William Watson was born in his family’s Dura Den Cottage, outside Cupar in Fife, in 1860. He was the first of seven children – three boys and four girls – brought into the world by Mary and John Cobb Watson. His father operated farms and mills in the local area, spending his leisure time playing golf on the links at St Andrews, where he was a member of the R&A.

When not playing golf, Watson helped to look after his father’s flax seed mills whilst also studying at St. Andrews University. His parents often entertained visiting golfers and one of these guests was Judge Martin B. Koon from Minneapolis, who was introduced to the family by banker David R. Forgan, a former resident of St. Andrews.

The judge was suitably impressed by Watson's golfing knowledge. After returning to Minnesota, Koon and a number of influential Minneapolis businessmen met to discuss setting up their own golf course and it didn’t take them long to decide the best man to lay out their initial 9-hole course.

William accepted their invitation to leave home and set sail for the United States, boarding the RMS Etruria at Liverpool in England in October of 1898 then crossing the Atlantic to assist with establishing what became the Minikahda Club in Minneapolis.

A year later, Watson moved to Los Angeles, where his first job was as greenkeeper and instructor at the Green Hotel course in Pasadena. Within a few months, he had laid out a 9-hole course at Casa Loma for Redlands Country Club and he built a course for Hotel Raymond, the first big resort in the San Gabriel Valley. In 1900, the City of Los Angeles engaged Watson to design its first public 9-hole course, called Garvanza Links, with oiled-sand putting surfaces on a property that still remains part of a city park.

Watson founded William Watson Golf Accessories in 1900 to sell golf equipment and opened a distribution office in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce building, where he also worked on his course designs. His father – who lost his mill business due to the non-repayment of a loan – and his brother joined him the following year, helping to operate the store. Annandale Golf Club then hired Watson in 1906 lay out a course (with coconut fibre mats for tees and oiled sand “greens”) with his father and brother hired as assistant professionals.

When the Watson family worked at Annandale, Billy Bell was the caddie master. He learned very quickly from Watson and became supervisor of construction for a few of his projects, going on to become George C. Thomas’s main construction supervisor. Bell eventually formed his own company and would go on to become well known for remodelling William Watson courses, often within a few short years of their original design and build.

William Watson married Ada Grace Sanborn from Hebron in New Hampshire in 1906, when he was 46 and she was 34. Ada took over the running of the golf equipment company in 1913 Ada and moved their office to the Knickerbocker building in downtown Los Angeles, making use of more than half the eighth floor of the building. She even visited some work sites with Watson to learn the supply-side of the construction business.

Watson would design or redesign over a hundred courses from Virginia in the east to California in the west. He started out when most people in the United States knew little about the game, soon becoming known as a golfing authority.

The following is an edited extract from an article written by Marty Joy, the Head professional at Belvedere Golf Club in Michigan. Marty also kindly supplied the photo of William Watson and the clipping from The Country Club Magazine and Pacific Golf & Motor:

The Chicago Club appointed William as its head professional in 1914, to be in charge of its course on the north side of Charlevoix, which had a good reputation for its superior routing and excellent conditioning. Watson would return seasonally to the Charlevoix Golf Club for the following twenty years.

Opposite the Chicago Club, on the south side of Pine River in Charlevoix, stood the Belvedere Club, which had started out in 1878 as a Baptist summer camp and developed into a 100-acre resort destination with clay tennis courts, a beach frontage and 90-room hotel.

What Belvedere didn’t have was a golf club so, in 1925, two large, marshy parcels of land outside Charlevoix were acquired for the purpose of building a golf course. William Watson had spent the previous twelve summer seasons in the area and his reputation as a golf course architect was known nationwide.

Indeed, his advice was requested by some of the best golf designers of the time, including Billy Bell, Tom Bendelow, Robert Hunter, Donald Ross, George C. Thomas and Sam Whiting. The Belvedere committee had only one man on its short list to design its course and that person was William Watson.

He surveyed the property, laying out tees, bunkers and greens. By the start of 1926, the design work was finished and it was time for the Lavern A. Miller Landscape Company – which had worked on other Watson projects – to do the construction.

In the summer of 1927, Belvedere officially opened and William Watson was engaged as its first professional. Watson worked at both Belvedere Golf Club and the Charlevoix Golf Club seasonally from 1927 to 1930, arriving in Charlevoix in late June and leaving for California in early September.

The stock market crash of 1929 curtailed Watson’s career and his last known design was the course at El Sobrante Golf Club in San Pablo, California that same year. Unfortunately, it was never completed due to the onset of the Great Depression. He spent his later years at home in Los Angeles with his wife Ada, until his death on 2nd September 1941.

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A Watson newspaper advertisement headed Laying Out of Golf Courses ran as follows in The Los Angeles Times:

I make a speciality of laying out new courses and remodelling of old ones on the best up-to-date scientific lines: on plans that afford the maximum of interest and pleasure to all members of the club, be his handicap high or low.

These are some important golf courses I have layout out that are evidence of the character of the work I do:

Altadena Country Club, Pasadena, Cal.

Interlachen Country Club, Minneapolis, Minn.

Westmoreland Country Club, Evanston, Ill.

Midwick Country Club, Los Angeles, Cal.

Toledo Country Club, Toledo, O.

Thousand Islands Country Club, Alexandria Bay. N.Y.

Have also remodeled the well known Homewood and Ravisloe courses of Chicago, making of them much better tests of golf than they were before.

An extensive and critical study of the best golf holes in Scotland and England during the past summer enables me to apply the fresh knowledge gained of bunkering, trapping and other matters connected with scientific course construction to American golf courses.

Shall be pleased to visit and inspect any tract of land contemplated for a new golf course, or to advise with club officials on any question pertaining to a golf course.

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Architect Todd Eckenrode has restored a number of Watson designs and he had this to say about the architect:

“His name, his star, is certainly rising. As we all got interested in architecture in the last decade or two, we are finding these gems like Orinda, Diablo, Harding Park and Belvedere. Watson utilized the bold, often severe features of the existing terrain beautifully in his routings. He wasn’t afraid to play along a sweeping hillside or up and over a ridge. He understood how to align a golf hole that would take maximum advantage of the contours and kick-slopes and would reward a player who could figure that out. He had a wonderful way of using diagonals, of rewarding the player who recognized the proper angle.

He never practiced a cookie-cutter approach to design. He was terrific in using the land’s natural features, but he was also skilled at creating features when needed. For example, at Orinda and Diablo, in Northern California, he brought in the tractors and created wonderfully irregular greenside mounds that tied in superbly to the green contours. Just off the green, between the mounds, he constructed closely mown swales that pull the ball away from the green. It inevitably led to interesting recovery shots.”