Founded in a Pontypridd hotel, opened with nine holes, funded by a rugby match against the Wallabies — and rebuilt from the ground up after the clubhouse burned down.
In the winter of 1905 a group of Pontypridd men met at the Park Hotel to talk about golf. They had no course, no clubhouse and no money — what they had was a view, and the nerve to take on the rent.
Within two months the greens were cut and the club was taking members. Within five years it had burned down once and built back better. The story below comes from the newspapers of the day — the Evening Express, the Rhondda Leader, the Weekly Mail and the Cardiff Times — which covered the club week by week as it found its feet.
"About the best pavilion of any club of its size in the country."
— proposing the toast at the club's first annual dinner, March 1910, seven months after the fire
The club's own film: the earliest photographs anyone has found, the old wooden clubhouse, cine footage from the days when a camera on the Common was an event in itself — and the same hillside as it looks now.
It covers ground the written record cannot. The newspapers below tell you what happened; this tells you what the place looked like.
Members meet at the Park Hotel in Pontypridd, with Mr T. R. Griffiths in the chair. Mr Owen Thomas reports on the ground they hope to take — the rent is expected to be between fifteen and twenty pounds a year. Days later the professional from Radyr inspects the site and pronounces that the newly formed club has found ground for "a very fine sporting nine-hole course". No time, the paper notes, is to be lost in building it.
Evening Express, 2 and 5 December 1905The course is finished and open. Edwin Bradbeer, of Wells Golf Club in Somerset, is appointed green keeper — and, in the way of small clubs, is also the man you applied to if you wanted to join.
The Rhondda Leader, 3 February 1906The season opens not with golf but with a dance. No invitations are sent — tickets are had from the honorary secretary at Town Hall Chambers. Gentlemen five shillings, ladies three and six.
The Rhondda Leader, 12 October 1907At the annual meeting, chaired by Mr E. E. Crawshay, the members elect Sir Alfred Thomas MP — later Baron Pontypridd — as club president. The accounts show a deficit, most of it wages to the workmen and thirty pounds ten shillings spent on a new pavilion.
Evening Express, 15 January 1908The Welsh Rugby Union grants permission to raise a scratch side to play Pontypridd for the benefit of the Pontypridd Golf Club. On the Monday, at Ynysangharad, a Pontypridd and District fifteen meets the touring Wallabies and Welsh Internationals in front of a near-crowd. Seven Australians turn out. P.C. Moore of Treorchy scores the first try. A golf club that got the Australians to the park to pay for its course is not a thing many clubs can claim.
Evening Express, 2, 10 and 13 October 1908A photograph appears in the paper of the competitive shield presented to the club by Sir Alfred Thomas MP — won that week by Mr H. Crockett, the previous holder being Mr John Parry, who would be captain within the year.
Evening Express, 24 October 1908On the Tuesday afternoon fire breaks out and the newly erected pavilion — timber and zinc, not quite finished, the new furniture delivered only the week before — is practically demolished. Most of the members' clubs go with it. The damage is put at four to five hundred pounds. Reporting a near-identical fire at Radyr six weeks later, the Evening Express looks back at Pontypridd and notes that the building was complete and ready for opening when it "mysteriously got alight".
Evening Express, 10 and 11 August and 23 September 1909 · Weekly Mail and Cardiff Times, 14 August 1909Seven months after the fire the club holds its first annual dinner at the Park Hotel, the captain Mr O. R. Owen presiding. Proposing the toast to the club, Mr R. A. Lewis tells the room it now possesses about the best pavilion of any club of its size in the country.
Evening Express, 23 March 1910W. E. Summers, more than once captain of the Pontypridd Teachers, is elected captain of the golf club — one of the last peacetime appointments before the war.
The Rhondda Leader, 7 February 1914
The club that put up a wooden pavilion in 1909 and replaced it inside a year has kept the habit. The clubhouse was refurbished again in 2021 — a sports bar, a members' lounge, a function room for a hundred and twenty, changing rooms and showers — and the honours boards went straight back on the wall.
Eighteen holes now, rather than nine. The stone circle still shares the hillside. The view over the Rhondda and the Taff has not changed at all.
The digitised newspaper record stops in 1919. Everything after that is in the clubhouse, in members' albums, or in people's memories — and we would like it on this page.
Sources. The 1905–1914 accounts on this page are drawn from contemporary reports in the Evening Express, The Rhondda Leader, the Weekly Mail and The Cardiff Times, digitised by the National Library of Wales and free to read at newspapers.library.wales. Dates and names are quoted as they were printed at the time.
