How it started

Posting this in 2018 due to a family enquiry about their great grandfather's golfing past. This was how things looked 60 years ago. I don't have the dates the next few journal photos were taken on and have simply shown them as a series even if they were often shot on the same day. I think they are too valuable a record not to be recorded.

My father had been employed by Trinidad Petroleum Development Company in 1947 as a land surveyor for their oil drilling and refinery business in Trinidad. A small independent which I think was purchased by BP in 1956. There are several entries in the House of Commons Hansard of questions being raised in November and December 1956 into the deal and the apparent blocking of an attempt by a US company to purchase it. I need to research a bit more.

So I guess it was BP taking over that brought about the decision to build a golf course for the ex-Pat employees. Other oil companies in Trinidad had golf courses for their ex-Pats (Texaco & Shell) and my father as a keen golfer had played at most of the golf courses on the island. He lists seven courses in a note he made of courses played and included the well known Brighton Golf Course (Texaco) not too far away. I still have some glass bottomed pewter tankards he won there, including one from 1952.

As my father was a surveyor, had also been in charge of TPDs sideline agricultural farms (coffee, cocoa, citrus, bananas and small dairy herd ), came from a farming family (in Norfolk, UK) and was a keen golfer, he was charged with finding a site on company lands, designing a course and finally constructing it. This must have happened around 1957 on a site north of the village of Palo Seco on the southern coast of the island.

I do remember going out with my father to look at the bulldozers in action tackling the jungle or as it was known locally "Bush". I am sure there is a photo of this somewhere in my piles of memorabilia.

The photo is from an album where my father has captioned it with
" See background - it was all like this before bulldozing".

The golf course was ploughed up by my father about 10 years after he had built it, as the company had an image problem. Laying off employees with the fall in petroleum market and comparatively luxury facilities for the ex-Pats. Truth is most ex-Pats had already left as BP was in the process of selling off and they asked him to make a modern show dairy farm for the entire island as well as form the basis for the ex-employees to have a couple of cows a bit of land and use a central milking unit which would market the milk.