Champlain, Glenlea, Highlea

When the National Capital Commission purchased the Glenlea golf course in 1974, a writer in the Ottawa Journal explained the history of the golfing community’s low regard for the golf course that would henceforth be known as Champlain:

The Glenlea Club …, in terms of rounds of golf, likely has been the most popular golf real estate in the Ottawa area for 45 years …. The Glenlea has been in operation on the Aylmer Road, just west of the Champlain Bridge, since 1929, always as a semi-private club. As such it afforded, for many years, the only green fee club in the district. It was geared for family play and "homeless golfers" …. Glenlea was never a plush golf course…. And while its ready availability led to convenience for thousands of players over the years, it also contributed to the regular run of condescending jokes from more snobbish players. (Ottawa Journal, 10 February 1975, p. 17)

The present golf course superintendent, Mike Leslie, recalls that when he became the newest member of the greenkeeping crew in 1986, Champlain had a reputation as a muddy, unkempt place.

Figure 1 Mike Leslie, Golf Course Superintendent, Champlain Golf Course.

In Leslie’s opinion, Capital Arborists, the local company that managed the grounds in the mid-1980s, was not up to the task: it lacked greenkeeping know-how, and its equipment was inadequate to course maintenance requirements. The grass everywhere was too long: on the greens, in the fairways, and in the rough. Complaints from golfers were loud and incessant.

An unfortunate event that occurred the year before Leslie was hired at Champlain perhaps supports the idea that the company was in over its head. After 17-year-old Terry Gray flipped one of the company’s three-wheeled utility vehicles, pinning himself underneath it, where he was crushed to death, the Hull coroner investigated the role of Capital Arborists in the accident:

he found not only that poor young Gray was not even a company employee (just a guy “helping a friend, the night groundkeeper, when the accident happened”), but also that in general “The company acted as amateurs and not professionals”; most seriously, the company was “lacking safety regulations to protect its employees” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 October 1985, p. 13).

Although Capital Arborists was replaced in 1988 by Golf Management Associates, a thoroughly professional and knowledgeable company, improving the situation at Champlain took time.

And so, in 1995, Ottawa Citizen writer Allen Panzeri observed that “Champlain is playable but don’t expect much more”:

The greens were abysmal at the start of the year; only in the last two weeks have they improved, though there are still several rough ones.

Why it has taken almost half the season to make the greens playable is a question I’d still be asking if I were a member, since every other course has long been in decent shape.

Then there are the fairways. Some are distinguishable from the rough only because the weeds are shorter.

You almost get the feeling that only what’s absolutely necessary gets done. It’s the mentality you generally see when a course thinks it has a captive market, as if public-course golfers (let them eat cake) have no right to expect better….

Also, you generally have to wear waterproof shoes.

Not now, though: it hasn’t rained in two weeks and it’s obvious the sprinklers haven’t been running that often. When I played there again last week, one of my partners saw a sprinkler on the 16th and cracked, “Oh, look, they have the sprinkler on for a minute.” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 July 1995, p. 18)

Yet despite the golfing community’s faint praise and pronounced condescension, each of the journalists quoted above recognized an architectural integrity within the layout of the golf course that even poor conditions could not obscure.

On the basis of its “more than passable layout,” the Citizen writer argued that Champlain “deserves better treatment than it gets”: there are “a number of interesting holes that you’d like to play again” (2 July 1995, p. 18). The Journal writer offered a wry observation about the condescension of snobbish golfers from other clubs: “It was odd … that when the finest players gathered at the Glenlea for tournaments, they were rarely ever able to take it apart” (10 February 1975, p. 17).

Good golfers could not take the course apart because of the good design of its best holes. And when each of the writers above made his comments about Champlain, in 1975 and 1995, respectively, the best holes then in play were the ones designed by the original architect and staked out in 1928 – holes built not with the earth-moving equipment used today, but rather with horses pulling Fresno Scrapers and railway plows.

As old as these golf holes are, what the Journal writer said of the Glenlea golf course half a century ago still applies to a many a player’s experience of the course today: “while the trouble didn't stare you down, it was beckoning subtly, and the course required your constant attention” (Ottawa Journal, 10 February 1975, p. 17).

On the golf course today, the challenges presented by the earliest holes endure as challenges for golfers who have all the advantages of modern technology because those challenges are still best addressed not by the brute power of long hitting, but rather by the virtue of strategic decisions: a decision about where to place the ball in the fairway in order to approach the green from the right direction, for instance, or a decision about whether to carry the ball in the air all the way to the flag or bounce the ball onto the green links-style.

And the substantial redesign or replacement of almost half the greens at Champlain since the articles above were written means that golfers must continue to devote constant attention to their games if they are to avoid troubles that subtly beckon.

And so, in its architectural bones, what has often been seen as the ugly duckling of Ottawa’s golf courses has the DNA of a swan.

Introduction

Champlain, Glenlea, Highlea: The Makings of Golf at the People’s Place explores the architectural history behind today’s Champlain Golf Course.

There is the story of the property on which the architects laid out a golf course. It was acquired in the 1920s by William H. Stewart to serve first as the home of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club and then as the home of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. It always had the makings of a golf course, for it shares many of the characteristics of the land with which it is contiguous – that on which the Royal Ottawa golf course was laid out in 1903 by Tom Bendelow (designer of more than 400 golf courses by that point), who said that “the natural features of these links … were the finest he had ever seen” (Ottawa Journal, 30 May 1903, p. 9).

There is the story of the stewards of the golf course. In the summer of 1928, it was the Highlea Tennis and Country Club that hired an expert to assess the property’s suitability for golf and plan a golf course. The member-owned Glenlea Golf and Country Club presided over the golf course for a decade, and then private syndicates took over for much of the next ten years until the Stewart family formed the Glenlea Golf Club in 1950. Twenty-five years later, the National Capital Commission acquired the golf course. The course was changed by each of these stewards.

There is the story of the heads of the greens committee in the earliest days, and the story of head greenkeepers, too, who were the ones on site planning and building fairways, tees, and greens.

And, pre-eminently, there is the story of the architects themselves, the masters among all the makers of today’s golf course.

Architects

So, who are the architects behind today’s Champlain golf course?

Figure 2 Stan Brigham, June 2022.

One of the most important architects has been the most recent one: today’s proprietor, Stanley Brigham.

During his first period of stewardship over the course in the early 1980s, he created the fourth hole, excavating from scratch the pond that remains the distinctive feature of what may be the signature hole on the golf course today.

At this time, he also turned today’s third hole from a par four into to a par five by adding over 100 yards to it and building today’s green across the creek at the top of the hill where the cattle barn of William Lansdowne Allen used to stand.

And he also designed what have become the ninth and tenth holes, which were built between 1985 and 1986, several years after Brigham had left Champlain.

With his return to the course in 1998, Brigham spent the next five years significantly redesigning several holes:

(1) he added the upper tier to the green on the second hole, added mounds around the new part of the green, and added a bunker at the left side;

(2) he lengthened the fifth hole by adding a back tee (turning it from a par four into a par five) and moved the green further back and doubled its size;

(3) he added thirty yards to the seventeenth hole and built the present seventeenth green and its surrounding mounds;

(4) he added 100 yards to the first hole and built the present green and its surrounding mounds;

(5) he added 120 yards to the thirteenth hole and built the present green and its surrounding mounds;

In 2019, Brigham lengthened the fifteenth green and developed the mounding behind it (also bringing the pond within reach of shots played over the green).

For a period of ten years (from 1988 to 1997), the Champlain Golf Course was managed by Golf Management Associates, a company run by entrepreneur Gordon Eyre and architect David L. Moote. The latter was the son of architect Robert Moote (who had trained under Stanley Thompson) and nephew of David S. Moote (the youngest person ever elected president of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America).

Figure 3 Left to right: David L. Moote, Robert F. Moote, 1997.

In 1992, GMA temporarily added two new short holes within the eighteen-hole course to enable an early “morning-nine” round of golf.

In 1997, it planned an eighteen-hole executive golf course for the area west of today’s tenth hole. All levels of government had approved the plan, but GMA’s contract with the NCC was not renewed and these plans came to nought.

And so, David L. Moote’s main design legacy at Champlain today is the sixth hole, which he built in 1988 and to which he added the present back tee in 1997.

Eight new golf holes were developed at Glenlea between 1950 and 1952, the majority of which remained in play until the mid-1980s, after which GMA and Stan Brigham altered many of them significantly or replaced them outright. The holes built in the early 1950s were designed through collaboration between the Glenlea head pro Harry Mulligan and William Lynwood Stewart, son of the owner William Henry Stewart.

Mulligan served two long terms as Glenlea’s head pro: the first, from 1929 to 1943; the second, from 1950 to 1973. In 1974, he was promoted to the position of Glenlea’s “golf director,” making room for Gilles Leduc in the pro shop. Mulligan’s contributions to the development and promotion of golf in Canada were recognized in October of 1974, when a lifetime membership of the Canadian Professional Golfers Association was bestowed upon him.

Figure 4 Harry Mulligan, early 1950s.

News having broken in April of 1974 that the National Capital Commission was on the verge of acquiring the Glenlea Golf Club, the NCC eventually closed a deal with owner Lynn Stewart for a purchase price between $1,000,000 and $1,300,000 (Ottawa Citizen, 8 October 1974, p. 3). At this point, Harry Mulligan’s official association with the golf course ended and he moved to Lyn Stewart’s new golf course at the Kingsway Park Golf Club for the rest of his career.

Mulligan died in 1981; he was the same age as the century.

But his influence endures architecturally at the Champlain Golf Course, for several golf holes that he designed and built with Stewart between 1950 and 1952 remain in play at the course.

They laid out six holes in the area that today hosts the driving range, two practice putting greens, and the second, third, and fifth holes, but only their fairways and the front half of today’s second green remain of their work in this area. They also designed today’s seventeenth hole (using elements from earlier golf holes). And they restored an earlier golf hole to play that had been abandoned for three years (this hole plays today as the sixteenth).

The holes designed by Mulligan and Stewart were part of nine holes added to the golf course to restore it to an eighteen-hole configuration. Parts of the course had languished unused during World War II, and a number of acres were sold after the war:

Originally, the Glenlea course was an 18-hole course …. considered by experts to be one of the finest in this part of the country.

However, during the war, with the decline of golf activities, part of the course was allowed to run down, chiefly because of the scarcity of help.

Following the war, a number of acres were sold and until now the course has been only nine holes.

Since the war, and especially during the last two years, membership at the club has increased to such an extent that new land was needed.

Figure 5 Lyn Stewart, early 1950s.

This newly acquired land lies directly to the west of the present ninehole course and, under the direction of Club Secretary Lyn Stewart, new greens and tees are rapidly being laid out.

Club pro Harry Mulligan and Secretary Stewart are pooling their knowledge of design and construction in laying out the new course.

Both have a good deal of know-how in this field, having seen and studied designs in Canada, the United States, and the British Isles.

Pro Mulligan has played and taught at courses in Canada and below the border. (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1952, p. 22)

Note that although Stewart and Mulligan were confident that they could design these new holes, they had never laid out a golf course before, for the newspaper indicates that their “know-how” came not from ever having designed and built anything, but rather from having “seen and studied designs” of golf courses in Canada, Britain, and the United States.

And so, since the holes that Stewart and Mulligan designed at Glenlea represented their first work as golf course architects, we know that although Mulligan was associated with the Glenlea golf course from the moment it opened in 1929, he had not designed the original eighteen-hole layout. If he had, he would have told the Ottawa Citizen writer cited above that his design know-how came not from seeing, studying, and playing golf courses, but rather from his having designed the original Glenlea course!

In the ensuing years, however, the stories that the always chatty and gossipy Mulligan told to Ottawa sportswriters about his seminal role in getting the original golf course up and running led to persistent misunderstandings of just what Mulligan had actually told them about the design and construction of the Glenlea golf course.

Things begin to go awry in an article published in 1955 when the Ottawa Citizen reported that Mulligan “was employed by W.H. Stewart to get the Glenlea started” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 May 1955, p. 19). This statement is accurate, but it is also ambiguous. And of the two ways in which the statement can be understood, one is incorrect.

Figure 6 W.H. ("Bill") Stewart, early 1950s.

What does it mean that Mulligan was hired by W.H. Stewart “to get the Glenlea started”?

This statement is accurate in relation to the fact that Mulligan was the first head pro at Glenlea, starting on 1 May 1929: as such, he was charged with setting up a pro shop, handling tee times, running tournaments, and teaching members how to play golf. In this sense, he “got the Glenlea started.”

But the statement in question does not mean that Mulligan got “Glenlea started” in the sense of laying out its golf course, yet the newspaper statement was later interpreted to have meant just that.

Shortly after Mulligan’s death in January of 1981, for instance, sports columnist Eddie MacCabe observed that Harry Mulligan’s “closest identity was with the old Glenlea Golf Club,” and then he wrote ambiguously, “Harry built that club”:

There was, on the Aylmer Road site, the Highlea Tennis and Country Club, operating for perhaps half a dozen years.

When the late Bill Stewart decided to expand into golf, he hired Harry Mulligan to lay out and design the course, which opened in 1929.

(Ottawa Citizen, 20 January 1981, p. 17).

MacCabe turned the ambiguity of the 1955 Citizen’s statement that Mulligan “was employed by W.H. Stewart to get the Glenlea started” into the declaration that Mulligan “built that club” – and “built” it in the literal sense: “to lay out and design.”

As we know, however, that is simply not true: Mulligan had not designed a golf course before the 1950s.

Although Mulligan was hired to serve as the Glenlea Golf and Country Club’s first golf professional, the golf course land was originally inspected by a golf expert in the summer of 1928, and it was then that an eighteen-hole golf course was planned. This golf course was under construction in March of 1929, two months before Mulligan began his first term as head pro.

Surprisingly, when Eddie MacCabe was writing his 1981 article about Mulligan’s passing, he had apparently forgotten an important piece of information that he himself had included in an article about Glenlea eight years earlier:

Did you know that until 1929, the Glenlea was known as the Highlea Club, and was a tennis and social place?

At that time, due to some change in licensing regulations and other requirements, and to meet a growing need, a group of men, led by Bill Stewart, organized the Glenlea Club.

It was laid out by Harry Mulligan and the late Karl Keffer who was pro at Royal Ottawa for many years and was Canadian Open champion among other things.

(Ottawa Journal, 26 April 1973, p. 27)

Figure 7 Karl Keffer, circa 1929.

For the first time, we find Karl Keffer mentioned as a designer of Glenlea. And since Keffer had nothing to do with the 1950-52 design by Harry Mulligan and Lyn Stewart, we know that MacCabe’s identification of Keffer as a designer of Glenlea refers to the original eighteen-hole layout of 1928-29.

We are now able to understand the information that MacCabe conveys in 1973 with his claim that the Glenlea course “was laid out by Harry Mulligan and the late Karl Keffer”: his statement conflates two periods of construction – on the one hand, the laying out and construction of the original course from 1928 to 1929 by Keffer, and, on the other hand, the laying out and construction of a supplemental nine holes between 1950 and 1952 by Mulligan and Stewart.

It turns out, then, that Keffer and Mulligan each designed parts of today’s Champlain golf course, but they worked on the design separately, and their work was separated by almost a quarter of a century.

And so, although Mulligan would help green committees with his advice as the full eighteen-hole course was brought into play between 1929 and 1933, it was Mulligan’s long-time mentor and benefactor Karl Keffer who laid out the original eighteen-hole golf course.

And just as Keffer returned to Sand Point, Ontario, to provide ongoing advice (over a decade) on how to improve the course he had laid out for the Arnprior Golf Club in 1923, no doubt he frequently hopped over the fence between Royal Ottawa and Glenlea in the late 1920s and early 1930s to check out how things were coming along with his design.

Since eleven of the holes in play on today’s Champlain Golf Course – whether in whole or in part – are attributable to Karl Keffer, we can see that there is a need to set the record straight about his fundamental role in laying out the original golf course.

Beginning Before Glenlea

News broke in April of 1925 that a syndicate of local Ottawa and Hull men had bought land along the Aylmer Road for a new country club:

Property Bought For Tennis Club

Plans are under way for a bowling and tennis club on the Aylmer Road, just west of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. A syndicate of Ottawa and Hull men led by Mr. W.H. Stewart, of Hull, have purchased about 10 acres of land from Herbert Routliffe.

The property is situated on the north side of the Aylmer Road opposite the Chaudière Golf Club property and adjoining that of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club.

The purchase price is understood to be $10,000, and another $20,000 is to be spent in erecting a clubhouse and improving the property this year. (Ottawa Journal, 18 April 1925, p. 26)

“Herbert” Routliffe was actually Hubert Routliffe, and the land that he sold to the syndicate had been farmed by his family for two generations.

The man who led the syndicate, William Henry Stewart, would soon become the sole owner of the Routliffe property and add more contiguous land to it until he had accumulated about 180 acres by 1928 – more than enough room to accommodate the eighteen-hole golf course laid out at that time.

The Farmers and the Land

Today’s Champlain Golf Course, Chateau Cartier Golf Course, and the golf course of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club were all once part of the Britannia Farm of Hull founder Philemon Wright, but by the early twentieth century, the original farm had been subdivided many times.

Figure 8 George Routliffe (1831- 1906), father of Hubert, early 1900s.

The man who sold the small farm to Stewart in the spring of 1925, Hubert Routliffe (1877-1926), was one of four children born to George and Ameila Routliffe. They were grandchildren of George Routliffe of Bideford in County Devon, England, who had been recruited by Ruggles Wright (the third son of Hull founder Philemon Wright) to come to Hull as a laborer in the early 1800s.

Bideford’s George Routliffe was eventually granted his own 100-acre farm in the township of South Hill (lot 16 of Range 4), which his children and grandchildren farmed well into the twentieth century. But his son George (seen to the left), acquired his own small farm along the Aylmer Road (comprising Lot 11 b and 11 c of Range 2). His son Hubert inherited this property upon his father’s death in 1906.

With the old Aylmer toll road having been taken over by the municipality of South Hull in the early 1920s, leading to its improvement and its opening as a public road, property values along the road increased.

Many farmers, such as Hubert Routliffe, decided to sell land that had been in their families’ possession for generations. And so, ten acres of the Routliffe farm became the first parcel of the land that would become home to today’s Champlain Golf Course.

A substantial portion of the land of Hubert’s next-door neighbour, William Allen (1840-1913), would also become part of today’s golf course, but the Allen family would not sell it until the 1950s. Allen, a grandson of Bideford settler George Routliffe (and so, Hubert’s first cousin), chose not to sell to land speculators:

George [Routliffe] has a small farm, to the right, joining the Wm. Allen farm.

This latter was entered by the pioneer of the name – John Allen. It was taken up in 1806. It is still in the family, being owned and operated by Wm., a son of Ruggles, and grandson of the original John.

While the rich owners of property in the days when Wm. Allen was young and starting have sold their farms to go into “something better” and failed to “make good,” he has stayed by the farm and has long since added to his acres until he has one of the best areas on the road.

The original Allen farm extended to the Bellview [Bellevue] Cemetery.

(Anson A. Gerard, Pioneers of the Upper Ottawa and the Humours of the Valley (Ottawa: Emerson Press, 1906), p. 10)

William Allen was gored in the belly more than a dozen times by a bull that he was trying to round up in 1913 and was carried into his farmhouse where the fourth green of today’s golf course is located today.

He died in his bedroom there before a doctor arrived.

William Allen’s son, William Lansdowne Allen, took over the farm, where he shared its farmhouse with his sister Ida. When the Highlea Tennis and Country Club opened next door on his cousin Hubert’s old farmland, William and Ida regularly attended social events held there (see, for example the Ottawa Citizen, 14 October 1925, p. 18, and 20 October 1925, p. 17)

In 1950, the Stewart family acquired the Allen land at the corner of Aylmer Road and Allen Road that today comprises Champlain’s second, third, fourth, and fifth holes, as well as the driving range and the strip of land running from the range up to Aylmer Road through the bunkered practice green area.

William L. Allen lived on in the old farmhouse on Aylmer Road until it was destroyed by fire in 1957. His remaining property in this area, where today’s third green and fourth hole are located, was subsequently acquired by the National Capital Commission.

W.H. Stewart

The “syndicate of Ottawa and Hull men” that purchased the Routliffe property was “led by Mr. W.H. Stewart” (Ottawa Journal, 18 April 1925, p. 26).

As the owner of the property, William Henry Stewart (1883-1965) would be the leading figure in all things relating to the Highlea Tennis and Country Club, but he was not one of the men who on 4 August 1925 incorporated “to promote, organize, conduct and manage a golf, tennis, country and social club”: “Captain Leslie Burrow, civil employee, Holly Acres, farmer, Milton F. Cross, dentist, all of the city of Ottawa, … Orville B. Haycock, gentleman, of the town of Aylmer, Alfred V. Gale, manager, George Graham, barrister, Louis de Ganzague Raby, registrar, of the city of Hull, … and Thomas Foley, estate agent, of the town of Aylmer” (Gazette Officielle du Quebec, vol 57 no 34 [22 August 1925], p. 2543).

Figure 9 William Henry Stewart (1883-1964), early 1950s.

Highlea’s incorporators covered the political bases. Raby was the registrar of the city of Hull. Acres was the MLA for Carleton County in Ontario.

Another influential figure, although he was not one of the incorporators, was immediately recruited as another of “the promoters and provisional directors”: Romeo Lafond, MNA for Hull (Ottawa Journal, 15 August 1925, p. 21).

Stewart became Highlea’s secretary-treasurer, and he had public influence, too, for he was also the secretary-treasurer of the municipality of South Hull (in which the new club was located).

In October, when “The directors decided to lease the Highlea Tennis and Country Club property” from Stewart’s syndicate, “Mr. W.H. Stewart was appointed manager, in addition to his office of secretary-treasurer” (Ottawa Citizen, 9 October 1925, p. 3).

Stewart’s desire to serve South Hull descended through his family.

He was the grandson of the early Aylmer settler Robert Stewart (who was born in Ireland’s County Monaghan in the early 1800s). Three of Robert Stewart’s sons would serve the township of South Hull, including W.H. Stewart’s father, who lived in the original Stewart homestead on Aylmer Road (which still exists today) when he served his nine years as mayor of South Hull (he was still mayor when he died in 1919).

Figure 10 Stewart homestead, Aylmer Road.

W.H. Stewart’s uncle Robert Stewart had served as a South Hull township councillor in the mid-1880s (alongside William Allen, senior, among others), and his uncle David Stewart had served as the township’s secretary-Treasurer.

Beginning in 1914, a few years after his father was first elected mayor, W.H. Stewart served continuously as secretary-treasurer of South Hull township for twenty years, retiring in the fall of 1934. (He served alongside township councillor William L. Allen, some of whose farmland at the corner of Aylmer Road and Allen Road he would acquire in 1950).

After attending primary school in Aylmer, W.H. Stewart left town to attend Stanstead College, a private boarding school in Stanstead, Quebec, for study from Grades 7 to 12. Stewart made good friends at the school and occasionally spent holidays in nearby Sherbrooke at the homes of fellow students. Enrolled in the Commercial English programme, in which six subjects were taught, the nineteen-year-old Stewart won an award for “2nd in Writing” at the commencement exercises in June of 1902 (Sherbrooke Daily Record, 23 June 1902, p. 3). An example of his award-winning penmanship is reproduced below.

Figure 11 Signature of William H. Stewart as Secretary-Treasurer of the Township of South Hull.

Returning to Aylmer, Stewart became a prosperous and well-known farmer of fruits and vegetables, maintaining a substantial market garden. He married Mabel Lillian Victoria Cross (1882-1954) of Caledonia Springs in 1910 (with whom he had three children, Madeline, Elaine, and William Lynnwood).

Stewart’s farm became a model for fellow members of the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Vegetable Growers Association, whom he welcomed to a tour of his gardens in the spring of 1916.

It soon became clear that his administrative skills were irrepressible, and many organizations availed themselves of them.

In 1919, he served as Secretary-Treasurer of the South Hull branch of the United Farmers of Quebec. The same year, he served on the Horticulture Committee in Ottawa for the Central Canada Exhibition of 1919. In 1922, he was one of the incorporators of the Canadian Horticultural Council established “to advance all matters tending toward the improvement of the horticultural and allied industries in Canada” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 August 1922, p. 5). In 1920, the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Vegetable Growers Association sent him as its representative to the Ohio Market Gardeners’ convention. At the Toronto meeting of the Ontario Vegetable Growers Association in 1922, he was elected first vicepresident of the Association and became its president in 1923 (serving in this role until 1925).

And his work for the township of South Hull did not suffer at all from the many other calls upon his time and attention. In 1927, “Mayor W. Maxwell and members of the [South Hull] council tendered W.H. Stewart, the municipal secretary-treasurer, their heartiest congratulations for the able manner in which he has filled his office” (Ottawa Journal, 8 September 1927, p. 7). Le droit called attention to his long service and exemplary record : “M. William H. Stewart est secrétaire-trésorier depuis 14 ans et a toujours donné satisfaction. La dernière vérification de sa comptabilité fait voir qu’il a la tient en très bon état et il a une police garantie de $5,000” (Le droit, 27 March 1929, p. 5). It was reluctantly, one suspects, that in 1934, “Le conseil [municipal de Hull-Sud] a approuvé la retraite de William H. Stewart, secrétaire-trésorier depuis les derniers vingt ans” (Le droit [Ottawa [2 Octobre 1934, p. 4).

Beginning work as secretary-treasurer of South Hull just before World War I, and adding to it constantly increasing administrative responsibilities for the various Quebec and Ontario horticultural organizations of which he was a member, Stewart began to hire a man to work his market garden (and this man, so long he was married, received a free house as part of his remuneration). At other times, Stewart sold off standing crops of fruits and vegetables, as well as his hay, to the highest bidder.

In the early 1920s, he began to look for ways to leave farming. In 1920, he offered for sale a “dairy farm, 100 acres good land, buildings in good condition, 4 miles from Hull; easy terms” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1921, p. 11). He offered the dairy farm for sale again in 1921, but he also added a new line to the advertisement “or will rent to party with stock” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 March 1921, p. 11). In 1923, he offered “50 acres of choice garden land, well built and watered” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 May 1923, p. 7). In 1924, he again offered his 100-acre farm for sale (along with another 65 acres along the Aylmer Road). His advertisements became more detailed: “Choice dairy or truck farm. 100 acres, 4 miles from city, 10 roomed house, sheds, 2 barns and stables, good water supply; 75 acres under cultivation; 15 acres bush; good terms. W.H. Stewart, Aylmer Road” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 August 1924, p. 7).

Understandably, W.H. Stewart became too busy to devote the time necessary for the proper maintenance of his farm (and his other farmlands), but it is probably also the case that after the Aylmer Road became a public highway in the early 1920s, he recognized the opportunity for other sorts of development along the road.

By 1925, he had decided to develop a country club and so began looking for land closer to Ottawa and as close as possible to the projected Champlain Bridge.

Figure 12 The Aylmer toll road and one of its turnpikes circa 1906. The photographer looks east, with St. James Cemetery visible on the south side of Aylmer Road (this part of the road being today known as Alexandre-Taché Boulevard).

Stewart may have turned his thoughts in the direction of acquiring land for country club development as early as 1919. That year, on behalf of South Hull, he had been engaged in important correspondence with the Quebec provincial government regarding the desire both locally and provincially to replace the toll road between Ottawa and Aylmer with what is now the Aylmer Road. In conversation with a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, he predicted that “The new Aylmer Road would run alongside the Hull Electric Railway and would open up a lot of desirable building land” (Ottawa Citizen, December 1919, p. 12).

When William Henry Stewart died on 9 August 1965 (coincidentally, the day that the Glenlea club championship was decided that year), he left to his children an estate valued at about $350,000, the majority of this value represented by Glenlea Enterprises, Limited (Ottawa Citizen, 26 October 1965, p. 14). Nine years later, the National Capital Commission – “Concerned about urban growth in the Lucerne area,” and “eager to preserve recreational space there” – purchased the golf course from his son William Lynwood Stewart “for a price between $1 and $1.3 million” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 October 1974, p. 3).

The Highlea Clubhouse

Hubert Routliffe began his work life as a labourer on his father’ farm (alongside his younger brother George). By the time of Hubert’s marriage in 1902, however, he had become a carpenter. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1922, farming was far from his mind: he was one of three men who incorporated as the Aylmer Construction Company, Limited. Within four years, he had become well known for his construction of several “édifices dans le district de Hull” (Le droit, 22 May 1926, p. 4).

Figure 13 Ottawa Journal, 25 August 1925, p. 30.

And so, it appears that part of the deal that Routliffe struck with Stewart’s syndicate regarding the purchase of his farm was that he would be hired as the general contractor for the construction of the Highlea clubhouse (see the advertisement to the left). Indeed, this grand edifice became one of his claims to fame, for we read in Le droit just nine months after its completion, when Routliffe died “après une courte maladie,” that it was he “qui construisit le Highlea Tennis Club” (Le droit, 22 May 1926, p. 4).

The clubhouse seems to have been built on the site of the old Routliffe farmhouse itself. On the one hand, Le droit’s obituary notice about Hubert Routliffe says that “il était né sur le Chemin d’Aylmer … à l’endroit même où existe aujourd’hui le Club [Highlea]" (Le droit, 22 May 1926, p. 4). On the other hand, topographical maps of this area from the 1920s show that the Highlea clubhouse was located exactly where the Routliffe farmhouse had been located.

The clubhouse was completed in a matter of months. It opened officially at the beginning of September of 1925, but events had been held in it during the last half of August.

It was a large building, designed to look impressive from the roadway, and designed to be usable in different ways in the summer and in the winter. And in those days (when the lands of Philemon Wright’s old Britannia Farm were still largely void of trees), the view east and west from its verandahs (or “galleries”) was splendid:

Highlea Tennis and Country Club is ideally situated on a slope on the north side of the Aylmer Road, overlooking the links of the Royal Ottawa and Chaudière Golf clubs, with the Ottawa River in the foreground.

Spacious galleries run the entire front and side of the clubhouse proper, which is 114 feet in length and 40 feet deep. The main building is two storeys high, the main floor being divided into entrance halls, lounge rooms, dance and dining hall, the latter 30 feet by 80. This, with the galleries, which are 15 feet by 160, will afford ample space for the accommodation of large parties, the galleries being so arranged that they may be enclosed and used as an extra dining hall in the winter. The second storey is divided into room sufficiently large for the accommodation of private parties. Shower baths and locker rooms are arranged in the basement.

Figure 14 Ottawa Citizen, 5 September 1925, p. 14. The verandahs or galleries are open to the air in this photograph.

The material used in the construction of this substantial and attractive building is mostly concrete, brick, and stucco.

The front lawns are terraced, with tennis courts so arranged that a good view of the tournaments may be enjoyed by patrons while seated in comfort on the galleries. (Ottawa Journal, 15 August 1925, p. 21)

In the spring of 1927, an attempt was made to make the clubhouse furnishings on the inside as impressive as its appearance on the outside:

The club has only recently been lavishly furnished and beautifully redecorated at an enormous cost.

The verandah is furnished with yellow wicker settees, tables, fern stands with potted ferns, and wicker bird cages, and rugs, all lending a pleasing sight to the eye and is most comfortable.

The spacious ball room, which is considered to have the best dance floor in the district, is very beautifully decorated with deep blue arches lying on a buff background, and the curtains on the windows, which are of the best silk manufactured, blend nicely with the Japanese draperies.

The private parlors are furnished of the best, one being furnished with a cozy Chesterfield set in front of a fireplace, with mahogany tables and deep carpets, the other parlor being furnished in a buff shade with a cream wicker Chesterfield and thick rugs. (Ottawa Journal, 30 April 1927, p. 13)

The photograph below from the late 1920s shows a man and a woman engaged in a game of tennis doubles on one of the two courts laid out immediately in front of the clubhouse (note that the sliding window-doors of the galleries or verandahs have been closed).

Figure 15 Highlea Tennis and Country Club, late 1920s. Where the woman and man play tennis above is today the parking lot of the Champlain Golf Course.

Highlea Golf 1925-26

What would become the Champlain Golf Course first appeared as a glint in the eye of certain members of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club from virtually the moment of its incorporation on 4 August 1925.

Figure 16 Thomas Foley (1885-1938), Ottawa Journal, 11 February 1938, p. 12.

Among the eight men incorporating as “The Highlea Tennis and Country Club” was Thomas Foley, a future president of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. He would have been among the foremost of those who made sure that golf was included among the goals articulated in the new club’s charter: “to promote, organize and manage a golf, tennis, country and social club” (Gazette Officielle du Quebec, 22 August 1925, p. 2543, emphasis added).

Golf happened to occur first in this list of the Highlea corporation’s interests. It became the main interest of the corporation that succeeded Highlea: the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, Limited. And today, a golf is all that is left.

Between the spring of 1923 and the spring of 1924, Foley had been heavily involved in another chartered country club.

Incorporated as the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club, a group of young entrepreneurs attempted to establish on 180 acres of farmland adjoining the Royal Ottawa Golf Club on its north side a 27-hole golf facility. As the most significant real estate agent operating along the Aylmer Road in the 1920s, Foley had probably facilitated the Hillcrest group’s negotiation of a purchase option on the Shouldice farmland in question. In 1924, the Stanley Thompson Company designed an eighteen-hole championship course and a nine-hole ladies’ course for the club, and then it was just a matter of financing the whole project by selling 1,000 shares at $100 per share. Insufficient shares having been sold by the end of 1923, some of the original members of the Hillcrest Board of Directors were replaced, and Foley stepped-up his involvement: he was elected treasurer (Ottawa Journal, 11 April 1924, p. 19).

But nothing availed, and the scheme collapsed. (For the full story, see my essay “Ottawa’s Hillcrest Golf and Country Club and Its Stanley Thompson Courses" at donaldjchilds.ca.)

Given Foley’s commitment to the Hillcrest project, perhaps it should be no surprise to see him involved one year later in another country club project, this one also planned for land adjoining the Royal Ottawa Golf Club (this time on its west side).

Born and educated in Aylmer, son of a father from County Wexford, Ireland, who settled in Aylmer in the 1840s when it was a settlement called Symmes Landing (comprising just a few houses), Foley became an accountant of the Crown Bank of Canada after graduation from the University of Ottawa and then served as manager of branches in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and other places in Western Canada before returning to Aylmer and entering the real estate and insurance business in 1913.

Concerning the national Victory Bond campaign during World War I (1914-18), we read that “Mr. Thomas Foley, the well-known real estate man, is in charge of South Hull and Eardley, and is a special canvasser for the town of Aylmer and is devoting practically all of his time to covering this territory” (Ottawa Citizen, 31 October 1918, p. 7). He became a member of Aylmer town council in the early 1920s, ran for mayor of the municipality of South Hull in 1923 (unsuccessfully), and was among the local people regularly discussed as a possible Liberal candidate for federal elections.

Named president of the Ottawa Real Estate Board in 1925, he had become “one of Ottawa’s leading real estate and insurance men,” with “some large deals to his credit” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 February 1938, p. 1; Ottawa Citizen, 20 February 1926, p 18). He was mainly “Interested in sub-division and development” on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River where he was “well known” (Ottawa Journal, 11 February 1938, p. 12). For instance, Foley developed the “summer colony” known as “The Gardens,” in which he lived (Ottawa Citizen, 11 February 1938, p. 1).

He typically facilitated the sale of farmland to developers:

Slater farm, on Aylmer Road, near Ottawa Golf Club, has been taken over by a syndicate of Ottawa men who will subdivide and offer very large lots to the public at moderate prices in the near future. The price paid was in the neighborhood of $125,000. This is one of the largest suburban deals ever put through in Ottawa. The deal was negotiated through T. Foley …. (Ottawa Citizen, 27 May 1921, p. 3)

It is likely that the deal between Stewart’s syndicate and Hubert Routliffe was negotiated through Foley.

Foley’s interest in adding golf to the sports available at the Highlea Tennis and Country Club emerged just a month after the official opening of the club:

Highlea Club To Have Golf Course

A meeting of the directors of Highlea Tennis and Country Club was held at the clubhouse, Aylmer Road, when those present were: President, Capt. L.F. Burrows, vice-president, A.V. Gale; directors, Thos. Foley, Dr. M.F. Cross, Geo. C. Graham, A. Parker, O.B. Haycock, and the secretary-treasurer, W.H. Stewart.

The directors decided to lease the Highlea Tennis and Country Club property. Mr. W.H. Stewart was appointed manager, in addition to his office of secretary-treasurer.

The club will add golf as well as tennis and bowling to its list of sports. Arrangements are being made to lay out a nine-hole golf course on the land adjoining the club house. (Ottawa Citizen, 9 October 1925, p. 3)

A similar affirmation of plans for golf was recorded two months later in the final board of directors meeting of the year: “Land has been prepared for laying out of additional tennis courts in the spring, and arrangements are being made for a nine-hole golf course” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 December 1925, p. 10).

What were these “arrangements”?

As many as twenty additional tennis courts were planned for 1926, so preparations for laying out so many new tennis courts would have been extensive. Was preparation for the laying out of a golf course also undertaken at this time?

Had a golf professional already been consulted? Had he perhaps staked out a nine-hole course by the end of 1925?

It turns out that just three new courts (not twenty) were introduced to play in the spring of 1926 (making a total of five). Perhaps a golf course was laid out on the ground that had been under preparation for additional tennis courts.

For some reason, golf became associated with the Highlea Tennis and Country Club at this time. For instance, the Montreal Gazette told readers early in 1926 that the banquet of the Canadian Ski Association would be held at the “High-Lea Golf Club” (1 March 1926, p. 17). Was this a slip of the pen, so to speak (an absent-minded confusion of the Tennis and Country Club with a Golf club), or had the Highlea club already staked out a golf course? Sherbrooke’s La tribune did the same thing: “un grand banquet et … un bal … eurent lieu au chalet du Highlea Golf Club, sur le chemin d’Aylmer” (La tribune [Sherbrooke], 2 March 1926, p. 6).

Note also that when it was announced early in 1929 that a new organization called the Glenlea Golf and Country Club had replaced the old Highlea Tennis and Country Club and that it had made arrangements for the laying out of an eighteen-hole golf course, a newspaper report indicated that “part of [the ground] was played over some years ago” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23).

Was there a forerunner at Highlea to the Keffer course of 1929?

If it is true that golf was “played over” the Highlea ground “some years ago,” although no golf club had ever been officially formed at Highlea, one might suspect that Highlea members promoting the development of a golf course might have been so eager to get golf going that they played over a provisional, crude layout as early as the fall of 1925 or the spring of 1926.

Gaudaur Puts His Oar In

Stewart purchased from Routliffe a sufficient amount of land to accommodate at least twenty-five tennis courts, as we can see from the announcement made by “the energetic secretary-treasurer” in August of 1925: “Two courts are practically complete and will be ready for play towards the end of the week …. Before the end of the season, five courts will be in full swing and, before the commencement of the 1926 tennis season, Secretary Stewart hopes to have from 20 to 25 courts at members’ disposal” (Ottawa Citizen, 31 August 1925, p. 10).

Figure 17 The five tennis courts of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club as shown on a 1933 aerial photograph. Today, the golf course parking lot occupies the place formerly occupied by courts 1, 2, 4, and 5 (the area where court 3 was located is today grass-covered). The two entrances from Aylmer Road remain the same.

Although the five courts in question were not actually ready for the beginning of the 1926 season, they were completed by the end of it.

They would be the only tennis courts ever built at Highlea or Glenlea (they are shown to the left), but at the November banquet celebrating “the first year of [Highlea’s] existence in the tennis world,” Stewart informed club members that “five more will be added, making ten ready for the next season” in 1927 (Ottawa Journal, 6 November 1926, p. 13).

Given that in 1925 the club apparently already had land sufficient for laying out at least twenty-five tennis courts (land that was already being prepared late in the fall of 1925 for laying out these courts), Stewart curiously also announced that “additional land was recently purchased so that more courts can be added when necessary” (Ottawa Journal, 6 November 1926, p. 13).

Was “additional land” really needed for future tennis courts?

Or was Stewart anticipating the development of a golf course?

Stewart had announced his acquisition of additional land for future development by Highlea on November 5th. On November 29th , however, it was announced that the Highlea club had been sold: “Announcement was made last night of the sale of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club to a Montreal syndicate …. Associates from Montreal have paid, it is understood, $68,000 for the Highlea Club assets. They assume complete control on December 1” (Ottawa Citizen, 30 November 1926, p. 10).

It turns out that just before the sale of the Highlea club, Stewart appears to have sold to the Montreal syndicate the ten acres of land that his own syndicate had originally purchased from Routliffe: “The new owners have decided to install 21 new courts on the land in front of the clubhouse. This property was purchased last week for that purpose” (Ottawa Citizen, 30 November 1926, p. 10). And the Montrealers also had “an option on 125 acres of land for a golf course” – presumably the “additional land” Stewart had purchased several weeks before in anticipation of the Montreal syndicate’s interest in developing a golf course (Ottawa Citizen, 30 November 1926, p. 10).

Figure 18 Charles Gaudaur (1863-1927), Galveston Daily News, 2 November 1895, p. 9.

The new Montreal owners made a bit of a splash in Ottawa when they informed the newspapers that the man who led their syndicate was Charles Gaudaur:

Montrealers Purchase Highlea Country Club

Charles Gaudaur, Former Sculling Star, Heads Quebec Syndicate

Announcement was made last night of the sale of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club to a Montreal syndicate headed by Charles Gaudaur, former widely known sculler, and brother of Jake Gaudaur, who held the world sculling championship some years ago. (Ottawa Citizen, 30 November 1926, p. 10)

From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, Gaudaur had enjoyed tremendous national and international fame as one of Canada’s preeminent rowers when the sport was a hugely popular spectator sport.

As the Ottawa Journal explained, “In the early eighties, Charles Gaudaur was rated as the fastest short distance oarsman who ever rowed over a course. It was claimed that he could overhaul his brother, Jake, the champion at that time, on a mile course. At any rate, he was an oarsman of outstanding ability” (Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1926, p. 18).

igure 19 Charles Gaudaur racing singles scull circa 1900.

Born in 1863 in Atherley, Ontario, Charles Gaudaur was the 1902 North American singles sculling champion at the one-mile distance. He often raced doubles with his more famous and more accomplished older brother, Jake, the world champion at singles sculling from 1896 to 1900.

Charles also developed a successful career as a professional wrestler.

And in the early 1900s, he became a hotel proprietor in Barrie, Ontario, at the Victoria Hotel (1902), where he was “a genial and up-to-date host” (Northern Advance, 20 November 1902, p. 3). For several years before and during World War I, he served as the game warden or overseer in Atherly for Lake Couchiching and part of Lake Simcoe. He was then appointed a bridge keeper. In the mid-1920s, he was a taxidermist.

How he came to lead a syndicate of Montreal businessmen interested in developing a country club in South Hull is a mystery.

Figure 20 Wilfrid J. Grace (1887-1964), Osgoode Hall, circa 1914.

It is interesting to note, however, that “Wilfred J. Grace handled the transaction” between Gaudaur and Stewart, for Grace had led the failed attempt to establish the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club thee years before (Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1926, p. 18).

Grace (an Ottawa lawyer, alderman, and capitalist entrepreneur who had been born in Kazabazua, Quebec, in 1887) seems to have been interested not in golf, per se, but rather in the possibility of making a profit from country club stock. William (“Bill”) Gladish, who (as sports editor of the Ottawa Journal) had published many items promoting the Hillcrest venture, and who was added to the Hillcrest board of directors in the spring of 1924, perhaps signalled his sense of what motivated the year-long whirlwind of promoting the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club when (just after the venture collapsed in May of 1924) he published the following item:

With so many golf clubs being organized there has sprung up a class of professional promoters of golf clubs who lease or option the land; sell the stock; see to the appointment of committees; build the clubhouse and golf courses and then step out to start another club. They organize joint stock companies to own the club and sell stock. There is a commission to the promoter for the sale of stock.

With the incessant broadening out of golf, shares of stock in the various clubs have been in keen demand and market values of the shares have enhanced considerably. During the past few years most golf club shares have been good investments. (Telegraph-Journal [St. John, New Brunswick], re-published in the Ottawa Journal, 28 May 1924, p. 5)

I wonder if Gaudaur and his syndicate of Montreal businessmen had been seduced by one of Grace’s get-rich-quick golf schemes.

In any case, Gaudaur had installed himself at Highlea by December of 1926, “managing the club in the interests of the Montreal syndicate” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1927). The club continued to host dinners and dances in December, culminating in a special New Year’s Eve “dance, concluding with breakfast at half past four” (Windsor Star, 22 December 1926, p. 17). And throughout the winter, it hosted “continuous dancing nightly from 7 till 2” and it regularly hosted clubs engaging in winter sports, advertising that there was “no place where you can enjoy a more pleasant evening after a hike, skiing party, or tobogganing” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 January 1927, p. 12; Ottawa Journal, 30 December 1926, p. 11).

Throughout it all, Gaudaur seems to have been a very “hands-on” manager. For instance, when the Social and Athletic Club of the Interior Department hosted 200 skiers at Highlea, inviting as the guest of honour the “Hon. Charles Stewart, Minister of the Interior,” the Ottawa Journal reported that “Much of the credit of the affair was due … to the courtesy of Mr. Charles G. Gaudaur” and the Ottawa Citizen observed that “Mr. C.G. Gaudaur and his efficient staff are to be congratulated on the very able way they looked after the needs of the guests” (Ottawa Journal, 21 February 1927, p. 28; Ottawa Citizen, 22 February 1927, p. 13).

Twenty-five years after his proprietorship of the Victoria Hotel in Barrie, Gaudaur was still a “genial and up-to-date host.”

But on 22 March 1927, just 112 days after Gaudaur’s Montreal syndicate had purchased the club, the Ottawa Citizen announced “W.H. Stewart Controls Highlea T & C Club”: “The Highlea Tennis and Country Club, which up to the present has been operating under the control of a group of Montreal businessmen, was yesterday taken over by Mr. W.H. Stewart…. The purchase price was not mentioned” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1927).

And the very same day, Gaudaur “left for Atherly, Ont., … to accept a government appointment” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1927). He was going home to serve as a bridge and canal manager for what would turn out to be the last year of his life.

Was the purchase of Highlea by the Montreal syndicate Gaudaur’s initiative – his baby, so to speak – from the beginning? Was Gaudaur’s decision to return home to Atherly the end of the project as far as the other members of the Montreal syndicate were concerned?

Or was it other members of the Montreal syndicate who decided to abandon the Highlea project, leading Gaudaur to seek a government appointment back home in Atherly as his bolt hole?

Whatever the case may be, the brief “inter-regnum” of Charles Gaudaur seems to have produced two things: first, absolute control of the Highlea club and related property by W.H. Stewart and, second, considerable momentum toward the development of a golf course.

Highlea Golf 1927-28

In November of 1926, Gaudaur’s Montreal syndicate had adopted Stewart’s own plans for the tennis side of Highlea’s operations: it would build the approximately twenty new tennis courts that Stewart had said he would build. The new owners seem to have been even more ambitious about developing Highlea as a golf club. Not only had they secured “an option on 125 acres of land for a golf course”; but they announced that they expected to add to their tennis membership as many as “500 golf players before next summer” (Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1926, p. 18). Such membership numbers would rank alongside those of Royal Ottawa, Rivermead, and Ottawa Hunt.

When Stewart resumed control of Highlea, he immediately made two things clear – first, that he regarded five courts as sufficient to the tennis club’s needs (so long as they were upgraded and maintained properly) and, second, that development of a golf club would be a priority:

It is the desire of Mr. Stewart that the club be made a social and athletic club in every sense of the word, and every consideration is being given towards attaining this object.

A very ambitious program has been planned for this summer’s activities.

It has been decided that two at least of the five courts will be resurfaced with a material similar to asphalt, called “Amesite.” These hard courts, although in use in other cities in Canada, will be an innovation in Ottawa, and it is anticipated that the tennis members at Highlea will appreciate this added attraction. These courts will allow play within an hour of a rain storm, a great advantage, which tennis enthusiasts in this district will appreciate. The remainder of the courts will be placed in first class condition at the earliest possible date and maintained by a competent groundsman throughout the season.

Mr. Eddie Jamieson, the secretary of Ottawa District Lawn Tennis Association, will be chairman of the tennis committee.

Mr. E.M. Ramsay, of the Department of [the] Interior, is heading a separate syndicate to promote a golf course and is making arrangements with Mr. Stewart for use of the Highlea clubhouse. (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1927, p. 11)

Golf seems to have been an important part of the “ambitious program … planned for this summer’s activities.” After all, plans for introducing golf at Highlea were sufficiently advanced by March of 1927 that the promoters of a golf course were already “making arrangements with Mr. Stewart for use of the Highlea clubhouse.”

Was the “separate syndicate” formed at Highlea by March of 1927 “to promote a golf course” associated with an earlier preliminary layout – the “part of [the ground] … played over some years ago” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23)?

Stewart’s interest in developing a golf club at Highlea was indicated not just by what was quoted in the newspapers in March of 1927; it was also indicated by what was pictured in the newspapers in April of 1927, for the club’s full-page advertisements removed the word “tennis” from the Country Club’s name and, in claiming that the “Highlea Country Club” “Offers Ideal Facilities for Tennis and Recreation,” they showed just one other form of “recreation” that the club had in mind: golf (see below).

Figure 21 Ottawa Journal, 30 September 1927, p. 13.

People certainly continued to associate the Highlea club with golf.

In the spring of 1927, a man who had been in a car crash explained to reporters that it happened after “it was suggested we should drive out to the Highlea Golf and Tennis Club for ‘a wee doch and doris’” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 April 1927, p. 3). Le droit mentioned in June of 1928 that Quebec and Ontario participants in a convention of labour of organizations in Ottawa would hold “un banquet conjoint pour les deux organizations au Highlea Golf Club” (Le droit, 26 June 1928, p. 10). In July of 1928, the Ottawa Citizen mentioned that “A very happy incident took place at the Highlea Golf Club” when friends and neighbours hosted a dinner for one of their number who was getting married. In December, the same newspaper reported that “Guests danced and made merry at the Highlea Golf and Country Club last night while the place was being broken into” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 December 1928, p. 3).

Mind you, the club was called the Highlea Tennis and Country Club or the Highlea Tennis Club ten times for every time it was called a “golf” club, but one wonders whether it might have become associated with golf in the minds of some people because they had driven by the club and seen people playing golf on its grounds.

Even after Highlea’s name was changed to Glenlea at the beginning of 1929, the new club was still referred to in the Ottawa newspapers as the Highlea Golf and Country Club as late as the spring of 1931 (Ottawa Citizen, 16 April 1931, p. 7)

Endsley Moore Ramsay

As we know, when W.H. Stewart assumed control of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club at the beginning of 1927, he made it clear that the club would focus on both tennis and golf, and he appointed a different person to look after each sport:

Stewart Contrôle Le Club Highlea

M. W.H. Stewart a obtenu le contrôle du Highlea Tennis Club et Country Club qui jusqu’à ces jours-ci appartenait à un syndicat montréalais.

M. Eddie Jamieson, secrétaire de l’Association de tennis du district, sera président du comité de tennis, et M. E.M. Ramsay s’occupera du golf. (Le droit, 23 March 1927, p. 2)

Interestingly, readers learned on the same day news of Stewart’s re-acquisition of Highlea broke that “E.M. Ramsay, of the Department of [the] Interior, is heading a separate syndicate to promote a golf course and is making arrangements with Mr. Stewart for use of the Highlea clubhouse” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1927, p. 11). Somehow, Ramsay was ready to negotiate with Stewart about golfers’ use of the clubhouse even before the newspaper announced that Stewart had resumed control of Highlea.

Ramsay is first mentioned in connection with Highlea concerning the banquet held at the club by the Social and Athletic Club of the Interior Department in February of 1927: “Much of the credit of the affair was due to the untiring efforts of the committee, Mr. E. [M]. Ramsay, director of skiing …, and also to the courtesy of Mr. Charles G. Gaudaur” (Ottawa Journal, 21 February 1927, p. 8). Given that Ramsay – “an enthusiastic sportsman and golfer” – will have worked with Gaudaur early in February in connection with the planning of this event, I wonder if he fell to talking with Gaudaur about the latter’s plans for the development of a golf course at Highlea (Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1955, p. 2). Ramsay may have been deputized by Gaudaur to work on the club’s golf plans before Stewart re-acquired the club.

Or, just as Edward G. Jamieson was the chairman of the Highlea tennis committee from before Gaudaur took over, during the period Gaudaur was in charge, and after Stewart resumed control, so Ramsay may also have been in the position of promoting a golf course at Highlea even before Gaudaur’s period at Highlea. That is, he may already have been working with Stewart himself regarding the building of a golf course before Gaudaur acquired the club.

Stewart was a lifelong resident of South Hull, but his golf committee chairman was an Arnprior boy, born and bred. Living and working in Ottawa his entire adult life, Ramsay still regularly returned to the Arnprior area to visit friends and relatives, to attend weddings, and so on. He remained active as a lodge member of the Odd Fellows of Arnprior all his life. When he died in 1955 at sixty-four years of age, his remains were buried in the Arnprior cemetery.

Figure 22 Endsley Moore Ramsay (1893-1955), Ottawa Journal, 30 November 1955, p. 2.

A graduate of McGill University and then Yale University, Ramsay came to hold two jobs in Ottawa. On the one hand, he worked for the Ministry of the Interior. On the other hand, he was president of Ramsay Company, an organization of patent lawyers.

As a golfer, Ramsay was a member of the Chaudière Golf Club from 1924 to 1925 and a member of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club from 1925-28, where he won its Fraser Cup in 1927 (playing off a handicap of 18). The Chaudière club was founded to make golf more accessible to golfers with a modest income; Ottawa Hunt was as exclusive as Royal Ottawa and Rivermead.

It was perhaps Ramsay’s committee to which a news report referred in 1929 when the founding of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was announced: “A committee has for some time past been working on the details of establishing a long felt want in the nature of a first class golf club easily within the means of those with moderate incomes” (Ottawa Journal, 16 February 1929, p. 4)

Ramsay remained a member of the club as it transitioned from its Highlea days to its Glenlea days. In 1929, for instance, at the Glenlea Hallowe’en dance hosted by a number of the wives of the club’s directors, Ramsay was one of the five people composing “the committee in charge of the arrangements” (Ottawa Citizen, 1 November 1929, p. 14). And almost twenty years later, he was still a prominent member of the club in 1948: “Bobby Alston, pro at the Glenlea Golf Club, reports that E.M. Ramsay hit a deer with his second shot while playing the first hole yesterday” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 June 1948, p. 12).

Deer still present themselves as targets on the same hole today.

Other Golf Courses Laid Out in the Ottawa Are in the 1920s

Owner William Stewart was determined to have a first-class golf club “with the fees very much below the usual for a club of this calibre,” and so, as we know, “for some time past” he had “a committee … working on the details of establishing a long felt want in the nature of a first-class golf club easily within the means of those with moderate incomes” (Ottawa Journal, 16 February 1929, p. 4).

This “long felt want” had developed for two main reasons: on the one hand, golf was increasing in popularity; on the other hand, Ottawa’s established golf clubs were increasing in exclusivity. The Royal Ottawa Golf Club (established in 1891 and located on Aylmer Road since 1903), the Rivermead Golf Club (established in 1910 and located between Lucerne Boulevard and Aylmer Road), and the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club (established in 1919 and located on the opposite side of Ottawa) were flourishing, but each had long waiting lists.

By 1929, several golf clubs were competing in the Ottawa area to offer people more affordable golf. On Aylmer Road, the Chaudière’s golf course (today’s Chateau Cartier) was laid out in 1923 and the Hull Golf Club (today’s Gatineau Golf and Country Club) opened a nine-hole golf course in 1926. As we know, on farmland adjoining Royal Ottawa to the north, the Stanley Thompson Company laid out two courses for the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club in 1923, but they were never built as the club vanished before a shot was played. In the planned community of Gatineau Mills, a company town built by the Canadian International Paper Company, the latter began to develop what would become known as the Tecumseh golf course in 1928. On the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, a nine-hole course was opened to the public on a dairy farm in the Nepean village of City View in 1924, and in 1926, nine holes of the McKellar Park golf course were built. But the first golf course laid out after the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club was formed in 1919 was in Hull on Rue Gamelin (once called Brigham Road, and then called Mountain Road), where a “caddie’s course” that would become the home of the Fairmont Golf Club was built in 1922.

Fairmont Golf Club

Established in 1923, the Fairmont Golf Club (the name was often spelled “Fairmount”) had taken over what was called a “caddie’s course” built on Rue Gamelin just north of Fairy Lake (today more usually called Lac des Fées). It had been laid out by working-class golfers who had learned the game as caddies at the Ottawa area’s exclusive private golf clubs. Like the Ottawa Golf Club’s Chelsea Links (in use from 1896 to 1904), the Fairmont course was beyond the last electric railway station and so golfers had to walk to the club. The course was said to be “within ten minutes’ walk from the end of the Wrightville electric car lines and located amid ideal and lovely surroundings” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1925, p. 2).

These ideal and lovely surroundings consisted of a semicircle of hilly land at the north end of Fairy Lake.

Figure 23 The fields at the north end of Fairy Lake during the winter of 1920. A golf course would be laid out here two years later.

The American Annual Golf Guide of 1926 presents information supplied by Fairmont that indicates that the club was established in 1922, but the first news of it appears in the Ottawa Journal in July of 1923 in a column (“Heard on the Green”) about local golf news: “Fairmount is a caddie’s nine-hole course somewhere in the vicinity of Fairy Lake” (Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1923, p. 13). An accomplished local golfer was quoted as saying he “was very impressed by the possibilities of [the] new course at Fairy Lake …. He gave a vivid picture of its scenic beauties” (12 July 1923, p. 13).

In the 1920s, caddies were not just young children; many were young men in their late teens and twenties whose main job was caddying. A group of them seems to have developed a course of their own in the hilly fields above Fairy Lake that had long been used for outdoor activities: this place had for a number of years been used in the winter and spring by the Cliffside Ski Club for cross-country skiing and ski-jumping, and it had come to be used in the summer and fall by Boy-Scouts and Sea-Scouts for hiking, camping, and various scout games.

Figure 24 View from the top of the Cliffside Ski Club's Fairy Hill Ski Jump, 1924.

In Britain, rough-and-ready relatively short golf courses crudely shaped by caddies for their own practice and enjoyment were called “caddies’ courses” (see Saturday Review, 27 February 1909, p. 271). The author of the Ottawa Journal’s “Heard on the Green” column seems to have adopted this usage.

Among the caddies who played the Fairmont caddies’ course, one stood out: twenty-eight-year-old Harry Steele. He represented Fairmont in the Ottawa and District Golf Championship at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club in July of 1923: “The only Fairmount entry, L. [sic] Steele, did very well” (Ottawa Journal, 12 July 1923, p. 13). So, we know that the course had been named Fairmont by the summer of 1923. And by the end of the year, what began as a caddie’s course had become the location of a full-fledged golf club. Comprising a larger and non-caddie membership, the Fairmont golf Club applied for admission to the Royal Canadian Golf Association in the fall of 1923. And so, in January of 1924, the annual report of the RCGA indicates that “one of the clubs joining the association” is “the Fairmount Golf Club, Hull” (The Globe [Toronto], 23 January 1924, p. 9).

Consistent with its origins as a “caddies’ course,” the golf course of the Fairmont Golf Club was described by The American Annual Golf Guide (1926) as short – “a sporting one of 2,800 yards” – and the Ottawa Citizen seems to confirm that the new Fairmont Golf Club took over an existing golf course when it observes that “An attractive nine-hole course has been secured at Fairy Lake” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1925, p. 2). The routing of its nine holes in the mid-1930s is shown below.

Figure 25 The routing of the nine holes of the Fairmont golf course indicated on a 1938 aerial photograph. The greens show up as light-coloured square patches of grass.

Harry Steele, born in 1895 in Wright, Quebec (not far from where the Fairmont golf course would be laid out twenty-seven years later), was hired as Fairmont’s first golf professional and served in that role off and on till at least the end of the 1920s (Harry Mulligan displaced him for two seasons from 1927-28).

He was said to have been “a man of considerable golfing ability” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 May 1943, p. 16). But he became a wandering man of all trades at several local golf courses after his stints at Fairmont: he represented the Gatineau Golf and Country Club in its “Field Day” tournament of 1940; he was the Gatineau club’s caddie master the next year; in 1943 he served at Glenlea simultaneously as Harry Mulligan’s assistant pro and as the club’s head greenkeeper.

His Fairmont Golf Club was certainly well-established by July of 1924, and he was succeeding in raising the calibre of golf played on the course, for the Ottawa Citizen reported that the biggest “surprise” of the first round in the “City and District Golf championship tourney” of 1924 was the good score by “Kirke Ludington, of the new Fairmont Golf Club” (9 July 1924, p. 1).

It was not a club with a big membership, mind you. The Ottawa Citizen says that in 1925 the Fairmont Golf Club opened that year “with a limited membership of fifty men and twenty-five women” (23 April 1925, p. 2). But membership was increasing. Just a month later, Canadian Golfer described it as “a progressive club with 125 members” (vol 2 no 1 [May 1925], p. 108).

Clubs established in the Ottawa area during the 1920s were fond of calling themselves “progressive,” a word used to indicate to potential members that they were “progressive” in a democratic sense: they offered an affordable and accessible alternative to the area’s exclusive private clubs.

Figure 26 Ottawa Citizen, 10 June 1939, p. 22.

The Fairmont Golf and Country Club lapsed as a member-oriented golf organization in the early 1930s (after the defection of most of its members to the new Glenlea Golf and Country Club in 1929). The golf course endured, however, and was renovated and redesigned several times over the next thirty years, but it was always offered to the public as a pay-for-play golf course. It never again had a golf club organized by members.

The Fairmont Golf and Country Club endured with the same name – offering pay-as-you play golf, country-club activities (including sled-dog races), and nightclub acts – until the early 1950s, when the Federal District Commission (forerunner of today’s National Capital Commission) targeted the property for expropriation in connection with development of a parkway for accessing the new Gatineau Park

Figure 27 Sir Robert Borden, circa 1923-24.

In 1923, Sir Robert Borden, former Prime Minister of Canada, fronted a group (organized by Ambrose Eugene Corrigan) that intended to build an eighteen-hole golf course on the old Eddy Farm located between the Aylmer Road and the north bank of the Ottawa River.

Incorporated as the Chaudière Golf and Realty Company, most of the founding members of the company were golf nuts, such as Borden himself (seen in the photo to the left), as well as Corrigan (former club champion at Rivermead), and William Foran (a founder of Rivermead).

The Chaudière Golf Club first opened for play in the summer of 1923, although it did not begin its first full season of operation until 1924, when Harry Mulligan was hired as its first golf professional.

The club’s founders were eager to start play as soon as possible. After “the course was laid out by George Cumming, of Toronto, … work was commenced about the 1st June, 1923,” and play commenced on seven holes with temporary greens on Saturday, June 30th (Ottawa Journal, 19 June 1924, p. 1; see also Ottawa Citizen, 27 June 1923, p. 3). And more holes were opened for play within a week: “Twelve temporary holes are now in play” (Ottawa Journal, 7 July 1923, p. 23).

The club was still two weeks away from the official opening of the golf course, but nothing would stand in the way of the Chaudière’s quest to open as quickly as possible – not even the absence of necessary greenkeeping equipment:

One experience which the Chaudière Golf Club has been forced to face gives something of an idea of the tremendous growth of the game through Canada and the United States.

In the upkeep of the greens, one of the most necessary implements is the hole-cutter, a machine which is standardized throughout the golf world.

To eliminate the margin of error in the cutting of the cups and to keep the edges clean and trim, this implement is an essential to the greenkeeper, yet none one could be found on the continent.

So great has been the demand in Canada and the United States for the paraphernalia necessary to golf courses that the entire supply has been exhausted and none could be obtained save from England. (Ottawa Citizen, 17 August 1923, p. 11)

Opening day was 21 July 1923 (see the photograph of the opening drive below).

Figure 28 Chaudière Golf Club, 1st tee, 21 July 1923.

The cost of a share in the Chaudière Golf and Realty Company was $100. Significantly, however, one did not need to buy a share to play golf. Furthermore, at the Chaudière, it was announced, “There is no initiation fee. The annual fee for 1923 will be $30; but members, if they so desire, may pay a monthly fee of $10 for the balance of the playing season. This will entitle them to playing privileges and the use of the club house” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 June 1923, p. 3).

The Chaudière Golf and Realty Company promised a progressive golf club animated by egalitarian democratic principles and policies. Officers of the new club articulated these principles and policies at a meeting of the board of directors in July of 1923:

At a meeting of the shareholders of the new company held this week for organization purposes, Sir Robert Borden was elected president. He stated that he was associating himself with the enterprise with the sole idea that it was going to give a number of Ottawa people an opportunity to play golf who had hitherto been barred from membership in existing clubs owing to expense and other causes. By charging a nominal monthly fee for playing privileges and eliminating initiation charges, the new club, he thought, would provide some of the advantages usually obtained from municipal courses.

Mr. William Foran, who was the “father” of the Rivermead Golf Club, was elected secretary, Mr. A.E. Corrigan, manager ….

Mr. Foran said that it would be the aim of management to cut out all unnecessary “frills” in order that the playing fees might be kept low and within the range of everybody. Clubs and other supplies would be available for players at practically cost price and there would be sets of clubs for rental by those who do not own them.

Mr. Corrigan predicted that the Chaudière Golf Club would soon develop some of the best golfers in Ottawa because it had been revealed that there were a number of gentlemen who resided in the city now who had played golf in Scotland and England but who had been compelled to abandon the game since coming to Canada. These now would be able to get on the links. (Ottawa Journal, 7 July 1923, p. 23)

One such golfer as Corrigan described was William Allison Divine from North Berwick, who had served as the golf professional at the Ottawa Golf Club from 1899 to 1903 when it was located at its Chelsea Road Links (1896-1904). When the club opened at its present location in the spring of 1904, Divine was replaced by John Oke (winner later that year of the first Canadian Open Golf Championship) and Divine then gave up the game to become a baker on Wellington Street in Ottawa. But twenty years later he joined the new Chaudière club and became the first member to record a hole-in-one on its new golf course (Ottawa Journal, 27 July 1953, p. 26).

Harry Mulligan, the first head pro at the Chaudière (appointed 1 January 1924), recalled that Corrigan acted on the democratic principles enunciated by the first directors. In an interview thirty years later, when he was the head pro at the Glenlea Golf Club, Mulligan recalled Corrigan fondly:

Working with A.E. Corrigan, Harry helped to get the first pay-as-you-play course [Chaudière] on its feet.

“It was the greatest thing that happened to golf in Ottawa,” the diminutive Glenlea pro stated.

“It gave young golfers of the city, those with not too much money, a chance to play the game….

The thing I liked about Mr. Corrigan was the fact that whether they had money or not, they could still play a round or two,” Mulligan recalled. (Ottawa Citizen, 3 May 1955, p. 19)

In the Ottawa Journal in 1929, a similar observation was made anonymously by a member of one of the older, more exclusive golf clubs: “A.E. Corrigan made golf popular in Ottawa when he built the Chaudière and brought the game within the reach of the man of average means” (Ottawa Journal, 27 May 1929, p. 19).

Hillcrest Golf and Country Club

In the spring of 1924, Bill Gladish, the sports editor of the Ottawa Journal, reflected on the development of golf in the Ottawa area since World War I:

Golf is gradually crowding every other summer game out of the picture. The strides the game has made in Ottawa since the war have been immense.

Three new courses [Ottawa Hunt, Chaudière, and Hillcrest] have been added to the two which were in existence previous to the war [Royal Ottawa and Rivermead].

The baby club, the Chaudière, is just about ready to step out of its long perambulator and make way for the recently christened Hillcrest Club, which is also located on the popular side of the Ottawa River. (Ottawa Journal, 8 April 1924, p. 16)

What Gladish calls the “Hillcrest Club” was incorporated in June of 1923 as the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club. Since its letters patent were issued a few days before those of the Chaudière Golf and Country Club, Hillcrest was actually christened not as Ottawa’s fifth golf club, but rather as its fourth.

It was born in the spring of 1923, when five young people new to golf (two barristers, a bookkeeper, a stenographer, and the head of Ottawa’s downtown office of the Canadian Pacific Railway) decided to incorporate as a golf club and build an eighteen-hole championship golf course and a nine-hole “ladies’ course.” Ranging from nineteen to thirty-six years of age, these golf neophytes had negotiated an option to purchase 180 acres of land adjoining the property of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club along its northern boundary.

And then they arranged for the Stanley Thompson Company to design their golf courses.

Figure 29 Ottawa Citizen, 4 July 1923, p. 3.

As shown in the map reproduced to the left (which was published in Ottawa’s main newspapers), the property was situated 400 yards north of Aylmer Road on the west side of Brickyard Road (which has since been replaced by today’s Boulevard Saint-Raymond).

The club asserted that “Its ease of access – being only a 10c fare and a 15-minute ride from the center of the city by either the Green Buses or the Hull Electric Railway – has a great appeal” (Ottawa Citizen, 30 August 1923, p. 11). An important purpose of the publication of the map was to show that the new golf course would be accessible to Ottawa residents:

it would be within walking distance of the Broadview Station, which served both the Hull Electric Railway line and the Canadian Pacific Railway line (all of which are marked on the map).

Also indicated on the map was the fact that the club would have a prestigious neighbour: the Royal Ottawa Golf Club.

The site where the Stanley Thompson staked out twenty-seven golf holes is today a subdivision known as Birch Manor or Manor des Trembles, but in 1923 the property in question comprised a farmhouse, its related outbuildings, land largely cleared for grazing, and another portion of land along its western boundary that had second-growth trees and brush on it.

Figure 30 The 180-acre farm to be purchased by the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club. National Air Photo Library, A4572-50, 5 April 1933, modified and annotated.

The club published an advertisement on 4 July 1923 in the Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Journal, and Le droit that referred readers to an “accompanying sketch” of the course design, but this sketch was accidentally omitted from all three newspapers (Ottawa Citizen, 4 July 1923, p. 3). Better late than never, however, the sketch seen below appeared eight weeks later in a newspaper article about the club’s nine-hole ladies’ course. (Note that I have coloured the ladies’ course blue, the front nine of the championship course green, and the back nine of the championship course yellow, and I have added hole numbers otherwise difficult to make out on the original newspaper image.)

Figure 31 Modified, enhanced sketch by Stanley Thompson & Co. of the 27 holes to be built for the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club, Ottawa Citizen, 4 July 1923, p.3. I have coloured the clubhouse light brown. The nine-hole ladies’ is coloured blue; the first nine holes of the championship course are coloured green; the second nine holes of the championship course are coloured yellow. The broken lines are contour lines.

The barristers, the CPR manager, and the stenographers intended to raise the $100,000 with which the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club would be capitalized by selling 1,000 shares for $100 each:

Ownership of one share constitutes a membership in the Club – gives the holder a voice in club administration – and is a bond on the club assets.

These shares are offered to the first 300 members at $100.00 each, payable as follows: $50.00 when called – and balance – $25.00 in 30 days and $25.00 in 60 days after the call.

No call will be made nor any obligation due from applicants until 300 memberships have been secured. (Ottawa Citizen, 4 July 1923, p. 3)

The opportunity to purchase shares was offered via newspaper advertisements

Figure 32 Ottawa Citizen, 4 July 1923, p. 3.

Dominoes would begin to fall when “300 membership applications [had] been secured”: “The minute we have 300 names – we take possession of the grounds – and in two weeks later will have 9 holes in play. Messrs. Stanley Thompson and Co. are holding themselves in readiness to expedite the work” (Ottawa Journal, 21 July 1923, p. 26).

At the beginning of April in 1924, as we have seen, when Ottawa Journal sports editor Bill Gladish described the golf season to come in Ottawa, he referred to the impending opening of the “recently christened Hillcrest Club” as a certainty (Ottawa Journal, 8 April 1924). But after April, there is no more news about the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club.

The board of directors had tried all forms of advertising to entice membership applications, and its strategies comprised both the soft sell and the hard sell. But neither worked. And so then, no doubt surprising subscribers who had bought a $100 share for the right to play the Stanley Thompson golf courses, the board began to offer group memberships to public servants in government departments – and even to groups of American residents of upper New York state.

But nothing availed in the quest for 300 memberships, and the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club disappeared without a shot having been played.

City View Golf Club

There was a golf club founded on the outskirts of Ottawa in 1924 that intended to serve residents of the city as a public golf course: City View Golf Club.

Figure 33 James Ernest Caldwell (1862-1954), Canadian Golfer, vol 15 no 6 [October 1929], p. 461.

The owner was James Ernest Caldwell (1862- 1954), a “well-known farmer-poet” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 November 1924, p. 17). He owned a 300-acre farm at City View (his farmhouse was located on Merivale Road) and he laid out the nine-hole golf course himself.

Caldwell was born on his parents’ farm at City View in 1862, five years before Confederation. But he never saw a golf course, let alone played golf, before his fiftieth birthday. In September of 1912, however, he watched an exhibition match at Royal Ottawa between, on the one hand, the team of former British Amateur and Open Champion, and reigning U.S. Amateur Champion, Harold Hilton and his British amateur partner Norman Hunter, and, on the other hand, and the team of Royal Ottawa head pro Karl Keffer and Rivermead head pro Davie Black.

Caldwell later recalled the experience:

As a youth of fifty summers, I had yet to see my first game of golf….

But in 1912, Mr. Harold Hilton, the famous amateur and open champion of Great Britain, visited Canada on his way to defend his title at the American amateur championship….

For some time, previous, it had been in my mind that golf was a game that would stand watching, so I decided to see it as played by a top-notcher….

Figure 34 Harold Hilton (left) and Norman hunter on their tour of Canada in the summer of 1912.

It was a rare day, such as comes to reward us for perseverance through extremes of heat and cold, when we can say that everything is just right – a perfect day….

Royalty was there, premiers and ex-premiers, and premiers-to-be, ambassadors, consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, Ministers of War, of Marine, of Agriculture, of Finance, of the Gospel; Members of Parliament, Deputy Ministers, chief clerks, railway magnates, lumber kings, bank managers, editors, press gallery men, one farmer, why specify more….

And the Royal Ottawa. What a royal course!... Nearly a hundred acres of fairways and greens, undulating to the winding course of the indispensable brook. Bounded and broken by clumps of tall elms, and farther off the original forest; and southward, over the old Aylmer Road, shining glimpses of the Ottawa.

And who were the actors in this beautiful grass-carpeted, tree-screened stage set in the bosom of the ancient hills? Hilton was then about 42, standing about five feet six and weighing about one hundred and forty…. Norman Hunter, his playing mate, had been for a number of years among the best, but had never reached the highest honors. He was taller, heavier, younger than Hilton. Two years more of the links for him and then “Flanders Fields.” Missing, and no one knows his sepulchre.

Figure 35 David Black (left) and Karl Keffer, 1907 Canadian Open Championship, Lambton Golf and Country Club, Toronto, Ontario.

Then there was Karl Keffer, the pro of the Royal Ottawa, then doing and still to do great things on the links. Grave and modest of demeanour, careful and thoughtful. Karl was seldom caught napping. And from nearby Rivermead, Davie Black, … lately out of Troon, where the real links are; every joint in his compact, close-set body working, smooth and true ….

And now it is half-past two. The players with their caddies are at the first tee. The crowd quiets down, every voice is hushed. Hilton, as premier player and visitor, has the honour…. He picks his favorite driver, takes his ball from his pocket and places it fresh and shining on its tiny eminence. Not a whisper now. Every eye is on the player as he places and replaces his feet, ever scanning the fairway, selecting the spot where he shall place the ball, two hundred yards away. Now he has his position right, he sees that imaginary line along which he must play. With supple wrists and forearms, he seems to mesmerize the ball, then with swift, yet easy, sureness, and well concentrated vigor, he swings. The stroke is made, is perfect; the ball flies straight down the course; it seems to defy gravitation, actually floating upward near the end of its flight, then dropping and bounding on still eager for its goal….

We hear some wiseacre indulging in what he thinks is a criticism of golf, referring to it as “knocking a little ball around a field.” O Ignorance! What crimes are committed in thy name! Verily, any ignoramus could conceivably “knock a ball around a field,” but to drive a ball probably 225 yards in a given direction is surely one of the most consummate triumphs of personal skill in the whole round of sport or of craftsmanship. So, at least, I thought on that beautiful summer day as with the gallery I followed these four players from green to green….

Fifty years had passed before I saw my first game of golf. I feel positive I will not survive my last game so long. (J.E. Caldwell, “How I Fell in Love --- with Golf,” Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 1 [May 1920], pp. 35-38)

As Royal Ottawa had a long waiting-list, Caldwell decided that in the spring of 1913 he would join the new Rivermead Golf and Country Club, which he said at that time “had only 13 somewhat primitive holes” (Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 1 [May 1920], p. 36). In the meantime, he laid out his own golf course on his farm at City View where he attempted to learn the fundamentals of the game.

Figure 36 William Campbell.

Figure 37 Duke of Argyle, 1909.

On this crude course, Caldwell practised the game with fellow poet, William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918), a former minister of the Episcopal Church who had resigned his position in New Brunswick after a crisis of faith and moved to Ottawa in the 1890s to become a civil servant. A relatively poor man who could not afford membership at Royal Ottawa or Rivermead, Campbell moved to City View in 1915, perhaps in part to avail himself of the opportunity to play golf regularly on Caldwell’s farm.

Campbell had been introduced to the game in the early 1900s by Canada’s former Governor-General (from 1878 to 1883), Lord Lorne (1845-1916). Born John Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland Campbell, he was destined to inherit the title Duke of Argyle upon his father’s death. He had become a son-in-law of Queen Victoria when he married her daughter Princess Louise in the 1870s, several years after attending the University of St. Andrews, where he discovered what would become a life-long love of golf. As Governor General, his passion for the game was such that he laid out a golf course at Rideau Hall in 1883 and played the first ever recorded round of golf in Ottawa that spring (see my essay, “The First Round of Golf in Ottawa: Rideau Hall, 1883” at donaldjchilds.ca).

Becoming the 9th Duke of Argyle and thereby head of the Campbell clan upon his father’s death in the late 1890s, the Duke on several occasions invited William Campbell to Inverary Castle (the ancestral residence of the head of the Campbells) to play golf on a course laid out on the Duke’s estate in the mid-1890s. As Caldwell reports:

Figure 38 Inveraray Golf Club, circa 1900, with Inveraray Castle in the background.

On his visits to the old country, he [William Campbell] was more than once a guest of his admiring friend, the late Duke of Argyle, former governor General of Canada, who, as a poet himself and head of the clan Campbell, felt doubly related.

Amid the delightful surroundings of Inverary, he made the acquaintance of Scotland’s wonderful game and ever after had a keen appreciation of its delights and difficulties, repeating to me the remark of an old Scottish caddie that “a golf ball against the sky is the finest sight in the world.”

He also professed that some of the scared mysteries of success in the game had been revealed to him by the said worthy.

But judging by some of his scores, I had my doubts.

(Canadian Golfer, vol 3 no 11 [March 1918], p. 591).

Still, for all his apparent limitations as a golfer, William Campbell must have helped Caldwell get his start in the game, for the latter observed that immediately after his introduction to golf at Royal Ottawa, he had laid out his own “temporary nine-hole course over pasture land of a somewhat sporting character” and that Campbell had regularly played golf with him over it.

Figure 39 J.E. Caldwell, Canadian Golfer, Vol 8 no 8 (September 1922), p. 403.

Figure 40 Ottawa Citizen, 21 June 1924, p. 12.

As Campbell was an experienced golfer by this point, he must have offered the completely inexperienced Caldwell at least basic instruction. Although Caldwell soon became the much better golfer, he later recalled that Campbell “was seldom happier than when having a friendly round over this improvised course. At different points, some very beautiful views occur and Campbell never failed to enjoy them to the limit” (Canadian Golfer, vol 3 no 11 [March 1918], p. 591).

It seems likely that it was a version of this old “improvised” nine-hole course that Caldwell began to prepare in the spring of 1924 for use by the general public – a course that he described in a news release sent at this time to Ottawa’s major newspapers:

J.E. CALDWELL FORMS CLUB AT CITY VIEW

Nine Hole Golf Course Is Already Laid Out

Announcement was made yesterday by Mr. J.E. Caldwell of a proposal for the formation of a semi-municipal golf organization to be known as the “City View Golf Club,” for which there is already available a special nine-hole course at City View….

The new course is situated on the Caldwell farm at City View and is reached by the Merivale Road, which is a splendidly paved road all the way.

The property on which the course is actually located comprises 40 acres of ground and the land is well turfed and otherwise naturally appropriate for a course. The farm has natural drainage and is wooded in several spots, thus adding to the attractiveness for a golf club.

The plan of Mr. Caldwell is to provide accommodation for up to 100 players, with special encouragement to new enthusiasts. The semi-popular plan will be followed of charging a flat annual membership fee of $25 and special arrangements are being made for lady members.

Mr. Caldwell has already played over the nine-hole course many times and has found it to have the advantages of many other club links. The greens have been flagged for some time past and it is expected that actual play can be started after a few days’ preparation.

Mr. Caldwell points out that the property is just one mile from the city limits and is easily accessible by motor cars. (Ottawa Citizen, 21 June 1924, p, 24)

Caldwell’s announcement will certainly have attracted the attention of many golfers, for by 1924 he had garnered a strong local reputation as a skilled player. As the newspaper noted, “Mr. Caldwell is one of the best known amateur golfers in Ottawa, being the 1923 champion of the Rivermead Golf Club. He also won the Rivermead championship three years ago and has been the runner-up on several occasions” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 June 1924, p. 24).

Ottawa golfers also knew that by the mid-1920s, Caldwell enjoyed a growing national and international reputation as an accomplished golfer. He had played in the Canadian Open at Rivermead in 1920. And beginning in 1918 (less than six years after he took up the game), and throughout the 1920s, he represented Canada as a member of the Canadian Senior Golf Team, playing under team captain, George S. Lyon, and alongside his good friend, P.D. Ross (a member of Royal Ottawa and the owner of the Ottawa Journal, which published one of Caldwell’s first poems).

Figure 41 P.D. Ross (top left), J.E. Caldwell (top right), and George S. Lyon (seated). Canadian Golfer, vol 7 no 6 (October 1921), p. 401.

In the 1920 international match against the Americans, Caldwell defeated that year’s U.S. Senior Open Champion (Hugh Halsell), and in the 1922 competition, Caldwell fought that year’s U.S. Senior Open Champion (team captain Fred Snare) to a draw.

Caldwell, the personal friend of Prime Ministers Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, had long been well-known as Ottawa’s farmer-poet, but his interest in golf led to interesting developments in his poetry. When he published a new collection of his poems in 1899, the Ottawa Citizen had observed: “Mr. Caldwell’s verse is always worth reading: graceful in style, eloquently descriptive and full of local color, his poems all have a genuinely Canadian tone, as from the pen of one who is a close student and lover of Nature and is well qualified it interpret it in all its moods” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 August 1899, p. 4). Twenty years later, he was writing as a close student and lover of Golf, well qualified to interpret golfers in all their moods.

Caldwell was encouraged by his good friend Ralph Reville, founder and editor of Canadian Golfer, to publish his poems about golf in this magazine. And so, in a 1920 issue of Canadian Golfer, we find a poem by Caldwell called “In Memoriam.”

One of Caldwell’s Victorian idols, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had in the mid-nineteenth century published a long elegy about the unexpected loss of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, and had called the famous poem “In Memoriam.” In ironic homage to Tennyson’s poem, Caldwell’s “in Memoriam” is about the loss of his golf ball:

In Memoriam

My dear little silent, white-faced friend,

I loved you well, but this is the end!

Many a journey you made for me

Bounding over the grassy lea;

Never a murmur and never a stop,

As gaily you went “over the top”!

Never a time when you went astray

But I was to blame, whatever men say!

If you loved to lie in a grassy nook,

Or plunge right into a purling brook,

‘Twas only human and boyish, too,

But you never shrank when the chill wind blew;

And shame on me, I made you go

Till you dropped and sank in the wintry snow!

* * *

Time leaves his scars on the fairest face,

And your life has gone to the depths of space;

So here’s a flower for your simple pall –

My poor little, white-faced, dimple ball!

(Canadian Golfer, vol 5 no 10 [February 1920], p. 586)

Canadian Golfer also published his poem about golfers’ reactions to the scores they make:

Scoring

O, don’t you smile when Fate is kind

And to your hand a “birdie” flew,

Upon a card all duly signed

To write a dinky darling “two.”

And think you not the world is fair,

And golf the game for you and me,

When three good shots have made you square

With par, and you inscribe a “three.”

And oh that lovely middle zone –

That golden mean that makes a score,

Could we but dwell in that alone,

The perfect, priceless “four”!

And yet, when towards the distant flag,

A long three-shotter on we strive,

We’ve reached a dazzling dizzy crag,

When we ascribe a well won “five.”

But life must have its darker side,

The bitter with the sweet must mix,

Some “cursory” remarks implied, Inaudible, surround a “six.”

But now misfortune comes amain,

Too long we’ve frisked about in heaven –

Down to the pit we plunge again,

As we ascribe that awful “seven”!

But there’s an end to every tale,

An end there comes to each one’s fate,

I’m still alive, I’m not in jail,

But woe is me, I’ve made an “eight”!

So goes the game, and goes the play,

And while we may feel somewhat sore,

What charming frankness we display,

In telling why, oh why, that score!

(Canadian Golfer, vol 6 no 6 [October 1920], p. 416).

Alas, despite this increasingly famous golfer-poet’s invitation to golfers of all sorts (including beginners) to come and rub shoulders with him at the City View Golf Club, and perhaps play a round of golf with him on a course of his own design, Caldwell’s venture into golf course construction and golf club ownership does not seem to have been a success.

Indeed, the golf course – let alone the golf club – is never mentioned in the Ottawa newspapers again after the initial items about it, and the advertisements announcing its existence, appeared in June of 1924.

So, just how long the City View Golf Club and its nine-hole course lasted is not clear.

Perhaps the new venture never got off the ground, or perhaps it sputtered to a halt after its first season.

Whatever the fate of the City View Golf Club, however, one supposes that Caldwell probably continued to use the golf course as his own private practice facility (just as he seems to have done since 1912), but he could not have done so beyond the 1931 golf season, for in 1932 he leased the 300 acres of his farmland to the Central Experimental Farm.

Figure 42 Threshing on the Caldwell farm at City View, early 1930s

And in 1946, Caldwell sold all 300 acres to the Central Experimental Farm, which maintains them to this day. He retained only the family farmhouse, in which he spent the rest of his life.

McKellar Park Golf Club

J.E. Caldwell remained a member of Rivermead after the apparent failure of his City View Golf Club, but he also remained determined to make golf available to Ottawa golfers on a “semi-municipal” basis. And so, in 1926, he joined with several others in the founding of the McKellar Park Golf Club.

As Dave Allston points out in “The McKellar Golf Course: Part One,” Caldwell was a member of the McKellar Townsite Company board of directors and was no doubt instrumental in convincing the board as a whole that a good way of coping with the fact that sales of company lots had been slow for a long time would be to lease 85 acres of the company’s property for development of a golf course and golf club (http://kitchissippimuseum.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-mckellar-golf-course-part-one.html). In a successful effort to have the Westboro Ratepayers Association sign-off on this proposal, Caldwell himself addressed the association in May of 1926: “the natural location, good pure air, the wonderful scenery, etc., would all tend to be important factors in the successful formation and operation of such a club” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1926, p. 14).

Figure 43 William Henry Dwyer (1861- 1930). Ottawa Citizen, 13 December 1930, p. 7.

Soon to be elected the first president of the McKellar Park Golf Club (serving from 1926 till his unexpected death in 1930, when Caldwell succeeded him), William Henry Dwyer (1861-1930), representing the directors of the McKellar Townsite Company, outlined for the association the likely cost for the construction of the golf course, recommended the election of a provisional committee to explore the establishment of a golf club, and “suggested members of the committee meet with the directors of the company on the proposed site” so that “ways and means as to the erection of the course” could be discussed (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1926, p. 14).

Golf seems to have been underway at least informally on a nine-hole course before the end of 1926, as the Ottawa Journal’s year-end review of local golf developments makes clear: “Golf in Ottawa took further strides this year [1926] with the opening of the McKellar course, a sporty nine-hole layout on the Brittania Line” (Ottawa Journal, 2 January 1927, p. 11).

When the McKellar Golf Club officially opened for play in 1927, the Ottawa Journal reported that the eighteen-hole course had been “Laid out by a competent architect” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7). It was said that, “in the opinion of golf experts, [it] is not the easiest in the world to navigate” and that “it has about everything to be desired” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7).

It is unlikely, however, that the architect in question was an internationally recognized architect such as Harry S. Colt or Willie Park, Jr. When Colt visited Ottawa in 1913 to plan modifications for the Royal Ottawa course, and when Park visited in 1920 to lay out the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club course and also to plan modifications for Royal Ottawa, their presence in town was noted in the newspapers. Similarly, the newspapers mentioned well-known Toronto architect George Cumming by name when he was in Ottawa to design the Chaudière golf course in 1923

Figure 44 View of the McKellar Golf Club property circa April 1928. The clubhouse, under construction, can be seen on the left side of the photograph. The golf course land stretches to the right of the clubhouse.

More than twenty years after the founding of the McKellar Golf Club, two different newspapers’ accounts of Caldwell’s life and times said that he was the one who had designed the course: he “planned” and “laid out the McKellar course”; “He was the man who laid out the McKellar course” (Ottawa Journal, 2 August 1950, p. 3; Ottawa Citizen, 13 January 1954, p. 8). But although Caldwell certainly modified the course in the years following its formal opening in the spring of 1927, it is unlikely that he designed the original eighteen-hole layout.

In 1926, Dwyer had invited members of the provisional golf club committee of the Westboro Ratepayers Association to meet with him and other McKellar Townsite Company directors (such as Caldwell) on the proposed golf course site itself: “Experts on building golf courses,” he said, “could also be present, and ways and means as to the erection of the course discussed” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1926, p. 14). Dwyer was interested in hearing from “experts on building golf courses”; his good friend the farmer-poet who had laid out a nine-hole course on his dairy farm would not seem to have fit this bill. And when Caldwell subsequently modified the McKellar layout in the years immediately following its construction, his work on the course was implicitly described in the newspapers not as an amendment of his own original design but rather as supplementary to another’s original work.

Caldwell became second vice-president of the club in 1927 and was also made a member of the grounds committee. And at the end of the 1927 season, he was put in charge of a two-hole redesign project:

Since last season [1927], some changes have been made. Along Carling Ave., No. 6 hole is now played down the hill, and a new hole, No. 12, provides a short sporty shot into the southwest corner of the field, from where the player takes a shaded walk to No. 13.

The veteran champion, J.E. Caldwell, under whose direction the change was made, considers the new location a distinct improvement. (Ottawa Citizen, 28 April 1928, p. 17)

His redesign work was reviewed appreciatively: “The new placing of two holes and the arranging of bunkers have greatly increased its value as a course” (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1928, p. 11); “Two new holes recently put into play add greatly to the course, and members have expressed themselves as well pleased with the arrangement” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 July 1928, p. 12).

Caldwell became head of the greens committee in 1928 and so was formally in charge of a great deal of further redesign work between 1928 and 1929:

The greens committee, of which Mr. J.E. Caldwell is chairman, reported the various improvements on the course.

Towards the close of the season, temporary greens were made while new permanent greens were being reconstructed, and he felt that players of this year would find considerable to enthuse over when spring rolled round.

This winter, two new fairways were being cleared out continuing from No. 14, which would make the course championship length. (Ottawa Citizen, 8 February 1929, p. 14)

At the annual general meeting in the spring of 1929, “The greens committee was instructed to continue the work of terracing and developing the grounds at the north of the clubhouse where a green is being constructed for putting and driving practice” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 April 1929, p. 36).

More work was scheduled for the 1929 season:

The program of course improvement for the present season is an ambitious one.

As an additional test of golfing skill, the layout of the holes on the “homeward nine” is undergoing a revamping. Three new holes which will run their course through a woodland setting will add both beauty and playing interest to the links.

The renovation will also serve to make the total length of the course several hundred yards greater.

A number of new greens are under construction; sand traps have been placed about the majority of the putting surfaces and much terracing work done.

A practice putting clock and driving area are already under fashioning at the rear of the clubhouse. (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1929, p. 11)

And so, although Caldwell seems not to have been the “competent architect” said to have laid out the original golf course, his subsequent creation of several new holes, his redesign of others, his renovation of greens, and his addition of significant bunkering served in many ways to re-make the course in his own image – at least in the minds of his fellow members.

Figure 45 A view of the golf course of the McKellar Golf Club looking east from Windermere Avenue (which ran through the course), circa 1942.

Also coming with Caldwell and Dwyer from Rivermead to McKellar was the new club’s first golf professional, Alfred Rogers, described as “an excellent pro” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7). As was the case in those days, two of his main responsibilities were teaching and general supervision of golf course construction and maintenance. And so, early in the summer of 1927, we read, on the one hand, that “Alfred Rogers, the club pro, has been giving lessons to a number of enthusiasts, and he is rapidly rounding them into shape as real golf players” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7). And, on the other hand, we read that “The new 18-hole course, which has a par of 68, responded well to the massaging of a corps of workers under the direction of Steward Harry Grays[h]on and the club ‘pro,’ Freddie Rogers” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7).

Alfred (“Freddie”) Rogers was born in England in 1903. In 1916, three years after his family’s emigration to the Outaouais region, we find him firmly established in a local school and a local church: in June, in fact, he won the 100-yard running race for boys aged 10 to 12 at the St. Alban’s Anglican Church Sunday School picnic in Aylmer. But by 1921, both he and his younger brother Harold were living at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. Fifteen-year-old Harold was working as a “Bartender”; eighteen-year-old Alfred was working as “Help.” Alfred must soon thereafter have become a caddie and probably apprenticed under Karl Keffer in the pro shop.

When news of Rogers’ appointment at McKellar was announced in May of 1927, it was noted that he had been “assistant professional at the Rivermead Golf Club for a few years back” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 May 1927, p. 10). He had worked there under head pro Jimmy Clay, who in 1911 had come from Toronto with Keffer to the Ottawa Golf Club to serve as the Keffer’s assistant (he would later also serve as his assistant at Jekyll Island). Keffer had helped Clay to secure the Rivermead appointment when Davie Black moved to British Columbia after the 1919 golf season. Keffer also probably sent Rogers to Rivermead to serve as Clay’s assistant professional after Davie Black’s apprentice Harry Mulligan decided to leave Rivermead after Black’s departure and complete his apprenticeship under Keffer at Royal Ottawa.

It was probably through Rogers that McKellar acquired kits first greenkeeper, Samuel Bourgeau, for the latter was stepfather to the former.

Rogers was at McKellar for just one season That he would not return to McKellar for the 1928 had been determined by the end of 1927; the club had placed an advertisement with Canadian Golfer for publication in the issue of January 1928: “Wanted – Professional …” (Canadian Golfer, [vol 13 no 9], p. 731). In the spring of 1928, the Ottawa Journal reported that “Rube Mullen, the new professional, who succeeds Gordon [sic] Rogers, is now at the club and is now formulating plans for the coming season” (30 April 1928, p. 21).

Gordon! … how soon we forget. Alfred, we hardly knew ye.

Rogers seems not to have worked in the golf industry for very long. After leaving McKellar at the end of the 1927 season, he worked in Ottawa for the YMCA at a winter golf school in the early months of 1928. His next appointment as golf professional was at the Fairmont Golf Club, where his work was celebrated in the summer of 1930 by a writer for Golf Illustrated who reviewed the golf clubs in the Ottawa area:

The Fairmont clubhouse is an old building, taken over some years ago from one of the ski clubs …. What Fairmont Club lacks in outward appearance as regards its clubhouse, however, is amply offset by its handsome and intriguing course, and by the excellent qualifications of its professional, Alf Rogers, veteran assistant pro for years at the Rivermead Club. (Golf Illustrated, vol 33 no 4 [July 1930], p. 50)

After his work at Fairmont, it is not clear that he ever had another job as a head golf professional. Perhaps he returned to Rivermead as an assistant. When he died in 1962, at just 59 years of age, he was working as a porter at Ottawa’s Laurentian Club.

Although Alfred Rogers left McKellar Park Golf Club after the 1927 season, his stepfather Sam Bourgeau stayed on. He was instrumental in helping Caldwell design new holes, redesign others, build new greens, and build new bunkers. He was celebrated as tireless in his work for the club, being referred to as “Sam Bourgeault [sic], the indefatigable green keeper” (Ottawa Journal, 6 April 1929, p. 41). It was implicitly his achievement in building eighteen holes during the club’s first year of operation that was acknowledged in the newspapers as the club prepared for its second full season: “One of the few clubs to have 18 holes in the first year, McKellar in its second year will begin with a really fine course” (Ottawa Journal, 9 May 1928, p. 20).

Bourgeau managed his crew effectively and efficiently: “Members of McKellar Golf Club will find the course greatly improved for this season’s play. A number of men working under the greenkeeper have been busy for the past few weeks making everything ship-shape …. The greens … present a splendid appearance” (Ottawa Journal, 9 May 1928, p. 20). Toward the end of the summer of the second season, we read that “This popular course has shown many marvellous developments this summer. The whole 18 greens are a revelation of what careful tending can accomplish” (Ottawa Citizen, 1 September 1928).

Sam Bourgeau was listed as McKellar’s greenkeeper as late as the 1930-31 edition of the American Annual Golf Guide and Year Book, but I suspect that he left the McKellar Golf Club in the spring of 1930 (being replaced by Tom Unsworth) to work at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, where his wife’s brother-in-law, Charlie Rogers (Alfred Rogers’ uncle), had just been appointed head greenkeeper. Bourgeau would eventually succeed Charlie Rogers as the head greenkeeper at Glenlea.

The McKellar Park Golf Club provided the Glenlea Golf and Country Club not only with a well-trained greenkeeper, but also with stiff competition. Competing for members from the same middle-class social strata, it offered a quasi-municipal model for what Glenlea would become.

As can be seen in the advertisement to the left inviting people to apply for memberships at the beginning of the 1927 season, McKellar described itself as “A Private Club at Municipal Club Rates.”

Newspaper reports regularly mentioned its approximation of a municipal model. Before the club had officially opened, we read: “This course is in some ways meeting the need for a municipal golf course. It is well managed, has a high type of executive, and is a popular meeting place for those who wish to enjoy the game” (Ottawa Journal, 2 January 1927, p. 11). Similarly, toward the end of the first season, we read that “The McKellar Golf Club … is rapidly becoming one of the most popular clubs in this district. Founded on municipal lines, it has filled a long felt want, that of furnishing a place for the man pressed for time who is able to enjoy only the minimum amount of the game a week” (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7)

Its annual membership rates ($35 per season for men, $25 for women), as well as its monthly, weekly, and daily rates, were closely matched by its competitors. Caldwell’s assumption in 1924 that an annual subscription of $25 per season would be an appropriate rate for his nine-hole course would seem to have been a good guess.

Caldwell became McKellar’s most prominent golfer in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1929, at sixty-seven years of age, he won the Canadian Senior Open Championship. When Ernie Wakelam (who was the top Canadian in the 1929 Canadian Open and who would eventually replace Karl Keffer at Royal Ottawa) was appointed head pro at McKellar in 1931, he wrote to Canadian Golfer about Caldwell “Glad to say McKellar wintered wonderfully well and our worthy president, Mr. Caldwell … is] highly pleased. I played a round with him recently and I really believe he improves with age [he was 70]. One has to play real golf against him” (Canadian Golfer, vol 17 no 1 [May 1931], p. 61). The next year, Caldwell won the club championship.

Figure 46 Ottawa Journal, 13 January 1954, p. 23.

Caldwell continued to play golf for as long as he could walk, and that was for a long time. One of the last images of him published in the Ottawa newspapers shows him practising his chipping at eighty-eight years of age on the lawn of his farmhouse on Merivale Road, the only part of the family farm he retained after selling the rest of his 300 acres to the Central Experimental Farm.

In the photograph to the left, he stands not far from his old golf course, and not far from the spring well into which his older sisters had carried him to enable the three of them to survive the great fire of 1870 that swept through the region destroying farms and homesteads, including the original Caldwell farmhouse.

Remembered as “a devotee of the Royal and Ancient” game, Caldwell lived until 1954 (his ninety-second year), long enough to witness the slow demise of the McKellar Golf Club, which ceased to operate at the end of the 1952 season (Ottawa Journal, 13 January 1954, p. 23).

Hull Golf Club

Another quasi-municipal golf club was established in 1926 on the other side of the Ottawa River.

According to Diane Aldred, in The Aylmer Road: An Illustrated History (Aylmer, Quebec: Aylmer Heritage Association, 1994), it was at the beginning of 1926 that George Nash, mayor of Aylmer in the early 1920s, sold 217 acres of farmland and a farmhouse on Aylmer Road (which he had recently developed as the Hull Country Club) to Alfred Aubry, former restaurateur and owner in the mid-1920s of the prospering Gatineau Bus Line.

Figure 47 Left: George Nash, Ottawa Citizen, 1 September 1923, p. 19. Right: Alfred Aubry, Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1924, p. 17.

With the addition of a nine-hole golf course several months later, Aubry turned this property into the Hull Golf Club, which was incorporated 18 May 1926:

Figure 48 Nash farmhouse, Aylmer Road, circa 1930.

New Golf Club on Aylmer Road

The Hull City [sic] Golf Club, a new organization for devotees of golf, has almost completed its nine-hole course, which it is expected will be ready for play with temporary greens next week.

This course is a mile this side of Aylmer and is laid out on the old Nash farm, and the farmhouse makes a very commodious clubhouse. It is a 217-acre affair and will have ample room for the full 18 holes when completed.

Reuben Mullen is in charge of the work and will be pro at the new club.

Many prominent businessmen of Hull are interested in the project. (Ottawa Journal, 5 June 1926, p. 26)

Reuben (“Rube”) Mullen, a hockey star in Hull from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, had represented the Fairmont Golf Club in the Ottawa City and District Golf Championship in June of 1925 and he had represented the Poonahmalee Golf Club (Smiths Falls) in a friendly Ottawa City and District tournament at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club in September of 1925. He was just the sort of local golf professional that the Hull Golf Club needed in order to promote awareness of the new club among local residents.

Figure 49 Rube Mullen, Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1915, p. 6.

Nine holes were laid out by Mullen in the spring of 1926, and by the beginning of the 1927 season, another nine holes were said to be in development: “The course is in splendid shape, nine holes being ready for play, with the remaining nine holes under construction. For a new club, the greens are in really remarkable condition. The natural ruggedness of the course provides adequate hazards” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 May 1927, p. 10). But the second nine holes were not built for another five years, and by then the club had become known (since 1929) by a different name: the Gatineau Golf and Country Club.

We can see below that both the Hull Golf Club and the Gatineau Golf and Country Club were open to the public; advertisements described the course as a “municipal golf course” and as a “public golf course,” respectively.

Figure 50 Left: Ottawa Citizen, 22 My 1927, p. 11. Right: Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1929, p. 10

Seasonal memberships were available for unlimited play. There were also monthly and weekly rates. Golfers could also pay for daily play at a rate of 50 cents per day. These rates were almost identical to those charged by the McKellar Golf Club.

Developing a nightclub to go along with its golf course, the Gatineau Golf and Country Club would become for decades the most direct competitor for the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, which organized virtually identical golf and entertainment offerings.

Tecumseh Golf Club

Planning for what would become known as the Tecumseh Golf Club began in 1928 under the supervision of James Michael Murray (1876-1942), manager of the new Gatineau paper mill that he started up in 1926 on behalf of the Canadian International Paper Company.

Charged also with the responsibility of building from scratch a new town to house the new mill’s employees, Murray recognized that the explosion of golf’s popularity in the 1920s meant that he would have to include a golf course amongst the recreational facilities he would build for the company town, which would become known as Gatineau Mills (the photograph below shows some of the houses of Gatineau Mills under construction in 1926).

Figure 51 Gatineau Mills, Quebec, under construction, 26 October 1926.

Working for paper companies from the age of seventeen until his death, “Jim” Murray began as a machine tender but quickly rose to become “superintendent and manager, in which latter capacity he worked in almost every mill of the International Paper Company” (Montreal Star, 28 April 1942, p. 16). His special genius, however, seems to have been as a “manager of personnel relations”: “He held a unique position in the paper making industry of America, both from the point of view of his lifelong experience and of his intimate acquaintance with men in the operating end of the business all over the Eastern United States and Canada” (Montreal Star, 28 April 1942, p. 16).

Figure 52 James Michael Murray (1879-1946), Montreal Star, 28 April 1942, p. 16.

When Murray died unexpectedly in 1942 at sixty-five years of age, it was said that “His friends in the industry were legion” (Montreal Star, 28 April 1942, p. 16).

It is certainly clear that he had many friends in Gatineau Mills, where the local newspaper told of the genuine sadness that was felt by virtually everyone in the new company town when it was learned that Murray would be leaving Gatineau Mills in 1930, after just four years in charge of the Canadian International Paper Company’s now thriving concern:

Départ Regretté Du Surintendant à Gatineau Mills

M. James Murray, Qui Dirigeait Là Les Etablissements de la Canadian International Paper, A Quitté Pour Occuper Un Poste Supérieur au BureauChef de la Compagnie à New York

On nous apprend de Gatineau Mills que M. James Murray, surintendant des établissements de la Canadian International Paper à cet endroit depuis le début il y a quatre ou cinq ans, est parti pour remplir un poste plus élevé au bureau-chef de la Compagnie à New York.

Tout en se réjouissant de la promotion accordée à leur ancien surintendant, les employés et la population de Gatineau-Mills regrettent vivement ce départ.

M. Murray était réputé pour son esprit de justice, son affabilité, sa facilité d’abord dans ses relations avec les ouvriers. Il s’est vivement et activement intéressé au développement de la localité, non seulement au point de vue purement industriel, mais a tous autres égards.

C’est ce qui fait que tous les citoyens sont peinés de l’avoir perdu. (Le droit, 9 April 1930, p. 4)

Figure 53 Tecumseh Golf Club.

Today, a street in Gatineau Mills still bears his name, as does the first hole of the Tecumseh Golf Club, the remembering of his name serving as a testament to his enduring legacy in the Gatineau area.

Murray had arranged for three holes of the company golf course to be opened in 1929, but he recognized that special expertise would be required to lay out a proper nine-hole golf course, so before he departed for New York in the spring of 1930, he arranged to bring to Gatineau Mills the man who had built Karl Keffer’s nine-hole course at Sand Point, Ontario, for the Arnprior Golf Club in 1924 and then served for the next five years as its greenkeeper: James Abram Garfield Macpherson (1881-1960).

Macpherson had been the key figure at sand Point in the sodding of greens in 1924, the draining of fairways in the years following, the regular seeding of greens and fairways, and the building of permanent greens that occurred in the late 1920s. His success in building the Sand Point golf course from scratch led to his move to “Gatineau Point” in 1930:

Mr. James G. MacPherson left on Monday for Gatineau Point, where he has been offered the position of superintendent of the private golf course at present being built by the International Pulp and Paper Company.

The course will be a nine-hole one and when completed will be in keeping with any of the clubs around.

Mr. MacPherson has had considerable experience along this line and no doubt will make a success of the work. (Arnprior Chronicle, 24 July 1930, p. 10)

For a while, Macpherson lived in Gatineau Point on his own, visiting Arnprior to see his wife Marjorie and their four boys on weekends, but then most of the family moved to Gatineau, where a fifth son was born to the couple. Their eldest son, however, stayed with his grandmother at Sand Point, where he continued to go to school. But by the end of 1932, the whole family had all returned to Sand Point, where James worked at logging rather than golf course maintenance.

The employment of Macpherson at Gatineau Mills led to a long connection between the Arnprior and Tecumseh golf clubs, which engaged in an annual home and away competition. In 1934, Arnprior Golf Club president John Campbell Yule donated a trophy that the victorious club would possess for a year: it became known as the Yule Trophy.

Rumours of Other Clubs

Given the virtually annual appearance of a new golf course in the Ottawa area during the 1920s, the air was always full of rumours that this property or that was about to be purchased by golf course developers.

When news of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was first published in mid-February of 1929, for instance, we learn that there had been “a rumor current of late that Ottawa would have another golf club” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1929, p. 4). And six years before, when A.E. Corrigan successfully negotiated in April of 1923 the purchase of the 157 acres of “the old Eddy estate” that would become the golf course of the Chaudière Golf Club, the Ottawa Citizen reported that “this is neither the first nor the second time that an effort has been made to secure it for a course, the overtures of the would-be purchasers of the past not having been successful” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 April 1923, p. 10).

Similarly, in May of 1924, we find an Ottawa Journal article reporting that a golf course would likely be built on the 250-acre farm of the Ritchie Brothers in Aylmer (Ottawa Journal, 2 May 1924, p. 1). In Pioneers of the Upper Ottawa, Anson A. Gard describes this farm as it existed at the beginning of the twentieth century:

Beginning at the Fraser Road … and running to the Aylmer [town] line, which begins at the little toll gate, you may see … what is possibly the finest farm on the whole distance from Hull to Aylmer.

It was once owned by John Egan, who had brought it up to a high state of cultivation….

It is now the property of the Ritchie Brothers, Robert and Thomas, successful lumberers, with large limits up the river and mills in Arnprior. (Anson A. Gard, Pioneers of the Upper Ottawa and the Humours of the Valley [Ottawa: Emerson Press, circa 1906], p. 17)

This farm was across the Aylmer Road from the farm owned by George Nash that would become the Hull Golf Club in 1926 and the Gatineau Golf and Country Club in 1929. Perhaps Alfred Aubry had tried to buy the Ritchie Brothers’ farm in 1924 before he acquired Nash’s property in 1926.

In 1926, there was talk of yet another golf course planned for the Aylmer Road:

May Be Golf Course On The Lumsden Farm

Efforts To Purchase Aylmer Road Property May Succeed

Negotiations which have been going on between prominent Ottawa golf enthusiasts and John Lumsden, owner of Silver Springs Dairy Farm [formerly the Conroy farm], Deschênes, Que., may result in the property of Mr. Lumsden being acquired for a golf course this year.

Mr. Lumsden has been approached twice to dispose of his property to persons eager to start another golf course on the Aylmer line, but he has turned down both offers.

Mr. Lumsden stated to The Journal today that he might yet decide to sell out to the promoters of the new golf links. (Ottawa Journal, 10 April 1926, p. 7)

Lumsden hesitated because he was faced with an attractive alternative to selling his land to golf course developers: “He was considering whether it would not be more expedient to have the choicest part of it subdivided and placed on the market” (Ottawa Journal, 10 April 1926, p. 7)

It was into this this 1920s environment of roiling rumour and fact about golf course development on both sides of the Ottawa River that a few golf-mad members of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club set out with enthusiasm and confidence.

A Glenlea Gang of Four

As mentioned above, before the creation of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was announced in the middle of February of 1929, there had been “a rumor current … that Ottawa would have another golf club” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1929, p. 4).

This rumour may have started in the summer of 1928 when the Highlea promoters of a new golf club arranged for a survey and evaluation of property adjacent to the clubhouse and contiguous with the property of Royal Ottawa. Or, noting that Harry Mulligan had agreed to serve as the new club’s golf professional well before the club prospectus was prepared in February of 1929, one might suspect that the rumour started during his negotiations with the promoters of the new club. Or, again, since two of the three people who would join W.H. Stewart on the executive committee of the new club were prominent members of the Fairmont Golf Club, the rumour might have emerged from his discussions with them.

Response to the announcement that the new club had been formed was immediate and positive: “Reports show that although the club made its bow only on Saturday last [February 16th], the response was instant and most gratifying, indicating that the establishment of a fully equipped golf club within the range of those with moderate incomes has been well received” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 1929, p. 20).

As we know, however, half a dozen golf clubs had emerged in the 1920s, each aiming to draw members from the same demographic – “those with moderate incomes” – so the success of the new venture in such a competitive market was far from assured.

E.M. Ramsay, of course, had been promoting the creation of a golf club at Highlea for two years or more, but in the spring of 1929, he was not one of the four people making up the “main executive committee” – “the members of which are as follows: Chairman, Mr. J.C. Brampton, M.B.E.; managing director, Mr. W.H. Stewart; secretary, Lieut. B. Money, R.N.R.; chairman of greens committee, Mr. David McEwan” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 May 1929, p. 13).

Who were the three people joining with Stewart to get the new club going?

Born in Islington, London, England, in 1874, James Charles Brampton was a career British civil servant. Working initially as a clerk in the General Post Office in London, Brampton became after World War I a clerk in the Ministry of Pensions. In March of 1926, he was sent at the rank of Principal Clerk to Ottawa to establish an office in Canada for the payment of pensions to British veterans resident in North America. On account of his exemplary service in Ottawa, he was awarded the honour of MBE in 1929, and then OBE in 1931.

A passionate golfer, he began to play golf at the Fairmont Golf Club as soon as he arrived in Canada in 1926 and was elected to its executive committee in March of 1927, less than a year after his arrival in Ottawa (Ottawa Citizen, 12 March 1927, p. 10). Over the course of three years, he participated in many of the club’s competitions. And his wife Florence Brampton presided over many of the teas arranged by the ladies in 1927 and 1928. The Bramptons spent the spring and summer of 1928 back home in England, returning to Ottawa in September, shortly after which Brampton must have begun to work with Stewart on the creation of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club.

Brampton seems to have been something of a Pied Piper, leading members from Fairmont to Glenlea. Harry Mulligan, coming from Fairmont to Glenlea with Brampton, told the editor of Canadian Golfer in the spring of 1930 that “All the members of Fairmont Golf Club, which was located on Mountain Road, have combined in with us” (Canadian Golfer, vol 16 no 1 [May 1930], p. 76). And when Eddie MacCabe wrote about the beginnings of Glenlea (after a conversation with Lyn Stewart about the latter’s sale of the club to the NCC), he observed: “the Highlea Tennis Club … was converted to golf in ’29 and many members of the old Fairmont Golf Club, British civil servants, moved over. It was their influence which decided the late Bill Stewart, Lyn’s father, to re-name it the Glenlea” (Ottawa Journal, 10 February 1975, p. 17). Brampton seems to have been the foremost among these “British civil servants.”

Returning to England in the early 1930s, Brampton died there in April of 1948. His only child, Charles, who had stayed on in Canada as the owner of a bookstore in Ottawa, died here in August of the same year.

Club secretary Harold Bart Money was born in Portsea, Hampshire, England, in 1891. Educated at famous boys’ boarding schools Trafalgar House and Winchester Hall, he entered the army in 1912 with the Royal Engineers and then, on the outbreak of Worl War I, he entered the Officers Training Corp. After two more years with the Royal Engineers, “he transferred to the Royal Navy as an assistant paymaster” in 1916 and saw “action in both the North Sea and English Channel,” as well as the North Atlantic, concluding the war at the rank of Lieutenant Paymaster (Ottawa Citizen, 29 March 1948, p. 12).

He came to Canada in 1921 to work for the Royal Bank of Canada but then entered the civil service in 1923 in the Department of Finance. Still, he was a navy man at heart, and so, in 1924, he transferred to “the Department of Naval Service” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1948, p. 16). Paymaster again, Lieutenant B. Money, R.N.R. (Royal Naval Reserve), served as an officer at Defense Headquarters in Ottawa. At the outbreak of World War II, he entered the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve at the rank of Lieutenant Paymaster and concluded the war at the rank of Paymaster Commander.

Money was an enthusiastic sportsmen from his youth onward. He was active in support of the Social and Athletic Association of the Department of Finance. He served as secretary of the Ottawa Valley Cricket Council for the seasons of 1926 and 1927, a responsibility that also required supervision of a tennis section. Although Money’s deepest sporting enthusiasm was for cricket (he remained a member of the Hampshire County Cricket Club all the while he lived in Canada), he showed “untiring zeal for the welfare of his tennis clubmates” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 September 1926, p. 10).

The Ottawa Valley Cricket Club’s home courts and grounds were the tennis courts and cricket pitches at Rideau Hall. When Money retired as club secretary in November of 1927, “A cordial vote of thanks was accorded the retiring secretary for his invaluable work during the last two years. The present satisfactory condition on the cricket grounds and tennis courts is, in a large measure, due to his untiring efforts and enthusiasm” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 November 1927, p. 11). Money was just the sort of energetic person that the new Glenlea Golf and Country Club needed as its first secretary.

Although Money helped to found the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, he eventually became a member of the Rivermead Golf Club.

He was married to Gertrude Harrington in England. They had a stillborn child in Ottawa in 1922. Gertrude died in 1937 and Money later married Amy M. Adams in Ottawa. He died in 1948 at the rank of Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander in “the special branch” of the Royal Canadian Navy” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 March 1948, p. 12).

On 19 February 1929, David Allan McEwan (1886-1934), having risen from work as a painter to the role of superintendent of Ottawa Paint Works, Limited, was appointed chairman of the greens committee, and he was re-elected to this position in 1930. He was as important as any member of the gang of four that got the Glenlea Golf and Country Club up and running, as we can see from the newspaper report about the club’s first annual general meeting of members in June of 1929:

The first general meeting of the club was held mainly with a view to report on progress and to receive suggestions from members. A large gathering was present.

The chairman’s opening address dealt with the organization so far effected.

He referred to the admirable work performed by the honorary secretary [Money] … and the chairman of the greens committee, Mr. David McEwan.

In the course of the interesting discussion which followed the chairman’s address, many valuable suggestions were made by the members present….

[R]eplies were given by the managing director, Mr. W.H. Stewart …, Mr. McEwan, and the chairman [Brampton]. (Ottawa Citizen, 25 June 1929, p. 10)

Figure 54 Left: David Allan McEwan (1886-1934). Right: Lillian Gertrude Austin (1886-1940). Early 1900s.

Like Brampton, McEwan and his wife Lillian Gertrude Austin (1886-1940) had been members of the Fairmont Golf Club. David and Lillian (who served on the Ladies’ executive committee and the Ladies’ handicapping committee) were active members of the Glenlea club in its early years. They each won, or were runners-up in, a number of the club’s various cup competitions between 1929 and 1933.

Late in 1933, however, David McEwan’s health deteriorated significantly.

His golf game that season was at its peak. He began the competitive golf calendar with a good performance in a mixed two-ball foursome competition at Glenlea in May of 1933 and then went from strength to strength. He won the Bain Trophy, representing victory in the men’s four-ball foursome championship (which he had also won in 1930).

He won the Stewart Cup, representing victory in the open handicap championship (in which he had finished runner-up in 1929). And, finally, he won the Sir William Clarke Cup, representing victory in the club championship.

Sadly, at season’s end, he was committed to the Ontario Mental Hospital in Brockville.

And he was not happy there:

Brockville, Ont., Aug. 28 – A coroner’s jury sitting here tonight found the death of David McEwan, 48, of 307 Booth Street, Ottawa, which occurred here yesterday morning, was the result of an accident.

McEwan, a patient for the past two years at the Ontario Hospital, escaped about five o’clock Monday morning and a short time later his badly mangled body was found on the C.N.R. tracks, directly north of the hospital, where he was struck or run over by a passing train. (Ottawa Journal, 29 August 1934, p. 18).

He died of a fractured skull. The verdict of the coroner’s jury may have been an act of kindness: a handwritten notes on McEwan’s death certificate state: “no auto or other vehicle involved”; “suicide while insane.”

He was just 48 and left a wife, five sons and three daughters.

In 1898, the institution in which he become an inmate had laid out a golf course for the use of its inmates: “Steps are being taken to organize a golf club in Brockville. Links have been laid out on the asylum grounds, and patients may take a hand in the game too” (Ottawa Journal, 23 April 1898, p. 6). Had these links endured into McEwan’s time, perhaps his experience at the hospital would have been different.

Lillian (whose handicap had come down from 36 in 1928, when she was ladies’ captain at Fairmont, to 30 in 1934) continued to play golf representing the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. In fact, she competed in an invitational tournament played at McKellar Park Golf Club one week after her husband’s death (Ottawa Citizen, 4 September 1934, p. 11).

David McEwan’s golf legacy endures today at the Champlain Golf Course insofar as his role as chairman of the greens committee required his active participation in the construction of the golf course in 1929 and 1930, and much of that golf course remains in play today.

Plundering Fairmont

Mulligan, we recall, claimed that “All the members from Fairmont Golf Club, which was located on Mountain Road, have combined in with us” (Canadian Golfer, vol 16 no 1 [May 1930], p. 76; emphasis added).

Note that Mulligan spoke of the Fairmont Golf Club in the past tense. He was not the only one to do so:

The Fairmont Golf Club is a thing of the past.

After getting along to where it was commanding notice in the local golfing world, the club has been abandoned and will not be operated this year.

This news will come as a surprise and cause regret to many who have enjoyed games over the tricky course there. It was a well-planned links, and sporty enough to test the ability of the best golfers in the vicinity.

A great many Fairmont members have moved to Glenlea, the thriving young club on the Aylmer Road. With nine holes now in play, and the prospect of the full eighteen being ready by June, things are booming at Glenlea. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1930, p. 10)

Fairmont had decided to incorporate as a golf club at its first meeting of 1928, but less than twelve months later, its hopes were compromised: its golf professional had gone to Glenlea, and so had an important member of the 1927 board of directors, J.C. Brampton, as well as leading players David and Lillian McEwan.

But announcements of the death of Fairmont were exaggerated. Despite the loss of so many members to Glenlea, the club held its usual tournaments in 1929. That summer, for instance, club president Theodore Lanctot and the club’s “energetic secretary” Bob Garrick presided over Fairmont’s “Annual Invitation Day” tournament, with teams from the Chaudière, Rivermead, Royal Ottawa, Ottawa Hunt, McKellar, and Larrimac taking part:

Fairmont Golf Club Team Wins Perras Invitation Tourney Cup ….

Playing in an invitation tournament at the Fairmont Golf Club yesterday afternoon, Lorne Chamberlain of the Royal Ottawa came home in 33, one under par, to set a new record for the Fairy Lake club. The occasion was the Annual Invitation Day at Fairmont and over ninety golfers from neighbouring clubs took advantage of the opportunity to test their skill on the tricky course which nestles among the hills northwest of the city of Hull.

The main competition was for four-man teams …. They were mixed up in four-ball foursomes, and the best low net of the four men from any club would win the handicap silver trophy which was offered by F.W. Perras, M.P. The honor of capturing this trophy fell to the lot of the hosts of the day, the Fairmont team. (Ottawa Citizen, 8 August 1929, p. 14)

At the banquet after the tournament, Fairmont member “Dick Pentland … obliged with vocal selections following the dinner” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 August 1929, p. 14). Richard (“Dick”) Pentland, Fairmont’s golf captain, won the Fairmont club championship two weeks after this tournament (Le droit, 22 August 1929, p. 6).

He was then recruited by Glenlea.

In the spring of 1930, Pentland went to Glenlea to serve as chairman of the entertainment committee. He apparently had a fine tenor voice. At Ottawa recitals, he was “always a favorite … singing with great spirit and brilliance and fine emotional quality” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1938, p. 11). He seems to have found irresistible the opportunity to organize large-scale entertainment events – in which he sang solos – on the stage of the grand ballroom of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club.

Over the long run, these sorts of defections took their toll on organized golf activities at Fairmont.

It invited new golf membership applications throughout the early 1930s. Men and women could purchase seasonal memberships, as before, but green fees could also be paid on a daily basis, and this form of golf play would become the staple of the Fairmont Golf and Country Club.

Figure 55 Ottawa Journal, 18 May 1932, p. 21.

In 1932, green fees were 50 cents for weekdays, 75 cents for weekends – prices similar to those charged at the McKellar Golf Club, the Gatineau Golf and Country Club, and the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. But the price of a round of golf at Fairmont would drop to 25 cents by the end of the 1930s – the cheapest in the area. Times were tough for many Ottawa area golf clubs in the 1930s, but perhaps toughest for Fairmont.

After 1929, one finds no more reference to Fairmont teams or individual members representing Fairmont in intra-club or inter-club competitions: Fairmont seems to have become a place where the majority of players paid daily green fees and none of the seasonal members organized a club.

Yet as late as the 1950 season, one of the most accomplished professional golfers in the area, Bobby Alston, became the Fairmont pro, so it would seem that the golf course itself retained a respectable profile for decades after its membership had been plundered by Glenlea.

Ironically, in perhaps the only reverse plundering in Fairmont’s history, Alston had come to Fairmont in 1950 from Glenlea, where he had served as head pro from 1947 to 1949.

The 1928 Architect's Report

During the summer of 1928, certain people at Highlea – perhaps E.M. Ramsay’s committee, or perhaps William H. Stewart himself – arranged for “careful surveys and appraisals” of “more than 150 acres of excellent suitable land, situated west of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club and north of the Aylmer Road, being the premises now occupied by the Highlea Club” (Ottawa Journal, 16 February 1929, p. 4).

Figure 56 Autographed photograph of Karl Keffer, early 1920s.

Perhaps Ramsay was the one who suggested that Karl Keffer was the man for this job. Given Ramsay’s passion for golf and his fondness for Arnprior, it seems likely that on his visits back home from 1924 onward he would have played the newly opened Keffer-designed nine-hole golf course at Sand Point. It may have been his experience of this golf course that led him to identify Keffer as the architect who should be asked to design the golf course for the Highlea club.

Indeed, as the golf professional and architect working next door at the Royal Ottawa course whose land was contiguous with the land around Highlea, Keffer may even have been consulted by Highlea figures as early as the fall of 1925 about the plan announced then to lay out a nine-hole course on land adjacent to the clubhouse. And we recall also that in November of 1926, with a view to developing a golf course, the Gaudaur syndicate had secured an option on the further 120 acres of adjacent land acquired by Stewart earlier that November: this may well have eventuated in the commissioning then of a survey and appraisal of this land’s suitability for development as an eighteen-hole golf course.

And so, Keffer might have been consulted by various groups interested in developing a golf course on Stewart’s land during the three years before he was asked to survey and appraise this land in the summer of 1928.

Now in his mid-forties, Keffer was still competitive in the professional game. Less than a year before he hopped over the fence between Stewart’s land and the Royal Ottawa course to lay out eighteen golf holes, he had won the Quebec Open. Of this 1927 victory on the Royal Ottawa course, he later recalled: “I … scored six 3s in a row to win the Quebec Open … and this was as big a thrill as I ever enjoyed” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 October 1955).

Figure 57 Karl Keffer, 1910. "The Percy Barrett Story," in I Lambton: A Celebration of Our Past & Present, vol 1 no 2 (9 October 2021), p. 3.

Figure 58 Karl Keffer on a Donald Ross sand green at Jekyll Island. Spalding Official Golf Guide for 1915, ed. Thomas Bendelow (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1915), p. 172.

Keffer, of course, had not just a local standing in the game of golf, but also a national and international standing. Having caddied at the Toronto Golf Club in the 1890s and early 1900s, then having apprenticed under its golf professional George Cumming from 1906 to 1909, Keffer won the 1909 Canadian Open while still an assistant professional. In 1910, he had been recommended for the job of head pro at the Jekyll Island Club in Georgia by Walter J. Travis, twice winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, winner of the British Amateur Championship, renowned architect, and founder and editor of American Golfer. And in the spring of 1911, he was hired by the Ottawa Golf Club (which became Royal Ottawa the next year). Keffer won his second Canadian Open title in 1914, after which his golf career was suspended for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force from 1916 to 1919.

By this point, Keffer was also developing a career as a golf course architect. In 1913, he had begun to design a nine-hole golf course for the Jekyll Island Club, whose multi-millionaire members were said to possess one-sixth of the world’s wealth at the beginning of the twentieth century. Very few people know about this Keffer course today. Yet shortly after its grand opening in 1923, it received a stellar review from the editor of Golf Illustrated. Although it was combined with a pre-existing nine-hole course (laid out in 1909 by Donald J. Ross) to form an eighteen-hole circuit, the Keffer course built in the Jekyll Island dunes was the one described hole-by-hole by this magazine’s well-respected, links-loving, golf-savvy editor. He hardly had a word to spare for the other nine holes designed by Ross, one of America’s greatest golf course architects! Warming to his task, the editor said that one of Keffer’s dune holes was a “great hole” and that it was followed by “the best he knew” of anywhere in the world. Keffer’s nine-hole golf course had bowled him over.

Yet Keffer’s career as a golf course architect is virtually unknown.

This career will have started when he was an apprentice to George Cumming at the Toronto Golf Club from 1906 to 1909. Cumming was the most active designer of golf courses in Ontario at this time, and his apprentices learned from him the art of laying out a golf course. Turning the golf course of the Napanee Golf Club from a five-hole to a nine-hole layout in the spring of 1907 may have been Keffer’s first work.

But there was a more substantial job awaiting him on his arrival at the Ottawa Golf Club in the spring of 1911. Eighteen months before, the club had purchased 96 acres of land adjoining its property and by December of 1910 had “started work on it” to “enable an additional golf course to be laid out” (Ottawa Journal, 3 December 1910, p. 2). One of Keffer’s first responsibilities in his new job would have been to supervise the laying-out of this nine-hole course. The president of the Royal Canadian Golf Association, Ottawa Golf Club vice-president J.F. Orde, said of it that summer: “there is nearing completion at the Aylmer Road Club, one of the finest nine-hole courses in the country” (Ottawa Journal, 6 July 1911, p. 4).

Figure 59 Sapper Karl Keffer, Royal Canadian Engineers. He became a runner of messages between trenches.

After Keffer completed his first three holes at Jekyll Island, his service in World War I delayed by several years his completion of a full nine-hole circuit in the island’s sand dunes, but word of his abilities as a golf-course designer seems to have been spreading in the Ottawa area. In 1919, when the Ottawa Hunt Club considered building a golf course, it called in Keffer to assess its property’s potential for golf and to lay out a temporary nine-hole course. At Blue Sea Lake in 1921, the summer neighbours of the Duke of Devonshire, Canada’s golf-supporting Governor-General, called in Keffer to lay out a nine-hole golf course near the Duke’s estate.

Keffer’s great Jekyll Island course having opened with huge fanfare at the end of 1922 and beginning of 1923, Keffer was shortly thereafter asked to design nine-hole courses for the Pembroke Golf Club in 1922-23 and the Arnprior Golf Club in 1923-24. He may also have been the unidentified “competent architect” who laid out the McKellar golf course in 1926 (Ottawa Journal, 6 September 1927, p. 7).

By the time Keffer was hired in 1928 to lay out an eighteen-hole golf course for the Highlea Tennis and Country Club, his education as a golf course architect was of a very high order. He had acquired the principles animating his design work through his associations with some of the best golf course architects in Canada, Britain, and the United States:

George Cumming, the professional golfer and course designer under whom Keffer apprenticed at the Toronto Golf Club from 1906 to 1909;
Donald J. Ross, whose course at Jekyll Island was opened for play in 1910 under Keffer’s supervision and on whose Pinehurst #2 course Keffer engaged with Ross in competition;
Harry S. Colt, whom Keffer accompanied while Colt staked out his planned changes for the courses of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club in 1913;
J.H. Taylor, architect and five-time British Open champion, whom Keffer visited during World War I while with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Britain, where Keffer also made a point of studying the architecture of some of the best golf courses in Scotland and England;
Willie Park, Jr, who, like Colt, visited Royal Ottawa and in the early 1920s developed plans for improvements undertaken while Keffer was head pro;
and Walter J. Travis, who in 1926 laid out at Jekyll Island one of his last golf courses while Keffer was there, and who did so by incorporating into his new links design five pre-existing holes designed and built by Keffer himself.

By the time he was commissioned to assess the Highlea property in the summer of 1928, Keffer had become experienced in the art of assessing both actual and potential golf course properties and submitting written reports about them.

Respect for Keffer’s design savvy having led in 1920 to a request by the R.C.G.A. that he assess Rivermead’s appropriateness as a venue for that year’s Canadian Open, newspaper accounts of his report allow us a glimpse of it:

The [R.C.G.A.] committee in making their decision were greatly influenced by the very favorable report received from Karl Keffer….

His letter stat[ed] that in his opinion the Rivermead links were very suitable for the tourney.

He stated that in the past the course had lacked length, but this year measured 6,000 yards, while the greens, which had always been excellent in the past, had wintered well; besides, considerable bunkering had been done during the past year.

He also commented on the fact that the course is very accessible to the city and that he believed the professionals would find it very suitable …. (Ottawa Journal, 12 May 1920, p. 17).

We can glimpse his report to the directors of the Highlea club in similar ways.

For instance, the fact that the Ottawa Journal’s report of the “careful survey and appraisal” done in the summer of 1928 is virtually the same as the report that appears in the Ottawa Citizen suggests that each newspaper had presented their version of a news release from the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. And these articles read as though the words come right out of Keffer’s report to Highlea: “the land is naturally suitable and will provide a course of 6,410 yards. Natural hazards are spread over the course, the contour of which is interestingly varied” (16 February 1929, p. 4).

Similarly, language from Keffer’s appraisal of the land probably appears in an April newspaper article that also seems to have been based on a press release by the club:

The planning permits of beautifully varied holes and very wide fairways.

The nature of the soil, mostly sandy loam, will be very favorable in every respect for the best type of golf ….

No obstacle exists for the formation of a first-class golf course. (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17).

Similar language appeared in another newspaper item a week later:

From the golfer’s outlook, no better position could be devised, nor could a more naturally beautiful golf course be imagined or one with less difficulties to surmount before the whole of the links are in thorough playing order.

The club possesses 182 acres of most beautiful land, great tracts of which need little or no attention, and the remainder of which can be speedily worked up into magnificent playing condition.

Natural hazards abound; the fairways, in width, contour, and layout, are excellent ….

The sandy loam covering the course, and the existing drainage, give full promise of early and late play each year to an extent enjoyed by only the most favored clubs; and, in short, the term “Golfer’s Paradise” is no misnomer. (Ottawa Citizen, 20 April 1929, p. 16)

The club’s prospectus from February of 1929 also contained this sort of language:

The course …. will be one of full championship length (6,410 yards) and 150 acres in extent.

It is adjacent to, and west of, the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, being located on the north side of Aylmer Road, and occupies high ground naturally drained.

It is excellently suitable for golf, and fine fairways, with rolling ground and natural hazards, will be immediately available. (Prospectus of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, Lyn Stewart Scrapbook, provided by Joe McLean)

I believe that in each of the passages cited above we hear the voice of Karl Keffer in his role as golf course architect.

Building the Golf Course

Figure 60 David McEwan, early 1900s.

On 19 February 1929, David McEwan was appointed chairman of the greens committee and that very day he explained the process by which the golf course would be built: “Mr. McEwan tabled a detailed report embracing the plans and arrangements for placing the course in condition for play by the date of the official opening in May” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 1929, p. 20).

For McEwan to have “tabled a detailed report” within minutes of his election as chair of the greens committee means that such “plans and arrangements” must have been formulated well before the mid-February meeting in question. We can infer that McEwan had been working with at least Stewart, and probably Brampton and Money as well, for many weeks – perhaps even months – before this organizational meeting.

Yet for all the “detail” comprehended by McEwan’s report, it is clear from executive committee decisions in March and April both that Keffer presented plans for the golf course that allowed the club options in the matter of certain details and also that certain of these details had not been determined by February.

Keffer’s broad design principles emerge indirectly through newspaper reports: his layout comprised “varied holes” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17); these holes called for “very wide fairways” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17); the greens were to “be of large dimensions” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1929, p. 4). But he left the club with options regarding the precise location of certain tee boxes and greens.

For instance, we learn that on 19 March 1929, “The executive committee took advantage of the unusually mild weather to pay a visit to the ground … to examine the general conditions and to determine a definite location for … certain greens and tees” (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1929, p. 20). This process of deciding the definite position of certain greens and tees took just over three weeks. The “lines and projected tees and greens of the first nine holes” were in place by at least 6 April 1929, and a week later it was reported that “The whole of the layout of the course has now been finally fixed” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17).

Another cause of late decision-making about the location of certain tees and greens was the club’s sudden acquisition of more property:

The prospectus of the club gave the playing area of the links as 150 acres, but additionally acquired land increases the area to more than 180 acres; and for the information of the “long driver” it may be stated that the total length of the course, as at present planned, is over 6,600 yards, the longest hole being 550 yards and the shortest, 225 yards [this should probably read “125 yards”]. (Ottawa Journal, 5 April 1929, p. 25)

Keffer’s layout was originally said to be 6,400 yards, whereas the report above suggests that “as at present planned” the length will be 6,600 yards, which suggests that the acquisition of more land may have eventuated in plans to lengthen certain holes. In the end, however, the original eighteen-hole golf course seems to have been laid out on the original 150 acres acquired by 1928.

The club seems to have decided not to use the extra land for the championship course, for it was also contemplating the laying out a ladies’ course on the 30 acres it had acquired: “Having added another large area of land to the original acquirement of 150 acres, the committee is disposed to give serious consideration to its future program regarding the installation of an additional ladies’ nine-hole course” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 March 1929, p. 2).

The course planners had a lot of options in March of 1929, and so their plans were in flux.

The executive committee’s pre-construction tour of the property on 19 March 1929 had led to the expectation that construction would begin by the end of the month:

Inspection of the ground indicated that commencement of work would be practicable, in normal circumstances, within the next fortnight, as much of the snow was cleared away, and it was evident that the present condition of the ground would render green, tee, and fairway operations a comparatively easy matter.

The intention is to press the inceptionary work forward with intensive vigor, to permit of as early play as Spring weather will allow …. (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1929, p. 20)

Ten days later, the newspaper announced that, as expected, construction “will be commenced in the next few days” – that is, during the last days of March or the first days of April (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23).

Spring came early to the Ottawa region in 1929, which led the executive committee of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club to tout the possibilities of early play in future years on the golf course it was building. In terms of the dryness of the ground they found on their inspection of April 6th , “The course planners … stated that play was practicable on at least seven …. of the first nine holes” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17). On April 14th, “the course planners” inspected the planned second nine holes and “stated that play would have been practicable on approximately fourteen of the eighteen holes about three weeks ago” – that is, around March 24th (Ottawa Citizen, 20 April 1929, p. 16).

The 1929 course, mind you, was still weeks away from being ready for actual play, for, alongside work on tees, fairways, and greens, there was a wide range of other “inceptionary work” to be done. We read that the “unusually favorable weather” in the early spring of 1929 was “of great advantage in the preliminary clearing work” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17). This clearing work included “the burning off of the dry grass” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23). Otherwise, however, it was said that “The whole of the ground … requires so little clearing that early play is assured” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23).

The aerial photograph below, dating from 1928 (just after the Champlain Bridge was completed), allows us to see how relatively treeless the Highlea property was when Karl Keffer hopped over the fence from Royal Ottawa to lay out the golf course in the summer of 1928.

Figure 61 The northern 2/3 of the Highlea/Glenlea property as it existed in 1928 is outlined above in orange. The Royal Ottawa golf course is outlined in yellow. Aerial photograph circa 1928, Toronto Public Library.

Despite the executive committee’s promotion of the Glenlea land as possessing “excellent natural drainage,” we find that in addition to preliminary clearing work, “suitable ditching and trenching” was also undertaken to assist existing drainage (Ottawa Citizen, 13 April 1929, p. 17). Together, the existing natural drainage, on the one hand, and the additional ditching and trenching, on the other, required “the making of … bridging” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23).

The 1933 aerial photograph below shows the bridging for foot traffic and for vehicle traffic required by the drainage systems in place on the original fourth, fifth, and sixth holes (today’s eighth, eleventh, and twelfth) at the extreme north end of the property.

Figure 62 Annotated detail from a 5 April 1933 aerial photograph of the north end of the Glenlea golf course. Note that there was just one mature pine tree at this end of the golf course (short and left of the 4th green.)

The three bridges across the creek on the sixth hole (today’s twelfth) seem to be located where we find the three crossings today.

One reason that decisions about the location of tee boxes could be left until relatively late in the spring of 1929 was that the tee boxes seem to have been relatively portable.

In the first week of April, we read in the Ottawa Citizen that “Work on the course has now commenced, and the whole scheme of things from the scarlet tee boxes to the rich, luxurious greens is now rapidly rounding into perfection” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 April 1929, p. 2). Ottawa’s other newspaper, the Journal, seems to have received the same press release from the club: “Work on the course has now commenced, and the scarlet tee boxes which will shortly be erected will form a picturesque addition to the landscape” (Ottawa Journal, 5 April 1929, p. 25).

The nature of the mysterious “scarlet tee boxes” to “be erected” is probably illustrated by a photograph of a contemporary tee box at the Point Grey golf course in British Columbia in 1929 (seen below).

Figure 63 David Black (former Rivermead pro) prepares to play from the first tee box at the Point Grey Golf Club, British Columbia, in 1929. His opponent is Walter Hagen, the man on the right wearing white-topped golf shoes, plus-fours, a white sweater, and tie (right hand on hip, left hand in pocket). Note that the tee-box comprises a rectangular wooden frame filled with sand.

Tee boxes at this time were often framed with rectangular wooden borders. The wood of the Glenlea tee boxes seems to have been painted scarlet.

This sort of tee box was “erected” on raised earth and then filled with sand. It was so easy to construct that it was effectively portable: it might be moved to a new location whenever a club’s greens committee wished to change the starting point of a golf hole. This portability seems to be implied by the club’s statement later in April that “the specially designed tee boxes will be in place within the next few days” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 April 1929, 9. 16). As late as the 1935 season, the placing of these tee boxes on the course each spring seems to have been as normal a part of the spring work as the placing of benches beside them, for we read in mid-April of that year that “Tee boxes and benches are all in place” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 April 1935, p. 12).

Now as to the greens, there seem to have been three types at Glenlea in 1929:

The Glenlea course is rapidly improving, and nine temporary holes are now in play.

A number of permanent greens and tees have been built, and it is expected that nine permanent holes will be ready within a few weeks.

The green committee have built one particularly interesting and sporting green, No. 9, which with its undulating surface, specially made, has attracted considerable attention and interest. (Ottawa Citizen, 31 May 1929, p. 12)

There were “temporary” greens on “temporary holes,” and there were “permanent greens.” And among the permanent greens, there were those more or less found on suitable level areas of the property, and there was one “specially made” with “undulating surface.”

The pastureland that was from the beginning covered in grass and required virtually no clearing probably hosted the first “nine temporary holes … in play” in May of 1929. One began with a temporary hole: neither the tee, nor the fairway, nor the green was necessarily final or permanent. In all likelihood, the fairway was an open field; the tee was merely the spot in the open field where two markers were put in the ground for the commencement of play; and the green was the spot in the field where a hole was dug and a flag placed in it. “Nine temporary holes” of this sort would allow play to begin in May.

But at the same time, “permanent tees and greens” were under construction nearby. The goal was to have “nine permanent holes” ready by the summer. Although these “permanent holes” might not yet each have its own permanent green and tee, the fairways (and the routing of such fairways through the property) were intended to be permanent.

And so, the Glenlea golf course was built incrementally during the 1929 season. In fact, it was not until the summer of the second year that most of the permanent greens had been built:

New Greens Ready At Glenlea Course

Dave McEwan, chairman of the greens committee at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, announces that the new greens will be ready for play Civic Holiday, August 4th[1930].

Much care and labor has been spent on these greens and members will have every reason to be proud of them.

The fairways, too, are in excellent shape. (Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1930, p. 15).

And these permanent greens were often permanent only in regard to their location, and not necessarily in regard to their final form. There was often a third stage of green development: a more sophisticated “specially made” green (with or without “undulating surface”) might replace the initial “permanent” green.

Note that in the 1920s, construction of golf course greens became much more sophisticated and labour-intensive than it had been a decade before, as Ottawa Citizen golf writer Brian Devlin observed during the construction of the Chaudière Golf Club’s first nine greens in June of 1923. He was astonished at how quickly the work was going:

Green Construction

This shaping of nine greens in the period since work could be commenced is something more than worthy of mention.

The building of greens nowadays, with the extensive backing-up and contouring necessary to the requirements of modern golf, is not the simple matter it was a decade ago.

Then, the ground merely was cultivated, the line between fairway and green being but a difference in grass texture.

But now, each putting surface is constructed from accurately drawn plans, each conforming to the type of shot required and each having its own individual characteristics. (Ottawa Citizen, 17 August 1923, p. 11)

My assumption that most of the Glenlea greens built between 1929 and 1930 that were said to be “permanent” were in fact permanent only in regard to their location seems to be confirmed by the fact that only one of them seems to have been made along the lines of the Chaudière greens. The latter were “constructed from accurately drawn plans,” which had calculated the size and orientation of the green according “to the type of shot required” and which had produced nine distinct greens “each having its own individual characteristics.” At Glenlea, it seems that just one green of this sort had been built by the time of the official golf course opening on 1 June 1929: “No. 9, … with its undulating surface, specially made” (Ottawa Citizen, 31 May 1929, p. 12).

In other words, in terms of the greens that Keffer’s plans called for, there may have been in the spring of 1929 seventeen more greens still to be “specially made."

As for the fairways, the old traditional horse-drawn mower would not do for this new club. What was needed at a thoroughly modern golf course operation was a motorized mower. And so, at the end of April, the executive committee announced that “A motor tractor and special mower will be delivered from Montreal this week and will be in action as soon as the ground allows” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 April 1929, p. 16).

As spring came to a close in 1929, everything was going according to the mid-February plan: “Progress with the course is marked, and the daily improvements in all directions have exceeded the expectations of the committee and the members” (Ottawa Journal, 14 June 1929, p. 27).

"Two Experts"

Construction of the Glenlea golf course was underway by the end of March in 1929, but Karl Keffer was at the Jekyll Island Club until mid-April.

Five days after the mid-March course inspection by the executive committee, there was another inspection: “On Sunday afternoon last … the course was specially and very fully inspected from end to end by two experts, whose verdict at the termination of the inspection was most reassuring and satisfactory” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23). In the absence of Keffer, the executive committee seems to have needed “reassuring” that its decisions about certain tee boxes and greens were good ones.

Who were the “two experts” who inspected the layout?

Figure 64 Harry Mulligan. Ottawa Journal, 4 May 1946, p. 18.

Harry Mulligan was probably one of them. He had not gone to Jekyll Island with Keffer during the winter of 1928-29, instead operating the indoor Victoria Golf School in downtown Ottawa. Sometime before their mid-February announcement of the formation of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, the promoters of the project had been in contact with Mulligan about the possibility of his assuming the duties of golf professional at the club. Although the executive committee did not formally announce his hiring until its meeting on April 3rd, it let it be known in mid-February that a “well-known local golf professional has been engaged” (Ottawa Journal, 5 April 1929, p. 25; Ottawa Journal, 16 February 1929, p. 4).

In the five seasons since he had left the pro shop of Karl Keffer at Royal Ottawa (one of which he had spent in Massachusetts as an instructor to a wealthy family at their private course), Harry Mulligan had established a reputation as an excellent golf teacher: “Harry Mulligan, now with Glenlea, who has taught many their golf from stance to the proper way of the fourth and most exasperating putt of all, can point to a clan who can say ‘you made me what I am today,’ as they come bravely out of bunker and rough with the ease of veterans” (Ottawa Journal, 13 April 1929, p. 45).

Keffer had probably recommended Mulligan to the organizers of the new golf course when the club was still named Highlea, perhaps when he assessed their land and staked out a golf course for them in the summer of 1928. My guess is that plans for the new golf course had gathered sufficient momentum for the Highlea organizers to have begun negotiations with Mulligan before the end of 1928 season. Mulligan’s having reached some sort of understanding with them would explain his decision not to go to Jekyll Island during that year’s winter season: he had been asked to be on hand the following spring for the opening of the club. Even though his contract with the club did not begin until May 1st, Mulligan would have been a natural resource for the Glenlea executive committee looking for confirmation that its work was consistent with Keffer’s vision for the golf course.

Figure 65 Rube Mullen. Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1915, p. 6.

The other expert who inspected the layout may well have been Mulligan’s Victoria Golf School partner, Rube Mullen, the head pro at the McKellar Park Golf Club.

In the golfing public’s eye, Mullen and Mulligan were closely connected. In October of 1927, they finished tied in the professional division of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club Invitational Tournament and “were ordered” to engage in a playoff the next day: “as Mullen and Mulligan are the two youngest pros in the district, the match caused quite a flurry of interest and a fair-sized gallery followed the play” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 October 1927, p. 11).

In November of 1928, they announced that they were opening a winter golf school in downtown Ottawa: it would become known as the Victoria Golf School. It was one of only three such schools in Ottawa that winter: Harry Towlson, the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club head pro, opened one of them; former McKellar pro Alfred Rogers opened the other (mind you, he merely set up two driving nets at the Y.M.C.A.).

Figure 66 Ottawa Citizen, 7 March 1928, p. 11.

Despite his young age, Mullen was already known as a course designer himself: he had been responsible two years before for the layout of the Hull Golf Club’s nine-hole course. And he was also familiar with Keffer’s work at Sand Point, for in the summer of 1928 he had taken a team of McKellar Golf Club members to Sand Point to compete against the Arnprior Golf Club. Respect for Mullen’s architectural savvy is implied by the fact that a newspaper reported that “Rube Mullen, pro at the McKellar, … was well pleased with the layout of the course” (Ottawa Journal, 27 August 1928, p. 11).

Towlson, Rogers, Mullen and Mulligan were probably the only golf professionals in Ottawa in March of 1929. As contracts for golf professionals in those days ran from spring to fall (for between five and seven months), Ottawa’s golf professionals in the 1920s either ran a winter golf school or headed south for the winter to work at an American club or a club in the Caribbean. Rivermead’s Jimmy Clay, for instance, worked for Keffer at Jekyll Island. Having wintered in Ottawa and worked together at their golf school, and being familiar with Keffer’s design work, Mulligan and Mullen were ready-to-hand when the executive committee of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club sought reassurance in March of 1929 that they had done right by Keffer’s plans for their layout.

Opening Day

Although play on the golf course was underway in May, it had been decided much earlier in the spring that the official opening of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club would be 1 June 1929.

But a question remained: how should this important occasion be celebrated?

Figure 67 Sir William Clarke. Calgary Albertan, 17 January 1930, p. 2.

Club president J.C. Brampton had become friendly with a significant fellow countryman, Britian’s trade representative in Canada, High Commissioner Sir William Clarke, and so Brampton was able to persuade him to strike the official first drive:

Sir William Clarke Will Open Glenlea

England’s High Commissioner to Canada Has Consented to Officiate on June 1

The executive committee have much pleasure in announcing that Sir William Clarke, the High Commissioner for Great Britain in Canada, has very kindly consented to open the Glenlea Golf and Country Club on June 1, the date of the formal opening of the club. (Ottawa Citizen, 27 April 1929, p. 16)

The programme of events for the opening day was set ten days ahead of time:

Figure 68 Ottawa Citizen, 28 May 1929, p. 9.

The executive committee of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club wish to announce the following program for their opening day, June 1, on which date Sir William Clarke, K.C.S.I. [Knight Commander of the Star of India], C.M.G [Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George], the British High Commissioner, has very kindly consented to officiate at the formal opening of the club at 3 p.m.

They are glad to announce, also, that the Reverend A. Robert George, B.A., has very kindly consented to speak on the opening day, as indicated below:

(1) The executive committee will meet Sir William Clarke, Lady Clarke, and Miss Clarke at 3 p.m.

(2) Sir William Clarke will address the members in the pavilion and then proceed to the first tee to drive off the opening ball of the season.

(3) The members will then return to the pavilion and the rev. A. Robert George will then speak.

(4) Band and dancing, 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., and dinner-dance from 8 p.m. to midnight. Members are asked to turn out in full force on the opening day and to bring their friends to see what has already been accomplished. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1929, p. 32)

Figure 69 Sir William Clark, sailing to Canada in the fall of 1928. Calgary Herald, 1 October 1928, p. 1

We learn that “about two hundred members and guests congregated at the Aylmer Road club to witness the opening ceremonies, which were performed by Sir William Clark” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1919, p. 10). After his speech at the clubhouse, “Sir William proceeded to the first tee” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1919, p. 10). Here, he used the leverage provided by his long limbs to wallop the ball: “he drove a long ball well down the fairway to officially open the golf course” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1919, p. 10).

Then, as had been previously announced, Reverend A. Robert George (1879- 1961) of the First Baptist Church of Ottawa addressed members and guests in “official dedication ceremonies” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1929, p. 10).

After twenty years of service in the Baptist church in Britain, he had arrived in Ottawa in November of 1926 from King’s Heath Baptist Church in Birmingham, England, on a lecture tour of North America. The congregation of the First Baptist Church, however, invited him to travel no further and instead to supply the church’s pulpit for four months.

In February of 1927, however, the congregation invited him to become its permanent minister. He accepted and stayed until 1931, when he resigned because of ill health. He shortly thereafter became a member of the teaching staff at McGill University, teaching in the Department of English, the Department of Education, the Faculty of Engineering, and the Theological Colleges affiliated with McGill (Ottawa Journal, 15 May 1961, p. 18). He was also a sessional lecturer at Queen’s University (Kingston Whig Standard, 16 May 1961, p. 17)

Figure 70 Reverend A. Robert George. Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1931, p. 23.

The Glenlea Golf and Country Club had found a popular and accomplished speaker to bless its enterprise on opening day.

Reverend George was a well-educated person, with a B.A. from the University of Bristol and a Bachelor of Divinity from the University of London, and he was a good orator. He was able to speak in a highly learned manner, when required, but he preferred to speak to people in a more accessible manner – whether he was addressing children or adults. One frequently finds in the Ottawa newspapers of the day observations like the following: at his church, “Rev. A. Robert George delivered a delightful allegorical address which greatly captivated both junior and senior members of the congregation”; to a group of businessmen, “the speaker was delightfully humorous in his delineation of the things which everyone knows, such as … how to do the other man’s job …; … how to run the country [and so on] …. His talk was a searching probe of human nature very much as it is apparent amongst all of us and was replete with drolleries” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 June 1928, p. 15; 7 February 1929, p. 16).

When he delivered a talk to the University Club of Ottawa in 1926 called “On Being Over the Heads of the People,” he advised that a speaker’s words “should be appropriate and adequate to the theme and suggested there are times when even preachers may be in danger of sacrificing wisdom to the words, and of surrendering philosophy to philology” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1926, p. 15). He warned: “A man may memorize the Oxford dictionary and yet not talk sense”; and so, he said, “Keep your eye on the ball was good instruction for other things besides golf” (Ottawa Citizen, 3 December 1926, p. 15).

He had spoken before to sports clubs, such as the Glebe Curling Club: “Rev. A. Robert George of Birmingham, England, spoke. One might say it was a speech of wise council and glittering epigrams” (Ottawa Journal, 7 February 1927, p. 12).

And so, we can be confident that Reverend George gave the kind of speech at Glenlea for which he had come to be known when we learn from the Ottawa Journal that he delivered his speech “in a witty vein” (Ottawa Journal, 3 June 1929, p. 16).

After his speech, there was an hour of entertainment – “Every tennis court was in play, and the ball room was thronged with those eager to take advantage of the orchestra” – and “a buffet luncheon was served” (Ottawa Journal, 3 June 1929, p. 16). Then the assembled crowd, comprising members of the club and their friends, members of other golf clubs, and members of the press, inspected the golf course:

The visitors thronged over the course and made an inspection of the clubhouse, the professional’s shop and practically the entire grounds. In this, members and guests were assisted by members of the executive committee, who spared no effort in the entertainment of those present.

Beautiful course

To those who had not previously visited the club, the course was a real surprise.

Nine beautifully planned holes are now in play, and favorable comment was heard on all sides of the possibilities of the Glenlea club.

Admirable progress has been made to date, and the natural contour of the course offers great possibilities for future development and construction. (Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1929, p. 10)

In particular, “visitors from other clubs were loud in their praises of the possibilities of Glenlea” (Ottawa Journal, 3 June 1929, p. 16).

A “very pleasant feature” of the ceremonies was “when Lady Clarke was presented with a beautiful bouquet of roses by little Miss Valerie Brampton,” the granddaughter of J.C. Brampton (Ottawa Journal, 3 June 1929, p. 16).

Figure 71 Sylvia Valerie Canning (née Brampton) (1923-2008), Cowichan Valley News Leader, 6 February 2008, p. A17

Born in Poona, India, little Sylvia Valerie Brampton (1923-2008) grew up to became passionately interested in sports, winning the Lisgar Collegiate athlete of the year award when seventeen years of age and becoming after high school a devotee of the royal and ancient game.

She married Richard Canning (1920-2014) in 1941. The latter served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II and then joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, being posted to Regina, Saskatchewan. Here, Valerie “worked for the Government of Canada and the Saskatchewan School Trustees Federation for almost thirty years” (Cowichan Valley News Leader, 6 February 2008, p. A17). In 1978, the couple moved to Duncan, British Columbia, where “regular reservations at the golf course” were a main feature of their lives (Leader-Post [Regina Saskatchewan], 28 September 2014, p. 32).

Valerie remained “an ardent sportswoman for all her life, with Cowichan Golf and Country club being the focus for the last many years” of her life (Cowichan Valley News Leader, 6 February 2008, p. A17).

By many decades, “little Miss Valerie Brampton” was the last survivor of the main participants in the opening day ceremonies at Glenlea.

The First Greenkeeper?

When the newspapers broke the news on 16 February 1929 that a new golf club had been formed in Ottawa, the first reference to the construction of the Glenlea golf course was vague: “The green committee will have all the necessary ground preparations completed for play early in May” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 1929, p. 4). But the same articles make clear that a greenkeeper had already been hired: the course “will be under the charge of a groundsman of 16 years’ experience” (16 February 1929, p. 4).

The prospectus, upon which the newspaper articles seem to have been based, used similar language: “A groundsman with 16 years’ experience of golf courses has been engaged.”

As we know, three days later, “Mr. D. McEwan” was appointed “chairman of the greens committee” and “tabled a detailed report embracing the plans and arrangements for placing the course in condition for play by the date of the official opening in May” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 1929, p. 20). As suggested above, the fact that he was able to table this detailed report the very night he was appointed chairman of the greens committee means that “the plans and arrangements” for construction of the golf course were in place well before this mid-February meeting.

Unfortunately, this historically significant first “groundsman” remains unidentified. I suspect, in fact, that he renegued on his contract before spring construction began and that there was probably no official head greenkeeper at Glenlea in 1929. Rather, the golf course that opened in May of 1929 seems to have been built by a ground crew closely supervised by the club’s greens committee.

But it seems likely that it was input from this anonymous “groundsman of 16 years’ experience” that informed “the plans and arrangements” that the executive committee possessed by mid-February of 1929.

My suspicion that this greenkeeper was not part of the crew building the new golf course in the spring of 1929 derives from the fact that there is no reference to him in the Ottawa newspapers, whereas greenkeepers subsequently hired at Glenlea are mentioned in them. Note also that throughout the 1920s, greenkeepers at other golf courses in the Ottawa area were regularly identified by name in the newspapers – especially when compliments were due to them on account of the condition of their courses.

For instance, at the Ottawa and District Ladies Golf Championship at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club in 1924, the greens and the greenkeeper were singled out for compliment: “Scotty Miller, the greensman, deserves tremendous credit for the shape that they are in” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 June 1924, p. 10). At the Ottawa and District Championship at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf club in 1928, he was again acknowledged: “The Hunt Club groundsman, Scotty Miller, worked tirelessly in getting everything in tiptop shape” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1928, p. 12). We recall that the McKellar greenkeeper was also celebrated for his work ethic: “It is expected the club will have a banner season. Sam Bourgeault [sic], the indefatigable green keeper, reports there is no evidence of winter kill” (Ottawa Journal, 6 April 1929, p. 41). Similarly, when the Chaudière Golf Club decided to retain the greenkeeper who had helped to construct the course in 1923, he was named in the newspaper report about matter: “Fred Bingham, who has had charge of the construction of the course …, is groundsman” (Ottawa Journal, 19 June 1924, p. 13).

So it is surprising that amid the regular celebrations in the newspapers of the achievements of the ground crew at Glenlea during the construction of the course throughout 1929, we never encounter any reference to a head greenkeeper, let alone a mention of any such person’s name. Even the word “greenkeeper” is absent from accounts of the Glenlea golf course in 1929. Instead, all work is attributed to the greens committee and a competent ground crew. On the eve of the official opening, for instance, the executive committee spoke with confidence of the prospects of the new club and complimented its team of “groundstaff”:

the executive committee base their main hopes upon the ground itself – now no longer a prospective golf course, but one in being, with a number of excellent, playable holes.

And strenuous work is being performed by a large and competent ground staff to finish off the full eighteen holes at as early a date as possible this year.

(Ottawa Citizen, 29 May 1929, p. 13)

Given that the names of head greenkeepers in the area had long been acknowledged in similarly complimentary newspaper reports, it is curious that there is no reference here to a head greenkeeper with sixteen years’ experience.

The reference above to a “competent” ground staff suggests to me that when the groundsman with sixteen years experience did not show up to implement the plans he had perhaps helped to draw up during the winter, the Glenlea executive committee proceeded to assemble a ground staff by poaching a number of employees from the greenkeeping crews at Ottawa’s other golf courses. The existing clubs would have been the natural local source of “competent ground staff.”

So, who was the “groundsman with 16 years’ experience of golf courses” who did not show up in the spring but seems during the winter to have reviewed Keffer’s blueprint for the new golf course and helped the executive committee to draw up “the plans and arrangements for placing the course in condition for play by the date of the official opening in May”? I suspect that sometime between December of 1928 and February of 1929, the promoters of golf at Highlea had worked out an agreement with James Hickman of the Highlands Golf Club of London, Ontario. Hickman had come to London from Beaconsfield, Quebec, in 1922. He was hired by Highlands at a salary of $1,500 per year (which was almost twice as much as the club’s first golf professional, John Innes, was paid: $75 per month). Hickman was also given a house to live in at $15 per month.

Hickman had become well known as one of the new generation of greenkeepers seriously interested in the improvement of the art and science of greenkeeping. He was a charter member, for instance, of the Canadian Greenkeepers Association, formed in 1924. He later “formed an association in 1929, known variously as the Western Ontario Greensmen Association, later as the Western Ontario Greenkeepers Association, and later still as the Western Ontario Golf Superintendents Association” (Gordon Witteveen, A Century of Greenkeeping [Chelsea, Michigan: Ann Arbor Press, 2001], p. 97).

Gordon Witteveen implies that Hickman worked at just two golf clubs over the course of his entire career: “Jim Hickman was … [an] English gardener who immigrated to Canada and found work at the Beaconsfield GC near Montreal. Later, Hickman moved to London Highland GC” (A Century of Greenkeeping, p. 15). Hickman was the first greenkeeper at the Stanley-Thompson-designed Highlands course, which opened in 1922, and Witteveen indicates that Hickman presided over the Highlands course continuously thereafter until replaced by Witteveen himself in 1958.

Interestingly, however, although unremarked by Witteveen, Hickman seems to have decided at the end of the 1928 golf season that he would work somewhere other than at Highlands in 1929. Already at the beginning of December of 1928, for instance, advertisements in newspapers as far away as British Columbia announced that he was available for hire for the 1929 season: “GREEN-KEEPER, LIFE EXPERIENCE, SEEKS position on golf course; thoroughly understands construction and maintenance; best of references. Write James Hickman, 215 Emery St., London, Ontario” (The Province [Vancouver, B.C.], 7 December 1928, p. 25). In January, a similar advertisement appeared in Canadian Golfer magazine, where he was the only greenkeeper announcing in that magazine that he was available for the 1929 season: “GREENKEEPER seeks position. Has good references as to ability in upkeep of golf courses, also considerable experience in construction work. Write James Hickman, 215 Emery Street, London, Ontario” (January 1929, vol 14 no 9, p. 770).

That he was the only greenkeeper advertising his availability for the 1929 season, that he was so well-known for his seriousness of purpose, and that he emphasized his thorough understanding of golf course construction would certainly have drawn the attention of the organizers of the new golf course venture at Highlea.

Did they try to lure Hickman to Ottawa?

Was Hickman serious about leaving Highlands, or was he merely threatening to leave London in order to get a raise?

We know two things for sure: first, that Hickman was back at Highlands in 1929 (later that year he founded the Western Ontario Greensmen Association), and, second, that Glenlea announced the hiring of a head greenkeeper in the spring of 1930 who was definitely not the anonymous one mentioned in the 1929 prospectus.

Whence a Local Groundsman?

Some of the first greenkeepers in Canada were immigrants from Britain who had done the same work in the “Old Country.” Others, like Hickman, were gardeners who had immigrated from Britain and translated their gardening knowledge and skills to golf course maintenance in Canada.

Indeed, in the 1890s and early 1900s, the word “gardener” was often used in Canada as a name for a keeper of a golf course. In April of 1897, for instance, the president of the Ottawa Golf Club announced to members that “everything will be in first class shape within a few days,” noting that “a staff of gardeners are at work on the greens” (Ottawa Journal, 17 April 1897, p. 7). In Britain, too, we find the esteemed golf writer Horace G. Hutchison referring in 1899 to those who laid out golf courses not as architects or designers, but rather as “gardeners”: “it should be the study of the links-scape gardener to lay out his links in such a way as to make the golf as difficult as possible, consistently with giving the reasonably well played shot a reasonable chance of achieving success” (Golf, vol 8 no 6 [April 1899], p. 279).

As virtually no one in Canada had golf course maintenance experience in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Canada’s first generation of greenkeepers initially took whatever local help they could get. Note the advertisement by the Ottawa Golf Club greenkeeper seeking help in 1906: “Groundsmen or farm hands wanted at the Ottawa Golf Club, Aylmer Road. Telephone … or apply to foreman at the golf course” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 June 1906, p. 4).

Figure 72 A scyther at the Ottawa Golf Club, circa 1904.

The same sort of advertisement was placed ten years later during World War I: “Wanted, men to work on the Royal Ottawa Golf Club links, Aylmer Road. Handy farm men, light scything, running hand mowers, etc. Apply to the Greenkeeper on the grounds” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1916, p. 4).

By the 1920s, however, there was an increasing number of experienced groundsmen in the Ottawa area, including the occasional golf professional whose preference was not to work in the pro shop but rather to work on the golf course. Note, for instance, the following advertisement in 1921: “Groundsman wants position as head golf greenkeeper; can layout; repair clubs if necessary” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 March 1921, p. 10).

By the 1920s, some of the handiest of the gardeners, farm hands, and general labourers who had taken up greenkeeping work – and taken to it – were acquiring a high level of greenkeeping knowledge and experience from years of work under the best greenkeepers at Royal Ottawa and Rivermead. Just as golf boomed in the Ottawa area in the 1920s, some these local men were ready and available for a head greenkeeping position of their own.

The Ottawa Area's Greenkeepers in the 1920s

In late 1928 and early 1929, there were a finite number of head greenkeepers in Ottawa, one each at the seven existing golf clubs: Royal Ottawa (1891), Rivermead (1910), Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club (1919), Chaudière Golf Club (1923), Fairmont Golf Club (1923), Gatineau Golf and Country Club (begun as the Hull Golf Club [1926]), and the McKellar Golf Club (1926).

Unlike the greenkeeper touted by the promoters of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, very few of these greenkeepers had sixteen years of experience at the job by 1929. More importantly, none of them left his course for Glenlea that year.

At Royal Ottawa in 1929, Alexander (“Sandy”) Scott Ogston was the greenkeeper. He had replaced James McCarthy (or McCartie), the man who was groundsman when Keffer arrived at the Ottawa Golf Club in 1911. Like Keffer, McCarthy lived at the club. Born in England in 1880, he had immigrated to Canada in 1907. Identified as the Ottawa Golf Club’s live-in “Groundsman” in the 1911 census, he was presumably the one who began preparations on the newly acquired land that would become the nine-hole short course or ladies’ course and so was the one who placed the advertisement in the fall of 1910: “Two handy men to work on grounds. Apply to Groundsman, Ottawa Golf Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 October 1910, p. 4).

Ogston would graduate a number of head greenkeepers for other golf courses during his two decades at the club, including one or two for Glenlea, but he did not begin his career as a greenkeeper. Born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1871, Ogston came to Ottawa in 1900 to visit his uncle Alexander Keith Scott, a mason employed in the construction of the West Block of the Parliament Buildings. When his uncle moved to Alberta in the early 1900s, Ogston visited him and there married Fanny Storr in 1903, shortly afterwards establishing himself as a “Jardinier” or gardener in Montreal on the campus of McGill University’s Macdonald College.

His wife’s family was from Ottawa (her father John Storr was “one of the pioneers of the painting business in Ottawa” [Ottawa Citizen, 19 November 1920, p. 18]), and the couple regarded Ottawa as home (when their “youngest daughter” died in St. Anne de Bellevue in 1913, the couple buried her in Beechwood cemetery), so they were looking for an opportunity to move to Ottawa (Ottawa Journal, 1 February 1913, p. 10).

In Montreal, Ogston’s strong interest in phenology (the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in connection with the relation between climate, on the one hand, and plant and animal life, on the other) brought him to the attention of a young professor at Macdonald College, Dr. William Harold Brittain, who had been awarded the College’s first doctorate in agriculture in 1911. In fact, Ogston served in 1912 alongside Brittain (who was destined to become the long-serving Dean of Agriculture of Macdonald College and Vice-President of McGill University) as the two Macdonald College observers of phenological phenomena for the Royal Society of Canada at the latter’s Montreal station. They charted the flowering dates of a variety of plants that the Royal Society was interested in.

As head greenkeeper at Royal Ottawa as of 1915, Ogston faced a shortage of workers during World War I and placed the advertisement seen above for farm hands who might be interested in a new form of outdoor work: “Wanted, men to work on the Royal Ottawa Golf Club links, Aylmer road. Handy farm men, light scything, running hand mowers, etc. Apply to the Greenkeeper on grounds” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1916, p. 4). Ogston himself quickly developed considerable expertise in the art of turf management and, unusually for greenkeepers of the day, actually lectured on the topic. In 1920, for example, he was invited to deliver a paper, called “Lawns and Their Upkeep,” to a meeting of the Society of Ottawa Vegetable Growers and Florists: “Grass wants feed like everything else,” he explained, “[so] you must have fertilizers. Soil is all right, but with the climatic conditions existing, it must be nourished” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 February 1920, p. 17). W.H. Stewart was probably in the audience.

Ogston worked closely at Royal Ottawa with Keffer both before Keffer left to serve in France with the Canadian Expeditionary force in 1917 (a period when some of the redesign suggested by Harry Colt in 1913 were instituted) and after Keffer’s return from the war when Willie Park’s plans for improvement were instituted in the early 1920s. Ogston seems to have remembered these times fondly, for more than two decades after he had left Royal Ottawa, Ogston attended Keffer’s funeral in 1955.

Robert Stanton was the greenkeeper at Rivermead in 1929, where he had worked since the founding of the club. He was actually recorded as living on the club’s grounds in the 1911 census as a “servant” whose work was as “gardener” on the “golf grounds.” He had been born in Apsley, near Hemel Hempstead, England, in 1877 and had immigrated to Canada in 1910, indicating that he had been employed as a greengrocer in England but would be seeking work in Canada on a farm.

He was hired at Rivermead by George May, the first greenkeeper of the club’s nine-hole course, “in the laying out of which he [had] been largely instrumental” (Ottawa Journal, 3 June 1911, p. 2). May had “been engaged for the past seventeen years with some of the largest clubs in Scotland as instructor and green keeper, the latter vocation being his particular hobby” (op. cit.). Although Stanton was new to greenkeeping, he had a chance to learn everything about it from May as the nine-hole course used from 1911 to 1913 was built. And he learned quite a bit during the 1913 season, when “underdraining … was done,” making the course drier than ever the next spring (Ottawa Citizen, 7 May 1914, p. 9).

Figure 73 Alexander Black (1849-1921).

When four new holes were built in 1914, Stanton had a chance to learn from a new greenkeeper, and he could hardly have asked for a more knowledgeable mentor: “Mr. [Alexander] Black, father of Davie Black, will be the greenkeeper” (Ottawa Citizen, 7 May 1914, p. 9). Alexander’s wife had just died, and Davie was able to persuade his father to come to Canada.

Greenkeeper Black had acquired extensive experience on the great links courses at Troon:

The Green Committee of the Rivermead Golf Club have engaged a Scotch green keeper who will arrive in Ottawa about April 15th. He comes from Troon in Ayrshire where he has had charge of two 18-hole courses for ten years….

The permanent greens, all 30 feet square, are now laid out and sewn, with the best grasses obtainable.

The making of bunkers and other artificial hazards will be started this spring. (Ottawa Journal, 10 March 1914, p. 4).

In 1914, Black also installed a watering system, comprising a tank and extensive piping (Ottawa Citizen, 7 May 1914, p. 9).

But Alexander Black stayed in Ottawa for just one golf season (he eventually returned to Troon, where he died in 1921), which allowed Stanton to become head greenkeeper in 1915, the year Rivermead officially opened its full eighteen-hole course in July.

The other major local greenkeeper, Gavin Weir (“Scotty”) Miller, was at Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club. Although diminutive in stature (five feet, two inches tall), he loomed large in the Ottawa greenkeeping community by the time of his retirement in 1956. By 1929, he had accumulated many years of experience of greenkeeping. He started in Connecticut in 1903, moved to Royal Ottawa for a while and then Rivermead. Indicating in the 1911 census that he was a farm labourer, he was presumably just another member of the grounds crew at such golf courses in those early days. When he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915, mind you, he gave his profession as that of “Butcher,” so we know that his employment as a greenkeeper was not continuous.

Figure 74 Scotty Miller, Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, circa 1940s.

Morrison was not discharged from the army until January of 1920, when he was deemed unfit for further service. He had been hospitalized for everything from gunshot wounds in the arm and leg, incurred while in action in France, to gonorrhea (soldiers with this affliction were legion during World War I), and bronchitis caused by mustard gas and exposure to the elements (this bronchitis became a chronic condition). Morrison was gassed at Vimy Ridge in March of 1917 and then wounded in the famous Canadian assault there on April 9th .

Perhaps not surprisingly, given such experiences during the war, Miller was regularly fined for drunkenness!

A year after his discharge from the army, Miller responded to the following advertisement in the Ottawa Citizen: “Golf course greensman to take charge of Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club’s new links, must have complete knowledge of golf course maintenance” (12 February 1921, p. 14).

Fred Bingham was the first greenkeeper at the Chaudière Golf Club, where he constructed the George Cumming course from 1923 to 1926. He was probably the Frederick Bingham who had immigrated to Canada in 1912 and resided in Ottawa after the war (according to the 1921 census) as a seller of “Gardening Implements.” We recall that many of the first Canadian greenkeepers were British gardeners. By 1930, Bingham had been replaced at the Chaudière by Arthur Holland (resident of Cooperative Gardens in Deschênes village), who in April and May of that year built a miniature nine-hole course (adorned with a fountain and equipped with lights for night play), “the entire nine holes” lying between the clubhouse and Aylmer Road, the driveway to the clubhouse more or less dividing them in half” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 May 1930, p. 10).

The greenkeeper at Fairmont Golf Club when the new club opened on the pre-existing “caddie’s course” in 1923 was probably Harry Steele, who was its golf professional from 1925 to 1926, after which he was replaced by Harry Mulligan. Steele competed In the Ottawa City and District Golf Championship in 1923 representing Fairmont, when the golf course was still being described as a “caddies’ course.” He did the same in 1924, but he was listed neither as a professional nor as an amateur, and for him only it was specified in the newspaper that his score counted only in the “open” part of the competition (that is, he was not allowed to compete as an amateur). Since this fact went without saying for all professional golfers, one might suspect that Steele was not then a professional golfer but was instead a greenkeeper. And greenkeepers were regarded as golf professionals since they earned a living from the game.

The Ottawa Journal writes at the beginning of the 1926 season as though Steele has been in charge of all work at the course: “Harry Steel has again been appointed pro at Fairmont and has everything in readiness for the season. A gang of men are making new greens and clearing brush away for several new holes” (26 April 1926, p. 15).

We can see that he was well-known among the serious young golfers of the national capital region, for when his mother died in April of 1925, both Rube Mullen and his brother Gus (an amateur golf star) attended the funeral (Rube Mullen had been a hockey star alongside Harry Steele’s brother Percy for Hull City teams during World War I).

At the Hull Golf Club, Rube Mullen’s responsibilities as golf professional initially included architecture, construction, and greenkeeping:

The Hull City [sic] Golf Club, a new organization for devotees of golf, has almost completed its nine-hole course which it is expected will be ready for play with temporary greens next week.

Reuben Mullen is in charge of the work and will be pro at the new club. (Ottawa Journal, 5 June 1926, p. 26).

Renamed the Gatineau Golf and Country Club in 1929, it hired Charley Court as head greenkeeper in 1932 or 1933, a job he held until 1940, when he was replaced by Joe Brunet.

Figure 75 Tom Unsworth. Ottawa Journal, 14 March 1953, p. 28.

As we know, the “indefatigable” Sam Bourgeau was the head greenkeeper at McKellar Park Golf Club from 1927 until 1930, when he was succeeded by Tom Unsworth, who had begun work as a gardener on private English and Scottish estates in 1908. On one of these estates, he had laid out a private nine-hole golf course, He immigrated to Canada in 1927 (Ottawa Journal, 29 May 1954, p. 16).

None of these greenkeepers left their Ottawa clubs in 1929 to work at Glenlea.

If Glenlea’s “groundsman of 16 years’ experience” did indeed renegue on his commitment to the new club, did one of the experienced greenkeepers at the existing Ottawa golf clubs occasionally “moonlight” at Glenlea during the spring of 1929, now and then giving helpful direction to the greens committee and its ground staff?

Figure 76 Scotty Miller. Ottawa Journal, 3 May 1956, p. 24.

Scotty Miller, for instance, claimed in his later years that he had built the Gatineau Golf and Country Club’s course.

Since Rube Mullen was the one who laid out the first nine holes in 1926, I presume that Miller was claiming to have laid out the second nine holes that were built in the early 1930s.

Whatever the case may have been, however, Miller would have been “moonlighting” in any such role at the Gatineau, for he served continuously as the greenkeeper of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club from 1921 to 1956.

Note that local golf clubs certainly had a tradition of helping each other get started at the beginning of the twentieth century. Back in 1907, for instance, the Perth Golf Club lent its greenkeeper to the Almonte Golf Club when the latter hired Ottawa Golf Club professional George Sargent to lay out a new nine-hole course for it. And in 1919, both Royal Ottawa’s Karl Keffer and Rivermead’s Davie Black were loaned to the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club, first to advise it about the suitability of its land for development as a golf course and then to lay out a temporary nine-hole course for the fledgling golf club.

And so, it is at least possible that Glenlea received unofficial encouragement and support from a local greenkeeper (or two) as it brought a nine-hole golf course into play in 1929.

The Pro and His "House"

The Glenlea Golf and Country Club had dedicated downstairs rooms to showers and locker rooms for male and female golfers. It was loathe to dedicate more space within the clubhouse for a golf professional’s shop. And so, the executive committee decided less than a month after the founding of the club that the pro would have his own building: “The question of erecting a building for the use of the golf club professional was settled by the decision to acquire a bungalow, now standing in the neighborhood of the clubhouse. This will be taken from its present position and re-erected close to No. 1 tee” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 March 1929, p. 15).

This house for the golf professional – located behind (that is, north) of the clubhouse, and also beyond the club’s large icehouse – can be seen in the 1933 aerial photograph below.

Figure 77 1933 aerial photograph.

The transfer of this building from its original location to its new position was accomplished in less than two weeks: “The new pro house is now erected close by No. 1 tee, from which an excellent idea of the general lay-out of the course can be obtained” (Ottawa Journal, 29 March 1929, p. 23).

Figure 78 The pro's "house" is visible behind the Glenlea clubhouse in this mid-1930s photograph. Lynwood Stewart archives.

The pro’s house can be seen to the left in a greatly enlarged detail from a mid-1930s photograph of the clubhouse.

This bungalow seems not to have been the old Routliffe residence, which I believe was demolished to allow construction of the clubhouse. An early 1920s topographical map of this area marks a building likely to have been the Routliffe residence at the very spot where the Highlea clubhouse was marked on topographical maps from the late 1920s onward.

The bungalow that became the “pro’s house” seems to have been “acquired” from a nearby property owner – probably William Allen.

This building housed not just the pro shop, but also living quarters for the golf professional. It survived the burning down of the Glenlea clubhouse in 1942, and it also survived the burning down of the second Glenlea clubhouse in 1949, when the club’s golf professional at that time, Robert (“Bobby”) Alston, was living in it.

Five years later, however, W.H. Stewart’s son, manager Lyn Stewart, let it be known that he was developing “big plans for the club in the future” – plans that required (among other things) replacing the old pro’s house: “He has a new and larger pro shop open now” (Ottawa Journal, 13 May 1955, p. 30).

Skiing

From the beginning, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club envisaged the possibility of expanding its sports offerings to include winter sports:

The intention of the management committee is to foster the club spirit, and to encourage members to use the club, not merely for golf and tennis, but to develop any other suitable side which may appeal to the sporting element, such, for example, as skiing and other winter sports as well as the summer ones.

The existing facilities of the club will provide for the fullest extension in these directions. (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1929, p. 20)

By mid-summer of 1929, the club began to think seriously about its programme of winter sports:

Proposals are on foot for the Glenlea Golf and country Club to be made a center of skiing activities during the winter, and in view of its excellent position in regard to the ski trails, it may be found possible to inaugurate a ski club.

Those members who are interested in such a club should communicate with the secretary, who will also be pleased to hear from other ski clubs who desire to avail themselves of the Glenlea privileges as a ski club center during the forthcoming winter. (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1929, p. 14)

The Highlea Tennis and Country Club, of course, had made a formal arrangement with the Ottawa Ski Club for the use of its facilities: “Secretary W.H. Stewart was instructed to acknowledge a letter received from the Ottawa Ski Club, in which acceptance was made by the Ski Club of the terms by which they will become members of Highlea for the winter months” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 December 1925, p. 10).

Figure 79 Members of the Ottawa Ski Club, 1925-26.

And through “the courtesy of Mr. Charles Gaudaur,” organizations like the “Social and Athletic Club of the Interior Department” were still able to use the Highlea Tennis and Country Club as the focus of their ski hikes while he was in charge.

It turned out that Highlea’s biggest promoter of golf, E.M. Ramsay, was also a dedicated skier: “Director of skiing, Mr. E. [M.] Ramsay,” was given credit for having the Minister of the Interior attend as a guest, and for the “special feature of the afternoon … the taking of moving pictures of the skiers in action” (Ottawa Journal, 21 February 1927, p. 8)

And so, during the Glenlea Golf and Country Club’s first winter, it is no surprise that its clubhouse continued to be a fixture of local skiing activity. By January, it was the regular stopping point of the Ottawa Ski Club, as well as of ski clubs associated with the employees of various offices and departments of the Government of Canada:

Ski Hike Tonight

The combined forces of the Auditor General’s Office, the Department of Pensions and National Health, and the Labor Department will hold their long awaited ski hike this evening to the Glenlea Golf and Country Club.

This moonlight excursion … is expected to attract large numbers of government employees.

The combined party will assemble at the Chateau Cartier terminus of the Hull Electric [railway] and leave by the 7:30 pm car for Wrightville. At the end of the car-line, W.J.B. Hookey of the AGO’s office will lead the way, while Grant Garrioch of the Cliffside ski club will follow the party to make sure that no one gets lost on the trail. (Ottawa Citizen, 21 January 1930, p. 11)

The clubhouse remained the destination of a number of ski trails in 1931:

Moonlight Ski Hike

Sixty members of the Fisheries Department staff enjoyed a moonlight ski hike over the Glenlea-Wrightville trail on Monday evening. Supper was served at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club at half-past ten o’clock and the party enjoyed a dance until the arrival of their buses at half past one o’clock. (Ottawa Citizen, 28 January 1931, p. 21)

But no further ski club activity is reported at Glenlea after the winter of 1931 until the late 1930s, when the club again became the destination point of several trails of the local ski clubs.

Glenleas Hockey

In 1930-31, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club entered a men’s team in the Ottawa City Intermediate Hockey League (OCIHL), which operated within the Ottawa District Hockey Association. Glenlea was a last-minute entry: at the beginning of November, the R.C.M.P. committed to ice a team in the six-team league, but it renegued on this commitment a few weeks later and the Glenlea Golf and Country Club immediately stepped into the breach.

In a sign of the seriousness of the new club’s commitment to the league, Tom Foley, president of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, also agreed to serve as second vice-president of the OCIHL. Still, Glenlea had to assemble a team from scratch and then try to compete with several well-established teams.

Many of the league’s teams were affiliated with teams in the Ottawa City Senior Hockey League, which sent an all-star team to tour Europe in 1931-32, and whose teams were eligible to compete for the Allan Cup. So, the OCIHL teams clearly comprised players of high calibre. And the level of play during the 1930-31 season was even higher than usual: “Les clubs de l’Intermédiaire donnent cet année du sport de calibre supérieur” (Le droit, 14 January 1931, p. 8).

Nicknamed the “Glenleas,” the team dressed about fifteen players over the course of the 1930-31 season (about 20% had historically French names – Laroque, Leclair, Joliat – and most of the rest had historically British or Irish names). Note that six players tended to play the entire game in those days, so the Glenleas might show up at games with just eight players: a goaltender, two defencemen, a centre, and two wingers, with two substitutes sitting on the bench, should they be needed.

League play would begin in the first week of January in 1931, but practice sessions were underway in the fall of 1930: “All six teams comprising the Intermediate City Hockey League will practise at the Auditorium this evening …. A team wearing the colors of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club will take over the R.C.M.P. franchise” (Ottawa Journal, 24 November 1930, p. 16). League play would be in the Ottawa Auditorium for the first time, a step up from play at the Minto Rink in previous seasons. The Auditorium was the home of the Ottawa Senators, so ice conditions were among the best to be found in the city.

The Glenleas played just six league games, losing them all, but never by a lop-sided score. The league championship would be won in the spring of 1931 by the Ottawa Montcalms, and it was the Glenleas who gave the future champions the toughest battle: “Montcalms gained two points in the Intermediate City Hockey League Standings in a scheduled fixture at the Auditorium last night by 2 to 1. The losers [the Glenleas] led until the third period when two goals … sent Montcalms into the lead, and they finished one goal up” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 January 1931, p. 10).

Figure 80 The Ottawa Citizen Shield. Ottawa Citizen, 14 March 1931, p. 10.

After the Montcalms won the Intermediate Hockey League championship in mid-February of 1931, they engaged in a sequence of two-game series against other intermediate league champions throughout the Ottawa district. They won them all and entered a two-game series against Almonte in mid-March for the Ottawa Citizen Shield, a trophy emblematic of the championship of the Ottawa City and District Intermediate Hockey Association. After a tied game in Ottawa, the Montcalms travelled to Almonte and won the final game in overtime.

That the Glenleas had led this championship team after a first period goal until late in the third period is a testament to the Glenlea Golf and Country Club’s ability to draw together from scratch a surprisingly competitive hockey team.

The Glenleas wanted to play more than the six hockey games scheduled for the OICHL season, and so it was announced at the beginning of January that “arrangements are being made to hold a series of exhibition games at the Glenlea rink” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 January 1931, p. 10).

The Glenleas won the first such game against one of their OCIHL opponents, the Ionas: “The Glenlea hockey team defeated Ionas by a score of 3-1 in a well-played exhibition hockey game played at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club yesterday” (Ottawa Journal, 12 January 1931, p. 13). The Ottawa Citizen reported that “the contest drew a big crowd of spectators” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 January 1931, p. 10).

Their next exhibition opponent was “Post Office”: “In a fast, interesting game of hockey played on Sunday afternoon at the Glenlea rink before a large crowd of spectators, Glenlea defeated the Post Office hockey team of the Civil Service League by a score of 4 to 2” (Ottawa Journal, 19 January 1931, p. 16). “Post Office” was “the Civil Service League champion” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 January 1931, p. 10).

But perhaps the Glenleas’ greatest exhibition achievement occurred in a two-game home-and-away series against the Arnprior Green Shirts, a team that had recently made it to the semifinals of the Allan Cup competition.

Figure 81 The Arnprior Green Shirts pose on Arnprior's Elgin Street outdoor rink in the early 1930s. Original photograph possessed by the Arnprior and McNab/Braeside Archives.

The Glenleas travelled to Arnprior at the beginning of January, losing 1-0 in a closely fought contest.

The return match was three weeks later: “Glenlea of the Intermediate City League handed Arnprior of the Upper Ottawa Valley League a 2-1 reverse in an exhibition game played at the Glenlea rink on Saturday” (Ottawa Journal, 2 February 1931, p. 17). Glenlea club members regarded this contest as a great social occasion: “A dance was held on Saturday evening at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club after the Glenlea-Arnprior hockey game for the players and friends and members of the club. About 200 were present” (Ottawa Journal, 2 February 1931, p. 8)

The “Glenlea rink” mentioned in newspaper reports cited above was an outdoor ice surface built at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. It was presumably set up on the perfectly level surface in front of the clubhouse where the tennis courts had been laid out. Spectators could watch the game outside around the boards of the rink, or they could watch the game from the comfort of the verandah, which was enclosed in the winter by windowed panels. The clubhouse was elevated well above the rink and tennis courts, so a good view was afforded of the games played below.

The greatest player to emerge from the Glenleas was Art Kilrea, “a member of one of Ottawa’s most famous hockey families” (Ottawa Journal, 30 December 1939, p. 25). Art’s older brothers Hec and Wally, as well as his younger brother, Kenny, all played in the NHL, as did his nephew Brian, long-time coach of the Ottawa 67s.

Figure 82 Art Kilrea, Ottawa Citizen, 25 February 1943, p. 15.

Born in 1912, Art was just 18 years old when he played for the Glenleas.

When older brothers Hec and Wally were playing for the Detroit Red Wings, Art went with his younger brother Kenny to play in 1936-37 for the Detroit Pontiacs of the Michigan-Ontario Hockey League (forerunner of the International Hockey League).

Art returned to senior hockey in Ottawa in the late 1930s, but he joined the Canadian armed forces at the start of World War II and ended up starring for the Royal Canadian Air Force hockey team in Europe.

The Glenleas were watched by audiences of hundreds at their outdoor home rink, but they also played before thousands at the Ottawa Auditorium, for the OCIHL frequently played its league matches right after the conclusion of games between the Ottawa Senators and their Canadian and American NHL opponents:

“Glenlea go into action again on Thursday night, playing a league game with the Ottawa East team at the Auditorium immediately after the New York Americans-Senators professional game” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 January 1931, p. 10). The Glenleas also played a game at the Auditorium that “followed the professional game between Toronto and Ottawa”: their Intermediate League game was “a well-played, hard-fought affair from start to finish” (Ottawa Citizen, 7 January 1931, p. 10). As these NHL games did not take the nearly three hours it takes to complete games today, many of the thousands who came to watch the Senators play also stayed to watch the OCIHL talent.

The Glenleas certainly did their part in promoting the game outside the city of Ottawa. During the 1930-31 season, for instance, the OCIHL was particularly interested in promoting the game in Rockland, and on two separate occasions in January staged two of its league games consecutively at the Rockland rink on a Thursday night. Four OICHL teams and fans bused down to Rockland for the “doubleheader”: “The four teams will leave by buses from the Monument National, George and Dalhousie Streets, at 6:30 and a small fee will be charged any supporters wishing to make the trip” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 January 1931, p. 27). Dozens of fans also drove down in their own automobiles.

Figure 83 Le droit, 13 January 1931, p. 6.

Alas, the Glenleas played just one season. Newspapers announced in the fall of 1931 that the team would not lace up skates for the 1931-32 season.

Glenlea's Boxer

Glenlea also backed a local boxer participating in a Montreal tournament to determine the members of Canada’s boxing team that would go to Berlin in 1936 to participate in what has come to be known as Hitler’s Olympics: “Eddie Brooks, doing a comeback in the lightweight class, will have the backing of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club” (Montreal Star, 8 July 1936, p. 22).

The Montreal Star got the Ottawa boxer’s name wrong: he was not Eddie Brooks, but rather Frankie Brooks.

Figure 84 One can see on the left side of the above photograph the Ottawa Boys Club, circa 1936, located in former Fire Station No. 7, at the junction of Bell Street and Somerset Street, Ottawa, Ontario.

No boxing fan in Ottawa would have got his name wrong. Boxing since 1931 in the lightweight class, first out of the Madison Athletic Club and then out of the Ottawa Boys Club, Frankie Brooks won the Ottawa City Championship in 1933 and then won the Championship of Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec in 1934.

Frankie was from the beginning a crowd pleaser. Newspaper references to him were always positive. He was described as “the flashy and popular boxer”; “Brooks is an entertaining performer and is also a rugged customer” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 April 1934, p. 11).

“Frankie Brooks,” it was said, is a “popular Mittman who can take care of himself in the ring against any boxer his weight” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1934, p. 8).

His popularity combined with his skill to make his fight the headline bout at a number of Ottawa boxing events, as in December of 1933 when he narrowly lost by decision “a rousing, free-hitting bout from start to finish” before “a crowd of more than seven thousand people” at the Ottawa Police Amateur Athletic Association’s boxing and wrestling show at the Ottawa Auditorium (Ottawa Citizen, 7 December 1933, p. 10).

Over the five years of his boxing career, he seems to have won about as many fights as he lost. But perhaps his greatest victory came in the championship match he lost!

After he won the Ottawa lightweight championship in 1933, he fought the next year against Willie Heathfield for the Eastern Ontario Championship:

Feature Fight

The fight of the night was the bout between Frankie Brooks, of the Ottawa Boys’ Club, and Willie Heathfield, Knights of Columbus, Cornwall. The judges gave the decision to Heathfield, but it was a hairline verdict.

The rugged Cornwall fighter had Brooks bleeding badly at the mouth in the first round, but Frank McCarthy’s boy came back strongly in the second and third.

Heathfield had a little more power in his punches, and that edge won him his victory. (Ottawa Journal, 16 May 1934, p. 20)

Although Frankie lost this fight, he nonetheless won the championship when, a couple of months later, the Eastern Ontario Boxing Commission retroactively disqualified his opponent for having previously boxed as a professional.

Figure 85 Ronnie Headley.

Frankie had trained for this fight not at the Ottawa Boys’ Club, however, but rather at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club: “Ronnie Headley … and Frankie Brookes [sic], the smart Ottawa amateur, have training quarters at the Glenlea Golf Club” (Ottawa Journal, 2 May 1934, p. 17).

Ottawa-born Headley was one of the city’s greatest boxers, a contender for the Canadian professional championship at both the lightweight and welterweight classes.

He was not at Glenlea for very long (he was perhaps using Frankie as a sparring partner), for he would soon set up camp in Montreal to prepare for the Canadian lightweight championship fight against the reigning champion Tommy Bland (Headley lost by a decision).

Frankie, however, became a fixture at Glenlea, and in more ways than one.

An amateur fighter who trained and fought in his spare time, Brooks was hired by W.H. Stewart to work as a waiter at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. And later in 1934, Stewart was rewarded for this hiring decision when Frankie deployed his boxing skills in what might be called “The Battle of Glenlea”:

[Several men] were charged with disorderly conduct and causing damage following an early Sunday morning fight at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club in which four employees were injured ….

[They] are alleged to have forced their way … into the club by means of a basement door after they had been refused admission as undesirable guests by the manager, W.H. Stewart….

Speaking to the Citizen last evening, William Stewart … emphasized the fact that none of the men involved were members of his club and that he had absolutely refused them admittance. He said that this was the first incident of the kind which has occurred there, as the club did not cater to a disorderly crowd.

Mr. Stewart stated that the men entered by means of a basement door after having broken a lock. They then went upstairs unobserved, he said, and took a table, unknown to him.

When they summoned a waiter [Frankie Brooks] and attempted to give their order, they were refused service and were quietly asked to leave….

One of the men, when the party was refused the privilege of ordering beer, took a bottle from the table of a guest seated at a nearby table. The guest remonstrated with him and reported the incident to the management, who ordered the bottle returned.

It was then that one of the accused … struck constable William McVeigh of South Hull who had been called over to the table, and in a few minutes a furious battle, in which fists, chairs, and bottles were used, was being waged. (Ottawa Citizen, 17 September 1934, p. 2)

Whether by fist, by bottle, or by chair, Brooks was hit in the face, causing lacerations to his lips, which required stitches to close. (Three men were later convicted of assault and damage to property, receiving jail terms of between three and six months.)

In 1936, Stewart seems to have remembered his employee’s service above and beyond the call of duty two years before.

Frankie had been retired from the ring for more than a year when he began musing about the possibility of returning to training in an attempt to qualify for the Canadian Olympic boxing team. There was much talk of the Berlin Olympics where Adolph Hitler proposed to demonstrate by the German team’s acquisition of gold medals the superiority of his country over all others: Frankie wanted to contribute to the Canadian effort to refute that claim.

Stewart learned of Frankie’s ambitions and arranged for him to be sponsored by the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. With Glenlea’s backing, Frankie returned to the ring and hired a trainer: “Frankie Brooks, clever and rugged Ottawa lightweight, will compete in the Olympic boxing trials at Montreal…. Brooks is tuning up for the trials under the watchful eye of Frank McCarthy” (Ottawa Journal, 19 June 1936, p. 22).

Frankie’s fight in Montreal against that city’s own Roland (“Rollie”) Potvin was described in the Montreal Gazette as “a battle that had the crowd on its feet cheering throughout” (Gazette [Montreal], 14 July 1936, p. 12).

It was a brutal match, and a punishing mismatch:

Frankie Brooks Passes from Picture after Earning Admiration from Crowd at Canadian Olympic Boxing Trials ….

Frankie Brooks, of Ottawa, Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec lightweight champion, lost a decision to Rollie Potvin, of Montreal.

But he won the admiration of the crowd for his dogged fighting and ability to absorb steady punishment. (Ottawa Citizen, 14 July 1936, p. 11)

Unfortunately for Brooks, Potvin, who hailed from the University Settlement area of Montreal (he was known as the “University Settlement slugger”) had perhaps the best night of his boxing life “and gave one of the finest displays of the evening” (Gazette [Montreal], 14 July 1936, p. 12).

From the beginning, Brooks was overwhelmed by “the pounding fists of young Rollie Potvin” – the “slugging university settlement youngster” (Gazette [Montreal], 19 June 1936, p. 17; 14 May 1936, p. 13). Regarded as “the outstanding Montreal possibility to make the Olympic team,” Potvin seems to have been trained to race “in right from the opening gong to set his opponent shaking at the knees with a terrific barrage of right-hand hooks” (Gazette [Montreal], 15 July 1936, p. 13).

Frankie was not a slugger (he had occasionally won a fight by a technical knock-out, but his fights usually went the distance). Yet he had never been knocked out (whether by TKO, or otherwise), and he was determined that what might well be his last fight would not be the first one in which he was laid low for the count.

But the situation was dire virtually from the start in a fight that quickly became a lost cause. It seems to have been a real-life lightweight version of the brutal heavyweight boxing scenes depicted forty years later in the movie Rocky (1976): “Brooks staggered through most of three rounds, bleeding profusely and his head jolting from side to side under the one-two blows of the French-Canadian” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 July 1936, p. 11).

Remarking on the one-sidedness of the contest, a reporter for Montreal’s L’illustration nouvelle was astonished that neither Brooks nor the seconds in his corner threw in the towel:

Potvin a … été fort sensationnel et a infligée une terrible raclée à Frank Brooks d’Ottawa.

Ce fut pour employer l’expression dans les cercles pugilistiques: un véritable massacre.

Brooks s’est montré excessivement courageux, mais il est incompréhensible que ses seconds n’aient pas arrêté le combat car il n’avait pas la moindre chance de gagner …. (L’illustration nouvelle, 14 July 1936, p. 18)

Yet despite the constant beating that he was suffering, Frankie occasionally surprised Potvin and the huge crowd alike: “Brooks rallied several times and broke into wild attacks” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 July 1936, p. 11).

Alas, however, “his rallies lasted only momentarily” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 July 1936, p. 11).

In fact, Frankie was becoming so exhausted that there were times when he simply could not defend himself. The reporter for Le droit, sympathetic to the local man from “L’outaouais,” nonetheless noted that “Brooks se laissait ouvert comme une porte de grange” (Le droit, 14 July 1936, p. 8). Even the University Settlement slugger showed a measure of sympathy and respect for Frankie’s courage and determination: “More than once, Potvin held his punches as the Ottawan stumbled against the ropes, too tired to even shield his body with his gloves” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 July 1936, p. 11)

And so, “Glenlea” Frankie simply would not go down, and he would not allow his seconds to stop the fight.

The crowd roared as he somehow managed to stay on his feet until the final bell rang, hardly to be heard amid the noise. And the din had hardly abated when Frankie, bloodied and bruised, walked haltingly to the centre of the ring to stand swaying slightly at the referee’s left side while the unanimous decision was announced.

As the referee raised Potvin’s left arm above his head to signify his victory, slugger Rollie looked down at his right hand, which was already swelling from the countless hooks it had landed, and then turned to look at Frankie, saying, “Il n’y aura pas de ‘rematch’.…”

Through swollen lips, scarred with stitches from “the Battle of Glenlea,” Frankie replied with a voice that was hardly more than a whisper: “Don’t want one.”

Constantly mentioned in the sports pages of the Ottawa area newspapers from 1931 to 1936, Frankie Brooks is never mentioned again after his loss at the Montreal Olympic trials.

Incorporation as Member-Owned

By the end of Glenlea’s first year of operation, the original president, J.C. Brampton, MBE, was made an honorary president (and the next year awarded a life-time membership), both in recognition of his untiring zeal in the formation of the club and also, it seems, in order to make way for Thomas Foley, whose business and financial acumen seems to have been sought as part of an effort to reorganize the club as a member-owned entity.

The process was well underway by November of 1929, when a “special general meeting of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was held”:

Tom Foley, after introduction as the recent addition to the executive committee of the club, read the report of the incorporation committee. Interesting discussion ensued and a general feeling of enthusiasm towards the incorporation of the club as a member-owned organization was displayed.

It was unanimously decided to empower the special committee to further explore the ways and means respecting the finance of this project, and several professional gentlemen were added to the committee in an advisory capacity.

This committee will report back in the near future and a general meeting of the club will be subsequently called to approve the scheme. (Ottawa Journal, 27 November 1929, p. 25)

The Glenlea Golf and Country Club was incorporated by letters patent issued on 16 January 1930, incorporators comprising “Adrien Arcand, manufacturing agent, Ottawa, Gaudias Vincent, René Arthur, both civil Employees, Quebec” (Gazette Officielle du Quebec, 8 February 1930, p. 594). On 25 July 1930, the number of directors of Glenlea Golf and Country Club, Inc., was increased from three to eight (Gazette Officielle du Quebec, 23 August 1930, p. 2939).

Foley had been a director of the Hillcrest Golf and Country Club at its inception in 1923 (Ottawa Journal, 7 July 1923, p. 5). In the spring of 1924, he was elected treasurer (Ottawa Journal, 11 April 1924, p. 19). On the collapse of the Hillcrest venture, Foley became one of the “Promoters and Provisional Directors” of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club.

In 1929, Foley had headed a “special committee appointed to arrange for the re-constitution of the club” (Ottawa Journal, 21 January 1930, p. 16). At the Glenlea club’s meeting in January of 1930, Foley was elected president, and made his first speech to members:

Mr. Foley detailed, in an interesting manner, the scheme of reorganization, emphasizing the practicality and solvency of the undertaking, and contrasted the bright prospects of the club as a member-owned concern with the many disadvantages experienced under private or syndicate control … and indicated that no effort or money will be spared to make Glenlea a remarkably fine venue for golf addicts.

The provisional agreement entailing the leasehold of the Glenlea property and containing an option for its purchase was presented to the meeting and received formal ratification. (Ottawa Journal, 21 January 1930, p. 16)

There was further progress announced a few weeks later: “At a meeting of the Directors of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, the chairman, Mr. Thomas Foley, announced that the club officials now held the signed lease giving the club possession of the entire property at Glenlea as from 1st April 1930” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 February 1930, p. 25).

During Foley’s negotiation of this lease with Stewart, it may have helped that the Stewarts and Foleys had become close since the founding of the Highlea club: “The directors of the Highlea Tennis and Country Club entertained over two hundred members and friends to a delightfully arranged supper dance at the clubhouse, Aylmer Road. The guests were received by Mrs. W.H. Stewart and Mrs. Thos. Foley” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 October 1925, p. 18).

The Glenlea directors regarded transformation of the club into a member-owned entity as a great milestone, the key ingredient in the club’s prospective success:

History Is Made At Glenlea Club

Property Formally Passes Under Directors’ Control. Anticipate Early Opening.

The first day of this month made history for the Glenlea Club, as on that day, at two minutes past midnight, the final signatures were appended in the presence of the full body of directors to the documents transferring the charter of the club to the control of the board of directors appointed by the club members.

Protracted negotiations throughout the winter were necessary for this satisfactory consummation … and the board of directors hopes that the membership will realize that as from the 1st instant, the success of the club depends entirely upon its full use by the members.

All profits, henceforward, will, of course, be devoted to club upkeep and improvement. (Ottawa Citizen, 2 April 1930, p. 10)

New Greens and More Holes 1930

At the final general meeting of 1929, directors assured members that “a fully equipped eighteen-hole course would be available next season” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 October 1929, p. 19). And Harry Mulligan wrote in similar terms to Canadian Golfer in the spring of 1930: “This is the second year this course is operating. We have at present ten holes open in very good condition and expect to have the eighteen holes going by June 15th” (Canadian Golfer, vol 16 no 1 [May 1930], p. 76).

A new greenkeeper had been appointed to preside over the transition from temporary greens and temporary holes to permanent greens and permanent holes: “The appointment of an experienced head greenkeeper is announced. He brings with him many years of experience gained with a celebrated golf club” (Ottawa Citizen, 17 March 1930, p. 9). We learn the new greenkeeper’s name a month later: “Temporary tees are in use, and Charlie Rogers, the head green keeper, promises temporary greens shortly” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 April 1930, p. 10).

I suspect that there is a typographical error in the above quotation and that it ought to have read: Rogers “promises permanent greens shortly,” for the next sentence in the item reads: “In the meantime, the ordinary greens are in complete use” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 April 1930, p. 10).

Rogers had acquired his greenkeeping knowledge at Royal Ottawa under Sandy Ogston. He was charged with the task of building permanent greens and bringing them into play as quickly as possible:

New Greens Ready At Glenlea Course

Dave McEwan, chairman of the greens committee at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, announces that the new greens will be ready for play Civic Holiday, August 4th .

Much care and labor has been spent on these greens and members will have every reason to be proud of them.

The fairways, too, are in excellent shape. (Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1930, p. 15).

The decision to prioritize the building of permanent greens in 1930 seems to have led to deferral of construction of more new holes. Harry Mulligan’s talk of all eighteen holes being open by mid-June of 1930 was a pipe dream: the season concluded with no new holes introduced to play.

Glenlea still had only a nine-hole course in 1930.

New Greens and More Holes 1931

The same gradual, incremental work to fulfill Keffer’s vision of an eighteen-hole championship course continued in 1931. Spring came early that year, not only allowing golfers to play during the first week of April (“All tee boxes and flags are in place and the ground is quite dry”) but also allowing plans to be made for early construction work: “The chairman of the greens committee reports that the course is now being rolled and seeded. Several men are engaged in this work. It is anticipated that a start will be made on several new holes as soon as the grass is dry enough to burn” (Ottawa Journal, 9 April 1931, p. 22).

In 1931, however, there was a new person elected as chairperson of the greens committee: original member Dr. William Arnot (“Bill”) Burgess.

Figure 86 Dr. William Arnot Burgess (1886-1940). On the family farm circa 1910.

Bill Burgess was born on a farm in Leamington, Ontario, in 1886. An extremely intelligent and academically inclined student, Burgess would not make the family farm his life’s work.

He attended the University of Western Ontario and graduated with an MD in 1910. He had just set up a private practice when World War I broke out in 1914 and he immediately joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps. He was posted to Field Ambulance units on the front lines in France and Belgium in 1915 and served in the field until 1917, when he returned to England to serve as second in command of a Field Ambulance unit in Britain.

At the front, Captain Barrett had seen more than his fair share of deaths of all kinds.

During the second Battle of Ypres, in April of 1915, Burgess was in charge of the 2nd Field Ambulance’s Advanced Dressing Station when the German army began to drop artillery shells on it and then began to advance towards his position:

At five in the afternoon, Captain W.A. Burgess reported thence that he was moving back to St. Jean with two of the unit wounded.

The [stretcher] bearers of the 2nd [Field Ambulance], one and all, manifested splendid skill and personal bravery.

As the O.C. (Lieutenant-Colonel D.W. McPherson) writes with pardonable pride:

“theirs was the worst section of them all to clear from when the poisonous gases were first encountered. The men frequently placed their wounded in ditches, lying flat to avoid shells; where there was little protection, the wounded got the first choice.

No wounded man received a second wound while in our charge.

The three officers of the section, Captains Burgess, P.G. Brown and McKillip, deserve the greatest of praise for their untiring devotion to duty.”

(John George Adami, War Story of the Canadian Medical Corps: Volume 1, The First Contingent to the Autumn of 1915 [London: Rolls House Publishing, 1918)

Having been promoted from Captain to Major, Burgess returned to Canada before the end of the war to serve in Ottawa from 1918 onward as a medical advisor to Canada’s Board of Pensions Commission. He had become familiar with shell-shock-induced suicide amongst soldiers and veterans, and so, in 1920, he was called before a House of Commons committee to address “concerns that widows and families of soldiers who had died by suicide might be denied support” (Matthew Barrett, “Absolutely Incapable of ‘Carrying On’: Shell Shock, Suicide, and the Death of Lieutenant Colonel Sam Sharpe, Canadian Military History [2016], vol 25 no 1, p. 23). Burgess explained that “the benefit of the doubt is given to dependents in every case. It must be a very clearcut case where it [a pension] is refused” (Barrett, p. 23).

Burgess continued to serve in the Canadian Medical Corps for decades and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1930. During World War II, he served on what became known as the Canadian Pensions Commission. But he died unexpectedly in Toronto General Hospital in 1940 one week after what had seemed to have been a successful operation on vertebra in his neck that had been injured in a car accident several months before. His obituary notes: “A keen fisherman and hunter, he was also a golfer until an accident to his hand forced him to give up that sport” (Ottawa Journal, 26 July 1940, p. 19).

Burgess had joined the Glenlea Golf and Country Club when it opened in 1929 and became a strong supporter of the club. He helped to organize entertainments during the first year, and the next year (1930) won the Stewart Cup, awarded to the winner of the club’s handicap competition. His second wife, Lillian Doris Sparks, was also an avid golfer, representing Glenlea in the Ottawa and District Ladies Golf Championship of 1931, in which she was one of the few golfers to play off a scratch handicap.

Chairman of the Glenlea greens committee as of the spring of 1931, Burgess presided over continued construction work and various improvements. The early spring weather was favorable: “The unusual warm, dry weather has put the course in splendid shape and the greens committee is keeping hard at work, roller men and teams smoothing over the rough places of last year. The fairways are shaping up wonderfully well” (Ottawa Journal, 21 April 1931, p. 16). And so, we read, “The course is being improved almost daily” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 April 1931, p. 10).

The chairman of the greens committee was true to his word that “a start will be made on several new holes as soon as the grass is dry enough to burn” (Ottawa Journal, 9 April 1931, p. 22). At the shareholders meeting on 1 May 1931, Burgess “gave a report on the progress already made this year. One new hole is now ready, and a start has been made on four more” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 May 1931, p. 14).

And just a month later, we learn:

Work has been completed on the new holes at the Glenlea Golf Club, as promised by the greens committee, and 13 are now available for play.

Several of the new holes are providing some real interesting golf shots….

The course has been greatly improved during the past two months and players who played last year and are just starting in now are agreeably surprised. (Ottawa Journal, 1 June 1931, p. 19).

The most interesting of the new greens earned a newspaper article to itself:

Have Punchbowl Green at Glenlea Golf Club

What is known as a punchbowl green has been constructed at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. It is the only one of its kind in the Ottawa district and there is only one other in Eastern Ontario.

The green is built to resemble a giant punchbowl and the golfer must place his ball on the green to make a good showing on the hole. It is said to be one of the most interesting holes in the district and players take quite an interest in it.

The shot is a short one, but the ground surrounding the green is left rough to penalize poor shots. (Ottawa Journal, 9 June 1931, p. 14)

The other Ottawa newspaper reported the same news with very similar wording, which suggests that the newspapers based these items on a press release from Glenlea. The “Punchbowl Green” in question seems to have been designed for what in 1931 was the par-three tenth hole (we are told that “the shot is a short one”). The remains of this green were clearly identifiable on today’s thirteenth hole until November of 2023. It had been used as Champlain’s thirteenth green until 2002. Although it would soon have a bunker back left and back right (the latter was filled in at the end of the 2023 season), the original 1931 green was simply surrounded by rough. The remains of the green in October of 2023 appear in the photographs below.

Figure 87 A contemporary view of the 1931 punchbowl green on the old 10th hole of the 1931 Glenlea Golf and Country Club.

The back left bunker, its steep side dropping down from the raised edge of the green, appears below.

Figure 88 2023 photograph of the original 1931 green.

It is doubtful that Glenlea’s punchbowl green was as rare as the club said it was. In 1929, there was already a hole of this sort at Cataraqui: “Playing at the Cataraqui Golf Club today, Edward Gibson … made the sixth hole (the Punch Bowl) in one shot. The distance of this hole is 135 yards” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 August 1929, p. 10). And as of the fall of 1929, there was an excellent example of a punchbowl green being built as the eighth hole at Renfrew (today’s seventeenth), designed by George Cumming and known as “the devil’s punch bowl” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 July 1936, p. 17). Furthermore, just across the road from Glenlea at the Chaudière, after the club officially named each of its holes in 1930, the name for the fifth was “Punch Bowl” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 May 1930, p. 11).

Hardly three weeks after the new Glenlea hole was introduced in 1931, it was here that the club’s golf captain “Bob Halpenny scored the first hole-in-one ever to be made on the course. The ace was made on the recently constructed punchbowl hole, a drive of 150 yards” (Ottawa Journal, 23 June 1931, p. 16).

Figure 89 1938 aerial photograph showing the third hole or "Gully hole" of the original Glenlea layout (Champlain’s 7th green today). Also marked on the photograph is the "punchbowl' green discussed above, to which bunkers were added sometime after the 1932 season.

Another of “the new holes … providing some real interesting golf shots” was the “Gully” hole: “The second hole-in-one of the season at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was made by Mrs. George F. Grattan when she negotiated the 110-yard ‘Gully’ hole in one stroke” (Ottawa Citizen, 9 September 1931, p. 10). She played a “mashie shot on the short 110-yard ‘Gully’ hole” and the ball “rolled in” (Ottawa Journal, 9 September 1931, p. 17).

Seen in the photograph to the left, this hole was the third hole in 1931. It corresponds to today’s seventh hole, but today’s green was built several years after the one on which Mrs. Grattan made her hole-in-one. She played to a green on the flat ground forty yards in front of the present green.

Note that although only 13 holes were in play by the end of 1931, the following newspaper announcement in September of that year refers to the eighteenth green: “The putting and approaching competition … will take place on the 18th green” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 September 1931, p. 11).

Since there were at most thirteen holes in play by September of 1931, what was referred to as “18th green” was presumably one of the thirteen greens then in play. This implies that the even before the eighteen-hole course was completed, the holes were numbered (and known to members) according to their place in the eighteen-hole configuration drawn up by Keffer in 1928.

Building Permanent Greens in the Late 1920s and Early 1930s

The greens that Keffer’s 1928 design called for no doubt required push-up construction: raising the green above the level of the surrounding ground. To push the soil up to the height required, the recently-invented bulldozer became the machine of choice for golf architects after the 1930s, but in the 1920s, horses and ploughs were used at a golf course such as Glenlea’s.

The soil used to elevate the green was from the green site on the golf course (whereas today, preferred materials – from sand to topsoil – tend to be trucked into the golf course site).

Elevated greens remain a common element in contemporary golf course architecture, with the elevation of the green above the level of the fairway varying from a mild rise of several feet to a dramatic rise of many feet onto a distinct plateau. Today, the entire green complex might be raised on all sides, but in the 1920s, the soil was literally pushed from a front edge that was level with the fairway to a back edge that was raised several feet above the fairway and surrounding ground, as in the case of the fourteenth green at Champlain (seen in the photograph below), which is one of the oldest greens on the golf course, serving as the eleventh green on the original Keffer layout of 1929.

Figure 90 On the left side of the photograph above, one can see that the front edge of today's 14th green at Champlain is level with the fairway that runs up to it, but the green then rises steadily to the back edge (seen on the right side of the photograph), where there is a sharp drop-off of about three feet.

The pitch of the push-up green from front to back produced progressively steeper shoulders, yielding the steepest drop-off at the back.

Such a green is most receptive to an approach from directly in front of it. Placing the approach shot below the hole produces the most manageable putt: it is the straightest and it is the slowest.

Approach shots hit over the back of the green require a delicate recovery shot onto an elevated surface sloping away from the golfer. Approach shots played left or right of the shoulders of the green require delicate recovery shots onto a sloping surface that will produce a good deal of break.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the main instrument for building this sort of push-up green was a pullplow called the Fresno Scraper, often operated by one person and pulled by one or two horses.

Figure 91 Drawing of early 20th-century Fresno Scraper.

Seen in the drawing to the left, 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 push-up greens in the 1920s are described by an experienced golf-course builder of the day named L.W. Sporlein, who explains construction strategies where greens and green-side traps were to be built with soils from the green site – which was presumably the situation at Glenlea.

Using a Fresno Scraper, one began by scraping away the turf and topsoil from the green site. According to Sporlein,

In cases where it is desirable or necessary to save the topsoil at the green site for replacement on the green after it has been roughly shaped up, the surface soil only is removed, and piled up as near as possible to the green.

It is placed either directly in front of, or to the one side most convenient for, hauling back onto the green surface, after roughing in with the less fertile soils.

(cited in Michael J. Hurdzan, Golf Greens: History, Design and Construction [Toronto: Wiley, 2004], pp. 23-26).

The “less fertile soils” in question were generally “obtained while building the trap” (Sporlein, cited in Hurdzan, pp. 23-26).

The operator scraped the turf and topsoil away from the bunker sites that had been marked out around the sides of the green, adding this topsoil to the pile of such soil already waiting for re-spreading onto the top of the green, which was built-up by soil of inferior quality scraped out of the bottom of the bunker sites.

Teams might work together in sequence, going around and around in a circle (as seen in the photograph below left), scraping rough soil out of the bunker site and depositing it on the green site, the operator pushing up on the Fresno Scraper handle to make the scraper become vertical and thereby dump its load of soil over the spot chosen (as seen in the photograph below right).

Figure 92 Left: teams with Fresno Scrapers circle around a green complex, scooping out soil from future bunkers and depositing the rough soil on the green site. Harry S. Colt and C.H. Alison, Some Essays on Golf Course Architecture (London: Country Life, 1920). Right: The operator of a Fresno Scraper lifts the handle upright to deposit its load on the green site, ready to pull the handle down again with a rope attached to it.

According to Sporlein,

in constructing the green, it is best first to build up the entire surface to a more or less uniform height and to place the high slopes or rolls in afterwards, when the approximate shape is obtained.

By a single adjustment of the spreader bar on the Fresno, so as to cause the load to spread out to a uniform thickness instead of dumping in one spot, the topsoil when ready for placement can be evenly distributed over the green surface.

After the surface has been … dragged with a spike tooth harrow, the hand work of raking into final shape is very much simplified. (Sporlein, cited in Hurdzan, pp. 23-26).

The crew would eventually level out and smooth this built-up soil with a device called a “Railroad Plow” (or “sturdy plow”). It comprised two heavy metal bars oriented parallel to each other like railway tracks and welded together across a gap of approximately two feet. The operator would direct the horses pulling the Railroad Plow around and around the surface of the green under construction. See below a bunker being excavated in the left foreground by a Fresno Scraper and a green site beyond it, which rises from front to back, that is being smoothed out with a Railroad Plow.

Figure 93 Fresno Scraper and Railway Plow operating in concert during green construction.

The process underway in the photograph above is likely to have been used in the construction of the Glenlea greens built in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Champlain greens surviving from this era and showing this kind of construction technique would seem to include today’s sixth, eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth greens – as well as the remains of old greens still evident in today’s first, thirteenth, and seventeenth fairways and the remains of an old green still evident in the rough along the western edge of today’s twelfth hole.

The Final Five Holes 1932-33

Before the end of 1931, there was news of the five holes that remained to be completed.

In his speech at the concluding banquet of the Glenlea golf season, “The president [Foley] was greeted with a round of applause when he announced that the eighteen holes will be ready for play next Spring and that an up-to-date water system would be installed on the course” (Ottawa Journal, 5 October 1931, p. 18).

Managing director W.H. Stewart went into more detail; he “spoke at length on the general status of the club and course, pointing out the improvements planned for 1932”:

It is certain, said Mr. Stewart, that eighteen holes will be completed next summer, and the installation of a water system will permit the course being kept in first class condition all through the playing season.

In this connection, two new holes are ready for seeding, two are just awaiting top dressing, and another is almost completed.

A new roller, of the heavy type, is being secured, and the fairways are being improved all along the course. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 October 1931, p. 12)

At the beginning of 1932, a new president and new directors spoke optimistically of the season to come: “[vice-president] Sam Berger outlined the future policy of the club in a general report. He told the gathering of many improvements to be made this season. A second driveway to the clubhouse was under construction while it is hoped to have an 18-hole putting green available for members in the near future” (Ottawa Journal, 17 March 1932, p. 19).

The next month, the new 1932 board of directors re-affirmed the promises made by Stewart the previous fall: “The directors have decided to complete the 18 holes and have them ready for play before the Summer months. An up-to-date water system will be installed on the course” (Ottawa Journal, 15 April 1932, p. 23).

At the annual meeting in the spring of 1933, we see that the promises made for the 1932 season were indeed fulfilled: “Eighteen holes will be in play this season” and “the course will be watered” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 April 1933, p. 9).

An aerial photograph taken in April of 1933 for the first time shows the completed eighteen-hole golf course (see below).

Figure 95 Aerial photograph from 5 April 1933 showing the full eighteen-hole course of the Glenlea Golf and Country club that came into play during the 1933 season.

Figure 94 Photograph of surviving pump taken October 2023.

The executive committee also announced in the spring of 1933 that the club had “Added water facilities for the convenience of members on the course” (Ottawa Journal, 13 April 1933, p. 19).

According to present superintendent Mike Leslie, these facilities comprised manually operated water pumps at wells that were located near wooden Gazebos constructed in the vicinity of today’s championship tee on the eighth hole, today’s senior tee on the twelfth hole, and the old tenth green that now sits in the middle of the thirteenth fairway.

The photograph to the left shows how one of the surviving pumps as it appears today.

The Rogers Family of Greenkeepers

Every July 12th, in the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, the book of Canada’s dead from World War I is opened to page 318, revealing the name of Alfred Rogers, who could be said to have been influential in the making of the Glenlea golf course – even though he died eleven years before holes were staked out!

Figure 96 Alfred Rogers' name is the 14th from the top in the right-hand column.

Rogers had come to Deschênes Mills (a village just east of Aylmer along the Ottawa River) from Walsall, County Staffordshire, England, in August of 1912 to work as a saddler or leather goods manufacturer. His wife Rose, who worked as a “Stitcher,” followed in April of 1913, with their three children, including Alfred, Jr, who was 10.

The latter would become the first golf professional of the McKellar Golf Club in 1927.

Alfred Rogers, senior, enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on 8 March 1916 and was sent overseas shortly thereafter. By July of 1917 he was with the 4th Battalion of the Canadian Labour Corps in the Vierstraat sector of Belgium, working on railway construction near the town of Ypres. During heavy enemy artillery shelling on 31 July 1917, he was killed. Today, his remains lie in La Laiterie Military Cemetery in Belgium.

Figure 97 La Laiterie Military Cemetery, Belgium. Photo circa 2020.

A consequence of Alfred Rogers’ immigration to Canada was the subsequent immigration of his brothers John and Charles to join him in Deschênes Mills. Younger than Alfred by thirteen years, Charles Enoch Rogers would be appointed head greenkeeper at Glenlea in the spring of 1930.

“Charles E.” Rogers was naturally called “Charlie” from the beginning, and it was as such that his parents had him recorded in the 1901 census of England and Wales. Following the path set by their older brother Arthur, Charlie and brother John Henry Rogers (nine years Charlie’s elder) came to Canada in September of 1913. Like Alfred, John had been trained in the making of leather goods, particular high-end goods, but Charlie had left the family home in his early teens to go to Yorkshire (after his parents died) to live there with his oldest brother, under whom he worked as a brick layer and general labourer.

The three Rogers brothers lived in Co-Operative Gardens, Deschênes Mills, on the Ottawa River side of the Aylmer Road, close to the Connaught Park Racetrack and the Rivermead Golf Club. John enlisted alongside Alfred as a Private in the 154th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in March of 1916, and five days later, Charlie did, too.

Figure 98 The three Rogers brothers are somewhere in this photograph of the 154th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force taken at the Barriefield Camp near Kingston on 16 September 1916, just before the battalion sailed for England.

Charlie sailed for England in October of 1916 and began extensive training there after a five-day voyage. He was not married and so he had his military pay sent to his sister-in-law Minnie, wife of his brother John. Transferred alongside John from battalion to battalion over the next 18 months, the brothers were finally sent to France together in the spring of 1918, where (apart from a 14-day leave for return to the United Kingdom granted in March of 1919) they served in the field with the 47th Battalion of the Canadian Infantry until their transfer from France to England in May of 1919. After a six-day sailing to Halifax from Southampton at the beginning of June, the surviving Rogers brothers travelled to Kingston, Ontario, where they were discharged from the army and returned to Deschênes Mills.

In June of 1920, Edith Yeo, born in Devon, England, immigrated to Canada. She indicated to immigration authorities that her “intended occupation” was to become the “wife [of] Mr. C. Rogers, Co-Operative Gardens, Aylmer, P.Q.” The couple would have a son and daughter together in the 1920s. When the newlywed couple was recorded in the 1921 census, Charlie (formerly a “Bricky and Labourer” in England) again gave his occupation as that of an “ouvrier” or labourer, but he indicated that his place of work was “Ottawa Golf.” He did not know it, but he was training to become Glenlea’s head greenkeeper.

Figure 99 Rose Rogers, Ottawa Citizen, 17 December 1959, p. 19.

Another interesting fact revealed by the 1921 census is that another resident of Deschênes Mills in 1921 was Karl Keffer. As a neighbour of the Rogers families in this small village, he may well have supported these families by helping fellow veteran Charlie Rogers and the two sons of deceased fellow veteran Alfred Rogers get post-war jobs at Royal Ottawa: Charlie joined the greenkeeping crew, and his nephews Alfred and Harold, sons of his widowed sister-in-law Rose, became a “Helper” and a “Bartender” at the club, respectively.

Sometime after his stint as head greenkeeper at Glenlea (for several years in the 1930s), Charlie moved to Montreal, where he died in his 48th year on 4 February 1944. Although he died in Montreal and was buried there in Pointe Claire cemetery, his wife, son, and daughter were all living in Ottawa at the time (Ottawa Journal, 9 February 1944, p. 2).

It is possible that while living at Pointe Claire, he was working as greenkeeper at the nearby Beaconsfield Golf Club.

Rogers was succeeded at Glenlea in 1934 by a new head greenkeeper who was also a member of the Rogers family: “The executive … announced that an experienced head greensman had been secured to oversee the work done on the course and much favorable comment has been heard regarding its condition at present” (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1934, p. 23). This new greenkeeper was the husband of Charlie’s sister-in-law Rose: Sam Bourgeau, greenkeeper at McKellar from 1927 to 1930.

Figure 100 Sam Bourgeau (1897- 1968),.Ottawa Citizen, 17 December 1959, p. 19.

Born in Aylmer on 25 November 1897, Sam was, like his father, a “journalier général” or general day labourer. He was just twenty years old when he met war-widow Rose Rogers, who was nine years his senior. In 1919, he married her and became stepfather to her two boys and two girls. Rose’s eldest son Alfred was just two years younger than his new stepfather. Perhaps self-conscious about how much younger he was than Rose, Sam told the census taker in 1921 that he was ten years older than he really was (saying he was thirty three when he was twenty-three).

Sam and Rose had their first child together in 1919.

Sam became a beloved father-figure for both his biological children and his stepchildren, especially his stepdaughters. He “gave away” the oldest one at her 1931 wedding (Ottawa Citizen, 3 September 1931, p. 27).

Figure 101 Pinecrest Cemetery, Ottawa, Ontario.

After his death on 20 April 1968, Samuel Bourgeau was buried beneath a grave-marker containing his name, the incorrect date of his birth, the correct date of his death, and single word: “Dad.”

Many a man would be happy with such an epitaph.

But the story told here of Sam Bourgeau’s life must include a chapter on his work at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, for he was responsible for bringing the original Keffer layout to its greatest state of perfection, as will be seen in the next section, which discusses the work done at Glenlea between 1934 and 1939.

Further Work 1934 to 1939

At the end of April in 1934, there was news of the new greenkeeper, Bourgeau:

The executive … announced that an experienced head greensman had been secured to oversee the work done on the course and much favorable comment has been heard regarding its condition at present.

The greens are all being seeded with top grass and should be in excellent condition soon.

The fairways are in good shape. (Ottawa Journal, 27 April 1934, p. 23).

This greenkeeper was the key to “improving the layout” in the years that followed:

With the fine weather of the last few days having dried out the ground and the flags set in place, the Glenlea is rapidly rounding into shape and will be ready for play over the weekend.

The greenkeeper and his staff have been busy for the last few weeks improving the layout and putting the course in first-class shape ….

Tee boxes and benches are in place. (Ottawa Journal, 19 April 1935, p. 21).

The improvements of 1935 included new greens: “The two new greens which have been newly constructed this spring will be ready for play this weekend” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1935, p. 12).

Figure 102 Annotated 1938 aerial photograph.

One of the new greens built in the mid1930s was at the eighth hole. As can be seen from the photograph to the left, the original green of this par-four hole was a simple, square, push-up green (push-up greens appear in aerial photographs as squares or rectangles, with the three raised edges standing out from the front edge). There were no bunkers defending this green.

The new green was rectangular, and it was defended by three bunkers on the left and three bunkers on the right. It would also have been a push-up green with a steep drop off the back.

Similar “improvements” were planned for the 1936 season:

“The club expects to have a very excellent year, and new improvements in the clubhouse and on the course are being planned and will be put in operation following the sanction of the [general] meeting” (Ottawa Journal, 23 March 1936, p. 15). It turns out that additional new greens had been built by the end of the 1935 season: “Several improvements to the course have been planned by the executive, and the new greens, which should be well matured by the time the members start swinging their clubs around the first tee within a few weeks, should add to the enjoyment and pleasure of the players” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 March 1936, p. 11).

Figure 103 An annotated 1938 aerial photograph.

One of the new greens was on the third hole (today’s seventh).

The photograph to the left shows that the original green was located on the flat area in front of the new elevated green (today’s seventh green). The original green was well-defended by side bunkers and a cross bunker in front of it. The new elevated green would eventually have two deep bunkers added on its left side, and the bunker at the front right of the green would be more than doubled in size. (Further work on this elevated green in 1951 would produce the punch bowl green we have today.)

And there were more improvements underway late in the 1936 season that would greet members at the beginning of 1937: “The [1936] season drawing to a close has been very successful at the Glenlea Club and improvements to the course underway at present promise a first-class golf course for players next year” (Ottawa Journal, 26 September 1936, p. 18).

Work in 1937 including renovation of greens, as we can see from the club’s optimism about the 1938 season: “Prospects are bright for a good season, and with the acquisition of new equipment for the development of the course, and the reconstruction of several greens, the Glenlea Club looks forward to the best season” (Ottawa Journal, 4 April 1938, p. 15).

The aerial photograph below shows the state of the course in 1938: the routing of the golf course remained exactly the same as appears on the 1933 aerial photograph shown above as Figure 95, but there were changes to greens and changes to bunkering around greens, and so on the photograph below I mark hole numbers beside the greens to draw attention to these areas.

Figure 104 Annotated 1938 aerial photograph. Photograph courtesy of Ross Heuchan, Royal Ottawa member.

As we know, by 1938, the location of greens on the third and eighth holes had been changed. The first green had been elongated and built on an angle inclining about twenty degrees to the right of straight play onto the green. Bunkers were added on the left and right sides of the second fairway and on left of the second green along the property line. Two wing bunkers were added to the fourth green (the deep bunkers that guard the eighth green today). A continuous bunker curled around three sides of the fifth green. The seventh green received a bunker and the ninth green received two wing bunkers. As we have noted, the punchbowl tenth green received two bunkers, and so did the fourteenth. A bunker was placed behind the seventeenth green (perhaps to inhibit balls from running under the water tank beyond) and bunkering at the eighteenth hole became fierce.

The new greens and the new bunkering evident in the photograph above were built by Bourgeau and his crew, and Glenlea clearly decided that he had been doing very good work and deserved the best equipment with which to do it:

retention of the services of Sam Bourg[e]au, greenkeeper, have been provided for.

Equipment for the care of the course has been overhauled and with better provision under the new setup for materials and supplies [the club was to be taken over by a local group “expected to provide the golfers with a generally improved course”], a first-class course is promised to golfers. (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19).

In 1939, course improvements continued. In the spring, one of the first items of business addressed by the new board of directors was the question of “the completion of the 16th green” (Ottawa Journal, 7 April 1939, p. 16). At the end of May, we learn that “A new green has been made on No. 16 and it will be ready for play very shortly” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 May 1939, p. 11).

After ten years of continuous work on the greens, the club reported that “the greens are in the best shape in the history of the club” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 May 1939, p. 11). And so, the club’s newspaper advertisements during the summer of 1939 invited golfers to “Play golf this weekend at the Glenlea over this greatly improved course. Greens are in beautiful condition” (Ottawa Journal, 1 July 1939, p. 3).

Alas, they would not match this beautiful condition for many years to come. The whole course, in fact, was at a peak that it would never again achieve.

The Scorecard

Figure 105 Lyn Stewart’s reconstruction of the original eighteenhole scorecard. Supplied by Joe McLean courtesy of Barbara Stewart.

Long after the original Glenlea layout had been modified several times after World War II, Lyn Stewart (the son of owner W.H. Stewart) reconstructed the original scorecard from memory: his handwritten version of it is shown to the left.

Note that the seventeenth hole was lengthened at one point to play as a par five. And note also that the R.C.G.A. length at which a hole should be regarded as a par five was 450 yards in those days. Holes six and eleven were measured differently over the years, ranging from 440 to 460 yards, so they were sometimes regarded as par fours and sometimes regarded as par fives.

Accordingly, the par score for the original eighteen-hole layout was sometimes reported in the newspapers as 71 and sometimes as 72 (but never as 70).

Golf-Ball Crimes and Misdemeanours

The members of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club and the Royal Ottawa Golf Club may generally have come from different social brackets, but they seem to have placed a similar value on their golf balls.

At the beginning of the 1934 golf season, “The Royal Ottawa Golf Club sent [Hull City Council] a copy of a letter which was forwarded to Hull South [Council] asking that the sale of golf balls be prohibited on the Aylmer highway. The club is asking that a bylaw to this effect be adopted” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 May 1934, p. 12). Royal Ottawa got its way and so, by the end of 1934, selling golf balls along Aylmer Road had become prohibited.

The South Hull official to whom Royal Ottawa sent this letter was the Secretary-Treasurer of South Hull council: none other than W.H. Stewart. The latter would retire as Secretary-Treasurer in the fall of 1934, but not before helping council to craft the bylaw about the golf-ball crimes and misdemeanours in the neighbourhood of his golf course.

With the new bylaw in force, and continuing to be frustrated by the local culture of golf ball theft and resale that had sprung up along Aylmer Road, Royal Ottawa invited Glenlea to join it in hiring a lawyer to charge people involved in the practice:

Figure 106 J.A. Aylen, K.C. Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1939, p. 13.

J.A. Aylen, K.C., who represented the Royal Ottawa and the Glenlea clubs, … [explained] that the prosecutions were undertaken to put an end to a “racket” which had grown up on the Aylmer Road and was causing a great deal of annoyance and inconvenience to golfers.

“Youths making a business of selling golf balls on Aylmer Road offer some wonderful bargains in new and nearly new balls,” Mr. Aylen remarked.

“They have two main sources of supply. The first is from caddies who steal them out of members’ bags. Thefts of this description have grown to alarming proportions, and it is very difficult to catch the guilty parties. The second source from which these balls come is by young men trespassing on the links and picking up any that may be on the links, including balls actually in play.

(Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6)

At the end of the 1935 golf season, Glenlea and Royal Ottawa charged six people with breaking the bylaw, lawyer Aylen explaining: “South Hull passed a bylaw some time ago at the instance of the golf clubs to prohibit the sale of golf balls on the Aylmer Road and we are laying … complaints under this bylaw” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6). The six young men, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty, “were arrested by Alfred Latreille, special constable retained by the Royal Ottawa and Glenlea clubs” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 1).

This court case received substantial newspaper coverage:

Golf Ball Thefts From Two Clubs Result in Fines

Youth is Convicted of Selling Balls on Aylmer Road – Many Caddies Are Discharged

In a determined effort to stamp out large-scale thefts of golf balls from members of Aylmer Road golf clubs, committed by organized gangs of caddies and youths of the vicinity, the Royal Ottawa and Glenlea Golf Clubs prosecuted six young men in Hull Magistrate’s Court this morning.

Four who pleaded guilty were fined $1 with the alternative of spending three days in jail, and two others were remanded ….

Ronald Barrette, 17, of Hull, was sentenced for offering golf balls for sale on the Aylmer Road contrary to the South Hull bylaw, and Armand Marion, 20, Albert Levesque, 19, and Octave Dussaume, 17, all of Hull, were fined for trespassing on the Glenlea links. (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 1)

The lawyer acting on behalf of the six young men made two arguments. First, he explained, there had been no intention to trespass on the Glenlea golf course: “the boys had been looking for mushrooms and had inadvertently walked on the golf links. There were no signs warning them off” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6). Second, he explained, the golf balls had not been stolen; rather, they had been found: “the balls they picked up had been driven off the course into the ditches beside the highway” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6).

Judge Roland Miller did not buy either explanation.

On the one hand, he observed, “The excuse that these clubs have not large signs warning trespassers off the course is valueless. The clubs don’t have to put up such signs. They have paid large sums for the property and lay out many thousands of dollars yearly to maintain them and are entitled to full protection” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6). On the other hand, he said, the claim that the balls were all found in ditches off the club’s properties was unbelievable:

Members of the complainant clubs don’t believe that all these golf balls offered for sale along the highways are balls that were accidentally played out of bounds, and I agree with them.

I can’t bring myself to believe that golfers at the Royal Ottawa and the Glenlea are such poor players that they drive dozens of golf balls off the course daily. (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6)

Alas, Judge Miller seems not to have been a golfer; otherwise, he might have known that it is perfectly possible for golfers at any golf club to drive dozens of balls off their course daily.

The two golf clubs were pleased with the success of this initial prosecution and indicated that they would charge others with the same complaints: “Officials of both clubs affirmed their intention of continuing criminal prosecution until the thefts and trespasses had been stamped out” (Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6).

At the same time, however, there was frustration that the golfers who supported this “racket” by buying the golf balls were beyond the reach of the officials at Royal Ottawa and Glenlea:

Figure 107 William Fraser Hadley.

Commenting on the organized thefts, Col. W. Fraser Hadley, honorary secretary of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, blamed buyers of the golf balls more than the youths who sold them.

“Some of these people who bought balls when driving along the road are very lucky that they weren’t subpoenaed as witnesses in these cases,” he told The Journal. “As long as there are buyers, the boys will continue to steal and sell the balls.”

Col Hadley remarked that more than a dozen caddies at the Royal Ottawa had already been discharged for participating in the racket.

(Ottawa Journal, 11 October 1935, p. 6)

The golf clubs were true to their word. Charges were laid again the next year, but the “lawyering” was not adequate:

Golf Ball Charge Not Correctly Laid

Holding that the charge should not have been laid under the Criminal Code but under a South Hull bylaw, Judge H. Achim this morning dismissed a charge of offering golf balls for sale preferred against Eugene Lalonde, 21, and A. Joanette, 19, both of Hull.

A warrant had been taken out against the boys by Redmond Quain, K.C., acting on behalf of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, after the two young men had been caught in the act of trying to sell golf balls on the Aylmer Road.

A South Hull bylaw provides a fine for persons found guilty of offering golf balls for sale within its limits. (Ottawa Citizen, 21 July 1936, p. 2)

The problem clearly persisted for a number of years, with constable “Eugene Decosse, of Quebec Provincial Police,” trying to stay on top of the matter in 1938: “Announcement was made today by Mr. Decosse that he is checking up closely on youths offering golf balls for sale to motorists and others on the Aylmer Road with a view to stamping out thefts on the different courses there” (Ottawa Journal, 7 July 1938, p. 12).

Officials at the golf clubs stamped their feet, but selling golf balls on the Aylmer Road never seems to have been stamped out.

Indeed, golf-ball crimes and misdemeanours in the area escalated, for by 1938 the driving ranges that had sprung up along Aylmer Road also became the targets of golf ball theft. In 1938, one driving range had 900 golf balls stolen, and “at the other driving range, Lyn Stewart, proprietor, told the court that a small building on his premises had been broken into and 300 balls taken” (Ottawa Journal, 7 July 1938, p. 12).

It turns out that the problem of golf ball theft was quite general at Ottawa area golf courses in the 1930s:

Constable Borden Conley, of Nepean township, … received several complaints from golfers [at McKellar Golf Club] that youths were hiding in the bushes and stealing the balls from the fairways before the players could retrieve them….

Other clubs in the Ottawa area have complained to police of similar trouble.

Lask week at the Hunt Club on Bowesville Road, several brand new balls were stolen by youths who hid in the bushes near the roadway or on adjoining farm land. (Ottawa Citizen, 26 June 1939, p. 4).

I suppose it is worth bearing in mind that the straitened financial circumstances faced by many during the Great Depression of the 1930s made the relatively easy (albeit illicit) acquisition and sale of golf balls an attractive way of making a bit of money.

A Visit from the King and Queen

Figure 108 The cover of The King and Queen in Canada and the U.S.A.: A Beautiful Pictorial Record (London: George Newnes, Limited, 1939).

In 1939, from May 17th to June 15th , King George VI and Queen Elizabeth toured every province of Canada, as well as Newfoundland and parts of the United States. War with Nazi Germany seemed imminent, and so the British government sent a reigning monarch to Canada for the first time to reinforce allegiance to the Crown in the event of war.

The tour was a great success. Huge crowds attended every official event.

On the afternoon of Saturday, May 20th, however, there was a less well-attended unofficial event when the King and Queen spontaneously decided that they needed a break from their stifling itinerary in Ottawa and Hull and arranged an impromptu escape to the farm of William Allen, where they chatted with him at the future site of today’s third green and fourth tee.

Press accounts of their unscheduled escape from official duties were extensive. Note in the item below that the reporter for the Montreal Star filed the story from “Glenlea Golf Club”:

King and Queen Slip Away For Walk in Woods

Family at Aylmer Overcome by Intimate Visit From Royalty

GLENLEA GOLF CLUB, Quebec. May 22 – (Star special) – How The Queen put an extra pair of walking shoes in the Royal auto while His Majesty put in a spare coat, then sneaked off to the woods to pick wildflowers, while 5,000 people at the garden party in Ottawa waited and wondered where the Royal couple were, is one of the most interesting sidelights of the Royal tour so far….

It all started when, after the luncheon with Premier Mackenzie King, the King and Queen decided they would like to go out into the woods and pick wild flowers. They had learned from Lady Tweedsmuir that there was a good quiet spot just off the Aylmer Road, about three miles from Hull.

This particular place is just west of the Glenlea Golf Club, on a side road [Allen Road] running north …. But although it is handy to the paved highway, it is little frequented. Lady Tweedsmuir discovered the spot and liked it because the countryside reminded her of the Old Land. (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24)

Figure 109 Left to right: Queen Elizabeth, King George VI, Lord Tweedsmuir, Lady Tweedsmuir, Ottawa, May 1939.

Although Lady Tweedsmuir, the wife of Canada’s Governor General ( Lord Tweedsmuir), had discovered this spot, it was the Governor General himself who walked this route most frequently. He had become well known to the farmers along the road. In fact, local farm residents who spied the royal couple on their unscheduled walk at first thought that they had simply seen the vice-regal couple again.

The car carrying the King and Queen arrived mid-afternoon at the intersection of Aylmer Road and what is today called Allen Road, turning from the paved highway onto the gravel lane that was then part of William Allan’s farm. Just a few minutes before this,

Ralph McConnell, son of Conrad McConnell, whose farm home stands on the Aylmer Road at the corner of the road up which the royal party walked, was working … with two of the farm’s hired men …. [when] the police radio car stopped within a few feet of them, and one of the constables walked over to them and asked if they would like to see the King and Queen.

They would not believe that such royal visitors were approaching until they were told to go to the radio car and hear for themselves.

They heard radio headquarters giving instructions for the visit, and in a few moments the royal car itself drew up behind the police car, and Their Majesties alighted. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

Farmer Allen’s lane was completely blocked to traffic of any sort, for accompanying the royal car was a considerable convoy:

[Parked in Allen’s lane] was a police car in which were Albert Canning, Chief Constable of Scotland Yard; S.T. Wood, Commissioner of the RCMP, and deputy chief George McLeod of the Ottawa Police department.

Also accompanying the royal automobile were eight motorcycle constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and nine of the City police force. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29).

The secret visit was a secret no more.

As soon as they emerged from the royal car, “the King and the Queen greeted the young farmers [at McConnell’s house] as they stood there in their overalls, soiled with their work, and asked them if this was a good road for a quiet walk” (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29) The Queen posed the same question to two people at the nearby bus stop: “The first thing that two ladies waiting for the Aylmer Road bus knew, the Queen came from nowhere and asked: ‘Is it all right to go up here?’ The lady in question did not answer coherently. She just said: ‘I think I am going to faint’” (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24). These two ladies – Mrs. Howard Routliffe and Mrs. A.C. Routliffe (they were married to cousins of Hubert Routliffe) – enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame:

“Is this a good road to walk on?” queried Her Majesty, and the reply, in accord, was, “Yes.”

“Is the road dusty?” she asked, and received again a double answer, in the affirmative….

“I was so excited I never even thought of curtseying, said Mrs. A.C. Routliffe, “and neither did my sister.”

(Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 1939, p. 20)

The King and Queen set out on their adventure “a few hundred yards to the northwest of the Glenlea Golf Club” (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29). They “walked along the rustic gravel lane [Allen Road] which leads from the Aylmer Road to the Side Road [now known as McConnell Road], and then along the Side Road for a distance of about a quarter of a mile” before returning as they had come, but along the way back they stopped for a conversation with Mrs. Howard Routliffe’s son, Ray, who was heading to his uncle’s house, his face streaked with the remains of a chocolate drink he had just mixed for himself but drank in too much of a hurry (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29).

The Queen asked him his name and his age, and she patted him on the head (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29). And Ray was not the only one to receive a pat on the head:

“The Queen patted Snap,” said little seven-year-old Ray Routliffe proudly yesterday, when he told me about meeting the King and Queen on the road east of Aylmer on Saturday afternoon.

Figure 110 Ray Routliffe and Snap stand where they met the King and Queen on the Side Road (today's McConnell road). Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29.

Snap is a mongrel dog. With his little master, he was walking along the second concession road in the township of South Hull. A lady and gentleman appeared, walking toward little Ray….

His heart missed one – and then two – beats. He recognized the gentleman and lady. They were the King and Queen.

They stopped and the Queen crossed a ditch to pick a few adder tongues (or dog-tooth violets).

Little Ray is still so excited about the meeting that he does not remember exactly what Queen Elizabeth said to him, but, with gleaming eyes, he said, “She is lovely.” He does remember that the Queen dd not ask if his dog was cross: “She just took a chance.”

Ray handed me a bouquet of red and white trilliums which he had picked that morning for the Queen. “Would you take them in to her from me?” he asked and was very disappointed when told I did not expect to see the Queen this afternoon.

I told Ray he would receive a chocolate bar for every sentence he could remember.

Ray’s eyes were wistful. “I’d like chocolate bars, but I can’t remember,” he sighed. (Jean Logan, Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 1939, p. 20)

According to farmhouse residents who observed a mysterious couple walking west along the concession road, the King and Queen had walked slowly on the way out – “loitering and having a good time” – but “on the way back, they certainly walked briskly” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 1939, p. 20).

When they returned to the royal car, William Allen and his sister Ida Allen were waiting for them:

W.L. Allen, well-known Aylmer Road dairy farmer, was standing in the yard of his home when the royal party stopped at the foot of the gravel lane that separates his farm from that of Conrad McConnell.

He called his sister, Ida, to come and see their visitors, and when she was about halfway to the lane across the field, he suggested she go back and get her camera. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

The farmhouse where Ida lived with her brother was located slightly beyond the point where the cart path turns to run around the back of today’s fourth green, and the field that she ran across to the fence along Allen Road where she met her brother was at that time a level field where we now find tees for the fourth hole and a massive pond excavated in 1982.

Figure 111 William Allen stands on his lane (now called Allen Road), near where he talked with the King and Queen. Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29. He stands at the base of the hill that rises to the site of his cattle barn (where we find Champlain’s 3rd green today). To his right flows the creek at the base of this hill which then made its way across his fields to the Glenlea clubhouse (just visible in the background between his right shoulder and the fencepost).

William Allen climbed over his fence intending to follow the King and Queen up Allen road: “Mr. Allen started to stroll up his lane behind Their Majesties when one of the plainclothes guards stopped him. When he explained he was the owner of the property, the guard smiled and allowed him to continue” (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29).

Still, “Mr. Allan offered to ‘climb back over his fence if it would make them feel any better,’” and when “general laughter amongst the party waiting behind the royal couple resulted’ from this quip, Allan seems to have decided to wait and converse with members of this party until the King and the Queen returned:

“They were at once very friendly, and one of the guards told me His Majesty just wanted to get out into the country for a few minutes for a stroll and a quiet smoke,” said Mr. Allen.

The proprietor of the farm entered into easy conversation with Lady Nunburnholme, the Queen’s Lady-inWaiting, as she rested in lush green grass beside the road. After discussing farming affairs with her, he told her he would dearly love the opportunity to grasp the King’s hand.

“Now I think that could be arranged, Mr. Allen,” replied Lady Nunburnholme. In the meantime, Mr. Allen’s sister had approached the waiting party, and as she stood behind the wire fence along the side of the road, Mr. Allen introduced her to the Lady-in-Waiting. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

Figure 112 Lady Nunburnholme (née Lady Margery Wynn-Carrington) (1880-1968), circa 1939.

Ida also engaged in conversation with Lady Nunburnholme, who explained why she had not accompanied the Queen on her walk: it was apparently a question of “not having the right shoes” (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24).

Ida was attended at the fence by her housemaid and two of her brother’s hired men, one of whom, William Watt, seems to have confided to her that he hoped she would be able to take a picture of him with members of the royal party, for when the King and Queen reappeared in the distance, walking briskly back toward them along Allen Road, she turned to the “hired man standing nearby who had been chewing tobacco. ‘You’d better get those tobacco stains off your face before the Queen sees you,’ she ordered. He retired to clean up a bit but came back” (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24).

And then, suddenly, the royal couple was back:

As the Queen approached to within a few feet of Mr. Allen, he addressed her with these words: “Your Majesty, I am much honoured by your visit to my property.”

To which the Queen replied, “Oh, are you the owner?” and walked up to him and shook his hand warmly. Then the King shook hands with him. Mr. Allen then presented his sister, who was standing behind the fence, and the Queen walked from the middle of the road where she was standing, across the wide grass margin, up a small grade, and shook hands with her across the fence. His Majesty the King followed suit, and soon the little group were engaged in easy and happy conversation….

The Queen had picked some wild flowers on her walk and was carrying a few in her hand when she returned. She asked [Mr. Allen] what they were and he told her they were cowslips. [The Montreal Star reported that the Queen had a similar conversation with Ida: “’What kind of flowers are these I have picked? she asked. ‘They are dogtooth violets, Your Majesty,’ she replied” (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24)].

The Queen asked Mr. Allen about his farm, what he had growing in the different fields, and expressed her delight with the beauty of the countryside. The King also chatted with the farmer and asked him the extent of his farm.

“I have 300 acres here,” said Mr. Allen.

“That’s a fairly extensive farm,” replied the King, “What is your principal produce?”

“I’m a dairy farmer, principally,” he answered.

“How many cows have you?” asked his Majesty.

“I have 75,” said Mr. Allen.

“And where do you keep them all?” His Majesty wanted to know.

“Right over there in that barn, sir,” replied Mr. Allen, pointing to a large barn about 75 yards inside his property from where the King was standing.

Mr. Allen said His Majesty made an involuntary step toward the barn, as if he intended to go in and see the cattle, but then he appeared to change his mind, and remained on the road gazing at the barn for a few moments. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

The barn at which the King was gazing stood on the site where Champlain’s third green stands today. Coincidentally, it was while the King was looking in the direction of the future third green from his vantage point near the site of the future fourth tee that Allen suddenly brought up the topic of golf!

Just by way of saying something which he thought might interest the King, Mr. Allen told his Majesty that his farm was surrounded on three sides by golf clubs: the Glenlea, Chaudière, and Rivermead.

The King asked him if he played golf, and Mr. Allen replied that he didn’t play very much.

“You certainly should be well supplied with golf balls, at any rate,” replied his questioner. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

Allen may have mentioned the golf courses because they could see the Glenlea clubhouse nearby and they could see on the far side of the Aylmer Road the flag waving on the Chaudière’s first green.

Emboldened by the easy conversation in which they were engaging, farmer Allen asked for a favour:

Mr. Allen … felt sufficiently at ease with Their Majesties to suggest they permit his sister to take their picture. They expressed their willingness readily and stood together in the road while Miss Allen took a number of exposures….

Miss Allen also took a picture of Lady Nunburnholme standing by the roadside with William Watt, one of Mr. Allen’s hired men, to whom the Queen also spoke a few friendly words.

After chatting for about 15 or 20 minutes with Mr. and Miss Allen, the King and Queen bade them farewell and returned to their car to be whisked away back to their official duties. (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29)

When reporters learned that Ida had taken these photographs, she was pressed for access to them. At first, she demurred: “I do hope they turn out, but I was so nervous I am afraid I may have spoiled them” (Montreal Star, 22 May 1939, p. 24). Then she put her foot down: “When interviewed later, Miss Allen stated she would under no circumstances release her pictures for publication, as she understood the King and Queen did not wish to have photographers about, and she intended to respect their wishes by not having her pictures published” (Ottawa Journal, 22 May 1939, p. 29).

Figure 113 Is this the photograph of the Queen “smiling graciously” when she noticed Ida Allen snapping her picture? Supplied by Robert Grainger. Email to the author 24 September 2020.

Yet what seems to have been one of Ida Allen’s photographs eventually emerged. Seen to the left, it shows the King and Queen, accompanied by one of their plainclothes guards, striding briskly along Allen Road. I wonder if this is the photograph that Ida Allen mentioned to Ottawa Citizen reporter Jean Logan: “Miss Allen had her camera and took a number of pictures of King George and Queen Elizabeth and said the Queen smiled graciously when she realized she was being snapped” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 1939, p. 20).

Ida Allen may well have kept her photographs private, as promised. The photograph above (on the back of which is written “Aylmer Road”) was sent to me by Robert Grainger, who researches and writes about the Ottawa neighbourhood known as Champlain Park. He found it in an album of family photographs shown to him by people connected to Champlain Park. This family may have acquired it through connection to the Allens.

Privatizing Glenlea

By 1938, perhaps the difficulties of running a golf club during the Great Depression had finally caught up with the member controlled Glenlea Golf and Country Club. The board of directors announced at the club’s annual meeting that spring that “Consideration will … be given a new policy by which the present club will be converted into a strictly private golf club and, if this transpires, a new name will be chosen” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 February 1938, p. 12).

But this rather startling proposal ended not with a bang, but with a whimper: the board of directors announced in April that “At this time it has not been found opportune to change the operation of the club as was intended” (Ottawa Journal, 4 April 1938, p. 15)

And so, the club did not become privately owned in 1938, but between 1938 and 1939 the board of directors continued to work towards a new management structure.

In April of 1939, the directors made another attempt to privatize the club and revealed a proposal that had been “under consideration for several months”:

A special general meeting of the shareholders of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club is being held tonight at the clubhouse on the Aylmer Road to ratify the leasing of the property by a local group which will operate the club under an arrangement that is expected to provide the golfers with a generally improved course and re-arranged clubhouse facilities. (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19)

The announcement above implicitly admits that the member-owned club’s ambitions with regard to the improvement of both the golf course and the clubhouse had not been achieved either to the degree or at the rate desired. The “new setup” promised a better way forward: “Equipment for the care of the course has been overhauled and with better provision under the new setup for materials and supplies, a first-class course is promised to golfers” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19).

The new operators must have been impressed by what Bourgeau had achieved with relatively limited resources, for the directors seem to have been told by the local people taking over the club that they wanted him signed up for another year: “retention of the services of Sam Bourg[e]au, greenkeeper, have been provided for” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19).

There was also an announcement in the spring of 1939 of the resolution of a problem that had arisen in connection with practices regarding group memberships: “Proposals for an equitable arrangement of memberships were discussed and finally put over for settlement by the incoming board of directors” (Ottawa Citizen, 7 March 1939, p. 10). A group membership plan seems to have created problems for the unsuccessful Hillcrest Golf and Country Club fifteen years before: in its attempt to achieve the membership total required to trigger construction of its golf course, Hillcrest had contrived a plan for groups, such as public servants in this or that government department, to purchase a collective membership – a plan that seems to have rankled members who had been required the year before to buy stock at $100 per share to earn playing privileges. The Glenlea directors had tried to increase membership funds in this way in the late 1930s, but the complaints of full members about inequities in these arrangements seem to have reached a tipping point. The new board of directors dealt with the matter before the new group took over: “elimination of special group considerations that have prevailed in previous years provides a more equitable arrangement for all golfers” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19).

So, who were these new proprietors who had grand ambitions for the club and proposed a new way of doing things?

The Corrigans Cross the Aylmer Road

In 1938, Stan Corrigan (1910-2000), a left-hander who played off a twelve handicap at the Chaudière Golf Club, which his father Ambrose Eugene (“Gene”) Corrigan had founded, took up membership at Glenlea. This move proved to be the beginning of a significant migration.

Figure 114 Frank Corrigan (1914-1967). Canadian Golfer, vol 18 no 4 (August 1932), p. 220.

In the spring of 1939, a rumour emerged that Stan’s younger brother Frank, the best amateur golfer in the Ottawa area (five-time winner of the City and District Championship at that point), would also leave the Chaudière to play at Glenlea: “The report is around that Frank Corrigan will play his golf out of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club this season. The local champion played from the Chaudière for years, but it is reported that he will cross the Aylmer Road to a new club this summer” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 May 1939, p. 10).

Frank indeed moved to Glenlea. And even more surprising was the fact that his father followed him.

Frank and his father had long been a team on the golf course: in 1932, “A.E. Corrigan and his son, Frank, of the Chaudière Golf Club” (who “is today one of the most promising young amateurs in Canada”), “easily led a large field” at Royal Montreal to win the “Pater et Filius Quebec Championship,” “the first time in the history of the event the father and son tournament … was won by other than a Montreal pair” (Canadian Golfer, vol 18, no 5 [September 1932], p. 288). A.E. Corrigan also played with all three sons (Frank, Stan, and James) in the annual Father-and-Three-Sons tournament held in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto in the mid-1930s.

Why did the Corrigans cross the road?

It was not just (as in the old joke about the chicken) to get to the other side. It was to get the other side: they were in the process of becoming the new proprietors. Gene Corrigan seems to have been the major player in the “local group” that was said in the spring of 1939 to be about to take charge of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. His sons Frank and Stan, who were the two sons associated with their father in A.E. Corrigan and Sons, Limited, were probably the other members of the group.

Gene Corrigan had been instrumental in the creation of the Chaudière, the person singled out by Sir Robert Borden as the key to the club’s success. Influential in Ottawa business as the managing director of the Capital Life Insurance Company and influential in Ottawa education as a leading member of the board at the Ottawa Collegiate Institute (renamed Lisgar Collegiate), Corrigan was the one who in April of 1923 “completed the purchase of the Eddy farm on the Aylmer Road adjoining the Country Club property and near to the Royal Ottawa Golf Club…. Mr. Corrigan states that he has purchased the property with a view to establishing a new golf course” (Ottawa Journal, 19 April 1923, p. 16).

Figure 115 Ambrose Eugene Corrigan (1881 -1939).

The Chaudière Golf Club was subsequently organized by Corrigan’s company: the Chaudière Golf and Realty Company.

One of the things that Borden particularly appreciated about Corrigan was his hands-on work to realize the vision of architect George Cumming: Corrigan was regularly on site with his greenkeeper, Fred Bingham, helping him literally to build the golf course.

In an interview thirty years later with an Ottawa Citizen sports writer, the Chaudière’s first golf professional, Harry Mulligan, fondly recalled Gene Corrigan, crediting him with helping to democratize golf in the national capital region:

Working with A.E. Corrigan, Harry helped to get the first pay-as-you-play course [Chaudière] on its feet.

“It was the greatest thing that happened to golf in Ottawa,” the diminutive Glenlea pro stated.

“It gave young golfers of the city, those with not too much money, a chance to play the game…. The thing I liked about Mr. Corrigan was the fact that whether they had money or not, they could still play a round or two,” Mulligan recalled. (Ottawa Citizen, 3 May 1955, p. 19)

A similar observation was made by an anonymous member of one of the established exclusive golf clubs in 1929: “A.E. Corrigan made golf popular in Ottawa when he built the Chaudière and brought the game within the reach of the man of average means” (Ottawa Journal, 27 May 1929, p. 19).

One wonders if Corrigan saw proprietorship of Glenlea as a way of continuing his legacy in this regard.

Father Gene and son Frank were excellent golfers, certainly the best of the golfers in the Corrigan family. All told, they would win the Quebec provincial father and son tournament five times – three years in a row from 1932 to 1934.

Gene Corrigan played left-handed. “Of powerful and imposing physique,” he “was in the public eye for many years through his prowess on the golf links” (Ottawa Journal, 2 December 1939, p. 7). At the official opening of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club’s temporary nine-hole course in September of 1919, for instance, he was paired with another local amateur golfer to play an exhibition match against the course designers Karl Keffer and Davie Black (Le droit, 3 September 1919, p. 2). In 1921, he won the Rivermead club championship.

And Frank Corrigan, as suggested by Joe MacLean, was probably the Ottawa area’s greatest amateur golfer of the twentieth century (as documented comprehensively in Joe MacLean and Martin Cleary, “Frank Corrigan: A Tragic End for an Ottawa-Area Champion Golfer,” Flagstick [2 April 2023]). In addition to his many Ottawa City and District championships, he won the eastern Ontario championship, and both the Quebec Amateur and Open championships.

When Frank tied the Glenlea course record of 69 in September of 1939, he was playing in the company of his father. We can get an idea of the prodigious distances that he hit the golf ball in the account of some of his drives during his 1940 victory over the best amateur players in the area in the Glenlea Field Day competition:

The Glenlea star was hitting the ball straight and long, especially in the last nine.

For his birdie on the 445-yard, par 4, eleventh hole, he was on the green in two and sank a 12- foot putt.

Corrigan reached the green with a spoon [three-wood] shot on the par 4, 260-yard, thirteenth, but needed two putts to finish.

He really ‘pasted’ one on the 15th. His tee shot was only five yards off the green – almost 300 yards. (Ottawa Citizen, 25 July 1940, p. 10).

Although newspapers do not name Gene Corrigan as the head of the local group taking over Glenlea, we can tell that he was implicitly in charge of the club by the end of 1939. By September, for instance, he had assumed the role of chairman of the greens committee, although he was not a member of the golf club, let alone any of its committees, in April, when the “chairman of greens” was none other than “W. Lyn Stewart” (Ottawa Journal, 28 April 1939, p. 19). And by the time of the club’s closing banquet, Gene Corrigan was acting as if he owned the place: he himself had just donated the two prizes he awarded that night for golf played by member’s that day, and he closed with a speech in which he “told of the improvements planned for the course next year” (Ottawa Journal, 2 October 1939, p. 19). Corrigan was running the show.

Note that during the 1939 golf season, Frank Corrigan represented the Chaudière club until the beginning of July. At the end of that month, however, he was representing Glenlea. This fact may indicate that the Corrigan-led “local group” had finalized the deal for control of Glenlea in mid-July.

In December of 1939, however, Corrigan’s reign at Glenlea suddenly came to an end: he died.

Figure 116 Ottawa Citizen, 24 February 1940, p. 7.

Two months later, the notice to the left appeared in Ottawa newspapers.

Gene Corrigan seems to have organized a partnership with his sons called the “Glenlea Club,” and the partnership seems to have been judged unviable without him, for it was dissolved on 31 January 1940.

Control of the club reverted the next day to the member-owned company, “the Glenlea Golf & Country Club, Incorporated.”

Although no longer proprietors, the Corrigan brothers still actively supported Glenlea as members of the club. Frank was elected to the Glenlea executive committee in March of 1940 alongside its secretary, Lyn Stewart, and the latter’s father W.H. Stewart.

Frank was also appointed to the greens committee, and Stan was appointed to the match and handicap committee.

And so, the Corrigans did not re-cross the Aylmer Road.

Soldiering on During World War II

The Corrigans might have been able to stabilize Glenlea’s financial situation, but Gene Corrigan’s death foreclosed that possibility, so the club soldiered on during World War II, lapsing back into its member-owned mode of operation. Yet, as we know, the member-owned operation was so financially constrained that for several years the board of directors had been in favour of privatizing the club.

The 1940 season began with an advertisement designed to attract new members. It declared” “Many improvements [are] planned over most picturesque Golf Course in Ottawa District” (Ottawa Journal, 6 April 1940, p. 26). And Harry Mulligan talked to newspaper reporters in the same terms: “Improvements now under way … are being rushed through before the real season” (Ottava Journal, 1 May 1940, p. 19).

Figure 117 In the 1940s, two women tee off from the 1st tee of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, watched by the starter visible on the left side of the photograph beyond the shrub (which was planted in the early 1940s to beautify the first tee). Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1949, p. 15.

It is likely that continuing with the “improvements planned” and “the improvements now underway” depended upon signing up a significant number of new members.

An April advertisement enticed applications for new memberships by offering 1/3 off “Annual Fees”: $20 for men, rather than $30 – IF the fees were paid by April 18th (Ottawa Journal, 6 April 1940, p. 26). But then the deadline was extended to May 4th, and the annual fee was dropped further to $18.

If discounted membership fees were not enough, the club added a soft-sell strategy to its new advertisements: “Situated in lightly wooded, rolling countryside, freshened by the invigorating air of the Gatineau mountains, the GLENLEA offers the pleasures of golf under conditions that will thrill the heart of every lover of summertime outdoor activities” (Ottawa Journal, 2 May 1940, p. 18).

Surely $18 for a season of heart thrill was a good deal!

Club management certainly produced some successes in 1940: “The Club House has been completely remodelled and re-decorated, offering a much larger dance floor, in a much airier and smoke-free atmosphere” (Ottawa Citizen, 14 May 1940, p. 22). But there was no talk of specific work on the golf course.

Figure 118 Ottawa Citizen, 6 September 1940, p. 16.

Throughout the year, the executive committee let it be known that Glenlea supported the war effort. There was a special announcement in the spring: “A special membership will be extended to representatives of various military units who will be located here this season” (Ottawa Journal, 9 March 1940, p. 31). And there was another announcement in September (shown to the left) that the club would close for the day “world prayer for victory,” as requested by the King (who had strolled past Glenlea hardly a year before).

At the beginning of the 1941 season, the Ottawa Citizen said that “The Glenlea … enjoyed one of its best seasons last year,” and the Ottawa Journal said that “Last year was the club’s best in recent years” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 March 1941, p. 12; Ottawa Journal, 3 April 1941, p. 20). But these claims cannot have been based on the club’s finances; they must have referred to the club’s successful tournaments and social events.

In 1941, signs of club distress began to emerge more clearly as the war called people away from the club: everyone from members to employees, and among employees everyone from caddies to ground staff.

At the beginning of the year, for instance, there was a general fear that there would not be enough caddies to go around at the seven Ottawa golf courses: “many of the caddies have enlisted in the armed forces”; at Royal Ottawa, “40 of the 130 caddies at this club have enlisted in the army,” and “Glenlea have also lost several, but younger boys are ready to take their places” (Ottawa Journal, 30 April 1941, p. 25).

At Glenlea, there was apparently a shortfall of members. In the spring, the club again offered reduced membership rates for those who paid the annual fees in April. The newspapers reported a rush to take up such offers. Then they reported rumours at the club that these generous offers would soon expire, so people must hurry to take up the offer. And yet, in June, after these offers had indeed lapsed, a new advertising campaign was launched once more to offer low rates for new members. As the advertisement below indicates, the club needed fifty more men and twenty-five more women:

Figure 119 Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1941, p. 13.

Still, throughout the year, the club strove to improve the member’s experience.

Figure 120 William Mulligan (1896-1978). Charlotte Observer, 5 May 1929, p. 30.

For the first time, for instance, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club was able to make available to members two first-rate golf professionals: “Bill Mulligan, formerly a pro in the Maritimes, is assisting his brother, Harry Mulligan, at the Glenlea” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 May 1941, p. 10). William (“Willie”) Mulligan, mind you, was probably earning his living not through a salary paid by the club, but rather from lessons and club repairs tossed his way by his brother.

During the same season, the executive committee was proud to boast: “a new system of watering the fairways and greens at the back end of the course is being installed” (Ottawa Journal, 8 April 1941, p. 18).

Otherwise, however, there was little talk of improvements. In fact, “improvements” mentioned in the newspapers in 1941 were confined to alterations in the shower room and to painting of the locker rooms.

And then, perhaps betokening troubles to come, the grand old clubhouse (originally built for the Highlea Tennis and Country Club in 1925) burned to the ground just a few days into the new year.

Burning Down the House

At 4:00 on Sunday morning, 25 January 1942, Bill Sewart finally went to bed after a busy Saturday evening at the Glenlea nightclub. Within minutes, however, he was standing behind the clubhouse in the snow, one shoe on but the other foot bare, and urging his wife and daughter, who were standing on the verandah roof above him, to jump into his arms.

The Glenlea clubhouse was engulfed by flames:

Mr. Stewart told The Citizen that the last patrons … had left about two o’clock in the morning. Shortly after four o’clock, he went to his room to retire for the night. He had previously gone through the main floor of the building and everything seemed to be in good order….

He had been in his room about ten minutes and was getting ready to go to bed when he heard crackling sounds in the wall and then something that appeared like an explosion. The second floor where he was living with his family was almost immediately filled with smoke, and flames enveloped the building.

Mr. Stewart rushed across the hallway to awaken his wife and daughter who were sound asleep in their rooms. Mrs. Stewart and her daughter grabbed a few articles of clothing but as they came to the stairway leading to the ground floor, smoke was so heavy that they took refuge on the roof at the rear of the building. At the risk of his life, Mr. Stewart made his way through a wall of flames and managed to reach the main door. He ran to the rear of the building and found his wife and daughter shivering on the edge of the roof.

There was no ladder available and he urged them to jump for their life before it was too late. The daughter jumped in his arms and escaped unscathed. Mrs. Stewart also made the 15-foot leap but fell to the icy ground and suffered hip and back injuries…. Mr. Stewart … suffered a frozen left foot. He only had time to put one of his shoes on before escaping from the building and stood barefooted in the snow for some time while he was rescuing his wife and daughter….

After saving his wife and daughter, Mr. Stewart managed to push his car out of the garage located in the basement of the club. In his excitement, he was unable to start the motor and one side of the car was badly scorched….

Mr. Stewart led his wife and daughter to his car where they stayed until some neighbours arrived and took them to their private home, some distance west on the Aylmer Road….

The chief steward, Mr. Stevenson, who was in the furnace room at the time of the outbreak, made his way through heavy smoke and flames and was badly burnt about the neck and head in his escape….

Mr. Stevenson told The Citizen that he was attending to the furnace in the basement when he heard an explosion overhead. He ran up to the main floor and succeeded in making his way through heavy smoke to the main door. Flames were spreading rapidly through the building and soon shot through the roof. Mr. Stevenson met Mr. Stewart at the front of the building and helped in the rescue of other members of the family….

The reflection of the fire could be seen for miles in the dark night…. Burning embers were carried in the direction of the W. Allen farmhouse, quite a distance away, but did not set fire to the farmhouse nor outbuildings.

A large icehouse located at the rear of the club fell prey to the flames. The pro golf shop, situated some 50 feet away, was saved.

The fire is believed to have originated in the walls of the building…. Alterations had recently been made to the club to provide a larger number of rooms to comply with the Quebec Liquor Commission regulations. (Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 1942, p. 20)

Figure 121 The top photograph, showing the Glenlea Golf and Country Club clubhouse in the late 1930s, is from the archives of Lyn Stewart. The bottom photograph was taken the day after the fire.

Less than twelve hours after the fire broke out, “scores of people visited the smoking ruins of the once fashionable clubhouse on Sunday afternoon” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 1942, p. 20).

The photographs to the left show the clubhouse before and after the fire. In the top photograph, one can see the doors of the garage in the basement where Bill Stewart kept his car. In the bottom photograph, in the very spot where he managed to push it, the car appears (in it, Mabel Stewart and her daughter Madeleine took shelter).

Interviewed on the day of the fire, Bill Stewart was uncertain whether he would rebuild the clubhouse, but just over a month later, he had plans drawn up for a new clubhouse and by the end of March had arranged for its construction.

This new clubhouse, however, would be more modest, and it would not double as a nightclub:

At the annual general meeting of the Glenlea Golf Club … plans were announced for the rebuilding of the clubhouse, which was destroyed by fire last January ….

The new clubhouse, to be used for golf only, will be built on the site of the previous one and will include suitable accommodations for both ladies and men of the club.

Provisions for lockers, showers, lounge rooms and dining room, together with a central main lounge for members and their friends only, has been made in the plans.

The contract for the building has already been let and it is expected that the facilities will be available not later than May 1. (Ottawa Citizen, 31 March 1942, p. 10)

During World War II, however, building supplies not related to the war effort were hard to come by, so it took a year longer than expected for the clubhouse to be completed

The New Clubhouse

Plans for the new clubhouse attracted a good deal of favourable comment in the Ottawa newspapers in March and April of 1942.

It was reported early on that “The building … will be of a rustic design” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 March 1942, p. 14). That is, “Of cement and wood construction, the upper part is of log siding” (Ottawa Journal, 25 April 1942, p. 29). And with building materials in short supply, the rustic siding would not detract from wood supplies needed for the war effort: “Some of the lumber which will go towards the construction of the club house will come from the heavily wooded section at the back of the Glenlea property” (Ottawa Citizen, 11 March 1942, p. 14). And so, of all the clubhouses ever associated with the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, this one would be in a literal sense the most representative of the property.

Figure 122 Ottawa Journal, 25 April 1942, p. 29.

A sketch of the architect’s “rustic design” can be seen above: “The building will be a two-storey affair, built on the log cabin style. On the main floor will be the showers and a locker room, while above will be the lounge, offices, and dining hall. The second floor will be surrounded by an outdoor verandah” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 March 1942, p. 11).

As noted in the preceding chapter, this new clubhouse was scheduled to be ready no later than 1 May 1942. Then it was announced it would open a month or two later. A year later, at the end of April of 1943, we read that “It has been announced that the clubhouse will be completed within two weeks and will be in readiness when the season gets under way” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 April 1943, p. 15).

There would be no nightclub facilities in this clubhouse. It was “raised as temporary club rooms for summer golfers” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8). It “also housed the bulky cutting and trimming machinery … used to keep the golf links in shape during the summer season” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8).

It was “for golf only” (Ottawa Citizen, 31 March 1942, p. 10).

The Crisis of 1943-45

The question of how long the Glenlea Golf and Country Club would continue as a member-owned corporation continued to hover in the air. No viable offer to buy the club had emerged from either an individual or a syndicate during the winter of 1942-43. And so, at the 1943 general meeting of members, “It was definitely decided that the club would continue as a membership golf club to be operated by and for the members for the 1943 season” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 March 1943, p. 11).

But in 1943, there was a prior question to be addressed: would the golf club operate at all?

The war was taking a significant toll at all golf clubs, insofar as many members had left to serve in the war effort, fewer people were playing daily green-fee rounds of golf, and shortages of workers and resources meant that maintaining a golf course became harder and harder. By 1943, golf clubs in the Ottawa area faced the real question of whether they would carry on for the remainder of the war.

The Arnprior Golf Club ground to a halt before the end of 1943 and very nearly disappeared, surviving only because of a concerted revival effort the next spring. Glenlea members had asked themselves during the winter of 1942-43 whether the club should carry on in 1943. They reached their decision for 1943 in March: “plans will be made to operate again this season” (Ottawa Journal, 23 March 1943, p. 16). They were not alone in doing so: “Like most other clubs in the district, the Glenlea has … decided to carry on as usual this summer” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1943, p. 9).

Newspaper reports in 1943 indicate the kind of problems that were cropping up. At Rivermead, there was a shortage of caddies: “Early in the season the caddy situation caused many to worry over the thought of toting a heavy bag around 18 holes” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 May 1943, p. 9). At Gatineau, rationing of gasoline supplies was making it difficult for members to travel to the club:

The president impressed upon the members the necessity for close co-operation in order that another successful season could be assured. One of the most important problems is transportation and he requested the members to get together and pool their cars. With this in view, a car committee was formed to go into the situation thoroughly. (Ottawa Journal, 24 March 1943, p. 14)

At Glenlea, there was a shortage of golf balls. Golf ball manufacturers having turned factories over to the making of products needed in the war effort, Glenlea members wondered whether there was a point to beginning the 1943 season if they were only going to run out of golf balls before it was over, so the executive directors made an announcement: “Despite fears that a shortage of golf balls might develop, club members were assured that enough balls would be available to carry them through the season” (Ottawa Journal, 24 March 1943, p. 14).

Glenlea’s executive committee moved on quickly from existential concerns to expressions of optimism: “all signs indicate a successful season…. Locker rooms and showers have been repainted and reconditioned. The course is rounding into shape …. Membership is satisfactory and members will not experience difficulties in transportation” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1943, p. 20).

And there were, indeed, successes during the 1943 season. The clubhouse expected to have opened in May of 1942 was finally opened in May of 1943. In mid-May, Glenlea was admitted to the Province of Quebec Golf Association. Around the same time, the board of directors approved a reforestation of the property: “An extensive landscaping program is under way at the Glenlea. Between three and four thousand spruce trees are being planted on the course” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 May 1943, p. 9). And finally, after fourteen years, there was a hole-in-one on the fifth hole (today’s eleventh): “Harold P. Costin became a member of the Hole-In-One Club yesterday afternoon when he accomplished the feat with a driver on the 235-yard fifth hole at the Glenlea Golf Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 1943, p. 16). Another Ottawa newspaper remarked: “The feat marks the first time in the club’s … history that a hole-in-one had been achieved on this par three hole” (Ottawa Journal, 28 June 1943, p. 21).

But there were signs of trouble early in the season.

At the beginning of May, all local clubs had golf professionals hired and in residence as the 1943 season began – except, that is, for Glenlea: “No professional has been named at the Glenlea as yet” (Ottawa Citizen, 1 May 1943, p. 14). And although usually one of the first clubs to open each year, in 1943, Glenlea was the last, and it was also the last to establish and publish its fixtures list.

All local golf course openings had been delayed by an unusually late spring: snow covered many parts of the Glenlea course until late in April. It was not expected to be dry enough for play until the first week of May. Still, optimism was the order of the day: “the course is rounding into shape and it is expected that all 18 holes will be playable by opening day” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1943, p. 20). The official opening day was May 8th, probably the latest ever at Glenlea or Champlain, and even at that point conditions were not good: “Most of the holes are open for play at Glenlea with temporary greens in use” (Ottawa Journal, 8 May 1943, p. 29).

Although the executive committee had proclaimed in the spring that membership was “satisfactory,” it was not (Ottawa Citizen, 29 April 1943, p. 20).

Figure 123 Ottawa Citizen, 14 May 1943, p. 21.

In a continuing attempt to attract new members, Glenlea had lowered its membership fees drastically. In 1939, dues had been $30 for men, $25 for women; as can be seen in the advertisement shown to the left, 1943 dues were $20 for men; $15 for women.

A spring advertisement in Le droit invited former members to come back to the club: “Les directeurs espèrent que les anciens membres reviendront encore plus nombreux cette années pour s’adonner à leur sport favorite. Le parcours est on excellente condition et tout laisse prévoir que la saison de 1943 sera de plus prospères » (Le droit, 7 May 1943, p. 15).

The “new board of directors” proclaimed that it was “looking forward to a banner season,” indicating that this expectation was “owing to the substantial reduction of membership fees,” yet having fewer members than the club would have liked, and with such members as it had paying significantly reduced fees, revenues must have dropped substantially in 1943 (Ottawa Journal, 10 April 1943, p. 27).

Figure 124 Circa 1940 Glenlea clubhouse photograph from the scrapbook of Lyn Stewart, supplied by Joe McLean courtesy of Barbara Stewart.

Also suppressing revenues in the spring of 1943 was continuing bad weather. The club said by its sign nailed to the tree beside Aylmer Road, “Daily Golf Players Welcome,” but rain made for an unwelcoming environment. Bad weather extended for several weeks the period after the May 8 th opening during which temporary greens had to be used. In fact, the regular greens were not ready for play until May 22nd, and even then the second and fourth greens would not be ready until they received “final treatment” during the following week (Ottawa Citizen, 21 May 1943, p. 20). What sort of green fee could have been charged for play on temporary greens?

And what happened during the week following the final treatment necessary to bring greens two and four into play? Well, when it rains, it pours: “Due to conditions of the course at the Glenlea, the playing of the Emerald Cup [mixed two-ball] competition was postponed until next week. The heavy rain left the fairways in a soggy condition, making it impossible to cut the fast-growing grass” (Ottawa Citizen, 31 May 1943, p. 15). Never mind the green fee that they might have been charged, how many “Daily Golf Players” would have been willing to pay anything at all to play in the bad conditions that prevailed until at least the first week of June?

In the context of these unfortunate circumstances, what happened next should not be a surprise.

In July, the day before the club championship was to be held, a mysterious announcement appeared in the Ottawa newspapers: “A meeting of the members and the executive of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club will be held tonight at 8:30 at the clubhouse. All members are requested to attend the meeting since important decisions will be taken” (16 July 1943, p. 17). Although nary a word is said about it in the Ottawa newspapers, it seems that Glenlea members agreed at this meeting to abandon the 1943 season.

After this special July meeting, there is not a single reference in the newspapers to any of the remaining fourteen events on the club’s 1943 fixtures list.

Another of the “important decisions” taken at this mid-July meeting seems to have been to let Harry Mulligan go, for a mid-August mention of him in the Ottawa Journal refers to “Harry Mulligan” as “formerly a professional at the Glenlea Club but now unattached” (18 August 1943, p. 18). In retrospect, perhaps it was a sign of financial troubles on the horizon that the club had held off on re-hiring Harry Mulligan until the last possible moment, the announcement that he would be back at Glenlea coming only on May 10th , a few days after the official opening (Ottawa Journal, 10 May 1943, p. 12). The club had presumably saved a month’s salary by the delay in hiring him.

Mulligan was employed elsewhere by the spring of 1944; after 15 years at Glenlea, he was appointed head pro at the Gatineau Golf and Country Club. The Glenlea board of directors had not replaced him by the time of their first meeting in the spring of 1944: “Glenlea officials have not, as yet, named a successor to Mulligan who was the only professional the club ever had” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 March 1944), p. 11).

And although spring came early in 1944 (at the beginning of April, Gatineau members were “reporting the course in excellent shape after playing the entire 18 holes”), the Glenlea Golf and Country Club had not even held its annual general meeting by April (Ottawa Journal, 10 April 1944, p. 17). Furthermore, the announcement that this meeting would soon be held indicated that it would only be at this mid-April meeting that “plans for opening the golf course – probably in a couple of weeks – [would] be made” (Ottawa Citizen, 10 April 1944, p. 9). Eventually, a plan was announced: “Although the club was late in starting, it is hoped to have nine holes open for play over the weekend” (Ottawa Journal, 22 April 1944, p. 20).

Was the late start (and the relatively limited ambition of opening just nine holes) a sign that the club lacked a head greenkeeper and adequate ground staff? After all, just up the road at Gatineau, preparations for the new golf season had been underway since mid-March: “Although the golfing season is still some weeks distant, Greenkeeper Joe Brunet … has not been idle. Joe has cleaned snow from many of the greens to avoid spring kill. He predicts an early start for the local divot diggers” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 March 1944, p. 11).

It seems that the signs at the beginning of the 1944 golf season were no more auspicious than they had been at the beginning of the previous season.

Figure 125 Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1944, p. 14.

Perhaps it is not a surprise, then, that during the whole of the 1944 golf season, there was not a single reference to any club competitions at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, or any club activities at all.

Instead, advertisements in the newspapers throughout June encouraged daily green-fee play (as seen in the item shown to the left). Rube Mullen, the golf professional hired to replace Mulligan, offered clubs for rent by the occasional golfer.

The 1945 season was no different.

Although from 1944 to 1945, individual Glenlea members were now and then reported as representing the club in golf tournaments at other clubs in the Ottawa are, it would not be until August of 1946 that Ottawa newspapers were once again able to report on the results of club competitions at Glenlea, including the men’s and women’s club championships.

Never mentioned in the Ottawa newspapers from 1944 to 1945 was the fact that the Glenlea Golf and Country Club had not opened its full eighteen-hole golf course during the last two years of the war. Each year had begun with the expectation (or perhaps merely the hope) that it would do so, but, in practice, the Glenlea had become a nine-hole golf course.

Mullen Changes

Executive committees had been mulling the privatization of Glenlea for at least eight years, so it is not surprising to learn in the spring of 1945 that there was to be a take-over by a syndicate of businessmen:

New Group Takes Over Glenlea Course

The Glenlea Golf Club will operate under new management this year according to an announcement made after a meeting held last night.

A group of businessmen has arranged to take over the club this summer and plan to have a new watering system among other improvements for the 18-hole layout. (Ottawa Journal, 13 March 1945, p. 14)

The leader of this group of businessmen was Rube Mullen’s brother, August William Herbert (“Gus”) Mullen (1890-1954). He would assume the Glenlea club presidency mid-year.

Figure 126 A.W.H. ("Gus") Mullen. Canadian Golfer, vol 23 (October 1937), p. 9.

Like the Mullen brothers Rube and Wyman, Gus was an excellent golfer, but whereas Rube and Wyman made careers as professionals, Gus remained an amateur, earning his living from the end of World War I to 1930 in the advertising department of the Ottawa Citizen and then becoming a businessman with a number of mining interests.

Rube was a hockey star, and so was Gus, playing “flying wing for the Gatineau Point stars” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 October 1918, p. 8). Then, he became a “well-known hockey magnate”: in particular, he managed a ladies’ hockey team – the Hull Vesta Ladies Hockey Club – for which his sister Daisy played goaltender (Ottawa Citizen, 2 October 1918, p. 8). He was quite ambitious on behalf of women’s hockey: “It is understood that Manager Mullen favors the organization of a league extending from the North Pole to Carlsbad Springs” (Ottawa Citizen, 6 December 1916, p. 8).

He also managed the Wakefield Baseball Club in the early 1920s and then led a syndicate that obtained the Hull City franchise in the Ottawa City Baseball League. In 1924, “A.W.H. ‘Gus’ Mullen won an Aylmer-to-Britannia swimming race” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 July 1942, p. 8).

But of all the sports in which he excelled, he was best at golf. He became “one of the golfing ‘greats’ in the Ottawa Valley during the 1930s”:

Almost every golf club in the Ottawa Valley knew – and liked – Gus Mullen. Every spare moment he had was spent on one of the district golf courses…. His entry into district competitions took him to nearly every green in the area. He won city and district championships on several occasions and was known for his keen competitive play. (Ottawa Journal, 5 February 1954, p. 18)

He first joined the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, establishing the course record in 1924 and winning the Ottawa City and District Championship the next year:

Seizing the opportunity presented by perfect weather conditions and displaying thirty-six holes of brilliant and unwavering golf, A.W.H. (Gus) Mullen, of the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, more than justified the hopes of his friends and club mates by turning in a notable total of 156 strokes over the links of his home club yesterday and thereby winning the title of Amateur City and District Champion for the season of 1925 and the Gerald Lees Trophy that goes with it. (Ottawa Citizen, 25 June 1925, p. 10)

He won the same title again in 1930 and 1931.

He then moved to the Gatineau Golf and Country Club and continued to play in the top local amateur competitions but found himself displaced as the premier local amateur by young Frank Corrigan. But the “doughty veteran” occasionally caught lightning in a bottle and gave Corrigan a good fight:

With both players shooting sub-par golf, Frank Corrigan, of the Chaudière, and Gus Mullen, of the Gatineau, finished in a deadlock yesterday in the invitation field day held at the Gatineau Golf and Country Club. Playing in a field of 61 competitors, Corrigan and Mullen both toured the 18-hole layout in 71s, one stroke under par, to lead all others by a comfortable margin. (Ottawa Journal, 22 July 1937, p. 16; 19 August 1937, p. 17)

Mullen was a class act: “it was too late to arrange a playoff, and Mullen kindly agreed to accept the prize for low gross on the first nine while allowing Corrigan the major low gross award” (Ottawa Citizen, 19 August 1937, p. 10).

There was instant karma. A few weeks later, Mullen won a prestigious provincial invitational tournament:

Defeating one of the smartest fields to gather here for an invitation tournament, A.W.H. “Gus” Mullen of the Gatineau Country Club, Ottawa, stroked his way to victory over the picturesque [Stanley-Thompson-designed] Seigniory Golf Club course here this weekend….

The exhibition of the Gatineau player on Saturday was one of the soundest ever displayed in this provincial classic. (Ottawa Citizen, 13 September 1937, p. 11)

In 1939, he placed first among seventy-nine competitors in “the most successful invitation field day in the history of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 July 1939, p. 10). Mullen shot 72, beating second-place finisher Frank Corrigan by one stroke.

It is no wonder that the old star and the young star became linked in the golfing public’s imagination: “Frank Corrigan carved himself out a three-under-par 69 at the Gatineau. Corrigan is the second amateur to shoot a 69 there this year. Portly Gus Mullen [in the 1920s, he was six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds] was the other. The club pro, Rube Mullen, holds the course record with a 68” (Ottawa Journal, 30 August 1939, p. 16)

Figure 127 Gus Mullen. Ottawa Citizen, 25 September 1942, p. 16.

In the early 1940s, Gus Mullen became a member of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club and joined Frank Corrigan and Lyn Stewart as leaders of the club’s men’s team. In 1942, he won the club championship. But then a heart ailment that plagued him for the rest of his life forced him to give up golf.

As the Glenlea club’s new president, Gus Mullen was immediately mulling over a big change: he wanted to return the golf course to a full eighteen holes.

Reading between the lines of his president’s report on Glenlea’s affairs in October of 1945, we can see that it is more instructive about the club’s history during the last two years of the war than were the optimistic statements published in the newspapers at the time. At Glenlea’s closing banquet,

[Mullen] gave his report of the club’s activities for the past year and outlined a very promising program for 1946.

Mr. Mullen stated that machinery has now been ordered, including a new tractor, which will permit the development and maintenance of a full 18-hole course during 1946, which will be one of the finest golf courses in the district.

The program includes a complete renovation of the greens and in view of the heavy expenditures, it would seem a banner season may be expected next year. (Ottawa Citizen, 24 October 1945, p. 11).

Reading against the grain of the optimism above, one infers that the club had not been able to maintain its full eighteen-hole course in recent years and that overall maintenance had declined to the point that greens needed renovation.

Sure enough, despite reading assurances in the previous two years that after nine or twelve holes had been opened each spring, it would only be a matter of time before all eighteen holes were open, we finally read an acknowledgement in 1946 that “During the last couple of years only nine holes have been kept open at the Glenlea due to war-time restrictions” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1946, p. 21).

There was a reassurance at the end of March that things would be different under Mullen: “Glenlea Golf Club will return to full-scale operation this season with 18 holes in play” (Ottawa Citizen, 30 March 1946, p. 20). And there was more reassurance in the middle of April: “Work is going ahead rapidly on the course and twelve holes will be ready for play this weekend. The full eighteen holes will be in play at an early date. The course has wintered well and with proper treatment will be in very good condition despite damage caused by neglect during the war years” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 April 1946, p. 16).

It all sounds so familiar.

These announcements by the club proved to have been nothing more than whistling past the graveyard. There would not be eighteen holes in play until 1953, and they would not be the eighteen holes that had been in play at the beginning of the war.

Mullen was elected club president for four consecutive terms from 1945 to 1948, and then for another three consecutive terms from 1950-52. He died in 1954, after heart illness that had troubled him for more than a decade.

The Great Contraction of 1947

Glenlea’s difficulties during the war years brought the club to a momentous decision: no more struggling to open all eighteen holes; it would officially contract from eighteen holes to nine.

Figure 128 Bobby Alston. Ottawa Citizen, 15 March 1947, p. 25.

In connection with the club’s new plans, local golfer Bobby Alston was named Glenlea’s head pro in 1947. In terms of tournament results, he was the most accomplished golf professional ever hired by Glenlea:

Alston has been a pro at Métis Beach, seven years at the Chaudière, two at the Rivermead and last season was at the Gatineau Golf Club. He has won several important tournaments in the past, including the Quebec Open once, the Ontario Open in 1936 and 1937, the Quebec Spring Open four times, was leading Canadian pro in the Canadian Open in 1936 and twice runner-up in the Canadian PGA. (Ottawa Journal, 8 March 1947, p. 22)

Alston was appointed to oversee the contraction:

Nine-Hole Layout For Glenlea

The Glenlea Golf and Country Club is adopting a new policy for the 1947 season.

At the annual general meeting last night in the clubhouse, it was decided to turn the 18-hole layout into a nine-hole course.

The best nine holes in the layout will be incorporated under the supervision of Bobby Alston, new club professional….

Glenlea heads figure they can provide a fine nine-hole course. (Ottawa Citizen, 15 March 1947, p. 25)

The Ottawa Journal confirmed that the new head pro was the boss in this matter: “Bobby Alston … will have charge of arranging the new layout” (Ottawa Journal, 15 March 1947, p. 27). But Alston may not have had carte blanche in his choices.

After World War II, W.H. Stewart sold part of the land on which the original Keffer design was laid out:

The original course was … considered by experts to be one of the finest in this part of the country. However, during the war, with the decline of golf activities, part of the course was allowed to run down, chiefly because of the scarcity of help.

Following the war, a number of acres were sold and … the course has been only nine holes. (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1952, p. 22)

It was the eastern half of the golf course contiguous to the Royal Ottawa course that was sold, and it was Royal Ottawa that bought it. And so, it is possible that Alston was advised by W.H. Stewart in 1947 that he intended to sell the eastern half of the golf course and that therefore Alston would not be able to use Keffer’s original eighth, ninth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth holes. Alston, that is, may have had just twelve of Keffer’s holes from which to select his nine for the new course.

Alston’s course comprised Keffer’s first six holes and then his tenth, eleventh and eighteenth holes.

Figure 129 Annotated aerial photograph from 1965.

Alston’s design legacy derives from his transformation of Keffer’s tenth hole: a 175-yard par three. This hole plays today as Champlain’s thirteenth. Alston was the one who turned it into a par-four hole.

Mind you, it was still a par-three hole when Alston’s nine-hole course opened in 1947, but by 1949 the par-three tee had been abandoned and a new tee was built in an area about twenty-five yards north of today’s thirteenth tee, producing a hole officially said to have been 350 yards long (see the aerial photograph to the left).

To emphasize visually that the new seventh hole should be played as a dogleg bending to the right, a row of trees was planted along the left side of the fairway (the trees are marked on the photograph to the left).

To protect golfers on the new seventh tee from errant golf shots played on the preceding hole, and to protect golfers on the preceding sixth green from errant drives played from the seventh tee, a row of trees was also planted between the sixth and new seventh fairways (these trees are also marked on the photograph to the left).

Today, however, nothing of the original trees remains except for large old decaying stumps (two of them are marked on the contemporary photograph shown below).

Figure 130 Annotated contemporary photograph from November 2023.The massive stumps marked above (around which new trees have sprung up) are the remains of trees planted to separate Alston’s new 7 th tee and 7 th fairway from the 6 th fairway and 6 th green (todays 12th fairway and 12th green). Alston’s second 7th tee and his 7 th fairway became today’s 13th tee and 13th fairway.

By 1951, Alston’s original seventh tee had been moved forward by twentyfive yards to its present location, making the hole 325 yards in length (the location of the first and second seventh tees is indicated on the photograph to the left).

As when the seventh hole was said in 1949 to have been 350 yards long, however, this new 1951 distance of 325 yards was probably produced by measuring not as the crow flies but down the centre of the fairway on a line following a gentle dogleg right, for the distance as the crow flies was about 300 yards.

The club seems to have been happy with the results of Alston’s work:

“A.W.H. Mullen, club president, reported that conversion of the former course into a picturesque nine-hole layout has proved popular, and added that nine permanent watered greens have been provided” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 March 1948, p. 19).

Even after the course was later made an eighteen-hole layout in the early 1950s, the Alston nine-hole course was revived as late as 1956 as a circuit used at the beginning of the year when other parts of the course were wet in the early spring.

Burning Down the House, Again

Recall that Glenlea’s second clubhouse had been built in 1942 as certain building materials were hard to come by during World War II, and so it had been “raised as temporary club rooms for summer golfers” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8). There was a kitchen for preparing meals for members and guests, but there was no dance hall or nightclub operation.

By 1949, however, W.H. Stewart was ready to invest further in the clubhouse, as his head pro, Bobby Alston, explained to the Ottawa Citizen at the beginning of the season: “Mr. Stewart was … in the midst of completing plans for an extension” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8).

As fate would have it, however, Glenlea’s second clubhouse caught on fire in March of 1949: “The fire jinx that has hit the Glenlea Golf and Country Club in recent years struck again shortly after eight o’clock last night and reduced the spacious building to a mass of twisted wreckage” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8).

The conflagration was quite spectacular and attracted hundreds of spectators who spent hours watching the fire consume the building and even threaten nearby structures:

The blaze broke out in the kitchen of the clubhouse. It was first noticed by “Bobby Alston,” club golf pro, and Walter Kelley [club employee]. Alston was in his cottage at rear of the club and saw smoke pouring from a window. Kelley was inside, near the front of the building, and saw smoke seeping from the kitchen. Alston went in but was forced back by smoke as Kelley staggered out through the fumes. (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1949, p. 3)

Another club employee, Harold Stevenson, was also in the building:

“We didn’t have time to save a thing,” Mr. Stevenson told The Citizen.

“All our clothes, money, in fact everything we own was in the building. Mr. Kelly was forced to leave the building with little more than underclothes and a pair of trousers.”

“We were lucky to escape with our lives,” Kelly said. (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8)

As when Royal Ottawa’s first clubhouse burned down in 1909, as when its second clubhouse burned down in 1930, and as when the first Glenlea clubhouse burned down in 1942, “Nothing could be done to save the building as there is no municipal fire service in the area and no mains are laid at that point” (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1949, p. 3).

Thought to have started in the kitchen, “The fire raced through the one-storey building, till within a few minutes, the entire building was a mass of flames,” and for “more than half an hour” the flames threatened “two smaller buildings, one, the home of Bobby Alston, golf professional, and the other a storage shed” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8). Alston removed many of his belongings from the “pro’s house,” but his building and the nearby shed were both saved when the wind changed direction.

But there was still plenty to hold the attention of those who had come to see the clubhouse “disintegrating before their eyes” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8):

In addition to the building, a car owned by the club’s proprietor, W.H. Stewart, was lost in the blaze. Mr. Stewart had left the vehicle parked at the south side of the club, near the main entrance, and had tried to start it shortly before eight o’clock. It would not start, and he left it and took a bus into Hull.

Figure 131 W.H. Stewart's car burns. Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1949, p. 3.

Nothing was saved from the building.

Intense heat from blazing timbers drove spectators back and prevented anyone from entering the building to save furniture or other stocks. So great was the heat that a 500-foot circle around the club was turned almost to a lake as the snow melted.

An east wind carried burning embers from the structure across the 500 yards of fields separating the clubhouse from the farm of William Allen and created a hazard to farm buildings. The sparks went into a barn of the Allen farm and a snow-bucket-chain was formed to prevent the building from burning.

The billowing smoke, fed by 500 gallons of fuel oil just delivered to the club Monday, blanketed the Aylmer Road for nearly 300 yards west of the club and stopped traffic for nearly 15 minutes.

The glare, reflected from a low overcast sky, could be seen for miles, and hundreds of spectators from Ottawa, Hull, Nepean, and Aylmer drove to the club to watch. As the blaze died, and only the foundations were left, the timber-filled cellars still poured heat and flame, and the glare could be seen for more than two hours after the fire was first discovered.

A large stock of beer and liquor was destroyed. For nearly three hours, spectators stood and watched as the quarts exploded one by one with a small, pathetic puff of steam and the dull “plop” of a bursting bottle.

Figure 132 Le droit, 22 March 1949, p. 1.

What effect the fire would have on the club’s chances of getting the fairways and the greens in shape for the golf year could not be determined. The main fairway and green cutting machines were lost in the blaze…. They are difficult to replace. (Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1949, p. 3)

Another New Clubhouse

As the second clubhouse was burning to the ground behind him, Bobby Alston told a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen that “he was quite sure the clubhouse would be rebuilt” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 8). And he was right:

Glenlea Club To Be Rebuilt

Members of the Glenlea Club will have a place to hang their hats next summer despite the fire which last night destroyed the Aylmer Road building.

William Stewart, manager and owner of the golf club, said this morning that the clubhouse would be rebuilt “as soon as we can get the materials and labor.”

He thought that “with any luck,” the club should be ready in about two months, or “just in time for the golfers.” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 March 1949, p. 16)

Four months later, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club invited the public to the “Official Opening” of its “New Club House” (Ottawa Journal, 26 July 1949, p. 20).

Figure 133 The third clubhouse of the Glenlea Golf and country Club, circa 1950. Lyn Stewart archives.

It was an “innovation”:

The management of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club offer an innovation to club-goers, introducing to the Ottawa district a modern supper-club in a country setting.

You are invited to visit the modern new clubhouse situated on the beautiful Aylmer Road, only ten minutes drive from the heart of Canada’s Capital, and participate in the golf or social activities offered for your pleasure.

In addition to a picturesque 9-hole golf course, the Glenlea offers …. a spacious clubhouse architecturally designed to cater to parties large or small, including private dinners, bridge luncheons, receptions, ski parties and banquets.

Figure 134 Architect's rendering of the clubhouse of the Glenlea Golf and Country Club. Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1949, p. 15.

The smartly appointed dining room with “picture” windows overlooking green fairways is a perfect setting for that delicious cuisine you’ll enjoy at the Glenlea …. (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1949, p. 15)

Figure 135 Undated photograph of William Lynwood Stewart (son of W.H. Stewart) in the Glenlea clubhouse. Photo supplied by Joe McLean courtesy of Barbara Stewart.

In the photograph to the left, Lyn Stewart stands beside the Glenlea trophy display case in the banquet room of the new clubhouse.

In the early 1950s, during the winters, there was dancing nightly in the new Glenlea clubhouse. Then came dancing and entertainment five or six nights a week.

The Glenlea was on its way to becoming, along with the Gatineau and the Chaudière, one of the most popular “nightclub hotspots” in the Ottawa region (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1980, p. 2).

From 1963 to 1974, “The Rowan Brothers” were the resident band at the Glenlea: they became better known as “The Playdates” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 October 1974, p. 37). They also appeared frequently on local television stations.

Figure 136 "Dennis Rowan and his popular 'Playdates' now playing at the beautifully renovated Glenlea Golf Club." Ottawa Citizen, 16 April 1963, p. 35.

The Stewarts Take Control

Between1925 and 1929, W.H. Stewart had purchased the approximately 180 acres of land on which the Glenlea golf course was laid out, and he had subsequently leased this land and its golf course to various corporations that ran the golf club, from the member owned Glenlea Golf and Country Club, Limited, to the “Glenlea Club” partnership of the Corrigans (Gene Corrigan died before the “Glenlea Club” could be incorporated), to the syndicate led by Gus Mullen.

Figure 137 Logo of the Glenlea Golf Club.

But on 22 September 1950, “letters patent” were issued to “William Henry Stewart, manager, of the City of Ottawa, and Mabel Lillian Cross, wife … of said William Henry Stewart, of Ottawa, Province of Ontario, and William Lynwood Stewart, secretary-treasurer of the Town of Aylmer, Judicial District of Hull, for the following purposes: to conduct and manage a country and social club under the name of the ‘Glenlea Golf Club, Limited.’”

For the first time, the Stewart’s owned both the land and the golf club.

One reason may have been Lyn Stewart’s personal ambition to restore the golf course to an eighteen-hole layout and to make the golf club a first-class operation.

In the 1950s, it was reported that he had “big plans for the club in the future” (Ottawa Journal, 13 May 1955, p. 30).

Lyn Stewart

William Lynnwood Stewart (1915-2002) first appears in relation to the Glenlea Golf and Country Club as a teenager in 1934 when, misreported as “Len” Stewart, he was one of “Three players tied for low gross honors in the junior golf tournament held … at the Glenlea Golf Club. Toddy Booth, Ottawa Hunt Club, Len Stewart, Glenlea, and J. Young of Rivermead all toured the Glenlea course in 81 strokes” (Ottawa Journal, 2 July 1934, p. 9).

It was just five years before this, when Stewart was fourteen years old, that the Glenlea golf course opened, but he seems to have been interested in golf from an even earlier age. He told Ottawa Citizen sports writer Randy Boswell that he had “been golfing since childhood” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 August 1988, p. 97). According to Flagstick writer Joe McLean, “Stewart was introduced to the game at a young age, caddying on the links at Rivermead, Chaudière … and Glenlea” (Joe McLean, “William Lynwood (Lyn) Stewart,” Flagstick.com, 29 April 2013). Perhaps when his father began entertaining the idea of adding golf to the sports played at the Highlea Tennis and Country Club in the fall of 1925, ten-year-old Lyn was one of those encouraging him to do so.

Figure 138 Lyn Stewart with one of his early trophies. Photo supplied by Joe McLean courtesy of Barbara Stewart.

In 1934, as a nineteen-year-old, Lyn Stewart won his first Glenlea club championship. He defended the title in 1935, 1936, and 1937. Could he win it a fifth time in a row?

Lyn Stewart retained possession of the Sir William Clarke Cup, emblematic of the club championship at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, by defeating W.B. Pettit after 36 holes of match play.

Stewart came from behind to win the last three holes to go one up at the 36th, after a very close match.

This is the fifth consecutive year for Lyn Stewart to win the championship. (Ottawa Journal, 15 September 1938, p. 21).

Stewart loved tournament play and became a respected competitor in local amateur golf competitions in the 1930s and early 1940s.

In 1936, he tied for first with two others in the Glenlea Invitational Tournament, vanquishing seventy other competitors (Ottawa Journal, 23 July 1936, p. 19). In 1938, he shared with Gus Mullen the low gross prize for the first nine holes at the Gatineau Invitational Tournament (Ottawa Citizen, 19 July 1938, p. 13). In 1941, he finally won the Glenlea Invitational:

Shooting the second-best game of his golf career, Lyn Stewart of the home club carried off the low gross honors in the Glenlea Golf and Country Club’s Invitation field day yesterday. [“More than sixty golfers teed off in the tournament”.]

Stewart needed forty strokes, five over par, on the outgoing nine, but once he turned for home, his game warmed up to a pitch that was almost as hot as the weather and he chopped a stroke off par for a 35 and a gross 75. (Ottawa Citizen, 1 August 1941, p. 11)

We see in 1942 evidence that his game stood up on other courses, too: “Lyn Stewart posted a low gross 80 to win the Capital Trust Trophy, emblematic of the Junior Board of Trade Championship, at the seventh annual Junior Board of Trade golf tournament held at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club” (Ottawa Journal, 30 July 1942, p. 18).

But at the end of the 1942 season, twenty-seven-year-old Lyn Stewart was forced to defer the further development of his competitive amateur golf career, for he was sent overseas as a member of the Canadian Army during World War II.

Figure 139 Shoulder title of the RCASC.

In April of 1941, this “popular official” at the Glenlea Golf and Country Club “received his commission [as a 2nd lieutenant] in the 1st Corps Troops, Royal Canadian Army Service Corps (R.F.)” (Ottawa Citizen, 18 April 1941, p. 10).

The RCASC provided transport support for Canadian soldiers wherever they were, whether training in Canada or Britian or serving in battle: regardless of their location, troops needed rations, arms and ammunition, petroleum products, and many other essential supplies, and the RCASC transported everything to them.

After the disastrous Canadian landings at Dieppe, France, in 1942, the Canadian Army decided to practice an amphibious landing at Brockville. And so, on 1 November 1942, with “Dieppe in mind,”

Canadian forces re-established themselves in a “Nazi-occupied” Brockville yesterday in one of the most elaborate and realistic military exercises ever attempted in a Canadian city and the first mock attack anywhere in Canada employing combined operations.

Units of the Royal Canadian Navy opened fire on “German” gun positions along the St. Lawrence waterfront at Brockville. Roaring Royal Canadian Air Force planes dive-bombed important “enemy-held” installations. Canadian commando troops and marines landed from assault boats and naval craft….

The thud of cannon and mortar along with the staccato fire of machine gun and rifle echoed through the town’s streets and across the quiet blue waters of the St. Lawrence. Screaming yellow Harvard’s dived to the attack. Shattering land mines gave the effect of exploding bombs….

One Ottawa officer … [was] among the members of the O.T.C. who took part in the “assault” …. 2 nd Lieutenant W.L. Stewart. (Ottawa Citizen, 2 November 1942, p. 6)

And then Lieutenant Stewart sailed for England where he achieved the distinction of being mentioned in several dispatches by commanding officers while serving with the RCASC. He subsequently received promotion to the rank of Captain.

Like many golf-mad soldiers stationed in Britain, Lyn Stewart took every available opportunity to explore golf culture in the “Old Country.” As his wife, Barbara, later recalled: “Lyn and his army buddies would take every opportunity to play golf on the links of England and Scotland. The locals looked after them by loaning the boys golf equipment and made sure they would receive a favourable rate for play” (quoted by Joe McLean, “William Lynwood (Lyn) Stewart,” Flagstick.com, 29 April 2013).

Figure 140 James Braid (1870- 1950), circa mid-1940s.

As a member of the Canadian Army Golf Team, Stewart played great links courses such as the Old Course at St. Andrews, and he also played great inland courses such as the famous heathland course of the Walton Heath Golf Club, where he competed in the Canadian Army Championship and where he met James Braid (1870-1950), five-time winner of the Open Championship and a renowned golf course architect, whose conversation stimulated in young Captain Stewart what would become a lifelong interest in golf history and the collecting of its artifacts (clubs, balls, books, photographs, and so on).

After the war, Stewart continued to play competitive amateur golf in the Ottawa area (although still a fine golfer, his post-war results did not match those from before the war), and he also increasingly became interested in the business-end of Glenlea’s operations. Mind you, one might say he had participated in the business end of the game as early as his caddie days in the 1920s. And in the mid-1930s, just after he turned twenty, he had established a driving range on Aylmer Road. But after the war, he became more interested in questions of club management, to which he had been introduced in 1939 when first elected to the Glenlea board of directors at twenty-four year of age. Later the same year, he was also appointed chairman of the green committee. After the war he took on the role of club secretary.

Figure 141 From left to right: club secretary Lyn Stewart, golf professional Harry Mulligan, club president Gus Mullen, managing director W.H. Stewart.

By 1950, as we shall see in the next chapter, Stewart began designing new golf holes for recently acquired land that would allow the golf course to return to an eighteen-hole layout.

Figure 142 Stewart in his Kingsway Golf Club jacket.

Recognizing in the early 1960s, however, that “the narrow strip of land bordering Gatineau Park along Mountain Road languished in development doldrums,” Lyn Stewart purchased 116 acres of the old Mulvihill estate for development as a golf course (Ottawa Journal, 9 June 1965, p. 3). What would become the golf course of the Kingsway Park Golf Club was approved by South Hull council in September of 1963. Stewart designed the first nine holes and opened them for play in 1965.

He would use the “renovated farmhouse built in 1812 … as clubhouse and Canadian Golf Museum” (Ottawa Journal, 9 June 1965, p. 3).

Figure 143 The main room of Lyn Stewart's Canadian Golf Museum, Kingsway Park Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec. Ottawa Journal, 21 April 1973, p. 22.

When Stewart later sold Glenlea to the National Capital Commission, he took with him the Glenlea logo, a version of which the Kingsway Park Golf Club retains to this day.

Figure 144 Left: logo of the Kingsway Park Golf Club. Right: logo of the Glenlea Colf Club, 1950-1974.

Stewart sold Kingsway Park in the early 1990s. What became of the Canadian Golf Museum?

We can see in the early 1990s photograph below that Stewart kept a good number his favorite museum items with him in a special room in his home.

Figure 145 Lyn Stewart in his home. Le droit, 8 May 1991, p. 22.

As of 1993, however, he began transferring the contents of his personal museum to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now known as the Canadian Museum of History) – a process that took years as each item had to be authenticated, catalogued, and valued. Stewart often also had to explain to curators what the items were and why they were important to the history of golf.

In April of 2002, a grateful Canadian Museum of Civilization held an “event commemorating Lyn Stewart’s contribution to the study of golf history in Canada” (Ottawa Citizen, 1 May 2002, p. 35).

Unfortunately, Stewart had died two months earlier.

The So-So Restoration of 1950-52

Almost as soon as he was re-hired in 1950, Harry Mulligan set to work with Lyn Stewart on plans to restore Glenlea to an eighteen-hole configuration.

At the start of the 1950 season, for instance, Mulligan speculated that the club might soon need to expand the course: “Golf activity is in full swing at the Glenlea club, where pro Harry Mulligan reports the course in fine shape for a playing membership of approximately 300. It is possible that the necessity for additional accommodation will result in expansion of this nine-hole course in the near future” (Ottawa Citizen, 15 May 1950, p. 17).

But before the Stewart family committed to buying the additional land that any such expansion would require, there would be an attempt during the 1950 season to “relieve congestion on the fairways” by means of “a new starting system” (Ottawa Journal, 8 April 1950, p. 20). This experiment did not relieve the problem, however, and so before the end of the season, it was recognized that the club needed an eighteen-hole course. At the closing banquet, “which was attended by 100 members, President Mullen announced that the club was enlarging the course to 18 holes, the construction being scheduled to finish in time for the opening of the season” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 October 1950, p. 1).

The Stewarts had reached an agreement with William Allen by the fall of 1950 to buy his pastureland lying between the club boundary marked on one side by the fence along the eastern edge of the first fairway and on the other side by Allen Road. This land was bounded on the south by Allen’s farmhouse and barns and on the north by the access road leading to the Daly farm. Today, this area comprises the driving range, as well as the fifth hole and the third fairway (today’s third green and fourth hole being the area where Allen retained his farmhouse, various outbuildings, and his cattle barn).

We learn from reports to the general meeting at the beginning of 1951 that “expansion of the present nine-hole course to an 18-hole layout” had begun with “work done in this connection last autumn,” with the expectation that “under favorable conditions, the entire 18 holes should be in play by mid-season” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 February 1951, p. 16). But the executive committee’s hope that the new nine holes would be in play by the middle of the season was far too optimistic. In 1951, in fact, just three new holes were developed, all on the original property, with Stewart and Mulligan supplementing the Alston nine-hole course by integrating three new holes within it.

First, Keffer’s 350-yard twelfth hole (today’s sixteenth) was revived (after four years of disuse) to serve as the tenth hole in the new Stewart-Mulligan design. Then Stewart and Mulligan ran a fairway from a spot not far from Keffer’s sixteenth tee to his seventeenth green, creating a new 345-yard, dog-leg right par-four hole to serve as their eleventh (it became today’s seventeenth hole). Finally, they added a par-three hole between the Keffer’s third and fourth hole (today’s seventh and eighth). The latter appears in the photograph below.

Figure 146 Annotated 1965 aerial photograph.

This new par-three hole played as the fourth hole of the Stewart-Mulligan routing.

It was 165 yards long, playing slightly uphill from south to north.

The tee was in the valley where the creek flows through the now heavily wooded area between today’s eighth tee and ninth green.

Its relatively small green was located just inside the Glenlea property line which was marked in 1952 by a fence (and a related treeline) all the way along the left side of what is today the eighth fairway. With no bunkers or other hazards guarding the green, the out-ofbounds area was the greatest danger the player faced on this hole.

The remains of the Stewart-Mulligan fourth green can still be identified on the left side of today’s eighth fairway, as shown by the photograph below.

Figure 147 Annotated 2023 photograph of the remains of the 1952 4th green,

The new fourth hole was similar to the par-three third hole that preceded it: it was 155 yards; it played slightly uphill; it played from south to north. And so at the third and fourth holes, many golfers were able to play two identical tee shots consecutively – a design flaw that may have led to Stewart and Mulligan’s decision to replace this hole in 1961 with a new par-three hole built elsewhere.

The three new holes were in play by the end of 1951 (a report in February of 1952 says that “At present 12 holes are in operation on the course”).

In 1951, Stewart and Mulligan had also modified the third green (today’s seventh), but it was not ready for play until the next summer (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1952, p. 26). There was an announcement in August of 1952: “The new 155-yard third hole – the Punch Bowl – will be ready for play and in use for the first time” (Ottawa Citizen, 16 August 1952, p. 28). The bowl created by the raised circumference of the rough around the green remains a distinctive feature of the hole to this day.

The remaining six holes, which would be numbered thirteen to eighteen, would be built on “adjacent property on the west side of the club” (Ottawa Citizen, 27 February 1952, p. 26). For the first of these, the thirteenth, a tee was built beside the pro shop: this tee is now a practice putting green. The thirteenth green was 365 yards away, reached by a fairway across the right half of today’s driving range. The golfer then proceeded to today’s second tee which in 1952 was the fourteenth tee. (See below.)

Figure 148 Annotated 1965 aerial photograph showing the 1952 14th hole.

Note that the fourteenth green comprised only the lower tier of the present green, and there was just one sand trap then: the deep bunker at the front of today’s green.

Figure 149 Lyn Stewart and an unidentified person play the 15th green built in 1952. Photograph supplied by Joe McLean courtesy of Barbara Stewart.

The second tier of today’s second green was in 1952 an area of rough rising toward the tee box for the fifteenth hole (this tee is marked on the photograph above).

From this tee, the fifteenth hole played 365 yards across the other half of today’s driving range to a green (seen in the photograph to the left) just across the creek from the area directly in front of the senior tee box on today’s fifth hole.

The photograph below shows Lyn Stewart and Harry Mulligan supervising the work of a bulldozer as it shapes the thirteenth and fifteenth fairways in the spring of 1952.

Figure 150 In May of 1952, an unidentified bulldozer operator shapes the thirteenth and fifteenth fairways in the area occupied by today’s driving range. The work is supervised by (from left to right) Lyn Stewart and Harry Mulligan. Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1952, p. 22.

The sixteenth hole played 375 yards along today’s fifth fairway from a tee that is now the senior tee on the fifth hole to a small green located slightly in front of today’s fifth green (see the photograph below).

Figure 151 Annotated 1965 aerial photograph showing the six holes designed by Stewart and Mulligan for the pastureland purchased from William Alle in 1950.

The seventeenth hole departed from a tee box that today serves as the tee for the third hole.

The seventeenth hole played 405 yards down the present third fairway to a rectangular green beginning ten yards before today’s 150-yard marker and running another twenty yards beyond it.

Near the fence along Allen Road, to the extreme right of the 100-yard marker in today’s third fairway, Stewart and Mulligan built a tee box for their eighteenth hole. Golfers played from here to the well-bunkered green behind today’s pro shop (this green complex today serves as a practice area). The direct line to the hole was no more than 230 yards, but there was (and still is) a well-treed marsh to be carried on this line. The expectation was that the hole would be played as a 90-degree dogleg right: the tee shot would be played 200 to 250 yards into an open area of fairway from which one would play a short approach shot to the well-guarded green.

Of course, many an impetuous golfer took the direct route to the green. Only one is known to have made a hole-in-one: “Brian Keane scored a hole-in-one at Glenlea Golf Club, but this one was unlike your average ‘ace.’ Keane, a Glenlea member, sunk his tee shot on a par four hole – the 325-yard 18th. It’s a dog’s-leg and Keane flew the corner with his driver and the ball ended up in the cup. Micheal Smith, Gerry Kreuk and Greg Ward witnessed the unusual hole-in-one” (Ottawa Journal, 6 August 1974, p. 19).

Figure 152 Ray Getliffe, Montreal Canadiens, early 1940s.

The title of the present chapter refers to the Stewart-Mulligan restoration of Glenlea to eighteen holes as “so-so.” When the golf course rating was reviewed and revised by the Province of Quebec Golf Association in 1955, its rating officer was ambivalent about the overall achievement.

The evaluation was provided by an accomplished golfer, “former National Hockey League star, Ray Getliffe,” who played in the NHL from 1935 to 1945, his last five seasons with the Montreal Canadiens. On the one hand, he told club officials that “The nicest hole he encountered on his afternoon outing was the par four 11th [today’s seventeenth],a dog’s leg to the right” (Ottawa Citizen, 13 May 1955, p. 30). On the other hand, the six new holes laid out on the land acquired from William Allen struck Getliffe as relatively weak (Ottawa Journal, 13 May 1955, p. 30). The new eighteen-hole course had a nominal par of 71, but he estimated that it would be rated 69 or 70, pending his report to PQGA officers:

Apparently, he found one or two weak pars on the final six holes, the new area just developed last year. Until that section grows up (and there are many young trees to come along and dress it up), it is wide open territory.

If a stroke is shaved from par, it likely will be from one of the final six holes.

Glenlea manager Lyn Stewart followed the official party around the course, pointing out changes that had been made, and trees which would grow and help the layout. (Ottawa Journal, 13 May 1955, p. 30)

All but one of the Stewart-Mulligan holes remained in play until the mid-1980s. Their golf course is shown on the 1965 aerial photograph below.

Figure 153 Annotated 1965 aerial photograph.

On the photograph above, I have marked the fourth hole in red, which was built in 1951. As we shall see in the next chapter, in 1962, it was replaced by the 135-yard par-three hole that today plays as Champlain’s fifteenth. Marked on the photograph above by a purple arrow, this new par three became the ninth hole in the Stewart-Mulligan routing (and, of course, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth holes of the 1952 routing were renumbered four, five, six, seven, and eight after the 1951 fourth hole was abandoned).

The New Par Three of 1962

It is not clear who designed the present fifteenth hole, but we know that it was built at the end of 1961 and opened for play the next year. It was probably the result of collaboration once again between Lyn Stewart and Harry Mulligan.

The new hole replaced the 1952 fourth hole, a 165-yard par-three hole that had been squeezed between Keffer’s par-three third (today’s seventh) and Keffer’s par-four fourth (today’s eighth). The new par-three hole would play in 1962 as the ninth.

Stewart and Mulligan may have had reservations from the beginning about their 1952 routing that presented two consecutive par three holes.

Figure 154 Above, the 16th and 17th par-3 holes at Tain Golf Club, Tain, Ross-shire, Scotland. Below: the 11th and 12th par-3 holes at Royal Ottawa Golf Club, Gatineau, Quebec.

Mind you, there are plenty of precedents architecturally for such routing. In the 1890s at Tain Golf Club in Ross-shire, Scotland, Old Tom Morris introduced consecutive par-three holes as Tain’s sixteenth and seventeenth holes. Closer to home, in 1903, Tom Bendelow laid out for the Ottawa Golf Club consecutive par-three holes on their new Aylmer Road property as the eleventh and twelfth holes.

But the first par-three hole laid out by each of Morris and Bendelow was significantly different from the second one: in terms of length, elevation changes, and hazards to be negotiated. And Morris’s second hole plays in a direction ninety degrees different from that of the preceding hole. All four of these holes remain in play today and are widely celebrated.

Stewart and Mulligan, however, probably did not like the fact that at Glenlea the slightly uphill 155-yard par-three third hole (today’s seventh) was followed by another slightly uphill 165-yard par-three hole. The holes were also laid out in exactly the same direction. And so, on consecutive holes, precisely the same club might be played from each tee – not a situation that architects would tolerate, if they had their druthers.

Figure 155 Ottawa Citizen, 16 May 1962, p. 19.

The new par-three hole obviously eliminated this routing problem.

The earliest image of the hole can be seen to the left: it shows Lyn Stewart himself in the spring of 1962 (on perhaps the very day the hole opened for play) addressing the ball with an iron as he waits for the foursome on the green to finish putting.

As in the case of the 1951 hole that the new one replaced, an elevation change required a careful calculation by the golfer regarding what club would be appropriate to negotiate the distance between tee and green.

But this calculation was different, for the 1962 green was slightly below the elevated tee, which was the opposite of the situation on the 1951 hole.

And whereas the greatest danger on the 1951 hole would seem to have been the out-of-bounds fence along the entire left side of the hole, the player on the new hole was faced with many trees that framed the new hole on three sides, threatening a difficult recovery shot for players who hit their tee shots long or wide.

In terms of its framing in 1962 by trees left, right and beyond, a semblance of the original look of the hole from the tee box endured until the turn of the century.

Figure 156 A view of the 15th green from the tee box, early 2000s.

Today, however, all but one of the trees on the right side of the hole are gone (save for a stump or two), and the same goes for the trees beyond the hole (but for a solitary birch). The view from the tee is open and expansive.

Figure 157 View from the 15th tee of the Champlain Golf course, 28 October 2023.

The basic scorecard that was used from 1962 to 1985 is shown below: one scorecard is from 1964; the other, from 1973.

Figure 159 Left: 1964 Glenlea Golf Club scorecard. Right: 1973 Glenlea Golf Club scorecard.

Figure 158 Left: cover of the 1964 scorecard. Right: cover of the 1973 scorecard.

Lyn Stewart changed the scorecard cover in 1973 to celebrate the centenary of Canada’s first golf club (Royal Montreal), but the yardages for the eighteen holes was the same in 1964 and 1973. Note that there were not yet forward tee boxes for women. But between 1964 and 1973, the “Ladies Par” increased by one stroke (as the par for the seventeenth hole went from 4 to 5).

Interestingly, however, the awarding of handicap strokes by hole was adjusted significantly between 1964 and 1973: the rankings of five holes remained the same; the rankings of the other thirteen holes changed.

The Traitor in the Glenlea Parking Lot

Where tennis had been played at the Highlea Tennis and Country Club from 1925 to 1928, where it continued to be played in 1929 and the early 1930s at the Glenlea Colf and Country Club, and where Glenlea members and guests soon afterwards began to park their cars (and continue to do so at the Champlain Golf Course today), an act of treachery against the people of Canada played out in 1955. Former Ottawa Citizen editor and publisher Russell Mills called it “perhaps the most shameful incident in the history of the Mounties” (Ottawa Citizen, 24 September 2018).

Corporal James Morrison, a member of the RCMP’s counter-espionage unit that was responsible for surveillance of Soviet embassy personnel in Ottawa in the 1950s, committed treason by selling to the Soviet Union the identity of a double agent in the KGB who was working for the RCMP.

The price was $3,500

Figure 160 Yevgeni Brik, 1953.

The double agent, codenamed “Gideon,” was a man named Yevgeni Brik (1922-2011), the son of a Soviet Union trade official who was posted in the 1920s to New York City, where Yevgeni went to American schools, learned to speak English fluently with a Brooklyn accent, and became indistinguishable from millions of American teenagers.

After the family returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Brik joined the army to fight the Nazis during World War II and was then recruited by the KGB to train as a spy who would be sent back to the United States.

He was introduced into Nova Scotia by means of a fake Canadian passport, under orders to acclimatise himself once more to North American life before moving to the United States.

But Brik never moved on to the United States. Instead, he developed a relationship with a Canadian woman and confessed to her that he worked for the KGB. Russell Mills explains what happened next:

Yevgeni and the woman took a train to Ottawa, where he phoned the RCMP.

The Mounties turned him into a double agent, saying he would not be prosecuted for spying if he would feed false information to his Soviet bosses. He agreed.

They gave him the code name “Gideon” and put him on the RCMP payroll.

He used his shortwave radio to send material to Moscow that was designed to mislead the Soviets. He did this for more than a year. (Ottawa Citizen, 24 September 1981)

And then Gideon was betrayed.

Figure 161 James Morrison. Calgary Herald, 30 January 1986, p. 5.

In a grave breach of security protocols, a senior RCMP officer casually revealed Gideon’s identity to Corporal Morrison, whose code name was “Long Knife.”

Addicted to alcohol and gambling, and severely in debt, Morrison knew from his surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa precisely which Soviet official he should contact if he wanted to sell this information: KGB agent Nikolai Ostrovskiy.

Morrison dropped Ostrovskiy a note in a downtown Ottawa hotel bar that they both frequented, and they then drove separately to Café Champlain on Bate Island, part way across the Champlain Bridge. Having assured themselves that they had not been followed, they then drove together in one car to the parking lot of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, where Morrison explained the kind of information he had to offer and the price he would charge for it.

As Donald G. Mahar observes in Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada, Ostrovskiy was excited at the prospect of recruiting a double agent for the Soviet Union, and so, “They agreed to meet late in the evening at the Glenlea Golf Club on Aylmer Road ….

It would be a meeting that would lead to terrible consequences” (Donald G. Mahar, Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada [Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016], p. 80).

A few days later, Morrison brought to Glenlea papers exposing Brik and Ostrovskiy brought cash:

At precisely 10:30 pm, Morrison watched Ostrovskiy arrive at the Glenlea golf course.

He drove over to the west side of the deserted parking lot and pulled up beside Morrison’s car. Ostrovskiy exited his vehicle and walked around to the passenger side and joined Morrison.

Not wanting to be seen together in the area, they quickly left the golf course and drove in darkness along the Aylmer-Hull Road. Other than exchanging a few rudimentary greetings, they never said a word to each other about their pending business.

Morrison … pulled off on to a seldom-used driveway that led to a vacant farmhouse a mile north of the golf course. (Mahar p. 82)

This deserted farmhouse may have been the Daly farmhouse, which was then located where the maintenance buildings of the Champlain Golf Course (built in 1983) are now located.

Morrison perhaps knew that this farm had been expropriated by the Federal District Commission (forerunner of the National Capital Commission) in preparation for the construction of the never-built South Hull Parkway (later renamed the never-built Lucerne Parkway) that would have crossed the Ottawa River on the never-built Deschênes-Britannia bridge.

The Daly farm was precisely one mile by car from the Glenlea parking lot: they would have travelled west on Aylmer Road, north on Allen Road, and then north on what is today the Champlain Golf Course access road.

Here, the deed was done as one traitor exposed another: Morrison gave Ostrovskiy Brik’s name, and Ostrovskiy gave Morrison $3,500.

In a little while, Brik was called back to the Soviet Union. When he told the RCMP that he was being recalled for debriefing and new instructions, his handlers believed that his secret was safe and advised him to do as ordered. On his arrival in Moscow, however, he was immediately arrested and confessed to what he had done. Nonetheless, for a while, he was allowed to live with his wife in Moscow and act as a “triple” agent who might be able to lure into the open to meet with him undercover British spies aware of his work for the RCMP.

Brik was eventually sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp. After that, he was sent into internal exile as a railway worker in a remote region of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, James Morrison eventually confessed to what he had done. The RCMP, however, kept his confession a secret until his treachery became publicly known in the mid-1980s. And so, thirty-one years after the fact, Morrison became the only RCMP officer ever convicted of treason and was sentenced in 1986 to eighteen months in prison.

Figure 162 Yevgeny Brik on the Boeing 747 flight deck during his trip back to Canada in 1992. Ottawa Citizen, 24 September 2018.

And then Brik showed up.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Brik was able to escape and make his way to a British Embassy. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had assumed Brik had been executed, and so its personnel were dumbfounded when British authorities told them that one of their spies had been found.

Brik was brought back to Canada in 1992.

When Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was briefed on the scandal, he said: “Every consideration must be given to this man who was betrayed by the cowardice of an RCMP officer” (cited by “The Current,” CBC Radio, 17 April 2017).

The Canadian government created a new identity for Brik and gave him a pension. He lived the last twenty years of his life in Ottawa, where he died in 2011.

Horses for Courses

On the Champlain Golf Course today, the remains of an old road are evident. It begins at the end of Rue Chaudière near the eighteenth tee, crosses the seventeenth fairway valley and then follows the creek along the side of the seventeenth fairway. Still following the creek, the road diagonally crosses the sixteenth fairway until it reaches the thirteenth fairway and there ascends the hill until it reaches the remains of the old green at the top of the hill. From this point, it used to run along the east side of the thirteenth fairway until it reached an area just east of the thirteenth tee and then turned further east for about fifty yards, where it ended. It appears on the 1933 aerial photograph below.

Figure 163 Annotated 1933 aerial photograph. The road beginning at Rue Chaudière is highlighted yellow. The creek that runs across the golf course is highlighted blue. Marked by green lines and numbers are the locations of some of today’ holes.

By the middle of the twentieth century, this old road was creating problems for golfers and greenkeepers, and it would continue to do so for decades.

Horse riders had discovered that there was a right-of-way along this road and were determined to ride their horses along it whenever they liked. Horse manure is an unpleasant hazard on a golf course, but the inconvenience caused for golfers who had to postpone their play until horse riders were out of the way was frustrating, and the danger to horse riders from golfers who were occasionally insufficiently careful about the safety or horse and rider was increasing.

Unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade horse riders not to cross the golf course, Lyn Stewart appealed to local government for help:

[At] a regular meeting of the South Hull Municipal Council … held in the Municipal Hall, Aylmer Road [4 May 1953] …. Mr. W.L. Stewart was present objecting to riders using the east side of the Glenlea Golf Course as a bridle path.

Council informed Mr. Stewart that it was understood that a private right-of-way existed through lot 11A from Aylmer Road to 3rd concession, but this Council had no jurisdiction over it.

And so, there would be horses for the Glenlea and Champlain courses for as long as riders liked.

Figure 164 Albert Quesnel with his prize-winning harness hackney ponies at the 1965 Aylmer Fair. Ottawa Journal, 13 September 1965, p. 3.

The person who proved most insistent on this right-of-way was well-known local horse breeder Albert Quesnel (1908-2005).

Quesnel delighted in everything related to horses. He bred all sorts of light horses: palominos, ponies, American saddle-breds, and so on. He trained horses as trotters, as harness show ponies, as gaited saddle horses, whatever. He showed them at fairs and exhibitions, and he won hundreds of prizes from the 1950s to the 1970s, including at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

He widely collected antique buggies, cutters, and coaches.

Quesnel was very active in support of the Ottawa Valley Light Horse Association (serving for many years as a director), and he was a member of the Connaught Park show committee.

And he loved to put on a show, whether as the driver of a hackney tandem at fairs and exhibitions or as an imitator of Ben Hur, as at the Aylmer Exhibition Grounds in June of 1957 and the Aylmer Fair in September of 1957, when he raced around with his four perfectly matched palominos pulling a Roman chariot that he had built himself.

Figure 165 Albert Quesnel and his palominos at the Aylmer Exhibition Grounds in 1957. Ottawa Citizen, 3 June 1957, p. 7.

Quesnel stabled horses in a barn on the east side of today’s eighteenth hole as well as in a barn behind the farmhouse of William Allen on the west side of the golf course parking lot. (He also owned a ranch three miles east of Aylmer on Highway 8.)

One problem faced by Glenlea and Champlain was that Quesnel’s horses often escaped their enclosures. Over the years, some were struck and killed on Aylmer Road. Others roamed the golf course. Golfers and ground crew would get excited and try to chase them down. Occasionally greens would be damaged by hooves. One time, a superintendent came upon one of Quesnel’s trotters at a bridge unable to go forward or backward because the sulky to which it was harnessed had overturned into the creek.

Most of the people that tried to capture them had no idea how to catch a horse. Apparently, however, there was a horse-savvy member of the greenkeeping crew who would eschew the fruitless fuss made by those running after the horses and instead stroll over to Quesnel’s barn, fill a pail with oats, and then walk calmy and quietly toward the horses: once they scented the oats, they would happily follow this Pied Piper of equines back to their enclosure.

Course managers were never happy that Quesnel rode his horses on the old road, or that he drove his sulky up and down the road, but what really upset them was his insistence on driving along this road with his horse-drawn cart laden with manure. His practice was to dump this manure at the end of the road (which happened to be on Royal Ottawa’s property), but the problem was that manure would drop from the jostling cart all along the way, fouling the fairways of four golf holes.

Figure 166 Albert Quesnel in his top hat and jacket, sans boutonniere, with his harness show ponies Frankie (left) and Johnny. Ottawa Journal, 26 October 1956, p. 7.

Several generations of course managers faced these problems.

Finally, one tried to block the road by using a bulldozer to place large boulders at the point where the golf course road met Rue Chaudière. Quesnel used heavy equipment of his own to move them. The manager put the boulders back in place. Once more, Quesnel shunted them aside. They inevitably met at this point of conflict one day. Harsh words were exchanged. Things spiralled out of control, one thing led to another, and the two ended up in court, where showman Quesnel is said to have arrived in his horse-show dress: top hat, fancy jacket, and the largest of boutonnieres.

Quesnel retained his right of way.

And so, his horses continued to become well-known to golfers from generation to generation. As late as 1980, in fact, whenever teenagers hit their drives out of bounds towards Quesnel’s barn on the left side of the eighteenth fairway, their friends would immediately mock them by neighing or whinnying like a horse: “You’ve lost your ball in Quesnel’s pasture!”

For all his contretemps with the Glenlea Golf Club and the Champlain Golf Club, perhaps Quesnel maintained a humorous perspective on it all: he named the two horses that he liked to drive in hackney tandem competitions Golf Vue Starlight and Golf Vue Silhouette.

Were they named for the evening view westward from Quesnel’s home over the golf course and clubhouse?

The Sale of Glenlea to the NCC

Shortly after the Glenlea Golf Club elected its executive committee and directors in the spring of 1974 (Lyn Stewart was a director and club secretary), news broke that the NCC was attempting to buy the golf course:

The National Capital commission is on the verge of buying the 130-acre Glenlea Golf Course on the Aylmer Road at a cost of more than $1 million. A spokesman for Royal Trust in Hull said today the contract of sale for the course has already been sent to the NCC.

Senior NCC staff … were in conference this morning and not available to explain the purchase….

Lynwood Stewart, owner of the golf course, today called reports of negotiations “straight speculation.”

Asked point-blank if he is negotiating with the NCC, he replied, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Our family has owned the course since 1921 [in fact, 1925] and we plan to keep on operating for years to come.” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1974, p. 1)

The day after the above story appeared, the NCC provided a spokesperson to explain the situation:

The Glenlea golf course will remain in operation for the foreseeable [future], a National Capital Commission spokesman said today.

Assistant general manager Rod Clark said the commission has no immediate plans for alternative uses for the 130 acres of land on the Aylmer Road. He said the NCC, which is in the process of buying the property, wants to protect open space before the fast pace of land assembly and development in West Quebec gets out of hand: “Purchasing the golf course is part of our general policy to increase strategic land holdings in the National Capital region” ….

Mr. Clark said the course will likely be leased back to the present operator, though the matter is still under review. The issue of the leasing back will probably be a factor in completing the sale of the course. The settlement is expected to be somewhere between $1 million and [the] $1.3 million that the seller was originally seeking….

The terms of the purchase have not been completed with the owner and he refused to discuss details of negotiations. (Ottawa Citizen, 24 April 1974, p. 3)

Negotiations were protracted. It was reported in October that the deal would be concluded in November, although “The NCC has not yet decided whether to operate the course itself or lease it to a private operator” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 October 1974, p. 3). But it was only in February of 1975 that the deal closed. The NCC explained its motive and its plans, but not the price it paid Stewart:

“The NCC is interested in open green space and we plan to keep the Glenlea as a recreational area,” said Alex Morin, NCC General Manager….

NCC officials, unwilling to divulge the sale price, said the rolling 6,040-yard layout will be retained for golf in the summer and used for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in the winter. (Ottawa Citizen, 11 February 1975, p. 18)

In March of 1975, the NCC referred to its new golf property as the “Glenlea Public Golf Course” (Ottawa Citizen, 29 March 1975, p. 69). But at the beginning of May, we read: “The Glenlea Golf Club, purchased by the National Capital Commission last winter, has changed its name to the Champlain Golf Course” (Ottawa Citizen, 2 May 1975, p. 21).

Early in his negotiations with the NCC, Stewart told a reporter that “we plan to keep on operating [Glenlea] for years to come,” and the NCC itself suggested that “the course will likely be leased back to the present operator,” but after ten months of negotiation, the NCC changed its mind: it would operate the golf course itself (Ottawa Citizen, 23 April 1974, p. 1; Ottawa Citizen, 24 April 1974, p. 3)

Knocking Down the House

The NCC would maintain the golf course, but it announced it would close the nightclub operation:

The NCC will not operate the Glenlea nightclub end of it, but they will keep food and liquor services, and they will dress up the clubhouse, and they will make it available to special parties … weddings and so on.

However, there will be no more entertainment, … unless that entertainment is provided by the persons holding special parties, and in concert with the management of the club. (Ottawa Journal, 10 February 1975, p. 17)

Figure 167 Ottawa Citizen, 15 August 1975, p. 50.

Late in the summer of 1975, however, the clubhouse was “leased to a private operator” and re-opened: “A discotheque booth has been installed and a huge circular table, big enough to dance on, has been set up near the door. Otherwise, it’s the same old Glenlea, including what seems to be the original paint job. It smells like a beer parlor.” (Ottawa Journal, 23 August 1975, p. 38).

After the discotheque folded, the old Glenlea clubhouse remained largely vacant for the next five years. The NCC lost interest in it. And so, on 13 December 1980, it was torn apart “by the wrecker’s ball” and flattened by a bulldozer (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1980, p. 2).

Figure 168 Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1908, p. 2.

The demolished building was supposed to be replaced by an even bigger one:

“It was razed because it was a fire hazard and in poor condition,” said NCC public activities director André Bonin Saturday. The NCC plans to rebuild it, improving facilities for golfers and cross-country skiers….

“Plans to reconstruct the larger building may take five years to become reality,” said Bonin. (Ottawa Citizen, 15 December 1980, p. 2)

Alas, a new larger building did not take five years to become a reality; it never became a reality.

How Would the NCC Manage?

What kind of commitment the NCC would maintain to the golf course was not clear. There were many doubters.

Right after the purchase, there were rumours that “the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, which was recently purchased by the National Capital Commission, will close down at least partially, if not completely, within three years” (Ottawa Journal, 10 March 1975, p. 2).

Early on, the NCC tried to manage the Champlain Golf Course directly. It used NCC employees to maintain the property. This proved to be very expensive. It decided to use a crew of inmates from the Hull Jail to help maintain the property. This proved economical.

But it also proved to be dangerous. Perceiving an instruction from the head pro to have been unreasonable, one of the inmates went into the pro shop and threatened to assault him with a chain. The inmate programme was discontinued.

Into this situation of work-force flux was introduced the person who would become the most important steward of the Champlain Golf Course for the next forty years: Stanley Brigham.

Stanley Brigham

Early in its attempt to manage the golf course, the NCC appointed Stanley Brigham as the person in charge of grounds maintenance. Known familiarly as “Stan,” he had earned the NCC’s trust and respect by his work in the mid-1970s at its Capital Golf Gardens, a short, eighteen-hole, par-54 course laid out over forty acres along Highway 31 (or Bank Street South), dating from 1960. One wonders, however, if the NCC’s interest in Brigham was piqued by his family’s connection to the land on which the Champlain Golf Course was laid out. For there was a certain historical appropriateness in making a Brigham the superintendent of land that had originally been cleared and farmed 175 years earlier by Stan Brigham’s great-great-great grandfather, Philemon Wright.

Along with his brother, Montgomery (1944-2017), Brigham had inherited in the mid-1980s a 4.5 acre portion of Philemon Wright’s Aylmer estate on the Ottawa River, at that time a 12-acre property that had come to be known in the late twentieth century as the Bowie-Brigham Estate. Environmentalists cherished this property as “an important bird sanctuary” and as “one of the last stands of red and white pine in the urban Outaouais” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 December 1990, p. 2). In the early 1990s, environmentalists fiercely opposed the attempt by some of the land’s owners to build houses on it.

Figure 169 George Murray Brigham (1909-1986), Secretary, Ontario Association of the Deaf, Windsor Star, 8 August 1950, p. 10.

Born in 1947, the son of George Murray Brigham (1909-1986) and Mildred Elizabeth Bevins (1916-1995), Stan was a resident of both Ontario and Quebec from his earliest days. With his parents and older brother, he lived in Ottawa for the greater part of the year, where the boys attended both public school and high school. Stan and Monty were both very good students – their intellectual development probably given a head start by the fact that at a very young age they learned a second langue: Ameslan, or American Sign Language, for their mother and father were deaf. (Although an accountant by profession, Monty also served as an interpreter for the deaf in court proceedings and for the Parliamentary Channel.)

In the summers, Stan and Monty lived with their parents in a cottage on the Bowie-Brigham estate for what they all agreed was – if not the greater part of the year – at least the “better” part of the year. Here, their parents encouraged the development in their boys of an abiding love of nature.

Figure 170 The image of Monty Brigham that accompanied his newspaper column on birding activity in the Outaouais. Ottawa Journal, 3 September 1977, p. 48.

In particular, after their parents gave them binoculars and a field guide, Stan and Monty became devoted observers of the wide variety of birds that could be found on the property.

Reports of the Brigham brothers’ unusual bird sightings and of their annual bird counts became regular features in the Ottawa newspapers during the 1960s.

Monty, in fact, would become the preeminent birder of the Outaouais region, writing for the Ottawa Journal a regular column on the topic (called “Birdseye View”).

In it, he often mentioned bird sightings reported by his brother Stan, as well as by their father, Murray.

Figure 171 13-yr-old Stan Brigham, Ottawa Journal, 17 November 1960, p. 15.

Like Monty, Stan was a natural athlete. For more than a decade, he attempted to emulate his older brother’s significant achievements in the sports they both loved: hockey, track and field, and football, among others.

Stan, for instance, followed his brother into the Laurentian View Pee Wee Hockey League, becoming a leading scorer during the 1959-60 season. In Ottawa’s Pee Wee school football league, he was voted the West End’s best lineman in the fall of 1960 when his Broadview Public School team won the championship. Like Monty, Stan then entered Nepean High School and became one of its most famous football players, adding the skill of punting to his other roles for the team.

He also established himself as one of Nepean High School’s best track and field athletes. At the 1962 Ottawa High School Athletic Association’s track and field meet, for instance, he finished a strong third in the shot put.

Also in 1962, playing out of the Chaudière Golf Club, Stan won the prize for the second low net score at the Province of Quebec Golf Association’s Junior Field Day held at Royal Ottawa. Stan’s low net scores in the early 1960s were not the result of an artificially inflated handicap: the fact was that the constant downward adjustment of his handicap rating simply could not keep up with his increasingly low gross scores: he was progressing too rapidly.

Figure 172 Stan Brigham, Ottawa Journal, 27 June 1964, p. 14.

By 1962, the fifteen-year-old was shooting scores in the low 80s on the area’s best golf courses. By 1964, seventeen-year-old Stan was regularly shooting in the mid-70s on the Chaudière course.

In the coming years, he would compete regularly in Ottawa City and District golf tournaments, representing both the Chaudière Golf Club and the golf team of Nepean High School.

Having been introduced to golf at the Chaudière Golf Club in the late 1950s, Stan would remain a regular competitor in a wide variety of club competitions until the early 1970s (spending a total of fourteen years at the club).

The Carleton University golf team played on the Chaudière’s golf course and (surprise!) first-year student Stan Brigham easily made the team in 1966.

Figure 173 Stan Brigham, third from left, with fellow members and coach of the Carleton University golf team. The Raven (Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton University, 1966), p. 195.

It turned out, however, that the education Stan wanted was not to be found in a classroom, but rather out on a golf course.

Figure 174 Stan Kolar, 1970.

Stan, that is, had already decided to make a life in golf.

And he had already confessed this ambition to the Chaudière head pro, Stan Kolar. The latter’s advice surprised him: “Get into the turf management end of it” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39).

The Ottawa Citizen’s sportswriter Eddie MacCabe asked Stan about his earliest memories of “the turf management end of things” at the Chaudière:

He started out watering greens at night, wandering around changing sprinklers, and mowing in the daytime.

“I loved it,” he said, “out there in the dark, alone … beautiful.”

“Then I started changing pin placements, and I discovered how much you could alter the character of a course by changing the cups.”

“It was 60 hours a week, $1.60 an hour, and it was great.” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39)

Perhaps the most important thing about his introduction to turf management at the Chaudière was the opportunity it provided Stan to work at various tasks under the supervision of its new greenkeeper, William Dolgos.

Brigham would later say, “I learned everything I know from Bill Dolgos.”

Figure 175 William Dolgos, 1964.

A graduate in 1965 of the School of Landscape Architecture at the Ontario Agricultural College, Dolgos had come to the Chaudière in the late 1960s and was awarded a long-term contract as golf course superintendent in 1970. He was later hired away from Chaudière by the Rivermead Golf and Country Club, and later still he went on to form Bill Dolgos & Associates, a company that designed and built golf courses.

Dolgos courses include: The Canadian, Pakenham Highlands, Calabogie Highlands, Dragonfly, Les Vieux Moulins, Club de Golf International (at St Bernard de Lacelle, Quebec), and the Napoleon Course at Club de Golf de Waterloo (at Shefford, Quebec).

Under Dolgos, Stan moved up on the greenkeeping staff at the Chaudière, acquiring greater and greater responsibilities. It was not long before he came to the attention of the National Capital Commission and was offered the “chance to handle the Capital Golf Gardens, an NCC short course”:

“That was the toughest 40 acres I have ever seen,” he said, but he got it going.

He got into mosquito control and course manicuring, and within a couple of years, he had private-course playability on his tees and greens.

The NCC took over the old Glenlea, and renamed it the Champlain, and Brigham was in charge of that, too. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39)

In Brigham, the NCC believed that it had found a golf course superintendent for the long term, and so it began to invest in him as an investment in its own future: it “sent him down to the University of Massachusetts for a concentrated course in turf management” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39).

Figure 176 Stockbridge Hall, of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, on the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts.

The classes that Brigham took at the Amherst campus of the U of M “included irrigation, drainage … the lot” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39).

The story goes that Brigham was a bit of a superstar when it came to conceiving drainage schemes, but, apparently, he did not aways pay sufficient attention to the cost of his schemes: “You did a beautiful job on drainage, Stan,” his professor told him, “but you blew your budget!”

Stan has watched his budget carefully ever since.

Cramped by the NCC

Having earned the National Capital Commission’s trust and respect at Capital Golf Gardens, Stan Brigham lost its confidence by the end of the 1982 golf season at Champlain.

Ambitious to upgrade the Champlain Golf Course by changing certain holes and creating several new ones, Stan set about the work without budget approval from the NCC for certain aspects of the construction work. A dispute arose as to who would pay for what. The dispute proved unresolvable. And so, Stan left Champlain: his first term as the person in charge of its grounds maintenance had ended three years before it was supposed to.

Diplomatically pulling his punches, Stan explained to a Eddie MacCabe in the spring of 1983 that he had left Champlain because “he was cramped by the civil service way of going” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39).

The design work that Stan had undertaken in the early 1980s involved plans for what would become today’s third, fourth, ninth, and tenth holes. By 1982, he had begun to create today’s third green and today’s fourth hole, which would be introduced as the new seventeenth green and the new eighteenth hole for the Stewart-Mulligan course. But Stan left Champlain before these holes were introduced into play.

These holes remain two of the most interesting holes on the golf course today.

Digging Up Trouble

Figure 177 Jean Pilon. Ottawa Citizen, 15 October 1989, p. 53.

When twenty-year-old Jean Pilon (the head pro at Champlain today) won the Champlain Golf Club championship in 1983, he did so with a tidy finish on the closing holes of the Stewart-Mulligan course: the 400-yard par-four seventeenth hole and the 325-yard par-four eighteenth hole.

Two years later, however, when Pilon won the club championship again in 1985, his equally tidy finish was on two new holes that were much more challenging: Brigham’s new 530-yard par-five seventeenth hole and his new 170-yard par-three eighteenth hole, with its forced carry over a large pond.

For two seasons, work on these new holes temporarily reduced the golf course by 700 yards to a length of 5,345 yards and a par of 68, but it produced in the fulness of time two enduring contributions to today’s Champlain’s golf course.

The Stewart-Mulligan seventeenth hole (today’s third) was lengthened more than 100 yards by Brigham to convert it from a relatively simple – even bland – par-four hole into the interesting par-five hole that challenges golfers today with its elevation changes and its sophisticated defenses of the green.

Brigham moved the green from its par-four location near today’s 150-yard marker to its perch on the top of the hill where the barn had been located that housed farmer William Allen’s cows. When Allen and King George VI stood near here in 1939 discussing Allen’s farming operation, as well as the golf courses that surrounded it, they never would have imagined that a putting green would take the place of the barn.

Brigham’s green is a brilliant improvement on the old green.

As can be seen in the photograph below, rough fronts the green on the steep rise from the stream that crosses the valley in front of it. A false front leads balls back off the green, particularly at the left front of the green. At the back of the green, a slope immediately and steeply descends into pine trees ranged from side to side across the entire width of the hole, threatening a harsh punishment for an approach shot played a little bit too long. Left of the green is a bunker and then a hill that descends steeply toward a pond: and so, a miss wide left may also be harshly punished.

Figure 178 An annotated contemporary photograph of today's 3rd fairway and 3rd green.

Today’s par-three fourth hole was created to replace the Stewart-Mulligan par-four eighteenth hole.

Where the fourth green now stands once stood William Allen’s farmhouse and related outbuildings. Where the pond is found today was originally a relatively level field where cows were pastured. In fact, it was across this open field in May of 1939 that Ida Allen ran from the Allen farmhouse to the fence at Allen Road to talk to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Figure 179 Today's 3rd and 4th greens and pond marked on a 1933 aerial photo of the Allen farmhouse, barns, and outbuildings.

The NCC presumably acquired this property around the same time as it acquired Glenlea.

The old Allen farmhouse and all of the family’s farm buildings evident in the 1933 aerial photograph above were long gone by the time of the 1976 aerial photograph seen below.

Figure 180 Annotated 1976 aerial photo of former site of Allen farmhouse, barns and outbuildings and future site of today's 3rd green and 4th hole.

Just when Brigham came up with the idea of turning Allen’s pasture into a pond is not clear.

It is abundantly clear, however, that it was the making of “Lake Brigham” that was the unmaking of course manager Brigham.

The cost of converting a cow pasture into the massive pond that graces the property to this day was considerable. It turns out that Brigham had undertaken this grand landscaping project without properly advising the NCC of his plan. More importantly, he had arranged for the work to be done without securing agreement from the NCC that it would pay for this work.

The ensuing dispute about this matter between Brigham and the NCC proved unresolvable, and the NCC subsequently decided to replace Brigham with someone else for the last three years of his original appointment as the superintendent of both Champlain Golf Course and Capital Gardens Golf Course.

Figure 181 Ottawa Citizen, 8 March 1984, p. 41.

And the NCC also decided that it would no longer directly manage grounds maintenance. It placed the advertisement to the left in Ottawa newspapers.

Shortly thereafter, a company called Capital Arborists was chosen to maintain the golf course from 1984 to 1986. This company had begun advertising “extensive tree care of all types” in the fall of 1981, but it had no experience of golf course maintenance (Ottawa Citizen, 2 December 1981, p. 57). While looking after the Champlain Golf Course in the mid-1980s, it continued to offer its “Professional Tree Doctoring” services throughout the Ottawa region (Ottawa Citizen, 22 December 1989, p. 54).

Although now long-gone (the company disappeared in the early 2000s), and although criticized on a number of occasions for lax safety standards that resulted in injuries on other sites to some of its “tree doctors” and that resulted at Champlain in the death of young Terry Gray in 1985, Capital Arborists was the company looking after the Champlain Golf Course when today’s third and fourth holes were brought into play and when (as we shall soon see) today’s ninth and tenth holes were built.

Brigham was sent packing because he dug up trouble: he dug a big hole without permission, changed the course of a creek without permission, and then built a dam without permission to fill his hole with water.

As we shall see, after leaving Champlain, he would thrive in the coming years as a manager of golf courses, as a designer of golf courses, and as a builder of golf courses, but it is too bad that he was not allowed to continue his renovation and redesign of the Champlain Golf Course in the early 1980s: his excellent improvements to the golf course after his return in the late 1990s might have happened twenty years earlier.

And it is too bad that he was not on the grounds to hear the overwhelmingly positive response to the new holes that he had designed.

Today, many people regard Brigham’s par-three fourth hole as the signature hole on the Champlain Golf Course. On the one hand, for non-golfers or non-members who merely pass the golf course on Aylmer Road, it is the only hole they know: it is the only one fully visible from that busy road. On the other hand, golfers not only find its forced carry from the tee boxes to the steep bank of the pond in front of the green one of their toughest shots in a round of golf; they also find the view spectacular.

This hole must be the most photographed of any hole on the course.

Figure 182 Le droit, 1 June 2001, p. 33.

And so, the massive pond that Brigham created in the early 1980s has now challenged golfers for more than forty years.

Moreover, it has also come to serve as a habitat for a wide variety of wildlife. There are minnows and fish in the water and insects of all sorts living in the pond, on it, and around it. A variety of amphibians make use of the water and the mud. All sorts of waterfowl visit the pond, and aggressive blackbirds nest in its reeds, ready to attack golfers who come too close. Beavers have felled trees into the pond. Muskrats have well-travelled routes into and out of the water. A mink has been seen plying the waterways around the pond. And this is to say nothing of the bears, deer, coyotes, and foxes who stop by for a drink.

The people of the region have also found ways to use the pond as more than a golf hazard: in 2004, for instance, it hosted the “National Capital Pond Hockey Championship.”

Figure 183 Brigham's pond appears in the background of this photograph of Steve Hambling, organizer of the National Capital Pond Hockey Championship of 2004. In the background, the rinks to be used for the tournament are being cleared on the frozen surface of the pond. The benches at the tee boxes are visible further in the background, as is the snow-covered third green on top of the hill at the top right corner of the photo. Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 2004, p. 27.

When it came to his first design work at Champlain, then, although Brigham did not do it by the book, he did good.

Two More New Holes 1985-86

Today’s golf course superintendent Mike Leslie was hired as a part-time employee at Champlain in 1986 to pick stones out of the previously seeded fairway of what is today the ninth hole. He had become quite knowledgeable about golf as a teenaged caddie at both Glenlea and Royal Ottawa, but he did not expect to make a career in the game. In two days, however, he completed work that was expected to take at least a week and his very pleasantly surprised boss offered him a full-time job on the spot. Leslie has been at Champlain ever since.

Figure 184 Eike Jorgensen, early 2000s.

The company that maintained the golf course in 1986 was Capital Arborists, and it hired as its golf course superintendent Eike Jorgensen, who, along with his two brothers, had already established Jorgensen Roofing, a firm that remains one of the best known roofing companies in the Ottawa area. It was Jorgensen who hired Leslie, and it was Jorgensen who in 1985 and 1986 built two new golf holes, following carefully the design plans developed by Stan Brigham.

As early as 1978, the NCC published an “invitation to tender grading Champlain Golf Course”: “The work includes clearing and grubing, site grading, finish grading, seeding, and related work” (Ottawa Citizen, 12 September 1978, p. 49). This work may well have represented the beginning of the development of today’s ninth and tenth holes.

The NCC had certainly begun to integrate this land into the golf course operation at least two years before Jorgensen began to construct the new holes, for the present machine shed was built near the old Daly farmhouse and barns in 1983, with the NCC calling for alterations in the summer of 1984.

The two new holes seem to have been intended to replace the thirteenth and fifteenth holes of the Stewart-Mulligan design, the plan being to develop a driving range in place of these two Stewart-Mulligan holes (the driving range still functions in this area today).

In designing the tenth hole, Brigham created what remains not just the longest hole on the golf course, but also one of the longest holes in the region. He had originally designed a long, narrow bunker along the west side of the hole, running back up the fairway from the green for almost 100 yards. It was intended to keep errant golf balls from running into the dense woods, but it could also leave a long approach to the green from the sand: what some call the hardest shot in golf. The bunker is now about a quarter of its previous size.

In designing the ninth hole, Brigham created a green complex stoutly defended by sophisticated bunkering. He gently sloped the left side of the green so that approach shots rolling right-to-left with any speed are inclined to roll off the left side. Originally, the two bunkers on the right side of the green were a single large bunker stretching in a crescent from the front right edge of the green to the back right edge. It was later split into two separate bunkers.

The trees planted along the right side of the fairway were both to divide the ninth fairway from the tenth fairway and to penalize drives straying to the right. Brigham knew that golfers might well favour the right side of the ninth fairway, for the landing zone for drives slopes significantly from right to left and down towards the woods (and the creek within it) that runs parallel to the line of play. When the fairway is hard and drives are running out, golfers who play a draw and land the ball slightly left of the centre of the ninth fairway may well find that the ball runs right down into the woods.

The architectural sophistication of these two holes is beyond anything offered by the old Stewart-Mulligan thirteenth and fifteenth holes that they replaced.

David Moote and the Stanley Thompson Influence

A new company took over management of the Champlain Golf Course in 1988: Golf Management Associates (GMA). It would look after the course for the next ten years.

GMA was incorporated in Ontario on 29 February 1988 as a joint-stock company whose specified economic activities included golf course operations. Its business location was a private residence at 35 Oldham Road in Etobicoke: the home of Gordon Eyre (1925-2016). Anticipating that the new company might employ as many as five people, Eyre had founded GMA in partnership with David L. Moote.

Figure 185 Ottawa Citizen, 27 November 1993, p. 87

Eyre knew nothing about golf; Moote was an up-and-coming golf course architect.

Figure 186 Le régional, 27 April 1988, p. 73.

For the first time integrating grounds maintenance, restaurant services, and pro shop operations within a single contract, the NCC announced in January of 1988 that it had awarded Golf Management Associates a five-year lease to manage Champlain. When it did so, Gilles Leduc, who had been appointed as the Glenlea Golf and Country Club’s last head pro in 1974 (when Harry Mulligan was promoted to the post of Director of Golf) and who had served as Champlain’s first head pro since 1975, was shocked.

Indeed, he felt betrayed.

Learning in August of 1987 that the NCC intended to lease both the Champlain Golf Course and Capital Golf Gardens to the successful bidder for a five-year contract, Leduc became one of ten bidders (eight were local and two were exterior to the region).

Figure 187 Ottawa Citizen, 5 August 1987, p. 53.

Leduc had submitted “une offre très détaillée à la CNN” and he did not expect to lose, especially considering that (as he emphasized) he had given fourteen years of his life to the golf course (Le régional, 4 May 1988, p. 34).

When he learned that his bid had not been successful, he complained to the newspapers that he could find no evidence that this so-called “compagnie” GMA even existed as a corporate entity, explained that he had discovered that Moote and Eyre were not ready for the job (for instance, he said, they had made no plans for acquiring a liquor license or for providing golf equipment for rent to the public), and noted that neither of the men was able to speak French.

Leduc was prepared to sue the NCC:

“Mon avocat est à terminer l’étude du dossier et je songe sérieusement à poursuivre la CCN pour n'avoir pas respecté les clauses principales de sa demande de soumission” (Le régional, 4 May 1988, p. 34).

The NCC stood its ground, however, and Leduc eventually relented.

In response to Leduc’s complaint about the “Johnny-come-lately” status of the company that was to replace him, the NCC told a newspaper: “la CCN ignorait depuis quand la compagnie Golf Management éxistait mais connaissait le bureau-chef de Toronto” (Le régional, 11 May 1988, p. 45). Had the NCC worked with Moote before?

Figure 188 David L. Moote, circa 1996. Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40.

A prior relationship between the NCC and David Moote would explain how the NCC came to award the lease to Golf Management Associates almost two months before the company was even incorporated. Or perhaps it was simply the case that Moote’s reputation had preceded him and the NCC was confident that he knew what to do with its golf courses.

Certainly Moote will have visited Champlain Golf Course in 1987 before formulating the GMA submission to the NCC. He will have recognized that it needed better management than Capital Arborists was providing and he probably recognized the need to eliminate the danger that had arisen of golf balls driven from the second tee threatening golfers on the third tee.

Gord Eyre was “an accomplished entrepreneur who was well respected in the business world” (Toronto Star, 5 May 2016, p. 34). At the time, another of his companies was in charge of concessions at the new SkyDome in Toronto. But since he had no experience of golf course management, it was David Moote who handled the practical side of their business. He flew into Ottawa once a week (picked up at the airport by his superintendent) and spent about an hour-and-a-half at the course before flying back home.

Working full-time at the golf course as Moote’s onsite superintendent was a succession of greenkeepers: Paul Brett, Greg Cable (at two different periods), and Daniel Riendeau. Senior to any onsite superintendent at Champlain from 1990 to 1992 was Moote’s Associate Superintendent at GMA: John Cameron.

David L. Moote had learned the art of golf course design primarily from his father, Robert F. Moote (1925-2017), but his uncle, David S. Moote (1927-2014), was also a golf course designer, as well as a greenkeeper. The brothers often worked together and eventually partnered in Moote & Associates.

They were born in Halton County, the sons of a Christian minister of the newly formed United Church. The latter’s various pastoral appointments “took him into many areas of Southern Ontario” (Windsor Star, 19 June 1973, p. 16). The brothers attended High School in London, Ontario, and they then enrolled in the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) at Guelph.

“Bob” Moote graduated in 1948 specializing in Ornamental Horticulture. He was immediately hired by Stanley Thompson to work with him at the Guelph golf course that Thompson had co-designed in the early 1930s and afterwards purchased: Cutten Fields. Then, according to Moote, “He gave me a pick and a shovel and sent me to the Maritimes” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40). After that, “He asked me what I wanted to do in the coming winter. I said I’d like to take some drafting [courses] so I could put more on canvas. I did that and we went to Toronto and got so busy, we never slowed down. We’d work all night and get up early in the morning” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40). Ever after, he remembered Thompson’s first piece of advice: “The important thing is to get the par-3s laid out, and the course will look after itself after that” (Toronto Star, 3 April 2003, p. 222).

Figure 189 Robert Frederick Moote, 1925-2017.

After Thompson’s unexpected death in 1953, Moote occasionally designed golf courses with an earlier Thompson assistant, Clinton E. (“Robbie”) Robinson, but Moote stepped away from full-time golf course design and construction in 1952, working instead for the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation for five years, first in the Ottawa area, where he led programmes serving young people in the United Church, and then in Montreal. But he was hired in 1957 by the Oakdale Golf Club to build a nine hole course: he stayed with the club until 1977. While there, he inaugurated the Ontario Turfgrass Symposium, acted for five years as secretary of the R.C.G.A., and founded Moote & Associates with his brother David and then R.F. Moote & Associates with his son David.

Having designed golf courses throughout Canada, as well as in Jamaica, he became a member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1980 and was made a Fellow of this organization in 1986. After his death in 2017, Golf Course Industry magazine said: “Moote will be remembered for his ever-present smile and welcoming demeanour, ever appreciative of, sensitive to, and respectful of those around him.” Robert’s younger brother David S. Moote also enrolled at OAC, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1951. He then enrolled in postgraduate studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, graduating with a Master of Science degree in 1953. He immediately set about transforming Canadian greenkeeping standards. As legendary Canadian greenkeeper Gordon Witteveen recalled in his chapter “David Moote, a Leader Ahead of His Time” in A Century of Greenkeeping:

Figure 190 David S. Moote, c. 1960.

When tall and handsome David Moote graduated … and took a position as superintendent in 1953, everyone knew that things would never be the same.

Dave Moote dominated greenkeeping for the next 25 years.

At Rosedale, he quickly started to experiment with different grasses in the nursery. He did not keep his findings to himself. He wrote and talked about what he learned at meetings and conferences….

He shared his findings with anyone willing to listen. He was one of our best public speakers. At a time when greenkeepers were still very much kept to the barn, David Moote could be seen talking to the members in the clubhouse. He was an intelligent man with an interesting story and the golfers loved to listen. (A Century of Greenkeeping [Chelsea, Michigan: Ann Arbor Press, 2001], pp 130-31)

And as if his academic inclinations to write and speak about the art and science of greenkeeping were not enough, he was also a gifted administrator.

Figure 191 David S. Moote welcomes Ontario Premier Leslie Frost to the meeting of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America in Toronto in January of 1961.

Having joined the Ontario Golf Superintendents Association in 1953, David Moote served as president from 1959 to 1960, hosting in Toronto in January of 1961 the annual meeting of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, of which he was elected vice-president in 1963 and president in 1964. He was just the third Canadian to be made head of the GCSAA, and he was just thirty-six years of age, to boot. In 1973, he was honored by the Ontario Golf Association as “one of the premier greenkeepers in the country” (Windsor Star, 29 January 1973, p. 25).

He had left Rosedale in 1969 for the Essex Golf and Country Club in Windsor, Ontario, where he was asked to upgrade the Donald Ross course to contemporary design standards. Having “revitalized Essex” since he had arrived “as course superintendent in 1969,” he was promoted to the role of general manager and asked to take a leading role in the club’s application to host the 1976 Canadian Open (Windsor Star, 9 July 1976, p. 19).

Moote had to present the course in Canadian Open condition by 1974, two years before the tournament dates, when the R.C.G.A. inspected courses competing to host the 1976 championship. At the tournament in July of 1976, reigning U.S. Open champion Jerry Pate voiced an opinion that was common amongst the visiting pros: “This is one of the best courses we’ve played on all season. I am really impressed. It took a lot of time and money to prepare it like this” (Windsor Star, 9 July 1976, p. 19).

Moote later moved to the Scarborough Golf and Country Club to work as course superintendent, eventually taking similar employment in Florida for several years before retiring there. When he died in 2014, the American journal Golf Course Management regretted the loss of this “industry giant” and “industry legend” (November 2014).

Although David L. Moote’s father took him to work on design projects when he was just six years old (he was born in 1953), his first sporting love was not golf, but hockey.

Figure 192 Dave Moote makes a scintillating save. Windsor Star, 27 November 1972, p. 22.

In his first year at the University of Guelph, he became the Gryphons’ first-string goaltender: “Gryphons lost [their] first all-star goaltender … to graduation this year, but his replacement, Dave Moote, seems capable of doing a lot of replacing” (Windsor Star, 27 November 1972, p. 22).

Moote became an all-star himself, frequently keeping his team in games they had no business winning:

Guelph goalie is bombarded, but he beats the Blues ….

University of Toronto Blues were once college hockey’s most potent goal-scoring force.

But this year they’ve had trouble lighting the lamp behind opposition nets.

Last night was a case in point. They fired 52 shots at Guelph Gryphons’ goalie Dave Moote at Varsity Arena but managed to put just four behind him. (Windsor Star, 27 November 1972, p. 22)

Selected the team’s MVP in the 1974-75 season, he played four seasons for the Gryphons and then entered the farm system of the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins. Before him was the possibility of a career in professional hockey. But a devastating knee injury put paid to that hope.

Dave Moote had concentrated on hockey, but he had by no means forsaken golf. It turns out that he had learned a lot about laying out a golf course by just tagging along with his father, such as when as a teenager he had helped his father stake out the sixteenth hole at the Brampton Golf Club in the mid-1960s. And when he was a bit older, he learned even more by becoming involved in construction and maintenance. He even caddied at Canadian Open championships in the mid-1970s, which was a further education in the standards that prevailed at the highest levels of the game.

When he graduated in 1975 from the University of Guelph, he had “earned degrees in sports psychology, turf management, and landscape design” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40). He immediately began designing golf courses with his father, but in the early 1980s, he indulged his academic inclinations and became an instructor at Seneca College.

Figure 193 Mike Leslie, July 2022.

When David Moote began working at the Champlain Golf Course in 1988, therefore, he brought with him a wealth of golf course knowledge and experience. And fortunately, like his uncle David, he by no means kept what he had learned to himself. Superintendent Mike Leslie, for instance, affirms to this day that he learned more from David Moote about golf course maintenance than any other person.

Leslie had taken to asking the Champlain superintendents all sorts of questions:

why they were doing this and why that? why doing this rather than that? when would one do this and when that? Superintendents Brett and Cable had both been students of Moote’s at Seneca College, and so they could provide Leslie with knowledgeable responses to his queries. Perhaps they let Moote know how quick a study young Leslie was, for Moote himself soon began to entertain Leslie’s questions and then to take him around the course to instruct him in certain matters. Moote taught Leslie to identify signs of diseases afflicting the turf, how to recognize the presence of certain pests, when in the year to look for such diseases and pests, and so on. Moote himself explained to Leslie the properties of various chemicals and their appropriate applications.

Superintendent Brett then saw to it that Leslie received proper certifications in the handling of these chemicals.

Leslie remains grateful for the knowledge that Moote and his students imparted to him: Leslie did not have to go to college to learn from an instructor; the instructor had come to him!

At the end of 1996, Dave Moote was interviewed alongside his father Robert by Golf Course News, which yielded an article in January of the next year called “Mootes Carry On the Thompson Design Tradition, and Their Own.” Father and son took their connection to Thompson seriously and were grateful for it. As Robert Moote’s fellow Stanley Thompson assistant, Geoffrey Cornish, explained in his Foreword to The Toronto Terror, by James A, Barclay,

All of us who worked for Stan are grateful that he was conscientious in training his assistants. Indeed, it is generally accepted that one of his partners, Robert Trent Jones, has since become the most influential golf architect ever. Other assistants who came from what Stan termed his “stable” went on to become recognized architects, including Clinton “Robbie” Robinson, Howard Watson, Kenneth Welton, Norman Woods, Robert Moote, and me. They, in turn, produced renowned golf architects north and south of the border. In Canada, they included Douglas Carrick, Graham Cooke, Lester Furber, Tom McBroom, John Watson, and David Moote.

Figure 194 On 27 September 2021, David Moote addresses the Stanley Thompson society at the Ladies Golf Club, Toronto.

Thinking about his architectural lineage, David Moote recognized that as a result of having tagged along with his father in the early days, and then as a result of having worked in partnership with him, the apple had not fallen from the tree: “We are in sync, knowing what the other is thinking” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40). In 1997, when David was still working at Champlain, Bob said of the two of them: “We have the same philosophy” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40).

David explained that he had come to recognize that their similar tendencies had derived from the same “grounding in terms of principles” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40). And these principles, it seems, they each traced back to Thompson. No doubt in part as an acknowledgement of this affiliation, David would later become president of the Stanley Thompson Society (to which he is speaking in the photograph to the left).

In 1997, after nine years of managing the Champlain Golf Course via Golf Management Associates, David Moote explained that by that point he had come to integrate his formal education in sports psychology, turf management and landscape design within an overarching “operational or maintenance perspective” on agronomy:

“That’s very much a good part of my business right now – regenerating golf courses, renovating them to practical, feasible economic operations, and taking them back to their natural states as well, so the maintenance costs are not so prohibitive” (Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40).

In addition to his work at Champlain in the 1990s, David Moote was reviving a number of other Quebec golf courses and earning a reputation as a golf course “doctor”: “Le parcours de Venise … était sous les soin du « médecin » David Moote, un surintendant de golf recherché …. Il a redonné de la vie à des parcours comme le Royal-Montréal, Beloeil, et Islemère” (La tribune, 8 June 1990, p. 3).

GMA’s first year of work on the Champlain Golf Course in 1988 was extraordinary. The company touted its achievements in April of 1989 in the English and French newspapers of the Ottawa region: “During 1988, extensive renovations and improvements were completed at the Champlain Golf Course. These include: the installation of a completely automatic irrigation system; the creation of a new Driving Range and Practice Area” (Ottawa Citizen, 22 April 1989, p. 98).

The driving range was developed on the site of the thirteenth and fifteenth holes originally laid out by Stewart and Mulligan in 1952. GMA was able to withdraw these two holes from play because of completion of what are today the ninth and tenth holes.

Figure 195 The driving range and practice area developed by GMA in 1988 is seen above in an enlarged detail from an architectural drawing done by GMA in March of 1992.

The GMA architectural drawing seen to the left shows the driving range and practice area as it existed at the end of the 1991 season. We can see that the old Stewart-Mulligan thirteenth fairway (next to the first fairway) was now used as the longest “Full Club Practice Range” (the phrase is highlighted in yellow). The hitting area for this old fairway is highlighted in pale green, with two lines indicating the line of practice hitting.

The old Stewart-Mulligan fifteenth fairway was used as a second, slightly shorter “Full Club Practice Range” (the phrase is again highlighted in yellow). Its hitting area is also highlighted in green, with two lines indicating the line of practice hitting.

This old fifteenth fairway was played opposite to its original line of play, and the old fifteenth green next to the new hitting area was used as a practice putting area: this green is highlighted in bright green above; the phrase “Putting Area” (highlighted in yellow) is printed across it.

Figure 196 A detail from a 1997 aerial photograph annotated to show the golf hole designed by David L. Moote in 1988.

In 1988, GMA also laid out a new hole designed by David Moote (the one that plays today as the sixth hole). It was created to replace the 310-yard second hole of the original Keffer design. Golfers had become capable of driving the ball far enough from the second tee to inconvenience – and perhaps even endanger – golfers playing shots from the third tee (today’s seventh). So Moote designed a new fairway and a new tees from which golfers would play toward the existing second green.

Seen to the left, Moote’s hole required a new set of tees: these comprised the existing forward tee on today’s sixth hole and a back tee north of today’s second green where the access road makes its ninety-degree turn toward the maintenance sheds (today, this area is used to store gravel and culverts). Half-way to the green, Moote designed two mounds on the left side of the fairway and three mounds on the right side. He also designed two more mounds for an area short and left of the green. To do this work, he brought a trusted “shaper” from Toronto who spent ten days on a bulldozer levelling the fairway and carefully sculpting these mounds.

Bringing into play both the two new holes that play today as the ninth and tenth and also his new hole that plays today as the sixth, Moote created a new routing that would endure for ten years: the Stewart-Mulligan fourteenth hole would become the second hole (as it is today) and Moote’s new hole would be played as the third. The new routing appears below on a 1997 aerial photograph.

Figure 197 1997 aerial photograph annotated to show the routing of golf holes from 1988 to 1997. (The numbers mark the location of the greens. In terms of the numbers given to the same eighteen holes today, the Moote routing was: 1, 2, 6 [from the forward tee], 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 5 [from the senior tee], 3, 4).

The photograph below shows golfers travelling from the fifteenth hole (today’s eighteenth) to the sixteenth hole (today’s fifth). Note the number 16 and the direction arrow at the bottom of the sign.

Figure 198 Ottawa Citizen, 2 July 1995, p. 18.

In 1997, David Moote decided to modify the hole he had laid out almost ten years before.

He created a new back tee. It not only added sixty to eighty yards to the hole; it also changed the way the hole was played. There was now a decision to be made regarding placement of the drive. The two mounds that mark the left side of the fairway when the hole is played from the original tees now presented themselves along the direct line to the green, about 220 to 240 yards from the back tee. Long hitters, of course, could always drive right over these mounds, but others had to decide whether to play left or right of them.

Going to the right of the mounds creates a gentle dogleg left shape for play, and it allows an approach shot to be played into the green on a line generally in accord with the rectangular green’s front-to-back axis.

Going to the left of the mounds slightly shortens the hole, but it leaves an approach shot that must be played to a landing area on the green that is narrowed by the forty-five degree angle that the green assumes when approached from the left.

The "Morning 9"

Golf Management Associates had a number of ideas for adding value to the NCC’s Champlain Golf Course. One of them was to create a nine-hole routing that people could play first thing in the morning without getting in the way of golfers who were also starting early on the proper eighteen-hole route.

David Moote charged Associate Superintendent John Cameron with this responsibility: it was assigned as a form of homework during the winter of 1991-92.

Figure 199 John Cameron, Whitetail Golf Club, Eganville, Ontario, early 2000s.

Studying under Moote at Seneca College in the mid-1980s (where he earned his diploma as a Golf Course Technician in 1986), Cameron began his greenkeeping career as a spray technician at golf courses at Hilton Head, South Carolina, before returning to Canada and, as of 1989, becoming Moote’s “Associate Superintendent.” His important role in Moote’s course renovation at the Cowansville Golf Club in the late 1980s and early 1990s was noted in the local newspaper: “Les conditions du terrain seront bonnes. Le consultant David Moote et le surintendant du terrain John Cameron ont donné le feu vert à la direction du club cowansvillois” (La voix de l’Est, 5 April 1991, p. 25). Moote was from 1990 to 1992 the GMA “Superintendent Liaison” for the Cowansville and Champlain courses

At Champlain, Cameron identified a problem with the bunkering around the green of what plays today as the ninth hole: there was a long crescent-shaped bunker guarding the entire right side of the Brigham green from front to back. An excellent bunker as it was, it nonetheless created a traffic problem, preventing golfers from leaving the green in the direction of the forward tee on what plays today as the tenth hole. So, Cameron proposed to divide the bunker in two and had the authority to do so, producing the arrangement that prevails today.

To enable a “Morning 9” circuit of golf holes at Champlain, Cameron proposed to create two new par-three holes.

One required two new tees placed just north of the present fourth green, one each side of the marsh located in this area: golfers would play to a green between what are today the back tee and the senior tee of the fifth hole. The other new hole would be created by locating two tee boxes east of this new green at the southern end of the driving range in order to allow play to the Stewart-Mulligan eighteenth green (which is today an area for practising chipping and bunker shots). These two new holes are marked by yellow highlighting as 5 and 9 on the architectural drawing below.

Figure 200 John Cameron. "Morning 9 Hole Course." March 1992. This drawing is in the office of superintendent Mike Leslie.

Under the heading “Start Morning 9” seen on the drawing above, Cameron drew broken-line arrows from the “Pro Shop” to what is the tee today of the fifteenth hole (marked as the twelfth hole above). He marks this hole as the first of the “Morning 9.” One was then to play what are today the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth holes (marked as the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth above). Proceeding across the parking lot, one would then play the newly created fifth hole of the “Morning 9.” Played next as the sixth, seventh, and eighth holes of the “Morning 9” were today’s fifth, third and fourth holes (marked sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen above). Note that Cameron located a third tee box on today’s fourth hole (the eighteenth in his day) on the Aylmer Road side of the pond. The final hole of the “Morning 9” was a par-three played from one of two tee boxes located in front of the old Stewart-Mulligan eighteenth green (today’s green for practice at chipping and bunker shots). These tee boxes effectively duplicated the approach shot that had been required on the old Stewart-Mulligan par-4 eighteenth hole.

The new tees required for this circuit of golf holes were not specially built; the grass was simply cut low at the locations indicated on the architectural drawing. Mike Leslie recalls, however, that the tee from which one played across the marshy creek to the new “Morning 9” fifth green required that a large oak tree be cut down. The new fifth green to which one played, mind you, was not a proper green: fairway grass was simply cut short in the shape of a green in the area between what are today the back tee and the senior tee of the fifth hole.

Construction work to build proper tees and a proper green was deferred until it could be determined whether the “Morning 9” was viable. It was introduced for play in 1992. It proved insufficiently popular to make its use worthwhile. So it was not used in 1993, or ever again.

Figure 201 John Cameron, Whitetail Golf Club, October 2023.

John Cameron continued to work for Moote but transferred from the payroll of GMA to that of R.F. Moote and Associates in the spring of 1992 when he was appointed Project Manager at the eighteen-hole course of the Lombard Glen Golf Club laid out by David L. Moote.

After just under two years on this job, he became R.F. Moote and Associate’s Project Manager at the eighteen-hole golf course of the Millcroft Golf Club in North Burlington, Ontario.

He then became the golf course superintendent at Edelweiss Golf Club from 1998 to 2003. Since 2004 he has been the golf course superintendent at Whitetail Golf Club and recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his start there.

An Executive Eighteen Might-Have-Been

Another idea that GMA had was to use NCC property to the north and east of the present golf course to develop an executive eighteen-hole golf course.

Figure 202 Annotated 1997 aerial photograph.

As shown on the 1997 aerial photograph to the left, this land was west of what is today Champlain’s sixth hole (designed by Moote), west of what is today the tenth hole (designed by Brigham), and north of what is today the eleventh hole (designed by Keffer).

I have marked as a yellow rectangle on the photograph to the left the tee that would be built by Moote later in 1997 as the back tee for what is today the sixth hole. The executive course parking lot was to be west of this tee.

To design the course and stake it out, Robert Moote himself came to Ottawa in the spring of 1997 and spent a month at Champlain carefully planning the location of tees, greens, and hazards so as to arrange an interesting golf course around trees that the NCC said had to be preserved.

By this point, a great deal of preparation had already occurred:

the NCC had granted approval for the project; an environmental assessment of the land had been completed; a certain number of trees had been marked for preservation within the golf course; a parking lot had been approved.

This project was a centrepiece in GMA’s submission for the new five-year contract for management of the Champlain Golf Course commencing 1 January 1998. But the winning submission proved to be the one submitted by BBC Golf, Limited – the company formed by Stan Brigham, Geoff Baker, and Michel Charron.

The new proprietors had no interest in an executive golf course. It was not built

Super Stan

As of 1 January 1998, the NCC awarded the lease to operate the Champlain Golf Course, its pro shop, and its restaurant to Stan Brigham and his associates Geoff Baker and Michel Charron (who composed BBC Golf, Limited).

Brigham was back. What had he been doing in the interim?

Ambitious to build a career in golf course management after his first experience at Capital Golf Gardens in the early 1970s, Brigham went on to manage not only the Champlain Golf Course but also the Gatineau Golf and Country Club. As sports writer Eddie MacCabe explained:

When the Gatineau went bankrupt [in the mid-1970s], Brigham approached the Toronto owners of the mortgage and offered to run the place until such time as they found other uses for it….

The first year, with a lot of changes and improvements and capital cost, they broke even. The second year, they made a little.

Every year since, for eight years, the profit has been going up. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39)

More or less willing to do whatever it took to make a go of a golf club, Brigham drew the line at managing the Gatineau’s nightclub. In fact, it turns out that Brigham and Laphen were so focussed on golf that “the Gatineau’s new management hadn’t given much thought to the nightclub”:

Figure 203 The nightclub building was piggy-backed onto the Nash farmhouse that served as the clubhouse of the Gatineau Golf and Country Club.

In July, Stan Brigham and club golf pro Barry Laphen took over the Golf and Country Club operation.

Both men know a lot about golf club operations, but neither knew much about nightclubs.

They closed down that end of the operation…. (Ottawa Journal, 16 September 1977, p. 27).

With work at Capital Golf Gardens, Champlain, and Gatineau Golf and Country Club under his belt, Stan had become famous enough in the local golf world to be interviewed by MacCabe in a 1983 article called “Super Stan,” in which the

writer described Stan as “a bona fide … golf adventurer,” and declared: “he has visions” (Ottawa Journal, 16 September 1977, p. 27).

His first vision involved a driving range – a kind that was new for the Outaouais of the 1980s:

He built a driving range up behind the [Gatineau] course, up Edey Road …. As these layouts go, this is the most elaborate we have ever seen. Something like $300,000 went into it, so they have a maxi-putt that nobody can come close to par on, and they have a huge driving area with elevated slopes, all measured out and posted, so you can see clearly what your shots are doing.

And Stan Kolar will head up the teaching force, beginning this season, and they’ll offer a package deal with swing mechanics and etiquette, all about moving along properly on a golf course, and then a round at the Gatineau. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39)

Another vision yielded Stan’s first course design, that of the Dome Hill Golf Club laid out on land north of Hull including “the old Dome Hill where the Ottawa Ski Club was located many years ago”:

Brigham is building a 36-hole complex there, up hill and down dale, over ravines and gullies.

“I am sick and tired of ordinary little golf courses,” Brigham said. “I want every hole on this one to be memorable…. I expect to have nine holes, and maybe 18, open next July. We have one par five that measures 660 yards from the gold tees. Now, we have white tees, and then short tees too, but on this course every shot will be demanding. I have 18 holes roughed out …. I know exactly what I want to do. And Ill do it.” (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1883, p. 39)

Figure 204 Dome Hill Golf Club. Ottawa Citizen, 29 August 1985, p. 41.

Stan was a good as his word. The photograph to the left shows play from the top of Dome Hill on the eighteen-hole course of Dome Hill Golf Club (today’s Hautes Plaines) in the summer of 1985.

And there was another vision.

Declaring that “Quebec is the last bastion of free enterprise,” Stan formed a partnership with his wife, Jane Bridges, called J.S. Golf Care Services, and their company offered a new kind of contract to golf course owners:

He has a golf package … in which he’ll take over complete maintenance of a golf course and bet you on the results.

For example, he’ll promise exceptional conditions and maintenance for $180,000 a year, where most private course greenkeeping budgets run to about $250,000 a year. And he’ll bet you his fee (which is separate from materials, wages, etc.) that he does what he says he will do. If he doesn’t, you win.

He has energy, enthusiasm, and he’ll put it all on the line to prove his point. (Ottawa Citizen, 5 May 1983, p. 39)

Stan’s next work as an architect was at the Gatineau Golf and Country Club in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When “the clubhouse at Gatineau … [was] knocked down by the club’s owners, the Richcraft Corporation,” with “a mall, including a supermarket,” to “be built over four existing holes,” Stan supervised “the process of building six new holes” (Ottawa Citizen, 8 January 1991, p. 22).

After his creation of the Dome Hill course, Stan’s renown as a golf course architect who was able to work wonders with dramatic topography spread. And so, in the early 1990s, landowner Elijah N. Jones asked Stan to help him create the spectacular resort course of the Club de Golf Héritage in the Laurentian Mountains at Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, Quebec.

In his review of the course, Flagstick editor and publisher Scott McLeod notes that Jones did the construction work but sought from Brigham “assistance on the design” (Flagstick, 30 March 2009). In the following comments, then, it is implicitly Brigham’s design that McLeod praises so fulsomely:

In my mind, the greatest asset of Héritage … is the way the golf course flows and fits the land.

The result is a number of dramatic holes (the par three 11th is a fine example, playing uphill and over a gorge) followed by those where you need to execute the proper shots to score well (the par four 12th, with a well defined landing area off the tee, comes to mind).

Each and every hole is an individual test of the varying skills necessary to be a complete player.

The variety of hole shapes keeps you continually stimulated. (Flagstick, 30 March 2009)

A reviewer for Golfpass, John Scott Deegan, offered similar praise of the design:

The hilly 6,768-yard course … plays almost as good as the more celebrated Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello Golf Club, a historic Stanley Thompson design in nearby Montebello….

Once players get past the blind second shot on the opening par 5, there’s nothing tricked up about the par-71 routing by Stan Brigham and owner Elijah Jones.

The five par 3s all play different, requiring multiple club selections.

Doglegs and several amazing downhill shots spice up the four par 5s.

The bookend par 4s at the ninth and 18th holes rise uphill off the tee, revealing just how dramatic the terrain can be.

It all adds up to great fun. (Golfpass, 23 September 2013, https://www.golfpass.com/travel-advisor/galleries/play-through-the-canadian-wilderness-at-the-club-de-golf-heritage-in-quebec).

Figure 205 Early 2000s view of Club de Golf Héritage, Notre-Dame-de-la-paix, Quebec.

Well done, Stan!

Although back at Champlain as of 1998, Stan by no means confined his attention or his “vision” to the NCC’s golf course. After his earliest work at the Gatineau, Stan was again a significant figure there in the dramatic redesign and renovation of the course between 2007 and 2010.

Accounts of who did what during this period of extensive work on the course vary. The Chronogolf website observes: “the historic course has been significantly improved by renowned architect and player Graham Cooke and builder Stan Brigham” (https://www.chronogolf.ca/club/gatineau). Was Stan just the “builder”? Scott McLeod says that the new course was “designed by renowned Canadian golf architect and player Graham Cooke and golf course superintendent Stan Brigham” (Flagstick, 19 June 2013). “Superintendent” Stan is credited with architectural input.

Figure 206 Graham Cooke, early 1990s.

In Le droit, Martin Comtois provides further information: the course was “dessiné par le réputé Graham Cooke, qui a peaufiné les plans originaux du gérant Stan Brigham” (Le droit, 7 May 2010). Manager Stan seems to have been the original architect.

Marc Brassard reported the same thing the year before: “L’architecte réputé Graham Cooke a été embauché pour peaufiner les plans originaux dessinés par Stan Brigham” (Le droit, 3 April 2009).

Cooke had the greater architectural fame, but Brigham’s original design might have had the greater impact on the interesting course that we play today.

As president of Seaway Golf, Stan Brigham also managed the Iroquois Golf Club from 2011 to 2014, along with his son, superintendent Chris Brigham.

Figure 207 Iroquois Golf Club, Iroquois, Ontario.

At the end of the 2014 season, however, Iroquois was in financial difficulties and Brigham – the “great adventurer” – had another of his “visions”:

If all goes according to a new plan, the Iroquois Golf Course will open this summer. On Monday, the golf oversight board agreed to lease the facility to Stan Brigham for two years for the price of $1.

“He was the unsolicited proposal to run the course,” said South Dundas Mayor Steven Byvelds about the offer.

The board had previously asked for applications to keep the course open without burdening the township with the costs, but none met their criteria. Instead, Brigham will operate the golf centre with the option of buying land for development.

“He would get first right of refusal,” said Byvelds. “He incurs all expenses; it becomes his risk.” (Golf Course Trades, 1 January 2015).

Brigham also owned Les Vieux Moulins for a number of years, where he sadly experienced the bane of many a golf course owner – people who build houses alongside golf courses and then complain about golf balls landing on their property:

Les gens achètent des maisons à côté d’un terrain de golf et ils sont les premiers ensuite à se plaindre dès qu’ils retrouvent une rare balle.

Ils veulent changer le terrain.

« Que doit-on faire? Fermer ? » a déploré Stan Brigham.

(Le droit, 6 September 2011)

Stan “deplored” the situation, made what changes he could, and then decided he had had enough. He did not close Les Vieux Moulins, however. Instead, he sold it.

In 2014, Stan became a partner in Pine View Golf Course, Incorporated, and so became one of the operators of the Pine View Golf Course. Under the care of his son, superintendent Matt Brigham, It has gone from strength to strength since.

Stan Brigham also did work beyond Quebec and Ontario, being called to Alberta as a consultant on the design and development of a golf course near Edmonton.

Brigham Restored, Champlain Reborn

During his second period in charge of the Champlain Golf Course, Stan Brigham has done more to make the layout architecturally interesting than any designer since Karl Keffer.

The three new holes (today’s fourth, ninth, and tenth) and the new green (today’s third) that Brigham designed in the early 1980s were essential contributions to the architectural renaissance that Brigham inaugurated at Champlain Golf Course, but he had only begun to fulfill his “vision” for the layout.

In 1998, he added the top tier and the backing mounds to the green of what plays today as the second hole. He also added the deep bunker on the left side at the back of the green. (This area had been an area of rough sloping upward toward the fifteenth tee of the Stewart-Mulligan circuit.) Also in 1998, at the suggestion of head pro and business partner Geoff Baker, he turned the par-four sixteenth hole of the Stewart-Mulligan circuit into a par-five hole by adding the back tee box at the edge of the pond.

Figure 208 Annotated 1999 aerial photograph.

The 1999 aerial photograph to the left shows this work on the second green and fifth tee completed, and it also shows wonderfully transformational work underway in two other areas.

In 1999, Brigham built two new greens: the present green and its surrounding mounds on what plays today as the fifth hole and the green and its surrounding mounds on what plays today as the seventeenth hole.

The new fifth green replaced Stewart and Mulligan’s sixteenth green, which had always been plagued by poor drainage, leaving it vulnerable to diseases. To this day, the area surrounding the fifth green becomes soggy not only after heavy rain, but even after overwatering. Brigham’s elevation of the new green was essential.

Additionally, the mounding around the green provides strategic challenges absent in the case of the original green. To avoid awkward recovery shots, golfers will not want to hit approach shots left or right or too long. From the Stewart-Mulligan green to the access road beyond it was thirty yards; now, the access road is just five or six yards beyond the back of the green, and the ball played too long will be fed down to the road after it crests the mounds that mark the back of the green. With this disincentive to hitting an approach shot long, approach shots might be hit short, in which case a false front to the green punishes those who are too timid with approach shots.

The photograph below shows the position of the remains of the Stewart-Mulligan green in front of today’s fifth green. The old green was flat and not elevated above the fairway more than six inches.

Figure 209 Annotated contemporary photograph of Champlain's 5th green.

Obviously, Brigham’s work is much more sophisticated than that of the earlier architects.

Brigham also replaced the original seventeenth green.

Designed by Keffer, this old “push-up” green had endured for seventy years. Although it was not used in Alston’s nine-hole configuration from 1947 to 1950, it was revived by Stewart and Mulligan in 1951 (serving as the eleventh green in the Glenlea/Champlain routing from 1951 to 1988, after which it became the fourteenth green in the GMA routing). The remains of the old green can be seen in the photograph below, with arrows indicating the direction of the push-up at its elevated front.

Figure 210 2023 photograph of Keffer's original push-up green (arrows mark the slope of the "push-up") and Brigham's 1999 green beyond it.

In 1999, however, Brigham built a new, long, narrow green extending forty yards beyond the back of the original green. Its location relative to the original green is shown in the photograph above. As with most of the new greens that Brigham designed on otherwise relatively featureless flat ground at Champlain, he constructed elaborate mounding around three sides of this new green (as is also shown on the photograph above).

Today, the old Keffer green serves as something of an extended apron in front of the Brigham green, which begins several yards beyond the six-inch drop at the back of the original Keffer green.

Brigham’s seventeenth green was built over a well that was sunk in this area in the 1930s to provide water for irrigation of the entire golf course. To this day, the main pipe that carried water to most of the course can be seen crossing the creek that runs along the right side of today’s seventeenth green (the creek marks the boundary between the seventeenth green and the fifteenth hole).

Figure 212 Annotated 1965 aerial photograph.

Figure 211 Old water tank behind today's 17th green.

Of course, Brigham had no use for the huge old water tank, so he had a bulldozer push it into the bull rushes at the base of the mounds built at the back of his new green, where it still wallows today (as can be seen in the photograph to the left).

After his burst of redesign energy between 1998 and 1999, Brigham began to consider other changes.

He knew, for instance, that something needed to be done about the first hole. At 475 yards in length, it had become too short for a proper par-five test in the twenty-first century, and yet, were it simply renamed a par four, it would be too difficult a test for most golfers to face on their first hole of the day. What to do?

Similarly, the thirteenth hole had been shortened from its 1950 playing length of 350 yards to about 300 yards. It had become a driveable par four. Risk-reward driveable par-four holes are regular features of golf course architecture in the twenty-first century, but Brigham had inherited a hole that was all reward, with virtually no risk confronting the golfer trying to drive the green. What to do?

Brigham decided to build new greens for these holes in 2002.

Figure 213 Annotated 2002 Google Maps satellite photograph.

The 2002 Google Maps satellite photograph seen to the left shows construction work well underway on the two new green complexes.

A cart path leads from the old thirteenth green to the new thirteenth green under construction. Note also the old back fourteenth tee and the old front fourteenth tee. Both these old, well-made tee boxes still exist, but they were made unusable by the new green.

There is no sign yet of the present fourteenth tee, the location of which (as marked on the photograph) is behind today’s seventh tee.

And note that the massive new first green complex that is under construction in 2002 (one can see about a dozen large piles of sand at the north end of the construction site) is not the green complex to which one plays today on the first hole (the location of today’s green is circled on the photograph).

What happened?

Well, it turns out that architect Brigham and superintendent Leslie fell to talking one day about the loss of yardage incurred in the playing of the fourteenth hole by the creation of the new thirteenth green. In the original Keffer layout, the fourteenth hole (which was Keffer’s eleventh) had played at a length of from 440 to 460 yards. Usually rated a par four, it was a stout test. But 100 yards of the hole had been lost to the new design of the thirteenth hole.

Leslie observed that the construction of a new, elevated fourteenth tee in the area behind the seventh tee would recover a good portion of the lost yardage. Unfortunately – darn it! – the new first green was being constructed right where inaccurate drives from such a new fourteenth tee would threaten people playing that green.

What about the idea of abandoning this new first green and instead building a green about forty yards to the west of it?

Brigham’s verdict: “Let’s do it!”

The photograph below provides a perspective of the difference that this decision made.

Figure 214 2023 photograph of the approach to the present 1st green at the Champlain Colf Course. The original new 1st green site was located beyond the pine trees indicated on the right side of the photograph. The partially built green here was turned into an area of extensive mounding.

Brigham used the material assembled on the original construction site to create large mounds to the right of the present first green. To the near side of this mounding, he subsequently added pine trees (which can be seen on the right side of the photograph above).

Brigham had presumably planned to surround the new first green that he originally set out to develop with the sort of mounding that we see around the greens that he built from scratch in 1999 on the fifth hole and the seventeenth hole. When he hit upon the idea of building the first green in its present location, however, he recognized that the existing topography lent itself to a version of the classic architectural design known as the “punchbowl green.”

Figure 215 2023 photograph with arrows showing the slopes that Brigham used in 2002 to produce the semi-punchbowl design of his new first green at Champlain Golf Course.

The ground on the left side of the new green naturally rose relatively steeply toward the edge of the sixth fairway to the west. The ground behind the green naturally rose with a similarly steep slope toward the north. Brigham elevated the surface of the green until the front edge was about four feet above the surface of the fairway and built the green into the crook of the two slopes in question. The effect was to create a high ridge around the left side and back edge of the green. He supplemented this natural ridge with several mounds on the back right side of the green, enhancing the punchbowl look.

Brigham also carefully engineered a false front for his new first green – as he had done in 1982 for his third green; as he had done in 1999 for his fifth green; and as he would do in 2002 on his new thirteenth green.

In designing the latter, Brigham chose a site just beyond the creek that meanders through six holes of the golf course. Just a few yards over this creek, he began to build up the present green complex, creating a fiendish false front. Approach shots played onto this area often not only roll back off the front of the green, but also roll right through the fringe and down into the rough. Indeed, an approach shot played onto the false front with backspin can end up in the creek.

Figure 216 Annotated 2023 photograph of the 13th green complex at Champlain golf course.

Having lengthened this hole by about 100 yards, Brigham showed consideration for the shorter hitter by angling the green toward the approach shot and by making the green rise significantly from front to back so that it would be receptive to a long shot played in with a relatively low trajectory.

Big mounds surround three sides of this green – perhaps the most dramatic mounds of any that Brigham has built at Champlain.

The result of the rise of this green from front to back is that the drop-off beyond the mounds at the back of the green leaves a golf ball played to this point in a difficult position: on the one hand, it lies about six feet below the level of the back of the green; on the other hand, it is about ten feet below the tops of the mounds at the back of the green. And so, an approach shot played right over the back of the green can leave a golfer with a blind recovery shot back onto the green.

An approach shot that misses the green to the left can end up in the creek that curls from the front of the green around the left side of it, or it can end up at the base of the mounds that mark the left edge of the green. In the latter case, a recovery shot will have to be played to a flag whose bottom half may not be visible.

After the extensive architectural changes made between 1998 and 2003, Brigham considered redesigning what plays today as the sixteenth green but decided against it. Construction work at Champlain afterwards focused on other projects, such as improving drainage (on the third, fifth, eighth, ninth, tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, and seventeenth holes) and building one or more forward tees on every hole but the seventh and sixteenth.

In 2019, however, Brigham returned to his redesign work at Champlain by enlarging the fifteenth green, lengthening it by about fifteen yards (and thereby increasing the size of the putting surface by about thirty-three percent).

The photograph below shows the soil for this work piled at the back of the fifteenth green.

Figure 217 Photograph dated 2 August 2019 showing materials in place for lengthening the 15th green.

Brigham’s lengthening of the green created a situation that generally requires golfers to use three different clubs to reach the three different pin positions (front, middle, back).

At the back of the green, he created several significant mounds. A shot that is hit just a little bit over the green will require a recovery shot from an uneven lie. A shot hit over the mounds with any force at all will trickle down into a pond.

Brigham enlarged the pond in question. Lying between the fifteenth green, sixteenth tee, and seventeenth fairway, the original pond had hitherto been irrelevant to play of the fifteenth hole. Brigham brought this penalty area much closer to the green than it had been before.

The photograph below shows the way the expanded pond encroaches upon the back of the green and it also shows the mounds built between the new back of the green and the pond.

Figure 218 Annotated photograph of the new 15th green, November 2023.

Shaper Leslie

Golf architects today often work extensively on site with their “shapers.”

In the early stages of golf course construction, the earth will be in a very roughly graded condition, requiring to be shaped by fine contouring work into the form that will realize the architect’s vision. The presence of the architect on site alongside the shaper enables decisions in the field during the construction of the course: the architect can assess and adjust the original plans as parts of the course are taking shape and can confer with the shaper about the best way to get the construction details right.

Figure 219 Left to right: Stan Brigham and Mike Leslie, 12th green Champlain Golf Course, 2022.

Since Brigham began his extensive redesign at Champlain in 1998, his shaper has been superintendent Mike Leslie, and architect Brigham has made many on site decisions in consultation with shaper Leslie when building new greens at Champlain between 1998 and 2019.

As we know, input from Leslie was essential in decisions about the location of today’s fourteenth tee and first green.

And when the latter was being built, Brigham was on site supervising Leslie as he shaped the green, especially the front edge, where one of Brigham’s characteristic false fronts was receiving fine contouring.

Brigham “eye-balled” the grading work that Leslie was doing: “I think a little more slope there would be good, Mike …. That’s it, but still a bit more …. Alright, Mike, that now looks about right.”

And so it went as they built other greens with false fronts and surrounding mounds.

They also consulted about the best design for the new green that Brigham developed for the fifteenth hole in 2019. Brigham was contemplating adding a second tier to the green, raising the back half of the green as he had done on Champlain’s second green in 1998. Leslie offered a practical observation: the two-tiered second green has a large portion across the middle that cannot be used for hole positions because of the steepness of the slope. Since the surface area of the fifteenth green would not be as large as that of the second green, the portion of a two-tiered green at fifteen that could not be used for pin positions because of a steep slope would be proportionately higher: in effect, there would be just front and back pin locations and no middle.

Brigham decided to maintain the gentle, continuous front-to-back slope of the original green (and decided also, as we know, to add mounding at the back of the green and to bring the pond closer to the back of the green). The new green now allows the possibility of a three-club difference between the middle position and the extreme front and the extreme back locations.

Figure 220 Annotated photograph of Champlain’s 15th green, November 2023, shows the continuous gentle slope of the new 15th green from front to back. The orange line suggests where the slope of a second tier would have begun.

Superintendent and “shaper“ Leslie has been at the Champlain Golf Course since 1986 and cares deeply about it.

Not having a budget or a workforce as large as those at the wealthier clubs in the Ottawa area, Leslie has nonetheless quite regularly produced very good greens that roll fast and true. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the wealthier clubs have occasionally tried to hire him away from Champlain, but his love for “the people’s place” has seen him turn down every invitation to go elsewhere – so far.

Bob Moote (whom Leslie accompanied as Moote laid out an executive eighteen-hole course at Champlain in 1997) had people like Leslie in mind when he talked about superintendents in an interview with Golf Course News just before GMA’s term in charge of Champlain came to an end:

I think there is something similar between the best architects and the best superintendents.

The best superintendents aren’t necessarily at the best courses and don’t have the biggest budgets.

The guys at mid-range [courses] have to use their ingenuity and really best find the level that suits their economic capabilities.

(Golf Course News, January 1997, p. 40)

The Benefits of Professional Advice

Figure 221 Harry Mulligan, Ottawa Citizen, 13 May 1955, p. 30.

Figure 222 Bobby Alston. Macleans, 15 August 1939, p. 12.

Figure 223 Geoff Baker, Le droit, 28 June 1995, p. 65.

Head pros have also played an important role in the design and presentation of the golf course over the years.

As we know, Harry Mulligan was the longest-serving head pro, and he was probably one of the “two experts” who were asked by the executive committee to inspect the decisions of David McEwan and the greens committee as they implemented Keffer’s plans in the spring of 1929. His reappointment as golf professional in the spring of 1931 included the observation that “Mulligan is a popular personage with the Glenlea golfers and has done real good work in assisting in improving the course” (Ottawa Citizen, 4 April 1931, p. 12). And he teamed with Lyn Stewart to design eight new holes in the early 1950s to restore Glenlea to an eighteen-hole layout.

Bobby Alston contracted the golf course from eighteen holes to nine. His mandate was to select the best nines holes from Keffer’s original layout. As we know, he chose Keffer’s first six holes, as well as his tenth, eleventh, and eighteenth. Alston did not initially alter any of the nine Keffer holes that he put together as Glenlea’s nine-hole par-35 layout of 1947. But by 1949, he decided to turn the tenth hole from a 175-yard par three into a 350-yard par 4. Alston, then, was the one who gave the golf course the hole that today plays as the thirteenth (although it was significantly lengthened in 2002 by Stan Brigham).

Geoff Baker is said to have come up with the idea of adding a new back tee to the hole that plays today as the fifth. Originally designed as a 365-yard par four to serve as the sixteenth hole of the Stewart-Mulligan design of 1952, the new fifth hole of 1999 played as a 500-yard par five from the new back tee.

Several years ago, Jean Pilon directed the superintendent to prune tree limbs along the left side of the ninth fairway.

Branches from large pine trees had spread out over part of the original fairway and dropped right to the ground, forming an impenetrable wall of dense pine limbs for 150 yards along the left side of the fairway. The slope of the fairway regularly ushered balls into this unplayable thatch of branches, especially when the fairway became dry and hard.

Figure 224 Jean Pilon, circa 2020.

The pruning suggested by Pilon has significantly improved play on the hole in a number of ways. First, balls can be found more quickly than in the past, when the massive, ground-hugging boughs hid errant shots. Balls hit too hard with too much of a right to left shape still reach the ditch in the woods along the left side of the fairway (an appropriate consequence for such a shot), but shots hit just left of the centre of the fairway that bound down into this area can now usually be played back into the fairway or even onto the green (instead of being lost or trapped in an unplayable position under the pine boughs).

Play here is as challenging as ever, but it is now faster and more fun.

The Head Pros

Perhaps surprisingly, for a golf course that has been served by a golf professional for almost 100 years now, there have been just eight head pros at Glenlea and Champlain.

Figure 225 Harry G. Mulligan 1929-43. Ottawa Journal, 4 May 1946, p. 18.

Figure 230 Harry Mulligan, 1950-73. Ottawa Citizen, 3 May 1955, p. 19.

Figure 233 Dany Lacomb, 1995-96. Le droit, 18 April 2002, p. 59.

Figure 226 Reuben ("Rube") Mullen, 1944-46. Ottawa Journal, 27 February 1915, p. 6.

Figure 229 Gilles Leduc, 1974-87. Le régional (Outaouais), 27 April 1988, p. 73.

Figure 232 Geoff Baker, 1998-2008, Week-end Outaouais, 21 May 2001, p. 13.

Figure 227 Robert ("Bobby") Alston, 1947- 49. Alston holds the Glenlea Open trophy presented for his 1952 win. Ottawa Journal, 1 September 1952, p. 10.

Figure 228 Rosaline Menard, 1988-94. Photo taken at Larrimac Golf Club circa 2004.

Figure 231 Jean Pilon, 2014, 2017 to present.

Conclusion

In 2001, François Drapeau observed in an article about the Champlain Golf Course in Le droit: “Le club Glenlea, et maintenant le club Champlain, malgré sa longue histoire, n’a pas d’événements historiques à raconter” (Le droit, 1 June 2001, p. 33).

Unlike the venerable old private clubs, Royal Ottawa, Rivermead, and Ottawa Hunt, Glenlea never hosted national amateur or professional championships. Such tournaments are by definition historical events. But it is not the case that Glenlea has no historical events to tell of. It has been responsible for many events that were important in the promotion and consolidation of golf culture in the national capital region. And in this regard, it supported the development of the game at both the amateur and professional levels.

Note, for instance, Eddie MacCabe’s observations when he reflected on the National Capital Commission’s acquisition of the Glenlea Golf Club (“the clubhouse, the acreage and the whole operation, lock, stock and bunker”):

The contribution to golf in the area from Lyn Stewart, through his seat at Glenlea, has been substantial.

He was ever ready for new ideas in tournaments, he made his place available (sometimes without cost) to organizations without funds, and he kicked in willingly with funds to support professional play, and competitions for assistants.

He has been, consistently, a giver to golf.

And because he operated from Glenlea, that humble little layout has been identified with some of the best things in the game. (Ottawa Journal, 10 February 1975, p. 17)

And Glenlea’s initiatives in growing the game of golf were appreciated not just in retrospect; they were often acknowledged at the time:

Several “Firsts”

The Glenlea has been “first” in a number of golfing activities.

It first inaugurated the City and District Match Play Championship in 1940, and this tournament has been taken over by the City and District Golf Association as an annual event.

In 1950, the Glenlea Open was introduced, bringing some of the best professionals in the district to the event. Stan Horne, well known Canadian golfer from Islemere, Montreal, won the contest in 1950. (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1952, p. 22)

Figure 234 The "Glenlea Trophy."

In fact, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club first organized the Ottawa City and District Match Play Championship not in 1940, but in 1939.

And since that time, but for several years during World War II, the championship has been contested annually. The tournament is now organized by the Ottawa Valley Golf Association.

What is still known as the “Glenlea Trophy” is shown in the photograph to the left. Like the Stanley Cup, it periodically requires a new ring to be added to its base to accommodate nameplates for the growing list of winners.

Of course the Glenlea Open no longer exists, but it was held half a dozen times during the 1950s.

Figure 235 Right to left: Stan Horne, 1950 Glenlea Open champion; Romeo Guenette, Glenlea Open amateur champion; Bobby Alston, loser of sudden-death playoff to Horne. Ottawa Citizen, 14 September 1950, p. 25.

It brought top Canadian pros to the golf course along with the region’s top amateurs, who played for their own trophy but nonetheless played alongside the pros and learned a great deal from them.

The first winner of the Glenlea Open was Stan Horne. He was an exceptional Canadian golfer with an international fame: he had won the Canadian PGA championship three years in a row in the late 1930s, he had played in tournaments on the PGA tour (leading the Miami Open for two rounds before finishing third behind winner Sam Snead), and he had also twice been invited by Bobby Jones to play in the Masters (his best result being a fifteenth-place finish in 1938).

Figure 236 Left to right: Ben Hogan, Stan Horne, Jules Huot. International Four-Ball Championship, Miami, Florida, 1939.

Furthermore, the first Canadian ever to win a PGA tour event, Jules Huot, also regularly played in the Glenlea Open (along with his two brothers).

In 1939, Horne and Huot had teamed up in the International Four-Ball Championship in Florida to defeat American superstar Lawson Little and the up-and-coming Ben Hogan (who had just the year before won his first PGA tour event).

Figure 237 Al Balding, circa 1952.

And so Horne and Huot were quite famous in Canada. Hundreds of people came out to follow their play around the Glenlea course. They immediately lent the tournament a good deal of prestige, leading to Al Balding’s entry into the 1952 Glenlea Open, hard upon his victory in the Quebec Open that year. Balding lost to his playing partner that day, Bobby Alston, but he would hit his stride over the next four years, during which he would win four PGA tournaments.

Plenty of noteworthy golfers were associated with Glenlea. As we know, the club had employed the already accomplished professional Bobby Alston, and already well-established Ottawa City and District champions such as Gus Mullen and Frank Corrigan had become members. Were there no home-grown champions?

It turns out that Glenlea’s own golf culture produced significant amateur champions in the form of Joyce Alston and Eric Kaufmanis.

Born in 1936, Joyce Grace Alston was the daughter of Bobby Alston and so learned the game from her father on the nine-hole Glenlea course that he had put together when she was eleven years old. After he left Glenlea for Fairmont in the spring of 1950, fourteen-year-old Joyce (still an Aylmer schoolgirl) not only retained her Glenlea membership but also accepted appointment to one of the various committees managing the women’s golf club. Later that year, she won the first of her many club championships over the next twenty-five years, besting her match play opponent 10 and 8!

Figure 238 Joyce Alston. A publicity photograph circa mid1950s. Note her footwear.

By 1952, sixteen-year-old Alston was “considered one of the most promising young golfers in the district” (Ottawa Citizen, 9 May 1952, p. 22). In 1953, she was being talked of as “the 17-year-old golfing prodigy from the Glenlea” (Ottawa Journal, 31 July 1953, p. 19). A year later, she was being described as “the eighteen-year-old youngster who’s been the Glenlea’s claim to fame in ladies’ golfing circles for some time” (Ottawa Journal, 21 August 1954, p. 17).

She was “the Glenlea ladies’ ace” (Ottawa Journal, 26 June 1954, p. 17).

Her photograph appeared in the Ottawa newspapers as often as sports editors could find a reason to print it. To them, she was “the fair haired Miss Alston,” the popular “tiny blonde performer” (Ottawa Citizen, 20 September 1957, p. 12; Ottawa Journal, 31 July 1953, p. 19).

At Glenlea, the Stewarts encouraged her ambitions and supported her development on bigger and bigger stages:

It was announced that the Glenlea Club had undertaken to send their 17-year-old ladies’ club champion, Miss Joyce Alston, to Sherbrooke for the Quebec [amateur championship] tournament which gets underway today.

The teenaged stylist has been Glenlea ladies’ champion for the last three years, has placed well in Ottawa district events, and only last week won the Renfrew Invitational Tournament.

(Ottawa Journal, 20 July 1953, p. 13)

There was talk of her turning professional, hiring a coach, playing tournaments in the American South during the winter.

The club’s nurturing of her provincial ambitions paid off in 1955 when she won the Quebec Junior Ladies’ Amateur Golf Championship and then two weeks later won the Quebec Ladies Amateur Golf Championship, the first time this “double” had ever been accomplished.

Figure 239 “Glenlea Golf Club’s Joyce Alston, left, Quebec Junior and Senior Golf Champion and winner yesterday of the Ladies' City and District title at the Rivermead, and Royal Ottawa's promising Junior Gail Rochester, right, are pictured at the Union Station prior to boarding the train for Victoria, B.C., and the Canadian Open and Closed championships next week” (Ottawa Citizen, 30 July 1955, p. 19).

Later that summer, she won the Ottawa City and District Ladies Golf Championship and was off to the Canadian Open championship and the Canadian Closed (i.e. “amateur”) championship in Victoria, British Columbia.

Alston would win the Ottawa and District Ladies Open championship six more times over the next twenty-two years, her seventh and final victory coming in 1977 when she was forty-two. She might have won more, but she skipped the tournament for six years when she scaled back her tournament play in the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s and became only “an occasional player” (Ottawa Citizen, 21 July 1969, p. 20). Even so, she shot a women’s course record of 72 at Glenlea in 1969 and continued to win the club championship for women with an astonishing regularity (she won it eighteen times between 1950 and 1974).

In 1972, she came back from “six seasons of self-imposed exile” from competitive golf. She was still just thirty-six years old. She immediately won the 1972 Glenlea Invitational Tournament, and later the same year she once again won the Ottawa City and District Ladies Golf Championship.

Alston was orphaned by the sale of Glenlea to the NCC and the consequent demise of the Glenlea Golf Club.

She remained loyal to the Stewart family that had supported her early development, however, and went to Lyn Stewart’s Kingsway Park Golf Club, representing her new club – quite competitively – in the big local amateur tournaments until the 1980s. But her job as a government printer limited her ability to play golf regularly. As she explained midsummer 1977: “I’m working. I’m lucky to get 10 rounds in a year. This is my eighth round this year and I had three last year …. But I love to practise. I hit a couple of hundred of balls a week” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1977, p. 15). She retired after her second-place finish in the 1980 Ottawa and City District Ladies Golf Championship.

She died in 1991 at just fifty-five years of age.

Figure 240 Joyce Alston. Ottawa Citizen, 31 July 1974, p. 22.

Figure 241 Eric Kaufmanis. Ottawa Citizen, 23 July 1974, p. 19.

Alston’s last win in local tournament play as a representative of the Glenlea Golf Club came in September of 1974 when she received the White Milne trophy for winning the championship at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club’s mixed two-ball invitational tournament. Her partner was a thirteen-year-old Glenlea member named Eric Kaufmanis, who was on his way to becoming the greatest golfer ever produced by Glenlea.

Kaufmanis, born in Toronto on 29 September 1960, son of Latvian immigrants Gundega and Rusins Kaufmanis (the former a dentist and the latter the Ottawa Citizen’s cartoonist), came to Ottawa in 1965 when his non-golfing parents bought a house across the road from today’s eighteenth tee (Glenlea’s twelfth tee at the time).

In 1974, thirteen-year-old Eric explained to a newspaper reporter what happened next: “We live close enough to the Glenlea … to be almost part of the place. I got in the habit of picking up lost balls and selling them to the members. Then I wanted to hit a few and now I’m a member at Glenlea” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 July 1974, p. 19). He would always remember Glenlea fondly:

Glenlea was my first golfing home.

In the early years, I would be there every day in the summer, from dawn until dusk. My father used to have to whistle for me to come home in the evening. He had an impressive whistle!

Some of the people [I remember] from that era were the head pro, Harry Mulligan, and …. Lyn Stewart … the owner. I remember he had a graceful manner about him and was kind to me. (Kaufmanis, quoted by Scott McLeod, “Eric Kaufmanis: A Rare Talent, Flagstick.com, 16 April 2021).

Becoming a member at Glenlea in 1972, Kaufmanis travelled that summer to the Kanawaki Golf Club in Kahnawake, Quebec, where he won the Quebec Golf Association Peewee Golf Championship in the “mosquito” division (for boys aged ten to twelve): “Eleven-year-old Eric Kaufmanis, representing the Glenlea Golf Club, has brought a share of the Quebec Pewee golf honors to Ottawa” (Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 1972, p. 39).

When just thirteen years of age in the summer of 1974, Kaufmanis, “who plays out of Glenlea,” was described as “one of the most promising juniors in the area” (Ottawa Citizen, 25 June 1974, p. 19). That summer he would win the Quebec Golf Association Peewee Golf Championship at Royal Montreal (nine strokes better than his nearest rival) and he would be named to the Quebec Junior team that would later play matches against Ontario.

And two weeks before his fourteenth birthday, he won the Glenlea club championship, beating his match play opponent 9 and 7!

Figure 242 Eric Kaufmanis, Indiana University, 7 May 1979.

Like Alston, Kaufmanis was orphaned by the sale of Glenlea in 1974, so he became a member of Royal Ottawa, whose third hole was just 200 yards from his back door.

Kaufmanis would go on to win the Canadian Juvenile Golf Championship in 1977, play on the Quebec team that won the Junior Willingdon Cup in 1978, and then take up an athletic scholarship to play for the Indiana University golf team from 1977 to 1981, where he “was also individually named to the All Big Ten team” in both 1979 and 1980 (Kaufmanis, quoted by Scott McLeod, “Eric Kaufmanis: A Rare Talent,” Flagstick.com, 16 April 2021).

He studied law at the University of Ottawa in the early 1980s and was called to the bar in 1986, after which he became a professional golfer for three years.

He played U.S. mini-tours and various State Opens in 1986, played on the Australian tour for the winters of 1986-87 and 1987-88, and played the Canadian Tour for three summers from 1987 to 1989.

Since then, he has practised law in British Columbia.

So, through Eric Kaufmanis and Joyce Alston, Glenlea left its mark on provincial and national golf championships. And through its inauguration and support of both the Ottawa City and District Match Play Championship (1939 to present) and the Glenlea Open (1950-57), the club played a fundamental role at both the amateur and professional levels in important local historical events.

Historical events, mind you, are in the eye of the beholder.

I obviously regard the architectural history of the Glenlea and Champlain golf courses as interesting and important.

And I regard the very survival of this golf course as in its own right an historical event worthy of study.

How on earth is it still with us?

It was conceived during the “Roaring Twenties” by the Highlea Tennis and Country Club, but the latter’s successor, the Glenlea Golf and Country Club, was able to build just nine holes before the darkest of economic clouds appeared on the horizon with the stock market crash of October 1929. Glenlea became member-owned the next spring and struggled to complete the remaining holes by 1933, the year the Great Depression was at its worst.

The straitened finances of the member-owned golf club were so dire by the end of the 1937 season that the executive directors announced before the winter was over that they would be seeking to privatize the club. Various privatization attempts failed for various reasons, and then World War II deprived the club of the affordable labour necessary to keep the full course open, and so it dwindled to a nine-hole shadow of its original glory.

To save Glenlea, the Stewart family asserted its prerogative and took over the club in the 1950s and returned the golf course to an eighteen-hole layout. And then the people of Canada acquired the golf course when it was purchased by the National Capital Commission. The NCC had saved the golf course from development as a suburb and shopping mall, but would it keep it as a golf course?

If it did, the old Glenlea operation would have to be reconceived as a public golf course: it would have to become the people’s place. As such, would there be enough money invested in it to maintain it properly, or would it be allowed to run down?

Believe it or not, there were some who doubted that the golf course would survive government ownership.

Yet, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, the Champlain Golf Course is still here. In fact, it is improving incrementally year by year as it approaches the 100th anniversary of the day in the summer of 1928 that Karl Keffer climbed over the fence between the Royal Ottawa course and Bill Stewart’s land to plan a new eighteen-hole golf course.

It has been called many things since: Highlea, Glenlea, Champlain, and even “the people’s place.”

May it live long and prosper!

CONTENTS

Foreword