Almanac Golf: Toby Cumming and ‘The golf courses of Vern Morcom’

 

 

 

 

The golf courses of Vern Morcom

Toby Cumming

 

I was sports mad as a kid, with a particular fondness for cricket. I played cricket daily through my primary school years, monopolising time at the crease with Alan, a Grade 3 blow-in from Canberra who fast became my best friend. I started basketball in the Under-10s and never stopped. It was golf, though, that appealed most of all. I would still venture outside with my cricket bat and tennis ball, but I began hitting the ball off the ground from a stationary position. No need to enlist my siblings, I could do this on my own. It wasn’t long before I’d mapped out some holes in our spacious Macleod back yard, where the oak tree’s merciless girth and the sand pit provided the hazards. This was back when bunkers were a real penalty – the sand pit wasn’t overly deep, but there is not much loft on a cricket bat. The blank pages of my schoolbooks were covered in golf holes. Garish colours – lime greens and oranges – and over-the-top designs, with sharp turns, too many bunkers and water everywhere. My favourite Christmas came towards the end of primary school, when I was given my first set of golf clubs. The clubs, from the Trading Post, were a random assortment housed in an ugly beige vinyl bag, but I could not have been more excited. Summers at Anglesea became a simple triangle for me: our holiday house, the golf course, the surf beach. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my first experience of Vern Morcom’s golf architecture. He had designed the course at Anglesea in the early 1950s. In a remarkable coincidence, Vern’s correspondence with the Anglesea Golf Club back then was with the Secretary, Mr A W Hedley, the same man who had just finished building our family holiday house. The place where I would fall into bed, exhausted from activities at the points of the triangle, on so many summer nights as a teenager.

 

Shift forward two decades in time, and a little to the east geographically, and I’m at Inverloch for a weekend in the spring of 2016. The intervening years were not inconsequential for me – undergraduate life, Eurasian travels, relocation to England for more university, marriage, Pan-American travels, homecoming to Melbourne, arrival of two kids, a West Footscray house bought and renovated – but they can safely be skipped over if the goal is to uncover the genesis of why I wrote the story of Vern Morcom. With one exception: all the timeless greats that I played across Britain, from Sunningdale to The Old Course to Rye to Royal Porthcawl to Walton Heath to Royal St George’s, undoubtedly sensitised me to outstanding golf course architecture. But enough digression; back to Inverloch in 2016, and the grand final weekend. We were staying at the house of my mum’s best friend from high school. My sons of the west were aged 9 and 7, just old enough to get excited that their Bulldogs were about to run out. I had a different reason to be excited. I’d played golf at Leongatha that morning and was stunned by how good it was. When I saw the Vern Morcom history that was displayed in the clubhouse, a small germ of an idea lodged in my head. How many Morcom courses, like Leongatha and Anglesea, were out there?

 

Skip forward another four years, and my book, The golf courses of Vern Morcom, is now published. It opens with a Foreword by Australia’s golfing oracle, Mike Clayton. The story begins in the 1890s with Vern’s dad Mick, tending the grass track for the Stawell Gift. Then to Bendigo, where Vern was born in 1900, and on to Black Rock where Mick was appointed Head Greenkeeper at Royal Melbourne. Vern grew up next to these famous fairways, and his early life coincided with the peak of golf architecture’s golden age. The book outlines Vern’s architectural principles, placing them in context among the philosophies of golden age luminaries Alister MacKenzie, Harry Colt and Charles Hugh Alison. Vern spent four decades as Head Greenkeeper of Kingston Heath, a course second only to the West at Royal Melbourne in most people’s accounting of Australia’s best. It was the design work that he did in his spare time away from Kingston Heath, though, that gives the book its heft. A total of 90 courses across Australia, mostly clustered in the south-eastern corner. I grouped the courses by geography because I want people to go out and play them, sharing in this living history. Beginning in Melbourne and radiating out, the chapters cover the Yarra Ranges, the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsulas, the Goldfields, the Murray, Gippsland, the Western District, Adelaide and surrounds, Tasmania and Perth.

 

Three things – the first two there from the beginning, the third emerging along the way – came together to drive me irresistibly forward in putting this book together. The first thing: I am a researcher. It is my day job. I have an enquiring mind and I get a thrill out of discovery. My first investigations into Vern Morcom did not yield much, which only served to pique my interest further. A website here, a magazine article there. The only text of substance I could find was A Round Forever, John Scarth’s book from 20 years ago on Vern and Mick. John’s book gave me many things, most important of which was a starting point – it included a list of courses that the Morcoms had designed. From this list I went to the State Library and to club histories. I also went, most evenings, to the National Library of Australia’s digitised archive, Trove. No twentieth century trawling the microfiche or requesting dusty pamphlets from the compactus. I would sit on my couch at home, the kids fast asleep, and enter Morcom search terms into my laptop until the early hours. I realised that the list of Morcom courses in A Round Forever was not exhaustive and, like a Ballarat digger with gold fever, I scanned Trove for new discoveries.

 

The second thing: I am interested in golf courses. It is common for discussions about golf courses to default to rankings of quality, but for me this is not the heart of it. I relish the fact that golf courses, unlike basketball courts or cricket ovals, are wildly individual. I never tire of playing somewhere new. Even if the course turns out to be mediocre. I like trying to intuit the thought processes of the person who placed the holes, and enjoy picturing how I might have done things differently. Driving through any country town, the sight of a course unplayed is a major distraction to me. For the holes that are glimpsed through the curtain of trees at 60 km/h, I will try to appraise them; for the unseen holes, I let my imagination fill in the space. Of course, with all the time in the world, the dream would be to slow down, pull into the car park, get the clubs out of the boot and play. With Morcom on my mind and a book to research, that is essentially what I did.

 

The third thing was the story itself. When I say that the story emerged along the way, I am being imprecise; like any history, it was there all along. What I mean is that my fascination with Vern Morcom’s story increased over time as I unearthed more background. The days he spent with Alister MacKenzie at Royal Melbourne in 1926. His work with dad Mick and Claude Crockford, both legendary greenkeepers, building the holes at Yarra Bend in the late 1920s. His formative work at Kingston Heath. His visit to Carnoustie in the early 1930s. His ability to size up a property from a brief inspection and a topographical map. I loved that a straight line could be drawn from the greatest architect of the golden age, MacKenzie, to country courses like Balmoral and Euroa and Barossa Valley, simply by going through Vern Morcom. I couldn’t understand why his story hadn’t been told, why so few people knew the provenance of his vast array of notable courses.

 

I hope that my book can be a starting point, like A Round Forever was for me. The story is not complete. In the two months since publication, I have already been told that the Northern Golf Club, not included in the book, has some Vern Morcom history. No doubt more Morcom discoveries lie in wait.

 

 

 

RRP HB: $59.95, SB: $44.95
To purchase the book,  contact  Graeme Ryan, [email protected]

 

Website www.ryanpub.com

 

 

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