The small town of Hoylake sits in the northwest corner of the Wirral Peninsula. There are five metropolitan boroughs in Merseyside and the Wirral, situated across the River Mersey from Liverpool city centre, is one of them.
This is where Royal Liverpool Golf Club sits and it stretches between Hoylake and the neighbouring town of West Kirby. It is a five-minute walk from the clubhouse to the nearby Hoylake town centre. It is the second oldest golf links in England, predated only by Royal North Devon Golf Club, in Westward Ho!, Devon.
When the club was first founded in 1869 it was called 'Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake'. At the time the clubhouse was the Royal Hotel on Stanley Road, adjacent to the 17th hole (2nd in The Open), and it was a nine-hole course which was extended to 18 two years later. It was then, in 1871, that it became Royal Liverpool though it is often affectionately referred to as Hoylake.
For its first seven years the course doubled up as a golf course and horse-racing track and, to this day, the original saddling bell still hangs in the clubhouse. The 1st (Course) and 18th (Stand) holes offer a nod to the history of the club.
Royal Liverpool may well have been off the Open rota from 1967 to 2006 but it has still hosted 12 Opens going back to 1897 when the amateur, and former editor of Golf Monthly, Harold Hilton won by one shot from James Braid on his home course.
This was Hilton's second Open triumph and another Hoylake star of the day, John Ball, had also won the Claret Jug two years before that in 1890. Ball's father was the owner of the Royal Hotel and Ball grew up playing on the links across the way.
The winner of the 1897 Open, Arnaud Massy, named his daughter Margot Hoylake Massy. The Frenchman was the first non-Briton to win The Open and he actually began playing the game left-handed before switching.
More recently when Woods won the 2006 Open here there were crowds of 230,00 which remains the highest attendance at an Open in England.
