Home-grown genius who designed America’s golf courses
March 2006
by Colin Farquharson
If you know the link between the best pie shop in Aberdeen, a typesetter in the Evening Express composing room and the designing of 800 golf courses in North America, it’s a safe bet you are not from the North-East of Scotland.
Because Thomas Bendelow – the Granite City man who was the link – was certainly not famous when he boarded a boatful of Scottish immigrants bound for New York in September, 1892. He had just turned 24 and been married for only seven months. But by 1936 when he died in Chicago aged 67, Tom had lived the American Dream.
Bendelow, the one-time printer, became the most prolific designer of golf courses in the United States and Canada, giving annual lectures on golf course design at the University of Illinois. A frequent contributor to Golfer Magazine and the American Golfer, Bendelow was good enough to play with the legendary Englishman Harry Vardon in a cross-country tour of the States in 1890. They became great friends and Tom caddied for Vardon when he won the US Open at Wheaton, Illinois.
But transatlantic communications were in their infancy and no news of Tom Bendelow’s rapid rise in America ever filtered back to Aberdeen. There were no “Local boy makes good in America” stories about him in the newspaper for which he had worked.
The memory of Tom’s contribution to the development of golf in America faded quickly after his death. When the name of Bendelow did crop up, it was usually to poke fun at his ‘Johnny Appleseed of Golf’ tag.
When Tom’s name finally appeared in the Illinois Golf Hall of Fame in 2005, it represented the culmination of years of hard work by one of his grandsons, US-born Stuart Bendelow, to restore his place in golfing history.
Tom was born on 2 September, 1868, one of the nine children of John and Mary Ann Bendelow, who established what came to be regarded as the best pie shop in Aberdeen, and furth. Details of when and where the pie shop business began are sketchy. We know from a poem written by former Aberdeen Lord Provost George Stephen, that it was “along Cassey-eyn” or Causewayend. It begins:
When weemin were vrochtin the roon o’ the clock
At the Jute Works or Broadford’s auld mills,
They’d set aff wi’ a shawl and a kwite owre their
frock
To try to get owre a’ their ills.
By gaun ilka pay-nicht alang Cassey-eyn
To buy there o’ mair than ae size:
Sae tasty as kitchie, het, sappy and fine –
Jist ane o’ John Bendelow’s pies.
One of my elder brothers remembers being sent in the Thirties from the family home in Linksfield Road to the Bendelow Pie Shop in the Spittal somewhere. It continued to be run by the Bendelow family until around 1960.
Tom was born into a God-respecting Brethren family. His father read the Bible daily and the family prayed together. They were regularly to be found at the St Paul Street Gospel Hall where the company was noted for strict adherence to the teachings of the Scriptures.
A conscientious but not a scholarly pupil, Tom was an outstanding runner in school sports; then he fell ill and took up the less energetic sport of golf although, as he told one interviewer in later life, he did return to athletics and ran professionally as ‘G P Smith of Edinburgh’. Running under an assumed name for prize money was common practice, but why should Tom say he came from Edinburgh? I wonder if the interviewer misunderstood when Tom told him that he ran ‘in Edinburgh’, where Powderhall was the stronghold of professional racing.
Schooldays in the 1880s were over for most by the age of 14. In the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1912, Tom told how he had served a seven-year apprenticeship with the Aberdeen Express as a printer and had started playing golf on the Aberdeen links when he was nine years old.
Circa 1877 there was only one golf course and two golf clubs in Aberdeen. The course, which started on the Queen’s Links near the east end of Constitution Street and worked its way up the Broad Hill and back again, was only a seven-hole circuit between 1815 and 1852. By 1877, the members of the Aberdeen Golf Club (later to become Royal Aberdeen Golf Club) and Bon Accord Golf Club were playing 15-holes – nine on the Queen’s Links and six on the King’s Links. In 1875 a local professional, Andrew Annand, set the course record with a score of 65 – one more than the young Tom Morris over the 14-hole course in 1873.
All of which suggests it was a tough course, with the wind whistling in off the North Sea, for the young Tom to learn the rudiments of the game from his father. There was no other links between Peterhead (golf club founded 1841) to the north, and to the south, Montrose where golf had been played since time immemorial.
I must confess that I had my doubts that there had been junior golfers playing the links even in the second half of the 19th century. As golf historian, Ian Edward writes in his new book The Royal Aberdeen Golfers: 225 years on the links: “ … even well into the 19th century there was hardly a working-man golfer in Aberdeen. The lawyers and leading merchants in the town, the bankers, naval and military officers, the doctors and occasionally the clergy were the classes from which the membership of The Aberdeen Golf Club was drawn.”
But Royal Aberdeen Golf Club’s director of golf, Ronnie MacAskill, an expert in the history of Aberdeen golf, put me right: “The Aberdeen Golf Club played over the Town Links until 1887 when they moved to a newly-laid out course on the waste ground to the north of the River Don on the estate of Mr Forbes of Balgownie. There was definitely a junior golf club in Aberdeen functioning in November 1839 – yes 1839! – as I have in my collection a junior golf club medal from that date, the oldest junior golf medal in the world.”
US-based Stuart Bendelow, when he was researching his grandfather’s life, assumed that Tom’s later references to Balgownie were a throw-back to his early days either on that golf course, or to his courtship days in the area. Stuart Bendelow, in his yet to be published book about his grandfather, writes: “Tom’s attention to golf was soon to be diverted by a fair Scottish lass by the name of Mary Ann Nicol. She was the daughter of a prominent farmer who did not think much of this Tom Bendelow, the son of a ‘provision dealer’, who had no proven trade and little aptitude for farming. Their courtship was largely constrained to discreet meetings at the base of the Brig of Balgownie.”
Tom and Mary Ann were married in 1892 at Belhelvie. According to Stuart Bendelow, Tom “longed for a living environment away from the close scrutiny of his formidable father in law… and it wasn’t long before the young couple made their plans to emigrate.”
Tom arrived in New York City on 21 September 1892. His wife, with their first child, Mary Ann ‘May’ Bendelow, born in December 1892, made the crossing to America in 1893.
Tom became a compositor with the New York Herald and in 1895 he noticed a classified advertisement – he probably set up the type – for a young golfer willing to teach the game to a family. Tom wasted no time in applying, and was hired by the Pratt family who owned the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.
After a few lessons in the basics of golf, the Pratt family wanted a quiet place to play and so Tom laid out a six-hole course within the grounds of the Pratt estate on Long Island.
Tom was in the right place at the right time; golf was beginning to boom in North America. Such was the demand for people – mainly immigrants from the east coast of Scotland – to show folk the fundamentals of a golf grip and swing, that this Aberdonian compositor began teaching, although he was still an amateur. There was no-one enforcing the Rules of Amateur Status in the mid-1890s.
Tom opened the first indoor golf instructional school at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1895. In 1899 he was hired by the New York City Park Authority to take charge of Van Cortlandt Park golf course, the first municipal golf course in the US. Tom redesigned it and expanded it to 18 holes.
He was helped considerably in his ‘missionary’ golf work by joining the staff of A. G. Spalding, one of the country’s foremost sports goods manufacturers. Tom’s job was to design and promote golfing facilities through North America as Spalding sought to expand its sphere of influence. Tom was editor of Spalding’s Official Golf Guide from 1907 to 1916.
In 1920 Tom joined the staff of the American Park Builders as chief golf course designer, a post he held in Chicago until the firm folded in 1933. He earned the tag, the ‘Johnny Appleseed of American golf’, travelling coast to coast and into Canada, designing golf courses. He was certainly responsible for bringing between 800 and 1,000 new courses into being.
Stuart Bendelow writes: “Golf courses at the beginning of the 20th century were laid out according to the natural terrain; large, earth-moving equipment did not exist. Horse-drawn graders and mowers did not come along until the early 1900s.
“The courses that Tom designed in the mid-to-late Twenties were some of his best, incorporating layout refinements in keeping with the changes in equipment and players.”One of Tom Bendelow’s early designs was the Atlanta Athletic Club’s 18-hole course at East Lake, the place where the great Bobby Jones learned the game. “It was extraordinary in that it gave a golfer the opportunity to use every wood and iron in his bag,” said Jones.
The Great Depression severely reduced the construction of new golf courses, the remodelling of older courses and the maintenance of existing courses. The demand for design work fell so low that Tom was forced to seek other work to sustain his family. He fell ill and died at his home in River Forest, Illinois.
Tom’s funeral service drew huge crowds, not only from the golfing fraternity. When they moved to the Chicago suburb of Austin in 1901, the Bendelows had found a very small assembly of Brethren there and Tom , an inspiring preacher, revitalised the group. On Sunday evenings at the corner of Leamington and Chicago Avenues, his powerful Scottish voice could be heard warning the unsaved to “Flee from the wrath to come”.
He developed a strict personal doctrine from his Aberdeen upbringing. He would never ever design a golf course on Sunday; he would not play golf on a Sunday and didn’t want anyone else to play either. He never drank alcohol, never swore and never told blue jokes. His only weakness was for huge cigars he constantly smoked. No one recalls if he smoked them on Sundays.
Colin Farquharson is indebted to the considerable input of Stuart Bendelow
Aberdonian COLIN FARQUHARSON has spent 50 years in journalism, writing and broadcasting on sport from greyhound racing to wrestling; latterly sports editor of the P&J. “I won’t hang up up my golf shoes before the last putt drops!”
This is an article from the March 2006 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.
How can I contact Stuart Bendelow?
I have an interest on a feature on Tom ofr a cable golf show.
— Alan Hinds 30 July 2006 #