GOLF: Fiftieth Birthday Bash at Beauport
Beauport Park Golf & Country Club will tomorrow (Saturday) be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of its golf course with a four-ball open tournament. Many former members and players from other local clubs have responded to invitations to compete, and there should be upwards of 150 golfers out on the course. Battle-based financial services firm Douglas Rowe is providing sponsorship.
Roger Hyder, managing director of the club, says: “The club has gone through the mill in recent years, but it has come a long way since we took over nearly five years ago, and we were very keen to recognise this special landmark in the club’s history”.
The course and clubhouse were built and operated originally by Hastings Borough Council as a municipal facility, opening on 1 July 1973. The cost was reported as £200,000 – in today’s money around £3.1 million, the kind of sporting investment which the modern council has long since ceased to contemplate. In a speech at the opening, then chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, Cllr FGL Palmer, told an assembly of around 300 golfers: “To a coastal town such as Hastings, an amenity like this is of great importance. It is bound to attract a lot more visitors to the town”.
Hyder has in his office a picture of the then mayor, Cllr WH Darker undertaking the celebratory tee-off. According to the Hastings Observer report of the following week, his efforts “provided a lesson in determination, if not style, to the watching crowds. He missed the ball completely with the first two strokes but, after removing his mayoral chain, managed a magnificent drive into a nearby clump of trees.”
Clumps of trees, plus what the Observer called “the rugged nature of the course”, referring no doubt to the ups and downs of its terrain, are what a round of golf at Beauport is all about. The course, which has barely changed in its lay-out since 1973, is notoriously tough – but much loved and in better condition, under Hyder’s management, than for several years.
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