Golf Bentham Golf Club
The Augusta of the Dales
Just two greenkeepers and an apprentice maintain the 18- hole Bentham Golf Club. Set in the beautiful Three Peaks region of the Yorkshire Dales, the club’s Head Greenkeeper, Alan Kellett, certainly has a lot to contend with, as he tells Peter Britton
world war! The club, formed in 1925 as a nine-hole,
N Alan Kellett 30 I PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014
had built a wooden clubhouse, complete with elegant veranda and changing rooms, and purchased two fields they had previously been renting. These were immediately commandeered by the Government to aid the war effort, ploughed up and planted with much needed vegetable crops. The clubhouse itself was moved further on to the course and doubled as an observer post for aircraft recognition. Rumour has it that a club member who served in the Royal Observer Corps spent most of his duty time practising his chipping and putting on the 8th green
ot many clubs can claim to have had their clubhouse moved to aid the war effort, but that is what happened at Bentham Golf Club during the second
whilst keeping an eye out for passing aircraft.
Once the conflict was over, the ploughed
land was brought back into play, with members helping with the construction of the greens and tees and the clubhouse being returned to its original position. Over the years, the club and course went from strength to strength and, around 1960, an old Army hut was purchased and attached to the clubhouse to form a social room, kitchen and a much needed nineteenth hole - again, all made possible by the members’ hard work. By the early seventies, the wooden clubhouse had “passed its sell by date” and was deemed to be inadequate to cope with the growing number of members. Other factors, such as the highway authority’s plans for a relief road through the middle of the dance floor, helped to make the
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