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Hoylake and Meolse Golf Club, Meolse Common Course. (1890s)
Short lived nine-hole course laid out on Meolse Common.
Thanks to Michael B Morrison and Anthony Stone for allowing us to use extracts fom their article “An Unknown Golf Club in Hoylake” for Through the Green magazine for the British Golf Collectors Society.
Entry from Volume 4 of The Golfing Annual in May 1891.
The course was set out on a strip of linksland called Meolse Common, located between Hoylake and Meols railway station. The Ordnance Survey Map below published in 1881 shows the coastal location of the course amongst the sandhills between the two properties The Dale and Sandhey.
O.S. Map Surveyed 1871; © Crown Copyright {year of publication 1881}.
Report on the new club in February 1891.
Liverpool Echo Thursday 19 February 1891. With thanks to Reach PLC. Digitised by Findmypast Newspaper Archive Limited. All rights reserved.
Royal Liverpool GC clearly wished to ensure the success of the new venture. The president of Hoylake and Meolse GC was announced to be William Otho Shaw who owned the Sandhey estate adjoining Meolse Common. The vice-president was the highly popular honorary secretary of RLGC, Thomas Owen Potter. The land for the proposed course was owned by William Ryder Richardson, who would succeed Potter as secretary in 1895. But the clincher was the captain of the new club who was none other than John Ball Jnr. At that time, he was both the Amateur champion and the Champion golfer, having become the first amateur, and the first Englishman, to win the Open Championship at Prestwick in September 1890. How many other clubs could claim a first captain who had such exalted standing in the game? However, when the next edition of The Golfing Annual was published in May 1892, there was no mention of Hoylake and Meolse Golf Club in the directory. Instead, we find a new club, Leasowe Golf Club, instituted in May 1891, with Otho Shaw as president and John Ball Jnr as captain. (See separate entry on this website for the early history of Leasowe Golf Club).