Born: 4th August 1869 - Highgate

Died: 21st November 1951 - East Hendred, Berkshire

Married: Charlotte Laura Dewar in 1894 - no children

Address: St Amands, East Hendred, Berkshire

Educated: Monkton Combe School 1881 - 1887
Clare College, Cambridge 1887 - 1890

Sport: At school he was a Prefect and Captained the Cricket 1st XI and Rugby 1st XV. Member of the 1st Four Stroke (Rowing) and Tennis Double Champion 1884-86. Athletics champion 2nd Division 1885.

Clare College, Cambridge: Studied Law BA in 1890. 2nd Class in special examination leading to an ordinary degree in law. Captained Cambridge University Golf Team in 1890.

Sporting Achievements:
Won R&A Jubilee Vase in 1891 and 1893.
1908 selected to play for England v Scotland at golf.

Appointed a partner in the Hastings Law Firm of Sayer & Colt in 1894, during which time he helped design the Rye Golf Course and became its Honorary Secretary in 1895. In 1897 he became a Founder Member of the Royal & Ancient Rules of Golf Committee.

Golf, having been his primary interest and a frequent competitor, it was no surprise when in 1901 he applied for the job of Secretary at the new Sunningdale Club with some 400 plus other applicants. In July, he was elected at a salary of £150 per annum.

It was from this base that he gradually developed his interest and ultimate career as a golf course architect. Suffice it to record that Harry Colt, together with his partners Charles Alison, John Morrison, and for a few earlier years Dr Alister MacKenzie, were involved in the design, construction, and remodelling of over 300 courses world-wide including the Eden Course at St Andrews, Royal Portrush in Ireland, Pine Valley and Augusta in the USA. Colt himself being responsible for 115 of these courses.

The complete list can be seen in another section on the Colt Association website. It is of interest that the British Open Championship has been played on a Colt designed or remodelled course no less than 47 times since 1910.

In 1928, Colt formed the firm of Colt, Alison and Morrison Ltd, where he remained as Managing Director until his retirement in 1945.

Colt was a bold designer who built strategic rather than punitive courses that were adapted to the stronger playing character of the then modern rubber-core Haskell ball. His greens, as was standard for the day, were built to facilitate surface drainage and were designed for speeds that today would measure 4-6 on the Stimpmeter. He was also a pioneer in terms of master-planning golf courses as part of residential areas. The Detroit CC, in the USA, flows seamlessly in the middle of graceful Tudor estates that frame the grounds. And Colt's St. George's Hill CC (1913), in England, originally a 36-hole complex, now 27 holes, was prototype of the modern country club estate development project.

Bernard Darwin wrote in the Times after covering the 1951 Open at Royal Portrush, in Ireland, that: "It is truly magnificent and Mr. H.S. Colt, who designed it in its present form, has thereby built himself a monument more enduring than brass." In the 1952 History of Golf in Great Britain, Sir Guy Campbell wrote: "The Eden course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, is a monument to the genius of H.S. Colt. True, there was good golfing ground, but there was also much that, at a cursory glance, appeared highly unsuitable - flat, featureless, sodden and at one end arbitrarily constricted. Yet out of this he contrived a links of character, great interest and wide variety, that not only provides an annual test of searching severity, but maintains year by year an undisputed popularity among golfers of both sexes and all ages and handicaps."
Colt was a modest and unobtrusive figure who, in a comparatively short time, probably made a greater contribution to the game than any other single individual, and in doing so, altered the landscape of Britain and other countries around the world to an extent which has not been fully realised until recently.

Alison

Morrison

MacKenzie

Colt Alison & Morrison Ltd