In 1895, Tom Simpson matriculated into Trinity Hall, Cambridge to read Law, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1898, followed by a master's degree in 1902. He married Edith Baynes a year later then was admitted to the Bar in 1905. Strangely, there’s no record of him playing golf competitively whilst at university, though he was subsequently elected to the Oxford & Cambridge Golfing Society in 1934.

A biography of Tom Simpson was published in 

: "A scratch golfer, he played most of his golf at Woking, and became interested in golf course design as he observed the remodelling of Woking's course by club members John Law and Stuart Paton."


Simpson, the only son of mining and printing magnate William Simpson and his wife Mary, spent only five years as a barrister in the legal profession before leaving behind the stifling offices at the Temple in London for a career as a golf course architect with 

Some of his best work was conducted right at the very start of his design career, when he laid out the 9-hole Vallière course at Morfontaine and extended the 9-hole Fontainebleu course to an 18-hole layout. These early French assignments were by no means be his last in that country; in the latter half of the 1920s, he would return to work at Morfontaine and Chantilly, in addition to laying out new courses at Chiberta and Deauville.


The outbreak of World War I curtailed much of Simpson’s design efforts whilst employed with the Ministry of Munitions during hostilities but his architectural talents were put to full use when he became a partner in the Fowler, 

, Simpson and Croome design firm in 1920. Three years later, Simpson moved with his wife and son from Eastbourne to ‘Quinces’ in Bramshott, the next village to Liphook, which then became the firm’s main office (and the family home for more than twenty years).

Simpson handled most of the company’s business in Europe, mainly in Belgium and France, where he laid out or refashioned some of the finest courses on the continent, including Chantilly and Morfontaine, which is widely regarded as his architectural pièce de résistance. He also designed quite a few private courses for the likes of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Sir Mortimer Singer and the Rothchild family.

By the end of the 1920s, his association with Fowler, Abercromby and Croome had ended but he engaged 

 to work with him for a while around that time, renovating the likes of New Zealand and Royal Fagnes. Sutton and Sons built nearly all his golf courses, at home as well as abroad, and they formed a formidable design/construction team over many years.

His next star pupil would be Molly Gourlay, the 2-time English Ladies Amateur Champion, who became a director in Simpson & Co. in 1936. Together, they remodelled four courses in Molly’s native country, namely Ballybunion and Kilkenny (1936), Carlow (1937) and County Louth (1938). Simpson was the first designer to employ a woman's architectural skills.

During the Second World War, Simpson relocated to Humbly Grove, close to Basingstoke, bringing with him his collection of wines, walking sticks, cigars, paintings, etchings and Persian rugs. Many may have thought he was near to retirement but Simpson was far from finished.


After World War II, Simpson worked for a few years in Spain, collaborating on a few projects with local designer 

 before finally retiring in the mid-1950s. From then until his death in 1964, much of his time was spent at his estate in Hampshire writing magazine articles and essays as well as preparing texts for lectures.

 by Alfonso Erhardt, the author observes: “Simpson was a noted eccentric: a collector of walking sticks, Persian rugs, 18th century furniture and cigars. He made a note in a book of every wine he tasted; he took up needlework and sewed maps of his favourite golf holes.”

paid this tribute to Simpson: “He believed the real architectural masterpiece is born and not made, but he belonged to the generation with little or no access to heavy machinery. Some see it as an advantage that he and his contemporaries could only build a certain way. It is a triumph for their ingenuity that they managed so well.” He also described Simpson as “a man of rich and varied talents, a distinguished golf course architect never afraid to speak his mind. It was a combination that made him a colourful and controversial figure although his controversial side, coupled with a whiff of eccentricity, was the offshoot of a penchant for the spotlight.”


Geoff Cornish and Ron Whitten describe him as follows in their book 

: “Always a colourful figure, Tom Simpson toured the English countryside in a chauffeur-driven silver Rolls Royce and [he] often appeared for inspections in an embroidered cloak and beret.”

Tom Mackenzie, partner in the design firm 

, has no doubts about where the architect ranks amongst his fellow practitioners: “Tom Simpson is one of the unsung heroes of golf course architecture, whose deserved position is alongside 

 fully endorses that opinion: “I love the artistry of MacKenzie and Colt’s ideas are still applicable today. But for my money Tom Simpson should always be part of that conversation. That Golden Age period set the standards of golf course architecture. So much of what we do today is informed by it – and Tom Simpson contributed to it as much as anybody.”


Tom Simpson illustrated his works with pen and ink, at times embellishing images with water colour, and his illustrations featured regularly in articles written by Bernard Darwin for 

. He was a very good painter, acting as the art critic for the 

and he had a hundred watercolours (mainly of Cornish coastal locations) exhibited at Victoria Galleries in 1911. He could also turn his hand to needlework, which was a skill he used to illustrate pictures of golf holes, and he was known to produce scaled plasticine models of greens he was working on.


Simpson was a man of considerable financial means so he was never reliant on golf to earn a living and this was evident in the way he went about his business. Henry Longhurst, in his autobiography 

, asserted that Simpson “didn’t gave a damn for anyone, particularly golf club committees.”


Bernard Darwin wrote the following in the introduction to Martin Sutton's 1933 book 

Golf Courses - Design, Construction and Upkeep

: "'The main essential of a great course,' as Mr. Simpson succinctly observes, 'is that it should provide an interesting and fair test of golf for every player, irrespective of handicap.' That sounds simple, but there are a few people born with a talent for producing this result better than the rest, and when they have cultivated that talent by anxious thought and long experience, why then they do it ever so much better."

: "Although Simpson experimented with golf holes, he believed the Old Course at St Andrews to be the only enduring test on course design. There are five basic principles that all golf course architects must surely adhere to when considering the design of a golf course:

1. Each hole must be interesting
2. The must be a variety of hole design
3. The natural beauty must be impaired as little as possible
4. The premium must be put on good golf
5. The course must be equally interesting to both the scratch player and high handicap player

Simpson was an accomplished artist, and illustrated his works in colour sketches."

: “Simpson, more than any of his contemporaries, pushed design to its limits in the search for interest and excitement. There 

 limits, however. He recognised that, only a little farther on, a hole became fluky and silly (sometimes people thought he had crossed that line). Design which went all the way up to this point produced a ‘mad masterpiece’. It would begin working on the player’s mind even before he got to the tee. St Andrews 12, 13, 14, 16, & 17; Prestwick, Sea Headrig; Woking, No.4; West Sussex, No.13 and Addington, No.8 – all these qualified as ‘mad masterpieces’. A hole must either be more difficult that it looks or look more difficult than it is. It must never be what it looks.”

"Simpson's ‘Bible’ consisted of a 272 page notebook, thumb indexed alphabetically, into which he wrote or pasted every scrap of information which he thought might ever be useful to him in his work while on travels. They covered design, building, greenkeeping, surveying, watering, estimating, stock replies to enquiries, standard forms of report and arrangement, fees, useful quotations, equipment and much more. All this was bound in an old leather binding apparently removed from another book… Almost all the pages of the book have been used, but some are blank, or absent. It starts with two salutary inscriptions:

‘N.B. The really wise lawyer is not the one who knows and memorises the law but rather knows where to find it. Hence this book. This is true of The Golf Secretary & The Golf Architect.’

‘Almost ninety percent of criticisms made by members are due to Invincible Ignorance.’”

Tom Simpson’s “Bible” was handed down to C.K. Cotton and was subsequently gifted to Donald Steel, who commented as follows in his book 

; “but perhaps Ken’s greatest act of kindness to me was his bestowal of Tom Simpson’s ‘Golf Architect’s Bible’ which is an amazing leather bound miscellany of architectural and greenkeeping ‘secrets’. The fact that there is only one copy is because it is predominantly hand-written.”


has this to say about the architect: “Ever the quintessential artist, Tom Simpson is thought to have been eccentric. Simpson was always happy to promote his own work, and was never short of an opinion. Upon attaining a new commission, his habit was to arrive at the club in a silver-coloured Rolls Royce: just to prove that he did not need the money.

However, although perhaps outwardly arrogant, Tom Simpson frequently held those of merit in high regard. In 

, Simpson credits Harry Colt, John Abercromby and Herbert Fowler with saving golf from ‘the Dark Ages’“.

 magazine, made mention of Simpson’s natural ability to court controversy: “Despite the obvious flair Simpson brought to golf course creation, his ideas were not universally popular. His unique ‘customer-is-always-wrong’ approach did him few favours, but the plain fact was that Planet Golf did not wholly buy into his practices. His belief in trapping the centre of the fairway to promote strategy was a tough sell, and whenever he did so, he was criticised.

His famous fairway trap at Carnoustie’s par-5 6th – the one that created Hogan’s Alley – was one of the few that was actually built; many others, like those advised for Muirfield’s 12th, were not, though Muirfield did adopt his suggestion of a more central trap – ‘Simpson’s Folly’ – some 40 yards short of the 9th green.

Neither did Simpson’s relish for causing mental mayhem endear him. A confirmed amateur, he enjoyed and encouraged luck; he liked to use slopes and shapes to confound the golfer; something of a design satirist, he especially liked trapping the golfer who flexed his muscles before engaging the grey matter. His contrary nature meant that, at times, he seemed to bring these elements into his design just to goad the more sober and staid golf course committees who had commissioned him.

Surely the best examples of these issues came at Harry Colt’s Sunningdale New. In 1934 Simpson created four new holes, the 6th-9th, as part of a comprehensive redesign. However they proved so unpopular that within two years Colt himself had been drafted in to literally reverse them. Simpson suffered a similar fate both at Royal Porthcawl and Rye, where some of his comprehensive 1930s revisions were later redesigned.”

Tom Simpson and H. N. Wethered (the father of Roger and Joyce) co-wrote 

Simpson also contributed four chapters to Roger and Joyce Wethered’s 

Golf Courses: Design, Construction and Upkeep

 by Martin Sutton, published in 1933, revised in 1950.

 by Fred Hawtree was published by Rhod McEwan in 2016 and it’s essential reading for anybody interested in Simpson’s work:

"It is only the mad masterpieces of the world that live in one's memory, such as holes 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17 at St Andrews, Sea Headrig at Prestwick, the 4th at Woking, the 14th at Liphook, the 13th at West Sussex and the 8th at Addington, to mention but a few of the classics." Tom Simpson

Tom Simpson

Tom Simpson spent only five years as a barrister before leaving behind the stifling offices at the Temple in London for a career as a golf course architect with Herbert Fowler in 1910.

North East France

Open de France

St Andrews Trophy

Vagliano Trophy

European Amateur

European Amateur Team

Jacques Léglise Trophy

France

According to the old Big Bopper song, “Chantilly Lace had a pretty face and a wiggle in her walk”. Golf de Chantilly is far more than a pretty face; it’s one of Europe’s most glorious courses.

Chantilly is set amidst the forest of the Ile de France, approximately 30 miles to the north of Paris. The club was originally founded in 1909 and it has played host to numerous French Opens, the first of which was the 1913 edition, won by George Duncan. His score of 304 is the highest in the competition's history, which bears testament to the Chantilly challenge.

The very best have teed it up at Chantilly, including the great Bobby Jones and Nick Faldo (who won the French Open here). The flamboyant English architect, Tom Simpson, laid out the course and he utilised penal bunkering in the extreme. Measuring 6,444 metres from the back tees Le Vineuil is an exacting test. You’ll not only need length from the tee but also accuracy to avoid the forest. You’ll also need to keep out of those menacing bunkers to score well.

The whole Chantilly experience is distinctly traditional and some say that it has a definite British feel. With 36 holes (Le Vineuil and Les Longères) and a clubhouse that is very reminiscent of that at Sunningdale are we sure we're in France? We are certain that the spirit of Tom Simpson and his silver chauffeur driven Rolls Royce lives here.

Chantilly (Vineuil)

Saint-Cloud (Vert)

Continental Europe

According to the old Big Bopper song, "Chantilly Lace had a pretty face and a wiggle in her walk". Golf de Chantilly is far more than a pretty face; it’s one of Europe’s most glorious courses.