Wentworth's "Burma Road" — the Nickname Nobody Explains Properly

Wentworth's West Course has hosted some of golf's biggest events for decades, and most people who play it or watch it on TV have heard it called one thing: the Burma Road. Almost none of them know why, and the real story has nothing to do with golf.

A course built, then abandoned

The West Course was laid out in 1926 by Harry Colt, one of the most influential golf architects Britain ever produced. It was a serious course from the start — heathland, tree-lined, built to test real players.

Then came the Second World War, and the course was abandoned entirely. Grounds like this weren't a priority while the country was at war, and by the time anyone turned back to it, the West Course had gone properly wild — years of neglect, overgrowth, and no maintenance at all.

The comparison that gave it its name

Multiple accounts of the club's history describe German prisoners of war from a nearby camp being used to help clear and restore the course after the war. The club secretary at the time, known as "Rawly" Rawlinson, is credited with comparing the sheer scale of the job to the construction of the real Burma Road — the brutal, labor-intensive supply route built during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. The name stuck to the course itself, not just the restoration project.

*A note on sourcing: this account of the nickname's origin is consistent across the golf-history sources that discuss it, but a fully primary, independently verifiable account (a contemporary club record or first-hand quote) wasn't reachable in researching this piece. Treat the who-said-it-and-exactly-when detail as reported, not certain.*

A nickname that outlasted the reason for it

Nobody clearing that course in the late 1940s was thinking about golf history. They were thinking about how much overgrowth stood between them and a playable fairway. Decades later, the West Course hosts the BMW PGA Championship, one of the biggest events on the European tour, and commentators still reach for "Burma Road" without most viewers knowing there was ever a real road involved at all.