From Raleigh Bicycles to a centenary.

Beeston Fields is one of the more unusual founding stories in English golf. The land and the clubhouse came from the family that built the Raleigh Bicycle Company; the course came from the longest-serving professional in the Midlands; the opening ceremony came from a reigning Open Champion. The combination of those three is why the club still feels different to play.

The Bowden family

The clubhouse and surrounding parkland were the family home of Sir Harold Bowden, second-generation head of the Raleigh Bicycle Company and one of the most influential industrialists in early-twentieth-century Nottingham. The estate had been in the family since his father, Frank Bowden, established Raleigh as a global manufacturer. When the family decided to part with the property in the early 1920s, the terms favoured the founding members of the new golf club.

Tom Williamson and the 1923 course

Tom Williamson was the long-serving professional at Notts Golf Club at Hollinwell, fifteen miles north on the Sherwood sand belt. He was also, quietly, one of the most prolific Midlands course architects of his era. Williamson laid out Beeston Fields’s eighteen holes on rolling ground in 1923; his routing has been refined steadily since but the bones remain.

The Open Champion opens the course

The opening round was played by Arthur Havers in 1923 — in the same summer he had won the Open Championship at Troon by a single shot over Walter Hagen. The opening party at Beeston Fields was, in effect, the new Open Champion’s first ceremonial round on home soil after the win. That counts as a debut.

The century since

The course has been refined through a century of stewardship. The clubhouse has been updated within the bones of the original house. The Old Drive Trackman simulator opened in the past few years, bringing modern coaching into the Victorian rooms. The club marked its centenary in 2023, with a year of events, exhibitions, and a centenary Captain’s cup.