We find ourselves at the midway point of the 149th annual British Open Golf Championship. It is being contested just outside of the English town of Sandwich at the Royal St. George’s Golf Club. A classic links-style course alongside England’s far southeastern coast, this marks the 15th time that the Open Championship has been contested at what is arguably the quirkiest of courses on the British Open rota.
St. George’s was the first golf course outside the boundaries of Scotland to host the Open way back in 1894, some seven years after it first opened. The course was a veritable “country” club for those English and Scottish golfers who were members of established, as well as crowded, golf clubs. With the railroad running all the way down to Sandwich, members of courses such as Muirfield, St. Andrews and Wimbledon could escape to their remote golf course in the country for a few days of solitude and quality golf.
Royal St. George’s was initially laid out and designed by Dr. William Laidlaw Purves, a leading eye and ear doctor who worked and lectured in London. Purves was the son of one of England’s leading surgeons, but he was orphaned by the time he was 13 years of age and was raised by two of his aunts. As a tribute to his deceased mother whose last name was Laidlaw, he dropped William from his name and became known as Laidlaw Purves. He started out going to law school, but then changed direction and instead went to medical school. He attended the prestigious University of Edinburgh Medical School and in 1864 he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. As a young doctor he traveled the world and spent time practicing medicine in Australia, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. He ultimately returned to England in the mid 1870s. An avid golfer with loads of connections, Purves was a member of St. Andrews, Muirfield, and Wimbledon Commons golf clubs.
While Laidlaw was a highly acclaimed medical doctor who lectured and wrote numerous medical journal articles, he was also involved in the development of women’s golf as well as a uniform handicapping system to be used throughout Britain. In 1893 he coordinated a meeting with the representatives of the 15 active women’s golfing clubs in the United Kingdom. This gathering led to the formation of the Ladies Golfing Union, a golfing organization that held championships throughout the British Isles for its members. The 1896 Ladies Championship winner was Amy Pascoe who acknowledged Purves in her victory speech. She called him the “fairy godfather of women’s golf.” He was the leading male advocate of women’s golf in the UK
Purves’ other claim to golfing fame was that he was the impetus behind a standard system of golf handicapping throughout the British Isles. He wanted to come up with an agreed-upon system wherein a 90s golfer could have a fair-and-square match with a 70s golfer without spending time haggling over match strokes. It was a fairly easy form of handicapping in that they took the average of your best three scores during the past 24 months, subtracted that average from par, and that was your given handicap.
Purves tweaked the system several years later when he, along with Issette Pearson of the Ladies Golf Union and leading men’s amateur Henry Lamb, came up with the added category of course rating. They assessed the difficulty or easiness of a course, gave it a number in relation to scratch par, and adjusted the handicap accordingly. Just like our system today, a 10-handicap at St. Andrews would be an 8-handicap at the less difficult Ladybank Golf Club under the standard scratch scoring rating.
Purves’ golfing high water mark was his design of Royal St. George’s. By the 1880s, golf was a very popular form of recreation throughout the British Isles to the point that courses were becoming impacted and tee times were hard to come by. For instance, Purves was the Captain (club president) of the Royal Wimbledon Commons Golf Club. However, his club shared the golf course with the London Scottish Golf Club as well as an engaged public.
In the mid 1880s, Purves and Lamb (runner-up in the 1886 British Amateur, two top 10s in the British Open) decided to build a coastal England golf course far removed from London yet reachable by rail car. They wanted to recreate the Scottish link-style golf courses they played when they were growing up. They settled on the land just outside Sandwich that was alongside the sea. It was pure links land. Very much to the design styles of the late 19th century, the course was built with multiple dogleg holes between the dunes coupled with a handful of blind tee shots. Those two design features are the most obvious reasons that today’s top golfers complain about the Royal St. George’s design. Also there are a lot of natural humps and bumps throughout the fairways at St. George’s, which means that a tee shot struck up the middle can sometimes take a bad bounce on one of the fairway’s ledges and end up in the rough. Then again, no one ever said that pure links golf is fair. The same thing happens at St. Andrews, Turnberry, Birkdale and the others. In fact, Purves’ goal with the design of his new course was that it would rival St. Andrews with regard to layout and difficulty.
If you think back to golf life in the 1880s, there was no real golf design and architecture industry of note. Unlike today’s top architects with their college degrees and apprenticeships under the top designers, golf course design back then was more of a hobby than a business. Old Tom Morris was a greenskeeper at Prestwick. C.B. Macdonald was a stockbroker in Chicago. Donald Ross was a carpenter who moved on to becoming a golf club maker. Like Laidlaw Purves, Alister Mackenzie was a medical doctor who was a surgeon during the Boer War where he learned the art of camouflaging. Keep in mind that these men were designing world-class golf courses at a time when the U.S. Open was a new tournament and the PGA Championship and the Masters didn’t even exist. They were doing it on the fly in a brilliant sort of way.
At a time when there was no real blueprint for golf course design, Dr. Laidlaw Purves decided to build his dream country club on the English coast. He received immediate recognition for his course, Royal St. George’s, when it hosted the 1894 British Open seven years after its opening. It has obviously stood the test of time since it’s hosting its 15th Open Championship some 127 years later. When some top golfer complains this weekend about hitting that perfect tee shot that bounded into a pot bunker or deep rough, they can always blame it on the nuances of links golf. Specifically, they can blame it on Laidlaw Purves, a true Renaissance man of the game.
