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Earlier in this issue, you will have read about the Isles of Scilly Golf Club. Here, local journalist, Clive Tregarthen Mumford, offers an insight into the history of the club and some of the other sporting facilities on the islands
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THE Isles of Scilly Golf Club was carved from granite outcrop and clifftop heathland, unpromising, indeed, vulnerable ingredients from a groundsmanship viewpoint.
By hand was fashioned a nine- hole links which the great Amateur champion of the early 1900s, Horace Hutchinson (who officially opened the course in 1904), described as being “among the most beautifully scenic links I have ever seen”.
Maintenance was always going to be its achilles heel. It was seriously strapped for cash in its formative years. To employ an agrarian expert was beyond its purse. Membership was small, as most islanders were more accustomed to swinging a boat hook than a mashie niblick. To most, the Royal and Ancient game was an alien pursuit.
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A succession of stewards valiantly doubled up as ‘greenkeepers’, the last-named role of the two a far from easy one. The course fairways were not conventional grass, but an amalgam of heather, gorse and thatch - whilst the thin subsoil was pure sand. An ancient gang mower, towed behind a tractor, was the only way to keep fairways tidy. It was also the only antidote to the ever present threat of rough and gorse eclipsing the fairways and returning the headland to its original overgrown form.
As for the greens, what with rabbit scrapes and the thin sandy subsoil, it was always going to be a losing battle to produce decent surfaces on which to putt and, over the years, was born a certain phlegmatic acceptance when a truly struck putt would
inexplicably veer off line.
To make matters worse, in the late 1930s, the links, for a spell, became the official “airport” of the islands’ eight-seater Dragon Rapides, which flew to and from the course on a daily passenger service from a clifftop airfield at Land’s End. A bell would be rung when an incoming plane was imminent; anyone out on the course would discard their clubs and go to the sidelines, before surging forward to hold down the wings of the plane after it had come to a halt. This daily activity did the links no favours, even if it didn’t noticeably damage them either!
It was in the Second World War that real hardship visited the links. The course was
commandeered by the military who built encampments and installations and even trained hawks to intercept carrier pigeons. When hostilities were over, the military departed and golf-minded island servicemen returned to their native home, and the extent of the damage became apparent. They could hardly distinguish the course’s features, so wild and overgrown were the fairways. Rough and fairway were as one, and greens were no longer recognisable as such.
It was only through the diligence and tenacity of a dedicated hard core of islanders - who wangled reparation from the War Office and did much volunteer on-course
greenkeeping work - that the links, and the club itself, were saved from total extinction
Nowadays, whilst the membership remains slim, the three volunteer greenkeepers are doing a magnificent job.
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