Charles Hugh Alison
Charles Hugh Alison (* 1882 in Preston, † October 20, 1952 in Johannesburg ) was a British golf course architect and a major representative of the Golden Age of golf architecture.
Life and work
After his university studies CH Alison began in 1906 as an assistant to Harry Colt his first experience in the construction of golf courses to collect. From 1908 to 1914 he was Secretary of the Stoke Poges Golf Club, whose place he built together with Colt. As a result, he assisted in other places Colts, so about 1912 in St. George 's Hill. After the First World War, he went to the United States, where he built the last four holes of Pine Valley, among others. 1923 came to Morrison and the already rather loose partnership with MacKenzie was finally dissolved. Colt and Morrison concentrated in the impact on Europe, while Alison went to the USA. From this period come Burning Tree in Maryland (1923 ) and the Milwaukee Country Club ( 1929).
After Black Thursday on October 24, 1929 and the subsequent years of economic crisis, the U.S. had no significant orders more, so Alison went to Japan in 1930. In only three months there he designed several golf courses on their own and let supervise the construction of 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 in 1941 by the military. However, were preserved Hirono in Kobe (1932 ) and the Fuji Course in Kawana (1936 ), since the count of the top names in Japan. But the transformation of Kasumigaseki was a great success. 1931 he also worked at Royal Selangor in Malaysia.
Like MacKenzie in Australia Alison applicable in Japan as the nucleus of the local golf architecture, especially as a mentor of the first Japanese golf architect Kenya Fujita and Seiichi Inoue. His large and deep bunker gained a high reputation and were even " Arizons " named after him, as there had not been similar obstacles in Japan until then. Some of his bunker were larger than the green, which they defended. His other design features are plateau greens and the use of large bodies of water that were in the golden age (and also in Alison's posts) actually frowned upon because of their punishing character.
In 1936 he built another Koninklijke Haagsche for Harry Colt, before the Second - as previously in the First - World War II worked in the army as a descrambler. The end of 1947 he moved to South Africa where he designed, among other things, the Bryanston Country Club (1949) and the Johannesburg Country Club ( 1951).