Charles Hugh Alison
Charles Hugh Alison (* 1882 in Preston ; † October 20, 1952 in Johannesburg ) was a British golf architect and a major proponent of the Golden Age of golf architecture .
life and work
After completing his university studies, CH Alison began building golf courses in 1906 as Harry Colt's assistant . From 1908 to 1914 he was club secretary of the Stoke Poges Golf Club, whose course he built together with Colt. He subsequently assisted Colts in other places, such as in 1912 at St. George's Hill. After the First World War he went to the United Stateswhere he built the last four holes of Pine Valley, among other things. In 1923 Morrison joined and the already rather loose partnership with MacKenzie was finally dissolved. Colt and Morrison subsequently focused on Europe, while Alison went to the US. Burning Tree in Maryland (1923) and the Milwaukee Country Club (1929) date from this period.
After Black Thursday on October 24, 1929 and the subsequent long-term economic crisis, there were no more significant orders in the USA, so Alison went to Japan in 1930. In just three months he designed several golf courses there on his own and had the construction supervised by his assistant George Penglase. His first project was the Asaka Course for the Tokyo Country Club (opened in 1932), which heralded an architectural revolution in Japan, although it was destroyed by the military in 1941. Hirono at Kobe (1932) and the Fuji Course in Kawana (1936), which have since been among the top addresses in Japan, have been preserved. But the redesign of Kasumigaseki was also a great success. In 1931 he also worked at Royal Selangor in Malaysia.
Similar to MacKenzie in Australia, Alison in Japan is considered to be the nucleus of local golf architecture, in particular as a mentor of the first Japanese golf architects Kenya Fujita and Seiichi Inoue. His large and deep bunkers became very well known and were even named "Arizons" after him, as there were no similar obstacles in Japan before. Some of its bunkers were larger than the green they were defending. Its other design features are plateau greens and the use of large areas of water, which in the golden age (and also in Alison's publications) were actually frowned upon due to their punishing nature.
In 1936 he built Koninklijke Haagsche for Harry Colt, before he worked in the army as a decipherer in the Second World War, as it did in the First World War. At the end of 1947 he moved to South Africa, where he designed the Bryanston Country Club (1949) and the Johannesburg Country Club (1951).
literature
- Harry S. Colt, Charles H. Alison: Some Essays on Golf Course Architecture . The Country Life Library, London 1920.
- Fred W. Hawtree: Colt & Co .: Golf Course Architects . Cambuc Archives, 1991. ISBN 0-951-77930-3 .
- Peter Pugh, Henry Lord: Masters of Design: Great Courses of Colt, Mackenzie, Alison and Morrison . Icon Books Ltd, London 2009. ISBN 1-848-31090-0 .
- Geoffrey S. Cornish , Ronald E. Whitten: The Architects of Golf . HarperCollins, New York 1993. ISBN 0-062-70082-0 .
Web links
- Thomas MacWood: Gliding past Fuji - CH Alison in Japan (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Alison, Charles Hugh |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Alison, CH |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British golf architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Preston |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 20, 1952 |
| Place of death | Johannesburg |