Club History

The Beginning – Written by Adam Ruck

“Aberdovey owes its place on the list of pilgrimages to be made by anyone interested in the history and literature of golf to Bernard Darwin (1876-1961), a founding father of golf writing and its supreme exponent. Bernardo, as his friends and admirers knew him, played golf at Aberdovey as a boy and maintained a lifelong attachment to the village, club and course, returning for annual visits and more often than that in print as Golf Correspondent for The Times and Country Life, and in his various autobiographies. Rarely did he make a point about the game and how or where to play it, without illustrating his remarks with a nostalgic anecdote involving ‘the course that my soul loves best of all the courses in the world.’ The excitement of the journey by train to Aberdovey and the pain of having to leave were favourite tropes.

Devotees who make their journey to west Wales from all corners of the world can still do so in the old-fashioned way, scattering oystercatchers as they trundle along the estuary in a two-carriage train. It will pause on request at the first of Aberdovey’s two stations, Penhelig, before depositing them at the clubhouse gate. They find the place as beautiful as Darwin described, the club as welcoming, and the course as charming.

Golf came to Aberdovey in the person of Darwin’s uncle Arthur Ruck, an infantry officer who in 1880 returned from India to a posting at Formby on the Lancashire coast and there took up golf. Until he left the army in 1888, Arthur Ruck spent the months of his annual winter leave with his parents who decamped from their home near Machynlleth to warmer winter quarters beside the sea at Aberdovey.

For exercise and hitting practice Major Ruck carried his clubs and a pocketful of balls to a strip of rough ground between the recently opened railway and the sea: the Aberdovey Common, as it was known. And in a common-sense initiative that must have been employed by golf enthusiasts up and down the land, but which thanks to Bernard Darwin has become uniquely associated with my great grandfather, he planted a set of flowerpots in the ground at intervals to make a rudimentary nine-hole course. Darwin tells us that ‘Uncle Arthur’s flowerpot course’ started somewhere near the present sixteenth tee, headed north towards Towyn and made its way back.

Among the locals and visiting friends and relations whom great grandfather introduced to golf during these winter holidays were his soldier brothers RM (Dicky) and OE (Edwal) Ruck; his close friend and brother-in-law Frank Darwin, son of the naturalist Charles; and Frank’s son Bernard, whose mother Amy (née Ruck) had died four days after delivering him. Bernard would go on to spend many holidays with his Welsh grandmother until her death in 1906.

She was no golfer, but knew all the prize winners at Aberdovey and often their scores, and understood the game well enough to give the club its motto, an old Welsh proverb meaning ‘if you can’t be strong, be cunning.’

The exact chronology of what might be termed Aberdovey golf’s prehistory is uncertain. Much later, the Rucks presented a set of clubs and balls, now on display in the clubhouse, claiming that they had used them at Aberdovey ‘around the year 1882.’ Although they were casting their memory back almost half a century, I am inclined to believe in the accuracy of my ancestors’ recall. However, Aberdovey prefers 1886 as the date from which it believes golf to have been played.

Be that as it may, RM Ruck, the best sportsman of the three brothers and an FA Cup winner as a hard-tackling defender for the Royal Engineers in 1875, soon took over as prime mover of golf at Aberdovey; the Golf Club’s founding President in July 1892, and its first champion.

Darwin’s ‘Uncle Dicky’ used his golfing knowhow and engineering skills to replace his brother’s course with a full 18-hole layout that stretched to 5540 yards, over much the same ground as the present course save for the zone now occupied by holes 11-14, which was too boggy. The course was ready by the end of 1892 and RMR engaged a photographer to document and advertise it, as Bernard Darwin recalled:

‘At that moment came what is rare in Merioneth, a hard frost and a fall of snow. The photographer could not be put off and my uncle made the best of a bad job. We congregated in Cader bunker with our skates thrown on the ground (the photograph is there to witness if I lie); my uncle was pictured playing a full shot with a driver out of the snow-clad bunker in exactly the wrong direction while the Aberdovey worthies assembled on the crest of Cader holding their hats on against the wind.’

‘Cader’ – properly the local mountain Cader Idris – was the name given to a mighty sandhill that stood between tee and green at the short fourth hole (later the third). Hitting over it was a fearsome challenge for golfers armed with the equipment of the time.

As founder and president of the Welsh Golfing Union, RM Ruck staged its first championship at Aberdovey in 1895. Braid and Taylor brought the crowds in for an exhibition match in 1898, and the best golfers from the Midlands came to do battle with Darwin (+4) in Aberdovey’s easter and summer competitions. The Club bred its own stars, including the Caves of the Trefeddian hotel and descendants of founder members including many Atkins and Howells.

The great Joyce Wethered paid a visit in 1933, and ‘when she failed to put her tee shot on the green at Cader, Aberdovey felt that it had not bowed the knee.’

Fashionable golf architects came and went. Darwin brought in HS Colt before the First World War, and held his breath when the great man reached Cader. His recommendations were mostly ignored, and after much work on drainage it was Herbert Fowler’s contribution in 1920 which is largely responsible for the present layout. This is often described as an old-fashioned ‘out and back’, but things are not quite that simple, since the course bends through 90 degrees and there are zigs and zags where short holes cross the course. In his A Round of Golf Courses (1951), Patric Dickinson likened it to ‘a badly tied bow tie, with the knot at the 3rd and 16th holes, like Scylla and Charybdis waiting to shipwreck golfers.’

Number three is the once-infamous Cader. Dickinson could still call it a ‘hideous Caliban of a creature’ but since then the wind and the hacking of golfers have taken their toll on the mountainous dune and the cavernous waste bunker has become a grassy bank. The green, once a handkerchief-sized oasis in a wilderness of sand, is now a generous crater.

The 16th, originally called the Bent Hole, survives as my great grandfather’s legacy: a classic short par 4 with the railway’s curve threatening attempts to take the direct line from tee to green. Darwin selected this hole for his eclectic Churchman’s cigarette card series, 3 Jovial Golfers (in search of the perfect course). Mr. Tiger was tempted, and paid the price.

James Braid returned to improve the course in preparation for the Welsh Golfing Union’s championship of 1931 and made it 500 yards longer, 29 bunkers tougher and, in the opinion of many, including Darwin, a lot less fun to play. The members were not happy and in 1933 voted to undo Braid’s work. As the Club’s historian Richard Darlington wrote in his centenary book, A Round of a Hundred Years, ‘the first years of the 1930s were spent in altering the course and then altering it back again.’ It sounds horribly expensive.

The episode is commemorated in an article of Bernard Darwin’s entitled ‘The Great Revulsion’ (January 1933) in which he applauds Aberdovey for daring to defy the craze for lengthening courses; and celebrates the fact that the protest was initiated by a group of the club’s strongest players, speaking up on behalf of their weaker brethren. Richard Darlington’s account of the meeting highlights the important role played in the debate by Darwin’s cousin Lord Atkin, another grandson of Mary-Anne Ruck.

In answer to the Club Captain’s simple question – ‘does Aberdovey want to be championship course or a holiday course?’ – the egalitarian law lord carried the debate with his intervention: ‘the Green Committee should endeavour to make the course easier for the ordinary golfer and so manage it as to make it an attractive holiday course.’

Bernard Darwin’s attachment to Aberdovey never faded. ‘About this one course in the world I am a hopeless and shameful sentimentalist,’ he wrote, ‘and I glory in my shame.’ Over a golf writing career that spanned two world wars and more than half a century, he wrote so much and so often about Aberdovey that his readers must have felt they knew the course intimately whether they had played there or not.

Aberdovey is a more sensible course these days. The crenellated rampart which defended the original 12th green ‘like the battlements of a sham baronial castle’ is long gone. The merciless James Braid replaced the 15th hole’s friendly crater green with a less forgiving configuration. ‘Poor, dear old Crater! Lightly lie the plateau’s turf upon thee!’

Darwin’s words remain undimmed and a visit to Aberdovey invites us to rejoice in his Green Memories. Here’s to the ‘mere schoolmaster’ who sliced onto the railway at eight of the first nine holes. Not forgetting the young subaltern who, when playing a foursome with a major, on the last green, under the clubhouse windows, with everything depending on the hole, ‘left the ball severely alone; he must have missed it by a good six inches.’ Taking everything into consideration, Darwin reckoned this ‘the finest and most flawless example of the air shot’ he ever saw. And what about the gentleman who dug a trench across the fairway to mark his record drive? Darwin is too polite to name him. I do hope he is an ancestor of mine.”

Written by Adam Ruck

Present Day

The present clubhouse opened in 1998 by a senior member of the Royal Family and has been the home to our members and welcomed guests since.

The links sits proudly on the Welsh Amateur Championship circuit with the club last hosting the event in 2017.