Herbert Charles Tippet

Herbert Charles Tippet (1892 - 1947) was a leading British amateur golfer, golf club administrator, and golf course architect in the years between the wars. He was, for a time, a close associate of millionaire American property developer Carl G. Fisher, the man who created the Miami Beach resort, for whom Tippet designed a number of golf courses in Florida and Long Island. He was one of the most successful British amateur golfers of the 1920s and 1930s and later served as secretary to several prestigious UK golf clubs. His wife was the grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Early life and military service

Herbert Charles Coningsby Tippet MC (he preferred to be known as Charles and rarely used his third initial) was born in Newport, Gwent, Wales in 1892 and brought up in Sudbury, Suffolk, the son of a surveyor, Conservative Party agent and keen amateur golfer. Tippet’s father, who was later killed while serving at Gallipoli,^[1] had been captain of Newton Green Golf Club in Sudbury. As a boy, young Charles acquired two things from his father; a life-long fascination with the military and an outstanding ability to play golf. Whilst at private school, Tippet served in the Army Cadet Force and was commissioned into the Territorial Army when it absorbed the Cadet Force in 1908, being commissioned on 27 November 1908 as a Second Lieutenant in the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment based at Bury St. Edmunds.^[2] On leaving school in 1910 he joined the regular army, being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on 2 April 1910,^[3] first in the 4th (Special Reserve) Battalion and later the 2nd Battalion of his father's regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, then stationed at Farnborough Barracks, Hampshire.^[4] By then he had developed his father's love of golf and became a successful amateur in the years immediately prior to the First World War, representing Newton Green and Royal North Devon Golf Club. On 1 December 1911 he was promoted to Lieutenant and transferred back to 4th (Extra Reserve) Battalion, by then stationed at Templemore Barracks in Ireland, where he became a member of the Royal Dublin Golf Club.^[5] On 6 September 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, he was promoted to Captain.^[6]

On 24 April 1916 the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin and the following day Tippet's Battalion was one of a number of units sent in to suppress the uprising. They forced their way into the centre of Dublin and fought the insurgents along the railway line from Broadstone Station as far as Cabra Bridge. After the rebels fled, 4th Battalion formed a cordon around the area until the rising ended.^[7] Shortly after, possibly because of his family connection to the Conservative Party and its strong opposition to Home Rule, Tippet left Ireland. On 14 May 1916 he was posted to France, where he served on the RDF regimental staff as part of 16th (Irish) Division until the end of the war.^[8] No record exists of his military actions although, many years later, his step-son claimed that he had fought gallantly.^[9] In 1919 he was awarded the Military Cross, an award given for "an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy",^[10] along with the standard campaign medals.

Tippet left the army at the end of the war but chose to be known as Captain Tippet in civilian life, a title generally considered appropriate only for ex-cavalry officers, which Tippet was not. He was to re-apply for his commission at the outbreak of the Second World War and on 26 May 1940 was commissioned into the General Service Corps as a Lieutenant^[11] and placed on the General List (a reserve of experienced former officers who could be mobilized if needed), but he did not see active service and was released on health grounds in 1943.^[12]

Golfing career

On leaving the army, Tippet decided to earn his living from golf but, although he was a golfer of considerable ability, he never played as a professional. His real forte was to lie in golf administration and in the designing of golf courses, learning his craft by studying the methods of Old Tom Morris, the architect of Royal North Devon and inventor of the modern golf course, and of James Braid who had re-built Newton Green.^[13] In 1919 Tippet was appointed manager of Ashford Manor Golf Club in Middlesex working for club captain and secretary Harold Hilton, a winner of two British Amateur Open Championships, under whom Tippet learned the business of running a golf club.^[14] Hilton was a well-known player on both sides of the Atlantic having won both the British and US Amateur Championships in 1911 and was a member of the prestigious Apawamis Golf Club in Westchester, New York. When the nearby Meadow Brook Golf Club at Westbury, Long Island were looking for a new secretary in 1921, Hilton recommended his protégé Charles Tippet. Tippet left Southampton for New York on 5 November 1921 being joined a month later by his wife and step-son.

Meadow Brook was at that time a nine-hole course with a history stretching back to 1894. Tippet immediately began working on improvements to the course and started to attract a reputation for his ability as a course designer. After taking up his duties as club secretary, Tippet began competing as an amateur in east coast tournaments while representing both Meadow Brook and Royal North Devon where he had retained his membership. In September 1922 he was the leading amateur in the Metropolitan Open at Lido and the following month he reached the second round of the Nassau Country Club invitation tournament at Glen Cove, New York. In 1923 he finished runner-up in the Metropolitan Amateur Open at Siwanoy, Florida, becoming acquainted with many of the leading US golfers, among them the legendary Gene Sarazen.

That year Tippet was introduced to property millionaire and keen golfer Carl Graham Fisher, possibly by Sarazen who was a friend of both men. Fisher, who was responsible for the development of Miami Beach, was then considering building a number of golf courses in Miami. Charles Tippet was recommended to design them and became closely associated with Fisher for the next few years.^[12] His first design for Fisher was the Bayshore Golf Club at Alton Beach, Miami which opened that same year followed by another 18-hole course at La Gorce. Together with a 9-hole course they formed Fisher’s prestigious Miami Beach Golf Club which he hoped would attract wealthy northerners to Florida. By 1925 Tippet was managing not only Bayshores and Miami Beach Golf Clubs but also the Flamingo Golf Club which he had designed for Fisher as part of his Flamingo Hotel project, along with another of Fisher's developments, the Flamingo Polo Club.^[15] Following the opening of the Miami Beach courses, Tippet was engaged to design two public courses at Hollywood Beach and Normandy Isle, both in Florida. The latter was to be built on 120 acres of land donated to the City of Miami Beach and for which Tippet submitted a building estimate of $119,200.^[16] However, due to the Great Depression, the project was postponed and work did not commence until 1937 using an amended design by Toomy and Flynn.^[17] Another Florida course at Westside, Fort Lauderdale opened in November 1926.^[18]

Buoyed by the success of Miami Beach, Fisher turned his attention to Long Island where he intended to build a "Miami of the North" and in 1926 instructed Captain Tippet to design two new courses at the eastern end of the Hamptons. A new 18-hole course at Montauk Downs opened in 1927 ^[19] and is still considered to be one of the most difficult courses on Long Island due to the strong wind from the ocean on both sides. A short-lived second course was built at nearby Hither Hills. But the Long Island development was not, at the time, a financial success and Tippet’s association with Fisher was finally ended by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which brought the boom in American golf course construction, temporarily, to an end.

Meanwhile, in April 1927, Tippet had returned to England to take up a new post as secretary of Royal Wimbledon Golf Club,^[12] a prestigious club with the Prince of Wales as captain, and he resumed playing in UK amateur competitions, reaching the fifth round of the British Amateur Championship at Royal North Devon in 1931, a tournament then classed as a Major. The following year he reached the last eight in the same championship and was talked about for that year’s Walker Cup team.^[20] In 1935 he won the London Amateur Foursomes.^[21] After ten years at Royal Wimbledon, Tippet moved on to Walton Heath Golf Club where he served as secretary from 1937 until 1945. In 1938, whilst at Walton Heath, Tippet received a commission to re-design Tramore Golf Club, near Waterford in Ireland,^[22] a course which still boasts of his association.

In 1945 he was engaged as secretary by Rye Golf Club in Sussex ^[12] with a brief to re-design the course which he did by creating new short 2nd and 7th holes to avoid a road which crossed the course.^[23] By this time Tippet was not a well man, having been released by the army on health grounds in 1943, and this appointment was to prove his last. On 26 November 1947, he collapsed in his office at Rye and died two days later.

Personal life and reputation

In November 1921 Tippet married Edith Marguerite Shand (née Harrington), a divorcée, formerly married to architectural critic and writer Philip Morton Shand, at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London. The only child of her first marriage, Bruce Middleton Hope Shand (1917 – 2006) married the Hon. Rosalind Cubitt, daughter of Roland Cubitt, 3rd Baron Ashcombe, and was later to become the father of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Immediately after his marriage, Tippet left England to take up his position at Meadow Brook in New York, his wife and step-son following him in December 1921.^[24] Mrs. Tippet and Bruce Shand returned briefly to the UK in June 1923 before returning to America in September, stating their intention to take US citizenship, although this did not happen.^[25] They remained in America until 1927^[26] when Tippet returned to take up his post at Royal Wimbledon, Bruce Shand going to Rugby School, an education paid for by the Shands with whom the Tippets remained friends. Edith Tippet survived her husband by thirty-three years, dying at Cooden Beach, Bexhill, Sussex in 1981. There were no children of the marriage.

In 2005 and 2006 the British Newspaper, The Daily Mail,^[27] ran a series of articles alleging that Charles Tippet had been a "cad" who had exaggerated his war record and exploited his bearing and accent to curry favour in America, and that his wife had been an unfit mother; claiming that she had abandoned her son, having herself been abandoned as a child. The following year, another newspaper, the Daily Mirror, ran the same story.^[28] No evidence was provided by either newspaper to substantiate the accusations against Tippet and the statements about his wife were untrue. (As a child, Mrs.Tippet had lived with her grandparents,^[29] The Tippets had taken their son to live with them in America from 1921 until 1927 but Bruce Shand chose to omit all reference to his early life in America from his autobiography ^[9] giving rise to the misconception that the Tippets had abandoned him.)

Although the Tippets had enjoyed celebrated company and a lavish lifestyle during America’s Jazz Age in the 1920s, Tippet was never a wealthy man. His playing record shows he was clearly a golfer of considerable ability and had he played as a professional in the modern era, he would have been well rewarded. Instead, his amateur status meant he earnt nothing from his playing career and after the lucrative design contracts in America came to an end, he earned a modest income as a golf administrator. There is no record of his having ever owned a house and he left no will and few assets.^[30] However, although his achievements as a golfer are now largely forgotten, several of the courses Captain Tippet built, especially those in America and Ireland, still boast of his association.

Golf courses designed, re-designed or improved by Tippet

• Meadow Brook, Long Island, NY. USA (improvements), 1921
• Bayshore, Miami, FL. USA (now part of Miami Beach Golf Club), 1923
• Bayshore 9-Hole Municipal, Miami, FL. USA,(now part of Miami Beach Golf Club) 1923
• La Gorce, Miami, FL. USA,(now part of Miami Beach Golf Club), 1923
• Flamingo, Biscayne Bay, FL. USA 1923 (converted to a public park 1930)
• Hollywood Beach, Hollywood, FL. USA, 1925
• Montauk Downs, Long Island, NY. USA, 1926-1927
• Hither Hills, Long Island, NY. USA (no longer in existence), 1926-1927
• Westside, Fort Lauderdale, FL. USA, 1926
• Normandy Isle, Miami Beach, FL. USA, (now Normandy Shores) 1927 (design amended 1937)
• Tramore, Waterford, Ireland, 1938
• Rye, Sussex, UK, (re-design of some holes) 1945

Golf clubs represented by Tippet

• Newton Green, Sudbury, UK
• Royal Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
• Royal North Devon, Westward Ho! UK
• Ashford Manor, Ashford, UK
• Meadow Brook, Long Island, NY. USA
• Lido, Long Island, NY, USA
• Royal Wimbledon, London, UK
• Walton Heath, Walton-on-the-Hill, UK
• Rye, Sussex, UK

References

External links