How Downley Hosted Wycombe’s First Golf Course
If you walk towards the Le De Spencer you will pass Golf Link Cottages and Golf Link Villas, built in 1897. They are the only remaining hint that Downley Common was once, a hundred years ago, a golf course. In fact, it was the first golf course in High Wycombe and the second in Buckinghamshire – Burnham Beeches golf course predated it by just two years. The existence of Downley’s golf course reflected two important facts: the Dashwoods owned (and own) the Common, and it was once without the tree cover it now has.
The golf course was established in 1893 by Sir Edwin Dashwood, the 8th Baronet, but it is possible that he never played on it. He had been living in New Zealand when he inherited the estate and title in 1882 and may have less than enthusiastic when he heard the news. He only returned to England seven years later with his New Zealand wife; the couple had a daughter the following year. Sir Edwin found a bankrupt estate and raised money by re-mortgaging it.
Quite why he thought a golf course would be a money spinner is a mystery. Anyway, he or rather his friend, Lt Col Lambart Henry Bowens, wrote an advertisement for the new ‘Wycombe Ho Golf Club’ in late March 1893: it would be open to all who could pay the annual subscription of £1 for gentlemen and 10/- for ladies. To put that in perspective £1 in 1893 would be about £160 today. That is quite cheap as golf courses go – full membership of a course can now cost over £1500 pa – but for Downley’s labouring poor, £1 meant two months’ rent. In other words, the Colonel, who lived in Finest Grove with his wife, two children and six servants, set the bar high enough to keep out the local riff raff.
Everything about the birth of Downley’s golf course was rather rushed. The advertisement only appeared on 1 April 1893, and it was proposed to have the first medal day on the Tuesday of Easter Week, provided the golf course could be laid out in time. Easter Day was April 2; the Tuesday was 4 April; and Sir Edwin unfortunately died on Friday 7 April. We will never know if he enjoyed a round on his creation, or if the effort to open it on time was the death of him.
We know something of what the course looked like owing to a sketch made in 1958 by John Blanchard. It had nine holes and was played the full length and breadth of the Common. The second drive was huge, from outside Sunnybank to a green beyond the entrance to Narrow Lane. Living in Vale Cottage or Well Cottage might have been risky, since the third drive went by them, but the eighth and ninth holes were the really exciting challenges given the depth and height of the ‘bunkers’, all old dells (or clay pits), that one had to avoid.
Interestingly the best spot for a drink was either after the first hole, at the Golf Links pub at the end of Chapel Street (which closed in 1935), or after the eighth hole at the le De Spenser Arms. Perhaps members visited neither, for the Golf Club had its own club house, presumably somewhere near the ninth hole.
Who played? For its first decade, probably just the members of the club, of whom there were twenty by 1904. We know who they are, actually. Exactly six months after Sir Edwin’s death, perhaps in his memory, and after renaming the club the West Wycombe Golf Club, the first 18-hole competition was held on Monday 9 October 1893. It was reported in the Bucks Herald. The ten players included six women and four men, including Sir Francis Dashwood, Edwin’s brother and heir and now the 9th baronet. The following month another competition was held and again reported in the press. Those present were presumably the social circle of the Dashwoods, including the Blagdens (related to the vicar of Hughenden), the Halls, and the Hicks-Graves (John Hicks Grave lived in Plomer Hill House and was the son of Rev John Graves, who lived in Bradenham Manor).
In 1897, according to another press report, the club was in excellent financial health. Nevertheless, in 1904 or thereabouts the twenty West Wycombe Golf Club members transferred to the newly-opened Wycombe and Bourne End (now Flackwell Heath) Golf Club. That left Downley’s golf course free for the use of the locals, and they maintained it for the next thirty-five years. The green keeper was Francis ‘Mowey’ Blanchard, who was presumably related to the John Blanchard who drew the sketch map, and the C Blanchard who as the club professional in the 1890s. The only Blanchard family in Downley at the time lived in one of the Golf Link Cottages: it would be nice if it was them, but the census firtst names are different.
Downley Common’s forty-seven years as a golf course came to an abrupt end in 1940: the Common was taken over by the MOD for the testing of Churchill tanks, made and repaired at Broomwade, and these ploughed their way across the Common day in and day out destroying the golf course.
