Walton Heath Has Always Championed Women

It’s one of suburban London’s most beautiful areas, filled with heather and hardwoods, and marked by quiet mornings interrupted only by an avian melody or other rustles of nature. The encroachment of urban sprawl has dented some of that over the last 120 years, but not on the grounds of Walton Heath Golf Club. There, southwest of the city in Surrey and an easy trot to the ancient Roman ruins of Stain Street, a golf ball trundling into a bunker could prompt a dart from a resting hare, while a traipse through the purple flora of heathland knolls might well scare up a covey of quail.

That is no different from the environment Harry Vardon and John Henry Taylor found in 1904 when they played the inaugural round at Walton Health with the club’s head professional, James Braid. The threesome was known as The Great Triumvirate for their near-complete dominance of the game at the turn of the 20th century. Braid, a Scot from Fife, had only won the Open Championship once when he took the job at Walton Heath, but he would go on to win Europe’s biggest championship four more times, including back-to-back victories in 1905 and 1906, a feat not equaled by a European until Padraig Harrington won in 2007 and 2008.

The Great Triumvirate had played a lot of inaugural rounds on their island home, along with challenge matches around the world. But Walton Heath was different. Not only was Braid the head pro, the course had been designed by Bill Fowler, a good amateur player who was most known for being a world-class cricketer. It wasn’t until his early 20s that Fowler took up golf. He became good enough to compete in the Open several times and he represented his homeland in the England-Scotland Amateur Match three times.

While Walton Heath was his first design – his brother-in-law, Sir Cosmo Bonsor, a brewer and Conservative member of Parliament, owned the land and tasked Bill with building the course – it wasn’t Fowler’s only contribution to the game. He was the creator of what we now call the “flash bunker” where sand slopes up to the edges and can be seen from a distance as well as the sand settling in a concave bottom, much different from the flat-bottomed bunkers preferred by the likes of Old Tom Morris and C.B. Macdonald.

While not a lot of people outside the UK remember Fowler’s work, in 1922, he was asked to redesign the benign par-4 18th hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links in California. The Englishman did just that, adding 200 yards and moving the hole to the edge of the ocean, a change that made Pebble’s final hole one of the most iconic in the game.

Legendary golf writer and exceptional amateur player Bernard Darwin, the grandson of evolutionist Charles Darwin, called Fowler, “perhaps the most daring and original of all golfing architects, and gifted with an inspired eye for the possibility of a golfing country.”

Leitch won the match 2 and 1.

A year later, in 1911, Hilton would win the third of his four British Amateur titles. He would also capture the U.S. Amateur that year, becoming the only English golfer in history to win the British and U.S. Amateurs in the same year.

It would take Cecil Leitch a little longer to become a worldwide name in the game. But in 1914, she would return to Walton Heath and win the first of her two English Women’s Amateur Championships. That same summer, she won the first of four British Women’s Amateur titles, a feat made even more impressive by the five-year gap that the championship wasn’t played due to World War I. Cecil also won the Canadian Women’s Amateur and was a five-time champion of the French Women’s Amateur making her one of the most accomplished English amateurs of all time.

Walton Heath would host the English Women’s Amateur again in 1928, won by Enid Wilson. That win spurred Wilson to capture three consecutive British Women’s Amateur Championships in the 1930s.

Braid remained the pro while also becoming a renowned architect in his own right. In 1919, he opened two of his most famous designs, the King’s Course and Queen’s Course at Gleneagles in the Scottish Highlands. And in 1926, he reimagined the links at Carnoustie, creating what most experts consider one of the toughest tests in all of championship golf.

At his home club, Braid welcomed Walton Heath’s first captain in 1935, a handsome self-assured 40-year-old known locally as Prince Edward of York. Less than a year later, he would be crowned His Royal Highness King Edward VIII. To this day, Walton Heath is the only golf club to have had a reigning monarch as its captain. Alas, His Majesty fell for an American double-divorcee named Wallis Simpson, and his brother, a keen golfer but a much better tennis player, became King George VI. The new king was named Patron of Walton Heath and remained so until his death in 1952.

Braid passed away in 1950, having been the club’s only head pro for 45 years while the Duke of Windsor, which is what Edward became after abdicating, remained at Walton Heath where he enjoyed the company of Britain’s most famous prime minister and fellow club member Winston Churchill

It was only the second time the entire continent had participated in the matches. All prior incarnations had been the U.S. versus Great Britain and then for four events from 1971 through 1977, Great Britain and Ireland. But with players like Bernhard Langer and Seve Ballesteros on the horizon, the PGAs on both sides decided that a combined European team made the event a lot more competitive.

It didn’t matter in 1981. The American lineup included veterans Tom Watson, Raymond Floyd, Tom Kite, Hale Irwin, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, Jack Nicklaus and Larry Nelson plus four Ryder Cup rookies named Ben Crenshaw, Jerry Pate, Bruce Lietzke and Bill Rogers.

An all-star team from the rest of the world couldn’t have beaten that squad.

Nicklaus would later say of the club, “Of all the courses surrounding London, there are few with as much history and honor as the wonderfully pure heathland layout of Walton Heath.”

The Golden Bear loved the place and went undefeated in that Ryder Cup, his last as a competitor.

Americans won those matches 18½ to 9½, the most lopsided defeat for Europe until 2021 at the hands of the most accomplished Ryder Cup team ever assembled with 283 PGA Tour victories and 48 major championship titles between them.

Just like that, Walton Heath was a part of golf history.