There is so much more to the experience of golf at a particular course than just teeing off at the 1st and holing out on the 18th. More than almost any other club, Royal Porthcawl demonstrates just how much more. Its members would say it is the best club in Wales, which is a point to be contested no doubt by Royal St David’s, Harlech. But what is indubitably true about Porthcawl is that it has one of the most atmospheric clubhouses in golf, one of the largest and most expansive practice grounds and a noble links that has stood the test of time.
This is not the end of the charms of Royal Porthcawl. Just as some of the considerable attraction of village cricket lies in the appeal of a game on the village green with perhaps a church and a pub in the background, so the approach to a golf club can heighten the excitement of the whole golfing experience. One thinks, for example, of the moment you leave the road to get to Royal Birkdale and turn towards the clubhouse and see the regal dunes topped with waving marram grass. One thinks also of the road over the marshes that guards the entrance to Royal West Norfolk, which for maximum effect must be driven over when the mist is just rising and birds are crying mournfully overhead. Arriving at Royal Porthcawl the visitor circumnavigates a few roundabouts, passes quickly through a housing estate that no one would call beguiling and then, suddenly, it is there ahead of you. In the foreground is Lock’s Common with its brilliantly green, spongy turf. It was here that the original holes of the RPGC were laid out and remained that way until cattle, camping and carriage wheels combined to become too much of a nuisance.
In the distance one might be able to see one of John Masefield’s smoke-stacked steamers battling its way down the Bristol Channel. John Jermine, who won the Wales Amateur Championship when he was 54, once said that no matter how far he had driven and how tired he was, his spirits were lifted by the first sight of Porthcawl’s clubhouse nestling down near the sea and the thought of the course beyond. Even the rest home to the right of the clubhouse, where Florence Nightingale once helped out and which is so often mistaken for the clubhouse, adds to the dignity of the drive in to the golf club.
Since the last years of the 19th century golfers have sought the sanctuary of golf at Royal Porthcawl. For well over one century they have hung their jackets on hooks that look as though they are over one hundred years old, sat on benches that have served thousands of golfers down the years and noted the memorabilia that surrounds them – the photographs of the club captains for example, the portrait of Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales, who would become a patron of the club. The portrait bears closer scrutiny. Wearing a jacket with the top two of the three buttons done up and with an upended club in his left hand, the future Edward VIII looks every inch the golfing charmer. HRH played there in December 1932 on a day when it was so windy that a coastguard had to climb up a very wobbly pole to secure the club flag. The Prince arrived the night before on board the Royal train and slept the night in a siding.
The visitors may pass through two bars, known as Trap One and Trap Two, and then out of the clubhouse, past the pro’s shop, the secretary’s office and up to the 1st tee where they will confront a magnificent course that has the true characteristics of a links course and, in addition, the bonus of having the sea being visible from every hole. Its first three holes run parallel with the shore before the course turns inland and twists and winds over terrain that could be described as uplands, containing waving banks of broom and gorse and some heather, not always what you expect on a links…
