🇬🇧 Molly Gourlay — Britain’s First Woman Golf Course Architect

Player | Designer | Pioneer of Subtle Strategy

🖋️ Introduction

Few figures in early women’s golf bridged talent on the course and creativity off it quite like Mary “Molly” Gourlay (1898–1990).
Known publicly as a champion golfer, England international, and Curtis Cup Captain, she also forged a second, groundbreaking career: golf course architecture.

Working alongside Tom Simpson, one of the most original and artistic designers of the Golden Age, Molly became the first woman in Britain to practise professionally in golf design. Her contribution was not symbolic — it was practical, intellectual, and creative. She walked land, analysed strategy, wrote architectural treatises, and shaped the design thinking of the era.

She understood the game not only as a competitor but as a creator.

“To design is to understand how a hole feels to be played, not just how it looks from above.”
— Molly Gourlay

👩‍💼 Biography: A Champion With an Architect’s Eye

Born in Hampshire and raised in Surrey, Molly Gourlay rose to national prominence between the wars:

• Winner of the English Ladies’ Amateur Championship

• Multiple-time champion in France, Belgium, Sweden

• Nine-time England international

• British Curtis Cup Team Captain

But beneath the competitive résumé was a more unusual legacy.

Her natural grasp of how holes played — angles, carries, lies, tempo, psychology — drew the attention of Tom Simpson, the architectural visionary behind Cruden Bay, Morfontaine, Ballybunion (revisions) and multiple heathland masterpieces. He saw in Molly what few male architects of the era ever encountered:
a top-level player who understood strategy as instinctively as artistry.

By the early 1930s:

• Molly had become Simpson’s design assistant and later partner/director in Simpson & Co.

• She travelled with him on design surveys and club consultations

• She contributed to routing discussions, bunker positioning, contouring, and playability critiques

• She became a familiar sight on projects where no woman had ever been part of the design team

She was not a token addition — she was a working architect.

🌿 Design Philosophy: Thought, Beauty, and the “Search­ing Test”

In 1938–39, Golf Illustrated published Molly’s four-part architecture series:
“What Are Good Holes?”, “One-Shot Holes”, “Short Two-Shot Holes”, “Two-Shot Holes”, and “Three-Shot Holes & Summary.”

These pieces reveal a designer of deep insight, perfectly aligned with Simpson’s strategic school but with her own strong voice.

Her Core Beliefs

1. A Good Hole Is a “Searching Test” for Every Player

A hole must challenge:

• the powerful hitter

• the accurate hitter

• the average player

• the short player

—but it must do so fairly.

Hazards for the “tiger” often don’t affect the “rabbit,” and vice versa. The weaker player’s penalty should be “automatic” — simply needing an extra shot — not endless hacking out of misery.

2. Strategy Over Brutality

Molly rejects penal, blind punishment.
She prefers:

• angled greens

• centreline hazards

• diagonal bunkering

• choices that reward imagination

Each shot must demand “accuracy of thought and action.”

3. Attack and Defence

Golf, to her, is a triangle:

player vs. player vs. course, with the architect arming the course to resist modern power.

4. Resist Mechanisation

By 1938 she was already warning that:

• the modern ball

• graded clubs

• rising hitting distances

were erasing nuance from the game. The architect’s defence, she argued, was to increase the premium on accuracy and strategy, not to chase length endlessly.

5. The Short Hole Is the Soul of a Course

She insisted:

• “Dull short holes are inexcusable.”

• Players have a right to see the entire green on short (<160 yards) one-shotters.

• Semi-visibility and deception — when fair — create delicious tension.

• Great one-shot holes define the character of a course.

6. Beauty Matters

In one of her most passionate sections, she rages against “uglification”:

• bunker shapes like “hip-baths”

• rectangular tees

• perched greens on artificial mounds

• straight-line earthworks

Nature “never works with a ruler,” she writes.
Neither should the architect.

A good bunker should look as if it “growed,” not like a manufactured shape. Beauty is not decoration — it is part of the playing experience.

Molly’s philosophy wasn’t theoretical. From the late 1920s into the 1940s she was actively involved in course design and renovation, especially in partnership with Tom Simpson.

🏗️ Practical Architectural Work

From the late 1920s to the 1940s, Molly Gourlay was actively engaged in design, renovation, and strategic advising.

Below is the consolidated Simpson–Gourlay portfolio, based on verified historical references, contemporary reports, and club records:

🇮🇪 Ireland – The Simpson–Gourlay Cluster

A remarkable run of late-1930s projects where Simpson explicitly worked “with Molly Gourlay”:

• Ballybunion (Old Course) – major 1936–37 revision, re-routing several key holes

• County Louth / Baltray – 1938 renovation, strategic improvements

• Carlow Golf Club – remodel with natural contour emphasis

• Kilkenny Golf Club – fairway and green refinements

These four are the strongest documented examples of Simpson’s use of a woman architect — Molly — in professional practice.

🇬🇧 England

• Camberley Heath (1936 alterations) – enhancements to the 1st, 9th, 18th; praised in newspapers as “artistic and brilliant,” naming Simpson and Miss Gourlay

• Liphook – associated through Simpson’s design updates; modern writers consistently pair the two

• Sunningdale Ladies / Sunningdale Heath – refinement and contour adjustments

🇫🇷 France

• Morfontaine – Simpson-led masterpiece; Molly involved in routing consultations and playability assessments

• Additional new-builds and concept work for French and Belgian clubs (1920s–30s)

🇦🇹 Austria

• Schloss Mittersill – later architectural histories attribute early layout consultation to Simpson & Gourlay

🇸🇨 Scotland**

• Cruden Bay (Simpson revision era) – Molly is noted in correspondence and Simpson’s company histories during this period of his work

Her influence is not limited to named projects. Across Europe, she appears as:

• design assistant

• routing consultant

• strategic advisor

• on-site course walker

• commentator and critic

She saw the course in the same way she played golf: through the lens of strategy, flow, and feeling.

🏗️ Architectural Work & Influence

Key Collaborations & Projects

🧭 Camberley Heath – Her Spiritual Architectural Home

Although her later fame came from the Simpson partnerships, Camberley Heath was the course that shaped her sensibilities and to which she returned throughout her life.

Here she:

• walked with Fowler and Simpson in the early 1920s

• absorbed the heathland principles of angles, minimalism, natural movement

• refined her understanding of strategic bunkering and sightlines

• later acted as a guardian of architectural integrity for decades

Members remembered her:

• advising greenkeepers

• arguing passionately for maintaining heathland ecology

• protecting Fowler/Simpson intent from creeping modernisation

• preserving the artistic essence of the course

Camberley Heath is where she learned architecture —
and where she quietly practised it for the rest of her life.

🪶 Legacy: A Designer Who Played Her Own Designs

Molly Gourlay’s architectural legacy is pioneering, multifaceted, and transformational.

She:

• was Britain’s first professional woman golf architect

• contributed meaningfully to major European designs

• published one of the earliest architectural treatises by a woman

• preserved the integrity of heathland design philosophy

• educated golfers in the artistry of holes

• brought empathy, fairness, and imagination to design

• proved that women could shape the landscape of golf, not merely participate in it

She bridged the early artistry of Ida Dixon and the later professionalism of Alice Dye.
She stands today as a missing link — a woman whose influence was present, powerful, and long overlooked.

“In every curve of land and line of play, she designed empathy into the game.”
— Women’s Golf History Project

For Camberley Heath, for British course architecture, and for women in the profession worldwide,
Molly Gourlay was not only a champion — she was a creator.

Molly Gourlay, golfer and designer — Britain’s first woman to work professionally in golf course architecture.

Learn more about Mollys

• Golfing achievements HERE
• life in her main profile HERE
• role as a referee HERE
• career as a Golf Course Architect HERE