Pitchmarks #14 - 24th September 2023

On the wonders of The Addington

The Wodehouse Bunker, The Addington Golf Club. Courtesy of Sam WIlliams

“I am the Suggestion Book”
J.F. Abercromby, when asked where the Suggestion Book was kept.

Can it really be two decades since I last approached the brow of Shirley Church Road, peering through the dappled light that streams through this oak and birch corridor for some sign of an entrance? Twenty whole years since I pulled into the car park to find only one other vehicle on site, that of the Secretary, who would shortly lock his door and leave me alone in my own private playground?

Time passes without relent and yet I retain a few fragments of memory from the last visit here. There was an air of neglect about the place; a hole in the tatty practice net that let my first warm-up ball float across the second fairway and into the ubiquitous undergrowth. On certain holes, it felt like walking a tightrope, the slightest deviation from centreline doomed by the slowly encroaching Rhododendrons and a bottomless layer of deciduous leaves.

But somewhere in that strange visit, the romance of The Addington was still present, the bones of a truly great golf course still visible despite all of that. Certain holes felt like the work of genius; bold, uncompromising. And all these years and courses and milestones later, my journey there is from a very different point in life, yet the same intoxication returns as I pull my sticks from the car and walk into the clubhouse.

On the way, winding through empty lanes to avoid the rush hour hell of the London Orbital, I listen to some of Bernard Darwin’s work read aloud, and try to absorb his enthusiasm, his sense of adventure - for at The Addington, golf still has such a thrill about it. Over coffee, I can’t sit still - keen to soak up the snippets of history on the walls of the bar, which had been locked up last time around.

There are stories everywhere of this place; a unique heritage filled with fascinating drama from 1913 onwards. The slow opening, with work all but ceased by the Great War; the creation and compulsory destruction of The New Course. The fire in ‘52; the Moira Fabes years; the beginnings of The Hewitt, and perhaps even the first notion of what would one day become the Ryder Cup. And recollections of boozy Sunday afternoons in the pool, after lavish lunches.

And then there’s the people. Aber, of course, who was at the helm from inception until his death in 1935. Darwin, Cyril Tolley, P.G. Wodehouse. Henry Longhurst, the Benkas, Ronnie Corbett. There is a book or two here, waiting to be written as if also obscured by the undergrowth, but this latest twist in The Addington’s narrative - the restoration of a staggering achievement - is not yet complete and so neither can the written record be.

J.F. Abercromby was described as “the sole, autocratic and on the whole benevolent dictator of [The Addington’s] fortunes”, and though the modern world dilutes the authority of an individual, our host today is as close to a dictator as I have seen in this era, a man possessed by this mission, the conduit for this work on behalf of the golfing gods. In the eyes of Ryan Noades, whose late father bought this place in 2006, a sparkle betrays that he is in love with this challenge, in love with The Addington, and a generation on from my last mid-iron towards that first green, I remember that I am too. Head over heels; right from the start.

But before we’ve even reached the first tee, Ryan’s passion is exposed in the unlikely topic of a scaffold pole. For the practice net through which my ball sailed back in that other life is now rotated, the vast steel curtain rail from which the net is suspended is bespoke, and Ryan spent a day in his truck retrieving it from some unknown blacksmith, for he had a vision of how the net should hang, and wouldn’t accept such restrictions as the standard length of a steel pole. And there it is, the clue to the next four hours. An unusual blend of attention to detail - a delight in the granular - and a keen sense of an awesome, wider vision. The biggest of big pictures.

The course is as glorious as I’d hoped, the wild routing a rollercoaster across this bold landscape. The greens are mown out to where they surely used to be, and surrounds extended to restore the ground game for which the course would have been built. Everywhere, their slopes beguile and deceive, but first you must arrive there, for each shot asks questions of the Tiger and the Rabbit alike. The 8th, with its trademark monument in the elbow of the dogleg; an otherworldly stretch through the 12th and 13th. The “Wodehouse Bunker” on the 6th, which the author listed as his postal address in “The Heart of a Goof”, and later described as “that chasm from which no 18 handicap player has ever emerged within the memory of man”.

By that point, this 11 handicap “player” has all but used his strokes, and so as we pause to gaze back into that (narrowly avoided) abyss, and the magnificent bridge that spans its outside edge, Ryan pulls out his phone and blows us away, yet again. For carefully filed within a couple of seconds of searching are some ancient black and white shots of the same hazard (back when hazards were just that, the good old days), and they depict a vast crater that will inhabit my dreams from this point on. And, of course - we’re getting to know Ryan by now - there is a plan to restore this golfer’s hell-hole, Wodehouse’s PO Box, to its former, terrifying glory.

Alongside the fine details, each of which displays both the scope of the work ahead and the ambition of those engaged in it, is this more general feel. Of hope and inspiration, fuelled by not only a golf course with more intrigue and character than any other, but by the fresh air and the spell-binding views. To say that - after almost four decades under the reins of Moira - the course felt claustrophobic last time is to downplay the intimidation of the trees and invasive shrubs. At points, the holes were strangled by such intruders.

But today, as the London skyline provides a newly revealed backdrop to our airborne attacks, we feel the wind on our faces and our iron shots, and can see the course’s beauty stripped bare. Underneath a smothering blanket, The Addington was perhaps slowly slipping away, gasping for breath, but it will not go the way of The New Course, for its decline is now being reversed, day by day, year by year.

The time comes for us to leave, but I don’t want to, and before I am even back on Shirley Church Road I am plotting a return. Driving home, I am lost in thought - sinking deep into the feelings that the day has brought me. Inspired not only by the grandeur of old Aber’s greatest masterpiece, but by the simple ambition of Ryan and his team. Their work seems somehow on a deeper level than any other renovations I’ve seen, and even Darwin’s prose has too many words for me as I drift along, wondering how this must all feel to those in the thick of it, deep in the mission.

So I switch to music instead, and it is my favourite - Beethoven’s Pastoral - and in the delicate warmth of those harmonies, I realise what it is about The Addington that seems so precious. For Abercromby created something beyond golf or even words up on the hill below London - some sublime piece of art - and to see it being cared for in this way is a creative act of its own. Such examples ought to be revered and protected - protected from Suggestion Books, protected from the vandals. And in the singular, passionate custody of Ryan and his architectural and agronomical partners, this gem will prevail. It will never cease to shine.

Darwin’s quote about the club’s “fortunes” sticks with me, for it feels as if a small fortune will be spent here before this project is complete, but I read the quote from Ryan’s father, Ron, in the club handbook, and smile. For he says that “something as unique as The Addington…is priceless. Whatever it costs is irrelevant”, and I sense that he taught his son well on this point. For Ryan’s life is now spent roaming the hills of The Addington - polishing one of golf’s greatest works, turning over every single stone - perhaps in breathless tribute to his father and to the one and only, J.F. Abercromby.

So I will finish with a line form Bernardo’s own grandfather Charles Darwin, who knew a thing or two about ambition, and evolution, for I suspect few sentences could ever sum up Ryan as well as this…“a man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life”.

Here’s to the absence of the Suggestion Book…

For more information on The Addington, you might like to read (or perhaps revisit) a recent contribution to the Sounder Players’ Journal, from Ryan himself. Click on the link below!

https://soundergolf.com/blogs/journal/what-ive-learned-ryan-noades