Herbert Fowler

Herbert Fowler entered golf architecture comparatively late and without following the traditional route of a Scottish professional. Born at Edmonton in north London in 1856, he came from a prosperous family, received a private education and became a partner in a West Country bank. He discovered golf at Royal North Devon in 1879 while visiting Bideford on business. A gifted all-round sportsman, particularly in cricket, he developed into a strong amateur and later joined both the Royal and Ancient and Muirfield. Financial reverses in the late nineteenth century helped redirect his life. When his brother-in-law Sir Cosmo Bonsor promoted the creation of Walton Heath, Fowler was given the opportunity to design the course, which opened in 1904. Walton Heath immediately revealed an exceptional eye for land. Fowler did not attempt to copy Scottish links literally. He used heath, contours and broad masses of vegetation to create golf that felt natural yet dramatic. Bernard Darwin famously described him as an “erratic genius,” perhaps the most daring and original architect of his time. His routings could be unexpected, his greens irregular and his bunkers forceful, but the freedom was supported by sound playing logic. He preferred variety and character to symmetry, accepting unconventional forms whenever they produced a stronger hole. Fowler subsequently developed an international practice. His associations include Saunton, The Berkshire, Eastward Ho!, Del Monte and several projects in the United States. At Pebble Beach his best-known intervention transformed the eighteenth into a long par five running beside the ocean, now one of golf’s most recognisable finishing holes. Tom Simpson joined his firm in 1910, and their partnership designed or remodelled numerous important courses, although their individual contributions are sometimes difficult to separate. Fowler thus formed a bridge between Victorian pioneers and the more organised design practices of the Golden Age. He died in 1941. His work is distinguished by rare physical and visual imagination. Where some contemporaries sought a repeatable method, Fowler pursued emotion, movement and individuality. His finest courses demonstrated that inland ground could possess as much personality as a celebrated links when an architect understood how to recognise and amplify its natural forms.