Thomas Henry Cotton, born in Church Hulme – today’s Holmes Chapel – on January 28, 1907, would go on to win our Open Golf Championship three times, more than 30 professional tournaments, and in the process become the leading British player of his generation.
His brother Leslie (born 1905), would also be a professional golfer but overshadowed by his more talented and successful younger sibling. It was around 1913 that the Cotton family quit Cheshire for London. As a schoolboy, Thomas Henry was a more than capable cricketer but he started swinging a golf club from 1920. Golf would prevail over cricket, his falling out of love with the latter erupting in a schoolboy huff when he rebelled against being forced to carry the kit bag around for the prefects.
Encouraged as he was by his father, also a keen golfer, and coached by John Henry Taylor (1871-1963), a man who would win the Open five times before WW1, Henry’s golfing ability would soon be on the up. In 1921, the brothers Cotton would play in the Boys' Amateur Championship for the first time, the year the competition was established for under-16s (under-18s today).
Cotton Jnr. left school in the summer of 1923, turning professional the following year aged 17, becoming a full-time pro two years later, and going on to accumulate 37 pro wins in a stellar career. The start wasn’t blistering though, his attempt to qualify for the 1925 Open Golf Championship ending in failure after two fairly mediocre rounds left him nine strokes short of the cut. A similar failure would follow the following year but he was not disheartened and worked methodically on improving his game. He’d also qualify as a pilot around 1930, serving with the RAF as a Flight Lieutenant during WW2, and raising money for the Red Cross charity by playing exhibition matches, which earned him the MBE in 1946.
Of the ‘Majors’, Cotton would ultimately have most success in our Open Golf Championship, winning it for the first time in 1934 and following this with further triumphs in 1937, when he beat the entirety of the US Ryder Cup team, and in 1948. That first success was illuminated by a round of just 65 and overall winning margin of five strokes, and ended a decade of American dominance. Finishing high up in the Open became commonplace to Cotton who ranked in the top 10 on 17 occasions. No other British player would prove capable of winning the event on three occasions until Nick Faldo won three Opens in six years in the late-1980s, early-1990s. Cotton had something of a sage motto: ‘To be a champion, you must act like one’.
Cotton would also compete for the British team in the Ryder Cup on three occasions (1929, 1937 and 1947). Officially instituted in 1927, the competition typically gave the United States the opportunity to paste its British adversary every other year. The 1929 staging, the first on British soil, saw what would turn out to be a narrow and rare British victory, although the latter consideration wouldn’t have been appreciated at the time. The 1937 event, hosted by the Southport and Ainsdale club, was the first US victory over here, while 1947, with Cotton player-captain, was a veritable stuffing with the Americans romping home by a score of 11-1. He’d also be a non-playing captain in 1953 when the US won for a sixth successive occasion, although this couldn’t have been much closer (6½ - 5½).
As a professional golfer whose claret jugs came either side of WW2, one does wonder just how much more he might have achieved had war not intervened (the tournaments between 1940-45 were not held). Many such sportsmen had some of their best years taken by conflict. Just a few months after the start of that war Cotton was married, on 11th December 1939, to Isabel-Maria Estanguet de Moss, the daughter of a Buenos Aires beef merchant who just happened to be taking golf lessons from the maestro. She was affectionately known as ‘Toots’. Cotton retired from professional golf in the early '50s and moved on to golf course design, including a couple of courses on the Algarve, another being a commission for Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild in France, just a few of the two dozen or so he designed. He was also a leading figure in establishing a foundation in 1952 to assist thousands of youngsters to take up the sport. Cotton summed up his motivation well: ‘We should give the game, without compromise, without intimidation, without prejudice, to as many as we possibly could’.
Nicknamed ‘The Maestro’, he believed hard work was the only way to achieve golfing success. He stressed the need to have ‘strong, educated hands’ and, later in his career, advised his pupils to build up their strength by hitting a tyre with a golf club every day for 10 minutes.
Cotton was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1980 and was then the first golfer to be knighted (1988) for services to the game. He authored 10 books, including Studying the Golf Game (1964),‘A History of Golf (1973) and Thanks for the Game (1980). He was both ambitious and intelligent, a charismatic man who helped scatter gold dust on the game of golf and elevate its standing as far as the general populace was concerned. He was sufficiently revered to feature as a subject on This Is Your Life, an episode airing on February 5, 1986, less than two years before Henry Cotton’s death.
Sir Henry Cotton passed away in London on December 22, 1987, aged 80 and would be the first professional golfer to be recognised with an English Heritage blue plaque at his firmer family home, 47 Crystal Palace Road, East Dulwich, in the London Borough of Southwark.
CHRONOLOGY
1907 – Thomas Henry Cotton born in Church Hulme, near Congleton (January 28)
1921 – Participates in the Boys' Amateur Championship with his brother Leslie
1924 – Turns professional aged just 17, the start of a stellar sporting career
1925 – Fails in his first attempt to qualify for the Open Golf Championship
1929 – Competes in the Ryder Cup for the first time; a rare British victory in the event
c.1930 – Qualifies as a pilot and goes on to serve with the RAF during WW2
1934 – Wins the first of three Open Golf Championships at Royal St George’s
1939 – Marries Isabel-Maria Estanguet de Moss, an Argentinian beef merchant’s daughter
1987 – Sir Henry Cotton dies in London (December 22) aged 80
