Humewood Golf Club

A The Humewood golf course is a unique place in South Africa, an old fashioned links designed by an English army officer who was given a golden opportunity to reproduce his home country’s traditional golfing terrain on a foreign shore. There is not another 18 holes in South Africa quite like Humewood, it’s a championship layout regarded as one of the toughest tests in the land: regularly ranked in South Africa’s finest courses.

Considering the terrain on which the course is situated, sand dunes on the windy shores of Algoa Bay, there was no alternative but to build a links when members of the Port Elizabeth Golf Club approached respected course architect Major S V Hotchkin in 1929 to provide them with a second championship course.

Hotchkin re-modelled and owned one of England’s classic inland courses, Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, but his real love was the links of St Andrews, and that gave him the inspiration to produce a masterpiece at Humewood.

Departing from the old links concept of nine holes out from the clubhouse and nine back, as on the Old Course at St Andrews and many other British Open layouts, Hotchkin put the clubhouse in the middle of the course, and designed two loops of nine starting and finishing at that point. He was obviously influenced by the Muirfield links in Scotland, which follows broadly the same pattern.

Hotchkin used the natural contours of the land to design his holes and build his greens. To compensate for the strong winds that blow, the fairways were generously widened, and bunkers kept to a minimum.

Humewood was opened for play in 1931 and within three years it was hosting the South African championships, both the Amateur and Open of 1934.

The sixth is the shortest hole on the links with an elevated green guarded by bunkers on both sides. Its chief difficulty lies in the fact that the wind blows across the hole, making the long and narrow green an awkward target.

The thirteenth must rank as one of the great championship holes in golf, the fairway full of rolling humps and mounds in the driving area, and the green hidden away in the distance on a sandy hillock, a waste area of sand and rough ready to catch any approach shot that drifts right.