Willie Park, Jr, and the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club: An Introduction
A fuller account of the how Willie Park, Jr. came to lay out the golf course of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club can be found in my book, A Forgotten Founder: John Moffatt Ross and the Origins of Golf at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club. See my website at donaldjchilds.ca.
Cover photograph: Willie Park, Jr (on the right), and his construction manager, W.C. Jackson, at Olympia Fields Course 4, spring 1922
Willie Park, Jr, and the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club: An Introduction
When Ottawa’s Hunt Club and Motor Club amalgamated in June of 1919, plans emerged both for a temporary nine-hole golf course designed by golf professionals Karl Keffer (Royal Ottawa) and David Black (Rivermead) and a permanent 18-hole championship course:
Figure 1 9 th green of the Keffer-Black course that circled the clubhouse counterclockwise, 26 July 1919. From left: J.M. Ross, J. Donaldson, J.E. Wilmot, Jas. N. Brownlee, Dr. D.M. Robertson, Frank Jarman. Jarman was Club President. Moffatt Ross (said to have been most responsible for uniting the Hunt Club and the Motor Club) was the Chairman of the Golf Committee. Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 7 (November 1919), p. 419).
Extensive plans have been made for the present season [1919] and next spring….
A temporary golf course, of nine holes, will be ready for use within two weeks and a professional [the Rivermead’s David Black] has already been engaged to begin work.
Next spring, a permanent course [of eighteen holes] will be laid out, one of the best architects in the Dominion being retained to draw up the plans.
(Ottawa Citizen [Ottawa, Ontario], 12 July 1919, p. 9)
Retained to lay out the permanent course was by far the best architect in the Dominion: Willie Park, Jr.
Figure 2 Left to right: Willie Park, Sr (Open champion 1860, 1863, 1866, 1875) and his younger brother Mungo Park (Open Champion 1874).
Willie was the second of four sons born to four-time Open Champion Willie Park, Sr (1833-1903), and the nephew of 1874 Open Champion Mungo Park (1836-1904). Known as “Young Willie” (as opposed to his father “Auld Willie”), he was shaped virtually from his birth in 1864 by the environment of professional golf, as he later recalled: “I commenced playing golf when I was in skirts and have been playing and working my entire life in this line of work” (Ashville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17).
“My first recollection of golf,” he was fond of relating, was “when my elder brother with a golf stick in his hand ready to swing, told me to gonna out of the way, and as I didn’t move, I had a lick on the chin” (Ashville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17). Barely out of “skirts,” Young Willie worked in his father’s golf shop, hammering patterned creases into the smooth surface of gutta percha golf balls (so that they would fly truer) and, when he had a moment to spare, practising putting marbles across the brick floor of the shop. Willie caddied as a boy at Musselburgh, of course, and was said to have skipped meals to find time to play the game himself.
Park’s environment certainly nurtured his interest in golf, but in Golf Illustrated in 1922, he also said that the “law of heredity” plays a part in golfing prowess. Willie’s father and uncle were Open Champions. His much younger brothers John and Mungo became golf professionals (Mungo laying out golf courses in the United States and Argentina and winning the Argentine Open three times). And Willie lived long enough to see one of his daughters, Doris Park (born 1901), represent Scotland in an international match.
After her father’s death in 1925, Doris represented Scotland internationally another twelve times, represented Great Britain internationally three times, and represented Great Britain & Ireland in the first Curtis Cup match against the United States in 1932.
Figure 3 Doris Park watches her shot while competing in the Lossiemouth Championship. Daily Record [Lanarkshire, Scotland], 28 June 1923 p. 16.
She won the Scottish Ladies Championship and she reached the finals of the Ladies’ British Open Amateur Championship. In 1950, as Mrs. Aylmer Porter (in her fiftieth year), she shot a 74 in the South-Eastern Women’s Golf Championship at Sunningdale, where the original course had been laid out by Willie Park, Jr, in 1901, the year of his daughter’s birth (Daily Telegraph [London], 5 June 1950, p. 3).
Proud of his family’s achievements in golf, Willie liked to trace its passion for the game back to his grandfather, James Park (1797-1873). Because the latter was a ploughman at a time when the game was generally confined to the gentry, his great-great-grandson, Mungo Park, speculates that James Park probably did not play the “long game” (the “noble” version of the game associated with the gentry), which required expensive, professionally crafted golf clubs, an expensive, labour-intensive feathery golf ball, and an expensive, well-maintained golf course, but rather the “short game” (or the “common” game) in which golf was
played on an extemporaneous rudimentary short course with crude equipment – such as a roughly fashioned stick in place of a proper club (https://golfclubatlas.com/feature-interview/feature-interview-with-mungo-park/)
Figure 4 Left to right: Old Tom Morris (1821-1908) and Young Tom Morris (1851-1875), circa 1872.
The Park family of Musselburgh and the Morris family of St. Andrews were the two Royal Families of nineteenth-century Scottish golf: between them, they won fifteen of the first twenty-nine Open Championships (including the first one, won by Willie Park, Sr, in 1860). They played in many other tournaments for professionals as well, and they played in dozens of challenge matches against the best players of the day, with Old Tom and Young Tom often playing matches for high stakes against Mungo and Auld Willie.
Auld Willie was a great match play competitor, and so was Young Willie, who acquired a reputation for virtual invincibility in match play during the 1880s and 1890s (he was said to have published for twenty years in a London newspaper a standing offer to play against any person on any links course for a prize of £100).
And the Park and Morris families were also fierce competitors in business: Old Tom Morris manufactured golf equipment (particularly balls and clubs) and laid out golf courses, and so did Auld Willie, Mungo, and Young Willie, as well as a number of their siblings in each generation. Yet for all the apparent rivalry between the families, there may have been an emotional connection between Old Tom and Young Willie, for just as the former’s son Young Tom had witnessed the death of his wife in childbirth in 1875, so had Young Willie witnessed the death of his first wife Mary Taylor Sime in childbirth in 1887. As Young Willie’s great-nephew Mungo Park observes:
Figure 5 In this 1890s photograph of golfers in front of the clubhouse of the Old Course at St. Andrews, Willie Park, Jr, and Old Tom Morris are found side-by-side (seated in the front row, they are 4 th and 5th , respectively, from the right side).
It is interesting … to see how many photographs show Old Tom and Willie Park, Junior, standing or sitting together, particularly after the death in childbirth of Willie’s first wife Mary ….
It is reasonable to speculate that Tom had sympathy for the son of his “great rival,” a feeling that might have been borne of Willie’s golfing ability but also of his tragic loss.
(Mungo Park, https://golfweek.usatoday.com/lists/mungo-park-willie-park-british-openqa/)
From a young age, Willie demonstrated exceptional golfing ability. He played in his first Open Championship in 1880, when just 16. In 1887, aged 23, he won the Open Championship at Prestwick, and then he won it again in 1889 on his home course at Musselburgh. In 1898, on the last hole of the tournament, he missed a short putt that would have earned him an 18-hole playoff against winner Harry Vardon, who thereby earned the second of his six Open Championships. Willie played in his last Open in 1910, when he was 46. He would finish in the top ten of the Open Championship twelve times.
In 1919, aged 55, Park played in his one and only U.S. Open at the Brae Burn Country Club (in Newton, Massachusetts), crossing swords with some of the greats of the new generation, such as professional Major winners Walter Hagen, Jock Hutchinson, and Jim Barnes, as well as recent amateur winners of the U.S. Open, Francis Ouimet and Chick Evans. American golf writer John G. Anderson was impressed:
Here was a former champion of other days and the Old World, Willie Park, courageous enough in heart to try his fortunes against the cream of the country’s best…. We find him still the wizard with the putter but slowed up on account of the necessity for long carries both on the drive and the second shots.
At that, his total … was better than some of the younger pros.
(John G. Anderson, Sun [New York], 15 June 1919, p. 19)
This was just ten months before Willie Park would make his first visit to Ottawa.
Figure 6 Willie Park, Jr, circa mid-1880s.
Willie was also a club professional. In 1878, at 14, he was apprenticed to his uncle Mungo at the Alnmouth Golf Club (in northeastern England near the Scottish border), and two years later, Mungo arranged for his 16-year-old nephew to work as golf professional and greenkeeper at the Tyneside Golf Club near Newcastle, England.
But Willie returned to Musselburgh in 1884 to work at the links and to assist with the management of William Park & Son, perhaps because his father’s health had begun to decline, a
development that led two years later to Young Willie’s first golf course design, as he completed a layout that Auld Willie had been forced to abandon because of illness. Young Willie did this architectural work for free on condition that the new golf club’s members buy balls and clubs from William Park & Son. The twenty-three-year-old had discovered the business strategy of the “loss leader.”
An anecdote long told in Musselburgh suggests that Young Willie also learned early on the potential importance to sales of William Park & Son’s golf equipment that a celebrity endorsement might have:
Park is a legendary figure in Scotland. They tell the story of Park’s meeting with Princess Victoria shortly after he had won the British Open in 1887.
Figure 7 Princess Victoria (1868-1935)
Figure 8 Willie Park, Jr, circa 1890.
The Princess [a daughter of the future King Edward VII, and so a granddaughter of reigning Queen Victoria] … took a keen interest in golf.
It seems that Victoria wanted to play a round at Musselburgh but found that the royal brassie had been mislaid.
Park promptly offered his own brassie as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.
Now Willie would have rather lost an eye than that brassie, since it was the club chiefly responsible for his winning the championship.
By some happy chance, Willie’s brassie survived a hectic session at the fair hands of Her Royal Highness. Upon completing the round, she stopped in front of Mr. Park, holding the brassie, and kept looking from him to the club without saying anything.
Willie saw his cue.
“Will Your Highness accept that brassie with my respectful compliments?” he inquired, the words almost choking him: “It is my favorite club.”
“In that case,” replied Victoria graciously, “I should not think of taking it from you, though I admit it pleases me.”
“Were it not my favorite club, I would not think of offering it to Your Highness,” responded Park, with an inspiring gallantry worthy of Sir Walter Raleigh.
(Brooklyn Eagle [New York], 5 July 1925, p. 41)
As this anecdote spread by word of mouth, it was no doubt worth more than a little “brass” to William Park & Son: “Please, Mr. Park, will you make me a brassie such as you gave the Princess?”
Park also knew how to capitalize on his own celebrity. After his first Open Championship, “his business developed rapidly and his catch-the-eye trade proclamation – ‘If you want a good club, get a good golfer to make it’ – was known the world over” (Daily Record [Glasgow, Scotland], 25 May 1925, p. 17).
Young Willie’s catchy business motto and his quick wit in his conversation with Princess Victoria are happy instances of an alert mind and an irrepressibly creative imagination that expressed itself in many other ways throughout his career – as, for instance, in his invention of a large variety of golf clubs.
Figure 9 A “bent neck” putter by Willie Park, Jr. Its offset feature has become a staple of putter design ever since.
“Ideas flowed from him,” says Douglas Mackenzie:
He invented the bulger driver in 1885, a patent lofter in 1889, a patent driving cleek in 1891, a patent compressed driver in 1893, and the patent bent-neck putter in 1894.
He also contributed a golf ball with 56 hexagonal sides which he thought slowed its motion on the green.
Tremendously inventive, he always seemed to have his pulse on what technology might be in demand.
In 1913, he patented a “stepped-face” iron to impart more backspin to the ball, a thriving area for innovation until such clubs were banned in 1921.
(D. Mackenzie, Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland, https://www. antiquegolfscotland.com/antiquegolf/maker.php3?makerid=31)
From the beginning, the world of business appealed to Young Willie – so much so that business concerns began to displace competitive golf as his focus. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, as golf began to gain popularity in England for the first time, Park astutely exploited business opportunities throughout Great Britain and Ireland.
He not only opened branches of William Park & Son in Manchester and London, but he also laid out golf courses for dozens of new golf clubs springing up in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Some of these courses were laid out on traditional links land, as in the case of Gullane No. 2 near North Berwick in 1898, but others were laid out at inland locations – particularly on heathland sites long thought unsuitable for golf.
Figure 10 Willie Park, Jr. Munsey’s Magazine (New York), vol 13 no 6 (September 1895), p. 604.
Park began to think about the difficulties of inland golf course design in these early days, but the imagination of the young businessman and architect was further stimulated by his experience of golf course design and construction in the United States in the 1890s. It was at this time that Americans began to play this new game, which needed golf courses on which to play it, equipment with which to play it, and instruction from golf professionals on how to play it. Recognizing another business opportunity, Park travelled to New York City in the spring of 1895 to open a branch of William Park & Son.
During the several months he was in America, he was induced to play exhibition matches and challenge matches against virtually every amateur or professional golfer of any standing then residing in the United States. The New York Sun noted: “Park is a hard worker.
He visits some golf course daily and is always ready to play the club’s professional for fun or money. So far, he has not been beaten” (Sun [New York], 14 May 1895, p. 5).
Park also laid out several golf courses in the American Northeast, especially for wealthy members of the Vanderbilt family. He stayed in their mansions, designed them a golf course, and taught them how to play. He did the same for John Jacob Astor IV at his estate at Rhinecliff, New York: “Mr. Astor was too busy laying out a new road through the property and in superintending other improvements,” said Park, “to give much time to golf, but we were on the links Saturday. Mrs. Astor is very enthusiastic about the game. She played at Newport last summer for the first time and promises to make a good golfer. She swings in a most graceful style, and in golf, swing is everything” (Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5).
Never one to forgo an opportunity to advertise either his skills or his associations with celebrities, Park wrote a detailed hole-by-hole description of this layout for an American newspaper, averring that “To some extent, it may be a guide to owners of country places who may wish to play golf” (Sun [New York], 23 May 1895, p. 5). Although he had no formal schooling beyond the age of fourteen or fifteen, Park discovered in writing such course descriptions that he had a gift for clear and succinct writing about golf. The American appetite for his teaching, course design, and perhaps even his writing, helped to convince him, on his return to Scotland, that the time had come to write The Game of Golf (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1896). Reputed to have been the first book written by a golf professional, it provides early insight into Park’s theorization of the art and science of golf course architecture.
Figure 11 Left to right: Willie Park, Jr., and Harry Vardon (1870-1937). Ganton Golf Club, Yorkshire, England, 1899.
Helping to convince Park that his future lay not with competitive golf but rather with architecture were two losses to Harry Vardon. Vardon’s victory over Park by a single stroke in the 1898 Open Championship vexed Park’s supporters almost as much as it did the two-time Champion himself. All were eager for a 72-hole challenge match to determine which of these superstars was the best golfer. In 1899, the first leg of the home-and-home series was played at North Berwick, 10,000 spectators gathering to witness the first 36 holes. This was the largest crowd ever to watch a challenge match. Vardon led by 2 holes. Vardon dominated the next match at his home course in Ganton, Yorkshire, winning 11 up with 10 to play. The question was decided.
In retrospect, the lop-sided result of this match effectively ended Park’s reputation as one of the most formidable of match play opponents.
And so, Park turned increasingly to golf course design – his innovative work on his own Huntercombe course in 1899 and on the Sunningdale club’s course in 1901 earning him a reputation as an exceptional architect. Park was familiar with the well-known requirements for designing a proper test of golf on links land, but no one had yet worked out how to provide an equivalent challenge and playing experience on parkland, pastureland, and heathland. At Sunningdale and Huntercombe, however, Park undertook to demonstrate that the rolling hills and the natural contours of heathland, with its gorse, heather, and other similar vegetation, and with its heavier and less sandy soil, could provide a strategically challenging and compelling golf experience.
The Huntercombe course was Park’s baby. He purchased Huntercombe Manor and 724 acres of land around it. He established his own development company: the plan was to build an eighteen-hole golf course surrounded by a housing development. He and his second wife Margaret Inglis invested virtually all their savings in this project. Park completed the golf course in seven months and it was immediately and almost universally acclaimed as a brilliant achievement.
Figure 12 Willie Park, Jr., at Huntercombe with his 1901 Daimler.
But Park’s development plans were beset by problems from the beginning. On the one hand, the golf course was not well-patronized, for it was located inconveniently far from the nearest railroad station. He bought a big Daimler so that he could personally transport golfers from the train station to the golf course. On the other hand, he had gambled that the local water table would be sufficiently high to provide the water necessary for the development, but drilling yielded no adequate supply.
Consequently, neither the clubhouse nor any of the houses was even started.
Parked spent six years trying to make good on his investment at Huntercombe. Yet despite income from other architectural work, cash flow became a problem that he could not resolve. And so, the Norwich Union Life Insurance Company foreclosed on him in 1906. Park’s contemporaries had nothing but sympathy for his reversal of fortune at Huntercombe:
Of the many fine course laid out by Willie Park, the outstanding examples are Sunningdale and Huntercombe.
The latter was a private venture financed by Park himself, and, through no fault of his, it was in this venture that he lost the greater part of the fortune that his golf had earned.
Huntercombe was one of the earliest of the great “Country Club” courses and has since, in other hands, become a success.
(Tunbridge Wells Courier [England], 25 August 1916, p. 4)
But sympathy did not help pay Park’s many bills. The only way forward seemed to be to design as many golf courses as possible as quickly as possible. As great-nephew Mungo Park notes:
Figure 13 Willie Park, Jr., circa 1907.
This was a difficult time ….
After Huntercombe was lost, he poured himself into work, and before the First World War, he was at his most active and influential.
Among a long list, he worked at Royal Wimbledon in 1907, West Lancashire, Temple, Laufer and Biggar in the Borders, and Grantown on Spey further north.
Neuport Bains, Mont Angel (Monte Carlo) and Royal Antwerp were also carried out in this period, and Killarney [Ireland] in 1911.
(Mungo Park, https://golfclubatlas.com/ feature-interview/feature-interview-withmungo-park/)
By 1911, forty-seven year-old Park was still revered as a golfer by the rising generation of golf professionals in the United Kingdom, but he had also come to be regarded as one of the country’s top architects – and also as one of its busiest:
Golf courses are springing up like the proverbial mushroom …. Our leading golf architect, Willie Park, twice Open Champion, is loud in his praises of the spread of the game.
Park was the greatest power in the game more than a quarter century ago: he is still in the front line of our professionals, and there is no one more calculated to speak on the game than the Musselburgh man.
Park is the most widely travelled of golfers, and he has spent many months of the rapidly dying year in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, in addition to traversing quite a score of circuits of the British Isles.
“There is no end to the game,” he says: “The old can play it as well as the young, and it will soon be the greatest of all games.”
(Coventry Evening Telegraph, 14 December 1911, p. 4)
Still, for all the great quantity of high-quality work that he did up to 1911, Park could not overcome the debts with which he had been burdened by the failure of Huntercombe. At the beginning of 1912, his finances became acutely strained as post-dated cheques paid to him for his design and construction of the golf course for the St Peters (Mablethorpe) Golf Club in Lincolnshire proved to be worthless. When these post-dated cheques bounced, Park was declared bankrupt in the spring of 1912.
Rather than being deterred by his financial problems, however, Park was all the more motivated to design as many golf courses as possible in the years that followed, but just two years after his bankruptcy, World War I broke out in August of 1914. The consequent collapse of the golf industry in Great Britain during the war was small potatoes in the context of the death of over nine million soldiers, of course, but it explains the decision that led to Willie Park’s eventual arrival in Ottawa:
Golf Hard Hit by War
The war raised havoc with golf in Europe, according to Park, and caused him to close up several stores which he had located in different parts of England and Scotland.
It is very near impossible to get a golf club made in England today, according to Park….
He was in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the first Zeppelin raid was made by the German forces.
(Minneapolis Journal [Minnesota], 3 December 1916, p. 27)
More than not being able to sell golf clubs, Park was left with no opportunity to express an architectural genius that was universally acknowledged and was becoming increasingly well-remunerated. And so, early in 1916, he decided to move to a country not yet involved in World War I – a country where golf course construction was booming: the United States.
When Park arrived in New York in the spring of 1916, after a twenty-year absence, the Brooklyn Eagle was excited to think of the work to come:
Willie Park a Great Golf Architect
Figure 14 Willie Park, Jr., circa 1916.
Those who believe that in links architecture the amateur designer [such as Harry Colt] is the salt of the earth will have their faith sadly shaken when they contemplate the achievements in golf course construction of Willie Park….
Park is the latest of the British professionals to leave the United Kingdom, where golf is practically dead on account of the war, to live in the United States.
Park is now past the age when he might be expected to do war duty and thus can leave his native heath without casting doubt upon his patriotism….
On entering the field of golf construction, he … blazed the way, being the first designer to take on the contract of laying out a course on heath land, which had always appeared to the general eye as peculiarly unfitted for links. The result of Park’s originality was the great Sunningdale course which was the pioneering of the many courses of this character now to be found in England.
(Brooklyn Eagle [New York], 4 May 1916, p. 20)
Figure 15 Golfer's Magazine (June 1916).
Park’s innovations in golf course design at inland sites would lead directly to his claim printed both in advertisements (as seen to the left) and at the top of the architectural design pad he used to draw the holes to be laid out at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club in April of 1920: “The ORIGINATOR of the MODERN SYSTEM OF GOLF COURSE DESIGN.” This claim would be endorsed in 1952 by golf architect and historian Sir Guy Campbell in A History of Golf in Britain. Calling Park “the doyen of golf architects, as the term is understood today,” Campbell asserts that Sunningdale (Old) and Huntercombe are “two courses of quality and continuing charm that … may be said to mark the springboard of modern practice” (A History of Golf in Britain [London: Cassell and Company, 1952], pp. 92-112).
Park was attracted to New York not just by the prospect of designing golf courses in a country not yet involved in World War I, but also by the prospect of working with Peterson, Miller & Sinclaire, Incorporated, “the exclusive agent in America of Carter’s Tested Seeds (Battle Creek Enquirer [Michigan], 25 September 1919, p. 2).
Before World War I, Park had worked with Carter’s Tested Seeds of London, which had earned a sterling reputation for producing excellent golf course turf for some of the best golf clubs in the British Isles. In conjunction with Carter’s, Willie Park (as architect) and Peterson, Sinclaire, & Miller (as course builders) pioneered a new comprehensive golf course design and construction programme:
A poor Golf architect means a poor layout;
inexperienced supervision of construction work means many unnecessary mistakes which often cost thousands of dollars to correct;
grass seed and fertilizer of unknown quality mean an initial saving at the cost of poor turf which is a Green Committee’s most trying and expensive problem;
and, finally, when a course is completed, lack of intelligent maintenance may spoil all the good work which has been done.
No one recognizes these facts more fully than most club officials, and from everywhere comes the cry, “We want the best of everything, we are willing to pay for the best, but we must be sure we are getting it.”
(Robert Oakes Sinclaire, The Golf Course, vol 1 no 11 [November 1916], p. 1)
Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller promised to provide the best of everything, beginning with their architect.
As expected, Park’s name quickly attracted business. By the fall of 1916, in fact, after less than half a year in the United States, Park had received more requests for his services than he could accept:
I came to America five months ago and have been kept busy every day since I arrived.
I have, during that time, laid out or re-planned courses at Baltimore, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Brittian, Meridian, Plotsville, Reidsville and Boston and have in hand five courses at and around Detroit.
I have had to decline quite a number of engagements as I have contracts way ahead that keep me on the go for several years.
(Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17
For each golf club, Park planned the layout and furnished detailed drawings of each hole. And that might be the end of Park's work for the golf club, which would then build its own course, as had previously been the norm. But Park always implicitly lobbied for Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller with the same message for each club: “While the laying out is the most important thing in a golf course, the proper supervision while in the course of construction is quite as necessary” (Asheville Citizen-Times [North Carolina], 19 November 1916, p. 17).
Park’s first work in Canada was at Mount Bruno, where he laid out an 18-hole championship course in 1917, although constraints on golf course construction in Canada during World War I delayed completion of the course until 1919. Personally supervising construction in 1918 on what he expected to be recognized as one of his best designs, he agreed to return the next year as the Club’s head pro and make Mount Bruno the base of his operations for the 1919 golf season.
Figure 16 John Moffatt Ross (1875-1937). Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 7 (November 1919), p. 418.
And so, as John Moffatt Ross began to consider the question of which architect he should choose to design the 18-hole course for the new Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, he found himself living through a cycle of golf news in Canada that seemed to be all about Willie Park. The Ottawa newspapers printed many items about him, and so, of course, did Canadian Golfer magazine, to which Moffatt Ross seems to have had a subscription (in 1920, he would correspond with editor Ralph Reville about his Club’s plans).
Throughout the year, there was regular news of courses that Park was laying out in Canada and the United States, news of progress on courses laid out by him the previous year, and news of courses that he was expected soon to design or redesign. For instance, in his syndicated column on golf in the Ottawa Journal, Reville observed the following in January of 1919:
Already indications are plentiful that this year will witness the most remarkable “boom” in golf ever recorded in Canada.
One of the outstanding features of 1919 will be the formal opening of the Mount Bruno Golf Club, situated at St. Bruno, some 15 miles from Montreal. This course, in the years to come, promises to become one of the most famous on the continent….
The celebrated Willie Park, ex-Open Champion of Great Britain, laid out the links and no expense has been spared to make them second to none.
(Ottawa Journal, 4 January 1919, p. 17)
In January, the Toronto Star welcomed the mere rumour that Park would come to Toronto: “The golf course at the Toronto Golf Club is to be reconstructed and it is said that Willie Park, who is to be professional at the Mount Bruno Club, Montreal, will be asked to handle the job. Park is a golf architect with a wide reputation” (Toronto Star, 10 January 1919, p. 24).
At the end of March, Reville reminded golfers that it was a privilege for Canada to host Park:
Figure 17 Ralph Reville, circa 1920.
Willie Park, the celebrated golf architect and ex-Open champion of Great Britain (1887 and 1889), arrived in Montreal from New York this week to take up his new duties at [Mount] Bruno Golf Club.
He writes me that he is “very enthusiastic about the outlook for the Royal and Ancient [Game] in Canada the coming season.”
It is a great thing for golf to have an expert like Willie Park take up his permanent residence here.
(Star Weekly [Toronto], 29 March 1919, p. 39)
Park was soon also at work at Laval-sur-le-lac “planning an 18-hole course” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 3 [July 1919], p. 140).
In mid-April, he was off to Chicago, having been “secured by the Olympia Fields Country Club to put the finishing touches on the third of their [three] eighteen-hole courses. He will also inspect the first and second … [and] visit several of the other Chicago courses” (Chicago Tribune, 15 April 1919, p. 20).
And news about Park just kept coming. In the first week of July, Park was in Halifax, planning improvements for the Brightwood golf course. Then he went to Manitoba:
Renowned Scottish Golf Architect to Survey ‘Peg Course
Willie Park Will Come Here Soon ….
With a view to improving its already fine course, Winnipeg Golf Club officials have made arrangements with Willie Park, noted British golf player and golf architect, to go over the Birds Hill course and submit recommendations for improvements.
(Winnipeg Tribune, 8 July 1919, p. 13)
While in Winnipeg, Park also laid out 18-hole courses for the Winnipeg Hunt Club and the Southwood Golf Club.
The Ottawa Journal reported Park’s next move in August:
This week, Willie Park, the well-known golf architect, who has just returned from a most successful trip to Winnipeg, is going over Beaconsfield [Montreal] with a view of suggesting improvements to the course in connection with the [Royal Canadian Golf Association’s amateur] championships of 1920.
The directors and members of the club are determined to have everything quite up to modern standards ….
(Ottawa Journal, 9 August 1919, p. 27).
Figure 18 David R. Brown, President of the R.C.G.A. in 1919 and the President of the Beaconsfield Golf Club in 1919.
Anytime after the spring of 1919, if Moffatt Ross had reached out to the president of the Royal Canadian Golf Association, David R. Brown, to ask for advice regarding architects suitable for laying out a proper championship course in Ottawa, he would have received a well-informed and entirely positive opinion about Park, for Brown was also the president of the Beaconsfield Golf Club and he had that spring retained Park for redesign work at Beaconsfield. According to Brown, “after careful inquiries as to the best expert to employ, the Board retained Willie Park to advise them regarding the changes for the improvement of the course” (Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 12 (April 1920), p. 733). Reville reported that Park outlined an “extensive programme of improvements” and “worked out a very comprehensive and complete championship course – one in every way worthy of the Canadian Amateur Tournament next summer” (Calgary Herald, 17 December 1919, p. 18)
In September, the New York Times marvelled at how productive Park had been since arriving in the United states in 1916 and at how busy he had become in 1919:
Park to Build Five New Courses for Chicago Club
Wiseacres in the golfing world have put up a candidate to run … for the busiest-man-in-the-world championship. He is Willie Park, the veteran and truly renowned architect of links.
Park has rarely passed a single season without drafting, planning, bunkering, teeing, and greening a course which has eventually become one of the most likeable in the hemisphere.
But his reputation and his record of many successes have kept so many jumps ahead of him that this year he is up to his neck in work.
The Metacomet Golf Club of Providence, R.I., … has recently contracted Park to construct a new links.
Out in Chicago … Park has been the architect selected to lay out five new courses for the new Olympia Fields Country Club.
(New York Times, 14 September 1919, p. 112)
Also in September, Park was called back to Monreal by a “new club, … the Riverside Golf Club, [which] will locate on the north side of the island of Montreal”: “Willie Park, golf architect and British Open Champion in 1887 and 1889, has already been engaged to lay out the links and supervise construction. Mr. Park considers that the new prospect offers every opportunity for the construction of a championship calibre course” (Montreal Gazette, 24 September 1919, p. 13). In the same month, he was off to Battle Creek, Michigan, to lay out an 18-hole course. By mid-November, he was laying out traps at the Rolling Road Golf Club in Baltimore, Maryland. Also in November, Reville reported that the Whitlock Golf Club in Hudson Heights, Quebec, had hired Park to add nine new holes to his original nine-hole layout there.
Having been since 1916 one of the most prolific golf course designers in the United States, Park had become in a single year the most prolific golf course designer in Canada.
As usual, Park returned to Musselburgh in December to spend three months with his wife, but Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller soon received so many new requests for Park’s services that the company brought him back to New York a month early. One of these requests was from Moffatt Ross, who arranged for Park to meet with the executive committee of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club in February of 1920.
Figure 19 Joseph G. Kanter (1881-1960). Brooklyn Daily Times (New York), 13 July 1931, p. 51.
It should be no surprise to learn that Park brought a representative of the Carter’s team with him. On the evening of February 19th, “an officer of the club” (probably Moffatt Ross) informed a reporter: “Messrs. J.G. Kanter and Mr. Willie Park, golf course architect, are at present in the city and will probably confer with officers of the club before next Thursday]” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1920, p. 9). Joseph G. Kanter’s job was to calculate the cost of an 18-hole Park layout. He would come to Ottawa without Park a month later to explain to the club the details of the construction process:
Representatives of the Carter’s Seeds Corporation, of England, addressed the meeting and … every phase of the question [was] gone into ….
Mr. J.G. Kanter, the New York representative of the Carter’s Seeds Corporation, and Mr. H.V. Hyrons, Canadian agent, addressed Tuesday’s meeting.
Both officials outlined the work that would be entailed in the construction of the proposed course and made several recommendations as to the lines that should be followed in beginning the work…. (Ottawa Citizen, 18 March 1920, p. 9)
When Park himself returned to Ottawa on 26 April 1920 to lay out the course, he was accompanied by the same Carter’s experts: “In addition [to Park] there are two representatives of the Carter’s Tested Seeds, Inc., of Boston, Messrs. J.G. Kanter and H.V. Hyrons, the … Canadian manager of the Carter’s Company, which is the chief builder of golf courses in America. The latter two gentlemen are here in an advisory capacity and are not charging for their services” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3)
Park completed his work at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, April 28th, and then gave an interview to an Ottawa Journal reporter about the main tenets of his modernizing design philosophy:
Mr. Park is enthusiastic over the possibilities of the new Ottawa course and is sure that, when completed, it will be second to none in America.
It is almost a natural course, says the golfer, and will require much less work to perfect it than the majority of courses. The fact that the ground is dry will give two more months of golfing and allow a game to be played immediately after a heavy rainfall.
The 180 acres belonging to the club will be ample for the course.
Every effort will be made by him to produce a championship course of about 6,500 yards, much longer than the average Canadian links, and so construct it that it will be pleasing to all players.
He is not a believer in the system of laying out a course so as to penalize the short driver.
His putting grounds will be along the most modern lines and all greens will be of the undulating type. Every effort will be made to produce a masterpiece of individuality at every green and there will be none of the stereotyped square greens that have been constructed in the past.
Although the work on the greens will be artificially created, the architect’s idea is to produce as near as possible a perfectly natural course.
All traps and fairways will be so constructed as to blend with the surroundings.
(Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19)
Club directors hosted Park and Kanter to dinner that night. Kanter spoke – “Mr. Kanter … thought the course would be an ideal one. It had a natural series of advantages equal to any course in the United States” – but “the feature of the evening was a talk from Mr. Park” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).
In a report since lost, Park seems to have described each of the 18 holes, occasionally describing shots required by particular holes. Fortunately, the Ottawa Journal printed Park’s list of the yardages (reproduced below) and quoted or paraphrased his discussion of six of the 18 holes:
Figure 20 Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27. Annotations in purple indicate that Park’s 1 to 9 are the same as 2025 South 1 to 9. Annotations in red indicate where Park’s 10 to 18 are found on 2025 West. Note that Park indicates a yardage of 6,518 yards, but the 18 holes add up to 6,488 yards. The yardage indicated for 13 probably represents a typographical error: Park probably wrote “145” (the hole opened at 150 yards).
[6] “The sixth hole [today’s South 6] is as interesting a golf hole as I have planned since I left Scotland,” says the golfer.
He describes it as an elbow hole [that is, a dogleg hole] where the driver is not only compelled to negotiate a creek, but also a lagoon, which will be constructed for the first drive.
When this particular hole is finished, it will be one of the finest two-shot holes in America, but it has also been constructed so as not to punish the short driver [that is, players will be able to choose not to try to carry the lagoon with their drive].
The green is of the raised type and closely guarded with traps and mounds.
[8] A short hole of 185 yards is the eighth [today’s South 8], which is to be constructed on the brow of a hill.
The short straight driver will be well treated and the green itself will be inviting to the long driver [who can carry the ball onto it].
Should he hook or slice, he will find himself in one of the many traps surrounding this closely guarded green.
Mr. Park takes particular pride in developing short holes of this character.
[9] A three-shot hole of 535 yards has been mapped out for number nine [today’s South 9]. The green will be prominently on a knoll close to the clubhouse.
Quite frequently, holes of this length are uninteresting, but nature has endowed the course with a wonderful contour. Few changes are considered necessary to put this into shape.
To negotiate the green, the player will have to use an iron club.
[10] Mr. Park considers that in all his golfing experience, he has never planned a hole that offered more natural golfing possibilities than the features presented by the 10th hole [today’s West 6].
It is 165 yards long with a bold sand trap in the face of the hill made by nature.
A carry of 100 yards will reach the green. This does not make it too difficult for the player who can land within reasonable distance. Should he fail, he will find himself in a natural trap.
Figure 21 The approach to the elevated 10th green [today’s West 6] of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club circa 1928. See Sam Kucey, The Ottawa Hunt & Golf Club, Our First Century: A History, 1908-2008 (Ottawa: Ottawa Hunt and Holf Club, 2008), pp. 60 and 87.
This green will remind the player of the natural seaside courses of Scotland and England and will be, without a doubt, one of the prettiest greens on this continent.
Mr. Park picked out this hole a few minutes after arriving on the site….
[12] The 12th hole [today’s West 17] is the shortest, being only 115 [145] yards, and will be constructed on a hill having quite an elevation [requiring a shot] of the mashie pitch variety….
[15] The 15th hole [today’s West 3] will be parallel with the Rideau River, and it is an extremely interesting one with a natural sand trap.
(Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27)
Club members enjoyed Park’s report: “Mr. Park gave a splendid talk…. After the meeting, various members expressed themselves as greatly pleased with the report received” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).
The Ottawa Journal reported that “Before leaving the city, Mr. Park … arranged all but the minor details of the architecture” (Ottawa Journal, 1 May 1920, p. 27). At the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, as at other clubs, Park “arranged … details of the architecture” by means of elaborate hole-by-hole drawings, each of which was accompanied by written instructions.
Figure 22 Detail from Willie Park’s drawing of the 5th hole of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club course [South 5], April 1920. From Kucey p. 60.
Only one these drawings survives. Seen to the left, it shows Park’s plan for the 165-yard par-3 5th hole (South 5).
It shows a pear-shaped green. Close straight lines mark a steep drop at the back of the green. Two bunkers (a large one in the shape of the letter “L” on the left and a smaller one on the right) guard the front and sides of the green. A creek fronts the green complex, and 100 yards of rough lies between the tee box and the fairway running up to the creek.
Along the right side of this drawing, Park printed the following detailed instructions for rerouting an existing creek and for elevating the green and bunkers above the existing level of the ground:
A & B – Sand traps running into green. Raise floors of traps 1’ 6”.
Green – Raise whole green 1’ 6” above present level. Raise back of green 3 ft above new level & slope to 0 (zero) at front.
Divert creek to front of green as shown.
Raise approach & fairway around green 1’ 6” above present level.
A – Raise left & front [1ft]. Slope to 0 (zero) [at] 9 ft.
B – Raise right and front 1 ft. Slope to 0 (zero) at 9 ft.
Park also indicates that there are “Additional notes below on A & B,” but these additional notes about the bunkers have been lost.
When Carter’s American agents Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller undertook to build a course laid out by Park, the company in every case installed a construction manager who not only understood Park’s general architectural philosophy but also knew how to interpret his drawings (and the blueprints made from them) so as to turn Park’s vision into material reality.
Figure 23 David Kay at the Bethlehem Golf Club, Bethlehem, Massachusetts. Boston Post, 5 May 1901, p. 20.
And so, when Park returned to Ottawa in August of 1920 to spend three days supervising the beginning of construction, accompanying him was one of his most experienced and trusted construction managers: “the job … is being supervised by Mr. David Kay, a Scotsman of international reputation, who has undertaken the laying of greens for some of the best known golf courses in the world” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 August 1920, p. 5). Kay had worked as a golf professional, course designer, and course builder in the United States and Canada since the mid-1890s.
Figure 24 Left to right: William Congreve Jackson and Willie Park, Jr., in the spring of 1922. Jackson consults with Park regarding construction of course #4 at Olympia Fields (Chicago, Illinois).
He had been building Park courses in the United States for the previous four years.
In November, William Congreve Jackson (1890-1973), “head of the construction dept. of Carter’s Tested Seeds,” was sent to Ottawa to evaluate Kay’s progress and to explain to the Club the work that would be undertaken in the spring of 1921 (Golfdom, vol 35 no 4 [April 1961], pp. 114-15). In 1921, Jackson would be sent to Chicago to supervise for Park the construction of the No. 4 Course at Olympia Fields (see the photograph to the left showing Jackson and Park working on site together), and shortly afterwards he would set out as a golf course architect in his own right (laying out over 50 golf courses in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio), but in November of 1920, he was in Ottawa to address the Club about progress on Park’s design:
Jackson, engineer in charge of building the course, was present and went over the estimates and reported that the course would be finished well within the estimate.
Moreover, work will continue for the balance of the present week and will re-open very early in the spring.
Five or six weeks’ work in the spring will complete the course. (Ottawa Citizen, 11 November 1920, p. 1)
Jackson’s prediction proved too optimistic. When construction manager Kay returned to Ottawa in the spring of 1921, he announced a revised schedule:
Mr. David Kay, well-known golf course expert, has arrived in the city from New York and will have charge of the completion of the new golf course now being constructed by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club.
Work in connection with the completion of the course will be commenced shortly, and it is expected that a twelve- or thirteen-hole course will be ready by the early part of July.
(Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1921, p. 9)
Kay’s prediction also proved too optimistic: nine holes were not ready for play until the fall of 1921, and they would not be officially opened for play until 1 July 1922.
These first nine holes did not include Park’s “third, fourth, fifth and sixth holes [South 3, 4, 5, 6], which were in swamp land” and would receive “their finishing touches” only in the spring of 1923 (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1923, p. 15). And they did not include the five holes on the west side of Bowesville Road (ready only in September of 1922). And so, the first nine holes to open were Park’s 1st, 2nd, 7th, 8th , and 9th (today’s South 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9), and Park’s 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th (today’s West 6, 7, 8, and 9).
Note that the Club carefully chose its own team to work with and learn from the Carter’s team. For instance, when the Carter’s team was in Ottawa consulting with Club directors in February and March of 1920, Henry (Harry) Towlson (1894-1967) received “a letter from J. Moffatt Ross”: “The First Great War was over,” Towlson later recalled, “and I had come from the old country as a professional to Sherbrooke when I received a letter from Mr. Ross asking me to come to Ottawa” (Ottawa Journal, 26 October 1944, p. 18). Moffatt Ross seems to have acted on the advice of the Carter’s team.
Figure 25 Henry ("Harry") Towlson (1894-1967). Ottawa Citizen, 6 February 1951, p. 19.
Towlson was born in Old Basford, Nottinghamshire, England, in 1894, but his family had moved to Skegness in the early 1900s, where Harry supplemented the family’s income (his father worked as a bricklayer’s assistant) with caddying fees earned at the two local courses where he later apprenticed as clubmaker. He fondly recalled caddying for superstar Harry Vardon when the latter came to Skegness. Towlson was then appointed an assistant professional at the Thorp Hall club at Southend-on-Sea, Essex, just before World War I broke out.
A month after the declaration of war, Towlson became one of 24 assistant golf pros who gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, in mid-September 1914 to join one of the famous sportsmen’s battalions that were contrived at the beginning of the war for the enlistment of volunteer athletes. He joined the Rifle Brigade of the 13th Battalion, which became known as the “Niblick Brigade.”
Towlson later recalled that “fifteen of them were left behind in France” and that, although he survived, “a bullet turn[ed] him to teaching”: “That hit carried away his small finger, rendered the third all but powerless, smashed three metacarpal bones, and ruined whatever ambitions he might have had to become a tournament golfer” (Ottawa Journal, 14 June 1939, p. 17). When he came to Sherbrooke, Quebec, in August of 1919 to serve as golf professional at the St. Francis Golf and Country Club, he told members that he “was ‘gassed’” when in the trenches in France and that it “was recommended on his discharge to come to Canada for the benefit of his health” (Sherbrooke Daily Record [Quebec], 9 April 1920, p. 7).
We know that Towlson was known to Carter’s because of information that Moffatt Ross himself seems to have supplied to the Ottawa Citizen:
Harry Towlson, the well known English golf professional, who has been engaged by the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, has arrived in the Capital.
Towlson, who came to Ottawa from Sherbrooke, where he has made his headquarters for the last year, is stopping at the Y.M.C.A. and will make his first visit to the course of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club at Bowesville this afternoon, accompanied by Mr. J. Moffatt Ross, chairman of the golf committee.
Towlson was highly recommended to the local enthusiasts by the Carter’s Company of London.
(Ottawa Citizen, 8 April 1920, p. 9)
Carter’s head office was indeed in London, but Moffatt Ross had presumably received this company’s recommendation of Towlson not from London but from the company’s New York agents, Peterson, Sinclaire & Miller.
Figure 26 Scotty Miller. Photograph courtesy of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club.
A year later, when Moffatt Ross advertised for the Club’s first greenkeeper, he no doubt intended to find another person who would contribute to construction of the Park course: “Golf course greensman to take charge of Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club’s new links, must have thorough knowledge of golf course maintenance. Apply J. Moffatt Ross” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 February 1921, p. 14).
Although diminutive in stature (five feet, two inches tall), the person that Moffatt Ross hired, Gavin Weir (“Scotty”) Miller, came to loom large in the Ottawa greenkeeping community
He had immigrated from Lanarkshire, Scotland, to work at a golf course in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1903, moved to Royal Ottawa for a while and then Rivermead. He indicated in the 1911 census that he was simply a farm labourer, and when he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915, he gave his profession as that of “Butcher,” so we know that his employment at golf courses was not continuous in those days.
During World War I, Miller was hospitalized for everything from gunshot wounds in the arm and leg, incurred while in action in France, to bronchitis and gonorrhea (soldiers with the latter affliction were legion during World War I). His bronchitis (which became a chronic condition) was caused by exposure to mustard gas in March of 1917 at Vimy Ridge, shortly after which he was wounded in the famous Canadian assault there on April 9th . No wonder he was regularly fined for drunkenness!
Figure 27 John Foley (1860-1942).
Miller’s fist year at the club overlapped with David Kay’s last. Kay finally had nine holes ready for play at the end of the 1921 season, but he did not return in 1922. Rather, new Club member John Foley managed construction of the remaining holes.
Foley seems to have joined the Club at some point in 1921. At age 61, he played his first recorded golf at the Club in the Beef and Greens tournament at the end of that season. Thereafter, he became “one of the most enthusiastic players in the club” (Ottawa Journal, 14 May 1923, p. 19).
Figure 28 John Gleeson. Ottawa Citizen, 23 July 1934, p. 2.
Investing generously in the Club, Foley and his long-time business partner in the cement and paving business, John Gleeson, seem to have exercised something of a friendly takeover in 1923. Gleeson was elected president at the beginning of the year and Foley was named a director. Furthermore, by the fall, Foley had replaced as Chairman of the Green Committee the person who had begun the year in that role.
Their partnership at the club seems to have reflected their partnership in business, in which “Mr. Gleeson had the getting of contracts and the handling of finances, while Mr. Foley looked after the construction end” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7). Foley’s experience gave him “no end of knowledge of how to get work done in the most expeditious and profitable manner”; “he was a natural born handler of men and developed a wonderful way of making friends and business connections” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1920, p. 7)
His reputation as a person who could get things done was unrivalled:
Mr. Foley has the reputation of being a man who doesn’t like a job unless it has obstacles in it, and unless it is working against a time limit…. When the contractor “fell down” on the grand stand at the exhibition grounds a few years ago, the city picked John Foley to pull order out of chaos ….
Mr. Foley is a great master of languages. He can make himself understood by Poles, Austrians, Ruthenians [peoples of contemporary Belarus and Ukraine], Italians, Russians, Swedes and half a dozen other sorts all at once. His “job” language is vigorous, virile, and effective.
(Ottawa Journal, 17 March 1916, p. 7)
Upon assuming chairmanship of the Green Committee in 1923, Foley promised that “the fairways would blossom as the ‘Garden of Eden’” (Ottawa Journal, 15 October 1923, p. 20). He seems to have been responding to Ottawa’s naysayers who pooh-poohed the vision of a championship golf course laid out on what was regarded as exceptionally unpromising land:
When, two years ago, a combination of golfing optimism and hard-headed business acumen in a few Ottawa citizens induced them to try to translate the old Ottawa Hunt Club into a modern golf and country club, the pessimists, who are always with us, simply jeered.
They conjured up all the obstacles they could summon: said that Ottawa could not support three golf courses; that any attempt to construct a third would come to financial grief; and that, last but not least, the grounds of the Hunt Club were a veritable Sahara desert, as foreign to grass as the icefloes of the Arctic.
(Ottawa Journal, 24 June 1922, p. 22)
Figure 29 Poster advertising the 1936 David O. Selznick motion picture, The Garden of Allah.
The supposedly unpromising original state of the property that the Club overcame was long remembered:
“The land then was little more than a great sand dune. There were very few trees and only sparse vegetation”;
“[it] was a sandy plain where only the hardiest weeds could thrive”;
“it resembled a movie set for the shooting of one of the desert scenes in the Garden of Allah”
(Ottawa Journal, 19 June 1958, p. 9; 14 June 1939, p. 17; 14 June 1939, p. 17).
Foley proved over his seven years as Chaiman of the Green Committee that the Club had been right to trust Park’s judgement that the land was “almost a natural course” and to accept Kanter’s assurance that the land had “a natural series of advantages equal to any course in the United States” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19; Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1920, p. 17).
The sand was a blessing that would save money (Park crowed, “the ground is dry”): “The course will not be an expensive one to maintain,” said the architect this morning. “For one thing, it will require no expensive drainage. Some courses require thousands of dollars for this purpose alone” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1920, p. 19; Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3). Rather than the Sahara Dessert, Park saw the green, green grass of home: “After a thorough preliminary examination, [Park] stated that the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club course-to-be was more like old country courses than anything else he had seen in this country” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1920, p. 3).
After bringing the full 18-hole course into play in 1923, Foley was not done. In 1926, for instance, he changed the order in which Park’s second nine holes were played. Park’s 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th became the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th (today’s West 6, 7, 8, and 9). Park’s 14th, 15th , 16th , 17th , and 18th became, respectively, the 12th (West 1), 13th (West 2), 14th (West 3), 10th (now reversed as West 5) and 11th (now a driving range). Also in 1926, he created new greens for the 3rd and 4th holes (South 3 and 4), this redesign work necessitating the adding of 53 yards to the 3rd hole and the subtracting of 47 yards from the 4th .
Foley did nothing, however, without the Club’s approval, and the Club was careful to make sure that changes it approved were consistent with Park’s vision:
During the past year, extensions and alterations to the course were authorized by the Board and approved by the members ….
Before authorizing these changes and extensions, which were strongly recommended by the Greens Committee [chaired by John Foley], the Board investigated the matter very thoroughly, secured outside opinions, and finally came to the conclusion that the improvement in the course, which would result therefrom, duly warranted the expenditure.
As a matter of fact, with very few exceptions, the changes simply amounted to completing the original plan as laid out by the late Willie Park.
(A.H. Fitzsimmons, W.Y. Denison, Report of Board of Directors and Financial Statement for the year ending December 31st, 1926 [Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, February 1927], pp. 2-3)
Park probably talked to the Club about his “original plan” as late as1923, for although local newspapers refer to no visits by Park to Ottawa after 1920, Jennifer Mirsky, Chair of Royal Ottawa’s Heritage Committee, recently discovered that Park was paid for consultation work at Royal Ottawa in 1923. And she has since discovered a description of his work: “Mr. Willie Park spent a week looking our course over and made recommendations re Greens etc. which will greatly improve our course” (Captain William L. Currier, Green Committee Report 1923, Royal Ottawa Golf Club). Since Park was in Ottawa for a week in the spring or early summer of 1923, one presumes that he also visited the (recently renamed) Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, which was about to be open all 18 holes for the first time.
Shortly after the week he spent in Ottawa in 1923, Park travelled to Vermont to plan a nine-hole layout for the St. Johnsbury Country Club. This would be the last course he ever designed.
Figure 30 Mungo Park (1877-1960), circa 1930.
For his week of work here at the beginning of August, Park was offered “a thousand dollars plus train fare from New York City and room and board for his stay, and some expense money” (Beth Kanell, “Amazing Greens: 100 Years of Notable Golf at the St. Johnsbury Country Club,” The North Star Monthly, 27 April 2023). Ill health, however, would prevent Willie from completing this course. His brother Mungo would come to St. Johnsbury in the spring of 1924 to do the greens. At that time, the club paid a further “$2,480 to Willie Park and his brother for laying out and work on the nine hole golf course, and other smaller sums for repairs to the property, improvements, etc., which he itemized” (Caledonian-Record [St. Johnsbury, Vermont], 17 May 1924, p. 2). Mungo itemized these repairs and improvements in 1924; Willie was incapable of doing so.
Local newspaper accounts of Willie’s visit to the St. Johnsbury Country Club provide no hints of ill health in August of 1923:
Over a score of members of the St. Johnsbury Country Club met Will Park, the international golf course architect, at the club grounds Sunday afternoon and went over the proposed nine-hole course which Mr. Park has staked out for immediate work…. There was genuine satisfaction at the excellence of the course as mapped out.
Mr. Park, who has laid out hundreds of courses both in this country and in the British Isles, said he had never before seen a more naturally situated course and one which could be more easily converted into a high-class one.
(St. Johnsbury Republican [Vermont], 9 August 1923, p. 5)
The article above then describes each hole, explaining the shots required to play them. The reporter presumably relies on a report similar to the one that Park read to the Club in Ottawa in April of 1920.
Park also dealt with the matters usually handled by Kanter – details about costs and construction methods:
Mr. Park talked to the assembled club members about the cost of the course that he had mapped out, and, with expert supervision, the cost will be about $6,500, all properly laid out with deep humus and seeded with red top. This will provide for large greens. The fairways will be planted with 125 pounds of grass seed to the acre and will be all trimmed away and cleared for a real high-class course.
[According to Park,] One of the unusual things about the course is the fact that there is a plentiful supply of both sand and humus on the property and nearly enough dressing is stocked in the old barns to take care of fertilizing of the greens and fairways.
Mr. Park explained that but for the natural advantages and the supply of materials at hand, the course, which can be built for around $6,500, would cost $20,000 to $25,000 in some localities. There are practically no hazards to be built as the naturally rolling land, with two small brooks, etc., furnishes natural hazards for a high-class golf course.
Mr. Park estimates that he can have the course laid out in 25 days. This does not mean that the permanent greens can be played on this year, as they must be seeded this fall and will be in condition for playing next July. However, the course would be in condition for playing within two or three weeks, as the tees and fairways would be completed and temporary greens and holes for playing. The permanent seeding would be done in the fall.
(St. Johnsbury Republican [Vermont], 9 August 1923, p. 5)
In this account of his work in Vermont, Park does not appear to be a man on the verge of breakdown. Indeed, in August of 1923, he seems still to have conducted business much as he had done in Ottawa in 1920. He presumably showed the same form in Ottawa just a month or two before.
But then, quite suddenly, “Willie Park … had a complete nervous breakdown in New York” (Gloucestershire Echo [England], 18 January 1924, p. 5).
George Trevor (1892-1951), well-known sports writer for the Brooklyn Eagle, and apparently someone who knew Park well, described Park’s decline:
Willie made good in this exacting profession. One contract after another came his way.
It was typical of his abnormal power of concentration that he became so engrossed in his work that he had no time for outside interests.
Health Give Way Under Strain of Overwork
Always introspective, Park became more self-centered than ever.
His work utterly absorbed him. He thought over problems of construction while he ate and when trying to sleep.
Reticent and retiring to an unusual degree, he now shunned the society of his friends and associates whenever possible.
Willie played a lone hand, refusing invitations to dinner and begging off whenever he was asked to address a club directorate on some phase of construction policy.
Park had the gift of being able to visualize in his mind all the little topographical details of any given plot of land which he had previously tramped over.
Strangely enough, he never could “read” a blueprint. Park trusted to memory rather than surveyors’ charts. A blueprint often confused him so completely that he would rush out of his office and walk over the territory under process of transformation in order to revisualize it in his mind….
Gradually his health weakened under the strain.
Unable to relax or to forget his work, Park …. suffered a complete nervous and mental breakdown.
(Brooklyn Eagle, 5 July 1925, p. 37)
Figure 31 J.A. Park.
It was reported that “He returned to Scotland from New York at the end of October [1923]” (Daily Record, 19 January 1924, p. 2).
It seems likely that Willie’s younger brother John (“Jack”) Archibald Park (1879- 1935), the golf professional at the Maidstone Golf Club in East Hampton on Long Island, New York, was able to look after him when the breakdown occurred.
But when it became clear that Willie’s health was not improving, the family decided that Mungo should come from Argentina to sail with Willie from New York to Southampton.
Willie’s wife came down from Scotland to meet Mungo and Willie at the port in Southampton. The three of them then immediately travelled by train to Musselburgh.
At the beginning of January 1924, the news was bad: “his condition has become worse, and he is now in a nursing home for a complete rest” (Gloucestershire Echo [England], 18 January 1924, p. 5).
Figure 32 Craighouse Mental Asylum (built 1889-94), renamed in 1922 the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders.
Great-nephew Mungo Park says that the Registrar in Musselburgh was a longtime friend of the Park family and managed to get a place for Willie in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders. Known until 1922 as the Craighouse Mental Asylum, this hospital was still familiarly called “Craighouse” when Willie was a resident there.
Alas, for all the effort to have Willie admitted to this state-of-the-art hospital, “his health did not show any sign of improvement” (North Mail, Newcastle Daily Chronicle [England], 25 May 1925, p. 11).
According to Mungo, “It is possible that his mental health was suffering from the effects of thyrotoxicosis, which at the time was untreatable” (Mungo Park, “Willie Park, Jr,” Golf Course Architecture, no 14 [October 2008]). Thyrotoxicosis, in which unhealthy levels of certain thyroid hormones circulate in the body, can produce a “thyroid storm” if untreated – possibly producing fever, tachycardia, agitation, altered mental status, impaired liver function, and even cardiac failure.
Willie Park, Jr, died 22 May 1925 and is buried (with his second wife, Margaret, and two of their children who died young) in the village of Inveresk (on the south side of Musselburgh) in the church yard of St. Michael’s Parish Church.
Figure 33 Left: St. Michael's Parish Church, Inveresk. Right: memorial to Willie Park, Jr, mounted on the churchyard wall.
Dedicated to Willie, fixed to the wall of the churchyard, is the memorial monument seen above (right).
Learning of his friend’s death, George Trevor wrote of other monuments by which to remember him:
Unable to relax or to forget his work, Park was … truly a martyr to the game of golf ….
He was a victim of the game he loved not wisely but too well. The siren call of golf proved overpowering to a man of his introspective temperament.
Now Park has gone to meet his reward in the mysterious beyond, leaving behind him as fitting monuments to his creative genius … superb examples of golf course architecture ….
We like to think of Willie Park sitting serenely with his friendly briar, safe in that bourne from which no traveller returns, watching with infinite satisfaction as duffer and star wrestle with the bunkers and hazards he gave his life to design.
(Brooklyn Eagle, 5 July 1925, p. 37)
© Donald J. Childs 2025