£100,000 a year for lease

of Hazlehead facilties:

Public voice their anger

FROM TODAY'S PRESS AND JOURNAL

By ROSS DAVIDSON

Residents voiced their anger at multi-million pound plans to redevelop an Aberdeen municipal golf course after it emerged the city council would receive just £100,000 per year from the deal.

More than 160 people met last night to speak out against the proposals for Hazlehead golf course which was opened in 1927.

Craigiebuckler and Seafield Community Council was told the local authority would get £100,000 per year for leasing the course to the Mackenzie Club consortium.

Area Liberal Democrat councillor Martin Greig, who chaired last night's meeting, said the deal would be renegotiated after 10 years of the 99-year lease.

Local residents at the meeting unanimously voted against supporting the plans which would include a hotel, a £2.85 million clubhouse and a golf academy.

The proposals will go before a full city council meeting for final approval later this month.

Golfers and residents attacked the plans last night and demanded a public consultation after concerns were raised about the amount of information released by the council.

Jim Douglas, 70, lives in the area and regularly uses Hazlehead's golf facilities.

He said: "Hazlehead was given to the citizens of Aberdeen years ago and it belongs to us. It cannot be sold off to the highest bidder.

"The company has said the course will be affordable - but also that it will be better than Augusta.

"That does not make any sense. No deveoper will work on a golf coure without wanting to make money.

Conservative councillor for the area, Jim Farquharson, said it was important to allow the Mackenzie Club the opportunity to prove it could offer affordable and accessible golf at Hazlehead but he admitted he was unsure it could be done.

Speaking after the meeting, Mr Greig said: "It is clear there is concerrn that Hazlehead Park will be lost as well as the golf course and that losing one of the city's best amenities is unacceptable. I hope the people who came here tonight will write to the council's chief executive with their views."

City businessman Brian Hendry, pictured above, a self-confessed "golf nut" when it comes to courses designed by the late Dr Alister Mackenzie, is the man leading the consortium. His original estimate of the cost of the enterprise was £10million.

The Great Hazlehead Controversy lives on ....

COLIN FARQUHARSON writes:

This is not the first time that the Hazlehead muncipal golf course has been involved in controversy with citizens of Aberdeen voicing their anger and disapproval. It's a replay of the mid-1920s when the cost - "It will bankrupt the city," was one cry - of the design and construction of the course by Dr Alister Mackenzie (best remembered for his work on the home of the US Masters, the Augusta National course) came in for widespread public critcism in the columns of the "Press and Journal."

The Hazlehead 18-hole course was officially opened on Saturday, July 2, 1927 with an exhibition match (which drew a gallery of between 4,000 and 5,000) between 50-year-old J P Taylor, five times Open champion, and 30-year-old Durham-born Aberdeen University graduate Dr William Tweddell who had won the British amateur championship at Hoylake a few weeks earlier.

Aberdeen Lord Provost Andrew Lewis had the honour of driving the first ball.

The P&J said that both Taylor and Tweddell went round in an approximate 76 shots.

It was on April 2, 1923 that the Aberdeen Town Council had decided to lay out a golf course at Hazlehead at an estimated cost of £8,000 (a lot of money in those days). Dr Mackenzie, Leeds, was engaged, not only to design the course but also to construct it.

Dr Mackenzie gave an assurance early on that the cost of his work would not exceed £10,000 but in January 1925, he reported that his estimate had been based on the assumption that the price obtained for timber would pay not only for the cutting of the trees but also for their uprooting. The actual cost to that date was already £10,415.

Dr Mackenzie also told the town council that the engineering difficulties had also been much more than he could have reasonably expected ... "In fact, the difficulties have been more formidable than those in the construction of any golf course in Europe!"

Throughout the formation of the course, there was a fierce public controversy over the nature of the work. Dr Mackenzie himself was widely criticised in respect of his estmating. Later events suggested that the total cost proved to be £18,000, i.e. £1,000 per hole, which was a massive outlay in the 1920s, particularly for a municipal golf course.

In fact, I have a photo-copy of Dr Mackenzie's original plan for the Hazlehead lay-out. It is not exactly the same as the one over which the Taylor v Tweddell exhibition match was staged, nor is it the course as it is today. The parkland 10th and 11th were not in the first blueprint.

Although Dr Mackenzie never confirmed it, the suggestion was that it would have been just too expensive to fell more trees, drain more peat bogs and remove more stones to have the course that the designer envisaged.

But, for many years, it was ranked as the No 1 municipal golf course in Scotland if not farther afield.

Yorkshire-born Dr Mackenzie died in Santa Cruz, California in 1934.

But the Great Hazlehead Controvery lives on ...