Which championship did Royal Birkdale first host in 1946?

Royal Birkdale first hosted the Amateur Championship in 1946. The event marked the club’s emergence as a major championship venue in the years immediately after the Second World War, and Irish golfer Jimmy Bruen won the title there.

Birkdale had been founded in 1889 and moved to its present site in the Birkdale Hills in 1894. Its links layout, shaped by the Hawtree family and J.H. Taylor, eventually gained a reputation for combining championship difficulty with unusually good spectator views.

The 1946 Amateur Championship is easy to confuse with later international team events held at the club. Royal Birkdale hosted the Curtis Cup in 1948 and the Walker Cup in 1951, but neither was its first major championship. The Open Championship came later: Royal Birkdale staged its first Open in 1954, when Australia’s Peter Thomson won.