CONTENTS
Foreword
This book remains a work in progress.
I circulated the first edition among members, friends, and supporters of the Napanee Golf and Country Club. I did so first and foremost because it is about something we all love: the Napanee golf course.
But I also wanted to invite people who read this book and find the subject interesting to ask themselves whether they might have a piece of information about the Napanee golf course – a fact, an anecdote, a rumour, a photograph of some part of the golf course, an old publication from the club, or even an old scorecard--that they could pass along to me. Information about the golf course that lies in the background of a photograph, for instance, even if it is only a photograph of a trophy presentation or of a group of friends playing golf, or information that emerges from a story about the past, may help to fill out the picture of the history of the design of the golf course that I sketch below.
The second edition of Volume One is archived at the Orillia Public Library. So I similarly invite anyone from Orillia (where Fred Rickwood concluded his career as a golf professional in the early 1940s) who might have information about him to pass it along to me. People able and willing to share a memory of him will contribute to the remembering that he deserves.
Feel free to email me: dchilds@uottawa.ca
More information about either the Napanee golf course or the man who designed it will make for a better third edition.
Donald J. Childs
Acknowledgements
My brother Bob Childs has done wonders with computer technology on my behalf, especially with regard to old photographs. His love of Napanee Golf and Country Club probably exceeds my own, and it certainly inspired me in my work on this book.
Milt Rose’s enthusiasm for the history of the golf course, particularly as shown by his willingness to listen to my recitation of facts and figures that emerged as I first worked on this book, was also an encouragement to me.
Napanee Golf and Country Club’s Golf Course Superintendent Paul Wilson has generously provided me with helpful information that he has gathered from his work on the course over the years.
I appreciated Rick Gerow’s willingness to tell me about the construction of various parts of the golf course in the 1980s and 1990s, even though we were playing golf at the time and he was in the process of winning the Super Senior Golf Championship.
Similarly, Bing Sanford cheerfully and helpfully identified features of the Rickwood course for me when we played a round of golf together. It was always a pleasure to be in his company.
Mike Stockfish read an early draft of the book and offered encouragement and useful advice, for which I thank him.
When I requested information from the Orillia Public Library about an item on Fred Rickwood, the response of Amy Lambertsen, who runs the library’s Local History Room, was immediate, helpful, and generous. What a wonderful librarian!
Lisa Lawlis, Archivist at the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives, was thoroughly efficient, encouraging, and supportive through all the many hours of her time that I monopolized. What a wonderful archivist!
Jane Lovell, a member of the Adolphustown-Fredericksburgh Heritage Society, researches and writes about local history. She has a special interest in the Herrington family and Camp Le Nid and generously corrected errors in and contributed information to the second and third volumes of this book. Jane works tirelessly in promoting the preservation of local history and the dissemination of knowledge about it. I am very appreciative of her contributions to this project.
Margaret McLaren, a golf historian with a main focus on the Rivermead Golf Club, kindly informed me of Fred Rickwood’s work at the Belleville Golf Club and supplied newspaper clippings about it. I thank her for this important contribution.
I thank Sandy Gougeon, a granddaughter of Bill Brazier, for kindly correcting several inaccuracies in my account of Brazier’s life and for helpfully supplying further information about and photographs of her grandfather.
I also thank Karen Hewson, Executive Director of the Stanley Thompson Society, and Lorne Rubenstein, Canadian golf journalist and golf writer without peer, for encouraging words in support of my research on Fred Rickwood.
Dr. T.J. Childs was extraordinarily helpful in discovering information, documents, and photographs about a large number of the people whose stories are highlighted in this book. His genealogical skills are extraordinary.
Vera Childs donated funds to provide access to important rare photographs that were essential to my telling of the story of the earliest development of golf in Napanee. I thank her for her generous support of this project.
I am grateful to Janet Childs for her patience and forbearance during my work researching and writing this book, and I am especially grateful for her hard work in preparing this book for publication.
Perhaps most important to a book like this, however, is the pioneering work on the collection and interpretation of local archival information about the golf course by Art and Cathy Hunter, and their band of fellow researchers, published as Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 (2010). To contribute to what they started is a pleasure and a privilege.
Preface
If you Google the name “Fred Rickwood,” your search will yield little beyond the fact that he participated in a number of Canadian Open and Canadian PGA golf championships in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The search might also reveal an image of his grave marker in Toronto’s Prospect Cemetery.
Figure 1 Fred Rickwood grave marker, Prospect Cemetery, St Clair Avenue, Toronto.
The gravestone tells us little about Fred Rickwood. Apart from his name, date of death, and age, he is identified only as Company Quarter Master Sergeant Fred Rickwood of the 26th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
So much is missing.
There is not even a date of birth, and so perhaps it is not surprising that the age given is wrong.
Most importantly, there is nothing about his life in Canadian golf, which is a great shame, for golf was the main reason for his Canadian life.
This book is an attempt to honour Fred Rickwood by remembering his life in early Canadian golf, particularly with reference to his design of the Napanee golf course.
The greatest legacies that golf course architects leave golfers are their golf courses – the ones that endure as times change and continue to engage the interest of golfers as each new golfing generation emerges. In Nova Scotia and Ontario, several of Rickwood’s golf courses remain in play, hosting many thousands of rounds of golf each year. The oldest of his golf courses is 110 years old; the youngest, a spritely ninety.
Long may Fred Rickwood’s legacy golf courses last – especially that of the Napanee Golf and Country Club!
Introduction
In an article celebrating Napanee Golf and Country Club’s emergence into a third century since its opening in 1897, Flagstick magazine observes that “There is no designer of record for Napanee. Much like the historic courses of the United Kingdom, its nine holes (but ten greens and with eighteen separate tee locations) were crafted gradually – with renovations taken upon by the membership when it has been deemed necessary” (8 June 2007).
To say that there is no designer of record for the Napanee golf course is true enough, as far as it goes. Yet the absence of a designer of record is not a matter of a missing designer, but rather a matter of missing records. Or more accurately yet, it is a matter of not inspecting the existing records closely enough.
For closer inspection of the records reveals that there was indeed an identifiable designer of the Napanee Golf and Country Club’s course, that his work dates from what is known as “the Golden Age” of North American golf course design, and that his golf course design mentor was the greatest of all Canadian golf course architects: the legendary Stanley Thompson.
In Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 (2010), Art and Cathy Hunter reproduce two 1927 articles from local newspapers that draw attention to a visit to the Napanee Golf and Country Club that summer by a pair of golf professionals, one of whom would exert a fundamental and continuing influence on the playing of golf in Napanee.
The Hunters draw attention to the following item in the Napanee Beaver (10 June 1927):
GOLF MATCH
The match played here Wednesday afternoon was a very interesting game and was followed by a large crowd of spectators. Bill Brazier, British Professional of Toronto, was paired with George Faulkner, a young amateur from Belleville Country Club, against Fred Rickwood, British Professional of Toronto, and W. Kerr, Professional at the Cataraqui Golf Club. On the first round Brazier and Faulkner were two up and held the same lead during the second round. Brazier made a score of 76, for the 18 holes, which is good, considering that the greens are not in a fit condition for putting. He plays a very steady game and seldom got in any difficulty. His partner, George Faulkner, got in trouble several times on the first round, but played a 39 in the second round and if he continues, he should soon be heard of in the Canadian Championship matches.
Rickwood had 40 for each round and had three penalties. He played a very sporting game and took chances rather than playing safe, which of course pleased the spectators. He made some great recoveries after getting in difficulties. Kerr could not seem to get going in the first round, and the course did not seem to be to his liking, taking a 47 the first round. However, he improved in the second round and made a 39. Final scores, Brazier 76, Faulkner 84, Rickwood 80, and Kerr 86. After the game Brazier gave a very excellent demonstration of how a ball should be driven with the different kinds of iron and wooden clubs and apparently could make the ball do anything he wished. Both Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood have been very busy giving lessons to the local members, and all are delighted with their work. Brazier's two lectures have been most instructive to golfers. Rickwood, besides being a good instructor, is an expert in laying out courses and building greens, and has during his stay, laid out a new green and practically completed it.
The Management of the Club were very fortunate in securing their services, and it is to be hoped they will return in the near future, as there are many who have not had the chance to obtain lessons from them.
The Hunters also note the following piece a few days later in The Napanee Express (14 June 1927):
GOLF WEEK
Last week the Napanee Golf and Country Club staged an interesting and profitable week for its members. Messrs. Bill Brazier and Fred Rickwood, two well-known professional golfers, spent the week at the course, giving lessons to those asking for them, and repairing and selling clubs and advising the members on any golf matters at request. On Monday Mr. Brazier, who is a wonderfully fine golfer and a splendid teacher, gave a lecture on wooden clubs, and on Wednesday evening an exceedingly interesting lecture on iron clubs. On Wednesday afternoon Messrs. Faulkner, of Belleville, and Kerr, of Kingston, played an exhibition game with Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood. Eighteen holes were played, … Brazier and Faulkner ... winning the match. The golfers who attended the game were treated to a fine exhibition…. Mr. Rickwood, who has had years of experience in laying out golf courses, has prepared a plan for the improvement of the Napanee course, and while here laid out and completed a new number one green. Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood will return here in August to lay out further improvements in the course. Both gentlemen were delighted with the Napanee course, stating that the fairways were the best in Ontario, and with improvement to the greens the course will be one of the very best nine-hole courses in Ontario. A large number of the Napanee enthusiasts received instruction from the professionals, keeping their time fully occupied during their stay.
Who was this Fred Rickwood? Who was this Bill Brazier? And how did they come to be barnstorming the province on a fix-your-swing, fix-your-clubs, fix-your-course mission?
In particular, what can we learn about this “course-whisperer” Fred Rickwood and how he had accumulated “years of experience in laying out golf courses”? What might it have been in his “years of experience” that led the management of the Napanee Golf and Country Club to commission him, rather than another golf course architect, to present plans for the improvement of its golf course?
We note that the one newspaper indicates on June 10th that it was “to be hoped they will return in the near future,” whereas just four days later we read in the other newspaper that “they will return here in August to lay out further improvements in the course.”
Their return was to be in the very near future, indeed! And their plans for that return went from vague to certain in just four days. Their June visit must have impressed the golf club. What was it that convinced club management to let course designer Fred Rickwood lay out a new and improved course that August?
These questions are important for lovers of the Napanee Golf and Country Club, for the present routing of the golf course is largely due to his work late in the summer and early in the fall of 1927. Five of his 1927 greens are still used at the Napanee golf course, and on holes where his original greens have been replaced, his fairways and tee boxes are still in use.
So here is our missing designer of record: Fred Rickwood.
A Word on the Organization of the Book as Four Volumes
This book, A Forgotten Life in Canadian Golf: Remembering Fred Rickwood and the Making of the Napanee Golf Course, is presented in four volumes.
Volume One, The Course of Fred Rickwood’s Life: From Ilkley to Orillia, presents the biography of this Canadian golf pioneer.
Volume Two, Napanee Golfers and their Courses to 1906, provides biographies of the earliest known golfers in Napanee, discusses the golfing grounds where golf was first played in the area, and discusses the first golf course laid out in 1897 and used down to 1906.
Volume Three, The 1907 New Course and Four of Its Players, discusses the first nine-hole golf course laid out for the Napanee Golf Club, presents photographs of the 1907 design, and presents biographies of the four golfers who appear in the photographs in question.
Volume Four, Blending Penal and Strategic Design at Napanee, reviews the architectural principles that Rickwood learned from mentors like Stanley Thompson and analyzes in Rickwood’s design practices at Napanee his implementation of principles associated with the 1910-37 period of golf course construction that Geoff Shackleford calls The Golden Age of Golf Design (Sleeping Bear Press 1999).
Volume Four: Blending Penal and Strategic Design at Napanee
The Twain of Penal and Strategic Design at Napanee
When Fred Rickwood became apprenticed to Harry Vardon at the end of the 1800s, the dominant philosophy of golf course design for inland courses was called “penal.” When Rickwood redesigned the Napanee golf course in 1927, the tenets of penal design had been replaced by those of “strategic” design. Rickwood’s journey from the one design philosophy of the 1890s to the other design philosophy of the 1920s is a small-scale version of the same journey undertaken by the sport of golf itself during these years.
English golf professional Tom Dunn (1849-1902) has been called “the father of penal golf course design.” He was a leading figure in the late 1800s movement of golf course building from the traditional home of golf on seaside links land to inland sites, leading to the development of heathland and parkland golf courses. His designs are distinguished by his tendency to put a row of bunkers 30 to 40 yards wide across fairways (they came to be called “cross bunkers”).
He was the son and nephew of noted mid-1800s professional golfers William Dunn, Sr, and twin brother Jaimie Dunn, respectively. In due course, he became more famous than his father and uncle because of his instrumental role in the building of new golf courses around London as the popularity of golf spread from Scotland to England.
Figure 2 Tom Dunn, circa 1889.
His style of golf course architecture derives from the difficulties he faced in attempting to develop the traditional challenges of the existing linksland golf courses on land that had been tamed and developed to serve as fields, meadows, parks, and so on.
Golf historians suggest that the rudimentary cross-bunker hazards for which Tom Dunn became famous – and then infamous when they went out of fashion – were the simplest and most economical way for him to introduce hazards onto otherwise 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).
Tom Dunn’s style was copied by other golf professionals facing the same task of developing farms and parks into golf courses. Both Vardons were involved in this kind of work in Yorkshire. We can see below an example of the use of 30- to 40-yard-wide cross bunkers as hazards by Charles Thom on the West Herts Club golf course that he laid out in the fall of 1892.
Figure 3 Harry Vardon plays from a primitive cross bunker at the West Herts Club, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, England, 1899.
In the photograph above, Harry Vardon, the greatest living golfer, winner of three Open Championships by this point, finds himself playing from behind a dyke built up from the turf scooped out of the pit in which he finds himself. The pit or bunker is filled with coarse dirt instead of the sand that fills modern bunkers.
Still, although Tom Dunn was not the only architect to use 30- to 40-yard-wide cross bunkers as hazards on parkland golf courses, he “is believed to be the first to use turf dikes (dug up earth piled high to form a wall) …. often placed … about 30 to 40 yards in front of greens, occasionally placing sand at the base” (Forrest L. Richardson and Mark K. Fine Bunkers, Pits & Other Hazards (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2006], p. 104).
Figure 4 Willie Dunn, Jr, circa 1889.
Tom Dunn died young, but he passed this construction philosophy on to his first apprentice: his much younger brother Willie Dunn, Jr, who had been apprenticed to his brother at age thirteen and who would bring his brother’s “penal” ditches and dykes to North America in the 1890s. The brothers had collaborated in France on the design of the Biarritz golf course in the late 1880s. Here, Willie Dunn, Jr, converted William K. Vanderbilt into a golfer and so was subsequently invited by Vanderbilt to come to New York and design golf courses, such Shinnecock Hills, a regular U.S. Open site. He won the first U.S. Open in 1894 (before it was taken over by the U.S.G.A.) and built dozens of golf courses from coast to coast across North America.
The Dunn family was among the most influential families in the history of golf course construction.
Willie Dunn, Sr, had the two golf-course-building sons we have met already, Tom and Willie, Jr. But one of his daughters married a man named William Tucker, and all four of her sons became golf professionals in the United States. Stories in the sports sections of newspapers in the American northeast in the late 1800s and early 1900s are full of references to golf courses being built by “the Tucker brothers” (William and Samuel). Willie Dunn, Jr, also worked with his two nephews in building a number of these golf courses. Another of his Tucker nephews, John Dunn Tucker, extended the Pinehurst Number One course to eighteen holes in 1901. Another of his nephews, John Duncan Dunn, joined him from Britain in 1897 and served as his assistant professional at the Ardsley Country Club at Ardsley Park, Irvington, New York – the golf club of rich American industrialists (Vanderbilts, Morgans, Rockefellers, and so on) for whom Willie Dunn, Jr, had built a golf course the year before. John Duncan Dunn became his Uncle Willie’s partner the next year in a New York City golf club company. He built golf courses, too, designing Ekwanok Country Club’s course in 1899-1900 with Walter J. Travis. This was the first golf course in North America to be compared favourably to golf courses in Britain.
So although Willie Dunn did not invent the “earth banks” for which he became even more famous than his brother (whom he out-lived by fifty years), he had come by his fondness for them honestly: they were as close to being in Dunn family blood as possible. We can see an example of them on the private golf course that he built in 1895 for William Bayard Cutting. The relatively flat, featureless land of Bayard Cutting’s Long Island estate, called Westbrook (at Islip), was made more challenging for golfers by the artificial hazard that was the distinctive feature of Dunn courses – the turf dike, earth bank, ditch, trench, or cross bunker (it went by many names).
Figure 5 Westbrook golf course, Islip, Long Island, New York, built by Willie Dunn, Jr, in 1895.
Dunn’s drawings for the golf courses that he built in the 1890s show his determination to force golfers to carry the ball in the air across hazards – whether natural or man-made.
For all to see, he published in the New York Sun his plans for what would become for the time the most expensive golf course ever built: the Ardsley Country Club in Ardsley Park, Irvington, New York.
Figure 6 Willie Dunn, Jr., provided his plans for the golf course of the Ardsley Country Club to the Sun (New York), 24 November 1895, p. 20.
Eight holes on the nine-hole golf course cross a deep hazard of some sort. Dunn takes advantage of the fact that the golf course borders the Hudson River: so, along the river’s edge, his first hole crosses two ravines, his second hole crosses a “glen,” and his fourth and fifth holes cross a gulch. The golfer on the fifth hole also has to cross an S-shaped cross bunker. Dunn builds two cross bunkers on the sixth, which was his brother’s standard practice. The seventh hole crosses an aqueduct. The eighth hole crosses a cross bunker and an “artificial brook.” The ninth hole crosses an aqueduct. The golfer on the third hole merely faces an above-ground hazard: a “rail fence.”
Two years later, he published similar plans for the more modest course for the Elmira Country Club.
Figure 7 Willie Dunn, Jr, provided the Sun (New York) with his plans for the Elmira Country Club, Elmira, New York. He built the golf course between the fall of 1897 and spring of 1898 (16 January 1898, p. 8).
Eight of the nine holes of the Elmira golf course were made to cross ditches, pits, or small ponds, and the other hole was made to run for 315 yards with a ditch as its left boundary. Note that Dunn ignores the land at the centre of the lot owned by the Elmira Country Club: he is uninterested in it because ditches exist only around the perimeter of the property.
Because of the influence of the Dunn family, by the late 1890s, building a golf course in North America according to any other philosophy than that of “penal” design was not easily conceivable.
For instance, in Golf: A Handbook for Beginners (1895), one of the first books ever published on North American golf, James Dwight offers his complete advice on “Laying Out Links” in just seven sentences, and his focus is on hazards: “It should be understood that links vary greatly in length as well as in the character of the ground. There is no definite distance between the holes. If you possibly can, get some competent person to lay out the course for you. It is hardly likely that a beginner can take all advantage of the different natural hazards, etc. The distance between the holes must vary according as open places occur with some hazard in front. As to distance, an average of 300 yards makes a good long course. Some of the holes should be 400 to 450 yards apart, and one short hole of 100 to 120 yards” (p. 41). Note that laying out a golf course is all about making golfers cross hazards: one needs a competent person to take advantage of the natural hazards, and to recognize how to put a hazard between golfers and their targets.
Similarly, 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” ([New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co, 1898], p. 10). Smith channels the spirit of the Dunns.
In its 1897 second edition, Wright & Ditson’s Guide to Golf in America includes a new section on how to build a golf course, and in it we see the same penal assumptions. First, golfers must 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.” Second, “there should be always some hazard or bunker to trap a poorly played drive.” The Wright & Ditson Guide presumably reflects the ideas of Alex Findlay, hired by Wright & Ditson in 1897 to design and sell their golf clubs. The company also promoted Findlay’s work as a designer of golf courses in the American north-east from 1897 to 1900: the company’s plan was to provide golf courses where consumers could use their products. He designed over 100 early American golf courses and thereby earned a place as one of the fathers of American golf.
Figure 8 Alexander H. Findlay, 1865-1942.
Findlay clearly endorses the Dunns’ philosophy with regard to the creation of hazards on inland courses: “Where nature, by some oversight, has forgotten to provide hazards or bunkers, they should be built by man.” Reading his Guide’s account of the kind of obstacles that these early golf course architects dreamed up to force golfers to carry the ball over hazards is shocking: 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 is “building hedges of branches, such as are used in hurdles of steeple-chasing” (the problem being that “the ball is apt to be lost in them or creep into such a nook as to be unplayable”). In the context of such desperate attempts to create hazards on otherwise featureless land, the Guide sees the Dunns’ cross-bunkering system as much more 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” (29-35).
Such was the reigning philosophy of golf course design when Fred Rickwood became an apprentice to the Vardons in the late 1800s. Yet by the 1920s, when he reached his peak as a golf course architect, the “penal” philosophy of a generation before was being replaced by a new “strategic” philosophy.
Strategic design philosophy not only replaced penal design philosophy; it rejected it.
This reaction against penal design began long before the ideas associated with strategic design coalesced in the early 1920s. It began with a reaction against the idea that the game should belong only to the scratch players and that the high handicappers were of no account – that the latter should be penalized for virtually every mistake they made. Their topped and skulled shots should always end up in a hazard so as to cost them strokes. A golfer who played two perfect shots onto a green should not suffer the indignity of finding an opponent in the same position after two topped shots. The “duffer” had to be literally stopped: by hazards.
In 1920, Walter J. Travis, a proponent of strategic design, looked back to the work of Willie Dunn, Jr, as the spur to his own reaction against penal design’s bias against high handicappers: "Whereas the Willie Dunn system called for compulsory carries for both tee and second shots, I was an advocate of optional carries: that is to say, I believe in the principle of giving the player a choice of carrying a bunker or playing safe" (1920).
Figure 9 Walter J. Travis, circa early 1900s.
Yet almost twenty years before this, in his book Practical Golf (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), Travis describes his ideal golf course, and virtually every one of the eighteen holes he describes has a hazard that must be carried in the air. As he explains,
Such is a brief sketch of a course that ought to bring out all the good golf there is in a man to do it in a decent score. An endeavor has been made to arrange the distances and likewise the hazards so that it is practically impossible to get off a poor shot and make a recovery on the next, save by some phenomenal stroke.
The large majority of courses have too many levelling holes, of from two hundred and twenty to two hundred and sixty yards, and with the hazards so arranged that the player may top a drive and yet get the green on the next shot by simply taking a full stroke with some club, in the same number of strokes as the man who has played the hole perfectly. (p. 153)
Here is the essence of penal philosophy! The duffer who has misplayed a shot must be kept from arriving on the green in two shots – just as the excellent player has done after two perfect shots.
Travis’s book had been written over the course of many months, the chapters appearing as separate articles in a golf magazine. By the end of this period, he felt that he had to return to the topic of golf hazards to offer his further reflections, and here we see the outlines of the “strategic” school of golf course design:
On none of the sea-side links has Nature made it necessary to arrange the hazards of an artificial character on the same general lines as those in this country, and which, from Maine to Oregon, may be said to all bear the same family resemblance as to suggest a common origin. This is due partly to … an imperfect appreciation of the real needs of hazards and their refinements and artistic application in other than the regular stereotyped patterns, which tend largely to disfigure so many of our courses…. Usually they are represented by huge embankments thrown up transversely the full width of the course, resembling rifle-pits, of uniform height throughout – hideous excrescences on the fair face of Nature. There is a line of these fortifications confronting you from nearly every tee, ranging in distance from 80 to 130 yards, and another line for the second shot, and so on, with little or no diversification throughout the round. (pp. 184-85)
Clearly Travis refers to the work of the Dunns. Indeed, he seems to allude to them by a play on words in his reference to earthwork hazards coast to coast that so much “bear the same family resemblance as to suggest a common origin”: the Dunn family! He used the same joke earlier in the book: “Endeavor to construct the hazards as to furnish some diversity, rather than have them all of the same family type” (157).
His advice: “vary these artificial creations at each hole” (185); “make them more picturesque and in keeping with their surroundings” (185); “No bunkers on a first-class course should …. be made with perpendicular and precipitous faces so as to make it almost impossible to get out in one stroke. Instead of the array of steep cops with narrow ditches which disfigure so many courses, aim rather to make the cops more semicircular in shape” (157). (The cop is the turf bank beyond the bunker face.)
And give up the insistence on cross-bunkers: “Too much importance is attached to the putting in of bunkers across the entire width of the course …. Most hazards should be arranged so as to compel a man to drive both far and sure, and yet to give the weaker player a chance to avoid being bunkered provided he can play his ball wisely…. Take, for instance, the regulation bunker for the tee shot. This almost invariably stretches across the entire width of the [fairway]. Instead of this, I should put in one, irregularly outlined, of about one-third the width across, leaving clear spaces on either side for the shorter player who cannot comfortably carry it” (pp. 187-89). Shorter-hitting and more timorous golfers could thus plot their way to the hole by a route around hazards, but it would normally take them more strokes than par to do so.
The fact that Travis’s book Practical Golf, written between 1901 and 1902, endorses penal design philosophy at one point and strategic design philosophy at another point shows the ferment of ideas that was entering the world of golf course architecture at this time.
Travis’s one small step here in the direction of “strategic” golf course design was a giant leap for golfing kind. With it, we are on the way to Stanley Thompson’s declaration in 1923: “The most successful course is one that will test the skill of the most advanced player, without discouraging the ‘duffer,’ while adding to the enjoyment of both. This is not an easy task, but is by no means an insoluble one. The absence of cross bunkers has largely made it possible” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”).
Recall the Local Ground Rule published in the spring of 1927 by the Napanee Golf and Country Club for the 1907-27 hole that became the present first hole: “A ball played into the bunkers may be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke” (Hunters 18). It seems that the original fairway for the first hole had fearsome cross bunkers. The bunkers in question do not seem to have been part of the green complex, for we recall from Volume Three of this book the photograph of George Reiffenstein and Henry Lovell putting on the green for this hole and note that there were apparently no bunkers around that green at the cliff’s edge.
My assumption is that these bunkers from which a good number of Napanee golfers seemed unable to escape were built according to the “penal” design philosophy of the early 1900s: since unlike every other hole at Napanee there was neither ditch nor significant undulation to trouble a drive on the flat land of the plateau above Blanchard’s Hill, there must be a man-made hazard. Someone must have put in an earthwork cross bunker of the Dunn family type.
The thing to note at this point is that Rickwood did away with this feature of his first hole.
So as we review the architectural principles displayed in Fred Rickwood’s redesign of the Napanee golf course, we need to be mindful of the principles of the two prevalent philosophies that would have shaped his awareness of the main desiderata in golf course design up to 1927: “penal” and “strategic” design philosophies.
In Rickwood’s work, we will find things Dunn, and things not Dunn. And in much of what is not Dunn, we will find the influence of Stanley Thompson.
Fred Rickwood and Napanee's New Ambitions
From 1897 to 1912, the land on which the Napanee golf course was located was owned, first, by Sir Richard John Cartwright, and then from 1912 to 1925 by his son Dr. Richard Conway Cartwright. The land had been loaned or let by them to the Napanee Golf Club. In 1926, however, financial transactions occurred by which a member of the golf club named Thomas Beattie Wallace purchased the land outright from Dr. Cartwright and his wife Florence, and then arranged to sell the land for the same price to “Napanee Properties, a company formed by members willing to invest in the purchase of the land for a golf course” (Hunters 16).
In just a matter of months, a new clubhouse was built during the late spring and early summer of 1926 (expanded and modified, it still serves as the clubhouse today). When it opened on July 31st, the clubhouse had been furnished to country club standards, a process by which the club incurred considerable debt. During the same summer, further debt was incurred by the purchase of new machinery for the maintenance of the golf course. Now that the golf course property was owned outright by the golf club, it seems that for the first time the prospect of substantial cash investments in the property could be entertained.
Officially re-named the Napanee Golf and Country Club, the golf club seems to have taken itself more seriously as a sporting institution as of 1926. As it moved into its new clubhouse, club management applied for membership in the Royal Canadian Golf Association and was duly accepted as an Allied Member as of August of 1926. The golf club clearly wanted the Canadian golf world to recognize that it was a proper golf club.
Similarly, it wanted the local community to know that it was a proper recreational facility. In April of 1926, the following announcement appeared in the newspaper: “Napanee to Have a Country Club …. Electric lights, water and all modern conveniences will be supplied in order that the clubhouse will have all things necessary for its use as a country club” (16). A year later, the club directors announced that “the club wishes to make the club a centre for the community and hopes to have the united support of the citizens of the town,” and they expressed the further hope that “the town will soon have a splendid recreation centre” (Napanee Express, 12 April 1927).
At some point between the end of the 1926 golf season and the opening of the 1927 season, club management also determined to spend money on improvements to the golf course design. We read in the Napanee Express that “the directors reported recommending that in view of the deficit incurred last year that the fees be raised $5.00 per annum for each class of members….. Any funds remaining after the usual expenses are paid, will be used for the general improvement of the grounds and club house” (12 April 1927).
As noted above in Volume One, it seems also to have been at some point between the end of the 1926 golf season and the beginning of the 1927 golf season that Napanee Golf and Country Club hooked up with Fred Rickwood and asked him to present a plan for improvements to its golf course.
The Post-Rickwood Golf Course
Virtually all of the fairways in play on the Napanee golf course today date from Rickwood’s time. Rickwood re-used some of the fairways from the 1907-27 golf course, but he alone is responsible for the routing of the third, sixth, seventh, and eighth holes.
Of the 12 greens at the Napanee Golf and Country Club today (including the two practice greens), five were built by Rickwood in the summer and fall of 1927. At least six have been built since then.
The Napanee Beaver makes it clear that today’s green on the second hole was constructed late in 1960: “The course has had …. some improvements to greens, including a new green on the second hole” (19 April 1961).
Figure 10 Mary Kathleen (“Kay”) Myers (formerly Coathup, neé Kent), 1921-2017.
We know that the present green on what is now the third hole is not the green that Rickwood built. Kay Myers (formerly Coathup, neé Kent) told the Hunters that “on the third, the knoll in front of the existing green used to be the green itself” (p. 127). During a round of golf played together in 2019, Barry (“Bing”) Sanford pointed out to me the location of the Rickwood third green on the knoll in question, and pointed out also the depression on the west side of it that marks the remains a bunker.
Yet there is no word in the Hunters’ book about when today’s third green was built. On the one hand, Coathup joined the club in 1947 and recalled that the Rickwood green was still the third green when she began to play, and Sanford began caddying at the golf club in the late 1940s and he also recalled the Rickwood green as being in play then.
On the other hand, the present green appears in a 1954 aerial photograph. And in that photograph, the third green is a much darker colour than the fourth green, which was opened for play in 1952. The fact that the third green is darker than the fourth green suggests that it was a mature green with denser grass than the fourth green, whose lighter colour indicates less dense grass and a sandier appearance. So we can assume that the present third green dates from about 1950.
The golf course was closed during the Second World War, meaning that the greens had to be tamed with scythes in 1946 when the course re-opened. This may have been the occasion for re-considering the layout of the third and fourth holes. Perhaps the greens had not come through this enforced fallow period in very good shape.
As mentioned, the present fourth green dates from 1952. After walking the course to inspect its condition just before opening day, Stan Waddington wrote in The Napanee Express that the sight of the newly cut fairways and the newly top-dressed greens made him anticipate many things to come in the new golf season, suggesting that one of the “most interesting is the scheduled unveiling of the Jack McPherson Memorial green, after two years of work and planning. This new green will be for official purposes number four” (15 May 1952).
The construction of the green on the present fifth hole, which gave the course ten holes, dates from the mid- to late-1980s. By 1982, it is clear that the tee boxes that would become the tees for today’s fifth hole were being built, for a newspaper story in the spring of that year announces that “Trees have been cut on the fifth to make way for a new men’s tee.”
Figure 11 Rick Gerow, current member (for fifty years).
But the present fifth green had not yet been contemplated in 1982; this reference to the “fifth” tee indicates a new tee for the hole that is today played as the fourteenth. Rick Gerow explained to me that the new “fifth” tee mentioned in the 1982 newspaper article was designed to lengthen to more than 600 yards the hole that we play today as the fourteenth (which in 1982 played as the fifth hole). This redesign, said Gerow, was part of a quest in the 1980s to achieve a 6,000-yard length for an 18-hole circuit of the course. (Gerow was instrumental in the design of today’s fifth green several years later.)
The green on the sixth hole and the green on the seventh hole date from the late 1990s.
Art and Cathy Hunter write that “in 1998, because of a threatened lawsuit from neighbouring property, it was decided to abandon greens 6 and 7 and build new greens to replace them at a cost of about $90,000. The two new greens opened in July 1999” (p. 122).
I do not know when the putting green near the clubhouse was built.
It is clear that at least six of the twelve greens on the present golf are not the ones laid out by Rickwood in the summer and fall of 1927.
How Would One Have Approached Laying Out a Course in 1927?
I suspect that the way Rickwood laid out the new golf course in 1927 was the result of a thirty-year process that began with his apprenticeship to the Vardons in Yorkshire. Recall that George Cumming was a thirteen-year-old apprentice when he accompanied Glasgow golf professional Andrew Forgan in the laying-out of a Scottish golf course in 1893. Apprenticeships to professional golfers in those days lasted as long as six years and included training in club-making, golf instruction, green-keeping, and golf course design and construction. So the theory and practice of the Vardons will have informed Rickwood’s initial understanding of the most important requirements of golf course design and construction.
In the early 1900s, when Rickwood laid out two golf courses at Amherst, a golf professional might lay out a golf course on his first visit to the golf club’s property, and do so in a matter of hours, while accompanied by the club’s green committee on a walk around the property. The conditions under which Barrett and Cumming laid out the first nine holes of the course for the Mississauga Golf Club in 1906 are not known, nor is it known how long they spent at the golf course – whether in the staking out of the tees, fairways and holes, or in overseeing any of the actual construction. But if Rickwood was indeed in Toronto at this time working for Cumming (a possibility discussed in Volume One of this book), his own practice will probably have been further developed by experience of that of Cumming and Barrett.
Of Rickwood’s practice at Amherst, we read that after the new golf club had leased a farm in West Amherst from a man named Baker as the location for the golf course, Fred Rickwood took charge: he directed the team that “measured the fields, pegged off the tees and greens, and made play possible” (C. Pipes, “The Early History of Amherst Golf Club” [1939], p. 3, cited in Michael J. Hudson, “An Examination into the Development of Golf Courses in Nova Scotia [MA Thesis, Dalhousie 1998]). F.N. Robertson observes that in the first year of play, Fred Rickwood “taught the local members to play the ancient game” (cited in Hudson, p. 40). He did everything that the professional golfer was hired to do in those days.
As the art and practice of golf course design and construction became more disciplined, however, leading figures such as Harry Colt warned that the old ways were no longer sufficient.
Figure 12 Harry Colt.
Much admired as an international golf course architect of the early twentieth century, and something of a mentor to Stanley Thompson, Colt humorously describes the laying out of a course in the early 1900s by an architect who comes for the first time to the land acquired for the golf club, immediately sets out with the club directors onto the land, and gallops across the property – spontaneously marking proposed tees and greens with his routing stakes, and declaring his work done after a few hours: he “was introduced for the first time to 150 acres of good golfing ground, and we all gathered round to see the golf course created instantly. It was something like following a water-diviner with his twig of hazel. Without a moment’s hesitation he fixed on the first tee, and then, going away at full speed, he brought us up abruptly in a deep hollow, and a stake was set up to show the exact position of the first hole.
Ground was selected for the second tee, and then we all started off again, and arrived in a panting state at a deeper hollow than the first, where another stake was set up to show the spot for the second hole. Then away again at full speed for the third hole, and so on. Towards the end we had to tack backwards and forwards half a dozen times to get in the required holes. The thing was done in a few hours, lunch was eaten, and [his] train caught, but the course, thank heavens, was never constructed!” (The Book of the Links: A Symposium on Golf, ed. Martin H.F. Sutton [London: W.H. Smith & Son, 1912], p. 70).
Colt says that “it is quite certain that no one can do good work … unless he has plenty of opportunity to consider the subject quietly. If anyone attempts this sort of work on a bleak November day, accompanied by a garrulous committee …, the result will be feeble” (p. 69). Time needs to be spent on planning a course to get the route of the holes right, to get the sequence of long and short and hard and easy holes right, to anticipate drainage problems, to best employ natural features of the land, including hazards, to take account of prevailing winds, and so on. Not to do so in the first place is to doom the course to subsequent re-modelling expenses.
Colt offers these admonitions in 1912. They prelude his advice: “My own method is first to view the land and walk over it once or twice, and inspect it very carefully, but not to lay out a single hole; then to make a second visit, having considered the scheme in the meantime, and on that occasion to settle, if possible, the framework, and take two or three days to do so, leaving the bunkering in great part for a subsequent visit” (pp. 69-70).
Figure 13 Dr. Alister Mackenzie.
Yet even when a golf course has been properly laid out by an excellent architect, danger still lies in wait. Dr. Alister Mackenzie, who built Augusta National Golf Club with Bobby Jones in the early 1930s, was Harry Colt’s partner in the early part of the twentieth century and in his own 1920 book on golf course architecture tells the tale of a golf club that came to grief by not allowing Colt to oversee the excellent plan that he had drawn up for the club’s golf course: “The writer has just returned from a most delightful sand-dune country which he chose for his holiday because he had seen it before and had also seen Mr. Colt’s plan for the constructing of what should have been the finest eighteen-hole course in England. On arrival he found the secretary or the committee had, through motives of false economy, refrained from getting Mr. Colt to supervise the work and had done it themselves.
The outcome was an expenditure of three or four times as much money as Mr. Colt would have needed, the destruction of many of the beautiful natural undulations and features which were the making of Mr. Colt’s scheme, the conversion of magnificent visible greens into semi-blind ones, … a complete absence of turf owing to wrong treatment, and alterations in the placing of the tees, bunkers, and greens, and a total disregard of the beginner and long-handicap player” (Golf Architecture [London: Country House Publishers, 1920], pp. 53-54).
Similarly, a few years later, Canadian Golfer referred to this question of whether or not the architect should supervise construction of the golf course he had laid out or whether club members should do it. Observing, on the one hand, that many golf clubs are wealthy enough “to develop the highest degree of beauty combined with superlative golfing possibilities regardless of cost,” the writer also concedes, on the other hand, that many other golf clubs must balance these goals against the long-term cost of upkeep. Like Mackenzie, Canadian Golfer points to the experienced professional golf course designer as the biggest money-saver in the equation: “The architect, since he knows the history of many links from wilderness to tournament condition, can, if he follows through the construction, incorporate many features that will net a considerable saving during the following years, but it often happens that after a survey of the property and staking of holes he has finished his contract and the construction is taken over by others” (November 1926, Vol 12, no 7, p. 569).
By the start of the next decade, Stanley Thompson had so thoroughly reconceived the practice of golf course construction through the work of his own company that Robert Trent Jones, Sr, who was to become one of the greatest architects on the American scene, asked Thompson for an outline of his company’s way of dealing with golf clubs. As James R. Hansen observes, although Thompson and Jones were discussing the possibility of forming a partnership in 1930, what Jones received from Thompson was not just an indication of how Stanley Thompson and Company did business, but a template for how any golf course construction company should do business:
On June 30, 1930, [Jones] wired Thompson’s general manager John Inwood – whom everyone called “Major” in honor of his service in the First World War – with a request for Thompson’s general guidelines for “submitting proposals to Clubs for making a layout and looking after the supervision of the construction” for a new golf course. Inwood reacted promptly, sending Jones a three-page letter spelling out the services normally provided by the architect (“preparing the lay-out”; “staking the location of tees and greens”; “preparing a plan showing greens, tees, fairways, and bunkers”; “supplying a plan of the water system, showing the size of the pipe and the location of the outlets”; and “preparing specifications for the construction of the course in detail”) and the range of fees that could be charged for them. Inwood explained that the company’s fees were “flexible” and “vary with the prosperity of the Club,” and that “we have to size up the situation before we give any figures”…. When accepting a job on the basis of the total complete costs for building a course, including all construction and its labor and material, the upper range of what Thompson was receiving ran between $88,000 and $111,000 (the latter representing about $1.5 million in 2012 dollars). For plans and specifications only, the charge could be as high as $4,500 for a prosperous club or client and as low as $1,500 for a course in a small town. For supervision of the construction, the average charge would be $5,000. Ideally, the Thompson firm also preferred to supply a club with three or four of its own men to act as general superintendents (at $350 a month) and foremen (at $235 a month), their salaries to be paid by the club and with Thompson “receiving our commission on their salaries as well as on labor and materials.” In this way, Stanley Thompson & Company, Ltd., made much more money from every job but even more importantly had control of the quality of the course that was being built. (James R. Hansen, A Difficult Par: Robert Trent Jones Sr and the Making of Modern Golf [Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2014], pp. 31-32)
By 1927, having worked on two big Thompson projects (at the Summit Golf and Country Club and the Thornhill Golf and Country Club), Rickwood must have been familiar with the way that Stanley Thompson and Company operated. Presumably he approached small-town golf clubs with a scaleddown array of the cost-conscious options that Thompson provided the generally bigger and wealthier golf clubs that consulted him.
I would say there is no chance at all that Rickwood had not visited the Napanee Golf and Country Club long before his arrival in town for “Golf Week” at the beginning of June in 1927. He made dramatic changes to the existing golf course at Napanee – changes that he would have had to have worked out with some care, and changes that he would have had to have persuaded the golf club directors to approve.
At Napanee, Rickwood would not only have walked the land; he would no doubt also have played several rounds of golf on the existing course to assess its potential for redevelopment. He would have hit some drives from areas where he thought a new tee box could go; he would have hit some approach shots to areas where he thought a new green might go. As we shall see shortly, he had available for the first time land that could be used for the construction of new golf holes consisting of the fields north of the north creek and gully where today’s sixth green, seventh hole, and eighth tees are located. He had to consider whether existing trees would have to be removed for the creation of new tees, fairways, and greens, or whether they could be incorporated into his redesign. Everything from the direction of the prevailing wind to the direction of the rising and setting sun had to be considered. Par values and shot values had to be calculated for each option. How much rain falls? When does it fall? How does the land drain? There is the question of laying water pipes for irrigation, and the location of a pump to provide the water. The cost of constructing one option needed to be presented alongside the cost of constructing another option, and so on. The cost of maintaining one set of possible design changes over time needed to be set alongside the cost of maintaining another set of possible changes over time. All options needed to be presented in relation to each other, and all permutations needed to be presented to the club officers tasked with making decisions about the future of their golf course.
Recall that Thompson presented official blueprints of his course construction proposals to the golf clubs for whom he worked, and he outlined all aspects of the construction, down to the diameter of the water pipes. His blueprints presented scale drawings of holes, tee boxes, greens, fairways, trees, landscape features (from rivers to inclines), and so on. Rickwood would have been familiar with Thompson’s blueprints when building golf holes for him at the Summit Golf and Country Club and the Thornhill Golf and Country Club. It seems likely that when stepping out on his own as a golf course architect he would have followed the example of the architect who represented the state of the art in Canada.
And of course neither a blueprint nor a detailed plan for improvements would have been the work of an evening’s doodling on the first night of “Golf Week” in Napanee in June of 1927.
Figure 14 Left: Stanley Thompson 1931 blueprint of a golf course for Lethbridge Country Club, Lethbridge, Alberta. Right: Stanley Thompson 1928 preliminary study of a golf course route for the Briars Golf Club, Jackson's Point, Ontario.
Furthermore, to construct a golf green as Rickwood did during his week-long stay in Napanee, the builder needs men and equipment and horses. The equipment required includes at least one Fresno Scraper, at least one “Railroad” Plough, a spike-tooth harrow, and conventional rakes. Two work horses are preferred. And a man with foot problems and with hands that blister in summer heat, such as Rickwood had, probably needs at least a couple of men to help him with the horses and equipment. All of these things have to be on the property and ready for work as of the first day of “Golf Week, or Rickwood will have no chance of completing his “demonstration” green within the time available.
So men, horses, and equipment must have been arranged for hire well ahead of “Golf Week.”
Similarly, it would be a very rare board of club directors that could receive plans for improvement at the beginning of a “Golf Week” and then within a few days accept those plans and give the go-ahead for construction of a new first green. The Napanee directors must have reviewed and provisionally accepted Rickwood’s plans before he arrived in town. “Golf Week” must have been arranged as an opportunity formally to conclude the contract tacitly already made – with the construction of a satisfactory “demonstration” green on the first hole having been agreed to as the deal sealer.
Rickwood's Re-Design in 1927
Rickwood and Brazier liked the fairways at Napanee Golf and Country Club, but those greens!
If only something could be done about those greens: “Both gentlemen were delighted with the Napanee course, stating that the fairways were the best in Ontario, and with improvement to the greens the course will be one of the very best nine-hole courses in Ontario.”
What was wrong with the greens?
On the one hand, we know that the greens were in excellent condition in the spring and summer of 1925: “The Napanee Golf Links are in exceptionally fine condition now, the regular rains bringing the grass on so rapidly that the greens are in splendid shape and the fairways are being closely cut. Altogether, the course is certainly one to be proud of just now” (Napanee Beaver, 29 June 1925). On the other hand, we read in 1927 that in the exhibition match during Golf Week “Brazier made a score of 76, for the 18 holes, which is good, considering that the greens are not in a fit condition for putting” (Napanee Beaver, 10 June 1927).
Perhaps the greens built in 1907 had structural problems from the beginning.
Walter J. Travis claims that it was only through his own work in 1906 that North American golf architects began to build up greens to shape them according to contours and elevation changes that they wanted. Before this, says Travis, golf course designers accepted the lie of the land as they found it: every green would have the contours of the land as it existed in the place where the architect located it. (See Walter J. Travis, “Twenty Years of Golf,” American Golfer [9 October 1920].)
Perhaps the 1907-27 greens had not been located in an area that drained properly. Three or four greens of the 1907-27 golf course that we studied in the photographs from 1912 foregrounded in Volume Three of this book seemed flat, and absolutely level with the ground on all sides of them. With no building-up and shaping of greens to stream water off of them and away from them, they may have been “Goldilocks” greens: requiring rainfall conditions to be “just right” for them to flourish.
Perhaps also, with time, they had come to seem old-fashioned or inadequate in other ways. Perhaps they were too small or too flat. Or it may be that greens built in 1907 were seen as strategically uninteresting by 1927. Or perhaps they had simply come to be seen as relatively uninteresting or unsophisticated in terms of other potential green locations that were being mooted by members.
Rickwood's 1927 First Hole
Evidence suggests that the first hole that we play today is very similar to the hole that Fred Rickwood designed in 1927. Recall that he laid out its green during “Golf Week” in the middle of June. Whether he made further changes – regarding the fairway, the tee, bunkering, and so on – is a question to be addressed in this section.
Figure 15 Arthur Bruce Medd, early 2000s.
In Golf in Napanee: A History from 1897 (Napanee 2010), Art and Cathy Hunter provide an account of their interview with Bruce Medd in the early twenty-first century (pp. 125-26). In response to their question to him about the first hole, we find the following summary: ”Thinking about changes in the layout of the course, Bruce said the first hole had not changed much, except back then it had only one tee” (p. 125). Medd’s phrase “back then” refers to the early 1930s (or perhaps even the late 1920s), when he first began to play golf at the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
Existing records are not definitive, but when he died in 2005, Medd was said to have been a member by then for seventy-four years – suggesting that he had officially joined the club in 1931.
Of course he may well have played the golf course as a guest of a member even before 1931.
Arthur Bruce Medd (1903-2005) was born in Simcoe, Norfolk County, Ontario, and graduated from high school in Exeter in the early 1920s, having qualified to pursue university studies as an aspiring teacher.
He studied at the Ontario Agricultural College from 1922 to 1926, where he not only studied hard but also played sports hard. At the “Annual Indoor Meet,” as a freshman, he won a three-person “60-Yard Potato Race” (a discipline not much practised at university anymore), but he thereafter focused on more traditional sports. In particular, he was a wrestler. At 118 pounds, he wrestled other young men in the same weight category.
But Medd was also a hockey player, a sport in which no concession is made to the lightweight.
And yet Medd was nonetheless a star: “Bruce Medd, the pivot man and lightest member of the team, can hold his own and fool a number of the seasoned veterans at the centre job. Light, wiry, quick, and a constant source of worry to his opponents, are qualities that he carries with him, and when it comes to scoring goals, Bruce gets a goodly share” (OAC Review, Vol xxxvii no 8 [April 1925], p. 294). In the 1924- 25 season, Medd’s university hockey team won the Championship of the Guelph City League. When he graduated in the spring of 1926, the OAC Review lamented that his “loss to the hockey team will be greatly felt,” observing in particular that his “back-checking at centre ice will be missed” (vol 38 no 7 [March 1926], p. 332).
Figure 16 Bruce Medd kneels on the left side of this photograph from the OAC Review, vol xxxvii no 8 (April 1925), p. 293.
I take it as a sign of both his intelligence and his athletic prowess that “the girls of Macdonald Hall” secured the services of “Mr. Bruce Medd” as their first ever coach for their first-ever Guelph City hockey league team (OAC Review, vol xxxviii no 5 [January 1926], p. 225). We recall from Volume Two of this book that from even before Caroline Herrington’s arrival at the Macdonald Institute in the fall of 1910, the boys of the Ontario Agricultural College had been trying to work out ways of getting close to the girls of the Macdonald Hall residence: Medd figured out a way.
Figure 17 A.B. Medd, Napanee Collegiate Institute, 1946.
After graduation, Medd began a career as a teacher back at his old school in Exeter. An item in the OAC Review indicates that he remained in Exeter until at least the summer of 1928.
Not long after this, however, he was on the move to Napanee, where he taught “Agriculture” at the Napanee Collegiate Institute. He also served in the Royal Canadian Artillery in the 1930s and fought in Europe during World War II. He returned to teaching at the Napanee high school, where he was popular with the students. He retired as Vice-Principal – the school now called Napanee District Secondary School. He thereafter became a veteran of the Lennox and Addington County Board of Education.
Medd became a member of the Napanee Golf and Country Club as soon as he arrived in town.
Figure 18 Medd, circa 1960.
Almost immediately, he found himself playing on the golf club’s Quinte Cup teams as of 1932. He and his wife, Carrie, were the kind of members without whom a golf club cannot function: they were devoted to golf, they were participants in all sorts of club events, and they served in various executive positions. Medd was the Club President who oversaw the extensive additions to the clubhouse in 1960-61. A club tournament was named in Medd’s honour at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Because he lived such a long life, dying in 2005 at over 101 years of age, Medd eventually set a record as the person who had maintained the longest ever membership of the Napanee Golf and Country Club. And because he became a member of the golf club so early in the twentieth century and remained a member until his death, he became a tremendous resource for those of us interested in the history of the golf course. As early as 1977, the Napanee Beaver printed an interview with him in which he was asked to reflect on the changes to the course since he first became a member in the 1930s (22 June 1977). I will cite him frequently in the sections that follow.
Rickwood built the first green in about five days during “Golf Week” in June of 1927. How had he done this in such a short time? The newspaper account of the week’s activities suggests that Rickwood must have been a very busy man. The Napanee Beaver reports that both men “spent the week at the course, giving lessons to those asking for them, and repairing and selling clubs and advising the members on any golf matters at request.” The Napanee Express says that “a large number of the Napanee enthusiasts received instruction from the professionals, keeping their time fully occupied during their stay.” Wednesday afternoon was dedicated to the exhibition match. For Thursday night, the club management organized an elaborate dance in honour of the professional golfers.
Since Rickwood had social obligations added to a full schedule of golf-related activities, it is hard to imagine how he found the time to build a green at all – let alone complete the job.
It looks as though one of Brazier’s roles was to become the focus of activities at certain points during “Golf Week” to allow Rickwood time to organize and supervise work on the first green. On Monday afternoon, Brazier took centre stage, offering what the newspaper called a “lecture” on the use of wooden clubs. On Wednesday evening he gave a lecture on the use of irons. These “lectures” clearly involved discussions and demonstrations of how certain swings were to be made and how certain shots were to be accomplished. The reporter was impressed to the point of wonder: Brazier was described as a “splendid teacher” who gave “exceedingly interesting lectures” and “gave a very excellent demonstration of how a ball should be driven with the different kinds of iron and wooden clubs and apparently could make the ball do anything he wished.”
Of course, however he found time to do it, Rickwood built an excellent green that still does duty today.
The green is generally square-shaped with rounded corners. The front is almost level with the fairway, with a slight dip in front of it that can stop an approach shot dead if the ball hits it just so. From the front, the green rises slowly, but steadily and regularly, to the back edge, which is about five feet above the level of the fairway at the front edge of the green, more than five feet above the rough that drops away behind the green towards the woods, and perhaps five feet above the level of the deepest part of the bunker that curls in a crescent shape from the back of the green to the front left corner.
Figure 19 Side view of first green at the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
The drop-off at the back of the green is relatively steep. The drop-off at the shoulders of the green is sharp and similarly steep. The drop-off at the shoulders becomes deeper and deeper as the green moves from front to back.
Figure 20 Back view of the first green at the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
This kind of green complex was typical of greens built in the 1920s. George Cumming, for instance, built precisely this kind of green for most of the eighteen holes at the Chaudière Golf Club in Ottawa in 1922.
Figure 21 Side view of the eighth green at the Chateau Cartier Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec (formerly the Chaudière Golf Club).
At Napanee and at Chateau Cartier, the rise of each green from front to back is very similar, and the drop-off at the back of each green is similarly steep and deep.
Figure 22 Back view of the eighth green at the Chateau Cartier Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec (formerly the Chaudière Golf Club).
Karl Keffer, George Cumming’s apprentice (and the course record holder for professional golfers at the Napanee Golf Club before World War I), also built the same kind of greens in the 1920s.
Figure 23 Side view of the fourteenth green at Champlain Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec (formerly the eleventh hole of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club).
Most of the greens that Keffer laid out at the Glenlea Golf Club in 1929, with his former apprentice Harry Mulligan (at that time the head pro at the Chaudière Golf club across the street from Glenlea, and in due course appointed the first head pro at Glenlea) were of this type.
Figure 24 Back view of the fourteenth green at Champlain Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec (formerly the eleventh hole of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club).
The three greens at the Napanee Golf and Country Club, Chateau Cartier Golf Club, and Champlain Golf Club are virtually interchangeable. At the same time, however, one can see how Rickwood greatly distinguished his otherwise typical 1920s green by means of an aesthetically pleasing and strategically effective bunker stretching in a crescent-shape around almost half of the green.
It is a testament to the excellent strategic dimensions of such greens, and perhaps a sign of the intelligence with which the late 1940s and early 1950s Green Committees of the Napanee Golf and Country Club approached renovations, that the third green built 1949-50 and the fourth green built 1951-52 follow the example of this classic design. They begin level with the fairway and rise steadily to the back edge, where the drop off is significant. Along one side of the third green is a significant shoulder, and along both sides of the fourth green are shoulders that become increasingly significant the deeper into the green one proceeds. The Green Committees of those days thereby maintained faith with the original nature of the Rickwood course.
So just how did Rickwood (and Keffer and Cumming) physically build such greens?
Figure 25 Fresno Scraper for harnessing to a team of two horses, by means of the attachment illustrated on the left side of this image. Note the handle on the right side of this image, by which the operator could dump the load, either all at once by raising the handle totally upright, or more gradually by raising the handle upright more gradually.
One needed a pull-plow called a Fresno Scraper, which was pulled by one or two horses. 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 implicitly describes the situation of Rickwood on the first green site at the Napanee Golf and Country Club in 1927: a green and trap to be built with soils presumably produced from the green site. According to Sporlein, “In cases where it is desirable or necessary to save the top soil 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 obtained while building the trap”(cited in Michael J. Hurdzan, Golf Greens: History, Design and Construction [Toronto: Wiley, 2004], pp. 23-26).
Using a Fresno Scraper, Rickwood began by scraping away the turf and topsoil from the green site, piling the topsoil nearby for redeployment on the green later. He then scraped the turf and topsoil away from the bunker site that he had marked out around the back and side of the first green, adding the topsoil to his pile of such soil already waiting for re-spreading onto the top of the built-up green. The green would be built up by the soil of inferior quality scraped out of the bunker. The Fresno Scraper operator led the horses around and around in a circle, scooping soil out of the bunker and depositing it on the green site. With a full scraper, the operator directed the horses to the next location on the green site for a deposit of soil. Either the operator, or an assistant, or Rickwood himself 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.
Figure 26 Left: Muleskinners operate a Fresno Scraper to scrape soil into the scraper’s bucket. Right: An individual Fresno Scraper operator has tilted the handle upright to empty the Fresno Scraper's load.
Rickwood eventually levelled out and smoothed this built-up soil by means of horses hauling a device called a “Railroad plow” or “sturdy plow,” comprising two heavy metal bars oriented parallel to each other like railway tracks and welded together across a gap of approximately two feet.
Figure 27 Muleskinners deploy a "Railroad Plow" or "Sturdy Plow" to smooth the surface of the soli piled on the green site.
Sporlein says that “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 top soil 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” (Hurdzan, pp. 23-26).
That such indeed was Rickwood’s construction method in the 1920s is confirmed by a member of the Cutten Club where Rickwood was the 1929 co-designer of the layout (with Chick Evans) and thereafter the supervisor of construction before Stanley Thompson joined the project in 1930. In Cutten Club: 50th Anniversary Book (Guelph 1981; archived in the Guelph Museums, Catalogue # 1981.65.1), Fred Brett recalls the origins of the golf course, forgetting Fred Rickwood’s role (as has everyone else): “Mr. ‘Chick’ Evans, a prominent golfer and golf course architect from Chicago, had been commissioned to design the course. He was subsequently joined by Mr. Stanley Thompson from Toronto, who was also a course architect, and together they completed the project in 1931” (p. 15). Although Brett was unaware of Rickwood’s contribution to the creation of the course, we nonetheless catch a glimpse of him at work in Brett’s next observation: “A great deal of work was required to clear the land of rocks and trees. Heavy construction machinery was unknown in those days and some of the tree stumps required the use of dynamite to remove them. Mr. Ted Evans, a present member, recalls watching this work when he was a young boy. The grading and contouring of the greens was accomplished by the use of large scoop type shovels that were pulled by teams of horses” (p. 15). Young Ted Evans was watching Fred Rickwood’s men wielding their Fresno Scrapers on the most expensive golf course then being built in Canada.
So the bunker and green on today’s first hole are intimately related, each involved in the construction of the other – a kind of yin and yang construction technique demonstrated by Rickwood for the executive officers of the Napanee Golf and Country Club during “Golf Week” at the beginning of June, 1927. He was showing them how fast and how well he could make a first-class green, and how quickly the golf club could have “one of the very best nine-hole courses in Ontario” if they hired him to carry out his plans for “improvement to the greens” (Napanee Express, 14 June 1927).
It is possible, given his own experience with horses in the Imperial Yeomanry and in the Canadian Army, on the one hand, and given his own vast experience in golf course construction from Amherst and Saint John to the Summit Golf and Country Club Club, the Thornhill Golf and Country Club, and his own Juddhaven course in the Muskoka region, that Rickwood was able to build the first green on his own over the course of his five days in Napanee.
But since he had so many other duties during “Golf Week,” it seems to me more likely that he directed others in this work. Furthermore, given that Rickwood emerged from his service in the Canadian Army with a foot problem that we know plagued him simply while playing golf in the early 1920s, and given that his hands were prone to blistering during the summer to the point of requiring to be completely bandaged, one has to assume that he hired others to control the horses and wield the plows during construction work at Napanee Golf and Country Club. It is likely that his long experience in managing construction men effectively and efficiently on Stanley Thompson construction projects, as well as his own construction projects, enabled him to hire Napanee labourers who had no golf course construction experience and to rent horses, scrapers, plows, and rakes and then to combine them all quickly into a competent green-building crew under his close supervision.
However he built the green, it is clear that the resulting product impressed the executive officers of the Napanee Golf and Country Club. Rickwood was hired to come back to the golf course in August and to institute his plans for improvement of the course.
Whether an explanation and demonstration of the strategic virtues of such a green was part of his “Golf Week” explanation of his plans for improvements to the course as a whole is not clear. Perhaps he had Billy Brazier fire an assortment of approach shots onto the new green to show how it would respond to them.
The banking of greens with a slope ascending from front to back, as in the case of Rickwood’s green on the first hole (and as in the case of the greens of the same date by Cumming and Keffer that we have inspected), was the sure-fire method of draining a green by means of gravity in the early years of the twentieth century, whether or not the greens was tiled for drainage. It was a style of green that Rickwood built for Thompson at the Summit Club: the eighth green there is described as “slightly raised, facing line of play” – the classic version of this style of green (Canadian Golfer, May 1920, vol vi no 1, p. 28).
The consequence of the architectural necessity that greens be built in this way to ensure proper drainage has remarkably beneficial consequences for the playing of golf on them.
On the one hand, the green is sloped in such a way as to be receptive to an approach shot hit straight into the green from the fairway. Architects could orient any such green toward the landing area that they preferred, so as to make the green more receptive to a shot from one side of a fairway rather than the other, for instance. The architect could thereby impose a penalty on out-of-position golfers, requiring them to hit into such a green on an angle less receptive to the flight of their golf ball.
On the other hand, anything hit long of the green or to either the turf or the bunker to the side of the green is in a tricky situation. The pronounced shoulder to the right of the first green, for instance, makes chipping onto the green surface from the rough a delicate proposition, and quite an exacting one when the hole is cut close to the right side of the green. Hitting an approach shot over the green into the bunker or into the rough beyond the bunker can cause despair, especially if the hole is cut near the top of the green, for the extreme elevation of the top of the green relative to the position of the ball (the green is about five feet above the level of turf behind the green and perhaps five feet above the bottom of the bunker) makes chipping a shot or blasting out of the sand onto an elevated green, with a slope falling away from the golfer, extremely difficult – to say the least.
Figure 28 Recovery shots from well below the surface of the green to a green sloping away from the golfer are very difficult.
When he returned to the Napanee Golf and Country Club at the end of August in 1927 to carry out the rest of his plans for improvements, Rickwood may also have created a new fairway for the first hole. You will recall that I speculated in Volume Three of this book that the 1907-27 first hole may have started from a tee near where the present ninth green is located.
Recall the photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall that we studied both in volume Two and in Volume Three. The three golfers stand at the top of Blanchard’s Hill in an area near the bottom of today’s ninth green. At their feet, we seem to catch a glimpse of what served as the first green of the 1907-27 golf course.
Our question at this point is where the next tee box was located. Was it in the area of today’s first tee boxes, such that the drive was down what is today’s first fairway (as indicated by the broken orange arrow in the photograph below)? Or was it located somewhere on the east side of today’s ninth green, such that the drive was over the area that is today occupied by the parking lot and the practise green (as indicated by the solid orange arrow in the photograph below).
Figure 29 Where was the fairway for the next hole after completing play on the green visible at the feet of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall? Photograph N-08785. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
The present clubhouse was built in 1926 in the area of the stand of trees visible immediately behind the three golfers in the photograph above. Notice its design and the orientation of its windows and doors.
Figure 30 Postcard sketch of the clubhouse circa mid-1930s.
The dormer window, verandah, ground-floor windows, and double-doors, and steps on the right side of the building face toward Original Road (or Blanchard Road, which is today’s Hamburg Road). The white posts (with black chain strung from post to post) run out to Original Road and mark a stone path from the road past the front of the clubhouse. The dormer window, ground-floor windows, double-doors, and steps on the front of the clubhouse look out over what was until 1926 the first green (and has ever since been the ninth green), a vantage offering a wide perspective of the Napanee skyline to the north.
The left side of the building had a small addition attached to it from the very beginning. The back of the building had no verandah. There was the same chimney running up the wall as it still does today (wide at its base, narrower at the top), and there seems to have been a small ground-floor window.
Figure 31 It may require an effort to look behind Sam Snead's behind to see the back wall of the clubhouse on 28 August 1959. A similar effort may be required to look before his behind to see the sloping roof of the addition that was built on the east side of the clubhouse in 1926. Club President Bruce Medd presided over the additions of locker rooms, and so, on that were built beginning in 1960.
Every indication via the design of the 1926 building is that the north side looking over the green and the town was conceived as the front of the building, with the west side conceived as a second front. The other sides were left to contest between them which would be regarded as the back of the building.
I suspect that the second tee of the 1907-27 golf course, like the first green, was located at the front of this building. (Note that with the completion of the clubhouse in 1926, the hole numbers were all changed, such that the old first green in front of the new clubhouse became the new ninth green, and a second tee in front of the new clubhouse would have become the new first tee.)
I conclude that when the Napanee Golf and Country Club commissioned the construction of its new clubhouse in the spring of 1926, it did not anticipate that as of the end of 1927 it would be commencing play from a first tee located at the back of the clubhouse and that in due course it would have to modify the back of the clubhouse so as to make it the side of the building that welcomed members and guests to the property. Golf life and social life alike had originally been conceived as beginning and ending on the other side of the building. Rickwood must have been very persuasive in selling club directors on his plan to move the first tee and first fairway behind the clubhouse: one of his first “improvements” to the golf course required reversing the architectural conception of the clubhouse’s orientation and function. All subsequent modifications of the clubhouse (through additions, the closing off of the verandahs, the building of a pro shop, and so on) have co-operated in this reversal.
Figure 32 Sam Snead tees off on the first hole 28 August 1959.
The tee box that Rickwood developed in 1927 has changed little over time, according to Medd: “the first hole had not changed much except back then it had only one tee” (Hunters, p. 125).
It may be Rickwood’s 1927 tee that we see in the 1959 photograph of Sam Snead driving during his first round of golf at the course on 28 August 1959. Note that the tee was significantly elevated, to judge by how far below the level of Snead his young caddie appears to stand, and note that that the corner of the tee where Snead positioned himself was sharply angled and edged.
The first hole has always been about 300 yards in length.
Then, as now, the question that the first hole asks is how close to the green the player wishes to be after the tee shot. Long hitters can entertain the possibility of driving the ball all the way to the green. Has this possibility made the hole obsolete in terms of the challenges that Rickwood intended for golfers? Well, recall that Rickwood himself blasted a ball 315 yards on Hutton’s revolutionary Dynamometer in 1922. Recall also that in the exhibition match that Rickwood played against Andrew Kay in Barrie in 1923, Kay was reported in the newspaper to have hit several 300-yard drives that day. As further proof that the best golfers back in 1927 could entertain the idea of driving the ball 300 yards, recall that a year after his visit to Napanee, Brazier scored a hole-in-one at the Sault St Marie Golf course on a 305 yard hole. So today’s long-ball hitters presumably face a version of the same challenge that Rickwood posed to the best golfers of 1927.
Still, most people today cannot hope to hit a golf ball 300 yards, and the same was true of most golfers in 1927. So Rickwood’s question to most golfers in 1927 remains the same today: how close to the hole does a golfer wish to be after one stroke? The question is generally whether golfers wish to be close enough to the green to chip the ball onto the putting surface for a relatively short birdie putt, or whether they are perhaps content to place their ball at an even further distance from the hole so as to be able to hit a full shot into the green with a preferred club.
Today, however, there is less of a challenge to the tee shot than Rickwood intended, for he designed the fairway so that there were trees on the left and right edges of the fairway at the 200-yard mark. Visible in the photograph below is the elm tree that he positioned in the fairway on the right side.
Figure 33 Bill Coathup (left) and Gary Coathup, first hole, Napanee Golf and Country Club, 10 July 1965.
The tree complicates tee shots or approach shots played along the right side of the fairway.
The same tree is visible in the background of the photograph of Sam Snead and his three companions on the first tee as they are about to set out on their round of golf on August 28th, 1959.
Figure 34 Left to right: Al Sinclair, Lois Smith, Barbara Kimmerly, and Sam Snead. First tee of the Napanee Golf and Country Club, 28 August 1959.
When Snead drove from the first tee a few minutes later, he teed his ball on the extreme left side of the tee, as evident in a photograph two pages above. He may have done so to give himself as much room as possible to the left of the tree in the distance to drive his ball past it. In his 1960 television series called Sam Snead’s Celebrity Golf, Snead often drove his tee shots flag-high on the 295-yard fourth hole of the Lakeside Country Club (California), so he may have had a similar ambition this day regarding the first hole at Napanee. We know he had that ambition on his next tee shot here, for the Napanee Beaver reports that “On the second nine he had a 300-yard drive almost to the green on the first hole” (2 September 1959).
The imposing tree visible behind the Coathups was an elm tree. It was matched from the day the fairway was created by a tee on the left side of the fairway. It was an older, taller tree, its canopy much larger than that of the elm tree that we see in the photographs above.
We can see this older tree on the left (north) side of the fairway, along with its partner on the right (south) side, in the background of a photograph of the clubhouse that dates from the late 1930s.
Figure 35 Detail from late 1930s photograph of golfers on the ninth green with spectator and dog in the background.
In this detail from the late 1930s photograph, we see in the foreground two men stepping onto today’s ninth green while being watched by a man and his dog standing where today’s parking lot is located. In the far background is a row of pine trees growing along Golf Course Lane. Between the people and the pines is the first fairway, with the tree observed above in the 1959 and 1965 photographs marking the right half of the fairway, and with the larger tree parallel to it, with some sort of white square object at its base, marking the left side of the fairway.
I am confident that the tree on the right side of the first fairway in the photograph immediately above is identical to the tree seen in the 1965 photograph because of the twisted branch on the right side of each that seems to be identical. The only difference is that the tree on the right is twenty-five years older than the one on the left.
Figure 36 The limb circled in the image on the left in this detail from a late 1930s photograph twists in the same way as the limb circled in the image on the right from a detail in a 1965 photograph. I believe that the two photographs show the same tree at times about twenty-five years apart.
The spreading of the canopies of the left and right trees over time would have narrowed the window for driving a tee shot between them. The canopy of mature elm trees, for instance, covers as much as a quarter-acre of space.
My belief, then, is that Rickwood designed the first hole such that these two trees were to function as gatekeepers of the first green.
At about 300 yards in length, the hole allowed the green to be reached with a long drive, but there was a risk and a reward to the strategy of attempting to drive the first green. The trees made sure that such a drive had to be an accurate one – with regard to both direction and height. A long drive hit off-line into the branches of these trees would see the ball bouncing in unpredictable ways. Luck would determine whether or not the golfer had a good chance of putting the next shot on the green.
On the other hand, a golfer could more easily lay-up short of the trees in the middle of the fairway and maximize the chances of approaching the green without tangling with either tree.
Barry (“Bing”) Sanford, a long-time member of the Napanee Golf and Country Club, confirms these observations about the strategic significance of Rickwood’s twin towers.
Figure 37 Bing Sanford with the Quinte Cup in 1981.
Bing was born in Napanee and grew up near the golf course. Rolling across the fairways on summer evenings, the sounds of party activities reached his bedroom window from the Napanee clubhouse.
His introduction to golf came via caddying at the golf course. From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, he looped around the golf course hundreds of times. He learned the game by watching it being played by some of the best club members of the day, caddying for golfers such as Fred Bentley and Glenn Wagar – tournament champions, Quinte Cup champions, and, in the latter case, several-time course record holder.
When Bing took up the game himself in his twenties and became a club member, he soon found himself on Quinte Cup teams, and in due course made a putt needed for the team win on the last hole of Napanee’s 1981 come-from-behind victory.
Bing says that the old elm tree on the right half of the fairway proved to be very difficult to negotiate for players inclined to play toward the green along the right side of the hole.
Although today, something of its strategic function has been assumed by the maple tree growing in the rough at about the same distance from the tee as the old elm tree stood, the latter was actually located in the fairway at that point – not in the rough (where today’s maple tree stands). It had to be taken down, Bing explained, because of Dutch Elm Disease. The tree on the other side of the fairway apparently came down on its own in the late 1950s because of old age.
The 1954 aerial photograph of the Napanee area shows that Rickwood’s twin towers indeed narrowed the driving lane on the first fairway as late as the mid-1950s, especially in terms of their canopies, which spread toward each other.
Figure 38 The trees on the left side of the first fairway and the tree on the right side of the first fairway, each just over 200 yards from the first tee, and less than 100 yards from the first green, are visible in this detail from a 1954 aerial photograph. Note how relatively narrow is the gap between them (it seems less wide than Golf Course Lane).
One other notable feature of Rickwood’s work on the first hole is his apparent elimination of a number of fairway bunkers. Local Ground Rules published by the Napanee Golf and Country Club several months before Rickwood’s arrival for “Golf Week” said of the first hole: “A ball played into the bunkers may be dropped back with the penalty of one stroke” (Hunters 18-19).
The elimination of these bunkers has already been discussed above as an expression of “strategic” design principles.
Re-modelling the Remaining Eight Holes
The rest of Rickwood’s re-modelling of the course seems to have been undertaken at the end of August, 1927. The Napanee Express reported that “Messrs. Brazier and Rickwood will return here in August to lay out further improvements in the course” (14 June 1927).
I doubt that Brazier returned to Napanee with Rickwood, or that it was ever really expected that he would.
On the one hand, as indicated in Volume One of this book, Brazier was not a course designer or a course builder: in his partnership with Rickwood throughout 1926 and 1927, he was clearly the teaching specialist. And Rickwood certainly did not actually need his help when it came to laying out greens and undertaking course improvements.
On the other hand, Brazier had a new appointment as a head pro.
He had been the professional golfer at Sault Ste. Marie Golf Club from 1924 to the end of the summer of 1926 (having initially been chosen over “30 applicants”), but he did not have a position with a golf club when the 1926 season ended (Canadian Golfer, vol 10 no 11 [1924], p. 880). Neither did Rickwood after the end of his 1926 year at the Thornhill Golf and Country Club. This their innovative partnership in 1927.
Although in June the Napanee newspaper said he was scheduled to return to Napanee with Rickwood in August, it is clear that he had incurred other professional responsibilities by this time. When he played the Canadian Open at the beginning of August, the newspapers gave his affiliation as “Southampton” (see, for instance, the mention of Brazier’s affiliation in the Montreal Gazette’s report on the 1927 Canadian Open [3 August 1927, p. 14]).
“Southampton” was probably the short-hand reference at that time to what has been known since 1946 as the Saugeen Golf Club. It was formed in the spring of 1925 as the Southampton-Port Elgin Golf Club. It purchased forty-five acres of land and commissioned Stanley Thompson and Company to build a ninehole golf course. By the summer of 1925, it was re-named the Saugeen Golf and Country Club.
So, even if the Napanee newspaper was correct in suggesting that Brazier intended to return with Rickwood at the end of August, he may not have been able to do so if, as seems likely, the new appointment at Southampton that had come to him that summer required him to be in attendance there.
And it seems likely that it did.
The hiring of Brazier at “Southampton” by August of 1927 seems not to have been an advance hiring for the summer of 1928, for when Brazier played in the Canadian Open in July of 1928, his affiliation was given as Baden (located between Waterloo and Stratford, Ontario). He was at Southampton in the summer of 1927 and he was at Baden in the summer of 1928. So it seems likely that he went off to Southampton shortly after “Golf Week” in Napanee at the beginning of June and worked there for the summer of 1927. It seems unlikely that a month or two after his new appointment at Southampton he left to go back to Napanee, as of perhaps the middle of August, to spend the rest of the summer there.
How long would it have taken Rickwood to implement his plans for improvement?
We can perhaps get some idea of the timeline for Rickwood’s work from George Cumming’s description of similar work by the firm Thompson, Cumming and Thompson on the Toronto Public golf course under construction in 1921. He explained the firm’s timetable as follows: “The course will have wonderful fairways to all holes. The turf is such that the land simply needs rolling…. All that remains is the construction of the greens and tees. The utter lack of obstructing trees, shrubs, water and rocks makes it possible, under our direction, to put the course in first-class condition in from four to six weeks” (Canadian Golfer, January 1921, vol vi no 9, pp. 620-21).
The work that Cumming describes here pretty closely describes what Rickwood faced at Napanee, where the fairways were already declared by Rickwood and Brazier to be among the best in Ontario; for the most part, all that remained was the construction of new greens, some new tees, and a fairway for the new sixth hole. So my guess is that Rickwood directed work on the course for from four to six weeks, from the end of August to perhaps the first week of October.
There is evidence, too, that club members may have done work in preparation for Rickwood’s visit, both to shorten the time required for the construction work at the end of the summer and to cut down on the overall costs of the work.
Figure 39 Glenn Wagar (1926- 2011).
Familiar with the Napanee golf course from before World War II (it closed from 1942-46), a playing member from 1946 to 2010, and several times a pre-Snead course record holder, Glenn Wagar indirectly informs us that Tom German had begun to build up the site for the 1927 sixth green by his own efforts well before Rickwod returned to Napanee at the end of August. Wagar told the Hunters that “As a young boy he played at a pond near the present sixth green. That pond was created when Tom German dug out the soil to build the old sixth green, just west of the present one” (126).
German was seventy-eight years old at the time.
Whether he dug up the ground and moved the soil with shovel and wheelbarrow, or whether he used a Fresno Scraper is unknown. Although he was in 1927 the oldest practising lawyer in Napanee (and could still shoot a score of 42 on the golf course), he had begun life as a farmer in the 1860s and 1870s and had worked on the farm until he was about thirty years old and headed off to law school, so he was not without resource when it came to hard work of this sort, either in terms of work ethic or horse-managing skills.
We also recall from Volume Two of this book that he may even have been willing to work on Sundays!
German could undertake this project during the golf season of 1927 both because Rickwood must have left detailed plans as to where his new holes were going to be built and because there were no golf holes in the area of the golf course where German went to work. As noted in Volume Three of this book, only the eighth green of the 1907-27 golf course (and probably the ninth tee) was located north of the north creek that flows from the railway tracks down to Original Road. The area that today hosts the sixth green, seventh hole, and most of the tee boxes for the eighth hole only became part of the golf course with Rickwood’s 1927 redesign.
Figure 40 The pond that Glenn Wagar says Tom German dug is visible in the 1954 aerial photograph of this part of the golf course. German was apparently providing rough soil for building up the nearby site planned for the new sixth green at the Henry Street end of the golf course in advance of Rickwood's return to the Napanee Golf and Country Club at the end of August in 1927.
Apparently water pipes to service the greens were not installed until the early 1930s, so Rickwood was not charged with this responsibility (although he may well have been asked to plan his redesign with the eventual installation of watering pipes in mind) (Hunters 31).
In the Hunters’ account of the newspaper articles about the golf club in 1927, there are no newspaper references to play at the golf course after August 23rd . It seems likely that the course was then closed so that the re-design could be undertaken.
The next newspaper report that the Hunters provide is from the summer of 1928, when we see a reference to the “new course” and to the fact that its newly constructed greens are still not quite mature: “The annual tournament for the district cup was held at the new course of the Napanee Golf and Country Club on Wednesday last. Strong teams from Belleville, Trenton and Picton came here to play the Napanee team, who were successful in winning it last year. The day was almost perfect for the game, the wind not being strong enough to bother the flight of the ball, but serving to cool the air. The fairways were in good condition, and the greens are getting better all the time, although they are not yet all they should be” (Napanee Beaver, July 3, 1928).
Hurdzan reaches the following conclusions about the 1920s techniques described above for green construction: “Most of it was done by horses using native soil close to the particular green site; no mention of tile drainage is made; and usually the soils deepest in the excavation site ended up in the top layers of the green. Once top-soil was respread, it may have had some organic amendment to it, but it, too, was as variable as the site. It often took many years of top-dressing with good sandy soils to build up a functioning rootzone” (26).
We know, however, that Rickwood’s greens had none of these problems. There are comments recorded in the local newspapers that suggest the greens came along quite well after the note in the Napanee Beaver on 3 July 1928 that “the greens are getting better all the time, although they are not yet all they should be.” Two years later, on 6 August 1930, the Kingston Whig, under the heading “Napanee Has One of Sportiest Courses in Eastern Ontario,” observed that “the Kingston golfers who were in Napanee yesterday to play against representatives of that club suffered defeat by a score of 28 points to 14. The Kingston golfers were unanimous in the opinion that Napanee has one of the sportiest courses over which they have played in some time. This year the greens and fairways are much improved and the 170 yard second hole over the gully gave the visitors an interesting few moments.” This kind of review of a Rickwood course is no surprise to us, since we are familiar with the rapturous reviews that his Summit course received, especially its greens, from even before the Summit Golf and Country Club officially opened for play. We know that Rickwood knew what he was doing.
So let us consider the remaining eight holes that Rickwood laid out during his 1927 renovation of the golf course. Four of his greens remain in daily play, and another is regularly used for practice – especially, recently, by the 2017 Golf Canada male Amateur Player of the Year, Josh Whalen.
Rickwood's 1927 Second Hole
From the observations of club members who played it, we can get a pretty good idea of where the now “disappeared” Rickwood second green on the “Gully Hole” was located.
In Golf in Napanee, Art and Cathy Hunter relate Medd’s observations: “The second hole is different [now]. There was no tee on the higher level. A set of cement steps went down to the lower level. The remains of these steps are still there. From the tee you went over a ditch, a flat area, and then up to the green which was very steep. Half the time your ball would roll back off. The green was smaller than the present one and had a deep ditch behind it. Deep enough, Bruce said, to swallow your ball if you went over the green” (p 125).
So it seems that the green was located at the top of the hill that one climbs today on the way from the bottom of the gully to the present green. But not all of the green was on top of the hill, strictly speaking.
Figure 41 The front edge of Rickwood's second green extended down the side of the hill on which it was perched.
At least the front part of the green was built on the slope descending toward the gully below.
Figure 42 Old site of Rickwood's green on the second hole, located on the slope and crest of the hill, with the slope facing the tee boxes and descending toward the gully bottom.
When I asked Bing Sanford if Medd’s observation that “Half the time your ball would roll back off” the green meant that the green had a false front, Bing said that it was not a question of a false front: “The green was built right on the slope!”
From the centre of this old green area, my Bushnell range finder measures 155 yards to the rock of the cliff face behind today’s central tee box. Since the teeing ground was several yards in front of the cliff face, there is no way that the 1959 scorecard distance of 165 yards for this hole can have been produced by a measurement through the air. The tee shot would have had to travel no more than 150 yards through the air to reach the middle of the green.
Recall the discussion in Volume Three of this book of the point made by Alan D. Wilson in a 1920s essay on “The Measurement of Golf Holes”:
The question is constantly asked whether holes should be measured in an air-line or along the contour of the ground. For practical reasons the contour of the ground is usually the better method. In the first place it is much easier …. If the play is over rising ground followed by falling ground and then another rise, it is true that the contour method slightly increases the length …. Of course, in certain exceptional cases, the air-line method should be used. Let us take, for instance, a one-shot hole of, say, 160 yards in a direct line, played from a high tee over a deep ravine to a high green beyond. The air-line measurement would be 160 yards. If a contour measurement were used, following down into the ravine and up the other side, it might show a distance of 200 yards, which would be entirely misleading, as the contour of the ravine in no way enters into the shot. In general, then, for the sake of practical convenience, holes should be measured on the contour of the ground; but in the unusual case where the contour does not enter into or affect the play of the shot, the air-line method should be used. (Bulletin of the United States Golf Association, Vol IV No 3, 24 March 1924, p. 74).
It seems that the Napanee Golf Club had determined its yardage for the second hole by rolling the yardage wheel down to the bottom of the gully and back up the other side.
Figure 43 Sam Snead, 28 August 1959.
I cite Sam Snead’s example in support of my assertion. When he first set eyes on the hole on Friday, 28 August 1959, he knew that the stated distance was wrong: the scorecard said it was 165 yards; the sign on the post said 163 yards. But the problem was not the difference of two yards between the yardages indicated. As he looked back and forth from tee to green, he could feel that neither yardage was correct. So according to the Napanee Beaver, Snead “took several practice drives on the short second hole, claiming that it was less than the 163 yards claimed” (2 September 1959).
Regardless of the practice shots, the hole was now in Snead’s head, it seems: “he drove to the left of the green and missed a putt” (Napanee Beaver, 2 September 1959).
Bogey.
On the second nine, he made another bogey here. He had five birdies on the other holes, but the two bogies here confined his round to a three-under-par total of 67.
Interestingly, this was the only hole that Snead bogeyed over the course of the two 18-hole rounds that he played at the Napanee Golf and Country Club. On Sunday, 30 August 1959, he made eight birdies, but again bogeyed the second hole on his second nine. In fact, over the course of thirty-six holes played at the Napanee Golf and Country Club, Snead made thirteen birdies on the other thirty-two holes and made three bogeys in his four tries at the second hole.
Today’s second green seems to have been engineered by adding a great deal of fill to what Medd tells us was originally a second gully on the “Gully Hole.”
Studying the area today, one can see the winding trail of an old creek bed descending from the woods to the right (east) of the present green. Bunker and green seem to have been built up out of the original, secondary gully that Medd describes. Bing Sanford confirmed Medd’s observations for me in December of 2019, pointing to the same old creek bed in the woods that used to lead water down through the minor gully that today’s second green now fills.
Medd calls this second gully “a deep ditch behind” the green – a ditch “deep enough … to swallow your ball if you went over the green.” Napanee golfers knew what they were talking about when they talked of ditches, so I trust Medd’s account of this deep ditch behind the original second green. Bing says that the whole area from behind the green through the second gully was untended – full of long grass, brambles, small bushes, and so on: “You didn’t want your golf ball going in there.”
This old green location on the second hole probably pre-dated Rickwood’s arrival at the course in 1927. It seems to be the only place that anyone would ever have built a green when the original golf hole was built here in 1906-1907. Moving a lot of dirt to build a green like the present one at the second hole was not feasible at the time either Rickwood or his predecessors worked on the course. And for drainage purposes, greens were often perched on top of a hill. In this case, the old green situated between a major gully in front of it and a minor gully behind it naturally shed water off the front and off the back.
Furthermore, as we have noted, the green also sloped noticeably, dropping from back to front, such that Medd says that “half the time your ball would roll back off” the front of it. So there would have been no drainage problems.
The green that Medd describes puts one in mind of today’s fourteenth green (a Rickwood design) and its extraordinary false front. Bing says he watched the best golfers among Napanee club members in the late 1940s and early 1950s unable to hold their ball on this green. Wagar and Bentley alike had watched balls roll off the front of the green all the way down the hill to the creek below.
False fronts are another regular feature of one or more greens on virtually all of Stanley Thompson’s golf courses. They fully acquaint golfers with the fact that an approach shot has been timid or has been poorly struck. Was this sloping front of Rickwood’s hole something that he had introduced to the green on the gully hole?
There is no reference to this hole or to this green before Rickwood’s work on it, according to the Hunters’ survey of newspaper items. But in 1930 we find that Kingston golfers report to the Kingston Whig that they experienced difficulties there: “the 170 yard second hole over the gully gave the visitors an interesting few moments” (6 August 1930). I suspect that Rickwood expanded the surface of the 1907 “Gully Hole” green so as to incorporate a false front issuing onto the steep natural downward slope of the first gully.
So the fiendish golf consequences of the architectural constraints that favoured hill-top greens – the consequence that a ball hit short of the level part of the second green would roll back off the front of the green (perhaps all the way back down into the ditch at the bottom of the gully) and the consequence that a ball hit beyond the level part of the hill-top green would roll down a hill (perhaps all the way into the ditch at its bottom) – was a result of the green designer’s letting nature direct the location of a green, a principle fundamental to Stanley Thompson’s design philosophy.
As Ian Andrew points out, both Cumming and Thompson sought out hilltop locations for greens (“The Architectural Evolution of Stanley Thompson” [2007] https://golfclubatlas.com/in-my-opinion/ianandrew-architectural-evolution-of-stanley-thompson/). So perhaps their protégés Karl Keffer (if he was in fact the designer of the “new course” of 1907, as discussed in Volume Two of this book) and Fred Rickwood (who we know was the designer of the new course of 1927), respectively, each saw the hilltop between the two gullies of the second hole as the only place for a green: they had both been taught to see it as the green location indicated by nature.
Rickwood's 1927 Third Hole
Medd told the Hunters that “the third went down the railroad where twelve is now” (p. 125). His account accords with Stan Waddington’s wry comment in his review of spring conditions on opening day in 1952: “Among other things noted was the still present magnetic force on the right side of number three fairway which continues to pull balls onto the C.N.R. right of way” (Napanee Post Express, 22 May 1952). So the third tee was probably where today’s twelfth tee is located.
And the “magnetic force on the right side of number three” is probably why Rickwood changed the orientation of the hole from the north-west orientation of the 1907 fairway to the due north orientation of the present fairway. He thereby made both the tee shot and the approach shot subject to the vicissitudes of the prevailing wind from the west. It is the prevailing wind that makes a tee shot moving left to right act as though it is drawn by a magnetic force toward the railway tracks. Of course golf architects always take the prevailing wind into account when designing golf courses.
Of the Rickwood green, Kathy (Coathup) Myers, who had been a member of the club since 1947, told the Hunters that “on the third, the knoll in front of the existing green used to be the green itself.” Again, Rickwood would have been taught to place a green precisely in this location, developing a relatively flat surface on top of an existing knoll, to avail himself of the knoll’s naturally pre-existing drainage patterns.
Figure 44 The orange lines indicate on a satellite image of today's third hole where the tee, fairway, and green of Rickwood's third hole were found from 1927 to 1950. Note the bunker to the left of the green (its impression is still evident in the rough on top of the hog’s back there today). The yellow line indicates the location of the fourth hole of the 1907-27 golf course.
The old Rickwood green was a hog’s back green. It had a valley about six feet deep right in front of the green, making it difficult to bounce a ball onto the green, and it had a similar valley beyond the green to punish approach shots that went too far. It was a smaller version of the green on the “Gully Hole,” but without the same “Gully Hole” hopelessness attending shots to the green that were either too short or too long. For whether the ball ended up short or long of the third green, there was still the chance of a recovery shot. The recovery chip up to the much higher surface of the green from either the bottom of the valley or the sloping sides of the valley would require considerable skill, but this was of course preferable to losing a stroke – or even a golf ball – in the unplayable gullies before and behind the green on the previous hole.
The third green may even have been inspired by the green site on the “Gully Hole.” It is possible that Rickwood used horses and Fresno Scraper to deepen the gullies before and after the green site and to build up the flat surface of the green atop the hog’s back. Precisely this kind of hog’s back was the kind of green site preferred by noted architect Harry Colt: “I like to select a ridge or a low plateau in preference to a hollow. The green is obviously more visible to the player, which is a feature after which I strive. And if we can select a wide hog’s-back for the purpose, we shall not need much, if any, artificial help in the nature of bunkers” (86).
Figure 45 Rickwood's third green is still visible today on the knoll fifty yards in front of today's third green. The top of this hog’s back is shaved flat. On its left side is a depression representing the old bunker (partly filled with snow).The steep slope in front of the green is matched by a mirror image of it on the far side.
Rickwood chose to punish approach shots left of the target by means of a single bunker. Bing Sanford showed me the depression still visible in the rough on the left (west) side of this knoll that marks where the bunker was located. Shots very wide of the green on the left would have had to have been chipped over this bunker onto a small putting surface – not necessarily an easy feat. Rickwood left the right (east) side of the green without a bunker. He seems to have regarded this side of the green as sufficiently frightening because of the nearby out-of-bounds fence toward which the prevailing wind would push poorly struck approach shots: from the right edge of the green to the out-of-bounds fence is less than thirteen yards.
Contrast this natural “found” location for the green on the third hole with the present one that replaced it, which required that a great deal of fill be steeped against the slope of the land dropping down toward today’s back fourth tee from the railroad track. This was the kind of earth-moving work that became easier with the introduction to golf course construction in the 1930s of the early bulldozer and the diesel-powered shovels and loaders that replaced the expensive steam-shovel of earlier years. To produce the level green that now sits between the sand trap, at the natural level of the land on the east side of the hole, and the now huge drop off behind and beside the north-west corner of the green, as the land naturally slopes down to the present back fourth tee, required that a great amount of earth be moved or trucked in. (The same is true of the new second green built in 1960.)
Certainly today’s third green is an excellent green, and today’s third hole is an excellent hole. But the original Rickwood hole reminds us of the way 1920s golf courses had to be constructed and why architects tried in those days to find greens naturally available within the landscape rather than imposing their preferred “idea” of a green artificially upon it (as later architects have been able to do with powerful earth-moving equipment).
Recall that Waddington said that it took two years of planning and construction to build the present fourth green between 1950 and 1952. Twenty-five years earlier, a Rickwood green could be laid out in a week. And some of the Rickwood greens could have been laid out even faster than that, I imagine, when they were laid out where nature suggested – on a hog’s back – since half the work had been accomplished by God already!
Rickwood's 1927 Fourth Hole
Reconstructing the nature of Rickwood’s fourth hole is a bit trickier, for today’s hole runs more or less from north to south, paralleling Rickwood’s third hole, whereas before 1952 the fourth hole ran more or less north-east to south-west.
Figure 46 Barbara Kimmerly, on the first tee, 28 August 1959.
Bruce Medd told the Hunters that “the fourth tee used to be in front of where it is now and the green was to the left of the current fourteenth lady’s tee, right in front of the woods” (125). Barbara [Kimmerly] Cowle, a member since the 1940s and a distinguished competitive golfer (with an eleven handicap in 1958), agreed with Medd’s recollection of the hole, telling the Hunters that she “remembers the fourth green being down on the edge of the woods that are along where the women’s fourteenth tee is now” (126).
Bing Sanford, who caddied at the golf course from the late 1940s onward, confirmed for me the recollections of Medd and Cowle with regard to the location of the fourth green. He also indicated that the tee for the Rickwood fourth hole was where today’s most forward tee is located.
The hole was a short one, he said, but a large tree between the tee and the green prevented golfers from driving directly at the green, which otherwise would have been reachable with a drive.
Waddington observations about the differences made by moving the fourth green from its Rickwood location to its present location tell us a lot about Rickwood’s fourth hole:
This new green will be for official purposes number four and has added some 53 yards to that hole, making it 353 from its original 300. By setting back this new green it will automatically set back number five tee another 94 yards, making number five a total distance of 489 yards, giving the Napanee Golf course its first and much needed par five hole. Technically number five will be a partial dog leg inasmuch as it will be almost compulsory for any but the long ball hitters to play well to the left of the trees on number four fairway. For those of you who can hit your tee shot 300 yards with equanimity it will still be a straightway course.
The substantial row of “trees on number four fairway” to which Waddington refers here are not the trees that run along each side of number four fairway today. The 1954 aerial photograph of Napanee Golf and Country Club reveals that there was at that time just one lonely tree between today’s third and fourth fairways, about half-way along them. In fact, one can see in the photograph below that it was the only tree in the whole area of the golf course between the railway boundary of the course on the third hole’s east side and the woods to the west behind today’s forward tees on the fourteenth hole.
The row of trees to which Waddington refers in his 1952 newspaper article are the trees that Medd referred to in a 1977 Napanee Beaver article; they can be seen clearly in the 1954 aerial photograph: there are four of them, all in a perfect row running on an east-west axis. It seems that the grand, giant old tree separating the fifth and fourteenth fairways until 2018, when it was finally brought down, was the last of these trees – the final one in the line of them from east to west.
These trees were the north side of the pre-1952 fourth fairway. In 1977, as we know, Medd recalled a time even before these four big trees came to dominate the landscape when the boundary between the fourth and fifth fairways that the four trees eventually came to represent had been performed instead by an ancient stone fence: “There was a two foot high stone fence across the fifth fairway (where the line of trees now stands)” (Napanee Beaver, 22 June 1977).
Figure 47 On the left of this detail from the photograph of Herrington and Hall about to tee off on the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 golf course, we see the two-foot high old stone fence crossing today's fifth fairway. The flag for the 1897-1906 fourth hole discussed in Volume Two of this book is visible at the right margin of the photograph. On the right is a photograph of the last half of the last tree of the four trees that Medd says used to grow alongside this fence.
There had been a golf hole in this area since 1897. First there was the fifth hole of the 1897-1906 course on which Herrington and Hall are photographed preparing to hit their drives, a hole that seems to have been kept as the fifth hole of the 1907-27. It was 215 yards in length. By changing the direction of the third fairway and lengthening that hole, Rickwood was able to lengthen the old golf hole in this area by eighty-five yards, for the tee could now be moved back parallel to Rickwood’s third green.
Figure 48 Rickwood lengthened the 1907-27 fourth hole by moving the tee back parallel with his new third green, and he made the hole play as a slight dog-leg right by forcing players to hit left of a nearby oak tree. The yardage of the hole increased from 215 to 300.
Rickwood may also have created the possibility of a risk-reward option by means of this new tee.
Figure 49 Bing Sanford, historical tour of the golf course, 28 December 2019.
The distance from Rickwood’s new fourth tee to the woods where the green was located near today’s forward tee on the fourteenth hole was approximately 230 yards. Yet between tee and green were the four trees of which Waddington and Medd speak. The one closest to the tee was the one that mattered. Bing Sanford says that in the 1950s, there was no way that golfers could try to drive over it to the green: it was too tall. So golfers had to play left of the oak tree and then pitch an approach shot onto the green. The playing distance of this dog-leg version of what used to be the fifth hole of the two older courses was 300 yards
But when Rickwood laid out the hole twenty-five years before the oak had become as tall as Bing Sanford recalls, golfers may well have had the option of trying to fly over the tree and carry the ball to the green.
My guess is that Rickwood used a green site here similar to the one used on the 1907-1927 golf course (which may have been close to the fifth green that Herrington and Hall were hitting to in the 1906 photograph). The land left (south) of today’s forward fourteenth tees slopes to the south and west towards the creek. So Rickwood’s fourth green (and the ones in the same location before it on the 1897- 1906 course and the 1907-27 course) benefitted from natural drainage.
But Rickwood’s green was built right up against the woods that has always grown in the valley of the south creek that runs from the railroad tracks to Original Road. Bing Sanford says that the green actually extended into the wooded area immediately to the southwest of today’s forward fourteenth tees. All of the greens built here over the years seem to have used the woods as a defense against overly ambitious drives or approach shots. The Local Ground Rules published in the spring of 1927 warned: “A ball driven into the bush must be played back from where it lies” (Hunters 18-19).
The bush was always a threat, whether one was trying to drive the green or merely playing an approach shot onto it, because the slope of the land was away from the player from every part of the fairway.
Figure 50 Bing Sanford indicates that the fourth green was behind today's forward fourteenth tees, extending into part of the woods that exist there today, with a ring of raised earth behind it. He located it to the right of the ancient trees on the left side of the orange semicircle marking the green location on the photograph above.
In the photograph above, we view the fourth green location as recalled by Bing Sanford. Our vantage point is the 100-yard mark of today’s fourth fairway. Note that the land slopes away from us, and slopes more and more as we approach the woods where the green was located. A tee shot would have had to have been driven far enough to provide a good view of the green – probably in the area of the mounds shown in this photograph.
Because of the slope of the land leading up to it, the green seems to have been a hard one to play to. Barbara [Kimmerly] Cowle told the Hunters that “it was the worst green to hole” [sic] (p. 126). Since, there is no such golf idiom as “it was the worst green to hole” (one might say, “It was the worst green to hole out on,” or “It was the worst green to hole a shot on”), I suspect that we simply have a typographical error here and that what Cowle said was that “It was the worst green to hold.”
What Medd told the Hunters suggests that this was the case: “the green was to the left of the current fourteenth lady’s tee, right in front of the woods. There was a high ridge behind the green because, if you lost a ball in the woods, it was really lost.” Bing Sanford spontaneously mentioned that ridge running in an arc behind the green as the distinguishing feature of the green complex. Since there is no such natural ridge in the area of the old green today, I presume that Rickwood built an artificial ridge behind the green to try to slow down runaway approach shots that were beetling over the back of the green towards the woods. Although in 1927 one was expected to play back out of these woods, Medd and Sanford witnessed the transformation of these woods into the land of no return that they constitute today. I assume that Rickwood’s purpose-built ridge was later bull-dozed away when the route was cleared through the woods in the early 1980s for the creation of the present back tee for today’s fifth hole.
The ridge that Rickwood built behind the green, for which Medd was grateful in regard to its function of slowing down a runaway golf ball, probably had a secondary function from Rickwood’s point of view as architect.
Stanley Thompson was of a mind with other 1920s golf architects that blind shots are to be avoided and that golfers need to be able to see the green in order to calculate with full knowledge the kind of approach shot they wish to play: “A green should face the shot but should never recede from the player for the very reason that it will be invisible” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”). With the land sloping away from the golfer on this fourth hole (as it had done on the 1907 version of the sixth hole, and as it probably did on the 1897 version of the fifth hole that Herrington and Hall seem to be setting out on), Rickwood’s green had to be built up enough for golfers to be able to see it, and he may have introduced the ridge in question behind the green not just to slow down runaway approach shots but also to enhance the visual cues as to where the green complex ended and the great danger of the woods began.
Rickwood's 1927 Fifth Hole
The original fifth hole departed from a tee more or less the same as the forward tees on today’s fourteenth. It was the start of a 395-yard par-four hole to the present fourteenth green, so it was not much different from the present fourteenth hole as played from the forward tees. The tee for the fourth hole of the 1897-1906 fourth hole seems to have been in this area, too, probably making the forward tees on today’s fourteenth hole the oldest continually-used area of the golf course.
Moving the fourth green to where it is now not only changed the direction of the fourth hole and added to its length (so that it moved from 300 yards to 353 yards), but it also meant that the next tee could be moved back as well, adding 94 yards to the fifth hole and creating a par five hole for the first time in club history: Rickwood’s 395 yards + 94 more yards = 489 yards. (Until 1952, the nine-hole par for the course had been 34.)
Waddingston's observation about the new length of the fifth hole and the new driving demands shows that the line of trees that used to constitute the north side of the old fourth fairway was now obsolete in that respect and that the same line of trees now constituted a formidable new driving challenge on the fifth hole. From the new fifth tee, one had to drive left of the line of trees. Only a 300-yard drive could clear the trees and make the hole play as a straight hole. So Napanee Golf and Country Club now had not only its first par-five hole, but also its first proper dog-leg hole.
Figure 51 Barbara Kimmerly and Sam Snead about an hour before their “dispute” about the line to take for the drive on 5.
Sam Snead, mind you, drove over these trees and into the bunker beyond them when he played the course for the first time on 28 August 1959, a warm Friday afternoon.
No doubt he was not happy about this.
But he played up the moment for the sake of the 100 or more spectators that had abandoned the Quinte Cup competition being held on the course that day between Napanee and Gananoque to follow the great golfer. The newspaper observed that Snead reprimanded his playing partner for not warning him that there was a bunker in that location: “After driving into the trap 400 yards out on the fifth, where he turned to Barb Kimmerly with his, ‘You aimed me right at it,’ Sammy used a No. 4 iron to get out and went almost to the green, another 90 yards away” (Napanee Beaver, 2 September 1959). He birdied the hole nonetheless
Note that the bunker in question was not made by Rickwood. His 395-yard hole needed no bunker in this location. This bunker was created as a defense against precisely the drive on the subsequently developed par-five hole that Snead played.
The difference between the dog-leg hole that Waddington describes and the straight-away hole that Snead turned it into by means of his daring drive can be seen in the 1954 aerial photograph below.
Figure 52 The route that Snead intended to play on the fifth hole is marked by his name. The dog-leg route that Waddington indicates was the intended line of play for the hole is marked by the word "dog-leg." The bunker that Snead's drive found is labelled as well. One recognizes the four trees to which Medd and Waddington refer.
Rickwood’s fifth hole was a straight hole, ninety-five yards shorter than the one Snead played.
By means of the modified contemporary satellite image shown below, we can get a good impression of how Rickwood’s 1927 hole would look today. Recall that there were four trees and two creeks on Rickwood’s fifth hole that have since disappeared, so they have been drawn onto the photograph. Note also that where there is rough today on the fourteenth hole there was no rough on Rickwood’s fifth hole, so all the grass that is visible needs to be thought of as playable fairway. (Bing Sanford says that on the golf course generally in those days, there were no areas cut as rough in those days. All the grass that gang mowers could access was cut as fairway grass.)
Figure 53 A modified contemporary satellite photograph shows Rickwood's fifth hole, with the tee box marked in orange, the green evident at the left margin of the photograph, trees drawn to represent the missing among the four trees that Medd and Waddington mention, and blue lines drawn to mark the streams that flow intermittently through the valley in front of the green.
Where today there are two streams that flow intermittently through the valley in front of Rickwood’s fifth green (our fourteenth green), and where today there is a bunker, however, there was until 1975 a different kind of hazard known by club members as “the waterhole” (Napanee Beaver, 17 May 1975). It was connected to the streams that flowed through the bottom of the valley in front of the green.
Although partly tamed today, the streams spring back to life in periods of heavy rain or rapid snow-melt.
Figure 54 A creek sprung back to life in 2018 bifurcates as it crosses the valley in front of the fourteenth green, its north tributary flowing through the bunker in the area that until 1975 was called "the waterhole."
Just as we could see indications of Tom German’s pond on the sixth hole in the 1954 aerial photograph of the Napanee area, so we can see “the waterhole.” When studying the detail from the aerial photograph below, note that areas of the ground that show up as bright white indicate a limited number of features on the golf course: (1) long, uncut, dry grass, (2) bunkers, and (3) the new tee and new green of the new fourth hole (where the grass was immature and sparse, allowing its sand base to show through).
Figure 55 The uncut grass of the area known until 1975 as "the waterhole" can be seen on the 1954 aerial photograph.
Rickwood carefully situated his fifth green relative to “the waterhole” and its related ditches so as to require strategic decisions.
Would golfers like to approach the green by means of a shot over the area associated with “the waterhole,” and risk their ball landing in this wild area if the wrong club was used or if a ball was not struck properly? Or would they like to approach the green in such a way as to avoid a forced carry over this “waterhole” obstacle? Deciding this question would determine the line taken with the drive.
Figure 56 Rickwood's placement of his fifth green punished or rewarded golfers according to where they placed their drive. An approach to the green from the left side of the fairway had to cross “the waterhole” of creek and uncut grass (symbolized by brown icons drawn on the photograph above). A drive down the right side of the fairway avoided such problems.
The map above shows the two options that Rickwood’s design invites golfers to consider.
Rickwood’s placement of his green near this “waterhole” hazard made his design of the fifth hole a living example of the strategically designed hole that golf course architects H.N. Wethered and T. Simpson would soon sketch in their book 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.
As we know: “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” (33). As we noted above, a great debate about the merits of these two architectural styles was under way by the 1920s. But until World War I, few golf course architects could conceive of a golf course layout other than according to the principles of “penal” design.
Figure 57 Nicol Thompson, Canadian Golfer, vol 1 no 1 (May 1915), p. 40.
In his 1915 essay on “The Trapping of Golf Courses,” for instance, Stanley Thompson’s brother Nicol recommends the principles of penal design when he explains how he would go about designing a relatively long par four hole like Rickwood’s fifth hole at Napanee:
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)
Nicol Thompson implicitly endorses the hazard placement strategy of the Dunn brothers, Tom and Willie. When he writes of bunkering, he does not have in mind the turf dikes that the Dunns used, mind you, but he agrees that cross-fairway hazards must prevent topped balls from rolling very far from the tee or reaching the green scot free.
Every wild shot, whether by a scratch player or by a high handicapper, should be punished directly by the likelihood of a lost shot.
In the diagram below, Wethered and Simpson show the kind of bunkering preferred by penal architects like Nicol Thompson to achieve this effect on the sort of 380 – 420-yard 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 left or left of the centre line of the fairway, whether hit by a short hitting high handicapper or a long hitting scratch player.
Figure 58 Illustration by Wethered and Simpson of penal design on 380-yard two-shotter, p. 33.
Figure 59 Wethered and Simpson illustrate a strategically-designed 380-yard hole, p. 33.
The bunkers placed in the fairway in front of the green are the second row of cross bunkers recommended by the Dunns to prevent the high handicapper from bouncing a ball to the green with a fluky second shot.
These bunkers must be carried, or a penalty is imposed, as only a heroic recovery shot will prevent the golfer from losing a stroke.
Wethered and Simpson opposed this sort of golf course design with a “strategic” architecture. They explain that “by the ‘strategic’ method, on the other hand, [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” (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” (32). Instead of being punished by a hazard, however, as the golfer would be on a hole with penal design, the golfer 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). 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” – such as having to carry a ball over the waterhole (32)!
In advocating for “strategic” design, Wethered and Simpson argue (as Travis did) that high handicappers should always be allowed an alternative route to the hole, so that they can bounce the ball onto the green if they work their way along the “alternative route” that avoids hazards (xii). From a “strategic” point of view, “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 distance] and is only effectual in quite needlessly irritating the long handicap man” (32-33).
In the diagram to the left, Wethered and Simpson suggest an alternative design for a 380-yard twoshotter 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 determines they can place their shot without going too far into the rough or falling too short and requiring that the next shot carry the bunker.
At the same time, the high handicap player can place a drive in many places and concentrate on placing the second shot in such a way as to find the alternative route onto the green via a short chip shot from the half of the fairway located right of the bunker.
Figure 60 Two different strategies for playing Rickwood's fifth hole are illustrated above.
Rickwood clearly sided with the “strategic” school of design in his laying out of his fifth hole. (Golfers today teeing off from the forward tees of the fourteenth hole can still experience the “strategic” demands of Rickwood’s fifth hole.) There are no fairway bunkers to punish a drive that is left or right of the centre line of the fairway. Rickwood merely suggests a certain target for the drive if the golfer wishes to open up the green to an approach shot. Placing the drive on the far right side of the fairway opens up a clear approach to the green: there is no hazard in the way.
From the right side of the fairway, golfers can bounce the ball up to the green if they wish (so long as conditions are dry).
Golfers who played left of this route presented themselves with the difficulty of an approach shot that required a carry of the “waterhole” that Rickwood placed in their way (this “waterhole” has since been replaced by a bunker). A successful shot along this line is possible, but such a shot is more complicated than the “strategic” approach made available by Rickwood’s design. The same is true today, but the challenge in 1927 was increased by the fact that the entire area around the “waterhole” was unmowed grass.
Bouncing a ball along this route would have been hazardous, indeed.
Rickwood would no doubt have agreed with Wethered and Simpson’s declaration that “every player, whatever his capacity, should be compelled to keep to one definite line if he wishes to play for position, and the course should be constructed with that object alone, so that each individual, whatever his power may be, is ensured his legitimate chance” (34).
Even the approach to the green suggested by Rickwood’s design still encounters a challenge, mind you, for Rickwood again selected a hill top for the location of one of his greens, and he again used a false front.
Figure 61 Note the false front of Rickwood's fifth green (today's fourteenth green).
There is a valley or hollow in front of the green into which the false front feeds timid or poorly played approach shots. The ball that lands short of the putting surface or that falls back off the false front of the green does not go all the way back down the hill into the valley. It stops part way down the slope that drops away from the green, several feet or several yards from the front edge of the green.
Figure 62 The part of the green visible above is the false front, which feeds balls back into the valley or hollow, from the bottom of which this photograph is taken.
The front of the green and the slope that leads up to it function in the way Harry Colt describes the classic “hollow” as functioning:
the turf hollow, with a “draw” into it [that is, with a slope that draws balls into it], practically forming a part of the putting green itself, will … help us in our endeavour to extract the very best from the champion himself. At the same time, these difficulties do not call for sacrifice of those of humbler merit. They are all certainly obstacles in their path, but the long-handicap player probably derives just as much pleasure from them as the scratch man, and this cannot be said of the ordinary type of sand bunkers. The good player can almost invariably extricate his ball from the latter with comparative ease, whereas the bad player finds them fearfully retentive. (84)
Strategically, the false front and the slope leading to it that we encounter on Rickwood’s fifth green “penalize” scratch player and high-handicapper equally: they have each brought upon themselves the requirement that they play a tricky shot to compensate for the one that put them on the hollow’s slope. But the high-handicapper is not penalized more than the scratch player, as would be the case if they were each in a bunker.
Of course, having to play a ball from below the false front of the green (difficult as it is) is always preferable to having to play a shot onto the putting surface from over the back of the green.
Figure 63 To play the ball onto the green from below the drop-off at the back of it is extremely difficult, as the ball lands on a downslope and can easily roll off the front of the green and down the slope toward the valley beyond.
The back of Rickwood’s fifth green drops off sharply, as is the case with all of the greens he built at Napanee. And as always, one must chip back onto a green that slopes away from the golfer.
Here, however, there is an ever-present danger that the ball played onto the green from below the drop-off at the back will roll all the way off the front of the green, gather speed on the false front, and drop some distance down the hill toward the valley bottom.
To be over this green in three shots is to face the prospect of three more shots to get down: I think of Rickwood’s fifth hole as the shortest par six in the world!
Rickwood's 1927 Sixth Hole
Rickwood is the architect who opened up the remaining land of Lot 18 of Concession 7 for golf. He crossed the north creek with purpose, constructing a new par-three hole in this area and parts of two others.
Before Rickwood’s 1927 redesign of the golf course, there was only the 1907-27 eighth green north of the north creek and its deep gully. Rickwood re-conceived the end of the long 1907-27 eighth hole as the beginning of a short par-four hole that would take the golf course up to its Henry Street boundary at the north end of the property.
In the newspaper report of the club officers for the year 1926, we see that the Green Committee comprised T.B. German, W.J. Wiggins, and Dr. Cameron Wilson. The fact that German’s name was first in the newspaper’s list may indicate that he was the Chairman of the Green Committee. He was certainly its senior member. There is no report of changes to officers and governors in April of 1927: the 1926 president and vice-president remain the same in 1927. So perhaps the Green Committee remained unchanged, too.
If German were indeed Chairman of the Green Committee when Rickwood came to the course in 1927, such a role might account for his investment of sweat equity in the construction of the new sixth green.
Rickwood’s six green endured until 1998, when the present sixth green was built to accommodate the changes to the seventh hole. The various tee boxes on the sixth hole had developed over time, but the Rickwood green was apparently unchanged until the very end of the last century.
It was different from every Rickwood green that preceded it in one notable respect: it had four bunkers. On the first hole, he had used a bunker at the back and side of the green. There were apparently no bunkers on the second hole: given the major gully in front of the green, the minor gully behind it, a drop into the woods to the left of it, and woods to the right of it, Rickwood seems to have regarded bunkering as unnecessary on that hole. He used one bunker on the left side of the third green. There were no bunkers on the fourth and fifth holes, just a woods behind the one green and a “waterhole” and ditch in front of the other. On the sixth hole, however, Rickwood splurged: he placed a bunker at each of the four corners of the green.
Figure 64 Rickwood's sixth green endured until 1998, when it was destroyed as part of changes to the seventh hole (changes underway in the background). Notice one of Rickwood’s bunkers on the extreme right edge of this photograph, halfway up the side. There was a bunker at each of the four corners of the green.
Architects of the day referred to such bunkers as “wing bunkers.” And upon their location, as combined with the orientation of the green, hung a golf hole’s claim to strategic legitimacy.
The orientation of the green is relevant to the approach shot. On a drivable par-four hole, the orientation of the green is especially important since the drive may well be the approach shot. Of the little comment on the sixth hole that has come down through the years – Medd, for instance, told the Hunters that “most of the changes in the sixth and seventh holes were made in recent years” (125) – there is one important comment. Twenty-five years before his conversation with the Hunters, Medd told the Napanee Beaver that the tee boxes for the sixth hole had changed since he first played the course in the early 1930s: “tees are changed on the fifth, sixth and eighth holes” (22 June 1977).
Medd is clearly referring to a major change. We know that the change of the tee on the fifth hole converted it from the 395-yard par-four hole that Rickwood built (which remains as our fourteenth hole as played from the forward tees) to the 489-yard par-five hole that today serves as our fourteenth hole as played from the back tee built in 1952. And we shall shortly see that Medd was also referring to the construction of the present back tee boxes on the eighth hole, which replaced an eighth tee in the area of today’s seventh green. So his inclusion of changes to the old tee for the Rickwood sixth hole on his list if holes with tee changes suggests that the present tees on the sixth hole are very different from the original tee.
Bing Sanford confirms that both sets of tee boxes near the railway tracks are very new relative to the old tee box, which was more or less the one that is now the western-most tee box on today’s sixth hole (the tee box closest to today’s fifth green). I mark its location on the 1954 aerial photograph below. Note the orientation of the green relative to it.
Figure 65 Rickwood's sixth hole had a green with four bunkers and was drivable from a tee located near the westernmost tee on today's sixth hole. The north creek is drawn on the aerial photograph. Note that there was no retaining pond near the railway tracks in 1954.
The yellow line on the photograph above shows that because of the slight angle of the green away from the tee, a straight drive ran the risk of rolling through the green into one of the two “wing bunkers” on the right. (Fades and draws faced similar dangers.) Of course drives hit approximately hole-high right or left of the green would have to be chipped over bunkers and held on the slightly elevated putting surface. Such were the risks of trying to drive the green.
Alternatively, the architect invited a tee shot to be played short of the green, perhaps slightly to the right of the centre line of the fairway: from this position, a simple chip along the axis of the green (marked by the pink line of the photograph above) would set up a birdie putt. An approach along the axis of the green (from where the yellow and pink lines intersect, for example) creates the least likelihood of interference from bunkers, and it creates the greatest tolerance for imprecision in the approach shot.
The further the hole was placed toward the back left corner of the green, the greater the difficulty of any approach shot other than the one played from just short of the green and right of the centre line of the fairway.
So the angling of the sixth green relative to the tee box means that Rickwood had again introduced an element of “strategic” design into the golf course: no punishing cross bunkers and no punishing side bunkers along the fairway were necessary to impose penalties on poor tee shots. Golfers would penalize themselves by putting a tee shot in the wrong part of the fairway.
Note also the single tree on the left side of the fairway. The 1954 aerial photograph was taken twentyseven years after Rickwood built the sixth hole. Is the tree that we see in the 1954 photograph a tree that Rickwood left in place, or planted, so that it would grow into a defence against a right-handed golfers attempt to fade a drive onto the green?
The green that Rickwood built on the sixth hole was slightly larger than the old seventh green that is now used as a practice green. It was destroyed in the creation of the new sixth hole and now lies under the mounds that mark the northern end of the sixth fairway. These mounds seem to have been built here both to penalize a drive that outruns today’s sixth fairway and to stop any such drive from leaving the sixth hole. Today, a shot played down the sixth fairway that bounded over the mounds marking the original green location would bounce onto the present tees for the next hole (one of the reasons, perhaps, why the old sixth green had to be re-located as part of the 1998 changes to the seventh hole).
Still, for all the work to obliterate Rickwood’s sixth green, satellite photographs today reveal the outlines of the square green beneath all the subsequent earth-moving. Something about the constitution of the 1927 green (perhaps the composition of its soil, or some aspect of the way the green beneath the mounds was made to drain) has ever since affected the way the grass grows over top of this area, leaving the unmistakable outlines of the old green visible.
Like a Viking longboat buried at the head of a Norwegian fjord, Rickwood’s green perhaps lies buried intact under today’s mounds, waiting for future golf archeologists to unearth it in their quest to learn about the mysterious golf course construction techniques of the early twentieth century.
Figure 66 The shape of Rickwood's 1927 sixth green is still visible beneath the mounds at the right margin of the satellite photograph above. The orange circles mark the four lost bunkers. Note that the two trees beside the green in this 2018 photograph are the two trees visible behind the two women putting on the green in the 1998 photograph three pages above. Before Rickwood built this hole in 1927, only two parts of the 1907-27 golf course existed in this area: the eighth green and the ninth tee.
We can see that Rickwood’s green was almost square, with a bunker at each of its four corners. The green was presumably constructed according to the techniques used on the first hole: scraping out bunkers to provide the sub-top-soil material for building the green into a plateau rising above the surrounding fairway, as we can see from the 1998 photograph above.
One wonders whether Rickwood had even asked German to begin work on the green, for the bunkers would have supplied all the rough soil for building up the surface of the green that Rickwood would have required. Alternatively, perhaps the bunkers were not as deep as they would have been had German not begun building up the green with soil from elsewhere.
Or perhaps German was actually digging up soil to build-up the seventh tee, which was to be much closer to his “pond” than the sixth green was.
Rickwood's 1927 Seventh Hole
Used for practice these days, the old seventh green was made by the techniques that were described in regard to the first green. It rises about 2.5 feet or 0.7 meters from front to back by a steady gradient.
Figure 67 The Rickwood seventh green rises from back to front. It serves as a practice green today.
The back edge of the green drops sharply to a bunker, as does the back of the green at the first hole.
Figure 68 The old seventh green drops sharply to a bunker behind it. A concavity in the grass beside the visible bunker marks the location of another part of the original back bunker (this concavity is circled in orange).
We can see in the photograph above part of one of the many bunkers that surrounded the seventh green. A concavity visible to the right of the bunker in question marks a former part of this bunker. Similarly, another concavity just like this one is located off the back of the green on the Henry Street side of the hole and it also marks an original part of the bunker in question.
Figure 69 The third part of the large semicircular bunker at back of the old seventh green is outlined in orange.
The road-side edge of Rickwood’s green at the front right corner is not like the front right edge of his other greens: it has been raised several feet (or about one meter) higher than its original level.
Figure 70 Rick Gerow, Green Committee, circa 1980.
Rick Gerow explained to me that the Green Committee in the 1980s received complaints that the front right quadrant of the green was angled in such a way that balls landing with a rightward trajectory found such a trajectory intensified by the slope of the green at this point, precipitating the ball towards the long grass, bushes, and fence that marked the boundary of the course along Henry Street.
The problem was accentuated when the prevailing wind from the west was strong.
Acting on these complaints, Gerow and fellow members of the Green Committee got out their spades, shovels, rakes, and wheel barrows and went to work on the offending portion of the green, raising the front right edge about three to four feet (about one meter) higher than it had been.
Figure 71 View of the front right corner of Rickwood's seventh green, which was elevated 3 or 4 feet (about 1 meter) circa 1980.
We have seen that there was a large, semi-circular bunker over the back of the green, similar to the one on the first hole. And there were even more bunkers around this green. In fact, the seventh green had the most bunkers of any green on the Rickwood course: five!
gain, the bunkers here would have been the source of the sub-top-soil material for building up the green in this relatively low-lying area of the golf course. Yet the bunkering here was more than merely serviceable as a resource for soil: these bunkers were the most ferocious on the golf course.
Here, Rickwood undoubtedly employed a classic example of penal design, for by means of his bunkering he required a forced carry of the golf ball all the way to the green. There was no route to the green along the ground, although allowing golfers such a route to the green – if they were willing to take the extra stroke that it might take for them to avoid a forced carry – was a staple of strategic design.
The five bunkers ranged around the seventh green are clearly visible on the 1954 aerial photograph of this area.
Figure 72 The five bunkers surrounding three sides of the Rickwood seventh green are clearly visible on the 1954 aerial photograph.
Although proponents of strategic golf course design preferred to allow golfers to find a route to a green along the ground, an exception was often made for a par-three hole.
In 1920, Alister Mackenzie generally affirmed the sort of “strategic” design principles that we associate with Wethered and Simpson, and also with Harry Colt and Stanley Thompson, but he also countenanced occasional forced carries over hazards: “There should be a sufficient number of heroic carries off the tee, but the course should be arranged so that the weaker player, with the loss of a stroke or portion of a stroke, shall always have an alternative route open to him” (24). Stanley Thompson was of the same mind: “One should always keep in mind that more than 85% of the golfers play 90 or over. These are the men that support the clubs and therefore the course should not be built for the men who play in the 70 class” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”).
On the other hand, Thompson observed, “it is only by accomplishing what is difficult that gives satisfaction and pleasure. The most popular courses are by no means the easiest ones and the wise committee will see that the course is difficult, but not impossible” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”). Perhaps the 1980 Napanee Green Committee was a wise one?
For “strategic” designers, a forced carry was a legitimate test in the game of golf. But high handicappers should not be faced with forced carries on every hole.
And a bunker should not amount to the golfing equivalent of a life sentence of incarceration, let alone capital punishment. As Thompson observed: “The bunkers around the greens should always be visible when within striking distance. A wider margin will naturally be given for a brassie [three-wood] shot than a mashie [five iron], but in no case should the bunkers be unfair. One should be able to get out with one shot without Herculean effort” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”).
Figure 73 Hurrell W. Huffman, 1928.
Rickwood designed his seventh hole for the mashie that Thomspon mentions. And it was a mashie struck on this hole the year after the new Rickwood course opened that produced the second-ever hole-in-one at the Napanee golf course. Playing on Labour Day in 1929, “H. W. Huffman made the seventh hole on the Napanee Golf Course in one; making a perfect shot from the tee with his mashie, and dropping it on the green about four feet short of the pin, it rolled in the hole” (Napanee Beaver, 4 September 1929). Canadian Golfer reported the news as well, including the feat in its list of golfers who had become “immortals”: “Napanee, Ontario, is next heard from. Mr. H.W. Huffman turned the trick here at the 7 th hole, 140 yards, and put Napanee in the spotlight” (vol 15 no 5 [September 1929], p. 390).
Sam Snead played a five-iron on this hole for his two attempts at the hole on Friday, 28 August 1959, scoring pars each time. He birdied the hole once during his record-setting round on Sunday.
The 1954 aerial photograph confirms that this green complex was the most formidably bunkered of all the greens that Rickwood built at Napanee. There seem to have been three pot bunkers carved out of the front edge of the green.
On the left side of the green was a very large bunker to catch any golfer hitting the ball too far left for safety (Rickwood seems to have anticipated that golfers would prefer to err to the left as a precaution against a ball flight that might flirt with the out of bounds along the right side of the green). And, as we have seen, behind the green, as in the case of the green at the first hole, was a semi-circular bunker to catch a shot that was hit too far – whether via a ball rolling over the green and off the back, or via a ball struck so hard as to carry right over the green.
Figure 74 Rick Gerow, 2005, after Quinte Cup victory at Picton.
When Rick Gerow scored his first hole-in-one on this hole, he was so used to seeing a shot struck too far not even bounce on the green but simply disappear from sight into the bunker over the back of the green that one day when his tee shot dropped out of sight without bouncing he immediately looked for it in the back bunker, only to find it a minute later in the hole: it had not even touched the side of the hole on its way into the cup!
Certainly the green was extremely well-protected by bunkers.
But there was also elevation change to consider, for the land dropped significantly from tee to green. Furthermore, the shot was also struck into the prevailing westerly wind. So the calculation as to what club to hit in order to cover the approximately 160- to 190-yard descent into an often significant wind was quite complicated. Furthermore, as we have noted, the front right quadrant of the green was sloped from left to right, issuing balls off the green into the boundary fence on the right side of the green and golf course property (with its attendant long grass and bushes). Right-handed golfers with a slice or fade that the wind would accentuate must have faced such a tee-shot with knees knocking.
And as if all these considerations were not enough, this hole was the only one to face directly into the setting sun of the early spring and late fall seasons.
So at certain times of the year, the golfer out for a round of golf at the end of the day faced an additional challenge at Rickwood’s already extremely challenging seventh hole.
In considering this hole, I find it hard not to think that Rickwood learned this type of design from Stanley Thompson’s brother and fellow golf architect Nicol Thompson. In the article quoted above, “The Trapping of Golf Courses,” Thompson offers advice on how to develop a golfer’s accuracy and skill by the bunkering of a short hole – advice that Rickwood follows implicitly on his seventh hole:
To develop accuracy and skill, it is not only necessary to punish poor shots, but on a modern golf course accuracy and skill should be rewarded. Holes and hazards should be so placed to develop all the shots and round out the player’s game. The short holes in particular should be built with this idea in view and made so severe that there is practically nothing left clear except the green to play on. A short hole properly trapped is one of the sportiest and best tests of golf on the course. (Canadian Golfer, May 1915, vol 1 no I, p. 40).
The design that Nicol Thompson recommends is the one that Rickwood built at the seventh hole. It allows no alternative route; the golfer must carry the ball all the way to the green over the three pot bunkers guarding the front of it. Only a lucky, fluky shot can get to the green otherwise.
Although in strategic design, as a matter of principle, the architect allows a route by which a highhandicap golfer can avoid having to carry a hazard (and can instead bounce a ball onto the green), the strategic designer often made an exception for par-three holes and made them quite penal.
Rickwood certainly did at his seventh.
Figure 75 Josh Whalen, Golf Canada's male Amateur Player of the Year for 2017.
Rickwood’s green still exists, but it no longer remains in play as part of a round of golf at the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
In the mid-1990s, high-school kids intentionally hitting golf balls from the seventh tee across Henry Street onto the roofs of residential houses there prompted the threat of lawsuits from the home-owners, leading the Napanee Golf and Country Club to undertake an expensive re-routing of Rickwood’s sixth and seventh holes in 1998.
In theory, Rickwood’s green could still be put into play, approached from the tees on the present seventh hole.
As things stand, however, it is part of a practice area where club members come to hone their chipping and bunker skills. Of late, the most regular user of the old Rickwood green complex has been Josh Whalen, Golf Canada’s male Amateur Player of the Year in 2017, and now a professional golfer.
Hurrell Huffman was the first to hole in one here in 1929.
Here, between the 1970s and the 1990s, Rick Gerow holed in one many times.
Now, virtually every time he practises his chipping here, Josh Whalen holes in one.
In Toronto, Fred Rickwood turns in his grave.
Rickwood's 1927 Eighth Hole
Rickwood may have developed the ninth green of the 1907-27 golf course into his eighth green. As I suggested in Volume Three of this book, it seems likely that the old ninth green was in the same area as today’s eighth green, but it is unclear whether there was any physical connection between them. Since the angle of the approach shot to the two greens diverged by about forty-five degrees, however, it seems likely that Rickwood would have had to have redesigned any pre-existing green here to face a new direction.
Of the eighth hole that Rickwood designed, Bruce Medd said, “The eighth had a different tee but the green was the same. The tee was up on the high rise, away over to the left and you hit to the left of the big trees.”
This tee box was essential to the “strategic” design that Rickwood introduced to the hole.
Medd’s phrase “away over to the left” suggests that the tee may have been a considerable distance to the left of today’s back tees, somewhere in the neighbourhood of today’s seventh green. Bing Sanford, in fact, recalls the eighth tee as having been built on a mound near today’s seventh green site.
This makes sense from a couple of points of view. The tee would have had to have been well left of Rickwood’s seventh green, since Rickwood’s hole required a tee-shot of as many as 190 yards downhill, which meant that a large area to the left of the hole had to be allowed for the typical dispersal pattern of errant shots from such a distance starting at such an elevated height.
Also, placing the eighth tee-box near the green on today’s seventh hole would enable Rickwood to introduce on the eighth hole a version of the strategic design for the long two-shotter that Wethered and Simpson illustrate in the diagram we have already considered in relation to Rickwood’s fifth hole. The tee shot, that is, was at a slight angle to the fairway – not making this two-shotter a proper dog-leg, but nonetheless raising the possibility of hitting through the right side of the fairway into whatever long grass or hay might have been growing between the eighth hole and Original Road.
The golfer had to decide how far up the fairway to aim the drive – a shot that that did not bite off enough of the angle would run out into the uncut grass on the right (east) side of the fairway.
Figure 76 Bruce Medd said that the old eighth tee was "away over to the left and you hit left of the big trees" between which we hit today. There were other big trees, too – the big pine trees near the old clubhouse – which made it advisable to aim right of the centre-line of the fairway, slightly away from the green.
No doubt the new tee box and the new fairway for the eighth hole were enabled by the building of the new clubhouse. The traffic of people close to the old clubhouse was now gone. So now a fairway could be run between the clubhouse and Original Road, and a tee could be located from which to play a shot across the creek that empties out of what is today the bottom of the holding pond – but which was then simply a big ditch.
Directing a drive near the old clubhouse was now not only possible, but also “strategically” desirable. The closer the line of the drive to the old clubhouse, the shorter would be the remaining distance to the green.
Note, however, that surrounding the old clubhouse were some of the oldest and tallest pine trees on the golf course, and the eastern-most of them would have interfered with tee shots too far to the left.
Figure 77 Some of the tallest pine trees on the golf course were alongside the old clubhouse, located on what is today the left (east) side of today's eighth fairway. The location of the old clubhouse is marked on the map shown on the page above.
Unlike the “strategically”-designed dog-leg hole hole sketched in the Wethered and Simpson diagram in the section above of the fifth hole, however, there was no bunker guarding an approach to Rickwood’s eighth green. But there was, and there remains, plenty to think about when hitting an approach shot here.
The approach to this hole is all about the relationship between the green and its surrounding terrain. Rickwood’s design of the hole makes it look from the fairway as though a ball can be bounced onto the green from the area in front of the green, as it can be on other of his holes such as the first and the sixth, but here on the eighth it just is not so. (Of course today’s scratch golfers hit such high shots into the green with wedges that the option of bouncing a ball onto the green never enters their calculations, but things were quite otherwise in the 1920s.)
An approach shot that falls short of the green tends to stay short of the green because much of the fairway in front of the green remains soft for most of the year; it takes longer to dry out to the point of firmness than any other fairway area on the golf course.
Rickwood allows the golfer with local knowledge of this green and its surrounds, however, to bounce a ball onto the green if the approach shot is struck so as to land on the narrow strip of turf perhaps five- to seven-yards wide along the seam between the fairway and rough on the left side of the fairway. This land constitutes a little plateau elevated several feet above the majority of the fairway to the right of it and so tends to be drier and firmer, enabling the ball to bounce. But miscalculation or mishit of the approach shot to this narrow area ends up in the rough to the left or drops into the bounceless zone to the right.
Figure 78 Approach shots that fall short of the eighth green may or may not bounce forward, depending on where they land.
The green seems benign when seen from the area in the fairway where Rickwood expected the second shot to be played from (120 to 150 yards from the centre of the green), but looks are deceiving.
It was constructed as the green on the first hole was: the front centre edge of the green is virtually level with the fairway, but the green gently rises towards its back edge until the back of the green is perhaps three or four feet (or about one meter) above the level of the rough behind the green.
Figure 79 The eighth green rises from front to back. In this regard, it resembles the first green built by Rickwood during “Golf Week” of 1927 and greens by Cumming and Keffer built in the 1920s (as seen in the section above on the first hole).
The drop-off at the back of the green is steep. As always, hitting a ball over a Rickwood green leaves the golfer with a very difficult chip shot onto the raised surface of a green that slopes away from the golfer.
Figure 80 As for all Rickwood greens at the Napanee Golf and Country Club, the drop-off at the back of the eighth green is steep.
A similar predicament is encountered on the right (west) side of the green, where the drop-off at the shoulder is also quite steep. Furthermore, the golfer who lands an approach shot on the very right front will see the ball roll back off the green because there is a subtle but fiendishly false front that issues balls back into the bounceless zone. In fact, there is a general hollow stretching from the area at the centre and right front of the green all the way around to the right side of the green.
Figure 81 A view of the right (west) front corner of Rickwood's eighth green.
Since there are no bunkers surrounding this green, I suspect that Rickwood gathered his soil for building up the green from the front right (west) area of the green that now forms a large, soft, bounceless swale. In other words, this swale – or “hollow,” as Harry Colt would call it – was probably designed for the very effect it has: gathering balls both from approach shots that did not bounce as intended and from approach shots that draw back off the false right front of the green.
As with the other Rickwood greens at Napanee, balls played wide right of the green require a chip shot onto an elevated surface, and the shot required is almost as delicate as the chip shots required from the back of the green. Balls played from the swale or hollow indicated in the photograph above are extra difficult because the turf tends to be quite soft, meaning that the strike of the ball on delicate chip shots must be precise to avoid chunking the ball.
The land on the west side of the green is different, however. Maintained as rough, this area constitutes a gently rolling plateau that is at the same level as the green and joins it seamlessly, but for the difference in the mowing. In other words, there is no drop-off at the left shoulder of the green.
Figure 82 Atypically of Rickwood greens at the Napanee Golf and Country Club, the eighth green has no drop-off along its left shoulder. The green is more or less level with the adjoining turf on its left (east) side.
Since on all the other Rickwood greens, the drop-off on the left side is virtually identical to the drop-off on the right, the difference here makes me wonder whether he saw an opportunity to recreate a version of a green that he built for Stanley Thompson at the Summit Golf and Country Club seven years before.
In 1920, Canadian Golfer described the second green at Summit in terms that apply perfectly to Napanee’s eighth green: “Play mid-iron shot across slight depression …. Green falls precipitously on east and north. West side being extended to plateau running in from south” (May 1920, vol vi no 1, p. 28).
Figure 83 A comparison of the green complexes of the second hole at the Summit Golf and Country Club (left) and the eighth hole at the Napanee Golf and Country Club (right).
Reverse the use of the words “north” and “south” here in the description of Thompson’s 120-yard par-three hole and you have a perfect description of the approximately 120-yard approach shot that Fred Rickwood intended for his eighth hole at Napanee Golf and Country Club.
Just as the Stanley Thompson hole at the Summit Golf and Country Club preserves the value of par three without a single hazard, Rickwood’s eighth hole strikes me as an excellent example of how “strategic” design can preserve the value of par four without the use of a single hazard.
Rickwood's 1927 Ninth Hole
The ninth hole may be Rickwood’s signature hole.
Why did he move the green to its present location from its 1907-27 site nearer to Original Road (today’s Hamburg Road), where the slope of Blanchard’s Hill is at its gentlest? The answer may be implied in the question: Rickwood wanted golfers to face a steeper challenge.
Recall the use of superimposition of old photographs in Volume Three of this book to determine where the 1907-27 green was located. We have a photograph taken by Mary Vrooman of her friends Mr. Bennett, Caroline Herrington, and Mr. Hall posing with their golf clubs at the edge of the green.
Figure 84 Bennett, Herrington, and Hall seem to stand on the edge of the 1907-27 green. Photograph N-08785. Courtesy of the County of Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives.
Recall also the photograph of four golfers standing on the Rickwood ninth green as they are being observed by a man and his dog. The latter stand in the area of today’s parking lot. We know that the photograph dates from the late 1930s because a photograph of the 1936 winning Quinte Cup team in the same area shows two trees by the steps into the clubhouse, whereas just one of those trees remains in the photograph below and it has not grown much since 1936.
Figure 85 A photograph from the late 1930s shows four golfers on today's ninth green. A man and his dog appear in the background.
Recall that behind Bennett, Herrington, and Hall, one can see buildings at the end of Golf Course Lane.
Figure 86 The buildings of John Cannon and his neighbour across the street at the end of Golf Course Lane appear in this greatly enlarged detail from Mary Vrooman’s photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall.
The buildings on the left of this detail from the photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall belong to John Cannon, who bought 1.5 acres of Lot 18 of Concession 7 from Richard Cartwright in 1875. The other buildings belong to the farm of Cannon’s neighbour on the south side of Golf Course Lane.
Remarkably, the same buildings are visible in the same area of the late 1930s photograph above.
Figure 87 Rooflines of buildings at the end of golf course lane.
One of the small barns on this property still stands at the end of Golf Course Lane today (although it is now so dilapidated that it may not remain standing much longer).
Figure 88 Barn at the east end of Golf Course Lane today.
Because of the remarkable coincidence that both Mary Vrooman (who took the photograph of her three friends on top of Blanchard’s Hill standing on the edge of the 1907-27 green), and the anonymous photographer of the late 1930s (who took the photograph of the four golfers on today’s ninth green) stood in nearly identical positions near Original Road (today’s Hamburg Road), where the slope at the top of Blanchard’s Hill is the most gentle, and because the buildings at the end of Golf Course Lane form a common point of reference in a very similar spot on the left side of each photograph, we can superimpose the photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall upon the photograph of the four golfers on the ninth green in front of the clubhouse (watched by a spectator and his dog standing in the area of today’s parking lot).
In this way, we can create a visual impression of where the three golfers from 1906 were standing relative to the contemporary landmarks that we have in common with the scene in the late 1930s photograph.
In the composite image produced below, we can see that Bennett, Herrington, and Hall were standing just above the crest of Blanchard’s Hill, almost even with the bottom of today’s ninth green, and that the pronounced rise in the ground where today a mature pine tree grows (a symbol of which is drawn onto the composite image below) was located to their left.
Figure 89 The 1906 photograph of Bennett, Herrington, and Hall is here superimposed onto the late 1930s photograph of the ninth green and clubhouse. The symbol of a pine tree drawn on the photograph represents the pine tree that today grows on the mound evident in the late 1930s photograph. Composite photograph by Robert J. Childs.
If we reverse our perspective, and look down our ninth fairway over both the place where the 1907-27 green was apparently laid out and where our present Rickwood green is laid out, we can compare the location of the two greens. The 1907-27 green was closer to Original Road, and it was much closer to the edge of Blanchard’s Hill.
Figure 90 Rickwood's present ninth green is in the foreground; the location of the 1907-27 green is circled in orange.
By moving the green to its present location, Rickwood made golfers confront a steeper part of Blanchard’s Hill with their approach shots, and thereby ensured that all approach shots would have to carry to the green and would be at least semi-blind shots.
Thompson said, the last hole should “never” be a short hole, for then the last hole tends to be an easy hole, and where the last hole is a short, easy hole, “the player who happens to be down [in a match-play contest] is discriminated against” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”). An “easy” final hole would give the advantage to the player who was one-up in the match, leaving that player an easier task to preserve his lead than the task he would face on a more difficult hole.
When Rickwood laid out the ninth hole in 1927, he put the teeing ground in a location different from that of any of the current tee boxes. Medd recalls that “there was one tee on the ninth, close to the road. In those days, the ditch was grown high with reeds and there was only a narrow footpath through it. The ladies were very much afraid of snakes in that area” (p. 125). It seems that Rickwood not only moved the earlier green, but also moved the earlier tee box, thereby lengthening the hole.
He also added a slight dogleg right aspect to the playing of the hole, whereas today’s ninth hole is played instead as a straight-away hole from its right (east) tee blocks (probably the tee blocks of the 1907-27 course) or as a slight dogleg right from the left (west) tee blocks.
Figure 91 The 1927 Rickwood tee was beside Original Road (today's Hamburg Road), making the hole play left to right, as indicated by the orange arrow on the left of the photograph above. The other two arrows show the straight-away play and the dogleg right play from today’s tee boxes.
A significant consequence of Rickwood’s location of his tee box beside Original Road was that drives hit up the fairway from there would often end up on the left side of the fairway. Drives hit too hard to the left would roll towards the woods, as Blanchard’s Hill dives towards the valley bottom along the left (east) side of the ninth fairway.
Rickwood decided to leave a couple of maturing trees growing in this area to complicate approach shots to the green from this side of the fairway. Whereas a designer from the penal school might have put bunkers here to put golfers who ended up here at risk of dropping a shot, Rickwood needed no bunker to penalize a bad drive. In strategic design, the success of failure of the drive’s result is determined by its location. It’s always about: Location! Location! Location!
A drive to the far left of the ninth fairway was to produce a complicated approach shot. Recovery was not to be impossible, but it was not to be easy. So Rickwood kept two trees, but he pruned them.
Figure 92 A detail from the 1932 photograph of the Quinte Cup winning team shows Laurie Douglas in the foreground and two pruned trees in the background.
In a detail of a photograph of the 1932 Quinte Cup winning team from the Napanee Golf and Country Club (to the left), we can see two pruned trees behind team member Laurie Douglass. The tree that is closest to him is the one that grew at the top of Blanchard’s Hill until 2017.
Comparison of this 1932 photograph to more recent ones that show the same tree from the same perspective indicate that the pruned tree in the background far down the hill below is not the second tree that recently came down – the one on the left side of the fairway almost parallel to the 150-yard marker (it would be behind the man, over his right shoulder). The tree that we can see is about as far toward the left side of the fairway as the capped well at the far left edge of today’s fairway.
The recovery shot from this part of the fairway would be tricky. Golfers would probably face an uphill, side-hill lie. And the ball would have to be played up to the green with a relatively low trajectory – high enough to make the top of the hill, but low enough to fly below the canopy of the pruned tree at the edge of the hill.
The fate of the scratch player and the high handicapper in undertaking this “strategic” shot would not be as different as it would be if two players of such different ability were to hit from a “penal” bunker in this area.
At about 365 yards in length, Rickwood’s ninth hole did not seem to be a long hole. But any hole played up Blanchard’s Hill plays long. According to elevation maps, the fairway rises approximately twenty-two yards (or twenty meters) from bottom to top. The landing area for the drive is generous. There are no penal bunkers to trap drives left or right of the centre line of the fairway.
Still, the approach shot certainly features a classic element of “penal” design: a barrier extending from the left edge of the fairway to its right edge. This barrier occurs in the form of a steep hill (which is part cliff) that spans the full width of the fairway, and so it must be carried by the approach shot. Not one shot in ten (or perhaps twenty!) can be bounced up and over this barrier, let alone onto the green. As according to penal design, however, this sort of hazard troubles the high handicapper more than it troubles the scratch player.
Figure 93 This view from the 150-yard mark of the ninth fairway shows the steep barrier that runs across the top of Blanchard's Hill before one reaches the plateau on which the ninth green is located. The barrier is steeper on the left and in the centre than it is on the extreme right, where the 1907-27 green was located. The flag and the top two-thirds of the flag-stick are visible, but the green is not.
The most interesting aspect of the challenge facing the golfer regarding the approach shot concerns the golfer’s blindness to the green. The flag is always visible, but the surface of the green is never visible. This blindness inevitably affects the accuracy of the approach shot, which is a big factor in success of failure on this hole, for the “blinding” speed of the green from back to front means that the difference between the relative chances for birdie and bogey on this hole can be determined by the simple question of whether the approach shot has placed the ball below the hole or above the hole. Coming on the final hole of Rickwood’s nine-hole examination of the golfer, this question can change the fortunes of a round or a match.
Blind and semi-blind shots have always caused controversy in the world of golf course design. Alister Mackenzie writes that “an approach shot should never be blind, as this prevents an expert player, except by a fluke, from placing his approach so near the hole that he gets down in one putt” (33-34). But of course foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So Mackenzie also says more moderately that “there should be a minimum of blindness for the approach shots” (20). Similarly, Wethered and Simpson say that “In certain cases we regard blind shots as admissable; still on the whole we prefer a course each hole of which presents a problem which needs to be thought out with thoroughness in the matter of attack; and blindness is injurious to the right presentation of such problems” (48). Stanley Thompson simply suggests, “The fewer the blind holes the better” (“About Golf Courses”).
Still, Ian Andrew explains that the blind shot was something that both Stanley Thompson and his presumed first mentor George Cumming accepted: “George would have been a mentor for both Nicol and Stanley Thompson…. When you take Cumming’s experience and the close relationship he had with Stanley Thompson, it would be most likely that George Cumming was the first to teach the young man how to route and build a golf course. Their routing styles are remarkably similar, with both using short holes for drama and long holes to traverse lesser land. Both sought elevated tees, raised green sites and natural plateaus…. Neither designer minded a blind shot if the green site beyond was worth it” (“The Architectural Evolution of Stanley Thompson”).
So if Rickwood was schooled in golf course design both by Cumming (as I suspect) and by Thompson (as I have shown), we can see that the raised green site on the natural plateau of Blanchard’s Hill would immediately have drawn Rickwood’s attention. Given that there was already the 1907-27 green located in this area, the question for him would have been, “Can this site be improved?” Moving the green further back from the edge of Blanchard’s Hill and making golfers hit their approach shots over the steepest part of the hill was his answer. There would be no bouncing of the ball onto this green. And there would be no sight of the bottom of the flag.
Of course the approach shot on Rickwood’s ninth hole was not a fully blind shot. It was a semi-blind shot, for the golfer can see the flag, but not the green. So what about a semi-blind shot? Mackenzie writes as though the semi-blind shot is worse than a blind shot: one of the most “annoying forms of blindness is that which is so frequent on inland courses – that is, when the flag is visible but the surface of the green cannot be seen. On a green of this description no one can possibly tell whether the flag is at the back, middle, or front of the green” (34). Mackenzie describes the situation – and the frustration – encountered by many a golfer on Rickwood’s ninth hole.
I think there a three points to make here, one with regard to Mackenzie’s particular complaint, one with regard to the concept of semi-blindness in general, and one with regard to Mackenzie’s own famous practice.
First, distance measuring techniques developed since the 1920s have alleviated Mackenzie’s complaint about a green site where the flag can be seen, but not the green. Different coloured flags for front, middle, and back flag locations have addressed his complaint in precisely the terms by which he articulated it. Now everyone can “tell whether the flag is at the back, middle, or front of the green.” Furthermore, and more importantly, GPS devices and laser rangefinders are more accurate yet in determining the exact distance that the ball needs to be struck. Laser rangefinders can even calculate the effect that the change of elevation on the ninth whole has on the distance that the golfer should attempt to hit the approach shot.
Second, there are actually many degrees of blindness disguised by the single word “semi-blind,” and Rickwood’s hole shows this to be true.
The big question that Rickwood’s design originally posed – and still poses, regardless of where the tee shot comes from – concerns the second shot: what degree of blindness would you prefer? The least blind shot into the green is available at a distance of about 150 yards (from the centre of the green) on the extreme right side of the fairway. From this position, one can almost – but not quite! – see the bottom of the flag (about eighteen inches of the bottom of the flagpole cannot be seen). Still, it is from this spot in the fairway that the golfer accesses the best available array of visual cues as to where and how far to hit the approach shot. To hit the drive further than this point is to drop into a valley which puts one closer to the green, leaving a shorter approach shot, but also leaving a “blinder” shot.
If we grant the legitimacy in golf architecture of a semi-blind shot, we will find that one aspect of the genius of Rickwood’s ninth-hole design resides in the degree of blindness for the approach shot that the golfer must choose by means of the tee shot.
Third, Mackenzie built a very similar final hole for one of the most famous golf courses in the world: Augusta National. Probably the most famous semi-blind approach shot in golf history occurs each April at the Masters tournament on the eighteenth hole of the Augusta National golf course. Laid out by Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie in the early 1930s, this closing hole is remarkably similar to Rickwood’s closing hole at the Napanee Golf and Country Club.
Figure 94 Television does not communicate well the great elevation changes of the Augusta National golf course. The eighteenth hole, depicted above, rises twenty-two yards (or 20 meters) from tee to green, the approach shot being taken from a point about half-way up the ascent undertaken by the fairway.
Certain similarities are easy to see: a valley in front of the tees, trees lining both sides of the fairway, a slide dog-leg right, a valley between the area for the approach shot and the steep rise to the green. But the invisible similarities are more interesting. Just as the Rickwood hole rises twenty-two yards (twenty meters) from tee to green, so does the Jones-Mackenzie hole. Just as a good tee shot ascends half of the twenty-two yard rise from tee to green at Napanee, so it does at Augusta. When hitting approach shots, golfers at Augusta cannot see the bottom of the flag-stick; neither can golfers at Napanee.
The ninth green is potentially the most difficult on the golf course because of its speed. Yet it was constructed just as so many other greens of the 1920s were constructed, and as all of Rickwood’s Napanee greens were constructed: the front is level with the fairway in front of it, but the Fresno Scraper built up the green from front to back until the back of the green rises about three feet (or just less than one meter) above the turf behind the green.
Figure 95 A side view of the ninth green, looking west. It rises from front to back.
Rickwood’s construction technique builds shoulders on each side and on the back of the oblong green.
Figure 96 View of the three-foot (just less than one meter) drop at the back of the ninth green. The drop diminishes on the side as one approaches the front of the green, which is level with the fairway in front of it.
The slope downward from the back to the front of the green is significant, meaning that on the top twothirds of the green the stimpmeter can measure Augusta-like speeds on downhill putts.
As always, chipping or bouncing a ball onto these slightly elevated plateau greens requires great accuracy and delicacy, a requirement that is all the more insistent on this particular green because of its downhill speed. Chips from behind the green are almost impossible to stop on the top half of the green, and chips from the side of the green must allow for a great degree of break as well as a very fast pace.
This putting and chipping challenge on the last green of a golf course makes sense for strategic design recommended by Stanley Thompson, and it does so for a couple of reasons.
First, as we have seen, Thompson regarded match-play as the dominant form of golf in his day and did not think it was fair for the golfer who was trailing in the match to suffer a final hole that was too easy, for the match was then likely to be beyond retrieval (the golfer who was ahead being able to coast to victory).
Second, as Peter Mumford points out in his discussion of the renovation of Stanley Thompson’s Islington design, “in his day, Thompson, like most designers, considered putting a critical aspect of the game. It wasn’t so much resistance to scoring but more a case of providing a complete test of golf. Match play was still very much in vogue during the 1920s – the Golden Age of Architecture – and great putters could still prevail at a club, even if they couldn’t keep up with longer hitters. Challenging greens often revealed the best all round player” (https://fairwaysgolf.ca/2016/08/19/islington-golf-club-restores-the-stanleythompson-flavour/).
In the end, Rickwood’s ninth hole seems an appropriate one with which to conclude the golf course that he designed for the Napanee Golf and Country Club in 1927.
The review of the new course by the golfers from the Cataraqui Golf and Country Club in 1930 was certainly positive: “The Kingston golfers were unanimous in the opinion that Napanee has one of the sportiest courses over which they have played in some time” (Kingston Whig, 6 August 1930). The timing of these comments on sporty golf courses in Eastern Ontario is interesting, for the Kingston golfers had Stanley Thompson on their grounds in 1930, where he was re-modelling 9 holes, re-routing two others, and working on the bunkering and greens of thee more holes. So comments made in 1932 by many of the same Cataraqui golfers who played in the 1930 match at Napanee Golf and Country Club are interesting, for the Cataraqui players not only amplify their 1930 assessment of the new Rickwood course, but do so from the point of view of golfers who have been playing their own Stanley Thompson design for two years:
There was a good deal of favourable comment from the Kingstonians on the improvement of the greens since they had started being watered. Some recalled the game, two years previously, when Napanee gave the Kingstonians a terrible trouncing. The greens at that time were brown and hard. Yesterday, to the delight of all, the greens were really green, permitting true putting. The cups were cut sharp. The trick was to gauge the distance of the approach… The consensus of opinion among the visitors was that the course was interestingly deceptive because it looks as if it would be easy to score on. As Charlie Jackson put it, “try and make it.” (Hunters p. 32)
Almost ninety years later, the advice offered by those Cataraqui veterans of a Stanley Thompson course to those who would visit Napanee to play a Fred Rickwood course still holds true today: looks easy; actually deceptive; gauge the distance; “try and make it.”
I do not know who Charlie Jackson was, but I doubt that he ever spoke a truer word.
Conclusion
Fred Rickwood was involved in the construction of golf courses for about twenty-five years – and perhaps for longer than that if he helped Tom Vardon build Ilkley Golf Club’s new course along the River Wharfe in the late 1890s. During that quarter of a century, golf course architectural theory moved from an unquestioning adherence to “penal” principles of design to a period of what Geoff Shackleford calls a “golden age” of strategic design (The Golden Age of Golf Design [Ann Arbor, Michigan: Sleeping Bear Press, 1999]). It seems that Rickwood’s personal trajectory mirrored the trajectory of the profession’s development as a whole over these years.
Assuming that Rickwood was an active collaborator with the Green Committee at the Riverside Golf and Country Club in the design and building of its new golf course from 1913 to 1915, as any club’s professional golfer would have been in those days, we can detect in his work there a commitment to the prevailing norms of “penal” design: “artificial remedies against careless golf are not required to any extent, owing to the skill on the part of those responsible in taking advantage of the various side-slopes and other penalties nature here has provided …. The hazards, confronting us from some of the tees, are rough enough to break one’s heart, and niblick, should you not carry” (February 1919, vol vi no 10, p. 531). We can see that in routing the golf course, he found natural hazards requiring the forced carries necessary to break the hearts of players who misplay shots. Nicol Thompson argued for precisely such “penal” norms in his 1915 essay for Canadian Golfer: “The Trapping of Golf Courses,” which we considered above. In those days, almost everyone agreed that a proper golf hole had to be routed across at least one hazard that had to be carried on the way to the putting green. If the hazard did not occur naturally, it had to be made.
After his “penal” work in New Brunswick (and what must also have been penal work at Digby and Amherst), however, Rickwood came to Ontario and began to build golf courses for Stanley Thompson, and thereafter Thompson’s influence prevailed in Rickwood’s own architectural work. But of course whether we study Fred Rickwood or Stanley Thompson, we will find that the formative influences on a golf course architect are many and varied.
Stanley Thompson, for instance, was a golfer first. He played golf with four brothers. All five of them excelled at the game and influenced each other as players, and even as golf architects.
Figure 97 The five golfing Thompson brothers circa the late 1920s. Left to right: Matthew, Frank, Nicol, Stanley, William. Matthew and Nicol were professional golfers. William was an amateur champion. Frank worked for Stanley Thompson and Company. Nicol and Stanley were golf course architects.
Stanley Thompson’s home golf course was the Toronto Golf Club, where the professional golfer was George Cumming, who influenced both the way Thompson played the game and the way he thought about golf courses. As we have seen, Ian Andrew suspects that Cumming was Thompson’s first mentor regarding golf course design. Yet Thompson also witnessed first-hand one of the great golf architects at work, for as a 19-year-old he watched with fascination as Harry Colt built a new golf course for the Toronto Golf Club in 1912. Two years later, he was an interested spectator again as Colt designed a new golf course for his brother Nicol Thompson’s club, the Hamilton Golf and Country Club. Playing as many of Britain’s great golf courses as he could during World War I, Thompson was also making architectural observations. Joining Nicol Thompson and George Cumming as a partner in Thompson, Cumming & Thompson late in 1919, Stanley Thompson was bound to have been influenced by each of them again – although this time perhaps by way of reaction.
For as he began his solo career in the early 1920s, Thompson was also reading what other golf architects had published on the subject. He adopted some of the ideas that he found, and adapted them to the expression of his own design philosophy. For instance, take Thompson’s recommendation in “About Golf Courses” (1923) that “There should be six or seven good two-shotters, with alternate tees for the lengthening or shortening of the holes as the ground is hard or soft or the direction of the wind [varies].” This is an idea (and virtually a sentence) that comes right out of Harry Colt’s essay “Golf Architecture” (published in 1912): “There is … one great feature that appeals to me – the elasticity of a course …. There is no doubt that a series of tees, whereby the length of a hole can be altered with varying conditions, is an advantage…. At the holes where, under normal conditions, there is no long carry off the tee, it will be advantageous to be able to obtain more length by using a back tee to suit the varying conditions of the surface of the ground, and also possibly the wind” (p. 74).
In addition to influences by major mentors such as Harry Colt, George Cumming, and Nichol Thompson, however, there will also have been influences on Stanley Thompson by relatively minor mentors. As Ian Andrew points out, Thompson would have taken on board information and ideas from the experienced supervisors of golf course construction that he hired to help him build golf courses during the hectically busy first years of his independent career as a golf course architect in the early 1920s “The Architectural Evolution of Stanley Thompson”). Fred Rickwood was no doubt one of these early minor mentors of Thompson. But any influence that Rickwood may have had on Thompson is probably untraceable.
Much more important, however, was Thompson’s mentoring of Rickwood at the very point that Thompson was working out and writing up his own philosophy of “strategic” architecture: “The most successful course is one that will test the skill of the most advanced player, without discouraging the ‘duffer,’ while adding to the enjoyment of both. This is not an easy task, but is by no means an insoluble one. The absence of cross bunkers has largely made it possible. One should always keep in mind that more than 85% of the golfers play 90 or over. These are the men that support the clubs and therefore the course should not be built for the men who play in the 70 class” (“About Golf Courses”). Thompson is in absolute accord here with the principles of “strategic” design later articulated more thoroughly and systematically by Wethered and Simpson. Thompson seems to agree with them that every golfer should be allowed a path to the putting green, but that “as soon as a player departs from the straight and narrow path, some penalty should follow” (“About Golf Courses”). The penalty, however, comes not in the form of what Thompson calls “cross bunkers” that block the route to the putting green (recall that Wethered and Simpson opine that fairway bunkers are unnecessary in “strategic” design), but rather in the form of difficult approach shots that golfers invite by departing from the “straight and narrow” path to the location for the best approach shot – a location that the “strategic” architect has been careful to provide.
Whereas we cannot trace Rickwood’s impact on Thompson, we can trace something of Thompson’s impact on Rickwood.
For instance, when Rickwood builds a nine-hole course for Alfred Judd at the Ernescliffe Hotel (1924-25), it is precisely during the months between his leaving the Summit Club as head pro and his taking up his position at the Thornhill Club as superintendent of the course – precisely, that is, five years into his work as a “construction man” for Stanley Thompson. So it is not surprising to learn from a brochure published by the Ernescliffe Hotel that in his Juddhaven design, Rickwood seems to have entirely abjured the “penal” design tricks that Thompson opposed: “The golf links are on the grounds, two or three minutes’ walk from the hotel, a splendid holiday course, not too long, with good greens and well cut fairways, with just enough hazards to be interesting.” Not for Rickwood arbitrary ditches and bunkers dug by dogma across and alongside fairways to ensure that golfers are immediately penalized by a hazard for every bad stroke – none of “the artificiality and grotesqueness of certain architecture,” that is, that so riled Thompson (About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep).
Rickwood’s conversion to the “strategic” design principles that Thompson espoused is further evident in the balance between “penal” and “strategic” holes that he built at the Napanee Golf and Country Club the year after his seven-year stint as a Thompson “construction man” ended.
There are penal gullies that must be carried with tee shots on his second and sixth holes, and there is a creek that must be carried with tee shots on his eighth and ninth holes. With regard to the penal aspect of the second hole, however, we know that strategic architects like Thompson, Mackenzie and Colt did not regard a forced carry on a par-three hole to be a disavowal of strategic principles. Despite the requirement that creeks be crossed with drives on the sixth, eighth, and ninth holes, Rickwood’s refusal to position creeks or gullies in front of his greens shows that he had no intention of introducing the double-ditch system of Tom Dunn into his Napanee design. In fact, he did away with the eighth hole of the 1907-27 golf course, which was positioned just across the gully of the north creek. The only hole at the Napanee Golf and Country Club that approaches Dunn’s usual imposition of two fairway-crossing barriers on the way from tee to green is the ninth: there is a creek to be crossed with a drive, and there is a steep hill to be overcome to reach the green.
At Napanee, there is an overbalance that favours “strategic” design by a wide margin. Rickwood availed himself of no fairway bunkers at all, let alone the Dunn family’s cross bunkers. In fact, inheriting some such system of bunkers on the 1907-27 hole that would become his first hole, Rickwood did away with the bunkers. On his par-four holes, apart from the tee shots on six, eight, and nine, Rickwood allowed golfers to make their way from tee to green with no hazards to be carried. He was content on his twoshot holes to allow the nature of the green, its orientation towards approach shots, and the location of hazards relative to it to establish the proper strategy for playing the hole.
When writing about the life and times of a sympathetic figure like Fred Rickwood, mind you, the author must beware becoming too fond of the subject of the book and overstating that person’s claims to fame as a golf course architect. So let me say clearly what is obvious: Rickwood was not a golf architect to be compared with the greats of the game such as Old Tom Morris, James Braid, Donald Ross, Harry Colt, Alister Mackenzie, or Stanley Thompson. Neither is he appropriately compared to Stanley Thompson’s famous disciples: Geoffrey Cornish, Clint “Robbie” Robertson, Howard Watson, Robert Moote, Norman Woods, Ken Welton, and Robert Trent Jones, Sr, who were all much more prolific than Rickwood, and whose work has proven to be much more important and much more enduring.
Thompson’s disciples had modern construction equipment to use both as a tool with which to build what they imagined, and also as a stimulant to imagine new possibilities for golf course architecture opened up by this equipment. They also came of age when golf course architecture had become recognized as a distinct professional discipline, and when having been associated with Stanley Thompson was a big deal, and becoming a bigger deal with each passing year. So these disciples were also much better funded and much better remunerated than Rickwood, the modern amounts of money being spent on golf courses being as much of a stimulus to their imaginations as the new machines available to them.
Thompson’s well-known disciples were also of a much more recent vintage. Every one of them was younger than Thompson by at least a generation. Most of them lived and practised well into the golfing boom stimulated by the televised exploits of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and even Tiger Woods. Rickwood, however, was almost a generation older than Thompson, being his senior by eleven years.
Alas, Rickwood’s own career in golf course design began and ended long before the halcyon days of the mid-twentieth-century golf boom. It ended, in fact, just as the reputation of his mentor Thompson took off for the stratosphere. When Rickwood got his biggest job of all at Cutten Fields – which he must have earned on the basis of his own high reputation as a golf course builder – he was at the end of his career in course building, not the beginning. Rickwood was almost fifty years old when he finished at Cutten Fields. In the early 1930s, he wound down his career in golf course construction as the famous disciples of Thompson wound theirs up. Just when Thompson had developed coattails that would carry quite a few of his disciples rather a long way, Rickwood jumped off. He took a step back, like Nicol Thompson and George Cumming ten years before, and concentrated instead on his responsibilities as a club golf professional. With his son George recently graduated from high school and apprenticing as an assistant golf professional under him at Couchiching Golf Club, Fred Rickwood focussed his attention on running the golf course and attending to the needs of the club members.
So even though Rickwood learned a great deal from Thompson about how to design and build golf courses, our culture usually does not think of the younger man as mentoring the older man, or refer to the older man as being a disciple of the younger man. Yet such was in fact the architectural relationship between these two men from 1920 onward.
Perhaps we should call Fred Rickwood a Stanley Thompson disciple who was ahead of this time.
Of course Rickwood was a good golf course architect long before he started working with Stanley Thompson. After all, his second nine-hole golf course at Amherst Golf and Country Club was judged worthy of serving as the site of the 1921 Maritime Open Golf Championship. Furthermore, it certainly stood the test of time, lasting fifty-five years until, in 1967, Thompson disciple Robbie Robinson was called in to re-develop it into a championship eighteen-hole course. And we also recall also that at Riverside Golf and Country Club in Saint John, New Brunswick, the new course there was greeted with a version of golf rapture: “the skill on the part of those responsible in taking advantage of the various sideslopes and other penalties nature here has provided … has resulted in a fairway interesting and sporting enough to satisfy the most critical…. Much credit is due to Mr. Andrew Jack, chairman of the green committee, together with his co-laborers in the cause, for the skill and patience they have shown in the work of elaborating out of most difficult surface conditions a home for the present local lovers of the game, and those to come after. A round of Riverside demonstrates that it is a thoroughly interesting course throughout, calling for well-placed shots. The views to be obtained from many points of vantage are fairly ravishing” (Canadian Golfer, February 1919, vol vi no 10, p. 531). After World War I, Donald Ross seems to have worked with Fred Rickwood’s nine-hole design when he was called in to extend the course to eighteen holes.
So when Fred Rickwood came to Ontario in 1919, he had gained not only experience at golf course construction, but also considerable success at it.
Given his initial inclination when routing golf holes at the Riverside Golf and Country Club to seek out “penal” hazards to be crossed with forced carries, Rickwood must have asked Thompson plenty of questions when they first worked together at the Summit Golf and Country Club in 1920. Rickwood would have asked why a certain hole was run this way relative to a natural hazard instead of that way. He would have asked why there were no fairway cross bunkers to penalize a topped tee shot or fairway shot. He may even have made a few suggestions about the creation of artificial hazards that Thompson might have rejected – perhaps by means of a “strategic” explanation. One way or another, Rickwood would have become aware of the general principles animating Thompson’s “strategic” design of golf holes.
Stanley Thompson did not write much about his architectural philosophy. Most often cited in this regard is a short essay from a small booklet that he produced in 1923 to advertise his general approach to golf course design: Golf Courses: Their Construction and Up-Keep (see the Appendix at the end of this volume). We might reasonably suppose that most of the ideas discussed in this essay came up as topics of conversation between Thompson and Rickwood when they were working together at the Summit Golf and Country Club, for this was the very time when Thompson wrote this essay. We might even imagine that Thompson was answering in writing the sort of questions that people who had been schooled in “penal” design, like Rickwood and myriad Green Committee chairmen, were posing to him in those early days when they were first confronted with one of his blueprints for a radically “strategic” golf course design.
When I read Thompson’s essay – one might almost call it a manifesto – I see all sorts of ways that his ideas relate to things that Rickwood did as an architect after working for Thompson.
For instance, consider Thompson’s affirmation that “the architect” must strive “to work in landscape features” and that “this is an item that cannot be overlooked, for the fascination of golf is not due solely to the science of the shots, but rather to the aesthetic effect of environment.” Recall that when Rickwood told the Canadian Golfer about his design for the course at Juddhaven that he built between 1924 and 1925, he gently boasted about his achievement of routing holes on the island in such a way as to use one feature of the landscape on three different occasions: “Rickwood states that there is little rock upon the island” and that “one feature of the course is that the tees for three holes were laid out on the same mound” (May 1925, vol 11 no 1). It seems that Rickwood designed to bring golfers three times to the top of the same mound so that they could enjoy the view many times. The golf course seems actually to have been built on a peninsula, rather than an island, but from the top of the mound that Rickwood mentions, golfers would have been afforded a panoramic view of Lake Rosseau circling around about three-quarters of the golf course property. Rickwood was proud of what he had done. It seems to me that he was heeding Stanley Thompson’s advice about the importance of aesthetic experience to the golf experience as a whole.
Figure 98 Part of Rickwood's Juddhaven golf course is visible in the cleared area behind the Ernescliffe Hotel. Lake Rosseau surrounds the property on three sides.
Similarly, at Parry Sound Golf and Country Club, which Rickwood built between 1928 and 1929, everyone agreed that Rickwood’s aesthetic sense both in choosing land for the golf course and in subsequently routing and laying out the golf course was sure and sound. The club’s professional golfer said that “It is really a wonderful little club…. The course was laid out by Fred Rickwood, of Orillia, who certainly did a very creditable job, making it a real test of golf and a very pretty course. This is the second year for the course, and already a large number of tourists have played over it and expressed their delight with the wonderful layout, keen greens, and beautiful scenery” (Canadian Golfer, December 1930, vol 16 no 8, pp 607-8). The Secretary of Parry Sound Golf and Country Club also gave kudos to Fred Rickwood for his services in general, but particularly for his aesthetic sense: “Several sites were investigated and then the services of Fred Rickwood were called in. He lost no time in advising us to accept the offer we had, and to acquire the present location…. Travellers who have seen it and pretend to know courses throughout the Dominion inform us it is one of the prettiest layouts they have ever seen” (May 1929, vol 15 no 1, p.4).
Figure 99 A hand-painted postcard from the 1930s showing Fred Rickwood's fourth hole at the Parry Sound Golf and Country Club. Portage Lake is visible in the background.
It is not an accident, I think, that in of the photographs that I have found of Rickwood’s vanished Parry Sound golf course (a discussion of which features in Volume One of this book), a magnificent view of Portage Lake is featured. Literally and figuratively, no one could picture the golf course without considering the beauty in which it participated and to which it contributed.
In retrospect, we can see that Rickwood’s aesthetic pronouncements about golf course design were accorded respect as far back as his days at the Summit Club. When W.H. Webling played at the Summit Golf and Country Club in 1922 and then wrote his review of Toronto’s newest golf course, he made sure to tell readers of Rickwood’s judgements about the golf holes, and not just in terms of their level of difficulty, but also in terms of their aesthetic dimensions: “We played over the course with a great deal of pleasure. Many of the holes have much natural character and call for real golf. Rickwood, the Club’s excellent professional, tells us he thinks that the sixth hole is the best on the course, while seven and eight are probably the most scenically beautiful” (“Golf’s Little Journeys,” Canadian Golfer, Sept. 1922, vol viii no 5, p. 422).
I think we have reason to be confident that Rickwood set about his 1927 remodelling of the golf course at Napanee Golf and Country Club with an eye out both for the aesthetic potential that could be developed within the landscape and for any potentially negative aesthetic consequences that various possible changes might have. For all we know, Rickwood may have done a great deal of work to enhance the golfer’s aesthetic experience during a round of golf at Napanee Golf and Country Club. Unfortunately, however, we have no evidence of any particular aesthetic considerations that he included in his redesign work.
Or do we?
Let us consider a pruned tree.
The tree in question came down just a few years ago. It was at the left or eastern end of the escarpment at the top of the ninth fairway, right where the cart path reaches the top of the hill. It had grown up several feet from the crest of the escarpment. By the early years of the twenty-first century, its canopy had become so huge as to knock down approach shots coming from the left side of the fairway, or even approach shots coming from the centre of the fairway that went left.
Of course this tree had not been pruned since 1927.
As a young tree, it appears in the photograph below of the 1932 Quinte Cup championship team.
Figure 100 1932 Quinte Cup championship team with the tree to the right of them showing evidence of having been pruned. Note also that the 9th green on the bottom of which they stand seems to have had its fall punching and sanding.
The team is photographed standing on top of Blanchard’s Hill to take advantage of the panoramic view of the Napanee skyline behind them. They are positioned at the bottom of Rickwood’s ninth green. The tree in question is visible behind the left shoulder of the man on the right of the photograph. It stands just at the crest of the steepest part of the hill.
When we inspect a greatly enlarged detail from this photograph so as to feature this tree, we can see that it has been shorn of all branches up to a certain height. The same can be said of a tree further down Blanchard’s Hill that is visible in the background immediately behind the tree in question. This pruning was presumably undertaken by Rickwood as part of his construction of the new ninth hole late in the summer and early fall of 1927.
Figure 101 Pruned trees are visible behind Laurie Douglas in this 1932 photograph.
In the context of this consideration of Stanley Thompson’s influence on Rickwood, I can think of at least three possible reasons for his pruning of the tree at the crest of Blanchard’s Hill in this way.
First, and most obviously, he must have wanted to make the new ninth green accessible – at least to some degree – to approach shots not just from the middle of the fairway, but also from the somewhat treed left side. We have noted that another tree on the left side of the fairway below the escarpment has also been pruned.
By the middle of the twentieth century, more and more trees came to be planted along the left side of the ninth fairway, making an approach to the green from this area very difficult – if not impossible.
Figure 102 Looking down the west side of the ninth fairway in the mid-twentieth century from a position at the bottom of the cliff on the west side of the fairway where the cart-path now ascends the hill.
Rickwood, however, seems to have meant this area to remain “approachable.” Of course he by no means invited an approach shot to the ninth green from the left side of the fairway, which may well have been left as rough (as it is today), but his pruning of the two trees shows that he did not intend an approach shot from this location to be impossible. “Strategically,” the approach shot from the left rough was to be possible, but not easy. A golfer’s having to face this shot, with its attendant difficulties, would be a consequence of a mistake in the golfer’s “strategy.” Any approach shot on the ninth hole was going to be difficult enough in terms of its semi-blindness alone, so there was no need for Rickwood to be overly “penal” about a drive hit too far left. So he pruned at least two trees.
Why not remove the tree on top of the escarpment altogether, then, instead of pruning it?
Stanley Thompson is ready with an answer that suggests two more reasons for pruning the tree: “In clearing fairways, it is good to have an eye to the beautiful. Often it is possible, by clearing away undesirable and unnecessary trees on the margin of fairways, to open up a view of some attractive picture and frame it with foliage.”
So Rickwood’s second reason for pruning the tree may have been to open up for golfers an attractive picture of the beautiful new clubhouse from the ninth fairway below. By leaving the tree in place, but pruning it extensively, Rickwood framed the fairway view of the clubhouse with newly, neatly pruned foliage. The photograph below from the early 2000s shows the tree in question still framing the original clubhouse structure (which is under the dormer window), but it also shows how much the drooping branches of the tree have dropped into the sight-line Rickwood had cleared with his pruning.
Figure 103 Trees unpruned in eighty years obscure the part of the clubhouse representing the original clubhouse.
The photograph above shows how a host of unpruned trees have come to obscure a view of the original clubhouse from the ninth fairway, as what we see left of the dormer window was added in 1960.
So by the early twenty-first century, Rickwood’s long unpruned tree had thwarted two of his intentions: it blocked a view of the clubhouse and it blocked approach shots from the left side of the fairway.
Rickwood’s third reason for leaving the tree in place and pruning it would have mirrored the previous reason: he wanted both to open up further and to frame with foliage the panoramic view available from the clubhouse windows and verandas – a panoramic view of both the golf course below and the Napanee skyline in the distance. We know that this was a view to climb for as long ago as 1906. Note that the pruning of the tree in 1927 trimmed branches to precisely the height necessary to give a clear view of the horizon to the north. The view over the town afforded from this vantage point was the reason that the 1932 winning Quinte Cup team was photographed where they were. A photograph from the same location just a few years ago would have had more than a quarter of the view of the town of Napanee below obscured by the drooping canopy of the tree in question, as the comparison of the two photographs below shows.
Figure 104 Each photograph is marked by the steeple of Grace United Church in the background on the left and by the same tree on the right, yet the view of the skyline of the town of Napanee in the top photograph is significantly reduced.
At the left margin of each photograph is the steeple of Grace United Church. At the right margin of each photograph is the Rickwood tree, pruned to a point above the Napanee skyline in the one photograph but obscuring the Napanee skyline and the golf course itself in the other photograph.
And so as Rickwood considered this tree perched simultaneously at the edge of the escarpment and at the edge of the ninth fairway, he must have recalled Thompson’s advice that the architect must take into account the importance of “the aesthetic effect of environment.” It is likely that Stanley Thompson would have appreciated what Rickwood was able to do by pruning a single tree.
With regard to Thompson’s impact on Rickwood via his particular “strategic” recommendations in “About Golf Courses,” we have already Thompson’s suggestion that fairway “cross bunkers” be eliminated and we have already noted that Rickwood not only refused to employ any fairway bunkers on any of the two-shotters that he designed for Napanee Golf and Country Club; he also seems to have eliminated what appear to have been fairway bunkers on the original third hole of the 1907-27 golf course (which became Rickwood’s first hole). Since the reference to these bunkers in the “Local Ground Rules” published in April of 1927, before Rickwood arrived in Napanee, there has never been a subsequent reference to them. Not even Bruce Medd recalled them. Either Rickwood obliterated them completely, or he effectively eliminated them by re-routing the first fairway from the north side of the clubhouse to the south side. Either way, the bunkers were gone.
In the early 1930s, the Kingston golfers who sang the praises of Fred Rickwood’s remodelling of Napanee Golf and Country Club may not have known it, but they were implicitly celebrating Rickwood’s application of Thompson’s strategic “design” principles. Their own golf course at Cataraqui Golf and Country Club was being re-modelled by Thompson in 1930 when they first visited Napanee in August and raved about the new Fred Rickwood course. The account of their experiences at Napanee Golf and Country Club that they gave to the Kingston Whig led to the following headline: “Napanee Has One of the Sportiest Courses in Eastern Ontario” (6 August 1930). When many of the same golfers returned to Napanee for another match two years later, “The consensus of opinion among the visitors was that the course was interestingly deceptive because it looks as if it would be easy to score on”; but it was not as easy as it looked (Hunters p. 32).
Golf holes that look easy, but are not, define the essence of successful strategic design. Two years of play by the Cataraqui golfers on their new Stanley Thompson golf course had not only not dimmed their enthusiasm for Fred Rickwood’s course; it seems to have sharpened their appreciation of its Thompsonesque “strategic” design.
Of course from the very beginning of his work for Thompson at the Summit Golf and Country Club, Rickwood was celebrated for his expertise at green construction, and it was his years of experience at constructing greens (among other things) that was mentioned in the Napanee newspapers in 1927. This specialization in the construction of greens must have been at least an indirect product – if not a direct product – of working closely with Thompson, who understood putting to be an extremely important potential game-changer in club competitions. Recall Mumford’s observation that “in his day, Thompson, like most designers, considered putting a critical aspect of the game. It wasn’t so much resistance to scoring but more a case of providing a complete test of golf. Match play was still very much in vogue during the 1920s … and great putters could still prevail at a club, even if they couldn’t keep up with longer hitters. Challenging greens often revealed the best all round player.”
“Challenging” is a proper description of Rickwood’s remaining Napanee greens. Downhill putts are fast. Nearly every putt is affected by subtle slopes. To read a putt is difficult; local knowledge is essential. Yet the greens look benign to a newcomer.
They give the impression of having emerged from the landscape, for each green at some point blends seamlessly into one of the contours that surround it. On the first, fourteenth, and ninth holes, this seamless connection occurs at the front edge of the green where fairway ends and green begins (as seems to have been the case with Rickwood’s sixth hole, too).
On the eighth hole, however, the seamless connection occurs with the plateau of rough on the left side of the green, and on his seventh hole the seamless connection was at the right front corner. On the hog’s-back greens of the second and third holes, all sides of these greens seem to have blended with the surrounding contours.
What Rickwood did with his greens in this regard seems in absolute accord with Thompson’s dictum: “Nature must always be the architect’s model. The lines of … greens must not be sharp or harsh, but easy and rolling…. The placing and contouring of greens requires serious consideration, as they must blend into the surrounding terrain” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”).
Every one of Rickwood’s surviving green complexes at Napanee presents the golfer with the challenge of landing on a slightly elevated plateau. Yet that the green functions as a plateau is hardly perceptible from the fairway, so easy and seamless is the blending of the green with the surrounding terrain.
Thompson himself favoured this kind of green, a preference stemming from his conviction that green “drainage must at all costs be taken care of. A green should face the shot but should never recede from the player for the very reason that it will be invisible” (“About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep”). His second green at the Summit Golf and Country Club (reviewed above in the section on the eighth hole) is an archetypal example of this early twentieth-century style of green. The green rises in slope from front to back, which satisfies the requirement that drainage be taken care of, and the slope of the green is angled in the direction of the tee or in the direction that the architect wants the approach shot to come from.
Rickwood made virtually all of his greens in this way. He learned that such a design allowed easy construction and effective golf design strategy. Simply aim the green to the location from which the approach shot is expected to be taken, and the construction technique automatically produces shoulders and precipitous drop-off at the back edge of the green – greenside conditions sufficient to challenge any golfer’s short game.
Like Thompson, Rickwood knew that making the green a low plateau with slightly elevated shoulders and a back edge that drops off precipitously would hone chipping and putting skills in any player capable of learning from failure. Not holding an approach shot on a plateau green immediately confronts the golfer with the question of how to get the ball over the steep back of the green, or over the shoulder of the green, and onto the putting surface –without having it fall short of the green or roll off the other side of the green. At the Summit Golf and Country Club, he built such a green for Thompson at the third hole, described as follows: “Green built up. Bank behind falls ten feet away to flat” (Canadian Golfer, May 1920, vol vi no 1, p. 28). Back in Rickwood’s day, there was no 60-degree wedge that would enable a flop shot. There was only the niblick, which had a loft similar to that of a nine iron or standard pitching wedge today. From behind the first, fourteenth, eighth, and ninth greens at Napanee Golf and Country Club, a player attempting to pitch a ball onto the green surface with a niblick would often have failed (in a variety of ways!). Even using a niblick to chip onto the greens over the side shoulders would have been extremely difficult when one was short-sided. And recall Bruce Medd’s observations about the golf clubs used in the late 1920s: “Fewer clubs were used. No one had numbered sets. Usually, you would buy a driver, a mashie and a mashie niblick, which would relate to today’s five and seven irons. No one had any nine irons or wedges” (Hunters, p. 125). Apparently, a golfer at Napanee Golf and Country Club originally faced these difficult shots without even a niblick!
We can tell his consistent recourse to this style of green, with its back and side drop-offs, that Rickwood agreed with Thompson that chipping and putting skills were essential to the playing of golf. One of the golf course architect’s responsibilities was to design a course that would enable the development of club members’ full range of golf skills. Members of the Napanee Golf and Country Club who ventured abroad to represent the club in matches at Kingston, Picton, and Belleville after Rickwood’s work on the course in 1927 could be confident that their chipping and putting games were as good as they could be.
In fact, in the first ten years after the Rickwood course was opened (from 1928 to 1937, that is), in competitions for the Quinte Cup (sometimes called the District Cup), Napanee golf teams won the cup over teams from Picton, Belleville, and Cataraqui, and then Trenton (which replaced Cataraqui) at least five times. One wonders at such a high success rate. Could it have been caused by enhanced chipping and putting skills from regular play on Rickwood’s course? Mumford says that a Thompson golf course was designed to allow a golfer to chip-and-putt an opponent to death in match-play competition. The same could be said of Rickwood’s Napanee course.
If he had learned it before, Rickwood would also have learned from working with Stanley Thompson at the Summit Golf and Country Club that elevation changes between tee and fairway and between fairway and green were extremely important to a great golf course layout – not just for aesthetic reasons, but also for strategic reasons.
Strategically, elevation changes always make club selection difficult.
At the Summit Golf and Country Club that Rickwood built for Thompson, many tees were elevated twenty to twenty-five feet above the fairway. The first tee was 100 feet above the fairway! The same was true of the fourteenth hole, where the tee was on a precipice and the fairway was in a valley 100 feet below. One green was elevated fifteen feet above the fairway; another was located on a plateau fifty feet above the fairway. Of course Rickwood not only built these golf holes; he played them frequently as Summit’s head pro, so he became intimately familiar with the relationship between Thompson’s ideas in the abstract and their practical impact on the playing of the game when those ideas manifested themselves in actual landscape.
Not surprisingly, then, we find Rickwood enamoured of elevation changes in his work at Juddhaven (featuring a mound from which golfers teed off three times per round), at Parry Sound (where the holes were routed across a land he himself had chosen for the club – land that sloped downward from one end to the other, as well as upward away from the shores of Portage Lake), and of course at Napanee (where gullies, hills, and cliffs abound).
We have discussed already the enormous elevation change facing the golfer on both shots on the uphill ninth hole. We have also considered the difficulty that the elevation change on the seventh hole introduced to club selection, especially when players’ calculations had to take into account the prevailing wind blowing into their faces. More subtly, Rickwood doomed many golfers to a difficult pitch shot when they found themselves in the valley in front of his fifth green (today’s fourteenth green) because of the elevation of the green fifteen to twenty feet (five or six meters) above the bottom of the valley. Similarly, on the “Gully Hole,” Rickwood seems to have designed his elevated hog’s-back green both to feed timid shots back into the gully before the green and to bounce aggressive shots over the back of the green into the gully beyond. However far toward the bottom of the gullies any particular ball rolled, the golfer was faced with a significant elevation change when chipping the ball back up the hill and onto the surface of the green. A minor version of this elevation change caused by gullies before and after the green was also achieved at Rickwood’s third green.
Perhaps Fred Rickwood should be called the small club’s Stanley Thompson.
He could build a good golf course on a modest budget. In doing so, he brought to small-town golf clubs the sorts of things that Thompson valued: the aesthetic experience of landscape, the strategic benefits in the routing of golf holes that come from dramatic elevation changes, the priority when designing a golf course of enabling golfing pleasure for all levels of players by emphasizing “strategic” design over “penal” design, the importance of providing sufficiently challenging greens to enable a short hitter with practised putting prowess to be competitive with the big hitter whose putting skills are average.
At Napanee Golf and Country Club, Rickwood achieved all of these goals.
And so he solved the problem that Stanley Thompson thought was both the most important one and the most difficult one that any architect could face: “The most successful course is one that will test the skill of the most advanced player, without discouraging the ‘duffer,’ while adding to the enjoyment of both. This is not an easy task, but is by no means an insoluble one” (About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep). In these terms, one of Rickwood’s most important and most enduring achievements at Napanee is to have “strategically” designed a Thompson-inspired golf course that presents interesting challenges for everyone without being unreasonably challenging for anyone.
Yet however much of his design work at Napanee was inspired by the architectural theories and practices of Stanley Thompson, Fred Rickwood nonetheless deserves recognition in his own right for his seminal contribution to the making of the Napanee golf course.
When he came to Napanee Golf and Country Club in 1927, Rickwood wisely recognized that the natural contours of the property’s landscape provided ample and remarkable raw material from which to fashion a relatively short course into a sequence of holes with movement up and down and left and right – on both fairways and greens! – more than sufficient to create myriad permutations in any golfer’s playing of the course across time.
And of course it is in the playing of a golf course that one finds the proof of the architectural pudding – as Sam Snead discovered. When he played at the Napanee Golf and Country Club at the end of August in 1959, after a summer of hot weather and heavy traffic on the golf course, the greens were not in their best shape, and it seems, furthermore, that the pin positions may have been “tricked-up” a bit for the sake of a bit of “home advantage” in the Quinte Cup matches that were being conducted on the course that day. Nonetheless, by this point in his career three times a winner of the Masters, three times a winner of the PGA Championship, a winner of the Open Championship, and four times runner-up in the U.S. Open, Snead’s endorsement of the course echoed that of the Cataraqui golfers who had come over from their Stanley Thompson redesign thirty years before to play the sporty Napanee course of Fred Rickwood: “If these greens were better and the flags in the centre of the greens,” Snead said, “it would be a pleasure to play here anytime” (Hunters 75).
From now on, whenever anyone investigates the unique formula that has made our almost 125 year-old golf course one that most people find a pleasure to play anytime – indeed, one that many people want to play every day – it will always be worthwhile “remembering Fred Rickwood and the making of the Napanee golf course.”
Appendix 1: Stanley Thompson, About Golf Courses
Stanley Thompson, About Golf Courses: Their Construction, and Upkeep (1923, from the Stanley Thompson Society website)
One hundred and thirty acres is sufficient to lay out a course on. Less than this should not be used, unless the peculiar character of the land permits, as the course is then apt to be confined and cramped, as well as dangerous. Anything in excess of 130 acres will permit the architect to work in landscape features. This is an item that cannot be overlooked, for the fascination of golf is not due solely to the science of the shots, but rather to the aesthetic effect of environment.
Lately there has been a reaction – and rightly so – against the artificiality and grotesqueness of certain architecture. Nature must always be the architect’s model. The lines of bunkers and greens must not be sharp or harsh, but easy and rolling. The development of the natural features and planning the artificial work to conform to them requires a great deal of care and forethought.
In clearing fairways, it is good to have an eye to the beautiful. Often it is possible, by clearing away undesirable and unnecessary trees on the margin of fairways, to open up a view of some attractive picture and frame it with foliage.
Water not only makes good mental and actual hazards, but by the picture which can be created adds greatly to the effect of a course if treated in a natural way. Streams, ponds, and even open ditches, if properly made, give variety, not only to the play, but the aspect of the course, and through their steady motion or quiet permanence inspire a feeling of restful calm.
Open areas may be demarked by the judicious grouping of trees, which may define the fairways or act as a screen to hide some undesirable feature. Oftentimes the natural beauty of many a golf course, which the average player assumes was always present, has been created by the skill of the engineer who can see opportunities for beauty in the rough woods, swamps or fields that mean nothing to the unskilled eye. The absence or presence of the above features, among others will decide whether continuous play on a course becomes monotonous or otherwise.
The most successful course is one that will test the skill of the most advanced player, without discouraging the "duffer,” while adding to the enjoyment of both. This is not an easy task, but is by no means an insoluble one. The absence of cross bunkers has largely made it possible. One should always keep in mind that more than 85% of the golfers play 90 or over. These are the men that support the clubs and therefore the course should not be built for the men who play in the 70 class.
As soon as a player departs from the straight and narrow path, some penalty should follow. Unless this is so, the game loses some of its enjoyment, for it is only accomplishing what is difficult that gives satisfaction and pleasure. The most popular courses are by no means the easiest ones and the wise committee will see that the course is difficult, but not impossible.
Every shot in the game should be planned and the holes should be so arranged that each one is different from the following one. There should be three or four short holes – five is perhaps one too many, as the remaining holes are apt to be unbalanced. They should be interspersed – not, however, near the beginning or the end. In the former case they tend to congest the course, while in the latter the player who happens to be down [in match-play] is discriminated against.
There should be six or seven good two-shotters, with alternate tees for the lengthening or shortening of the holes as the ground is hard or soft or the direction of the wind [varies], to preserve their values. The rest should be apportioned between pitch and iron shots for the second.
Beware of three-shotters, unless there is some special natural feature demanding them.
The starting holes should be comparatively easy, so as not to congest the course; the finishing ones should be long and difficult, for they are often the deciding ones in a [match-play] contest and no one should win a game on an easy hole.
The fewer the blind holes the better.
The bunkers around the greens should always be visible when within striking distance. A wider margin will naturally be given for a brassie [two-wood] shot than a mashie [five iron], but in no case should the bunkers be unfair. One should be able to get out with one shot without Herculean effort.
The placing and contouring of greens requires serious consideration, as they must blend into the surrounding terrain. Seventy per cent of the putting surface should be available for the placing of the hole. If this is so a putted ball will not increase its momentum after leaving the club. Drainage must at all costs be taken care of. A green should face the shot but should never recede from the player for the very reason that it will be invisible.
A practice green and extra putting green helps to pass away the time while waiting, as well as developing one’s game.
© Donald J. Childs 2020