by Sam McBride

Interesting to hear that my old home town of Nelson, B.C’s Granite Pointe Golf Course is going to shut down for a couple of years to enable a half-billion dollar project of re-building the 18-hole course combined with course-side housing, with completion scheduled for 2027.

That got me thinking of the old 9-hole Nelson Golf and Country Club in that location from 1919 until the expansion to the Granite Point 18-hole course in early 1990s. My grandfather Roland Leigh McBride (1881-1959) was among the founding directors to the original course, and was very active as a member of the club executive for many years. His love of golf was inherited by his two boys, Leigh Morgan McBride (1917-1995) and Kenneth Gilbert McBride (1920-1944).

My grandfather Roland Leigh McBride hitting a drive at the scenic Nelson Golf Course. Date is unknown, but it is before the Nelson Bridge was built in 1957. Mats were used for tee boxes then because the terrain and weather made it difficult for maintaining good grass in tee areas.
Nelson Daily News report of the superb golf played in an exhibition match at the Nelson Golf Course in May 1941, where Canadian Amateur Golf champion Kenny Black set a course record of 63 strokes, just two better that 21-year-old club champion Ken McBride

Both Leigh and Ken won Nelson and other Kootenay junior golf championships, and Ken went on to great success as captain of the UBC golf team that competed against the top American university teams, before joining Leigh as an officer with the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada regiment in 1942.  Leigh rose to Major and was wounded on two occasions, including the loss of an eye and multiple body wounds in his last action on May 24, 1944, when he was found unconscious by German soldiers and taken to a German hospital for treatment and then a series of prison camps until returning to Canada in a wounded prisoner exchange in January 1945.  While he was in a POW camp he heard that his brother Ken was killed in action near Rimini, Italy on September 16, 1944. 

Ken McBride, in 1942.
my uncle Ken McBride won the UBC Open in 1940 and 1941.
From left: Leigh McBride and brother Ken McBride. Photo taken in about 1932 in the backyard of the McBride home at 708 Hoover Street, Nelson, B.C., Canada

In Ken’s memory, the members of the Nelson Golf Club raised funds for the Ken McBride Memorial Trophy which was awarded to the winner of the annual Labour Day Club Championship from 1947 until 1977.  Leigh often made the trophy presentation.

Among the mementos kept in family memorabilia is the scorecard of an exhibition match in May 1941 when the Canadian Amateur Champion Kenny Black of Vancouver came to Nelson and played a match on the course with the club champion Ken McBride, club pro Charlie Blunt, and another top local player Walter Duckworth. Black’s score of 63 set a club record, with Ken just two strokes back and the others playing well too.

Ken Black won the Canadian Amateur Golf Championship in Quebec in 1938. The event was cancelled from 1939 to 1945 due to WW2. He was runner-up when the event resumed in 1946. He had also been runner-up in 1936.  He was inducted in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 1966, the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 1987, and the B.C. Golf Hall of Fame in 2001.  He died in 1995

I played the original nine-hole course often as a junior member of the club in the mid- and late-1960s.  The course was short in yardage, but quite a challenge because of narrow fairways, small greens and difficult rough on almost every hole.  As most players are right-handed, and high-handicap golfers tend to slice their shots to the right rather than hook to the left, the rough and woods on the right side of fairways claimed innumerable errant golf balls from me and many other players.  Another problem with the course was that about half of the tee areas were mats rather than grass, which tends to be easier to hit from than the mats.  The renovation and expansion of the course to Granite Point in the 1990s was a major step forward for Nelson golf.

A group of members of the Nelson Golf and Country Club posed for this group photo in summer of 1939, shortly before the arrival of WW2. Kneeling at front left is Winnifred “Winnie” McBride, wife of long-time club director R.L. McBride and mother of Leigh and Ken.
Nelson Daily News report of the first
After an extraordinary career as an amateur golfer, Ken Black entered the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 1987.
One of hundreds of newspaper clippings kept by my grandparents of family members making news on the golf links.
Report of the 1965 Nelson Labour Day Tournament, in which Ed Clem won one of eight championships he would win before the trophy was retired in 1977.