Dear Derren

Successful in their negotiations with Mrs. Stutt, the group organised a meeting on May, 1924, to incorporate the Box Hill GC. Some 57 Box Hill golfers and friends voted to form a committee, with Richards as president, and Browne as captain. The assets of the old club were taken over, and it was decided in its new incarnation it would be known as Eastern Golf Club.

Keen to make up for lost time the committee immediately set about building a course, aided in no small way by Tullamore's gardener, a tall, powerfully-built Englishman in his 40's named Sam Berriman, who was no stranger to golf and golf courses, having had some involvement with Riversdale GC in the early 1900's.

They worked quickly and, it seems, with some ruthlessness. The owners of livestock which still grazed upon the site, were told to remove them within seven days, otherwise they would be impounded.

But even with the cattle gone things apparently didn't move quickly enough for the committee and so, with the opening day already locked in, it was decided to go with nine temporary holes. Thus on June 14, 1924, with much pomp and ceremony, the Eastern GC was officially opened by none other than Australia's then Prime Minister, Mr (later Viscount) Stanley Bruce. It goes without saying he loved golf.

That night the club held a Gala Ball at the Hawthorn Town Hall. Both functions received wide coverage in the Melbourne press, in direct contrast to the quiet, almost unheralded opening of Huntingdale GC two decades later.

Adrian Redmond was a young man studying Law at Melbourne University when he joined Eastern in 1926, and was among those who moved across to Huntingdale in 1941. His recollections of Eastern's beginings and its surrounds at Doncaster, make for interesting reading.

"In those days there were scarcely any houses in the area, and Doncaster was a village, comprising a small, decrepit hotel and a couple of shops on the corner of Doncaster Road and Station Street (now Tram Road). The rest was mainly rural land; mostly orchards but also a few dairy farms."

Redmond claims that not long after Eastern GC came into existence, a good number of members mounted a push for the club's name to be changed yet again, this time to Tullamore, in recognition of the property upon which the club was built.

They garnered enough attention for the club to call a general meeting, to discuss the matter. "Feelings ran rather high," wrote Redmond, "with some members claiming the name Eastern gave the impression of the club being for Chinese, while others reckoned Tullamore was the name for a dirty old bog in Ireland. In the end the majority decided to adhere to Eastern."

Redmond says that when he joined the club, there were still only 12 holes, and only six completed greens. "The remaining six greens were what one would now call temporary greens - parts of the fairway mown very low, and very hard to putt on". It seems the permanent greens were still undergoing construction by Sam Berriman, but Redman wrote it wasn't long before they too came into play.

"Neither was it long before an area of land on the north-west corner of the course was bought, and a further three holes built, so making it a 15 hole course. And it remained that way for quite a long time," was Redmond's recollection.

He wrote that, after playing the 15^th hole, the Eastern golfers would walk past the clubhouse to the first tee, and play the first three holes again, to complete the 18. Records seem to indicate it was some four or five years after Eastern opened, that the 18-hole course was completed.

It should be pointed out that back then the standard score on each hole, which today is referred to as par, was instead known as 'bogey'.  The bogey rating of golf holes was a popular method of setting a standard and assessing a player's performance, and was based on the playing characteristics of each hole in the early days of golf.

The fictitious "Colonel Bogey" was a low handicap player who usually made a four on a long par-three holes, and five on long par-five holes, but otherwise played nearly flawless golf. It wasn't until the late 1920's that par ratings, a more standardised system set around yardages, began to replace bogey ratings.

Details of the early courses at Doncaster are somewhat vague, but in reporting a round played by the 1921 Australian Open champion, Arthur Le Fevre, in a tournament at Eastern in 1930, The Age published the bogey rating for each of the 18 holes.

The front nine had just one bogey three hole, and four rated as five, and read as thus: 4,4,5,4,4,3,5,5,5 - 39. The back nine had three bogey threes, and four rated at five: 5,5,3,4,3, 5,3,4,5 - 37. Total: 76.

In his descriptions of the course as he played it, Redmond makes mention of Koonung Creek, which he says "meandered across the course from east to west." It figured prominently on a number of holes, not the least the 'bogey' three 14^th, which Redmond said took the line of the creek bed, to a green perched above it. "In winter the creek bed became a stream, and sometimes a mass of mud resembling quicksand, so no matter how positive one was as to the spot where a mishit shot entered the mud, the ball was almost invariably lost."

And what were the balls, you might ask. Says Redmond, "the balls we used were Dunlops at 25 cents (2/6) and their cheaper grade, Warwicks, at 15 cents (1/6). Silver Kings also cost 25 cents, and the South British Rubber Co. marketed balls with the markings of the suits of playing cards, Hearts, Diamonds, Spades and Clubs. The latter balls went further, but had the disadvantage of a very soft cover, and one misguided hit could render one's ball useless with a cut in the cover".

Riding a world-wide wave of popularity in golf in the 1920's, and despite the rough and hilly nature of the course, Eastern went from strength to strength. While several new clubs had been born on the Sandbelt, including Victoria and Commonwealth, there were very few courses in the north-eastern suburbs until after World War 2.

In 1925 Eastern announced that "J. (Jim) Linquist, of the Melbourne Sports Depot, has been appointed to his first club job. From all accounts he is a fine specimen of a young professional, and has made himself quite popular with those with whom his business has brought him in to contact."

Three years after the arrival of Linquist, the Eastern GC inaugurated an event which very quickly blossomed into one of the biggest tournaments held annually in Melbourne, and well and truly put the club on the golfing map.

Support for Australian servicemen was strong among golf clubs during World War 1, and it continued in the aftermath. In 1920 a number of Sydney golf clubs combined to conduct an ex-servicemens golf day, at which they played for the Australian Infantry Forces (AIF) Cup.

The success of this tournament eventually came to the notice of the Eastern GC committee, and so they initiated the AIF Cup in Victoria in 1928, an event which did for Eastern what, some 50 years later, the Australian Masters did for Huntingdale.

While other clubs followed suit, it was the tournament at Eastern, played on the Melbourne Show Day public holiday in late September, that quickly became the pre-eminent AIF Cup in Victoria, certainly in the period prior to World War 2.

The inaugural event attracted a field of 100 players, which included golfers from all over Melbourne, as well as a handful from as far away as Mildura, and from across Bass Strait. Fittingly it was won by an Eastern member, W.J.Boylan, with a round of 70.

The first AIF Cup at Eastern was for amateurs only, but the following year it became the first ex-servicemens' tournament in Australia to include professional golfers who'd served their country, among them Le Fevre. All in all 150 players stepped up to the tee, but the 'train' was off and running.

Two hundred and twenty-five entries were received for the 1930 AIF Cup which, at the time, was believed to be a record entry for a single event in Victoria, but this was easily surpassed the following year when 340 hit off, one of them being Ivo Whitton, the only man other than Greg Norman to have won five Australian Open championships.

In 1932 a special competition was added for those who'd lost limbs in the various conflicts, and the overall numbers continued to climb. 505 players hit off in 1933, and in 1934 they ran buses every hour from outside the Ball and Welch building in Flinders Street to cater for some 567 entries.

As we know the game of golf is a tough assignment at the best of times, but the pranks and diversions employed all over Eastern on AIF Cup day were akin to going to war, which is exactly what they were meant to be, so much so they attracted the attention of Melbourne's daily papers.

The Argus noted "sand bags firmly embedded on the windward side of the club veranda sheltered a free bar, but there was another of these "buckshee wet canteens" situated in a much more strategic spot - at the 12th tee. The presence of this latter post provided what the French army communiques used to refer to as a 'point d'appui' (a location where troops are assembled prior to battle), and gave rise to frequent incidents which made or marred many a drive".

Of the 1933 tournament, The Argus wrote, "There were no "galleries" following the players. Those who were not playing golf were interested principally in the revival of traditional AIF games".

Photos of the day ran in The Australasian, one of them featuring a bi-plane which flour bombed the golfers as they went about their business. Their golf scribe wrote, "The last of the players came in at dusk. They had aped war for a day. Their surroundings had all the incongruity of a war-swept country side. Tin hats and sandbagged ramparts contrasted with blossoming orchards beyond the links. The bombing "strafe" was realistic. It was magnificent, for it was not war."

The numbers continued to grow, and the Melbourne Herald's legendary golf writer, Jack Dillon, wrote that the entry of 625 for the 1937 AIF Cup at Eastern was a world record.

On this particular day the club earned another quite extraordinary distinction. According to The Age, participants could enjoy the distinction of using the first field post office to be conducted in Australia. "Housed in one of the latest type postal vans, resplendent in post office red, telegraph, telephone and all postal facilities, with the exception of money-order business, will be available. A public telephone, complete with cabinet, will be included in the equipment.

"It is the intention of the Eastern club to issue postcards similar to those provided for members of the AIF during the Great War. The value of these cards will be enhanced in the philatelist's eye by local posting, as they will thus receive the special post mark of the first field post office. The office will be open for business from 9 am to 6 pm."