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.

CONTENTS

Foreword