When Berkhamsted Common we traversed at noon, in the sweetest of months, between April and June, the furze was in flower with splendour untold, and the heath was an ocean of verdure and gold...

So wrote a Mr Cautley in 1874, which captures the essence of the Common on which the course rests.

The playing of golf on Berkhamsted Common arose some time during the 1880s. A young School Master, Mr George H. Gowring, perceived that the old grazing land with its fine, crisp, sheep and rabbit-cropped turf, lay just waiting for man and nature to create, between them, near perfect golfing country. And so, with a few like-minded cronies and the permission of the then owner, Lord Brownlow, they laid out a rudimentary course.

Therefore, Berkhamsted has a fair claim to be Hertfordshire's most senior golf club.

Ladies' Golf at Berkhamsted was established at the very beginning. No less than four ladies were registered in the initial months of operations. By 1895 there were seven lady members. In 1957, the Ladies' County Championship came to Berkhamsted and the club notched up the remarkable distinction of three home players reaching the semifinals. Alison Gardner defeating Pat Howard in one of them and Etheldreda Boyd Denise Doyle in the other. Local enthusiasts even compared it to that of Joyce Wethered, probably the best feminine swing there ever was.

Between 1923 and 1926 the club committees decided to upgrade and extend the course by calling on the talents of that great man of golf, James Braid. A Fife man from Elie who had considerable fame for both his golf and the excellent work he had already carried out elsewhere, including Gleneagles, Rosemount (Blairgowrie) and Carnoustie.

With Harry Vardon and J.H. Taylor, Braid had constituted the Great Triumverate which had dominated British Golf for twenty years before the war, and had been the first of them to win the Open Championship five times. Braid driving off circa 1928