Whitcombe Hall of Fame | Sport: Golf
The Man Who Sparked a Revolution
In the early 1920s, a wealthy seed merchant named Samuel Ryder was enjoying his annual family holiday in Dorset. While his family took to the beaches at Weymouth, Ryder drove out each morning to play golf at the course on Came Down. There, he encountered a golfer of extraordinary talent: the club professional, Ernest Robert Whitcombe.
Ryder was captivated by Ernest’s skill — but it was a conversation off the course that would change golf forever. When he asked Ernest whether he competed in the major tournaments, Ernest replied that he rarely could. If he left the club, he wasn’t paid. And as for travel, he said, “I’d probably have to walk there, as the travel costs so much. The Americans come over here smartly dressed and backed by wealthy supporters. The Britisher has a poor chance compared to that.”
Ryder was stunned. And from that conversation, the seed of an idea began to grow — one that would eventually become the Ryder Cup, golf’s greatest team competition and one of the most-watched sporting events on the planet.
Ernest Whitcombe didn’t just play golf at the highest level. He helped inspire the event that transformed professional golf from an underfunded afterthought into a global spectacle. That is his first legacy, and it alone would be enough to secure his place in the Whitcombe Hall of Fame.
Early Life & Origins
Ernest Robert Whitcombe was born on 17 October 1890 in Berrow, a small coastal village adjacent to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset. He was the eldest of three brothers — all born in the same cottage beside the local church, a building that sits to this day practically within the boundaries of Burnham & Berrow Golf Club.
The club had opened in 1891, the year after Ernest’s birth, and its proximity was no coincidence in shaping the family’s destiny. The professional at Burnham & Berrow at that time was J.H. Taylor — one of the most dominant golfers of the era and a member of the legendary “Great Triumvirate” that ruled the sport in the years before the First World War. Taylor won The Open Championship five times across his career. It was under his eye, and on these fairways, that Ernest and his younger brothers Charles and Reginald first learned the game.
In 1910, aged just nineteen, Ernest was appointed club professional at Came Down Golf Club in Dorset — a remarkable appointment for someone so young, at a course that had been redesigned by J.H. Taylor himself just four years earlier.
Behind the brothers’ rise was a quiet but consequential decision made by their mother, Bessie Whitcombe. When Ernest took up his position at Came Down and the club offered her the role of stewardess, she uprooted the family and brought Charles and Reg with her to Dorset. It was Bessie who held the household together across those early years, who became known locally for her warmth and her cooking, and whose choice to move the family placed all three boys on the same course — literally and figuratively. The Whitcombe brothers are rightly celebrated. The woman who made it possible deserves to be named.
Charles worked as Ernest’s assistant in the professional’s shop; Reg was apprenticed to Ernest and learned the trade beside him. Came Down Golf Club’s own records describe the brothers’ daily routine: “Every morning early they were out, always with one club apiece, banging balls up to the flag.” It was a discipline forged in simplicity — and it produced three of the finest professional golfers England has ever seen.
A Soldier Before a Champion
Before Ernest could fully establish himself on the professional circuit, the world intervened. When war was declared in 1914, Ernest enlisted with the Royal Field Artillery as a gunner attached to the 16th Division of Kitchener’s Army.
His service was not peripheral. Ernest saw action at some of the most brutal engagements of the First World War: Hulluch, Guillemont, Messines and Ypres. He was wounded during combat — a burst of machine-gun fire left him with a small piece of shrapnel lodged in his left eye, an injury from which he never fully recovered. Some historians of the game have suggested that this injury may have affected his putting in later years, contributing to the narrow margins that separated him from the very top of the sport.
For his wartime service, Ernest was awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. He returned from the war a decorated soldier, and resumed his position at Came Down — and his pursuit of excellence on the golf course.
Key Achievements
Ernest’s professional career spanned nearly three decades, and while he never won The Open Championship, he came closer than almost anyone of his era — and his tournament record across the 1920s and 1930s stands as one of the finest in English golf.
Runner-up, The Open Championship, 1924 — Royal Liverpool, Hoylake
This is the defining moment of Ernest’s career, and it deserves to be told properly. After 54 holes at Hoylake in 1924, Ernest Whitcombe and Walter Hagen were sharing the lead. Hagen was the reigning champion — one of the most celebrated golfers on earth, a showman and a genius, described by observers as “Sir Walter” for his presence and charisma.
On the final afternoon, playing ahead of Hagen, Ernest went out in 43 on the front nine but steadied himself magnificently on the back, coming home in 35 to post a total of 302. For a time, it looked as though the Claret Jug was his. Hagen, playing behind him and receiving news of Ernest’s score on the 12th tee, knew exactly what he needed: level fours from there home.
Hagen lived dangerously — slicing into a bunker at the 12th, finding sand again at the 13th — but recovered each time with a pitch and a putt. On the final green, he faced a downhill six-footer for the championship. He sank it without hesitation. His total: 301. One better than Ernest Whitcombe.
Ernest’s round of 70 in the second round had been the best score posted by any player in the top ten across the entire championship. He had led going into the final day, matched the greatest golfer of his generation shot for shot, and lost by the narrowest possible margin to a man at the absolute peak of his powers. In any other year, he would have been champion.
The News of the World Match Play Championship, 1924
In the same year as his Open near-miss, Ernest won the prestigious News of the World Match Play — one of the most respected titles in British professional golf — defeating George Gadd in the final at St George’s Hill in Weybridge.
International Titles: Irish Open (1928 and 1935), Dutch Open (1928), French Open (1930)
Ernest was not merely a domestic player. He won three of Europe’s most prestigious national Opens across a remarkable seven-year span. His 1928 Irish Open victory was especially notable: he beat his younger brother Reg in a 36-hole playoff, with Ernest carding 148 to Reg’s 151 — a family final at Royal County Down that must have made for an extraordinary occasion at the Whitcombe dinner table. The Dutch Open victory that same year was emphatic, with Ernest finishing six strokes clear of the field — and in second place was his brother Charles.
The Ryder Cup — 1929 and 1931, and the Historic 1935 Appearance
Ernest was selected for the Great Britain team for the 1926 informal Ryder Cup match — the precursor to the official competition. He went on to play in the 1929 Ryder Cup (a Great Britain and Ireland victory) and the 1931 Ryder Cup. In 1935, all three Whitcombe brothers were named to the same Ryder Cup team — one of the most remarkable facts in the history of the competition, and an achievement unlikely ever to be repeated.
Ernest’s overall record across his career: ten professional tournament victories, a runner-up finish in the sport’s oldest and most celebrated major championship, three European Open titles, and a place in three Ryder Cup teams across a career that stretched from before the First World War to after the Second.
The Ryder Cup Connection
The story of Ernest and Samuel Ryder deserves its own moment of recognition, because its significance extends far beyond the Whitcombe family.
When Ernest explained to Ryder that he and other British professionals couldn’t compete on equal terms with their American counterparts — not due to talent, but due to money — Ryder’s response was immediate and consequential. He began sponsoring professional golf events, starting in 1923 with a tournament at his home club of Verulam in St Albans that offered guaranteed prize money for all entrants, ensuring that players’ expenses were at least covered. It was the first tournament of its kind.
From there, the idea grew. A challenge match between British and American professionals. A trophy. A name. In 1927, the first official Ryder Cup was held at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts — and the competition that bears Samuel Ryder’s name has been growing ever since, now watched by tens of millions of people around the world.
Ryder’s daughter Marjorie, in her privately printed family history, was explicit about the origins of this idea: it was the Whitcombes at Came Down, and Ernest’s candid words about the inequality between British and American professionals, that crystallised her father’s ambition to do something about it.
Ernest Whitcombe did not found the Ryder Cup. But the conversation he had on a golf course in Dorset — honest, unguarded, and perhaps said without any expectation that it would matter — planted the seed that made it possible.
Legacy
Ernest Whitcombe was, by any measure, one of the finest English golfers of the inter-war period. He was ranked among the top players in the country from 1924 through 1937, and his Open Championship near-miss in 1924 stands as one of the great near-victories in British golfing history.
His son, Eddie Whitcombe, followed him into professional golf — a direct continuation of the family tradition that began on the fairways of Burnham & Berrow and flourished at Came Down. Behind all three brothers, in those formative years at Came Down, was Bessie — the mother who moved her family to Dorset, kept the household together, and made everything that followed possible.
Ernest died on 14 July 1971 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, aged 80 — the longest-lived of the three brothers. He outlived Reg by fourteen years and Charles by seven, having watched both younger brothers build careers that owed something, in their earliest days, to his influence and his example.
He was the first. He opened the professional’s shop. He built the discipline. He had the conversation with Samuel Ryder.
Why This Matters Today
Ernest Whitcombe’s story is about more than golf. It is about what happens when talent meets honesty — when someone speaks plainly about an unfair situation to the right person at the right moment, and changes things not just for themselves, but for everyone around them.
He didn’t found the Ryder Cup. But without that conversation on a Dorset golf course, it might never have existed. That is a remarkable thing to be able to say about anyone.
For those who carry the Whitcombe name, there is something worth sitting with in that. The contributions that matter most are not always the ones that get the headlines. Sometimes they are a quiet word, told truthfully, that plants a seed.
Ernest Robert Whitcombe is the first of three brothers inducted into the Whitcombe Hall of Fame as part of our founding golf trilogy. Read also: [Charles Albert Whitcombe, 1895–1978] and [Reginald Arthur Whitcombe, 1898–1957].
Sources include: Wikipedia; The Open Championship official records; Came Down Golf Club historical archives; Golf Today; Peter Fry, The Whitcombes: A Golfing Legend (Grant Books, 1994); Golf Compendium; Where2Golf.
Discover more from Whitcombe
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.