MAGAZINE 2025-26
For the convenience and safety of players on the 6th hole I suggest a bell should be placed on the corner of the thorn hedge, approximately 75 yards forward of the orchard.
The reply: The Green Committee considered that any bell positioned on the course would be stolen.
Flick to September 7 1982 and a proposal from Joshua Armitage, otherwise known as brilliant illustrator, Ionicus.
Following the report from the agronomist on the poor state of the course it is suggested that, with the greatest possible respect for all those concerned, the present Green Committee be invited to resign.
No reply.
I reckoned I might as well read the lot and went back to the first page - an entry dated July 11 1981, supported by almost 20 signatures.
I suggest that the Green Committee should restore the Dowie to its hirsute glory, by allowing the rough to grow on the side of the cop along the length of the green. I further suggest that thinning it like a skinhead, as it was today, is merely adding ammunition for the “wets” who want to alter this wonderful hole.
The reply: Agreed and this is now being carried out.
However, in the end, though Dowie was permitted a fuller head of hair, the hole would not escape alteration. It’s Royal Liverpool’s 7th, The Open’s 9th, a long par three considered for many years to be one of the greatest one shot holes in golf - notable, as elsewhere at Hoylake, for an internal out of bounds.
Named after the Club’s first Captain, James Muir Dowie, elected in 1869, the 7th was feared and revered by many and developed a formidable reputation. The out of bounds cop was hard against the left edge of the green, meaning even a near perfect shot could find its way there, a rigorous test of the notion of ‘fairness’ - which would be its undoing.
Thinning it like a skinhead, as it was today, is merely adding ammunition for the “wets”
Once, course designers saw nothing unusual about using strategic out of bounds as a tool, and presenting golfers with such a hazard was regarded as perfectly valid. Modern golf is different, and the Dowie story marks a change in attitude and the reasons behind it.
In his much admired book, The Golf Courses of the British Isles, published in 1910, Bernard Darwin reached Hoylake and waxed lyrical.
“Next comes one of the finest short holes in the world, the Dowie,” he wrote. “There is a narrow triangular green, guarded on the right by some straggling rushes and on the left by an out-of-bounds field and cop; there is likewise a pot-bunker in front.
“To hit quite straight at this hole is the feat of a hero, for let the ball be ever so slightly pulled, and we shall infallibly be left playing our second shot from the tee. Nearly everybody slices at the Dowie out of pure fright, and is left with a tricky little running shot on to the green.
“The perfect shot starts out of the right, just to show that it has no intention of going out of bounds, and then swings round with a delicious hook, struggles through the little rush hollow, and so home on the green; it is a shot to dream of, but alas! seldom to play.”
1932 brought the rule change which inflicted a penalty stroke for going out of bounds, so for you and me it would be three off the tee. This reform probably meant that architects were now less inclined to deliberately incorporate out of bounds in their layouts.
In Golf Course Architecture magazine, Adam Lawrence wrote: ”Few par threes offer much in the way of strategy, in the sense of choosing one’s method of attack, mindful of the potential risks and rewards of each approach.
“But the Dowie, as Darwin says above, was truly strategic: only the brave would hit at the flag and risk the out of bounds in the hope of making a two, while the cautious would play away from the hazard and trust to their short game. And third is the way in which a simple fence or low turf wall could create, on pancake flat ground, a hole that challenged all and identified those who were both brave and skilful.”
To hit quite straight at this hole is the feat of a hero
In 1924 Hoylake had been reconfigured by designer Harry Colt, who left Dowie as it was, but come the 1980s the times they were a-changing.
In fact in 1967, when Roberto De Vicenzo won The Open at Hoylake, there was no out of bounds on 7. There was a feeling among players that a hazard so close to the putting surface bordered on the absurd, and it seems they had enough muscle to change the set-up of the course. Peter Thomson, winner here in 1956, later described how the hole “gave us all the horrors, when the wind was up.”
Back to the Suggestions Book and an impassioned plea dated March 15 1988 when the spectre of change had materialised once again.
[Council’s] lobbying of three distinguished golfers (none of whom is a member of this club) to support the proposal that the seventh hole should not have bounds shows only one side of the coin. The writer outlines Royal Liverpool’s place in the development of the game of golf, and how the club predates such organisations as the PGA, the European Tournament Players’ Association…We should not be subservient to them, or to sponsors, whoever they might be.
The notion that sponsors or any other promoters would refuse to bring a tournament to Hoylake merely because there is an out of bounds penalty at the seventh is naive beyond belief.
Finally, I suggest that if Council’s proposals are accepted members will have brought off what will amount to nothing less than a golf miracle - the making of a molehill out of a mountain.
Battles were fought. The war was long. But in 1993 came defeat for Dowie fans, and Cameron Sinclair was engaged to design the hole played today.
At the Extraordinary General Meeting called to vote on the Dowie issue, Josh Armitage told the gathering he was the worst player in the Club and had never gone out of bounds - words that fell on mostly deaf ears. So he expressed his feelings through the artistry of his alter ego, Ionicus, filling a page of the Suggestion Book with a heartfelt drawing.
Does any of this matter? Hoylake became an Open Championship course again in 2006 after a 39 year gap, and now the loss of the old Dowie feels like a simple coping with the demands of modern golf and the desires of modern players.
The internal out of bounds flanking holes 1 and 16, championship 3 and 18, and bordering the course’s practice range or Open infrastructure, inspires debate every time the tournament is staged at Hoylake. One journalist, previewing what would be the Tiger Woods masterclass Open, referred to the links as ‘Royal Out of Bounds’.
Here’s Adam Lawrence again: “Hoylake remains a course where out of bounds plays a significant role in a round. The famous seventeenth, or Royal hole, with its green right against the course’s boundary fence and within a few feet of the Stanley Road survived longer but is gone now too, a necessary victim of the desire to return The Open to the historic links.
“No-one would mistake Royal Liverpool for a modern golf course, but part of what made it unique was lost with the muzzling of the Dowie.”
