Herbert Charles Coningsby Tippet (23 November 1891 1939 Register of England and Wales. His birth was not registered until Q1 1892. England and Wales Birth Register Q1, 1892, Newport, Ref 11a/209 – 28 November 1947) was a leading British amateur golfer, golf club administrator, and golf course architect in the years between the wars. A former reserve army officer, Tippet was for a time a close associate of millionaire American property developer Carl G. Fisher, the man who created the Miami Beach, Florida resort, for whom he designed a number of golf courses in Florida and Long Island. He was one of the most successful British amateur golfers of the 1920s and 1930s and later served as secretary at several prestigious UK golf clubs. He was the second husband of Edith Marguerite Harrington, grandmother of Queen Camilla.
Early life Herbert Charles Coningsby Tippet M.C. (he preferred to be known as Charles and rarely used his third name)The correct spelling of his surname was Tippet but it was frequently misspelt, even in official publications, as Tippett. England and Wales Birth Index, Q1 1892 Newport, vol.11a, p.209 was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, on 23 November 1891 into a family originally from the south-west of England, and brought up in Bristol1901 Census of England and Wales. Surname incorrectly spelt as Tippett. and Sudbury, Suffolk. Baptised in St. Woollos, now Newport Cathedral, on 27 February 1892, he was the son of Charles Henry Tippet (1863–1915), a retired Lieutenant-Colonel turned surveyor, Conservative Party agent and keen amateur golfer, and Edith Alice Goodson. Tippet's father, who had served in the Second Boer War, re-applied for his commission at the outbreak of the First World War and was later killed while serving at Gallipoli. He had been the founder and first captain of Newton Green Golf Club in Sudbury.
The middle child and only son in a family of three, Charles Tippet acquired two things from his father; a lifelong interest in the British Army and an outstanding ability to play golf. It had always been understood that Tippet would follow his father into the army. Whilst at private school, he served in the Army Cadet Force and was commissioned into the Territorial Force when it absorbed the Cadet Force in 1908, being commissioned on 27 November 1908 as a Second Lieutenant in the 5th (Territorial) Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment based at Bury St. Edmunds.London Gazette, 22 December 1908
Military career
On leaving school in 1910, Tippet did not become a professional soldier. Instead, he followed his father's occupation, briefly training as a Land Surveyor, a skill which he was later to put to good use in landscaping golf courses, and he applied to join the Special Reserve of Officers, into which he was commissioned as a Probationer Second Lieutenant on 2 April 1910,London Gazette 1 April 1910 in the 4th (Extra or Special Reserve) Battalion4th Battalion is referred to alternatively as Extra Reserve and Special Reserve Battalion in various editions of the London Gazette of his father's regiment the Royal Dublin Fusiliers; an Irish infantry regiment of the British Army. The Special Reserve of Officers was a cadre of trained civilians who served as part-time officers for a fixed number of weeks each year and who were available to be mobilized in the event of war. For Irish regiments, it served a similar function to the Territorial Force in England. He completed six months of basic officer training between 1910 and 1911 during which time he was seconded to 2nd Battalion at Farnborough Barracks, Hampshire.Manwaring, Arthur E. (1911) Crown and Company, the Historical Records of the 2nd Batt. Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Formerly the 1st Bombay European Regiment, Vol. 1, reprinted by Forgotten Books, London 2013, , page 10. He appears at Farnborough Barracks on the 1911 Census of England and Wales By then he had developed his father's love of golf and became a successful amateur in the years immediately prior to the First World War, representing Royal North Devon Golf Club.Spalding's Official Golf Guide for 1915, p.179 After completing basic officer training at Aldershot, he was confirmed in his rank on 2 June 1911London Gazette 2 June 1911, p.4183 and transferred back to 4th Battalion, at that time stationed at Richmond Barracks in Templemore, Tipperary, where he became a member of The Royal Dublin Golf Club. On 1 December of that year, he was promoted to Lieutenant.London Gazette, 19 January 1912, p. 454 In 1913 he was sent to the School of Musketry in Hythe, Kent where he received a first-class certificate in small-arms use and on 16 April 1913 he was awarded the title of Officer Instructor of Musketry, effectively the depot's small-arms training officer. The appointment brought with it the position of Assistant Adjutant, a junior staff post. Tippet became a full-time soldier when the Special Reserve of Officers was mobilized on the outbreak of the First World War, following which, on 6 September 1914, he was promoted to Captain.London Gazette 6 February 1915, p. 1216 (first name incorrectly printed as Henry instead of Herbert) In October, he transferred with the Battalion to Sittingbourne in England, returning to Templemore in December 1915.
4th Battalion acted mainly as a recruitment and training unit and Tippet spent the first two years of World War I engaged in second-line duties but that was to change in the spring of 1916 when he was to see action for the first time. On 24 April 1916 the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin and the following day, Tippet's Battalion was one of a number of units sent in to suppress the uprising. They forced their way into the centre of Dublin and fought the insurgents along the railway line from Broadstone Station to Cabra Bridge. After the rebels withdrew, 4th Battalion formed a cordon around the area until the rising ended.
Shortly after, Tippet left Ireland. The Dublins had suffered severe casualties at Hulluch, near Loos, and replacements were urgently needed. On 14 May 1916, he was posted to France in the build-up to the Somme offensive, serving on attachment to the 8th (Service) Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Infantry Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division throughout the Somme campaign. Tippet is listed among the officers who took part in the Battle of Ginchy from 3 to 10 September 1916.8th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers War Diary for October 1916 On 6 July 1917 his attachment to 8th Battalion ended and from 9 July he was appointed Staff Captain GSO3Supplement to the London Gazette, 16 August 1917, p.8437 attached to the 1/1 Herts, 118th Infantry Brigade, 39th Division, in preparation for the Third Battle of Ypres where 118th Brigade saw action. No record exists of his military actions although, many years later, his step-son wrote that he had fought gallantly and Hansen refers to him as a war hero. He was mentioned in dispatches on 7 November 1917London Gazette 7 December 1917, p. 12921 for gallantry at Passchendaele and in March 1918 he took part in the First Battles of the Somme where 39th Division took heavy casualties in helping to prevent the Germans from breaking through to the coast. On 24 March, 1/1 Herts Commanding Officer, Lt. Col. Phillips, had been taken prisoner and Tippet took acting command of the battalion.1/1 Herts war diary, 28 March 1918 On 28 March, during the battalion’s withdrawal to Coyeux and a subsequent counter-attack, Tippet suffered a head wound from shrapnelSuffolk and Essex Free Press, 17 April 1918, p.8 and was hospitalised. For these actions he was subsequently awarded the Military Cross; an award given for "an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy".London Gazette. 1 January 1919
After recovering from the head wound, Tippet was appointed Staff Captain, 155th Infantry Brigade, 52nd Lowland Division, where he served out the remainder of the war.
The physical injuries would eventually heal but the mental scars never did. After serving for two years as a front-line infantry officer on the Somme and at Passchendaele, Tippet's experiences left him suffering severely from shell-shock, a condition which meant he was unable to cope with sudden loud noises and which was to remain with him for life.Milwaukee Journal, 23 May 1931 The medical condition brought his military career to an end. He left the army in 1919 but chose to be known as Captain Tippet in civilian life, a title generally considered appropriate only for ex-cavalry officers, which Tippet was not.
He was to re-apply for his commission at the outbreak of the Second World War and on 26 May 1940 was commissioned into the General Service Corps as a LieutenantLondon Gazette 2 July 1940 but awarded the War Substantive rank of Captain and placed on the General List (a reserve of experienced former officers who could be mobilized if needed). However, he did not see active service and was released on health grounds at the end of 1943. Following his release from the General List he was granted the lifetime honorary rank of Major on 1 January 1944.Supplement to the London Gazette, 4 January 1944, p. 80
Golfing career Having been invalided out of the army, Tippet was obliged to seek a new career and decided to earn his living from golf. However, although he was a golfer of considerable ability, he never played as a professional. His real forte was to lie in golf administration and in the designing of golf courses, learning his craft by studying the methods of Old Tom Morris, the architect of Royal North Devon and inventor of the modern golf course, and of James Braid who had re-built Newton Green. In 1919, Tippet was appointed manager of Ashford Manor Golf Club in Middlesex working for club captain and secretary Harold Hilton, a winner of two British Amateurs, under whom Tippet learned the business of running a golf club. The following year, Tippet won the prestigious Kashmir Cup, an individual scratch open competition held at Royal North Devon.
Harold Hilton was a well-known player on both sides of the Atlantic having won both the British and U.S. Amateurs in 1911 and was a member of the prestigious Apawamis Golf Club in Westchester, New York. When the nearby Meadow Brook Golf Club in Westbury, Long Island was looking for a new secretary in 1921, Hilton recommended his protégé Charles Tippet. Tippet left Southampton for New York on 5 November 1921 being joined a month later by his wife and step-son.
Meadow Brook was at that time a nine-hole course with a history stretching back to 1894. Tippet started working on improvements to the course and immediately began to acquire a reputation as a course designer. Unusually, despite having briefly trained as a Land Surveyor, he preferred to work from putty or clay models rather than drawings.The Evening News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 4 February 1927, p.20Warren Tribune, Warren, Pennsylvania, 17 December 1926, p.7 He was quickly to attract a circle of wealthy patrons and soon began receiving commissions to design 9-hole courses on private Long Island estates; the first at Gustave Heckscher's Upland House, the second at Middleton Burrill's Jericho Farm, both in Westbury. A third followed on Julius Fleischmann's Lindens estate at Sands Point, Port Washington.The Miami News, 10 December 1924, p. 18, via newspapers.com ref: 12014
His first major commission then followed to design a 9-hole and two 18-hole courses at the former William Phelps Manor in Teaneck, New Jersey, then being developed as a leisure facility. One of these courses is now the Overpeck Golf Club (6,584 yards, par 72), the remainder having been built over.