Harry Colt

Harry Colt, in full Henry Shapland Colt, was a golf course architect, born on August 4, 1869 at Highgate in London. He lost his father as a boy and learned golf at Malvern, where the family had moved. He was schooled at Monkton Combe and read law at Clare College, Cambridge, where he captained the university golf team. After graduating he qualified as a solicitor and spent several years as a partner in a law firm. He was a strong player as well: in 1897 he was among the founding members of the R&A’s Rules of Golf Committee, and in 1906 he reached the semi-finals of the Amateur Championship at Royal Liverpool.

The turning point came in 1901, when he was appointed the first secretary of Sunningdale, then newly opened, a post he held until 1913. During those years he reworked several holes of the Old course laid out by Willie Park Jr., and the quality of that work began to bring design commissions his way. Inland courses in Britain were held at the time to be far beneath the links by the sea, but Colt carried the thinking of the links onto heathland ground, and with routings that followed the lie of the land and bunkers placed where they asked a question of the player, he raised the standard of the inland course. A course, he held, should be part of the landscape rather than something imposed upon it. He is regarded as one of the first men to make course design a profession without having been a playing professional first.

He left a long list of notable work. In Britain there are Stoke Poges (1909), Swinley Forest (1911), St George’s Hill, the New course at Sunningdale which he designed himself in 1923, the East and West courses at Wentworth in the mid-1920s, and the remodelling of Muirfield in 1923. He was called to Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland in 1929 to design a new championship course. That course, the Dunluce Links, opened in 1933 and is often called his finest; in 1951 it became the first venue outside mainland Britain to stage the Open Championship, and it has held the championship again in 2019 and 2025. In the United States he advised on Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey, the course begun by George Crump. Counting new work and remodelling, he had a hand in more than 300 courses, of which 115 are his own design alone.

He was fortunate in his partners. It was at Alwoodley in Leeds in 1907, where he had been invited to advise, that he first joined forces with Alister MacKenzie; Charles Alison later made a third, and the three practised as Colt, MacKenzie & Alison. In 1920 he and Alison published Some Essays on Golf-Course Architecture, setting down how they thought about the placing of bunkers and the shaping of ground. In 1928 he founded Colt, Alison & Morrison Ltd. with Alison and John Morrison. In his last years his hearing failed and the range of his work narrowed; he died on November 21, 1951 at the age of 82.

See the other golf course architects here.