Tom Simpson

Tom Simpson was a true eccentric, prone to rubbing people up the wrong way. He didn't much care for the opinions of green committees or golf club politicos; in his own mind, he was assured of his architectural genius, and not without justification. Simpson’s body of work stands up to anyone’s.

Simpson was born in 1876 and studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge. Coming from a wealthy mining family, he didn't practice law for long after graduation (Harry Colt, seven years older than Simpson, graduated from Cambridge with the same law degree and did similarly little with it) and instead indulged his golf interest at Woking Golf Club in England. There, a giant leap in strategic golf architecture was taking place, with Stuart Paton and John Low building the centerline bunker on the fourth hole. This was a checkmate move in the battle between the penal Victorian school and the new strategic school, ushering in a new era, and Simpson was on hand to witness it. 

Something stirred within Simpson, and he joined in partnership with Herbert Fowler, architect of Walton Heath and The Berkshire, among others, in 1910. They combined to overhaul Old Tom Morris’s rudimentary Cruden Bay north of Aberdeen into the wonder we know today. While Fowler traveled to the U.S., where he changed the 18th at Pebble Beach from a par 4 to a 5, Simpson visited the European continent on behalf of the duo. He did much brilliant work there, such as the nine-hole Valliere (1927) course at Morfontaine, followed by the 18-hole Grand Parcours course (1927). 

Simpson also gave us today’s Golf de Chantilly (1929) and Golf de Fontainbleau (1919). By 1920, Fowler and Simpson had become Fowler, Abercromby, Simpson, and Croome. This partnership dissipated in the early 1930s when Simpson hired Philip Mackenzie Ross after Ross suggested how to place a license plate on Simpson’s Rolls Royce in a neater fashion, impressing the artistic Simpson. 

In the 1920s and 30s, Simpson was employed to consult at many of the courses that Harry Colt had designed in prior years. These included Muirfield, Royal Aberdeen, the New Course at Sunningdale Golf Club, Royal Porthcawl, and Rye — all clubs that would not have taken the hiring of anyone other than Colt lightly. Evidently they ended up subscribing to Simpson’s philosophy, which can be summed up by what he wrote about his work at the New Course at Sunningdale: “I have attempted to introduce the spirit of St. Andrews, the world's only real golf course. The proper function of the first fairway hazard is to govern the play of the hole. There is no necessity to bunker the wrong line to the hole if the green has been properly sited.” 

Perhaps the best example of Simpson’s approach to bunkering is at County Louth Golf Club (1936), which he renovated with Molly Gourlay, the English version of Marion Hollins. Baltray is a masterclass in subtlety and letting the ground contours express themselves. Hazards are minimal and often centrally placed, and green approaches cast off balls coming from the centre of the fairways. Those who have found the advantageous side of the fairway will be granted an approach shot less likely to be repelled by slope.

Simpson died in 1964 aged 87. He had asked Henry Longhurst to write his obituary, so Longhurst did this before Simpson died and showed it to him. It sums him up well: “In 82 years, Tom Simpson has touched life at an enviable number of points and I have always attributed to this fact his refusal to produce for golfing clients anything which he himself deemed humdrum, however much they desired it — as they often did.”