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Dorothy Iona Campbell
Amateur Golfer
Born: 24th March 1883, Edinburgh
Died: 20th March 1945, Yemassee, S.C.
![[Dorothy Campbell]](images/campbell.jpg)
Dorothy Campbell
© American Annual Golf Guide
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![[13th on East Course]](images/east4.jpg)
13th East Course, North Berwick
© Digitalsport UK
![[Canty Bay]](images/cantybay_1.jpg)
Canty Bay, North Berwick
© Digitalsport UK
Tournament Record
Scottish Ladies' Championship :1905,1906,1908
British Ladies Amateur :1909,1911
U. S. Women's Amateur :1909,1910,1924
Women's Canadian Amateur:1910,1911,1912
Western Pennsylvania 1914, 1915, 1916
North & South Womens 1918, 1920, 1921
Boston District Championship 1922
Florida West Coast Championship 1923
Philadelphia Womens 1925, 1927, 1929
U. S. Women's Senior Championship: 1938
Great Britain Team v. USA : 1905, 1909
Scottish Internationalist : 1909, 1911, 1928
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Campbell wins Amateur Double
By
Douglas Seaton
North Berwick Factfile
DOROTHY CAMPBELL was born at 1 Carlton Terrace, Edinburgh in 1883. She was originally named 'Gladys' but this was altered to Dorothy two months after the birth. Her parents were William Campbell, a metal dealer and Emily Mary Campbell. Dorothy had six sisters and two brothers, and her father died when she was seventeen years old.
The famous West Links at North Berwick where her grandfather Thomas Campbell and her uncles played golf was the perfect playground for the young Dorothy while living in Inchgarry House in Links Road. She took her first swing when she was 18 months old, and her first club was a six-penny club lacking the bone and the lead then commonly used, purchased in a toy shop in the High Street in North Berwick.
Dorothy played golf on the small nine-hole course at North Berwick, which was used principally by women and little boys. She said, "how any of us managed to acquire a decent game there will always remain a mystery to me, and yet it was done, because we had some splendid players. I do not think that any of our holes were as much as two hundred yards in length and as in those early days, the terms under which the ground was leased, forbade any traps or bunkers being made, the range of shots required was painfully limited. However, we managed to have a good time playing there and the very fact that our holes were so short and so narrow was an incentive to acquiring accuracy."
Campbell was the first to win the British and U.S Amateur Championships back to back.
In 1896, Dorothy Campbell aged 13 years, joined the North Berwick Ladies Golf Club and with a handicap of nine was able to hold her own against the senior members. Dorothy was a pupil of Ben Sayers and learned to play the game over the West Links, at a time when an hour's lesson cost 3/6d and a day's golf on the links was a shilling.
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In 1905, Dorothy Campbell played for the British team that beat a U.S. squad led by the Curtis sisters, six matches to one.
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In 1894, her older sister Madeline with a handicap of two, won the Ladies Handicap competition after a play-off over the Ladies Links. Madeline Campbell and Edith Orr were the leading golfers in the North Berwick Ladies Golf Club. In June 1905, Campbell entered the Ladies' British Amateur Championship at Cromer, where she reached the semi-finals. Two weeks later she entered the Scottish Ladies' Championship over her home course at North Berwick. The tournament was in its third year and had previously been held at St Andrews and Prestwick, but this was the first event to be organised by the Scottish Ladies' Golfing Association, formed the previous year.
The ladies arrived in North Berwick on Wednesday 13th June, when thirty-two played in a putting competition at the Royal Hotel, on ground now occupied by Craigleith View. On Saturday there was a stroke play tournament over the nine-hole Ladies Course and a competition on Monday over the West Links for prizes donated by the Town Council.
The Championship started on Tuesday with 43 competitors, when the first and second rounds were completed in stormy conditions. In the semi-finals, Dorothy Campbell beat J. Rusack from Hilltarvit by one hole and faced Miss M. Graham from Nairn in the final. The game was all square after 18 holes and Campbell snatched victory on the nineteenth green watched by over 4,000 spectators.
Dorothy Campbell retained her Scottish title at Cruden Bay in 1906, and won it again in 1908 at Gullane. In 1907 she was defeated in the final at Troon on the 21st hole by another North Berwick golfer Frances Teacher, and Campbell was runner-up again in 1909. The first time the British Ladies championship was played at St. Andrews in 1908, Dorothy Campbell played Maud Titterton in the final, and the entire town came out to watch, including Old Tom Morris. The final didn't start until three o'clock because the semi-final between Maud Titterton and the young Cecil Leitch went twenty-two holes. By that time the Old course was covered in fog.
Estimates for the crowd around the first hole was 9,000 people and by the 11th, a terrible storm blew in hitting the two contestants with hail, rain and wind. Many of the greens were completely covered in water. Titterton's ball bounded through the Swilcan burn on the final hole allowing her to square the match. At the first extra hole, Titterton beat Campbell with a par-4 to her bogey-5. On the 27th May, two days after the final Old Tom Morris died.
Campbell defeated Florence Hezlet in the 1909 British championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club and took up an invitation to play in the American championship of that year at Merion Cricket Club, where she beat Nonna Barlow 3 and 2 in the final to become the first foreign-born U.S. champion and the first woman to hold both the British and U.S. Amateur titles. It was a feat that neither Glenna Collett nor Joyce Wethered who later dominated the game, accomplished.
The only tournament Campbell failed to win that year was the Scottish Amateur Championship played at Machrihanish when she was defeated in the final by E. Kyle. In 1910, Campbell moved to Hamilton, Ontario and won the first of her three in a row Canadian Amateur titles. She also defended her U.S. title in 1910 defeating Mrs. G. M. Martin at Homewood C.C. Flossmoor, Illinois. In 1911, she picked up her second Ladies' British Open Amateur Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club, this time defeating Violet, the youngest of the three Hezlet sisters from Ireland.
Miss Campbell played with a shut club face, square to square and an unorthodox grip, with the thumb of the right hand under the shaft. Her best shot was a run-up shot that she used from distances of up to 50 feet. In the final of the North and South Championship, she beat her opponent by twice holing this shot from 40 yards out. She used her goose-neck mashie with a small face which she named "Thomas" for the shot, closing the club-face and hitting the ball on the downswing. At Augusta Country Club in 1926 she holed two chip shots and ended up having a record 19 putts for 18 holes lowering Walter Travis' record by two strokes for putts-in-one-round. She nicknamed her putter "Stella" which had been with her since 1909.
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" Campbell was the first woman to win the national championship of five countries, USA, Great Britain, Scotland, Canada and Bermuda"
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Dorothy Campbell represented Scotland in the Home Internationals in 1905-06-08-09-11-28-30. This was a golden period for the North Berwick golfers as Campbell was joined in the Scottish team by Frances Teacher and Elsie Grant-Suttie in 1908 and 1911, both were members of the North Berwick Ladies Club. Frances Teacher was Scottish Ladies Champion in 1907 and Elsie Grant-Suttie won the Ladies' British Open Amateur Championship in 1910 at Royal North Devon G.C. Grant-Suttie also won the Scottish Ladies Championship at St Andrews in 1911 after defeating Dorothy Campbell in the first round. Campbell in turn beat Grant-Suttie in the fifth round of the Ladies' British Championship in 1911.
In 1913, Campbell married Jack Hurd, a steel magnate living at 7209 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh. He was a member at Oakmont C.C where Tom Anderson Jr from North Berwick was the pro. The couple had a son and Mrs. Hurd went into semi-retirement from the sport until they divorced in 1921. When she returned to tournament golf in the twenties, she recognised that her old sweeping style, with the club held in the palms and the wrists stiff, was obsolete. She took lessons from George Sayers, who she knew from North Berwick, then a professional at Merion in Philadelphia. He had her change to the Vardon grip and she began to compete again.
At forty-one she entered the 1924 U.S. Women's Amateur hosted by Rhode Island Country Club, home course to the tournament favourite Glenna Collett, but she unexpectedly lost in the semi-finals to Mary K. Browne of Los Angeles. In the final, Browne could easily outdrive Hurd on every hole, but "Stella" was on-fire. Dorothy Hurd defeated Mary K. Browne, the national lawn tennis champion, 7 and 6 to win the title. This victory brought two more records that still stand; the number of years between titles, and the oldest player to win the event. Hurd continued to play through the 1930s winning the 1938 U.S. Senior Women's Championship at the age of 55.
In 1936, she was married to Edward L. Howe, chairman of the Princeton N.J. Bank and Trust Company but they divorced in 1943. Two years later Dorothy Campbell Hurd Howe was visiting friends in Beaufort (SC) when she was killed while changing trains at Yemussee for the New York bound express. She was en-route to the home of her daughter-in-law Mrs Sigourney Hurd of Pleasantville (NY) whose husband was a staff sergeant with the army in the Philippines. Dorothy was 61 years old when she died and remains the finest amateur golfer ever to emerge from North Berwick. The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was founded in 1950 and Dorothy Campbell Hurd Howe was elected to the Women's Golf Hall of Fame as a charter honouree at Augusta Country Club.
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Copyright © Douglas Seaton 2008, All Rights Reserved.
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