The Club: History
The First reference to a proposed golf course to be situated within the valley on the Hill of Howth appeared in The Irish Field on the 12th March 1910. It originally stated that plans were under way for a club that was to be known as Kilrock Golf Club, however, the following November, the same paper reported that the project had fallen through, but added that a new provisional committee, lead by a one Mr Julian Gaisford St. Lawrence of Howth Castle in tandem with the Right Honourable Justice Boyd and that this committee had been established with the intention of laying out a golf course within the Howth area.
November 1910 – a printed document gives more details.
“The Formation of a Golf Club on the Hill of Howth has been under consideration for some time now, and a meeting of those interested was held on Monday evening last at 41 Dame Street, Dublin, under the presidency of J.C.Gaisford St Lawrence. There was also present The Hon. Mr Justice Boyd, A. Butson, E.P.Culverwell FTCD, R. Noel Guinness, J.Kincaid, J.M. Maxwell, Rev. G.D.Nash, R.G Nash, D.Telford and G. Thornley.”
The document continues “After a full discussion it was resolved that those present at the meeting should form a provisional committee (with Power to Add to their number) and to take such steps as necessary to form the club”.
“Suitable Ground had been obtained near Kilrock and had been examined carefully by Mr McKenna, the Malahide Professional and other experts and they expressed an opinion that the accommodation available would enable an excellent nine-hole course”. That was in 1910.
The Irish Golfing Guide of 1911 contains an intriguing statement that: “A course has been chosen for the Hill of Howth and Mr Barcroft (then Secretary of Royal Dublin GC) has laid out nine sporting holes”.
Unfortunately, nothing more was heard of this grand scheme announced in 1910, or indeed of the nine sporting holes that were to have been laid out. It seems that the mantle was not taken further until four years later, when in 1915 a Mr A. Butson (who was present at the very first meeting in Dame St) made the decisive move that led to the formation of Howth Golf Club.
Butson, a Scot, came to Ireland in 1880 and had worked for the Jameson Distillery Family as a steward on their Estate in Portmarnock. Here he worked up to 1908, at which time he moved to own his business, that as proprietor of a Temperance Hotel (Spot the Irony) that was located opposite the entrance to the West Pier in Howth. This Building still stands, but today is a Bar / Restaurant known as Findlaters – (Irony once More).
Mr Butson was an avid Golfer and he appreciated the development potential of the Howth area for such a development in order to play the Game of Golf. He made further contact with Mr Gaisford St Lawrence, the principal landowner, enquiring if it would be possible to lease some land in order to lay out a course for play. Following some weeks negotiations between Butson and the Estate Office of Mr Gaisford St. Lawrence, 80 acres of the Western Slopes was granted at a fifty year lease for the location of a Golf Course on the Peninsula of Howth. Mr Butson wasted little time engaging the services of one Mr Tom Shannon, (the Professional of that time at Portmarnock Golf Club) with the task of laying out the design of Nine Holes. He then hired local labour to work on the extensive land moving design project and started to promote membership, and so began Howth Golf Club.
At first the club was a proprietary club and Mr Butson, of Scotland, was the proprietor. By 1915, through engaged promotion, he had enough members acquired to hold a general meeting and held the first meeting in his Hotel near Howth Pier. Those present, in addition to Mr Butson W.H. De Courcey, P.J Hussey, E.M. Stuart, W.B. Crawford and J.F.A Day. Butson opened the Meeting by giving the history of the foundation of the club but regrettably the details on the minutes are scant. The first item of business for Mr Butson was to announce that the cost of annual membership for ladies would not be less than a guinea, and that for gentlemen it would not be less than two guineas. Mr De Courcey then took the chair and the first officers of the club were elected. Mr Day was elected the Honorary Secretary and Mr E. Stuart became the first Captain of Howth Golf Club
First Golf Competition:
The First competition for the members was a mixed foursomes played on the 27th Dec 1915 and Mr Butson offered prizes for the Ladies and Gentlemen. Two other Prizes would be played for in 1916 as and when decided by the committee.
First Sponsored Golf Competition:
Within two weeks of the mixed foursomes competition, the first sponsored prizes in the history of the club were put up by Elvery’s, the sports store, one each for the ladies and gentlemen.
First Club Medal:
The Captain, Mr E. Stuart, put up a gold medal that would be played for in a strokes competition on St Patricks Day in 1916 and other competitions were to be organised for Easter Monday, Whit Monday and the first Monday in August.
Founded 1916 – A most dramatic year in Irish History
In comparison, with other clubs established in or around the Howth & Sutton area, such as Beann Eadair GAA founded in 1880’s, or Howth Lawn Tennis Club founded in the early 1880’s (predecessor to the existing Sutton Lawn Tennis Club today) and a Rugby Club that flourished in the 1890’s, Howth Golf Club was a relatively late arrival.
The Club takes 1916 as the foundation date as that is when the first elected Captain Mr E. Stuart took office.
1916 – The First Full Season Club:
That first season of 1916, was a major success in the Club and it was clear that the Club had been set up with strong foundations: The level of confidence amongst the members can be gauged from the fact that by November 1916 – only twelve months after the inaugural general meeting – Mr Butson was not only offering a further two prizes each for the Ladies and Gentlemen, but was also considering extension to the course to a full 18 holes. This however, proved to be very ambitious but it did prove two things, one was that there was already consideration for the development within the club membership and two, that the club in its nine hole form was not able to satisfy demand, a healthy position indeed.
The First Green keeper:
The first full time green keeper was Mr Patrick Keegan. At the request of the committee, the club secretary of the time Mr W.B. Crawford, was instructed to write to Mr Butson, due to the unsatisfactory condition of the greens. The letter dated 18th of March 1918, requested that Mr Butson offer employment to Mr Keegan, “A first-class man as green keeper who thoroughly understands the work”. Soon afterwards, Mr Keegan was brought into the employment of the Club as the first permanent greens keeper.
First Clubhouse Expansion
In response to an ever growing membership, the club as a matter of urgency was obliged to look at its facilities in 1919 as the clubhouse was little more than a changing room.
A sub-committee was formed in the middle of 1919 with the express purpose of overseeing the building of a new clubhouse that was to include a tea room and accommodations for the green keeper.
A local builder, Mr Clarke won the tender for the contract of the equivalent of £ 383.50. Heating for the new premises was donated by one of the members, who donated an anthracite stove. Sadly this proved either inadequate or unsuitable as another stove had to be purchased two months later at a cost of £ 7.90. The clubhouse has over the years since undergone numerous expansion plans and upgrades and is now located in such a position that it offers majestic views over Dublin Bay, Fingal and North County Dublin .
First Scratch Golfer:
Cecil Lee was the Clubs first scratch golfer, when he joined the ranks in the 1930’s and found himself keeping good company. He won the Captains Prize in 1937, but in 1938 it was won by Des O’Sullivan, second of the clubs scratch golfers. Des O’Sullivan’s golfing development had been halted by the Effects of the Great War, but afterwards, he produced one of his finest performances in the British Amateur Championship of 1949, by defeating the great Big Bill Campbell, perhaps the most prestigious scalp ever claimed by a Howth Man, in a tournament that has a good history for Irish golfers such as J.B. Carr, Gareth McGimpsey, Michael Hoey and most recently Brian McElhinney.
Third of the scratch golfers in Howth was Noel Mason who dominated the club scene in the 60’s and early 70’s. He won the Howth Scratch Cup on five successive occasions from 1962 to 1966 and reached the semi final of the Lumsden Cup in the latter year, beating Joe Carr in the senior cup match against Sutton in 1964. He also won a number of scratch cups around the country and brought great honour to Howth Golf Club. Andy Foran was a great competitor and rival of Noels and a tenacious competitor. Andy, playing off a 2 handicap, won the Club Golfer of the Year in its inaugural year 1961 and was crowned club champion in 1974 and 1975.
The Early Club Professionals:
Howth Golf Club has a long standing history with the Golf Professional and had some of the highest standard of Professional grace its fairways and serve its members. Pat Keegan, who was appointed as the Greens Keeper was the first “Professional” per say, but , having found work in the Curragh, was replaced in 1922 by Willie Nolan, then Professional of Galway Golf Club. The Committee decided to approach Willie, and he accepted the position on terms of two pounds and ten shillings a week plus 2 shillings a lesson.
Willie Nolan was one of the great figures in the History of Irish Golf. He was born in Bray, but hailed from Baldoyle where his memory stills live today in the form a street name. When he joined Howth, he was still very much on the way up in his career, but it was later, after his time at Howth, that he reached the pinnacle of his career. He was the Irish Match play Champion and the Irish Professional Champion in 1934, the previous year 1933 he had finished runner up in the Dunlop Championship with a score of 294, one behind eventual winner W.H. Davies of Wallasey. Another who tied with Willie on the same score of 294 was the great Henry Cotton. Willie Nolan also led the British Open at the half-way point on the old Course at St. Andrews, at that time he shot a course record 67 in the second round, beating the previous record held by Bobby Jones.
Willie Nolan – Irish Golf Professional, Howth Golf Club – 25 March 1896 – 4 March 1939, was an Irish professional golfer. He was one of the leading Irish professionals of the inter-war period. In 1933 he was a runner-up in the Dunlop-Southport Tournament and led qualifying in the Open Championship with the first ever recorded 67 at st Andrews.
Tom Phelan, a member of Howth, recounted on a number of occasions that he used to watch Willie practise his driving from beside Harfords Cottage, where the 18th Tee is today, and commented that his drive used to land about or on the green. Willie was happy in Howth, so much so, that when a more prestigious position came his way, he was reluctant to take it. In 1926, the professional’s job at Portmarnock fell vacant when Tom Shannon left to go to Milltown where there was a greater demand for lessons. Jim Bourke encouraged Willie to go for the position, which he did so hesitantly. Portmarnock snapped him up and it was there as Professional that his glory years began. Sadly, Willie died from cancer in 1939 at the young age of Forty-three – a tragedy in every sense.
When Willie left Galway, he was succeeded by Jack O’Neill, and again history would repeat itself as Jack O’Neill followed him to Howth. Jack’s association with Howth Golf Club was to last some forty-seven years. Since the 70’s John McGuirk of McGuirks Golf has been the Club Pro.
1919 – The Members buy out the Owner.
In 1917, issue of who should control the affairs of the club took priority. Relations with Mr Butson, founder and Proprietor of the club appear to have been amicable, but as with all clubs of that era, it was a natural progression that members, who at this point were really subscribers in the true sense, would look to take control of the club’s affairs.
It took a number of meetings and various negotiations spread over a few years, and the formation of a new joint committee to represent both the Proprietor and the Members, before the issue got resolved.
At the AGM held on the 17th November 1917, the members requested that a small sub-committee be formed to confer with Mr Butson with a view to the taking over of the Club, and to report back on its negotiations.
A meeting with Mr Butson was held on the 12 Jan 1918, where Mr Butson made a request of an annual rent of £ 150 to be paid. This was not accepted. As a result, Mr Butson, as a gesture of goodwill and friendship proposed that a new committee of eight people be formed, four in his representation and four forming the members representation. The members accepted this and with that, a committee of Messer’s Crawford, De Courcey, Hussey and Stuart represented Mr Butson, whilst Messrs Howard, Lynch, Mahon and Maguire represented the members via election.
All of this indicated Mr Butson’s willingness to make a deal if the terms were right. The negotiations dragged on into early 1919 before finally being resolved, as by late January Mr Butson was still asking for a rent in the region of £ 130 annually, but eventually, after what seemed like never ending haggling, a bargain was struck for a one off fee of £ 800, of which £ 700 was to be paid immediately and the rest over a three year period. A debenture plan was installed among the members, and although up- take was slow, the members eventually raised the funds. April 1919 was a seminal moment in the clubs history as it now belonged to the members as a result of their purchase.
Whilst all these negotiations had been underway, the club members were also negotiating a new lease agreement with the St. Lawrence Estate and during these negotiations Mr Julian Gaisford St. Lawrence agreed to accept the Presidency of the club.
Howth Golf Club and Golfing Union of Ireland Affiliation:
On March 11th, 1919, a letter from the Leinster Branch of the Golfing Union of Ireland, penned by Mr George Price LL.D, then secretary of the Leinster Branch, informed the committee that Howth Golf Club application for membership of the GUI had been accepted subject to their satisfying that the Club had complete running over the elections of members and the clubs finances. All details were quickly furnished to Dr Price and Howth Golf Club took its place as a full member of the Golfing Union of Ireland. All in all, 1919 proved a very important year in the development of Howth Golf Club.
James Braid, Five Times Open Champion and Designer of Howth Golf Course:
James Braid was a renowned Scottish Professional Golfer and Architect. Records show that Mr Braid played the game of golf from an early age. Born in Earlsferry, Fife, Scotland on the 6th February 1870 Braid was a club maker before he turned to golf as a professional in 1896. In the early days, it is said that he struggled to get to grips with his putting, but by switching to an aluminium putter (that would have been lighter) he started to find his winning ways.
He recorded the first of his Five Open Championships in 1901, when the tournament was played at Muirfield. He won by four shots from Vardon and by five from Taylor who finished second and third respectively. Braid followed this up with four more wins in 1905, 1906, 1908 and 1910. He was the first ever golfer to successfully defend the Open Championship title in 1906, were he did so by winning again by four shots, this time with Taylor finishing in second place and Vardon a further shot behind in third. But what is even more impressive is that he was runner-up in the Open in his first full season as a professional 1897, a fact that gets overlooked and a feat in itself considering some of the greats of the game graced the fairways at that time, none more than that of the likes of Harry Vardon and John Henry Taylor. Braid, Vardon and Taylor would become the most renowned golfers of that era. Incidentally the 1897 Open Championship was won by an amateur called Harold Hilton who won with a score of 314, one shot ahead of Braid – Vardon finished in sixth in that same event.
Braids career wins weren’t limited to the Open, he also won four PGA Match play Championships in the years 1903, 1905, 1907 and 1911 and he was winner of the French Open in 1910, held in La Boulie G.C. He won with a score of 298.
James Braid retired from tournament golf in 1912 at the age of 42 and took up the post of Club Professional at Walton Heath Golf Club, Surrey, England. He held this position until 1950, the year in which he died. He was also a renowned golf course architect with what must be over 60 designs to his name, the most well known of which are the “Kings” and “Queens” Courses at Gleneagles in Scotland and he was also responsible for remodelling of the Carnoustie Golf links in 1926. Braid was first invited to inspect Howth Golf Club and propose a redesign in the late 1920’s.
JAMES BRAID
PROFESSIONAL MAJORS: 5
- Open Championship: 1901, 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910
ADDITIONAL WINS: 10
- 1902: Tooting Bec Cup
- 1903: News of the World Match Play, Tooting Bec Cup
- 1904: Tooting Bec Cup
- 1905: News of the World Match Play
- 1907: News of the World Match Play, Tooting Bec Cup
- 1910: French Open
- 1911: News of the World Match Play
- 1920: British vs. America Match
From 9 to 18 holes:
Even though the extension of the course had been mentioned in 1916 at the November General Meeting, by a very ambitious Mr Butson, it would be more than a decade before the dream of an 18 Hole Golf Course was to be realised. The very nature of the terrain itself was the principal reason for the long delay, as the terrain ran uphill and was defined by thick gorse and unique heathers which would require a large amount of physical effort to make fit for golf. So wild in fact was that surrounding ground, that when Mr James Braid first walked the ground he somehow got separated for the party leading him, so lost in fact that a search party had to be got up, which happily found him. No doubt this experience brought home to Braid the toughness of the task that would face him.
Just before this initial inspection, in late 1927 Howth Golf Club was offered a further 12 acres and an additional 30 acres had been offered by the (then) neighbouring estate of McDougall, an area known as the “Bay of Loughs”, all parties sharing the vision to extend the course to 18 holes. The terms of these offers had been agreed by the middle of 1928, an initial inspection by Tom Shannon, now professional at Milltown Golf Club took place and with that done, the committee decided to approach James Braid to offer him the job of designing the new course.
James Braid was a founding member of the Professional Golfers Association, and having retired from tournament golf, had become well known for his course design success and was in much demand. Braid accepted the Job for a total fee of 28 guineas and living expenses. A Scottish Company called J.R. Stutt & Co. of Paisley were awarded the job of clearing the difficult terrain and to lay the course as per the design of Mr Braid’s instructions. The work of laying the 18 hole design took just over 14 months, and on the 15th of June 1929, the Opening Ceremony was performed by the President of the Executive Council (the title given to the head of government between 1922 and 1937).
At 6.30pm that evening Mr W.T. Cosgrave, was the first to drive his ball down today’s 16th Hole (then the 14th) and turned to the crowd that had gathered to formally announce the opening of the new nine holes.
The committees report for the Annual General Meeting of 1929 stated “The President received a very hearty and warm welcome from the members and their guests, and he (the President) was very much impressed with the magnificent situation of the links”. A one pound note was presented to the caddy that retrieved the Presidents Ball.
It was not until 1937 though that the bank overdraft needed to build the extra nine holes, was cleared. James Braid continued his work in Ireland as a course designer, designing not only Howth Golf Club’s new nine and introducing a new layout for the 18 holes, but he also designed Mullingar Golf Course in the midlands, Newlands Golf Club’s course in West Dublin and the golf course atWaterford Golf Club in the South East of Ireland. Howth Golf Club is James Braid’s only known design in North County Dublin to the best of our knowledge, and we’re chuffed about i!t. ( but if you know different then let us know!)
A History of Howth Golf Club
1916 – 2017
Contents
- Early Days
- From Nine to Eighteen Holes
- Growing to Maturity
- The War Years and After
- The Modern Era
- Achievers and Achievements
- Appendixes
Introduction
Until the early nineteenth century, the Howth peninsula was a small world unto itself. It supported an introspective community, principally of fishermen, who had little or no contact with the capital city on their doorstep. Overland travel between Dublin and Howth was difficult and occasionally dangerous. The attentions of the tiny village huddling in the lee of the cliff face were turned firmly towards the sea, from which it drew its livelihood. Geographically, Howth was a peninsula; psychologically, it was an island.
Three things changed all that. First, the harbour was built as the Irish terminal for the mail packet service. The first steam packet from Ireland to Britain departed from Howth harbour in 1816 and two years later it became the official mail station. It was not a success, however. By 1834 Howth had been abandoned in favour of Kingstown where the harbour was better situated and better designed. But in building Howth harbour, it had also been necessary to build a good road into Dublin. Then cam the opening of the railway branch line from Howth Junction in 1847. This twin revolution in transport and communications facilitated the third development which ended Howth’s historic isolation: the growth of the outer suburbs of Dublin in the late nineteenth century.
Writing in 1909, Dillon Cosgrave noted that “the development of Sutton, which comprises the isthmus and the western side of the hill of Howth, has been quite phenomenal in the last forty years. Nor can this be wondered at when we consider its great beauty and its mild climate. The latter is due to its sheltered position, the hill acting as a barrier to the cold easterly breezes.” It was here, on the slopes of Shielmartin, that Howth Golf Club was established in the second decade of the twentieth century.
The rapid growth of organized and codified sport was a late Victorian phenomenon. In the newly developed suburbs, sports clubs of all sorts were established. Sutton and Howth were no exception. Howth Lawn Tennis Club was founded in the early 1880s and was the lineal predecessor fo the present Sutton LTC. Sutton Golf Club dates from 1890 and Beann Eadair GAA club from the mid 1880s. A rugby club flourished in Sutton from the1890s to 1914, although the present Suttonians RFC dates only from 1925.
Howth Golf Club, too, was a relatively late arrival. The club takes 1916 – that most dramatic year in modern Irish history – as its foundation date, because that was when the club elected its first captain. However, its origins lie in the previous year and so it is in 1915 that this story begins.
1
Early Days
The first reference to a proposed golf course on the hill of Howth appeared in The Irish Field of 12th March 1910. It stated that plans aware under way for a club to be known as Kilrock golf Club. The following November, the paper reported that the project had fallen through. It added, however, that a new provisional committee, under the leadership of Mr. Julian Gaisford St Lawrence of Howth Castle and Rt Hon Justice Boyd, had been established with the intention of laying out a golf course in the Howth area.
A printed document dated November 1910 gave more details. Whether this was a newspaper advertisement of not is unclear: it has more the appearance of a public handbill. At any rate, it summarized the position in the following terms:
The formation of a golf club on the Hill of Howth has been under consideration for some time, and a meeting of those interested was held on Monday evening last a 31 Dame St, Dublin, under the presidency of Mr. J.C. Gaisford St Lawrence. There were also present the Hon. Mr Justice Boyd, A. Butson, E.P. Culverwell FTCD, R. Noel Guinness, J. Kincaid, J.M.Maxwell, Rev. G.D. Nash, R.G. Nash, D. Telford and G. Thornley.
“After a full discussion it was resolved that those present at the meeting should form a provisional committed (with power to add to their number) to take such steps as may be necessary to form the club.
“Suitable ground has been obtained near Kilrock. It has been carefully examined by Mr. M Kenna, the Malahide professional, and other experts, and they have expressed the opinion that the accommodation available will enable an excellent nine-hole course to be laid out.
“the entrance fee for gentlemen has been fixed at $2.2.0 but it has been decided that the first fifty gentlemen elected will be admitted without any entrance fee, and a second fifty at an entrance fee of $1.1.0.
“The annual subscriptions have been fixed at $2.2.0 for gentlemen and 1.1.0 for lady associates. Applicants ions form membership should be made to R.G. Nash, San Remo, Howth.”
The Irish Golfing Guide of 1911 contains the intriguing statement that “a course has been chosen on the hill of Howth an dMr Barcroft (Secretary of Royal Dublin GCJ has laid out nine sporting holes”. Unfortunately, nothing more is heard of the grand scheme announced in 1910 or in the course with its nine sporting holes. It appears not to have been in existence four years later, in 1915, when Mr. A. A. Butson made the decisive move that led to the formation of Howth Golf Club.
Butson was a Scot who had come to Ireland in the late 1880s and had for many years been the steward on an estate in Portmarnock owned by a member of the Jameson distilling family. He retired from that position in 1908 having, in a thrifty Scottish way, saved enough money over the years to set himself up in business on his own. With a nice touch of irony for one who had accumulated his little pile – however indirectly – out of whiskey profits, he opened a temperance hotel opposite the entrance to the east pier in Howth. The building still stands but, just to show that irony can work both ways, it has for many years past been a public house.
In 1915, however, it was Butson’s Temperance Hotel. The proprietor was an enthusiastic golfer like many of his countrymen and he appreciated the potential of the Howth area for the development of the game. He enquired of Mr. Gaisford St Lawrence, the principal local landowner, if it would be possible to lease some land in order to lay out a course. There followed some weeks negotiations between Butson and the Gaisford St Lawrence estate office which culminated in the granting of a fifty-year lease of about 80 acres on the western slopes of Shielmartin. The rent was $100 per annum.
Butson engaged Tom Shannon, the professional at Portmarnock, to design a nine-hole course and hired local labour to lay it out. He then advertised form members. So began Howth Golf Club.
It was a proprietary club and Butson was the proprietor. By November 1915, he had acquired enough members to have a general meeting. It was held in the hotel on the 16th of that month. In addition to Butson himself, the names of those present were W.H de Courcey, P.J. Hussey, E. M. Stuart, W. B. Crawford and J.F.A. Day. Butson opened the proceedings by giving a history of the foundation of the club, concerning the details of which the minutes of the meeting are regrettably silent. Butson then got down to business in earnest by informing the meeting that the annual subscription for ladies would not be less than a guinea and that for gentlemen not less two guineas. De Corcey then took the chair and the first officers of the club were elected. Day was elected honorary secretary and Edie Stuart became the first captain. Butson offered prizes for ladies and gentlemen for a mixed foursomes to be played for as the committee might decide in the course of the 1916 season. It was also agreed that a monthly medal competition be held alternatively for ladies and gentlemen, to be played off on a Saturday.
Within a fortnight, the first sponsored prizes in the history of the club wee put up by Elvery’s, the sports shop; one each for the ladies and the gentlemen. The captain put up a gold medal to e played for in a stroke competition on St Patrick’s Day and other competitions were arranged for Easter Monday, Whit Monday and the first Monday in August.
That first season, 1916, was a major success and it was clear that the club had been established on firm and secure foundation. The level of confidence among members can be gauged from the fat that by November 1916 – only a bare twelve months after the inaugural general meeting – Butson was not only offering a further two prizes each for ladies and gentlemen but was talking about an extension to the course to bring it up to 18 holes. He forecast that this would be ready for pay in the following May, a wildly optimistic exaggeration as it turned out, but one which indicated two things. First, some preliminary work to extend the course was clearly in hand, and this within a very short time of the club’s establishment; and second, the capacity of the club to satisfy the immediate demands upon it was obviously limited.
The dream of an 18 hole course was not to be satisfied for more than a decade but it was there practically from the beginning. The nature of the terrain was the principal reason for the long delay. The ground ran uphill by definition as was a wilderness of gorse and rock. The sheer physical effort required to tame this kind of unforgiving terrain in order to make it fit for golf should not be underestimated. For instance, when the work which finally led to the creation of the extra nine holes was started in the late 1920s the club engaged the services of James Braid, the former British Open champion and then – like many successful ex-professionals since – a well-known course architect. While walking the land on which the extra holes were to be laid out, Braid got separated for the rest of the party so thoroughly that a search party had to be got up. Happily, it found him. No doubt the experience brought to Braid the toughness of the task he had taken on.
In 1917, however, all that lay in the future. The immediate priority was the question of who should control the club. Relations with Butson appear to have been amicable, although had there been any friction it is unlikely that mention of it would have appeared in the minutes of the executive committee. The pressure to change the proprietary nature of the club came from two sources. First, a great many clubs had started in this way and had evolved to the point where the members bought out the proprietor’s interest as their own numbers grew; it was, in other words, a normal development. The second point is directly related to the first, for the membership of Howth Golf Club increased by 100 per cent in 1917 alone.
Apart from the desire to become members in the true sense rather than subscribers, which is what they were in reality, the golfers of Howth wanted a degree of control and authority over their own affairs which they could only have on their own terms. For example, in March 1918 the secretary, W.B. Crawford, was instructed to write to Mr. Butson offering to provide one Keegan, “a first-class man as green keeper who thoroughly understands the work” and pointing out that the condition of the greens had not been satisfactory, although admitting that it would only take about a fortnight to get them into shape. More startlingly, Crawford had to draw Butson’s special attention to the fact that horses and cattle are allowed to wander at large over the greens and fairway”.
He asked him to have this matter dealt with at once!
This kind of situation was clearly unacceptable. From the members’ point of view, the critical thing now was to secure control of the entire running of their own club. To be beholden to the good will of a proprietor, however benign he might be or however committed to the game he might be, was simply no longer good enough. In fairness to Butson, the problem of wandering animals persisted for some time and eventually led to a threat of legal action against local landowners who owned the trespassing beasts.
The annual general meeting held on 17th November 1917 it was resolved “that a small sub-committed be appointed from the club committee to meet and confer with Mr. Butson with a view to taking over the club (and) to report results of negotiations to a general meeting of members”.
This general meeting took place less than two months later, on 12th January 1918, and heard that Butson’s terms were for a rental agreement at an annual rent of $150. This was not accepted. Butson now counter-proposed that the existing sub-committee be wound up and that instead a new committee of eight be formed, four to be nominated by the proprietor and four by the captain in order to discuss the whole matter afresh. The AGM accepted this, but made a significant amendment in claiming the right for all the members to nominate the club’s four members rather than devolving that power to the captain, Messrs Crawford, de Courcey, Hussey and Stuart were Butson’s representatives while Messrs Howard, Lynch, Mahon and Maguire were elected by the members. Butson agreed to let this committee have full power to look after the maintenance of the course – a friendly gesture which clearly indicated his good will and argued well for the conduct of discussions. It was evident that Butson was willing to make a deal if the terms were right.
He would appear to have had good reason for wanting an agreement. He had spent a lifetime making himself comfortable and he still had the hotel to run in Howth. He did not really need the administrative chores of a proprietary golf club on top of all that, even a successful and expanding one like Howth. Requests from the executive committee or the secretary to do this or to see to that were bad enough, but seemed much worse when set against the complaint which he sent to them in the spring of 1918: that out of 75 current members, only 32 had paid their subscriptions! The committee acted promptly and decisively, announcing in an almost peremptory manner that nay member who had not paid up within a fort night would cease to be a member! As always, this kind of threat did the trick and no more was heard on this subject for some time, although Howth Golf Club – like every other club that ever was or ever will be formed – has to wrestle with this problem from time to time. Not only did all 75 members pay up, membership continued to expand and reached 92 over the following twelve months.
And so the negotiations on the committee of eight proceeded, dominating the affairs of the club in 1918. There were, happily, less weighty matters to occupy the minds of the club’s officers, as when “It was reported to the committee that members’ clubs were being lent to strangers by the green keeper, The Secretary was instructed to speak to Keegan on the matter.”
A other small problem which presented itself around this time – and another indication of pressure on existing resources – was the question of whether or not to allow three ball and four ball matches on Saturdays, which it was agreed to do but only when there were no competitions being played. On competition days, such matched could not commence before 5p.m.
The negotiations with Butson over the purchase of the club by the members dragged on into early 1919 before finally being resolved. As late as January 1919, Butson was still trying to get a rental agreement, this time on an annual rent of $130. This was $20 a year less than his offer of the previous year but it was evident that any kind of rental arrangement was unacceptable to the members. He then offered to dispose of his entire interest for a single payment of $850 or $900 on a staggered basis: he suggested $600 down and the balance in annual payments of $50 at 5 per cent. Eventually, after what seemed like interminable haggling, the bargain was struck at $809, of which $700 was payable immediately and the balance over three years free of interest.
These were large sums of money. It is worth bearing in mind that they represented more than ten times the annual wages of Keegan the green keeper, which stood at $78 in 1919. the committee decided to finance the purchase by debenture bonds issued to subscribing members. Seven members of the committee undertook a commitment of $20 each and the eight one of. However, the response from the general membership was disappointingly slow. By April 1919, however, the total subscribed by members had risen to $465 and the Bank of Ireland had granted an overdraft of $500 to the club on the personal guarantees on six individual members. A special general meeting held at the end of that month authorized the committee to complete the purchase from Butson.
This was of course, a seminal moment in the history of the club. The members had taken possession of the future, which now lay totally in their own control.
While all this drama had been unfolding, the club had negotiated a new lease with the St Lawrence estate and Mr. Julian Gaisford St Lawrence had agreed to accept the presidency of the club.
On 11th march 1919, a letter from Mr. George Price LL.D, secretary of the Leinster branch of the Golfing Union of Ireland, informed the committee that Howth Golf Club’s application for membership of the GUI had been accepted subject to their satisfying the Union that they had complete control over the election of members and over the club’s finances. These assurances were swiftly furnished to Dr Price and Howth took its place as a full GUI member.
All in all, the spring of 1919 was a significant moment in the evolution and development of Howth Golf Club.
As we have seen the club had by this time grown to a membership of almost a hundred. Who were these early members? They came from all over the north side of the city, although there were a few who hailed from south of the Liffey. The names and addresses of a representative sample of members and associates elected between 1917 and 1919 bear out this point:
The Misses M. Rae and Bella Watson, Simed Lodge, Clontarf.
Mr. P. Martin, 1 Upper Gardiner Street.
Mr. J. J. Hughes, 25 Dorset Street.
Mr. P. Brennan, Marengo Terrace, Howth.
Miss M. E. Shields, 41 Adelaide Road,
Mr. W.J. Carton, 260 North Circular Road.
Mr. and Mrs. Keogh Nolan, Vernon Avenue, Clontarf.
Mr. Ernest Williams, 2 St Anne’s Villas, Dollymount.
Mr. J.W. Bourke, 47 Hollybank Road, Drumcondra.
One could go on, but this short list makes the point perfectly well. While the principal focus of membership was bound to be the Clontarf, Dollymount Sutton and Howth littoral, there was a very high inflow from other parts of the city. In this respect, Howth was no exception to a pattern that was visible among all golf clubs at the time. Gold was a boom sport in Ireland, as outside, from the 1880s onwards. The rate of expansion slowed somewhat in the years of the Great War and the War of Independence before accelerating again from the mid 1920s up to the outbreak of World War II. For most of the half-century prior to 1939, the enormous popularity of the game in Ireland was marked by the foundation of club after club, right across the country. Of course, not all survived to maturity. But a majority did, and these soon discovered – here, Howth’s experience is absolutely typical – that the mere presence of a golf club was sufficient to swell its membership list and throw very considerable demands upon its resources.
In the case of Howth, resources were being taxed most by the continued growth in applications for membership, so much so that by the middle of 1919 the club had to consider charging an entrance fee for new members for the first time. It was decided not to do this before the start of the following year unless the number of gentlemen swelled to 150 or that of ladies to 50.
In response to this ever growing membership, the club was obliged, as a matter of urgency, to look to its facilities. The club house was primitive – little more than a changing room – and was no longer adequate to the demands being placed upon it. In the middle of 1919, a sub-committee was established of the express purpose of overseeing the building of a new clubhouse, to include a tea room and accommodation for the green keeper. A local builder, Mr. Clarke, won the contract on a tender of $383-10-0 ($383.50), plus $30 for plastering. In addition, Clarke charged $16-10-0 ($16.50) for the erection of two piers on which a gate would be hung in order to prevent the continuing nuisance of cattle, ponies and goats wandering across the course from adjoining properties. A further $9-10-0 ($9.50) went on tables and lamps for the new clubhouse. Heating for the new premises was provided courtesy of Mr. McConnnell, one of the members, who donated an anthracite stove. Sadly, this stove proved either inadequate or unsuitable because within a few months a further stove had to be purchased at a cost of $7-18-0 ($7.90).
In the meantime, a controversy arose within the club which seemed no more than a little local difficulty at the time but which was a harbinger of bigger things to come. Mr. Marcus Lynch, the club’s solicitor as well as being himself a member, was asked to draft a new set of rules. This he did and submitted them to the committee which in turn presented them for the approval of the annual general meeting held on 10th January 1920. One of the proposed new rules was that the number of committee members to be elected by the members at the AGM was to be six. On a counter-proposal from the floor of the meeting, however, this was changed to nine. The discussion was heated and the vote close: fourteen to thirteen. The repercussions were immediate. Mr. W.T. Chadwick, one of the senior members and a guarantor of the club’s overdraft at the bank, asked to be relieved of his position as guarantor. He argued that all the guarantors took a serious view of the members’ refusal to endorse the new draft rules at the AGM (there had been dissent and referral back in the case of other rules as well). He himself felt that it was particularly inadvisable, in view of the club’s financial position, to expand the committee beyond the number agreed to by the guarantors.
At this remove, it is difficult to see quite where the source of the guarantors’ anxiety lay. An extra three people on the committee was not, of itself, going to involve the club in any extra expense. Perhaps Chadwick was operating on the principle that the devil finds work for idle committee men and that this kind of work inevitably leads to the disbursement of funds. Certainly, the club’s financial position was precarious and remained so for the next couple of years. They were overdrawn at the bank and had committed themselves to an expensive programme of expansion; moreover, the residue of the payment to Butson still had to be discharged. Later in the year, when the whole business had been resolved, it was proposed to have the new rules printed up but the committee felt unable to sanction the $11 required to accomplish this without the express approval of the guarantors, an eloquent testimony both to the club’s financial difficulties and to the psychological dominance now being exerted by the guarantors.
The suspicion must remain – amplified, perhaps, by the events of the following year – that here was a classic case of the clique versus the democrats. Every club relies upon a small number of people who contribute a disproportionate amount of time and effort; without such people, no club could survive for a month. However, people of that kind do not always take kindly to having their own views overridden, especially by those who appear to contribute little or nothing to the club’s affairs other than their opinions, often delivered in a loud voice in the bar at closing time.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Chadwick’s request – or threat – had the desired effect. A special general meeting was hastily convened less than six weeks after the first one and the draft rules were adopted, with only minor amendments. On the crucial question of the size of the committee, the number to be elected by the members was reduced from nine to six. In short, it was the restoration of the status quo ante. The clique had won, but it was to prove a pyrrhic victory.
After these excitements, ordinary matters like the formation of the first ladies committee under Mrs. Arigho, or the donation of a standard lamp to the tea room by Mr. Fred Gwynne, or persuading the tramway company to allow some of its services to stop at the club entrance all seem like very dull stuff. None the less, the growth and development of a club is marked as vividly by such mundane matters as by grand operatic rows at annual general meeting.
The membership list was closed for the middle months of 1920, with the numbers standing at 126 gentlemen and 50 ladies, although an exception was made for applicants with handicaps of fifteen or less. The immediate effect of the re-opening of membership was the election of seven men and ten ladies. The numbers continued their steep rise and by November the men’s membership had reached 150, precipitating another closure of the list.
The constant, indeed relentless, expansion of the membership list since 1918 meant that the club was changing, not just in personnel but also, so to speak, in temperament. The stalwarts who had founded the club along with Butson, had overseen its first steps, had negotiated the purchase of Butson’s interest and the terms of the lease with the St Lawrence estate and had seen the club mature as a full member of the GUI, were now surrounded by new faces. Among the relative newcomers were some who felt that the founding fathers had less than a divine right to run the club. They were disturbed by the manner in which the decisions of the 1020 annual general meeting had been set aside. They determined to do something about it. As the 1921 AGM approached, the club stood on the rink of one of the biggest upheavals in its history. A lot of chickens were coming home to roost.
In any club, it is unusual for one of the major offices to be contested. But as the 1921 AGM of Howth Golf Club approached, it was clear that the outgoing Hon. Treasurer, C.J. Monks, who was offering himself for re-election, was going to face a challenge. The challenger was Michael McMahon.
On the evening of that AGM, Michael McMahon had been a member of the club for exactly one year and six days, having been elected on 16th January 1920.
Michael McMahon was a civil servant, one of a number of civil servants who were new but energetic members of the club. It is no exaggeration to say that his candidacy caused no merely a sensation but the most serious and immediate consequences. On 14th January 1921, the club guarantors wrote the following letter to the honorary secretary:
Dear Sir,
We are much concerned at the threatened opposition to the re-election of the honorary treasurer of the club. He has discharged the duties of the office in a most satisfactory manner and it would appear that the movement is not taken in the best interests of the club. The financial position and stability of the club is thus assailed and, as guarantors, we are reluctantly impelled to intervene. Technically, no doubt, the members are entitled to elect any person as treasurer of the club but, on the other hand, unless the treasurer wishes to retire, or there is some reason, it is usual to re-elect him.
Taking a charitable view of the situation, we must assume that the proposal to elect another treasurer is not seriously intended, or that the logical outcome of such a course has not been considered. We trust, therefore, that those who are responsible for the proposal will not only withdraw opposition to the honorary secretary’s re-election but actively support his re-election. Any other course must lead to disruption and, in that event, those responsible for the situation created must be prepared to take over and release us from the liability to the bank in respect of the overdraft which we have guaranteed, as, in justice to ourselves, we could not continue our financial support in the circumstances.
As the matter has arisen, and in order to provide for future possibilities, we consider it would be desirable to amend the rules of the club by inserting…. The words… ‘so long as any monies shall remain due and owing by the club to its bankers on foot of a guarantee, loan or overdraft account, no member shall be eligible for election as an officer or member of committee of the club unless recommended by the guarantors to the bank.’
This uncompromising letter was signed by P. J. Hussey, John Arigho, C.E. McConnell, W.T. Chadwick and J.E. Oliver. It was read out by James Spencer, the Honorary secretary, at the beginning of the Annual General Meeting. If its intention was to intimidate the McMahon supporters, it was a pretty comprehensive failure because no sooner had Spencer finished reading it out than John D. Nugent blandly proposed “that the business of the meeting be proceeded with”. Despite an amendment, moved by Spencer himself, to suspend standing order so that the guarantors’ letter could be discussed, Nugent’s motion was carried.
This was the crucial moment which indicated both the seriousness and the strength of the rebellion. In the course of discussing Spencer’s amendment – a discussion which was ling, detailed and, we may reasonably infer, passionate – it was made abundantly clear that if the guarantors’ conditions were not met the members would be faced with the necessity to take over the entire financial liability of the club and to release the guarantors from their undertakings.
Nugent, among others, responded that this was clearly understood and left nobody present in any doubt that the rebels were prepared of this and were willing to attend to it in the event of their being successful.
Once the proposal to suspend standing orders had been lost, the jig was up. It indicated that when the vote fro the treasurer ship came to be taken, McMahon was going to win. And so it proved. No sooner had this happened than James Spencer – who had been returned unopposed as honorary secretary for another year only minutes earlier – resigned, the first of many members of the old guard to leave not just the committee but the club itself.
The election of Michael McMahon as honorary treasurer was a watershed in the history of Howth Golf Club because it inaugurated a reign that continued unbroken until 1958. It also meant, in effect, the ousting of one establishment and its replacement by another. By the end of that annual general meeting of 22nd January 1921, not only had Michael McMahon embarked upon his ling tenure of office as treasurer but John D. Nugent, who was a member of the club only since the previous May, had been elected a vice-president and Jim Bourke, who had seconded Nugent’s original motion to continue with the business of the meeting, had been elected to the committee, coming second out of the ten candidates for six places. He was t remain on of the dominant figures in the club for many years to come.
In 1975, shortly before his death, Jim Bourke prepared a short five-page memorandum about the club, entitled “Howth Golf Club: Brief Recollections of its Early Years”. In it, he deals with the tumultuous events of 1921 by saying that the old officers and committee “were nominated by a small section of the members who at that time had taken over complete control of club affairs” and that “the main body of the members took exception to this arrangement and for the next Annual General Meeting in 1921, after much organization, they nominated as Hon. Treasurer Michael McMahon in opposition to the nomination of C.J. Monks of the aforesaid unpopular section”.
Although Jim Bourke’s account was challenged, on some points at least, by Tom Phelan – a contemporary who subsequently became another one of the leading figures in the club – it is one of only two accounts we have of these events written by a contemporary. (The other is {Phelan’s reply to Bourke.) While bearing in mind that it was written overt half a century later and was not regarded as definitive, it is still suggestive in a number of ways.
First, it seems clear hat the actions of the trustees in 1920 in frustrating the clear wishes of members left a bad taste. Equally, it is clear that when similar intimidatory tactics were employed a year later, the trustees found that they had been ambushed. But how had the ambush been laid? Perhaps the best clue lies in the composition of the membership. At the time of the fateful AGM, the membership stood at 142, exclusive of associates. Of these, not less than 38 had been elected in the previous twelve months. In the same period, at least 13 people had relinquished their membership. By even the most conservative reckoning, this was a very significant net gain of new blood both in absolute numerical terms and well as in percentage terms. We cannot be certain that all the new blood was either indifferent to or hostile to the old guard but it is certainly no coincidence that so many of them were actively involved in the events of January 1921. Michael McMahon and John Nugent were the most prominent of the new men but Jim Scannell – another 1920 new boy – also spoke vigorously on the night and we may reasonably infer ‘that James Nugent, who followed his brother into membership in the autumn of 1920, was also on the side of the rebels.
The McMahon faction had, therefore, much good material with which to work and they seem to have done so with outstanding efficiency. In this connection, Jim Bourke’s reference to “much organization” may be more significant than it seems. He notes in his “Brief Recollections” that “about 95 per cent” of the membership turned out for the 1921 AGM. Even discounting a bit for possible exaggeration, this still represents an extraordinarily high attendance for the annual general meeting of a golf club, or indeed of any other voluntary association. It raises a suspicion that at least some of the 38 new members elected in 1920 were part of a sort of counter-clique who were introduced to the club for the immediate purpose of voting out the old guard. The high attendance and the disciplined voting certainly points towards this conclusion.
Further evidence of such an organized coup is provided in a remarkable document written by Tom Phelan in response to Jim Bourke’s “Brief Recollections”. He traces the upsurge in membership to the conclusion of the deal with Butson, which led to a membership drive. The club records certainly bear out the big increase in new members in 1919 and 1920. Unlike most members of the old guard who were, ion Tom Phelan’s words, “all supporters of the Ascendancy of Establishment, as ere most golfers at the time”, the majority of the new members “were mainly Catholics and Nationalists made up of civil servants, teachers and commercial people from the bigger drapery stores, railway, etc.”
Prominent among these people was Jim Bourke himself and it was he who proposed his great friend Michael McMahon for membership in early 1920. McMahon had been born in London of a Co. Clare father and was a civil servant in the Ministry of Munitions during the Great War. But he was also interested in Irish nationalist politics and was a member both of the United Irish League and – most significantly – of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Towards the end of the war, he sought and was granted a transfer to Dublin where he struck up his friendship with Jim Bourke through their employment in the same civil service department and their membership of the same ADH lodge (Civil Service division no. 10000). Phelan further confirms that many of the new members elected around this time were ADH men, including D.P. Gallagher who was even a trustee of the Association. Tom Phelan was in an excellent position to know exactly what was going on, because he himself was a member of Commercial Division 702 of the ADH. The whole affair was, in his judgement, and ADH coup. He wrote: “Looking back, I don’t think the ‘old gang’, as they were known afterwards, had any idea of what was brewing – they were led like lambs to the slaughter.” He challenges Jim Bourke’s bland statement that “the main body of the members took exception” to the manner in which the old committee was running the club, as though the whole affair was a spontaneous revolt against an authoritarian clique. There was nothing spontaneous about it. It was a meticulously planned takeover of the club, lock, stock and barrel, by members of an organization well skilled in the arts of intrigue.
The events of January 1921 brought the first period of the club’s history to an end. It resulted in the departure of many founding members and in a fundamental change at the helm. At this point, however, it is perhaps appropriate to recall the outstanding achievements of many who were henceforth to play no further part in the club’s affairs. They had founded the club, built up its membership, overseen its early development and raised the necessary finances, effected the transfer of ownership from Butson to the members, and seen Howth affiliated to the GUI. Tom Phelan makes the point that the degree of control sought by the guarantors was not unusual in the circumstances, given that the “clique” comprised just about the entire active membership of the club, some of whom had put themselves at potential personal risk in order to guarantee the club’s overdraft. In addition, there was never any question of sectarian bias in those early years: four of the first five captains were Catholics, as was the unfortunate C.J. Monks, the man who got run over by the McMahon juggernaut. In five years, the founding fathers had established Howth Golf Club as a flourishing and viable entity. It was left to others to build on their initial achievement, but without them there would have been nothing to build.
FROM NINE TO EIGHTEEN HOLES
The new men had, so to speak, won the war; now they had to manage the peace. The withdrawal of the old guard left a vacuum. The club had neither a captain nor a secretary, for P.J. Hussey had resigned the captaincy almost as quickly as Spencer had the position of secretary. None the less, the new committee met one week to the day after the annual general meeting, having been summoned not by the captain – as was the usual procedure – but in his absence by William Devoy, one of the new committee members who was, incidentally, a nephew of John Devoy the Fenian.
The captaincy passed to Marcus Lynch, who had been a member for a number of years and who was also the club’s secretary. Hanlon had “topped the poll” in the election for the committee held at the AGM, and his elevation to the secretary ship created an ordinary vacancy on the committee which was filled by the unanimous co-option of W.G. Mulvin, another supporter of the McMahon faction.
In short, the new men did what all successful revolutionaries do. They first secured their own power base before moving on to deal with practical, day-to-day matters.
The first practical matter with which they had to deal was that most basic of all considerations: money. Michael McMahon, Jim Bourke and M. Dillon were appointed as financial sub-committee with full power of action and co-option in order to address the serious problems created by the changing of the guard. Just how serious these immediate problems were can be seen in a letter from the club’s bankers, Bank of Ireland, Henry Street branch, which stated that notices had duly been received from the guarantors of the club’s account indicating their desire to withdraw from that role. The bank had accordingly ruled off the account and would permit no further transactions on the debit side. Just to underline the point, three cheques were returned marked “Present Again”. The first was favour of Elvery’s for $1.10.6; the second favour of McKenzie’s for $7.4.0; and the third, by a nice irony, was payable to the former secretary, J.P. Spencer, for the princely sum of $1.9.6. At this stage, the club’s account was overdrawn to the tune of $155.16.5 with accumulated interest of $4.1.9. this was well within the permitted amount of the club’s overdraft which was $2, ooo, the sum guaranteed by the old trustees
The new finance sub-committee did not let the grass grow under its feet, nor indeed could it afford to. Within a week, it had arranged new overdraft terms with the Munster & Leinster Bank and had appointed new guarantors, all of them, incidentally, members of the AOH. The speed with which the financial situation was rectified was father evidence of the careful planning that had gone into the great coup. Clearly, the whole thing had been thought through in considerable detail and contingency plans were well in place. The new arrangements gained a particularly pleasing form of approval on 9th February in the form of a letter from Commander Gaisford St Lawrence in which he agreed to retain the presidency of the club and congratulated the members on their successes to date.
For at least one person, the whole change of committee was an unmixed blessing. At its last meeting before the 1921 AGM, the old committee had agreed to give the green keeper, Patrick Keegan a week’s notice and to employ in his place one Michael Bailey. Keegan was given to absenting himself from time to time in order to indulge his fondness for the bottle and then, presumably, to recover from the effects of his over-indulgence. However, none of these decisions had been acted on before the changing of the guard and the new regime decided to put everything on hold for an indefinite period. This restraint was repeated on a number of occasions in the future before Pat Keegan was eventually shown the door, but in the meantime he had established himself as one of the club’s characters. He also doubled up as club professional, offering lessons at a half a crown a time. In general, he was a hard-working man, but his occasional batters gradually took their toll.
The membership of the club continued to expand remorselessly. In February and March 1921, no fewer than 44 new members joined. The new committee reacted in precisely the same manner as the old, by limiting membership. However, whereas the old committee had always drawn the line at 150 men and 50 women, the new one set the more liberal figures of 200 and 70, respectively. By the autumn, the club had a waiting list for the first time in its history.
Whatever about the methods employed by the new men in taking over the club, they immediately demonstrated their administrative ability and managerial competence. Michael McMahon presided over a dramatic turnaround in the club’s financial position in his first year in office. He transformed a debit balance of over $500 on the club’s current account into a debit balance of over $150, while showing an operating profit for the year of $863.15.6. Course improvements continued, although in a small way for the moment. A new lease was under negotiation with the St Lawrence estate and the first plans were being laid for the acquisition of the extra land required to turn Howth from a nine-hole to an eighteen-hole course. It was to take almost ten years to realize this latter dream, but it is significant that it is already under serious discussion in late 1921, still in the energy-filled first flush of the new regime.
Whatever about energy for the long term, short-term items of expenditure were very closely monitored. Michael McMahon was a man for what would now be called financial rectitude and he was very careful indeed where the spending of money was concerned. He agreed to the providing of linoleum to cover the floor of the dining room, provided no more than $10 was spent (although the thought occurs that $10 would probably have bought a fair expanse of lino in 1921). He agreed to the purchase of extra lockers at $9 a piece and to 50 tons of sand at a shilling a ton. But he vetoed a proposal to make improvements in the ladies’ changing room – improvements which involved putting in such a frivolous extravagance as a toilet, among other things! – on the grounds that the money wasn’t there and wouldn’t be there until the next financial year, at least. The ladies responded in a wholly predictable manner, by organizing whist drives and other fund raising events in order to drum up the cash, or a least some of it, themselves.
It is, of course, easy to poke fun at the caution – prudence might be a more appropriate word – of a man like McMahon until one comes to appreciate the extent of his achievement, especially in the 1920s and ‘30s. He kept the club on an even keel financially, avoiding reckless expenditure, however tempting or desirable, while at the same time the club grew and expanded steadily. Negotiations with the St Lawrence estate for a new fifty-year lease at $100 a year were brought to a successful conclusion; modest extensions and improvements to the clubhouse were carried out, although the major
re-building which had been desired fro so long was not done until the mid ‘30s; most of all, the plans for an extension to eighteen holes were pressed forward steadily.
The club was dominated by a few personalities, as all clubs are. The stern, capable figure of McMahon held the purse strings, as well as being captain in 1927, 1928 and 1929. On what was for the most part a harmonious committee, the only occasional friction that arose was that between McMahon and Paddy Hanlon, the honorary secretary in 1922 and 1925 and again – in partnership with Jim Middleton – from 1926 to 1930.
Where McMahon was a man whose watchword was prudence, Hanlon’s was expansion, and naturally they clashed from time to time, as much for temperamental reasons as on account of whatever specific proposal was before them. Generally, Hanlon was a man for doing things: he wanted course and clubhouse improvements. McMahon wanted to balance the books and not rush into schemes that might lumber the club with heavy debts. It is the kind of personality clash that occurs in every club and, indeed, that every club needs.
The man who held the ring between these two was Jim Bourke. He had, in Tom Phelan’s words, “an ideal personality, debonair and diplomatic, resourceful in argument and imperturbable throughout (he as a formidable opponent) … his greatest asset lay in his influence over McMahon who trusted him implicitly. This undoubtedly made him the most powerful member in the blub and the real ‘power behind the throne’ for many years. Captains came and went but the club, to all intents and purposes, was run by these two members.”
Their influence was strongly felt in the matter of appointing a professional. As we have already seen, Pat Keegan was doubling up as both green keeper and professional. He had already survived one close shave at the end of 1920, when his repeated absences due to drink so exasperated the committee that they resolved to sack him. Then cam the great coup of January 1021 and in all the confusion Pat Keegan’s skin was saved. But not for long. He did not change his ways and this could only mean one thing: that sooner or later the new committee would reach the same decision as the old, except that this time it would be put into effect. And so it proved in December 1922.
Keegan found alternative employment at the Curragh. To replace him, the committee decided to appoint a full professional and they approached the professional in Galway Golf Club, Willie Nolan. He accepted, and so joined Howth on terms of $2.10.0 a week plus tow shillings an hour for lesions.
Willie Nolan was one of the great figures in the history of Irish golf. He hailed from Baldoyle where – it is good to record – his memory still lives in a street name. When he joined Howth, he was still very much on the way up in his profession but later, in the 1930s, came the days of his great achievements. He was Irish Match play champion and Irish professional champion in 1934. The previous year, he had come second in the Dunlop professional tournament at Southport and led the field in the Dunlop professional tournament at Southport and led the field in the British Open at the half-way stage on the old course at St. Andrew’s, where he shot a 67 in the second round to beat Bobby Jones’s course record. Tom Phelan recalls that Nolan used to practice his driving from the tee of the present 18th beside the wall at Harford’s Cottage and that the drives invariably landed on or about the 18th green.
Willie Nolan was happy in Howth, so happy indeed that when an even better professional opening came his way he was reluctant to take it up. In 1926, the professional’s job at Portmarnock fell vacant when Tom Shannon left to go to Milltown where there was a greater demand from members for lessons. Jim Bourke encouraged Nolan to pursue the Portmarnock job, which he did after some initial hesitation. Portmarnock snapped him up and it was a s professional there that he had his glory years. Sadly, they did not last for long because he died young. He was only forty-three when cancer carried him away in 1939; it was a tragedy in every sense.
When he had left Galway to come to Howth, he had been succeeded by Jack O’Neill. Now history repeated itself, for Jack O’Neill followed him to Howth, to begin an association with the club that lasted for forty-seven splendid years.
There is just one footnote to the Willie Nolan years. When he left Howth, the members and associates arranged for a testimonial and the presentation of a gold watch. This was duly done. However, the committee minutes of 10th March 1926 contain the following laconic entry:
“The honorary treasurer submitted a verbal statement regarding testimonial to W. Nolan showing a debit balance of 3d. This was considered satisfactory.”
By now, Howth had started to produce some very useful golfers. The best of them was Ceil Lee, the first of only three scratch players to date in the history of the club. Cecil Lee was a great character, full of fun and spirit. He loved company, enjoyed socializing and made the most of his weekends in the club, both on and off the course. He had no interest in club administration. For him, a golf club was a place to play the game and enjoy the company of your friends. Among Cecil’s friends were a number of members who were “agin the committee” almost as a matter of principle. They included Cormac Breatnach, a teacher; Mich Knightly, the editor of the Dail Debates; and Jim Holloway, a jam manufacturer who was also Cecil Lee’s employer.
Most members of any club contribute little to its administration. They join to play and to socialize, not to talk or to manage things. Such people are forever inclined to complain about what committees do, or to poke fun at them. But every now and again, chance remarks which are made in the bar and which are not intended in any malicious way, can have unforeseen consequences. So it was in Howth Golf Club in 1926.
On this occasion, the spark that lit the fuse concerned a matter that vexes many sports clubs from time to time. Disappointing financial returns from the bar. In 1923, Val Collins had been appointed as bar steward and had done a fine job but he resigned within tow years (although he returned later, staying with the club until his death in 1951). His replacement was Miss Agnes Hughes, whose father had succeeded Pat Keegan as green keeper and whose mother had stepped into Mrs. Keegan’s shoes as blub caterer. Miss Hughes was not a success in her new role. It became clear from stocktaking that there was a discrepancy and that stock had disappeared. This had never happened before and it was regarded as a very serious business. Worse, the news leaked out – as it was almost inevitably bound to do – and became the subject of bar room gossip.
Unfortunately, the gossip got a bit out of control and resulted in one of the members loudly accusing certain members of the committee of having tot drink for which they had not paid. This was serious enough, but it was also established that a member of the committee had not only been present when this allegation was made but had evidently discussed matters in the bar which were confidential to the committee room. Michael McMahon had discovered all this from interviewing Agnes Hughes. He now produced his master stroke. He brought Miss Hughes before a commissioner for oaths and had her swear an affidavit describing the conversations she had heard.
McMahon was, in the American expression, playing hardball. He was extremely embarrassed by the whole bar business: as honorary treasurer, he was the man most in the firing line. But he was enraged that people whom he regarded as chronic malcontents were using the whole sorry episode as a pretext to question his competence and, indeed, his integrity.
Miss Hughes’s affidavit quickly put the indiscreet committee man between a rock and a hard place. He had until this been loud in his calls for a special general meeting to discuss the bar situation. Now he protested that McMahon had acted without the authority of the committee in extracting the affidavit. He resigned from the committee forthwith declaring that his honour had been impugned – a good case of the kettle calling the pot black – and the resignation was accepted with what can only be described as indecent haste.
All this was, in a sense, no more than an unfortunate storm in a tea cup. Tempers had, however, become frayed an one of the most regrettable aspects of the whole affair was that Cecil Lee left the club for a number of years, although he returned later to resume his position as a popular and much loved member.
The committee were so shaken by the whole business that they called a special general meeting in the Dolphin Hotel on 14th February 1927 in order to get a vote of confidence. This they secured easily but not before there was a vigorous debate in which a number of people spoke, not least of them Jim Holloway, the jam manufacturer and employer of Cecil Lee. He accused the committee of carelessness and unbusinesslike methods in discovering the bar leakages earlier. He went on to say that if such a thing happened in his business he could put his finger on it within twenty-four hours, a declaration that impressed some people present, coming as it did from the successful proprietor of a good, solid business. Alas, pride goeth before a fall. Within a week, and with a sense of timing that would have been malicious had it not been coincidental, it emerged that one of Holloway’s staff had been fiddling the cash for over eighteen months without being discovered!
The whole sorry episode once again displayed the authority and sure footedness of the principal committee men, and of Michael McMahon in particular. Within a year, in March 1928, McMahon was elected an honorary life member of the club “in consideration of his long, untiring and most highly valued services” thus completing his transformation from rebel to pillar of the establishment. The pity of the whole affair was, of course, that the club had lost its best player with the departure of Cecil Lee. What nobody can have realized at the time was that the club was standing on the threshold of its greatest competitive achievement to date.
Howth won the 1`927 Barton Cup, beating Malahide in the final. The following year, it came tantalizingly close to defending it successfully, surrendering it to Sutton only after a playoff at Royal Dublin. But in 1929 Howth reached the final fro the third year running and once more victory was achieved, this time at the expense of Greystones.
This was a remarkable achievement by any standards, all the more so for a club barely ten years in existence. In fairness, Howth was not an easy course for visitors to play on. Tom Phelan, who played on the final sides in all three years, noted that “conditions on the course were rather primitive, very narrow fairways and the rough terrible – gorse, heather etc. – so much so that visiting Barton Cup teams rarely won a match at Howth.”
Even away from home, however, Howth players were capable of surprising the best. In 1929, for example, Jack Redmond, who was Professor of Music in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra and captain of the club in 1930, was partnering Eddie Stuart, the club’s very first captain, in a Barton Cup match in Hermitage. One of the Hermitage pair was Dr J. D. McCormack a good golfer who was a touch arrogant with it. He was an international and had won the Irish Amateur Championship. Walking down the first fairway, Stuart offered McCormack a cigarette (changed times: who would even dream of offering a doctor a cigarette these days?). McCormack declined, saying that he would save it for the 13th, meaning that the match would be all over by the. Well, it almost was because Redmond and Stuart stood three up on the 13th tee – whereupon Stuart produced the cigarettes again. The good doctor gave him a much dustier refusal this time, and the Howth pair duly went on to complete their victory.
The Barton Cup successes were a tremendous psychological fillip for Howth Golf Club. In a sense, they represented the “arrival” of the club. Moreover, they coincided with the other development which completed the early years of expansion and development. In 1929, the dream of an eighteen-hole course – present in members’ minds practically from the foundation of the club by Butson – was at last realized.
In late 1927, the Howth Estate offered a further twelve acres to the club while the neighbouring McDougall Estate offered thirty acres in an area known as “Bay of Loughs”, all with a view to the extension of the course to eighteen holes. Terms were agreed with the two estates by the middle of 1928. Tom Shannon came over from Milltown for a preliminary inspection of the land and – that done – the club decided to approach James Braid to offer him the job of designing the new course.
James Braid was one of the most famous names in the world of golf. Born in Fife in 1870, he was the first person ever to win the British Open five times. Along with Harry Vardon and John Henry Taylor, he dominated the world of tournament golf in the generation prior to the Great War. He was a founder member of the Professional Golfers’ Association and, following this retirement from tournament play, he set up as a successful course designer, much in demand. He was no stranger to Ireland. In addition to his work in Howth, he also designed Mullingar and Newlands, among other courses.
Braid’s fee was all of 28 guineas! The work of clearing the difficult terrain and laying out the extra holes was awarded to the firm of J.R. Stutt & Co. of Paisley, Scotland. Their tender of $1530plus an extra ↓51.18.3 for fencing was accepted. This was financed principally by bank overdraft – at the end of 1929 the club’s account stood at debit 1274. But the club was in a good position to service this debt: under Michael McMahon’s careful stewardship, the club had consistently shown a surplus on the annual revenue account throughout the 1920s, and 1929 was no exception. Ordinary income stood at $1940 against expenditure of $1365 and this, combined with a healthy balance sheet, left the club in a position to undertake the expansion at no real financial risk. The bank overdraft was gradually reduced through the early 1930s, before disappearing altogether in 1937.
The great day arrived at last on Saturday 15th June 1929. The opening ceremony was performed by the President of the Executive Council (as the Irish head of government was known between 1922 and 1937), Mr. W.T. Cosgrave. At 6.30 p.m. that evening, he drove a ball in reverse down the present 16th hole, then the 14th, and declared the extra nine holes to be formally open. The committee’s annual report for 1929 reports that “The President received a very hearty and appreciative welcome from the members and their friends and was very much impressed with the magnificent situation of the links.” A $1 note was presented tot eh club caddy who retrieved Mr. Cosgrave’s ball.
The Barton Cup victories and the opening of the new course bring to an end the second phase in the club’s development. Indeed, it might be said that the club came of age in 1929. Howth was now established both competitively and in terms of its basic playing facilities. It was not, to be sure, a classic course by any means. The terrain alone saw to that. A hillside course like Howth was bound to be regarded by purists with a certain reserve, but it had to advantages which offset some of its drawbacks. Not least were the magnificent views of the city and bay which the course afforded, as fine as anything any golf course had to offer in these islands or anywhere else. Most of all, the eighteen holes on Howth head were a testimony to the energy, tenacity and acumen of the people who, in less than twenty years, had transformed a rocky, gorse infested wilderness into a pleasant recreational facility. They had done this entirely in their own time, using their own money and their own ingenuity. As the 1920s drew to a close, there remained much more to be done in Howth Golf Club but the heroic period of development was over. The club now faced a period of thirty years or so in which the principal emphasis was on consolidation and caution. Having come through infancy and adolescence, it now embarked upon sober adulthood and careful milled age.
3
GROWING TO MATURITY
The new nine holes did not get off to the happiest of starts. A long spell of dry weather meant that the sods did not knit properly and then there followed a period of exceptionally wet conditions which turned some of the fairways into quagmires. In the circumstances, it is not perhaps surprising that some members were less than enchanted by the extension to the course. J. P. Rooney of The Irish Times, writing in 1933, noted that “the new holes need all the ‘walking’ they can get from the members; therefore I was surprised when one informed me that some of them play in the ‘Gaelthact’ (whatever they mean by that). They are missing a lot of the real fun by not doing the full round, and I am not so sure that the committee should not, in the interests of the new holes, make it a rule that those who are playing the full round should have the right to go through those who cut in.”
Rooney was generally enthusiastic about the new holes, but not in a wholly uncritical way. He found the greens in a very poor state – “very rough and almost unputtable” – and he had trenchant criticisms of two holes in particular, the fourth and the seventeenth, which he described as “mere blotches”. But in general, his tone was positive: “the new holes… are typically Braidish; splendid golfing holes, possessing plenty of variety… The turf is astonishingly good, and the lies on the majority of the fairways excellent.”
J.P. Rooney was one of the most senior and respected Irish sports writers of the day and had been around long enough to remember Howth in its infancy, in Butson’s day, and to compare and contrast new with the old. Writing of the early days, he recalled that “when you hit a ball a few feet off the fairway on either side you did not trouble to look for it; it was lost in the dense growth of ferns and bracken. I lost six at one hole, the fairway of which was partially blocked by portion of the hill, which those who came after Mr. Butson seem to have pushed back into its proper place.” But the work of “those who came after Mr. Butson” did not finish with the opening of the new course in 1929. The club still lay on the terrain that was basically unfriendly: even in the late 1930s, there were complaints about rock on the fairways and in late 1940, the committee was very glad indeed to accept the loan of blasting equipment from the Local Security Force – a precursor of the FCA – to remove some of it. They were not in a position to undertake the expense themselves.
Following the heroics in the Barton Cup in 1927, ’28 and ’29, the club had a quiet start to the new decade. The most notable competitive achievement was that of Jim Middleton in reaching the final of the Lumsden Cup in 1933.
Jim Middleton was, in every way, one of the most important figures in the history of Howth Golf Club. Along with Bourke and McMahon, he was a dominating influence for many years. He was born in Co. Waterford in 1890 and as a young man he played hurling with the Slieve Cua club. His house in Dublin was called Slieve Cua, recalling those years, and his hurling days left him an eccentric golfing legacy. He was a quite orthodox player in most respects, but he always reversed his grip, hurling style, about 100 yards from the pin. He joined Howth in the early 1920s, was joint honorary secretary with Paddy Hanlon from 1926 to 1930 and played on all three sides to reach the Barton Cup final.
He was known to one and all in Howth as “Uncle Jim” and he is remembered by all who knew him as the very epitome of a gentleman. He was kind, good natured, outgoing and judicious. There was nothing nasty about either his decisions or his speech. But his calm exterior concealed a man of tigerish determination, a formidable match player with the invaluable ability to play himself under pressure. In one of the Barton Cup matches in Bray in 1929, he holed a chip at the 18th in his match to keep Howth in the contest at a particularly difficult moment.
He was a man tempered by tragedy. His first wife died in December 1929 followed sadly by their baby daughter only four months later. But he married again very happily – his second wife, Teddy Middleton, was lady captain in 1940. He was a civil servant by profession, being an official first of the Department of Education and later of the Department of Social Welfare and was a famously dapper man. He wore sports jackets and trousers to match, sported a rose in his buttonhole, and looked like a man set for a day at the races which, indeed, he often was. He was fond of horses and – what is even better, a good judge of them – and he enjoyed a flutter, although he was typically cautious in his punting, as in everything else.
This was the man, then, who came within an ace of winning the Lumsden Cup in 1933. The trophy was named fro John Lumsden (1840 – 1925), ne of the legendary figures of early Irish golf and the founder of Royal Dublin. It was a match play competition for club golfers in Leinster and was much coveted.
The competition was played off in July 1933 in Clontarf. Playing off 6, Middleton beat D.E. Batchen of Dublin University (5) by 4 and 3 in second round, having got a bye in the first; W. Collins of St Anne’s (5) by 3 and 2 in the third round; and D. Barrington of the home club (6) in the fourth. In the fifth round, he conceded two strokes to J.J. Roche of Sutton and in what The Irish Times described as a “ding-dong battle all the way the home hole”, emerged victorious by the narrowest possible margin, 1 up.
By now, Middleton was in the semi-final and was described tee The Irish Times as “the surprise of the tournament”. In particular, the paper noted that “his steadiness around and on the greens has been a feature of his progress”. This stood him in good stead in the semi-final where he beat G.B. Butler of the Castle (8), 1 up. He was up against a man of his own fighting sort, however. Butler was three down after only seven; two down at the turn and still at the fourteenth; and still took the match to the last green.
Middleton went into the final as underdog, despite his spleen did performances all week. His opponent, Roger Green of Clontarf, was soon to be an international and was described as having played “the most consistent and convincing golf of the week”.
The Irish Times reported that “the final will reveal a remarkable contrast in styles, the local player with the orthodox grip and swing, and the Howth man’s change of grip for the short shots and putts, Middleton’s right hand being under on the long clubs an don top for the mashie, mashie nib lick and putting. He, however, finds the changeover keeps him straight; and that in golf is the main consideration.” In the end, orthodoxy and class won the day. Greene, playing off 2, won the thirty-six hole final 2 up. Although he led by one hole after the first eighteen, Jim Middleton had a nightmare start to the second round, losing both his rhythm and his concentration – both such marked features of his earlier successes – with the result that holes that might have been halved were lost. He stood on the fifteenth tee three down, but pulled the next tow back and might have won the seventeenth as well before making Greene a present of a half. That was the final chance. Middleton had shot his bolt and Greene won the last hole to confirm his superiority. It was, however, a splendid achievement to take a player of Greene’s ability to the very last hole in a 36-hole final. The physical demands alone, to say nothing of the psychological ones, are intimidating.
Uncle Jim lived to the ripe old age of eighty-six, dying in 1976. After his death, a memorial plaque was unveiled in the clubhouse, in what was one of the most memorable and nostalgic evenings in the club’s history.
Although the achievements of the 1920s had brought the club to full maturity, it should not be supposed that nothing further remained to be done. Until 1932, for example, there was no electricity in the clubhouse. In August of that year, a sub-committee was set up “to enquire into the possibility of having the clubhouse electrically illuminated”. They took very little time to agree to go ahead and immediately set about raising the money needed through the usual means of dances and whist drives. Michael McMahon’s presence on the sub-committee was probably enough to ensure that this was the only financial basis on which any development such as this could be undertaken. There were going to be no more borrowings form some time.
The club was duly wired up by Mr. J. avis, electrician, of Howth. It is difficult to imagine, at this remove, the psychological difference that electric light made on its introduction – let alone the physical difference. We have come to take electricity so much for granted. We throw a switch: a whole room is brilliantly illuminated. We look at the view from the Howth clubhouse at night and see the city below us, dazzling before our eyes. What a miracle all this must have seemed to men like McMahon, who had lived half their lives without it – and lived, moreover, in a country over 50 degrees north of the equator with ling, dark winters. In a world robbed of natural light for so much f the year, it is not possible to exaggerate the manner in which electricity revolutionized our whole way of looking at the world. McMahon, for example, had been born in 1974, five years before Edison invented the electric light bulb and fifty-one years before the beginning of the Shannon Scheme, the first large-scale enterprise in Ireland aimed at generating enough power to electrify the entire country. So the man who sat on the Howth sub-committee in 1932 and nodded his approval to the electrification of the clubhouse was almost sixty and had spent much of his life to date in a pre-electric world. We can hardly imagine how he and his contemporaries must have felt on that night, late in 1932, when the lights went on for the first time.
We do know, however, exactly how Michael McMahon reacted when the ESB bills started to arrive. The bill for the first ten months of 1935 amounted to $46.15.1, which resulted in most of the light bulbs in the club being taken out, to be replaced by ones with a lower wattage. Meanwhile, the club made representations to the ESB regarding the rate at which current was supplied and in September 1936 succeeded in getting a reduction in the charge from seven pence ha’penny to sixpence a unit.
In 1931, Jack O; Neill the professional had been with the club for five years. Then a problem arose between himself and the committee, the origins of which are obscure. The net result was, however, that in June 1931 it was decided to change his existing terms of employment. He was effectively dismissed and then offered re-employment at a retaining wage of $1 a week; he was to be relieved of all duties in connection with the course and was to confine himself to giving lessons and repairing and selling clubs. A greenkeeper was then sought, at a wage of 3 a week. The greenkeeper from St Anne’s, a Mr. Collins, was interviewed and was found to be such an attractive candidate that the committee was prepared to increase its offer to 3.10.0 in order to secure his services – an act of extravagant abandon compared to most of the financial decisions of the time. Alas, it did not net the fish, for Collins was offered the job only to turn it down, $3.10.0 or no $3.10.0.
Before another candidate could be interviewed in place of the ungrateful Collins, the members began to stir over the treatment of Jack O’Neill. A group of them got up a petition calling upon the committee to re-think its decision and looking for some sort of compromise. The principal signatories were Messrs G. Ring, S. Hughes, H. Healy, D. Hayden, E. Roche and R.J. Quinn. They met the committee, who explained to them in some detail the reasons for the dismissal. We can only infer that these related to the course maintenance aspect of O’Neill job, since these were the duties which, under the committee’s proposals, were to be taken away from his. We cannot, however, be certain because the minutes of this meeting – while emphasising that the committee went into details on the point with the members – are infuriatingly silent on what these details actually were, a form of polite reticence which may have seemed altogether proper at the time but which leave us a with a somewhat incomplete picture of the episode sixty hears later. This is a pity, in view of Jack O’ Neills’ pivotal position in the club over so many years.
The other possibility which may be inferred from the minutes is that the committee felt that the maintenance of a full eighteen-hole course was a more important priority than the possession of a professional and that the club could not afford both. At any rate, a compromise was eventually hammered out between the committee and the members. Jack O’Neill was to be retained as a working professional, provided he was willing to agree to this change of status – “the alternative being his immediate dismissal”, as the minutes note briskly. He did agree. He was re-employed at a wage of $3 a week an extra ten bob for him!). His hours were 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday with an hour off for lunch, and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. He was responsible for the management of the outdoor staff and for work on the course each day between 8 a. m. and 1 p.m. The afternoons were to be devoted to the more conventional professional’s tasks. In 1936, he reverted to the role of non-working professional at a wage of $2.10.0 a week.
So Jack O’Neill survived, but it had been a close thing and had the committee’s original decision gone unchallenged, it is entirely possible that he would have ended up as little more than a footnote in the annals of the club. Nobody knew it at the time, of course, but he had another forty-two years before him as professional at Howth Golf Club.
Just as Jack O’Neill was almost on the way out the door, that splendid old rogue pat Keegan was on the way back in. the post-Keegan regime in the clubhouse had not been a success. The Hughes family had taken over: Mr. Hughes as caretaker, Mrs. Hughes as caterer and the wretched Agnes – she of the affidavit – in the bar. It had not been a success. The bar problems which had touched off the Cecil Lee affair have already been alluded to; but it was also clear that Mrs. Hughes was not as capable in the kitchen as Mrs. Keegan had been, and complaints had been heard from time to time. The Hugheses head tow other daughters, in addition t Agnes. Kathleen the eldest girl, was by all accounts extremely good looking and she attracted the attention of many members, not to mention other lusty swains in the neighbourhood. The upshot of all this attention was that she was out a lot, no doubt having a very jolly time but doing nothing to endear her to the club authorities. In Jim Bourke’s rather deadpan words: “her frequent unexplained absences were viewed unfavourably by the committee”.
The Hughes family departed, pretty daughters and all, in March 1928. IN their place, the Keegans returned.
To be specific, it was Mrs. Keegan who returned. She was an excellent worker and a popular and efficient caterer. Her return was greeted with relief and satisfaction by everyone in the club and she continued to do a splendid job until her death in 1952. She was joined in the early 1930s by Miss Nellie Ryan, a native of Howth, who helped her with the catering for many years, and succeeded her after her death. Nellie Ryan also remained in harness until the end. She died in 1976.
The return of Mrs. Keegan, welcome though it was, had a price attached and the price was called Pat. No one had ever suggested that he was anything other than a fine, hard working fellow when sober; the problem had all to do with his ways when drunk. He allowed the passage of the years to change his ways and he was in regular trouble all through the 1930s.
The most amusing incident occurred just after Christmas 1937 when, flush with a fat seasonal bonus, he was asked to take the club horse down to Howth village to have it shoed and while the horse was with the farrier he went off to have a little drink. That was the last the horse, or anyone else from the club, saw of him for about a week. Eventually, he made his final departure from the club just before the war but, to everyone’s relief, Mrs. Keegan remained on until her death in 1952. She was an outstanding woman and is still remembered with affection by older members as an outstanding caterer.
In general, the 1930s were quiet years in which Howth Golf Club settled down to business. There were no dramas and – apart from the extension of the clubhouse, of which more anon- no great institutional achievements. Members may have had occasion to complain about Pat Keegan, for instance, but he was not the only offender. Caddies were a frequent source of irritation, whether because of incivility or because of their habit of finding “lost balls” which they then re-sold.
One of the more peculiar problems that arose on the course was that of rabbits, which naturally abounded in an area like Howth – especially in the days before myxomatosis – and which did a lot of damage. So great was their number that some people took to trespassing on the course at weekends so that they could course the rabbits with greyhounds! This was a source of great agitation to members, and the committee was obliged to appeal to Mr. Gaisford St Lawrence, as the landlord and the owner of the gaming rights, to see that the nuisance was stopped. The reference to gaming rights in this context might seem absurdly pedantic, but it was not so. The Gaisford-St Lawrence family was particular about its rights in this regard, as it demonstrated just before the war when the club arranged to ferret some of the rabbits – they had continued to multiply in their inimitable way – and quickly had its knuckles rapped for infringing the landlord’s gaming rights! Thereafter, the club had to ask politely for St Lawrences to do their ferreting for them, as the need arose.
If rabbits represented on pole of the animal kingdom in the club’s affairs, horses represented the other. Right through the 1930s, the fairway gang mowers were horse drawn: mechanization did not come until after the war. In the photograph taken at the opening of the eighteen- hole course in 1929, the horse then in use for this purpose may be seen quite clearly in the background. The photograph hangs in the clubhouse and will be familiar to members and visitors: it is reproduced in this book on page 000. Whether or not the horse in the photograph is the grey mare that was found dead in a ditch off one of the fairways on 7the November 1933 is unclear, although it would not appear to be so. The horse in the photograph looks to be anything but grey, perhaps the one equine colour that could be positively identified in a black-and-white photograph. At any rate, the unfortunate grey was hauled off to the knacker’s yard by that estimable firm, Messrs O’Keeffe of the Liberties, and that was the end of her. Her replacement didn’t last long before going the same way: almost a year later, it dropped dead while working on the course, breaking the shaft of the roller.
The only other animal to feature in our story was Mrs. Keegan’s dog, an animal of indeterminate pedigree but nasty temper. He made a nuisance of himself, growling and snapping at members, until at last – possibly after a member had actually been bitten by the brute – the committee ordered Mrs. Keegan to have him destroyed in the spring of 1934.
The most serious contretemps in the club in the mid 1930s arose over the thorny matter of handicaps. At a committee meeting in November 1934, the annual revision of handicaps took place. In January, however, some very heavy guns objected to the manner in which the revision was made. Jim Bourke and Jim Middleton, the two men who – save only for Michael McMahon – were probably the most powerful and influential figure in the club, wrote formally to the committee to place their dissenting views on record. The committee naturally paid serious attention to objections from such quarters but after a long discussion they decided to stand by their original decisions. With that, Bourke and Middleton resigned from the committee, along with two others, one of whom was the influential Tom Phelan. The actual details of the dispute are unclear would appear that the problem focused on the committees refused to take into account the names of those who had qualified with their scores in the period march to September 1034. At all events, the committee reconsidered in the light of the resignations, yield on that particular point, and the resignations were promptly withdrawn. A formal adjustment of handicaps was made and honour was satisfied all round.
This was essentially a row about golf and one confined to the committee room. But like any club, Howth occasionally witnessed rows of a less desirable sort, and so it was on St Patrick’s night 1934. There was a dance that night and everything went off without incident. But after the dance, some members had a difference of opinion and in the course of trying to sort it out, they did some damage to club property. This was due less to malice than to drink, which had made the movements of the members in question somewhat erratic. The damage was serious enough to prompt Michael McMahon to communicate with Marcus Lynch about what was to be done. In the end, the matter was settled to everyone’s satisfaction when one of the members involved paid a token $1 towards the cost of repairing the damage done on the night.
The real damage to the clubhouse occurred, however, in January 1936 as a result of a severe winter storm. The roof and chimneys were partially blown off; shelters on tow of the nine new holes were blown down as well; and the entrance gates were broken.
The damage was patched up for the summer of 1936 but the storm had given emphasis to something that had been on a lot of members’ minds for some time past. The clubhouse was still rather primitive, to put it politely. It had stood, more or less in its present form, since the early 1920s when it had replaced the original changing room with which the club had started. The damage, and the need to repair it, seemed a heaven sent opportunity to do a big job, the sort of job that could stand for a generation or more, rather than just another patch-up effort. Having tamed the wilderness and produced a golf course out of the most unpromising terrain, it was now time to look towards, or rather indoors, and to provide a clubhouse facility commensurate with the magnificent achievement outside.
In any development, something gets neglected. In Howth, it had been the clubhouse. The energy of members and associates alike had always been directed elsewhere: towards securing control of the club from Butson; towards ousting the old guard in 1921; towards the creation of the eighteen-hole course; and towards the prudent management of the club’s slender resources. In all this, something had to give. The something was the clubhouse. The club simply could not do everything it would have liked on the revenues available to it and so it had to establish priorities. Those listed above had always been deemed to be inviolable, sacrosanct. Everything else had to wait. The interesting point is that once the eighteen-hole course and been achieved in the late 1020s, the club seemed to become obsessed with financial caution to the exclusion of all other considerations. But sound finance is as it had been in the early days a means to an end. In the 1930s, it became an end in itself. The records of the club in that decade are full of reports concerning the inadequacies and shortcomings of the clubhouse. Small things kept going wrong, little things didn’t work and kept getting patched up. Gradually, the culture of patching things up came to overwhelm the culture of getting things done afresh.
The simplest example of this concerns the slowness with which the debt arising out of the course extension of the late 1920s was paid off. As was noted earlier, it was not finally cleared until1937, despite the fact that most of it had been disposed of by the early 1930s. The residue just hung there, a psychological drag on the club rather than a financial one, because for as long as the club was in debt there would be no more grand schemes, no more development. That sort of thing meant borrowing and how could the club borrow money when part of the existing debt was still outstanding?
This kind of thinking would have been sense itself were it not for the fact that even a cursory glance at the club’s accounts from about 1932 onward show that the debt could have been repaid in full some years before it was without any damage being done to the club’s fortunes. It was not done because its continuing presence was a useful weapon for cautious men who were growing older and running out of energy. Men like McMahon and Bourke had their best days behind them as dynamic, creative innovators. Henceforth, their energies were devoted primarily to defending what they had achieved earlier rather than to exploring new frontiers.
The 1932 electrification scheme, and the insistence that it be financed without recourse to borrowing, was a straw in the wind. It was not that the decision was in itself wrong, rather that it was indicative of a culture of parsimony that stood in sharp contrast to the culture that had dominated the club’s affairs for the first twenty years of its existence. It was the culture of parsimony that refused to discharge the balance of the debt, and that rejected all schemes for further large-scale capital investment, and that kept the clubhouse as it was: a thing of shreds and patches, mostly patches.
The storm of January 1936 blew all that away, along with the roof and chimneys. A patch up job was no longer acceptable except as a temporary expedient; by the autumn it was clear to everyone that a substantial job would have to be done to the clubhouse, not just to repair the old building and restore it to tits former condition, but to redevelop and expand it for the future. Once this decision was taken in principle, the wheels began to roll. The club approached the Munster & Leinster Bank for a loan of $2500 but the bank refused the application on the security offered. The club then revised its expectations downwards and asked for $1500 on the security of the club premises. This also was refused, at which point the club committee began to have second thoughts about the Munster & Leinster Bank. In the meantime, a subscription list was opened for members who wished to subscribe, so that whatever monies were raised by borrowing could be augmented.
Eventually, in June 1937, the club reached an agreement for a scheme costing about $1000 much more modest than originally envisaged to be financed mainly by a loan for that sum from the Property Loan & Investment Co., repayable in eight years. The club had hoped that they could secure a repayment period of twenty years, then tried to compromise at twelve years, but had to settle for the Property Loan & Investment Co.’s original offer of eight years, very much on a take it or leave it basis.
So the club closed with the finance company on that basis and the work was put in hands. The contractor was Mr. Finn of Howth whose tender of £1292 was about $140 less than any of the other five who had been in the running for the job.
The ill feeling generated by the Munster & Leinster Bank’s refusal to extend credit to the club found expression in April 1938 when the club closed its accounts with the bank and transferred its business to the National City Bank which welcomed this new business by indicating that it was willing to make an overdraft of $200 available to the club, if required.
In the end, the total cost of the rebuilding came to almost $2000, inclusive of water supply and all professional and ancillary fees. It left Howth with a clubhouse which, although by no means a temple of luxury, was comparable with those to be found in many similarly suburban clubs around the city. A sign of the times was the instruction issued to members in August 1938 forbidding the wearing of studded golf shoes in the new bar lounge! Times were changing.
As though to celebrate the new clubhouse, the Lumsden Cup so nearly captured by Jim Middleton five years earlier cam to Howth in 1938 thanks to F.X. Kelly.
All in all, Howth Gold Club had ever reason to thank the elements for the damage they had done in the storm of January 1936. Without the damage, it seems unlikely that the stimulus required to tackle the inadequate clubhouse facilities would. Have been found, given the attitudes dominating the club in the mid 1930s. Had those attitudes persisted, or been allowed to persist, for a few more years, the club would have a very long wait for a new clubhouse. For in 1939 the Second World War broke out and caused everyone to batten down the hatches. If the clubhouse had not been built when it was, it would certainly not have been built before the late 1940s.
The war came. Ireland declared its neutrality and disappeared into a somnolent little time warp. Social life, golf included, suffered along with everything else. By November 1939, government blackout regulations caused Howth Golf Club to reduce the wattage in the dining room light bulbs. Why it was unnecessary to make a similar reduction elsewhere in the premises is unclear. Could it have been that the other bulbs were already sufficiently dim? Whether or not it was so, the dimming of the lights was an appropriate symbol for the years that lay immediately ahead.
4
THE WAR YEARS AND AFTER
The war came and the country changed. Food and fuel were rationed: social life was circumscribed; and there was, in the early years at least, a constant anxiety that our neutral status might not be enough to protect us from invasion. None the less, Ireland survived the years 1939 – 45 well. We muddled through. We were, of course, fortunate to be spared the horrors of the war but even then times were difficult.
For the golf club on Howth Hill, as for the country at large, the war years were tough. The story was, for the most part, one of annually declining membership and green fees. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the people who rally kept the club in business during the war years were the associates, who actually outnumbered the members by 1945.
The effects of the war were many and they were felt very quickly. In themselves, they were little more than minor irritations but in aggregate they amounted to substantial cramping of the club’s style. The motor mower for the greens had to be abandoned because of petrol shortages; it was replaced by a number of hand mowers. For the same reason, the club’s lorry had to have its engine converted to run on paraffin. The coal shortage forced the cub to cut back its consumption drastically.
Strangely, the 1940 season was relatively unaffected by the war. In pat, this may have been because war shortages took time to work their way through the system; in part, it may have been due to the “phoney war” which did not end until the Battle for France in May 1940 and the Battle of Britain in the summer. But by the spring of 1941 the signs were unmistakable. In April of that year, the Leinster Alliance wrote to the club to state that, in view of the difficulties then prevailing, particularly with regard to transport, they were obliged to cancel the fixture which had been scheduled for Howth. Transport problems were also blamed for the fact that the Surprise Mixed Foursomes on Easter Monday turned out a fiasco. May competitors had planned to travel out by train from Amiens Street station only to discover that the early trains had been cancelled. They eventually came on the 11.35 but by the time it had reached Sutton and they had made their way up to the club and played their morning rounds, there was no time left for them to play their afternoon rounds. Similar competitions held on the Whit and August weekends fared no better and the Surprises Mixed Foursomes duly disappeared from the club fixture list for the duration of the war.
In a sense, to suggest that the war transformed the club is false. It diminished its activity and made it more difficult for members to get to the club, but it would be wrong to imply that the war threw a vast shadow over everything. In May 1940, for example, the full force of the German blitzkrieg fell upon the helpless defences of neutral Holland and Belgium. In Britain, Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister to be replaced by Churchill. The blitzkrieg smashed through the supposedly impregnable French defences, bringing Hitler to the English Channel and Mussolini into the war.
Meanwhile, what was going on in Howth Golf Club? Repairs to the clubhouse roof and to the sewer pipes were in hands; the septic tank was being overhauled; a member wrote to the committee concerning a dispute over his subscription; a painting showing a view of Howth harbour was presented to the club by another member; teams were selected for the Junior Cup and the Barton Cup; there were complaints about the caddies; final preparations were being made for the Captain’s Prize; Mrs. Keegan put in for the purchase of a fridge; new members and associates were elected; handicaps were adjusted; Val Collins, the steward, complained that a member in the bar had refused to pay for a splash of soda in his whiskey; and an application from the Dominican College Past Pupils’ Golf Society to use the course for their annual outing was approved. It was, in other words, business as usual.
Well, almost. Life went on and the game continued to be played but everything was just that bit more difficult. In June 1941, as the Third Reich was launching itself at the Soviet Union, Howth Golf Club lost $2.17.6 on a smoking concert and 12s 7d on a mixed foursomes competition, all in the one weekend. But a dance at the end of June yielded a profit of $6.5.0, so it was not all gloom. Still, the emphasis was on retrenchment. Travel difficulties, coal shortages and the severe shortages of tea and certain foodstuffs meant that social life was circumscribed, thus reducing the possibilities for fund raising. The only sensible policy in the circumstances was to pare expenditure to the bone. This raised the possibility of letting staff go and the honorary secretary, Paddy McDonald, wrote to all employees apprising them of the possibility. Happily, this never had to be acted on, but it was a sign of the times.
The fear of invasion remained until it was clear that the Germans were going to lose the war. In theory, the British could have invaded also; in practice, this was a more or less non-existent threat, given that Irish neutrality had a pronounced pro-Allied slant. None the less, official regulations were strict and were strictly enforced. The Gardai had to rebuke the club in the autumn of 1941 for not removing the sign post at the entrance. This was in contravention of the Emergency Powers (no. 62) order which instructed that all signs and names of places which could be of help either to an invader or to spies be removed for the duration of the war. Naturally, the club complied immediately.
In the effort to economise, nothing was overlooked. Score cards were used twice by erasing the old markings, thus keeping the printing bill down. In order to encourage compliance with this ruling, the committee ordered that any member in a competition who failed to toe the line would have his handicap reduced by one. Not surprisingly, this threat had a magical effect and there was 100 per cent co-operation from members.
The club ran out of new golf balls in September 1942 and had to content itself with nine dozen remoulds from Dunlops. Naturally, these were rationed? Each member got a supply proportionate to the number of old balls he had contributed to the original consignment which the club had sent to Dunlops, not all of which had been remouldable. Then there was the occasional problem of caddies stealing balls from members’ bags and attempting to sell them on to others. This was not only a sacking offence but one which quite properly, in view of the severe shortage of balls resulted in the culprit being reported to the Gardai. Not until late in the ear, February 1945, did the club feel able to dispose of its accumulated stock of remoulds to members in the knowledge that it had a small but sufficient reserve of good balls for Jack ‘Neill and the Barton Cup team. Even then, it was another year or nine months after VE Day before a free flow of new balls was once more available to members at large.
In the autumn of 1942, all that lay in the future. Montgomery and Rommel were squaring up to each other in the western desert and deep in the heart of Russia, the exhausted forces of the Third Reich were collapsing at Stalingrad. The war was turning at last against the Axis powers. But it was still lean times in Emergency Ireland. There was much anxiety over the misuse of six roller towels which the club had purchased. Towels were hard to come by during the Emergency, like everything else, and Paddy McDonald was pleased to have secured these ones. He was less pleased, as he informed the committee, to discover that “some members use the roller towels for purposes other than that for which they were intended”. Not even a world war, it seems, could improve some people’s manners.
In the entire course of the war, the single incident which created the greatest anxiety in the club was that known as the American Note. On 21st February 1944, the US ambassador to Ireland, David Gray, delivered a formal note to the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera. In it, the American government accused Ireland of applying its neutrality in a fashion that operated in favour of the Axis and against the Allies, “on whom your security and the maintenance of your national economy depend”. The specific charge was that not enough was being done to prevent the Axis diplomatic missions in Dublin and in particular the German legation from acting as bases for espionage. It asked for the immediate removal of the German and Japanese diplomatic representatives from Ireland. The accusations were preposterous indeed, they were the very opposite of the truth and de Valera rejected the Note out of hand. The whole thing had been dreamed up by Gray, one of the most eccentric and hysterical ambassadors ever sent abroad by any country. But its peremptory rejection by de Valera raised the possibility of economic sanctions against Ireland, which was the source of the club’s anxiety. Typically, it was Michael McMahon who anticipated the danger and attempted to make provision for it. He realized that further restrictions on motor fuel, for example, would so affect the club’s potential to generate revenue at a time when overheads were constant having already been cut to the bone that the only way out would be to apply for a bank overdraft. Experience had taught him that that meant guarantors and he took care to secure the agreement of five members who were willing to commit themselves for $100 each. Happily, the crisis evaporated mainly thanks to the cool good sense of Sir John Maffey, the British representative in Dublin, who know the true state of things in Ireland and who had Churchill’s ear and the need for the overdraft never arose in reality.
And so the Emergency, with all its petty hazards and irritating restriction ground towards its end. The ESB warned the club that it was using too much electricity and threatened it with a cut-off of supply unless it stayed within its allotted quota. Subscriptions and green fees continued to fall, as they had done steadily since 1940. For the first nine months of 1944, green fees were down over 22 per cent on the corresponding period in 1943; subscriptions were down by 6.5 per cent. Bank lodgments for September and October 1944 were 16 per cent down on the same period a year earlier. And yet, thanks to the careful management of Michael McMahon, the club cut its cloth and managed. McMahon missed nothing. In September 1944, for example, he realized that while the bus service out of town to the Hill of Howth was excellent, the service into town was poor because it did not meet the trains to Amiens Street station. This discouraged members from coming to the club and therefore depressed revenue. So McMahon made it his business to see the district superintendent at Amiens Street with a view to having a number of busses down the hill timed to meet the trains. And it was done. Thanks to this and other such initiatives, there was a small excess of income over expenditure in the accounts for 1944, as there was for every year of the war. This was a remarkable achievement. Howth Golf Club hot through the Emergency in one piece, financially stable and ready for the post-war challenges. It had done so, not just because of McMahon’s prudence, but also because of the increasing role of the ladies in the social life of the club. As we saw earlier, they came to outnumber the men but they also made their numbers felt. A social sub-committee, comprising both men and women, had been formed in 1943, and had proved much more effective at running profitable social functions than the men had on their own.
Without these efforts, the essential maintenance and development of the clubhouse and course could not have been kept up. In early 1945, the last major job on the course, prior to its total redesign in the early 1960s, took place. Hillocks were leveled and hollows were filled in front of the 2nd green. A shallow bunker on the 3rd fairway was filled in. A fence hazard in front of the 4th green was replaced by the making of a depression about ten yards further back from the front of the green. On the 5th, ridges on the right-hand side and across the fairway were leveled, a greenside bunker was filled in and some small rocks were removed form the fairway. There was also rock on the 6th fairway, just about on a driving length; it went as well. Drains on either side of the 6th green were filled in. The 12th green was completely remade. And so on.
It is important to stress work like this in order to illustrate that the club did not just stand still during the war. It managed to pay its way in the world while still attending to essential developments. There were no frills, to be sure, but nothing really fundamental was neglected.
The club that emerged from the war years had changed in certain externals but was still the same basic entity. It was a solid, suburban club, ideal for family golf. The hilly nature of the terrain, together with its relative lack of length, meant that it could never be as thorough a test of golf as Portmarnock or Royal Dublin. Consequently, it could never hope to attract the prestige and cachet attaching to such clubs. It was then, as it still is, essentially a neighbourhood club and therein lay its attraction. It was an open, friendly club, democratic and unsnobbish. Of course, social behaviour then was generally a great deal more formal that it is now. But even allowing for the changes in standards since the ‘60s, the main memories of more senior members as they recall the ‘40s is the great sense of community that existed in the club. Indeed, when the club embarked on a major increase in its membership in the early 1960s in order to finance an ambitious programme of expansion, some members resigned in protest and took themselves off to other clubs, on the grounds that the old, cosy Howth spirit was being destroyed. That spirit was epitomized by the social evenings. These are remembered by everyone with particular affection. They were, simply, great fun and reflected a club in which everyone know everyone else, in which cliques were more or less non-existent and in which the watchword was co-operation. Nowhere was this more true than in the relations between members and associates, which were a model of their kind. Everyone pitched in, did their bit and made things happen. The ladies frequently helped the staff with catering duties, in order to obviate the need to employ extra hands. As late as the early 1960s, when the present double-loop course was being laid out, members can recall themselves down on hands and knees removing stones from fairways following rock blasting.
That sense of friendly co-operation, which conveyed itself to visitors, made Howth a popular venue for society outings. No doubt, the views from the course which entranced everyone helped as well. There were days, however, when the weather could be so bad as to make play almost impossible. An Irish Times correspondent, reporting on a round he had played in Howth in 1935, noted that: : “It was a vile day when I played round, but so interesting was the golf as one went form one hole to another that I persevered to the end,
not wisely but simply enamoured of the place.”
Ten years later, just after the end of the war, another Irish Times man played in Howth. His name was Patrick Campbell. That was a name that became very famous in later years, both for its owner’s famous stammering wit on television and for his brilliant humorous writing in the Sunday Times and elsewhere. But in 1945 he was known, if he was known at all, as the son and heir of Lord Glenavy and as Quindnunc in the Irish Times. He wrote to the club for “An Irishman’s Diary”.
Under the heading “Quidnunc Fourball”, the club records for 7th December 1945 contain this unadorned entry: “The captain stated that the vice-captain, Mr. M. S. Corcoran, and himself had formed a fourball with Quidnunc that afternoon but, owing to foggy and somewhat wet conditions, had been able to play only eleven holes. “ Campbell’s account is rather more elaborate, for it is evident that he had roughly the same weather as his anonymous colleague ten years earlier.
“I played eleven holes without ever seeing the course at all. A grey cloud sat down upon the hill, a wet grey cloud that blotted out everything save the ground at our feet. But Dan Bridgemean and I set out with the captain, Sidney Bradshaw, and his partner, Michael Corcoran, and we did our best. We drove off into the wet, grey cloud, and twenty minutes later I found my drive sitting on the top of a gorse bush, perhaps fifty yards off the course. The other three had long since disappeared. I lost my caddy. He lost my bag. Out of the fog loomed Michael McMahon, Howth’s honorary treasurer for the last twenty-six years. We tried to fix some kind of compass bearing. We shouted into the fog and, at last, the other three appeared. It took another minute or two to round up the caddies and we tried the next hole.
“Two and a half hours later we gave up cancelling all bets. At the ninth hole Corcoran and I found we were playing in a different direction to Bridgeman and Bradshaw. We passed them on the tenth fairway, thinking they were another match. At one short hole Bridgeman had a two. He was assisted in this by being unable to see the green for his second shot.
“When we gave up at the eleventh Corcoran was still looking for two shots which he had played from about twenty yards away. The caddy did not see one of them at all, and thought the other was out of bounds. The three of us plodded off into the fog leaving him to it. When we reached the clubhouse we found him already changing his clothes.”
All this was entertaining and witty, but it offered the reader a rather partial view of the club. It was, of course, unfortunate that Campbell should have chosen such a foul day on which to play the course but what did he really expect two weeks before Christmas? A coastal, hillside course is always likely to be at its least appealing in December. The piece, which was one of a series of articles which the golf-mad Campbell wrote for “An Irishman’s Diary” on Dublin golf clubs, would have been better and fairer had it been done at a more appropriate time of the year.
What Campbell’s article did not, could not convey was the sense of a club which had survived the war in good order thanks to the resilience, loyalty and dedication of its members and associates alike. It was not wealthy, but it was financially sound. Even by 1943, many of the teething problems which had attended social functions and other fund=raising efforts earlier in the war had been overcome. The war caused the club to pull together. Howth had a vigorous and lively social life during the war years. It is remembered by older members not as a time when little happened although superficially it might appear so but as the crucial period in the development of the modern club, precisely because it was during the war that everyone had to do their bit in order to keep things on an even keel. In the process, there was much fun and enjoyment. Competitions, dinners, dances, social evenings, sweepstakes: all yielded priceless revenue to the club and endless enjoyment to members.
Yet how few were the members in number. In 1943, numbers of full members had fallen to 125, as against 128 full associates. Unlike the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the total annual expenditure of the club was covered by the annual subscriptions, there was a serious shortfall in this regard during the war. In 1943, expenditure was $1962.14.10. Subscriptions one from a member, one from an associate. (Interestingly, there had only been one previous such defaulter among the members and none among the associates since 1920.) Green fees were less that $150 and falling every year. The crucial element in bridging the gap was, of course, the bar which yielded $611. Even that left a small deficit, which was transformed into a surplus of almost $400 largely by the revenue which accrued from social functions. Without the success of these events, the club could neither have paid its way in the world nor have been the hugely enjoyable place which it actually was.
In short, it made sense to have fun. During the war years, subscriptions fell by $195 and green fees by $168 significant figures in a club where “ordinary” revenue was less than $2000 while wages alone rose by $65. But the club survived, and did so handsomely at a time of maximum difficulty. There can be no higher tribute to the wonderful club spirit of those years.
Once the war ended, there was much to be done. Everyday things which had been in short supply for six years gradually became available again. After six years of mending and making do, the club along with everyone else wanted to replace things that had been frayed and battered over the years. Everything from table linen to towels to liquid soap to metal toilet roll holders to chairs and tables were needed. A radio was purchased, as was a clock although these two items were not bought in the first flush of peace: the ever watchful McMahon waited until priced dropped a bit! Water tanks were cleaned. The clubhouse veranda was first repaired and then rebuilt. Four prints of Paul Henry paintings were bought. White coats were provided for bar staff as the material once again because available. The bar was once again stocked properly with a full range of tobaccos, probably the single most gratifying development of all. In short, everything that needed doing in the way of repairs and maintenance was seen to in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Most important of all was the course itself. Paddy Melia and Paddy Bradley [ch. Forename] drew up an ambitious plan for the radical overhaul of the course. It would have involved the wholesale abolition of the 6th hole and the existing 18th fairway, the lengthening of the 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th, and the acquisition of extra land in order to lay out new holes. The intention was to reduce the number of blind holes, to eliminate excessive climbing, to minimize the danger of lost balls, and to provide at least two long holes such as were not present on the exiting course. The committee baulked at such a radical plan, not least because there were insuperable practical problems connected with the purchase of the additional land required. In the first place, it was not for sale. In the second place, even if it had been, the price would most likely have been out of the club’s reach.
So while the Melia-Bradley plan was not acceptable, this did not mean that nothing was done. Nor did it mean that there was no support for the objectives that lay behind the plan; on the contrary. Fortunately, help was a t hand. The greens’ sub-committee also reported at the same time, giving their recommendations for course improvements. These recommendations were accepted in full and acted upon. They included immediate attention to the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th and a13the holes, as well as general improvement s to all tees and the removal of surface rock and stone from fairways, this last problem a seemingly perennial one. The sub-committee concentrated on one question in particular, which their report described in the following terms:
“Owing to the configuration of the ground, eh closeness of the underlying rock to the surface, erosion over long periods and other causes, portions of some of our fairways have only a thin skin of peaty, heather-covered soil which, if left untreated, will never grow a satisfactory crop of grass and thus provide a good lie for play through the green. The only ways by which these areas may be brought to a state comparable to that of other fairways are by sodding and dressing with compost. As the amount of sodding material within the boundaries of the course is rather limited, we think that the club should adopt a policy of dressing with compost and pursue that policy with vigour and regularity until the desired results are attained.”
They went on to point out that the materials for making compost were to hand within the course boundaries and that the application of compost would not only be beneficial to the fairways but also to the tees, which “because of the undulating character of our course are mostly of a built-up nature and somewhat restricted in area s compared with tees on more favourably situated courses”.
All this work was put in hands in the spring of 1946 and resulted in significant and appreciable improvements over the following seasons. In addition, it was clear that other and further improvements would be urgently required in coming years. New machinery would be needed for course maintenance. A new entrance road was badly needed and could not be postponed for long more. But like everything worthwhile in life, all this would mean money, and it gradually dawned on the committee that the single largest source of the club’s revenue, the annual subscriptions, had remained unchanged since 1928. The committee, after much discussion , proposed an increase and called a special general meeting in the clubhouse on 15th February 1947 in order to determine the general views of members prior to the annual general meeting which was due a the end of march. The February meeting drew an attendance of only twenty-seven members but it endorsed the committee’s proposal, to increase the subscription for full members from $4.4.0 to0 $5.5.0, with only one dissenter. The process was not entirely painless the associates were particularly unhappy with a corresponding increase in their subscription and for a few weeks there was quite an amount of confusion. However, the agm defeated a motion which would have had the effect of reducing the amount of the ladies’ increase, and therefore endorsed the decision of the previous month. More importantly, it had broken a tradition of almost twenty years and introduced the principle that if members wanted facilities of a modern standard, they would have to be prepared to pay for them. In contrast to the war years, the late ‘40s saw a significant and steady increase in subscription revenue every year. Not until 1954 was there a slight dip compared with the preceding year but even at that the total take was almost double what it had been ten years earlier.
The increase in subscription revenue was less in 1947 itself than the original percentage rise might have indicated, which suggests that there were some resignations. Certainly, the wartime preponderance of associates to members continued: while the limit for associates was re-fixed at the old pre-war limit of 150 in April 1946, the total number of full members stood at only 121 as late as November 1947.
One of the most gratifying post-war developments for all golfers was the resumption of professional tournament play and in September 1945 the club gave Jack O’Neill an extra week’s paid leave so that he could travel to St Andrew’s to compete in the Daily Mail Tournament. As well as being a welcome return to peacetime conditions, it also marked Jack O’Neill’s passage from being simply a professional in the club to being something approaching a well-loved institution. He had had one or tow minor difficulties with the committee before the war; now all the sweetness and light. True, his terms of employment changed from time to time, depending on whether or not the club granted him the sole right to sell golf balls, but there was never the slightest suggestion of friction. In 1947, for instance, he was relieved of the duty of supervising the outdoor staff so that he could concentrate solely on his professional work but there was no question of any reduction in remuneration .
Jack O’Neill was by this time over twenty years in the club and was to be there for more than another twenty. He was a man of exceptionally punctual habits: you could set your watch by him in the mornings as he made his way across the hill and up Thormamby Road on his way to work for a 9 o’clock start. As a golfer, he was a fine iron player who knew how to manouevre the ball around the course, but he was a bad putter. This alone was enough to ensure that he would never have made a successful tournament pro, on the same basis of Sam Snead’s famous dictum that “you drive for show but you putt for dough.” His eyesight was indifferent and he wore bifocal spectacles, which probably accounted for his troubles on the greens. He was a reserved man, not given to too many words, but like many another quiet man he enjoyed the company of more exuberant characters than himself. He shared a liking for horse racing with Cecil Lee and the pair of them used to go to the races together. On the golf course, he invariably wore a cap, and the shadow thrown by the peak ensured that the always had a “two-tone” face in the summer.
In one way, Jac, O’Neill was paid the finest tribute of all in 1957 when, in the run up to the annual general meeting of that year, some members suggested to Jim Middleton and Michael McMahon that a special presentation should be made to him in view of his long years of service as Howth professional. The matter was duly referred to the committee but the interesting point is that no one not even the longest serving member could recall with accuracy how long Jack O’Neill had been in the club. He had become part of the furniture.
The 1950s seem, in retrospect, to be something of a calm before the storm of change hat swept the club in the following decade. None the less, it was a period of steady if unspectacular progress. The club’s finances gradually recovered after the difficulties of the war years. By the early ‘50s, the balance sheet had been restored to its pre-war state of health, full membership was up to 165and associates stood at 143. By 1952 the number of members had already climbed past 180; the following year it was 194, although the number of associates had fallen back slightly to 137. The club survived a sudden spate of resignations in 1954 when 31 members and 30 associates departed the ladies’numbers took a few years to build up again, but on the men’s side, the recovery was immediate. By 1956 the full membership reached 200 for the first time, although fluctuation in other categories ensured that the membership of the club remained fairly constant at about 380 throughout the decade.
By the start of the ‘50s one measure of the passing of an old order had been the decision to dispense with horses for course maintenance purposes; the two horses were replaced by a single 15-horse-power tractor which not only did the work more efficiently but also saved the club about $70 a year in running costs.
Paddy Melia became honorary secretary in 1951 before handing over to Jim Middleton five years later. For all of the 1940s, the honorary secretary had been Paddy O’Hanlon, who had thus borne the burden of the tough years on his shoulders as no one else not even Michael McMahon had done. The honorary secretary’s job is probably the most taxing and most time-consuming one in any club and Howth owed a great deal to Paddy O’Hanlon for his selfless service over eleven difficult sessions.
Val Collins, the long-serving steward, died in 1951 and was replaced for a while by T. V. Devin. An even more significant death occurred in the following year when the caterer of many years’ standing, Mrs. Keegan, passed to her eternal reward. This meant that the main burden of the catering fell on the shoulders of Nellie Ryan and Mary in the following years. They remained with the club for many years and maintained the fine traditions which Mrs. Keegan had first established so many years previously. Paddy Keenan took over as secretary-steward in 1954, thus beginning a long association with the club. A Mr. and Mrs. Myles took over the catering in the same year, but the appointment was not judged to be satisfactory by either party and three years later, the Myleses resigned.
A notable feature of Howth in the years following the war was the presence of a number of Jewish members at a time when, to the shame of those concerned, there was still a prejudice against Jews in some clubs, most of Howth’s Jewish members cam from the southside, a significant fact in itself, and one which indicated the length of journey they had to make in order to avoid the humiliation of a black ball. The essential decency and tolerance of Howth Golf Club has seldom seen to better effect.
Joe Carr of Sutton was elected to honorary life membership in 1953 in recognition of his achievement in winning the first of his three British Amateur titles. Another famous amateur and Walker Cup player, Tom Craddock of Malahide, was appointed greenkeeper in Howth in 1955 in the early days of his career. His later achievements also resulted in his election to honorary life membership, in 1970.
Despite a severe worsening of the club’s finances in 1956, necessary building work had been put in hand that year. A new bar and lounge was opened at the end of June. This anticipated the wholesale redevelopment of the club which followed a few years later. The financial position was sufficiently serious for the club to appeal to members for assistance and two of them made the club a loan of $100 each. This money was repaid in the spring of the following year. It is indicative of how precarious the club’s finances could be, even as late as 1957, that $200 could make the difference it did. The problems would never have arisen in the first place had the members not shortsightedly refused to sanction a committee recommendation to increase the annual subscription from $6.6.0 to $7.17.6 in order to cover the costs of construction; after a heated series of meetings, a compromise of $7.7.0 with an equivalent increase for associates was agreed. Clearly, it was not enough.
The finances of the club may have had a melancholy look in 1957 but nothing could detract from Howth’s wonderful achievements on the gold course. It was the year of the three trophies. A. Weir won the McCrae Cup an open match play event for higher handicap players sponsored by Dun Laoghaire thus following in the footsteps of Don Duff who had brought it back to Howth two years earlier. The Dublin senior county hurler Paddy Donnelly bridged a gap of nineteen years by winning the Lumsden Cup, emulating F.X. Kelly’s pre-war achievement. Most important of all, Howth won the Barton Cup for the third time in their history, having been semi-finalists in 1952 and runners-up in 1955.
The first leg of the final against Foxrock was played at Howth and the home side were fortunate to escape with a lead of 3-w. The first four matches had been shared evenly when the last match came to the 18th with Callaghan and Flinn of Foxrock safely on. But Howth recovered and Foxrock three putted to take the match to the extra holes. Corcoran and O’Brien eventually pulled off a heart-stopping victory on the 20th. The return leg at Foxrock was equally unpredictable. At one point, it looked as if Foxrock were going to pull it off, for they had won the first match easily by 4 and 3; they were one up with two to play in the second; two up with three to play in the third; and all square in the fourth on the 15th. But the Howth men played the final holes much more strongly than their opponents and ran out winners on the day by three matches to one with one halved. This gave an overall victory margin of six to three with one halved. It was a memorable way to bridge a gap of twenty-eight years.
The warm glow of achievement from the1957 season was still present in the club when an era ended. In September 1958, Michael McMahon died. Of all the members of his generation, none had shaped the history of Howth Golf Club more decisively than “Old Mac”. He had been the prime mover behind the great coup of 1921 and had been honorary treasurer continuously since that date, as well as captain in 1927, 1928 and 1929. Most of all, he had been the dominant personality in the club for almost forty years, the one with the keenest and shrewdest intellect and the greatest force of will. The club bore his imprint more that that of any other man.
His death was the end of an era in more senses that one. Of course, when such a man as Michael McMahon dies, he leaves a gap which is almost impossible to fill. But there was more that that. The whole world of golf was changing and clubs like Howth were about to change with it. Within a few years of Michael McMahon’s passing, Howth Golf Club was to have a new course, a new clubhouse and a vastly expanded membership. It was on the threshold of a new world.
5
THE MODERN ERA
The whole world of golf changed, along with most other things, in the 1960s. It became vastly more popular with the general public and acquired its modern status as a major international spectator sport. This was principally due to the influence of television. It was the era of Arnold Palmer and the young Jack Nicklaus, the first modern golf superstars.
In Ireland, the stimulus for this development was the staging of the Canada Cup at Portmarnock in 1960. This was a major media and sporting event in Ireland and it helped to create a huge new public for the game in the country. The old order was changing.
Howth changed with it. In a decade, the club was transformed the club that had come to full growth in the 1920s was now born anew in a dramatic response to the needs of the modern era.
In essence, two things happened. First, the entire course was redesigned and re-laid. From the very earliest years, the difficulties presented by the location of the course its upland situation and a number of unsatisfactory features that seemed insoluble. A number of proposals for radical change had been made over the years, the most notable as mentioned earlier being those set out by paddy Melia and Paddy Bradley in the early 1950s but were rejected on account of the need to purchase extra land in order to bring them into effect.
This long- standing riddle was finally solved without any recourse to the purchase of extra land in 1959 when the vice-captain, Desmond Rea O’Kelly, proposed a wholesale re-design employing the double-loop concept for the layout of the course. It worked. The work began in 1960 and was not finished until 1962. Lorry load after lorry load of sand was brought in from Clo9ntar, pastureland soil which was not always ideally suited for the acidic conditions of Howth Head. Once again, as when Braid’s course was being laid out in the 1920’s, there was much blasting of rock required. Members showed the true Howth spirit by volunteering to clear much of the resulting mess on the course and by contributing in every other possible way to the great work. Eventually, the present course was complete, a fairer test of golf than the old one, with fewer blind holes and less strenuous uphill climbing.
Being a fairer course was important, because it helped to attract new members. Progressive improvements on the course continued throughout the 1960s abut the laying out of the double loop in the early years of the decade was the decisive moment in the history of the modern club. This great achievement was the source from which everything else flowed.
The second major development was the wholesale rebuilding of the clubhouse. The 1936 clubhouse was by now beginning to show its age. Some changes had been made in the mid 1950s. The bar had been relocated. A television room had been installed. But, just to prove that there is no pleasing everyone, the subscription increase which was proposed in order to pay for these modest improvements caused more than fifty members to leave for other clubs.
There were still unsatisfactory aspects to the clubhouse, however. There was no form of heating available other than an open fire, although the purchase of oil heaters in the late 1950s alleviated this problem. More seriously, there was no direct internal passage from the clubhouse to the ladies’ locker room. This was not a unique situation in Dublin golf clubs at the time, and Howth solved the problem temporarily by building a door into the wall of the television room (which had previously been the men’s locker room) to permit internal access for the first time.
All this was of a patch and mend nature, however. Gradually, the club grew impatient with its clubhouse and wanted to tackle the whole problem form the ground up, so to speak. In this, it merely reflected the spirit of the time in Ireland. For the first time in generations, there was a real sense of material prosperity and better times ahead in the country during the early years of the 1960s. People were thinking big, dreaming dreams that would have been impossible in the depressed Ireland of the 1950s.
Once again, as with the double loop course the practicalities were attended to by Des Rea O’Kelly who drafted various plans based on suggestions from different members. The project of building a whole new clubhouse from scratch caused no little controversy within the club and drew a significant amount of opposition form some members who regarded it as a crazy extravagance. They had been accustomed to a club which correctly thought of itself as not wealthy and which had for years kept itself going by careful management of scarce resources. To opt for a scheme which was estimated to cost $35,000 in a club whose total annual revenue in 1964 was barely $8,500 and whose operating surplus was a mere $781 seemed to them to be folly of a high order. As if to confirm their worst suspicions, the committee decided to go for the most ambitious possible plan, in order to solve the problem of accommodation in a definitive manner once and for all.
The dissenting members of the club were not the only skeptics. The banks shared their views and practically every bank in the city of Dublin refused to lend the club the money it required. The club raised some of the capital required through an ingenious subscription investment scheme, whereby members could lodge money with the club in the long term, on which the club undertook to pay a rate of deposit interest which was still less than what would have had to be paid to the banks on borrowed money. Still, this and other expedients of a similar nature could not possibly hope to finance such an ambitious programme of building. I the banks were unwilling to cough up the balance, the whole scheme would be scuppered.
It very nearly was; it was a close run thing. The National city Bank finally agreed to advance the money required. Committee members who were at the fateful meeting with the bank remember that it was attended by an American director at the bank was American owned who was perhaps more accustomed to and sympathetic to the ambitious, gung-ho vision of the Howth golfers than his more cautious Irish banking brethren. Whether this was so or not, the National City Bank came up trumps and the work went ahead to build the magnificent clubhouse that members know today. It was such a spectacular advance on what it had replaced that older members must have pinched themselves to believe that it was not a vision, that Howth Golf Club had such a spectacular and well-appointed clubhouse.
Even then, there were some who were not satisfied. One member complained because a swimming pool had not been included! Right front eh day the new clubhouse opened, there was a demand for a snooker room, which just goes to show how vaulting ambition increases people’s expectations, because such a demand in the old clubhouse would have been unthinkable.
The question remained, however: however: how was it all going to be financed? This was a very good question, not least because the final cost was a cool $55,000 or $20,000 over the original estimate! There was only one possible way, by a major expansion of membership and an increase in subscriptions. This is in fact what was done. Membership, which had hovered around 150 in the late 1950s, was over 300 a decade later. Subscription revenue in 1964, the last year of the old clubhouse, was $6,200. In the next six years it steepled: $7,800 in ’65; $9,100 in ’66; $11,765 in ’67; $12,150 in ’68; $12,500 in ’69 and $15,600 in 1970 and while the first three of those years saw the club operate on no more than a break-even basis, the next three years saw handsome operating surpluses the 1970 surplus was a very creditable $4,500, almost twice the entire subscription revenue of ten years earlier as the club’s resources expanded to absorb the high cost of debt servicing.
The opening of the new clubhouse in 1965 brought Howth Golf Club firmly into the modern age. It now had premises which could rival all but the most prestigious clubs in the country. It was a triumph for the visionaries who had the nerve to see their vision into reality, and who understood that the changes abroad in the wider world of golf and in Irish society provided them with the means to realize their dream.
Since the 1960s, the demand for membership of all golf clubs n the Greater Dublin area has been insatiable. In realizing that the new clubhouse could be financed by an expanded membership paying higher subscriptions, the men of Howth caught the rising tide and were able to thumb their noses at the begrudgers. Thus it as that when the golden jubilee was celebrated in 1966, it was done in a style befitting a self-confident, fully renewed club. Both on the course and indoors, Howth Golf Club had been transformed in a few years. It was a revolution as great as anything achieved by the founders.
The improvements continued in the 1970s and ‘80s. The locker rooms were upgraded and improved. Eventually the present men’s locker room not part of the original 1965 building was built and at long last the snooker room was added. To date, however, there is no sign of the swimming pool!
Not even the disastrous fire of 25th February 1985, which destroyed the bar, snooker room and secretary’s office, could the momentum and the clubhouse reopened restored to its former glory in June 1986,
By the late 1980s, membership had expanded to almost 500, of whom 400 were full members. There were almost 250 associates, of whom about two-thirds were full associated. The club had been transfigured in a generation. It continues to be managed on the same prudent financial basis that has stood it in such good stead over the last 100 years.
100 years is a long time, a person’s lifetime. For that long, the club has flourished on the slopes of Shielmartin. From its earliest beginnings in Butson’s day to the vigorous and expanding body of today, it has played a significant and honorable role in the life of the Howth area, and has made a valuable contribution to the development of the game of golf in Dublin.
It is significant that in this, its seventy-fifth year, Howth should have the honour of seeing one of its most distinguished members, Desmond Rea O’Kelly, assume the office of President of the great distinction and he does so in the centenary year of the GUI itself. It is the oldest national union in the world. Des Rea is a member of the championship committee of the R and A and was for fifteen years honorary secretary of the GUI. He has been both captain and honorary secretary in Howth itself, and has probably been responsible more than any other single individual for the astonishing expansion and success of Howth Golf Club in the last thirty years. If the period 1920 to ’60 was the age of Michael McMahon the period since 1960 has truly been that of Des Rea O’Kelly.
Howth Gold Club has now its centenary. It is in good hands, as it has always been. No one can tell what the future holds, but members can be sure of one thing as they play the course with its superb views or enjoy the warm good fellowship of the clubhouse: whatever it holds, it won’ be dull.
6
ACHIEVERS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Howth Gold Club has produced many outstanding performances, both from its individual members and as a club, over its seventy-five years. It is not possible to make a comprehensive list of all the great achievements of Howth players on the gold course, but this summary is an attempt at least to note the more prominent moments in three-quarters of a century of pride and excellence.
At the top of any list of achievements must come the three Barton Cup victories, already noted in previous chapters. The victories of 1927 and 1929 punctuated as they were by the runner’s up position in 1928 represented the club’s competitive coming-of-age. Howth was fortunate to have such talented and settled sides for what was then the premier inter-club competition in Leinster. Celebrated figures such as Michael McMahon, Tom Phelan, Jim Middleton, Jim Bourke, Paddy O’Hanlon and Jack Redmond played on the team in all three years and contributed to its solidity and consistency.
The 1957 team also deserves to be remembered with pride, not least of the fortitude it showed in coming from behind at crucial moments in so many of the matches. The team was: A. W. Facey (4); P.J. Donovan (6); T. A. Connolly (5); Don Duff (9); M. Cronin (6); Mervyn Reid (9); Michael Corcoran (9); Sean O’Brien (10); Colm Archer (8); and P.J. Lordan (12).
Howth has also won the Metropolitan Cup on three occasions, in 1974, 1985 and 1987. The Pierce Purcell Shield has come to Howth only once, in 1970, but the Uden Cup a competition confined to North Dublin clubs has been won on eight occasions since the first success in 1955. Indeed, Howth dominated the competition for a twenty year period, its further triumphs coming in 1957, 1958, 1959, 1965, 1968, 1972 and 1974. Sadly, the last seventeen years has not brought success in this competition.
The 1980s have been dominated by success in the McDonald and Best Cups, the former in 1985, 1987 and 1990 and the latter in 1981, 1984 and 1986. The juvenile members have also distinguished themselves, winning the Squire Ennis Cup in 1982, 1986 and 1988 and the Tile Style Trophy in 1986.
The early years of the club produced few golfers of outstanding ability, although Bill Telford was one of the more successful players in the early 1920s, winning the President’s Cup in 1921 and the Captain’s Prize in 1923 and 1926. Cecil Lee was the club’s first scratch player, although it was most unfortunate that he was not a member of Howth during the great Barton Cup years. With him in the side as he would have been it would have been an even more formidable combination.
When Cecil lee rejoined the ranks in the 1930s, he found himself in good company. He won the Captain’s Prize in 1937 but the following year it went to Des O’Sullivan, the second of the Howth scratch golfers. Des O’Sullivan suffered, as did all his contemporaries, from the effects of the war which arrested his development at a crucial time in his career, but after the war he produced one of his finest performances in the British Amateur Championship of 1949 when he defeated the great Big Bill Campbell, perhaps the most distinguished individual scalp ever got by a Howth man.
Among the more notable members during the 1940s was John Francis Jameson of the distilling family the same family, it will be recalled, which once employed Butson all those years previously who had been Irish Amateur Champion in 1903.
The third of the scratch golfers in Howth was Noel Mason who dominated the club scene from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. He won the Howth Scratch Cup in five successive years form 1962 to 1966, reached the semi-final of the Lumsden Cup in the latter year, beat Joe Carr in the Senior Cup match against Sutton in 1964, and won a variety of scratch cups and other trophies around the country. He brought great honour to Howth. His great rival was Andy Foran, who played off 2 and was a tenacious competitor. He won the club golfer of the year award in its inaugural year, 1961, and was club champion in 1974 and ’75. Sean O’Briain won the Veterans’ Prize and the President’s Cup in the same year, 1974, but neither victory can have been as sweet as his sensational defeat of Noel Mason in the Club Championship of 19XX when, playing off 7, he beat the great man on the 18th having birdied five of the last six holes!
No players have dominated club competition in the 1980s as Noel Mason and Andy Foran did in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but the club’s standard remains high. There is an encouraging number of younger members and one must hope that from their number will emerge the next scratch golfer from Howth.
Howth Golf Club Competitions and Trophies
Click below to see all our cups and shields
Captains Drive In
The Captains Drive-In is held on the first Saturday in January each year. The Drive-In is preceded be a 9 Hole team competition, using the front and back nine.
Mixed foresomes strokes competition. Normally played April/May time. Player must be a 7-day member to play in this competition.
This trophy was introduced in honour of Phillie McHenry. It was presented in 1974 by the associates in his memory. Phillie was a very popular member known for being really encouraging and generous with his time and giving golf tips. He was the Club Captain in 1950. Phille died in 1974. The men approached the family and the Phillie McHenry Trophy was set up. The trophy was first played for in 1975?
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This is a mixed foursomes match play. It is played throughout the summer with the final played in September. Entries open for this competition in early March and the draw is usually posted on the notice board by mid-April. It is played throughout the Summer with fixed ‘play by dates’ for each round and the final is played in September in conjunction with the other Club match-play events. Entry is confined to full/7 day members.
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The Ladies Matchplay Fourball Trophy
This trophy was introduced in 2010. There are 3 different competitions that player needs to put their name down for – one singles/one foursomes/one 4 ball. Player must be a 7 day member to play. Players must find a partner for the fourball and foresomes and enter names on timesheet. Draws take place and the competition is played throughout the summer with the final in September. It is very important to make contact and match arrangements with opponents as soon as possible to ensure matches get played.
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The Ivy Hadden Trophy
After Ivy Hadden died in 1977 her family approached the club to put up a cup in her memory. It was presented in 1978. It was first played for in 1979. Ivy was a PE teacher in Sutton Park School, she was a 1 handicap golf player along with being a great hockey and squash player. She won the midland golf championships Mullingar in the mid ‘70s. Ivy played in some of the mens competitions, off the men’s tee too.
The Leewell Cup
This is a Singles Matchplay. It was played for from 1927 until 2009 when it was discontinued?
The John McGuirk Trophy (Now called the Foursomes Matchplay Cup)
This was a ladies foursomes matchplay competition, played throughout the summer. The trophy was presented by John McGuirk in 1988 (until 2016) at the instigation of the then Lady Captain, Ann Coleman. The money raised through the entry fees was doubled by John McGuirk? and donated to the SIMON community. The prizes presented were donated by John McGuirk and were very generous.
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The Sheila Steele Trophy
This is a stableford competition. Sheila was born in 1925 in Greenore, where she started her golf, she died in 2012. She had a handicap of 6. She was the Lady Captain in 1958.
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The Husband and Wife Cup
When was it introduced, who introduced it, what format etc
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Golfer of the year – qualifying competition?
This goes back to the ‘70’s? The first trophy was lost so a replacement one was introduced. Louis Somerville started this competition. The format of points changed in 2018.
This is a strokes competition played over 3 months. To qualify the player must have played in 4 ‘medal’ competitions. The best 3 scores are submitted. Every year silver and bronze medals are presented by the ILGU at the AGM
The Silver Medal is for 1-20 handicap player
The Bronze Medal is for 21-36 handicap player (will this change with extended handicaps?)
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The Hi-Lo Trophy
This is a 9 hole matchplay competition. It commenced in September 2011. It was instigated by Breda Mullaly in 2011 and discontinued in 2015/6.
Presidents Cup
This cup was inaugurated in the Club Presidents honour was played for by the
men up to 2014. From 2015, with the change to an Executive President, the event
is now hosted by the Club President and is played for by both the ladies and the
men, with a winner from each gender. This is a stableford competition over 18
holes and an integrated timesheet operates on the day. The prizes are presented
at the prize giving dinner on the night of the competition This is a stableford competition. It was first presented in 1920. Lieutenant Com Jc Gainsford St Laurance 1920 RNDL. It was first played for in 1920. The ladies first played for it in 2015.
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Eileen Monahan Trophy
This is a fourball one day event. Eileen was the Lady Captain in 1976. Her husband was the Mens Captain in 1974. Eileen was the team captain in the 1980’s of the townsend foursomes which was won by the Howth team 7 times! Eileen’s family approached the ladies committee to introduce the plaque in her memory. The competition is a fourball as this was Eileen’s favourite golf format. The competition is played in Spring time. (insert photos)
The Ladies Scratch Cup
This is a singles matchplay competition. There are no shots given to anyone but anyone can play. This cup was introduced in 2012 by Aveen Magner. It is played for over the summer. Player puts their name down and a draw is held.
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The Ladies Cup
This is a singles matchplay competition. It is played over the summer and any handicap can play, full handicap difference given. It was introduced in 1922, presented by Ms A Corrigan who was Ladies Captain in 1921, 1922 and 1923.
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The Club Cup Trophy
This is a strokes medal competition. This was won by Alice Perry in 1950. This may have been the first year of the cup. Then until 1982 the men presented the cup (a silver cup) to the lady associates. In 1983 Alice Perry presented her original cup to the club as a perpetual trophy with a generous prize, still presented by the mens committee.
ILGU Silver and Bronze Medal
There are about 10 medal competitions over the summer. If a player wins one they qualify to play for the club cup final. If a player plays 4 they could qualify for the ILGU silver (Handicap up to 20) or bronze (21-36) medals. Medal qualifiers go forward to play in the Club Cup Final, this is normally played early September, on a Sunday.
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Silver Spoon
Played in Strokes
Des Rea O’Kelly Trophy – Stableford?
This trophy was introduced in 2013, replacing the Park Motors Trophy, in
honour of Des Rea O’Kelly, who was Captain of Howth Golf Club in 1960 and
1961 and was centenary President of the Golfing Union of Ireland in 1991. He
also designed the clubhouse and was the architect for the development of Liberty
Hall.
This competition is for ladies and men, with a ladies and men’s winner and
continued the integrated timesheet format of its predecessor.
Michael Hannigan Shield – Stableford
This is a singles stableford competition usually played during September. Michael was the Mens Captain in 1996 and died in office. The Club presented this trophy in his honour. This is an integrated competition with men and lady winners. The names are placed on the Shield
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Holmpatrick Cup
St Fintans Cup
GUI Pierce Purcell Championship
Seniors
Flo Noonan
Monthly Medal Strokes
Club Championship
Winter League (Friday/Sunday)
Winter Competition 12 Hole (non qualifying)
Wednesday competition
Golfer of the year qualifying competition?
This is strokes competition. To qualify the player must have played in 4 strokes competitions over 3 months. The best 3 scores are sent in.
Silver Spoon –
Every year silver and bronze medals are presented by the ILGU at the AGM.
The Silver Medal is for 1-20 handicap player
The Bronze Medal is for 21-36 handicap players
Players who win the silver and bronze medals are entered into a competition at a designated club to play in an interclub All Ireland Competition.
PGA Tankard
This is a one day 18 Hole Stableford (integrated) competition. There is a lady winner and a mens winner who along with our Pro will represent Howth in a match at a designated venue.
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Michael Hannigan Shield – Stableford
This is a singles stableford competition usually played during September.
Michael was the Men’s Captain in 1996 but died prematurely in office. The Club
presented this trophy in his honour. The competition is run with an integrated
timesheet and there is a ladies and men’s winner each year.
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Men’s Trophies & Competitions
Captain’s Prize
This is regarded as the premier competition of the year. It is usually held on the
last two Saturdays of June each year and is a cumulative stableford competition
over the two days. However, the Captain of the day decides the format and may
change the format to a strokes event and he may also introduce qualifying days
with a specified number qualifying for the final day.
Monthly Medals
There are seven monthly medals, April to October inclusive. The format is
strokes for 4 medals (April, May, July & September) and stableford for the other
three. All the medal competitions are played off the white tees and are Golfer of
the Year qualifying.
Club Championships
(i) Ben Edar Cup– Club Championship
The club championship and is played over 36 holes and is a gross
(i.e. no handicaps) strokes event over 36 holes on consecutive
days. It is usually held on the second week-end of August each
year.
(ii) Tom Joyce Trophy – Intermediate Championship
This is held in conjunction with the Club Championship and is open
to members with a handicap of 13 to 17 inclusive. It is a gross
strokes competition over 36 holes.
(iii) Paul Noonan Trophy – Junior Championship
This is held in conjunction with the Club Championship and is open
to members with a handicap of 18 or more. It is a gross strokes
competition over 36 holes.
PGA Tankard
This is an 18-hole singles stableford competition and the winner gets the PGA
Tankard and represents the club, along with the club professional and the ladies
representative, at the PGA regional qualifier competition in September/October.
The proceeds from the entry fees to the competition at each club go to the PGA
benevolent fund.
St. Fintan’s Cup
This is a 36 hole singles stableford event held in April each year with both days
golfer of the year qualifying.
Michael McMahon Trophy
Michael McMahan, who joined Howth Golf Club on 16th January 1920, was elected Honorary Treasurer on 22 January 1921. He remained treasurer for 37 years until the AGM in 1958.
McMahon was born in London to a Clare father and served as a Civil Servant in
the Ministry of Munitions during the Great War. He was interested in Irish
Nationalism and was a member of the United Irish League and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians. At the end of the war he sought and was granted a transfer from
London to Dublin. In Dublin he joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians Civil
Service Lodge (Civil Service Division No. 1000).
McMahon’s election as Treasurer, facilitated by the influx of new members with
affiliation to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, marked the end of the old guard of
founding members, with the resignation of the Secretary, James Spencer and the
Captain, P J Hussey and the departure from the club of many of the founding
members.
McMahons first year in office was a resounding success as he transformed a debit
balance of £500 on the clubs account into a credit balance of £150, while
showing an operating profit for that first year of £863 -15s – 6d.
As well as being Treasurer for 37 years he was also Captain for three years, 1927,
1928 & 1929 and he was one of the dominant figures in the club up to 1958.
NOTE The Michael McMahon trophy is – who and when was it presented – ask Paddy
Keenan.
Match-play Events
Tom Phelan Trophy
This trophy is presented to the winner of the Men’s club singles match play
competition. The qualifying competition for entry to the match play is held in
April and the top 63 players plus the holder from the previous year, who is
seeded number one and the other 63 players are seeded in the order they
finished in the qualifier, number 2 to number 64. The qualifying competition is a
Golfer of the Year qualifying competition.
Tom Phelan was a leading light in the club in the 1920’s and was part of the new
generation of members who ousted the founding members in 1921. During his
time on the executive committee, the club embarked on the extension of the club
to 18 holes. He was Captain in 1926 and as a mark of the esteem in which he was
held, he was again elected Captain in the Jubilee year of 1966. He also played on
all the Barton Cup teams that reached the finals in 1927, 1928 & 1929, winning in 1927 and 1929.
James Middleton Trophy
This trophy is presented to the winners of the men’s fourball match-play
competition. The qualifying event (or entries open for this competition in early
March) is usually held in April and the top 31 qualifiers plus the holders from the
previous year are drawn to play in the match-play over the Summer. The final is
played in September.
James Middleton, from Co. Waterford, joined Howth Golf Club in the early 1920’s,
was a distinguished member of the club, serving as Joint Hon. Secretary from
1926 to 1930 and was Captain in 1931. He played on all three sides from Howth
to reach the Barton Cup final in the years 1927,1928 & 1929, winning in 1927 &
1929 and he reached the final of the Lumsden Cup (named after the founder of
Royal Dublin) in Clontarf in 1933, losing on the last hole to Roger Greene, an
international player, from Clontarf.
He was a Civil Servant by profession and was a famously dapper man and was
known as Uncle Jim in the club. He died in 1976 at the age of 86.
Sid Bradshaw Shield
The Paddy McDonald Trophy – Golfer of the Year (GOY)
Paddy McDonald was Captain in 1939 and the trophy for Golfer of the Year is
named in his honour. The Golfer of the year is determined on a points basis
accumulated over 20 Golfer of the Year qualifying competitions during the
months of April to October inclusive. GOY competitions are denoted by the ‘§’ in
the fixtures diary. All the main competitions are GOY qualifying, such as the
Captains prize, all the medals, Presidents Cup etc. Points are allocated according
to a table setout in the Men’s Conditions of Competitions booklet. The golfer with the greatest number of points derived from his best 12 or fewer results from all Golfer of the Year qualifying competitions 1 will be awarded the Paddy McDonald Trophy. Each 18 holes of a 36 holes competition, where designated as golfer of the year qualifying, will be classed as a separate competition for the calculation of points for golfer of the year. All GOY competitions are played from the white tees.
Golfer of the Year Points Table
POSITION* | POINTS | POSITION | POINTS | POSITION | POINTS |
1st | 350 | 11th | 160 | 21st | 65 |
2nd | 325 | 12th | 150 | 22nd | 60 |
3rd | 300 | 13th | 140 | 23rd | 55 |
4th | 275 | 14th | 130 | 24th | 50 |
5th | 250 | 15th | 120 | 25th | 45 |
6th | 225 | 16th | 110 | 26th | 40 |
7th | 200 | 17th | 100 | 27th | 35 |
8th | 190 | 18th | 90 | 28th | 30 |
9th | 180 | 19th | 80 | 29th | 25 |
10th | 170 | 20th | 70 | 30th | 20 |
- * Competition Placing (based on net scores)
Other Competitions
Tom Nicoll Cup – stableford
Tom Nicoll was Captain in 1940 and the Cup is named in his honour. It is a
competition for those who have attained the age of 55 by the date of the
competition. It is played from the yellow tees.
Winter League (Friday/Sunday)Winter Competition 12 Hole (non qualifying)