History of Royal St George's
23 June 2011 15:26
In many ways, Royal St. George’s has changed little over the past century. The modest clubhouse—a model of English understatement in a game that has become so stridently overstated—is like a walk-through museum exhibit intended to show what a typical English golf club was like back in the day, when golf was a game of tweed and hickory; a place where time stands still, sepia-toned, perhaps with a hint of lingering pipe smoke from long-forgotten afternoons.
Above the fireplace is a board showing the names of all the captains of the men-only club, awash with Majors, Colonels, Brigadiers, Generals, Earls, Lords, Marquesses, Knights, Right Honourables, OBEs, CBEs, DSOs and even a future monarch: The Prince of Wales served in 1927-’28, before becoming King Edward VIII, only to abandon crown and country to marry Wallis Simpson, vacating the throne for his baby brother, stuttering George VI, who incidentally was the better player.
The golf course, too, has a timeless, immutable quality. Royal St. George’s, 11th on our list of the Top 50 Links of Great Britain & Ireland (see page 136), is sandwiched between two former Open venues—Prince’s and Royal Cinque Ports—on a sublime five-mile stretch of linksland between the Stour Estuary and the English Channel. The course has more or less retained Purves’ basic routing throughout its nearly 125-year history, and it feels even older as you play here, among the tufty dunes and along the shingle beach, where, as Matthew Arnold memorably wrote, the slow, grating roar of sea and stone carries “the eternal note of sadness in.” There was no golf here when Julius Caesar landed at nearby Deal, in 55 B.C., but it’s easy to imagine there was.
FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN
In many significant ways, however, the Victorian links has been completely transformed. Behind and to the left of the sixth green, for example, is a vast dune, originally called Jungfrau, after the Swiss Alp. In the first iteration of the course, the Alp was much taller—“steep, sandy and terrible,” wrote future club president Bernard Darwin, “with her face scarred and seamed with black timbers”—and it stood directly between the tee and the green, presenting an immensely demanding blind shot of some 180 yards, usually into the prevailing westerly wind. It was one of the most notorious holes in the country—and a favorite of Purves. Gradually, the hole was softened, and the tee moved ever-northward such that today The Maiden plays perpendicular to the original, scenic but straightforward. The dune now provides the best seat in the house for Open spectators.
The modernization of the sixth hole is illustrative of Royal St. George’s overall metamorphosis that allows it to remain a contemporary test. Many of the blind shots have been reduced or eliminated, most of Purves’ beloved, draconian cross bunkers have been removed, and a lot of the quirks of the course have been smoothly erased—especially with the changes in the 1970s by Frank Pennink. Coupled with the building of a Sandwich bypass road, the changes helped the course return to the Open rota in 1981 for the first time in 32 years.
This is how America’s first Open champion, Walter Hagen, who won two of his four titles at Royal St. George’s, described the course in 1928: “The first nine holes—tremendous fun, not very good golf. Second nine holes—tremendous golf, no fun at all.” Nowadays the course is tremendous golf and tremendous fun throughout. Each hole has a vivid personality—there’s not a ho-hum dullard among them—and taken together, Royal St. George’s feels like considerably more than the sum of its considerable parts.
For this year’s championship—the 14th Open at Royal St. George’s—the course has been lengthened by 105 yards from the last visit, in 2003, mostly by stretching the third, seventh, ninth and 15th holes. (The course guide advises that the approach shot at the 15th “is, quite frankly, nearly impossible.”) Additionally, the fourth hole—with the famous bunker, at 40 feet possibly the United Kingdom’s tallest—has been changed from a par 5 to a brutal, 495-yard par 4.
R&A chief executive Peter Dawson says that these changes are minor, and that the phenomenal distances top modern players hit the ball—potentially rendering many cherished championship venues obsolete—is not a cause for concern. “Driving distance is not increasing,” he insists. “Distances haven’t increased since the Open was last here.” In truth, Royal St. George’s—7,211 yards, par 70 this year—is generously laid out over such an expansive 400-acre tract that it could easily accommodate more lengthening should the need arise, though please, let’s hope it doesn’t.
