The 4th hole

The 4th in 1920

Stroke index 1 on the c.1920 card, which made it the hardest hole on the course. It turned west away from the railway along the southern edge of the land, past a clump of trees, with bunkers near the tee and short of the green. By the time the morning round of the 1921 News of the World final reached this hole, the crowd had doubled. Jack Gaudin cut his drive into the rough, and Bert Seymour won the hole with a four to lead again. In the afternoon Gaudin pitched short into the bunker in front of the green and lost the hole to Seymour, whose second shot had finished two yards from the pin. As Bernard Darwin's 16th it had serious trouble waiting for a pulled second shot. Darwin thought it a nice hole, if not a match for the dogleg that followed.^1,5,6,8,9

After 1936

Became the 16th (387 yards on both cards), though the later card makes it stroke index 6. John Swain says the post-war estate took the south-east corner of the course, where this hole lay. A card from a round on the shortened public course in October 1949 has no 387-yard hole.

There today

Lost under the South Oxhey estate. The hole ran west-south-west from Prestwick Road, across ground now covered by Ralston Way and Puttenham Close, to a green in what are now the Colnbrook School grounds off Hayling Road.