Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Open Championship

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Open Championship

1920: Deal

	Player	Score
1	George Duncan	303
2	Sandy Herd	305
3	Ted Ray	306
4	Abe Mitchell	307
5	Len Holland	308
6	Jim Barnes	309
7	Arthur Havers	313
	Sidney Wingate	313
9	G R Buckle	315
	Archie Compston William Horne	315

The first Open after the war was the first to be controlled solely by the R&A. The, then, six host clubs decided that it was best for the future of the championship that there be only one controlling body. George Duncan had finished in the top ten six times before the war and this was to be, somewhat surprisingly, his only success. It came despite two opening rounds of 80. 71 the following morning, and 72 in the afternoon, gave him the Claret Jug by two shots. These bare statistics do not convey the ground he made up in those final rounds. At the start of the third round Abe Mitchell was thirteen strokes ahead of Duncan and Bernard Darwin wrote of two 'what - ifs'. What if Mitchell had stayed warm in his rooms instead of coming up to the course, hours ahead of time on a cold day, to watch? What if Duncan had not finished his round of 71, to a tremendous cheer, just as Mitchell began his? He reached the first green in two. Bernard Darwin takes up the story 'all seemed well enough - till he took three putts. Much the same thing happened at the second and the third and at the Sandy Parlour; he made no gross mistakes but at each hole a stroke was frittered away, and then as a culminating horror he topped his tee shot into a bunker almost in front of his nose, tried for too much, took two to get out and took seven to the hole .... He finished in 84, but the whole thirteen strokes of his lead had vanished like a puff of smoke. By the time he had finished Duncan was on his way round for a second time'.