Under the Influence: Harry Colt

By Jeff Mingay

Golf architecture pioneer Harry Colt had
a profound effect on those who followed him

At the turn of the twentieth century, traditionalists were convinced that excellent golf could only be had on the ancient seaside links. The few inland courses that had been constructed by that time were poorly engineered and unimaginative in design, featuring flat, square greens and bunkers best described as ramparts, crossing the fairways at regular intervals. It was a time, according to the great English golf writer, Bernard Darwin, when there was a confusion of thought between golf and steeple-chasing!

There were, however, a few golf enthusiasts, including an English solicitor named Harry Colt, not yet convinced quality courses could not be built on hinterland, away from the sea.

Colt studied law at Cambridge University and captained the school’s golf team during the late 1880s. A fine player and admirable gentleman, his reputation and personal associations lead to membership in the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews, Scotland. During the early 1890s, Colt twice won the R&A’s Jubilee Vase in handicapped match-play competition and became a long-standing member of the R&A’s prestigious Rules of Golf committee.

In 1893, Colt went to Hastings, England to join another solicitor in “Sayer & Colt.” Shortly thereafter, a group of Hastings lawyers became involved in the organization of Rye Golf Club. As the club’s first captain, and later honorary secretary, Colt was heavily involved with laying out the Rye links on a fantastically dramatic tract of dunesland along England’s southeast coast. Contemporary course architecture critic, Bradley S. Klein, describes Colt’s design at Rye as “surely one of the most stunning debut efforts in golf history.” Still, becoming a full-time golf course designer was far from Colt’s mind at the time. He was content to continue his practice at law, to play golf, and to tinker with his original design at Rye.

In fact, Colt was still making alterations to the Rye course in 1901 when the new Sunningdale Golf Club at Ascot, in the heathlands southwest of London, advertised for its first club secretary. As a means to get into the golf business full-time, Colt applied for the job. According to his biographer, fellow English golf architect Fred Hawtree, 434 of the 435 applicants were doomed from the start. The qualified solicitor educated at Cambridge, member of the R&A Rules committee, winner of two Jubilee Vases, designer and past secretary of Rye Golf Club stood out in the crowd. Colt was hired and moved with his wife, Charlotte, to Ascot.

Shortly after Colt’s arrival in the heathlands, the Haskell ball gained wide popularity amongst golfers. The new rubber-cored pill was capable of travelling some 15 to 20 percent farther than its predecessor, the gutty. Almost overnight, existing golf courses proved too short for the Haskell. Sunningdale’s brand new course, designed by two-time British Open champion, Willie Park Jr., was no exception.

Park was busy on another project down the road at Huntercombe at the time, so the Sunningdale committee turned to its capable and experienced club secretary to remedy the problem with their course. Colt lengthened Sunningdale, removed a thick undergrowth of rhododendrons and heather on the margins of some holes, and rearranged some bunkering schemes as well. His remodelling work received high-acclaim and, in 1908, lead to his first commission to lay out a new 18-hole course at nearby Stoke Poges.

Strictly influenced and inspired by the ancient links, Colt was one of the first men to make a study of the famous seaside courses and to successfully adapt links principles and characteristics to inland sites. He was also one of the first golf architects to make a careful study of inherent terrain in an effort to utilize natural features in the design of his courses. Thus, at a time when a majority of inland layouts were blatantly artificial and overtly penal, Colt’s Sunningdale and Stoke Poges courses were remarkably natural in appearance. Moreover, they catered to golfers of all abilities, simultaneously. Like his beloved Old Course at St. Andrews, Colt’s designs challenged better golfers, while at the same time, afforded less skilled players an enjoyable round, albeit at the expense of a few additional strokes.

With his next heathlands creation at Swinley Forest, completed in 1910, Colt’s reputation as a leading expert on course design, construction, and upkeep spread far and wide; so far in fact that the Toronto Golf Club invited him to Canada to lay out 27 holes near the junction of the Etobicoke River and Lake Ontario, west of the city, that same year. Following a visit to Colt’s new Toronto course shortly after it opened for play in September 1912, leading British golf writer, Henry Leach, wrote: “As on many of the Colt courses, there is something of a Sunningdale look about the holes.” Indeed, in its early years, Toronto exhibited a more open, rugged, heathland sensibility. There were fewer trees, native grasses framing the holes, and steep, shaggy-faced sand pits arbitrarily sprinkled throughout the course.

“A very fine short (hole) is the fourth, and one with which the architect himself was much in love,” Leach continued. With its relatively tiny green traversing a thin, diagonal ridge and falling away from the line of play, Toronto’s fourth is in fact a rendition of the famous Redan hole: the 192 yard fifteenth at North Berwick’s West links in Scotland. The Redan concept has been mimicked on numerous occasions throughout the years by many of the most successful golf architects in history. In fact, there are some 70 well-known versions throughout the United States alone. But Colt’s fourth at Toronto happens to be Canada’s only authentic replica of the concept behind North Berwick’s famed fifteenth.

Colt was a master at routing courses. He reportedly started by searching for ideal natural sites for par 3s. He would then string those holes together with the others: a methodology that accounts for the remarkably consistent character and uniqueness of his one-shotters.

Legendary Canadian golf architect Stanley Thompson employed a similar method of routing. As a result, Thompson’s courses, too, feature world-class par 3s, including the Devil’s Cauldron at Banff and the infamous fifteenth at Jasper, called The Bad Baby. Curiously, Thompson was a 17-year-old caddie at Toronto Golf Club when Colt arrived to do his work there in 1911. And, his eldest brother, Nicol, was the head professional at Hamilton Golf & Country Club when Colt returned to Canada two years later to lay out a new course for that club, “up the mountain,” in the tiny village of Ancaster. Presumably, young Stanley paid some attention – consciously or otherwise – to the famous Englishman and his methods of golf course design.

After laying out Toronto, Colt returned to England where his business was thriving. By 1913, he was so busy laying out new courses and remodelling old ones that Sunningdale Golf Club reluctantly accepted his resignation as club secretary, with the provision that he remain available to the club in a consulting capacity. Colt agreed before steaming for Canada again in May 1913.

At Ancaster, Colt laid out the 18-hole ‘championship’ course playing host to this year’s Bell Canadian Open and a nine-hole short course for ladies and beginners. The club’s present-day third nine, designed by Canadian golf architect C.E. “Robbie” Robinson, replaced Colt’s short course during the mid 1970s. Still, Colt’s historic sketches for all 27 holes at Ancaster continue to hang proudly in the sprawling clubhouse presiding over the natural amphitheatre that contains the home green. They eerily resemble Colt’s hole-by-hole drawings for Pine Valley, which were made shortly after. It was during that same 1913 trip to Canada that Colt also visited the pine barrens of New Jersey to assist Philadelphia hotelier George Crump with the design and construction of the world’s perennially number one ranked course.

By the onset of the First World War, Colt had formed partnerships with Charles Alison and Dr. Alister MacKenzie. However, there was very little golf course work to do during the Great War. Following the Armistice, the optimistic and determined trio aimed to let the world know they were back in business by collaborating on a simple yet informative book, titled Some Essays on Golf Course Architecture, which continues to serve as a guide for golf course designers and builders today.

Colt didn’t enjoy traveling as much Alison and MacKenzie. In fact, the partnership was actually instigated more so to enlist commissions throughout the world and divide them up than to actually collaborate on individual courses.

An old friend of Colt’s from the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, Alison headed to North America following World War I, where he laid out more than 20 courses under the “Colt and Alison” banner, including old York Downs in Toronto, the Country Club of Detroit course, and Timber Point on Long Island, New York, Upon its completion in 1925, Timber Point was compared in quality to Pine Valley. Today, Alison’s original design there no longer exists.

In 1932, Alison traveled to Japan on behalf of Colt and laid out several more outstanding courses, including Hirono and Kawana. His work in the Far East revolutionized Japan’s understanding of the Royal and Ancient pastime. In fact, the deep bunkers Alison installed at Kasumigaseki Country Club near Tokyo are still referred to as “Alisons” today.

Loyal to Colt throughout his career, Alison died in 1952, at the age of 70, while working on golf courses in South Africa.

Colt’s relationship with MacKenzie was less amicable from the beginning. The two actually carried on nothing more than a strained relationship until 1923, when a final rift split them apart for good. Still, there is no denying the early influence Colt had on MacKenzie’s future works throughout the world at places like Cypress Point and Augusta National, Royal Melbourne in Australia, and The Jockey Club in Argentina.

Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, while Alison and MacKenzie were jet-setting, Colt continued to work modestly throughout Great Britain, Ireland, and continental Europe. He, too, laid out a number of equally fine new golf courses, including Wentworth and Sunningdale New, St. Cloud and Touquet in France, and the magnificent County Sligo amid the sand dunes on the remote northwest coast of Ireland. Colt’s most acclaimed work during the interwar period was at Muirfield and Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where he significantly remodelled and improved those two courses, which continue to feature prominently on the British Open rota in the modern age.

Colt turned 70 years old in 1939 and was becoming increasingly depressed with age. He was losing his hearing, his wife was in poor health, and golf course development was put on hold as a consequence of war. Although he would live until 1951, when he passed away at age 82, Colt’s design career effectively ceased at the onset of the Second World War.

Today, Colt is widely recognized as a pioneer: a man who revolutionized the art and science of course design, construction and upkeep. His creativity, ingenuity, and influence on men like Alison, MacKenzie and Stanley Thompson, too, not only had a profound impact on the development of his craft, but also conveyed to golfers throughout the world how the game was meant to be played, and enjoyed.

This article appears in the 2003 Bell Canadian Open tournament program.