Feature
Wentworth 1926: the forgotten match that gave us the Ryder Cup
A century ago, a seed merchant, a general strike and a 13½-1½ hammering at Wentworth set up golf's greatest team event. As Adare Manor looms, the story of the match the record books left out.
On 7 June 1926, readers of the Auckland Star on the far side of the world found a short cable from London on page eight. England had beaten America, it reported, and the sub-headline was blunt about why: “Barnes and Hagen off colour.”
The match it described had been played two days earlier on the East Course at Wentworth, in Surrey. Britain’s professionals had beaten a team of leading players from the United States by 13½ points to 1½. The cable called it the Ryder Cup. The record books do not. Officially, the Ryder Cup began a year later in Massachusetts, and the Wentworth match has spent a century as a footnote.
The Americans head to Adare Manor next September, a hundred years after that first official match. The one that came first involved a seed merchant who took up golf at about 50, a general strike, a visiting team with several players born outside the United States, and a conversation after the golf.
The seed merchant from St Albans
Samuel Ryder was born in Lancashire in 1858 and moved to St Albans in 1895 to build a business on a simple idea: selling garden seeds by post in packets that cost a penny each. It worked. According to the St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society, his firm on Holywell Hill employed around 300 people by 1922, and Ryder was known as a progressive employer. He was also a town councillor and, in 1905, mayor of St Albans.
Golf came late. Ryder took up the game at about 50, on medical advice, as a way to get fresh air and exercise. Verulam Golf Club, where he became a member and later captain, tells the story of his minister urging him out onto the course. He took to it quickly enough to become a single-figure player.
According to Wikipedia’s account of his life, Ryder came to know the Whitcombe brothers and learned how hard it was for British pros to make a living. From 1923 he began sponsoring tournaments. From late 1925 he employed Abe Mitchell, one of Britain’s leading professionals, as his personal tutor, partly so Mitchell could afford to keep competing, according to Today’s Golfer.
An idea already in the air
Ryder did not invent the transatlantic professional match. In 1921, a British team had beaten an American side at Gleneagles. That match is regarded as unofficial too, partly because Walter Hagen picked the American team himself rather than the PGA of America doing it.
In 1926 many leading Americans were crossing the Atlantic for the Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes later in June, which made a match beforehand practical.
The General Strike in May 1926 threw transport into chaos, and for weeks nobody could be sure how many American professionals would make the trip. Ryder had promised a trophy, but with the American team so uncertain he held it back. That, Today’s Golfer notes, is the first reason the Wentworth match is not counted.
The second reason was the team itself. Hagen’s side included men who had been born elsewhere and made their careers in the United States: Jim Barnes was Cornish, Tommy Armour and Fred McLeod were Scots, and Joe Kirkwood was Australian. Verulam’s own history of the Cup points out that several of the ten were not American-born, which is why the official match that followed was restricted to native-born players.
Two days at Wentworth
Wentworth’s East Course, a Harry Colt design that had opened only two years earlier, hosted five foursomes on the first day and the singles on the second.
The foursomes were a whitewash. The contemporary cable report records Britain winning all five, and in the top match Mitchell and George Duncan, the 1920 Open champion, beat Barnes and Hagen by 9 and 8. Mitchell and Duncan are the two men in the photograph at the top of this page, taken in 1921.
Wentworth’s clubhouse (2006). Photo: A1833 / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
The singles were no gentler. Mitchell beat Barnes again, 8 and 7. Duncan, playing Hagen, the biggest name in the American game, won 6 and 5. By the end, Britain had 13½ points to America’s 1½.
A footnote to the footnote: Al Watrous, one of the Americans beaten at Wentworth, finished runner-up in the Open at Lytham three weeks later, two shots behind the amateur Bobby Jones, with Hagen tied third.
The conversation afterwards
According to Verulam Golf Club, Ryder, Duncan, Mitchell and Hagen talked after the match and agreed that the contest should carry on, every two years. Ryder would give his trophy, a gold cup made by the London silversmiths Mappin & Webb.
It is often said that the small golfer on top of the cup is modelled on Mitchell, and his Wikipedia entry repeats it. LINKS Magazine disputes it, pointing out that the figure uses a Vardon grip while Mitchell did not, and that similar figures appeared on many trophies of the time.
1927, and the men who missed it
The first official Ryder Cup was played at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts on 3 and 4 June 1927, under a formal deed of trust. The Americans won 9½ to 2½.
Two of the central figures were not there. Mitchell had been named Britain’s player-captain, but appendicitis kept him at home and Ted Ray led the team instead. Ryder himself was too ill to travel. Hagen, who had been on the wrong end at Wentworth, captained the winning side and received the cup.
Mitchell did get his Ryder Cups in the end, playing in 1929, 1931 and 1933, and finishing on the winning side twice. He never won a major, despite eight top-ten finishes in the Open. Ryder died in January 1936 and is buried in St Albans, where his old seed hall on Holywell Hill still stands.
Wentworth hosted an official match in 1953, on the West Course. Great Britain and Ireland became Europe in 1979, and the side that takes on the Americans at Adare Manor next September will be marking a century of official matches, counted from Worcester in 1927.
Sources
- Papers Past: Auckland Star, “Professional golf”, 7 June 1926
- Today’s Golfer: Why the “first” Ryder Cup was scrubbed from the record books
- Verulam Golf Club: The Ryder Cup
- St Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural & Archaeological Society: Remembering Samuel Ryder
- Ryder Cup European Development Trust: History of the Ryder Cup matches
- LINKS Magazine: 5 myths about the Ryder Cup
- GOLF.com: Sam Ryder, the man who brought the Ryder Cup to life
- Wikipedia: Samuel Ryder
- Wikipedia: Ryder Cup
- Wikipedia: 1927 Ryder Cup
- Wikipedia: Abe Mitchell
- Wikipedia: 1926 Open Championship
- Wikipedia: Wentworth Club
Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it. Our editorial standards.
