The BMW PGA Championship will be played at the club, where a bunker was built by the British military to be a site more secure from bombing than central London.
When golf pros and fans pull up to England’s Wentworth Club for the BMW PGA Championship, they’ll be driving in over a little-known slice of World War II history.
About 30 feet under the club’s parking lot is a sprawling bunker that was constructed by the British military and used after the war’s outbreak in 1939.
The ultraexclusive golf club, where the tournament will be played from Thursday through Sunday, sits on the Wentworth Estate in the village of Virginia Water, in Surrey, about an hour southwest of London. Now home to some of the most expensive property in the country, Wentworth was once one of many country estates requisitioned by the British military during the war.
The site was intended to be a more secure alternative to central London, especially if German bombing eventually forced evacuations from the city.
“In the war planning in the late 1930s, it was identified as a possible future seat of government,” said Alex Windscheffel, a senior lecturer in modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Surrey. “You have to remember, in the late 1930s, there’s a lot of fear about the bombers” and what they could do to cities.
But the government stayed in London after all, so Windscheffel said, Wentworth “still gets used, but I don’t think it’s ever used quite in the way that was imagined.” The Wentworth Club declined to comment for this article.
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Source: Golf - nytimes.com
