Glamorganshire Golf Club

Glamorganshire Golf Club is located in Lower Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, 7.3 miles (11.7 kilometres) south west from the capital city of Cardiff and is one of the oldest golf clubs in Wales. The club was founded by the Earl of Plymouth.

The club played a leading role in the founding of the Welsh Golf Union and in its early years twice hosted the Welsh Amateur Championship as well as the Welsh Ladies inaugural Championships.

In 1898 the club was the testing ground of Dr Frank Stableford’s new Stableford revolutionary golf scoring system still used today.

Although near the sea, the Glamorganshire course is not a links, but an 18-hole parkland course on gently undulating ground at the eastern edge of what is now Cosmeston Lakes Country Park.

In 1890 the Earl of Plymouth gifted an extensive plot of land in Lower Penarth and the club was founded initially as a nine-hole course. The club undertook an expansion programme to the full eighteen-hole course during 1896 and the following year enabling the 1897 Welsh Amateur Championship to take place in Penarth for the first time.

The Stableford method of golf scoring, a system now utilised and revered, particularly by amateur golfers, the world over, was first devised by a Glamorganshire club member, Dr. Frank Barney Gordon Stableford. He first tried it out on fellow members of the club on 30 September 1898.

Prior to this revolutionary experiment here was no stroke indexing system available to golfers. Essentially all holes were played to par and the ‘Stableford’ points applied. At the end of the game one third of the players handicap was added to the overall ‘Stableford’ adjusted score. The maximum handicap for the event was fifteen. The new system obviously favoured the better golfer at the time which is hardly surprising as the good doctor was a single figure handicapper.

Stableford himself did not actually participate in his initial experiment though he donated a special prize to the winner, Mr W Hastings Watson, who scored a remarkable forty two points. There is no indication of what the members thought about the alternative of scoring by points or, indeed, whether they tried it out on any other occasions.

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Wikipedia