How Hamilton Golf and Country Club helped shape Canadian golf course architecture – SCOREGolf

It’s always exciting when the RBC Canadian Open returns to the Ancaster Links, as Hamilton Golf & Country Club’s current site was sometimes referred to in its early days.

This week, Hamilton hosts its seventh Canadian Open. It did so for the first time in 1919. The club occupies an ideal site for golf. It is perfectly rolling without the requirement of excessive hill climbing thanks to a brilliant routing by legendary British golf architect, Harry Colt (1869-1951).

Colt was a Cambridge-educated lawyer who effectively created the modern-day profession of golf architecture shortly after the turn of the 20th century. He came to Canada for a second time in 1914 to lay out a new course for Hamilton — “up the mountain” at Ancaster. A couple years earlier, he had successfully designed a new course for Toronto Golf Club on the recommendation of Carter’s Seeds, a British company with whom Colt was affiliated at the time. Relatively unchanged, Colt’s Toronto and Hamilton courses have long been among the top 10 on SCOREGolf’s biennial list of the Top 100 courses in Canada.

When Colt first showed up in Toronto, the term “golf architect” was new. In fact, Colt was officially the secretary of Sunningdale Golf Club in the heathlands southwest of London, England, at the time. He wasn’t advertising himself globally as a golf architect. As secretary of the club, Colt made significant upgrades to a pioneering Willie Park, Jr., layout that originally opened for play in 1901. After Colt’s refinements over the following decade, what’s now known as Sunningdale – Old (the club’s New Course was built by Colt in 1923) was widely acknowledged as the best inland course in the world.

The Toronto and Hamilton clubs wanted the same. So, they effectively summoned the secretary of Sunningdale Golf Club to Canada, via Carter’s Seeds, to assist with developing their new layouts. In retrospect, this foresight set an important standard for what a golf course should and could be in Canada. Colt’s pioneering work at Toronto and Hamilton not only produced what were undoubtedly the best courses in our country at the time, it also had a significant impact on the lives of club professionals George Cumming (1879-1950), Nicol Thompson (1880-1957) and Thompson’s younger brother, Stanley (1893-1953).

Cumming (Toronto) and Thompson (Hamilton) assisted their respective clubs with finding new properties and then getting those Colt-designed courses built. Undoubtedly, they absorbed Colt’s most important thoughts on golf course design and construction throughout those processes. When the new Toronto and Hamilton courses debuted, every golfer in the province of Ontario wanted similar upgrades to their own clubs. The problem was, Colt had returned to England and wasn’t keen on coming back. He didn’t love long-distance travel and had enough to do closer to home, throughout the British Isles and continental Europe. So, the next best alternative for Canadian golf clubs was to solicit the advice of those men who assisted Colt with his work at Toronto and Hamilton.

Cumming and Thompson subsequently advertised themselves as golf course designers and builders. They got busy quick, too, designing and building courses between 1915 and 1920 from Windsor to Ottawa, Toronto to Timmins. That’s when Stanley was brought in to help.

Thompson, Cumming & Thompson, as the company was known for a few years prior to 1920, got too busy, in fact. The golf pros were given an ultimatum by their respective clubs: you’re either golf course builders or club professionals. Cumming and the elder Thompson decided to retreat to club professional work, which opened a door for young Stanley. He formed Stanley Thompson & Co. in 1920. Four years later, his course at Jasper Park Lodge in Alberta, which ranks third on SCOREGolf’s 2022 Top 100, opened. After Jasper, Stanley Thompson was Canada’s go-to golf architect for the next three decades prior to his death in 1953.

Along with Colt’s Toronto and Hamilton layouts, Thompson’s best courses at Jasper and Banff in Alberta; Toronto’s St. George’s; Capilano in West Vancouver; and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia’s Highlands Links remain the benchmark in Canadian golf architecture. The link to Colt is fascinating.

Hamilton last hosted the RBC Canadian Open in 2019, when Rory McIlroy went 22 under to take the winner’s cheque. The course has since been renovated by contemporary British golf architect, Martin Ebert. Strategic tree removal has restored gorgeous long views across the property and back toward the sentinel clubhouse from the farthest reaches of the course. Architecturally, Ebert cranked up the intensity on and around the greens. He’s fiddled with some bunker locations and styling, too. But the brilliance of the Ancaster Links remains mostly attributable to Colt’s elegant routing over ideal ground.

Along with the eventual RBC Canadian Open champion, Colt’s pioneering layout at Ancaster should be celebrated by Canadian golfers this week.