work as chairman of the Green Committee in the 1920s. By 1927, Club president A.H. Fitzsimmons was so enamored of Foley’s achievements that he averred “no other single man has done so much for the furtherance of any course than John Foley” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 16). And when Foley died in 1942, he was regarded by many Club members as “The Father of the Hunt Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 January 1942, p. 12). The ascendancy of Foley seems to have occasioned a gradual forgetting of Moffatt Ross’s central role both in the founding of the Club and in the forging of the golf course.

Perhaps Moffatt Ross’s backing away from his leadership role at the Club was a perfectly mundane matter. He may simply have come to the conclusion that splitting his energies between the Hunt and Golf Club, on the one hand, and Rivermead, on the other, no longer suited him, leading him to decide, instead, that he would concentrate his attention on the club where his wife played golf and socialized.

It may even be that Moffatt Ross had regarded his work on behalf of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, and especially his work to create its 18-hole Willie Park golf course, as he regarded so many of his other projects: as a civic duty.

Note how he initially explained his determination to build a golf course at the new Hunt and Golf Club:

It is in the interests of the community that playgrounds be provided not only for the children, but also for grown-up people as well, and the Motor Club, with their new Hunt Club premises, Golf Course, etc., are only keeping abreast of the times, for owing to a lack of recreation, many men are dying years before their time through too much office, and not enough diversion.

(Ottawa Journal, 21 June 1919)

By creating a golf course, Moffatt Ross was helping Ottawa residents to live longer.

In so many things he did, that is, whether he offered advice to municipal governments regarding housing developments, campaigned for the building of the Prince of Wales highway, negotiated the amalgamation of the Hunt Club and the Motor Club, or organized the building of the championship golf course, he understood himself to be doing something not for himself, but for the community.

The new Club and its new modern golf course were no more his than was the new highway.

It is possible, then, that Moffatt Ross concluded in the mid-1920s that his main work at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club was finished: he had gone as far as he could with the golf course.

And so, as Alexander the Great wept and went back home when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer, perhaps John Moffatt Ross simply went back to other interests when he realized there were no more holes to build.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Amalgamating Horsemen, Motorists, and Golfers

Willie Park, Jr: Golf Royalty

A Long Forgotten Founder

Focused on Golf Even Before the Beginning

The Keffer-Black Report

Who Was this Moffat Ross?

The First Architects

The Keffer-Black Nine-Hole Course

The Keffer-Black 18-Hole Course?

First Word of Another Architect

George Cumming

First Word of Willie Park?

Willie Park in 1919, the First Part

A Drive to Mount Bruno?

Willie Park in 1919, the Second Part

The Problem for Park to Address

Park's Emerging Modern Strategy

Park's Return to the United States in 1916

What to Do With a Set of Park Drawings

Park Abandons His Holiday to Come to Ottawa

A February Week in Ottawa

Gratification Not Deferred, Debentures Issued

The Progressive Aggression of Moffatt Ross

Moffatt Ross Hires Harry Towlson, A Carters Man

March Madness

Park's Four Days of Design

Park's Construction Manager

1920 Construction

A Visit from Mr. Jackson

A Close Call?

Push-up Greens

Park's Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club Greens

The Royal Ottawa's Willie Park Piggy-Back

Moffatt Ross Secures Scotty Miller

1921 Construction

The Finish by Foley?

Whence Honest John?

Foley in Flanders Fields

Foley's Fairways and Greens 1923-1927

Rerouting

Strategic Design

Park's Passing

Conclusion

Afterword