Lying east of the city centre and sandwiched between Newtown and Tolladine roads, it was the first home of what is now Worcester Golf and Country Club. When this relocated across town to Boughton Park, St John’s in 1927, the course became Tolladine Golf Club before vandalism and debt sank that twenty years ago.
Ever since then the rolling green acres off Darwin Avenue have been a prime target for the beady eyes of builders, attracted by the convenient location, midway between the M5 and the city centre, and the rural feel of this green lung.
It will be a hard battle to defy the bulldozers, but already the wagons are being circled and if they could do it at Rorke’s Drift, why not Worcester?
Of course things were a whole lot different in December 18, 1898, when a meeting at the Guildhall to launch Worcester City Golf Club agreed to rent land at Tolladine for the creation of “a very sporting course running out for nearly a mile-and-a-quarter”.
In those days the site would have been well outside the city limits, but within walking distance and convenient for cycling or riding in the days when most transport was still by horse. Although where you put your golf clubs on a bike or a gee-gee would be anyone’s guess.
No matter, enthusiasm for the project soon gathered pace and within a month the land had been cleared and the greens established.
Playing conditions in the first years were clearly primitive. Two men were employed “when necessary” to keep the tees and greens in some sort of order, but the club owned only one mower and a hand roller, so the cropping of the grass on the fairways had to be left to grazing sheep.
Conditions were gradually upgraded and things looked set fair by 1914, when there were 141 gentlemen and 72 lady members and plans to extend the original nine hole course to 18.
However, the First World War was to have a devastating effect on the club’s fortunes. Two battalions of the Worcestershire Regiment even commandeered to course to drill on every day except Thursdays and Saturdays.
It took Worcester City Golf Club until 1923 to fully recover from the war and to rebuild its membership and finances.
More acreage was leased and the course was extended to 18 holes with the introduction of sand bunkers. A clubhouse and a ladies clubhouse were by then fully in use.
However, continuing disputes and problems over tenure with the landowners eventually drove the club committee to begin looking for alternative sites. Several were considered, including Spetchley Park, Lyppard Grange (now Warndon Villages) and in Oldbury Road, before the move was made in 1927 to Boughton Park, off Bransford Road, previously the home of the Isaac banking family.
The deal included an 18th century country house and more than 100 acres of land, on which a course was laid out by Dr Alister Mackenzie, the former Boer War physician who became one of the most famous golf architects in history. He designed more than 50 courses worldwide, including Augusta National and Cypress Point in America and the Royal Melbourne in Australia.
At Boughton the club was renamed Worcester Golf and Country Club, mainly to reflect the development of its country house and other facilities for additional sports such as squash and tennis.
Meanwhile over at Tolladine, the new and not quite so swanky, Tolladine Golf Club emerged. But as the years rolled on the site’s once so convenient location became something of a handicap. As Worcester expanded housing crept ever nearer. With increased housing came increased people, not all of them golfers.
There was growing vandalism to property and the lighting of fires before the end in 2006 and Tolladine Links heard the whoosh and crack of a driver hitting a golf ball no longer.
From the horizon now comes the rumble of heavy machinery. With apologies to the film Zulu: “It bulldozers, sir. Thousands of ‘em.”