Royal Melbourne Golf Club - History

History

Founded in 1891 as the Melbourne Golf Club ('Royal' prefix given in 1895), the founding President was Sir James McBain and the founding Captain was John Munro Bruce (father of later Australian Prime Minister Viscount Stanley Melbourne Bruce). Other honorary founding members include Patrick McCaughan, a businessman and developer of the Old Rialto Hotel building in Collins Street.


The club had to give up its original site, much nearer the city centre, because of increasing urbanization. It planned a move to its present location in the mid-1920s. Royal Melbourne's two current courses are known as the 'West' and 'East' courses. The West course was designed under the strict standards of famous course architect Alister MacKenzie. He visited the eventual site, located on the renowned Melbourne Sandbelt, south of the city, in 1926. The actual building of the West course was overseen by the famed Australian golfer Alex Russell, as well as the head greenkeeper Mick Morcom; it was completed for play in 1931, and required much clearing of forested land. The East course was designed by Russell, and was completed in 1932.

Read more about this topic:  Royal Melbourne Golf Club

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
    William James (1842–1910)