English Major Winners In Golf: Every Champion Listed

At Prestwick in 1890, an amateur from Royal Liverpool named John Ball won the Open Championship. Every previous winner had been a Scottish professional, most of them from a handful of families in Musselburgh and St Andrews, and the championship had been treated for three decades as a domestic Scottish competition that outsiders occasionally entered. Ball's win broke both conventions at once. He was English and he was an amateur, and English golf has been counting majors from that afternoon onwards.

The total since then is smaller than the size of the English game would suggest, and it has arrived in clusters separated by decades of nothing. Understanding why is more interesting than the arithmetic.

Counting English majors and why the total is disputed

There is no single agreed number, and anyone who quotes one without explaining their method is glossing over three genuine problems.

The first is the Channel Islands. Harry Vardon and Ted Ray were both born in Jersey, which is a Crown Dependency and not part of England. Vardon won six Open Championships and a US Open; Ray won an Open and a US Open. Include them and England's total jumps substantially. Exclude them and the early record looks much thinner. Most careful record-keepers list them as Jersey players. Popular accounts frequently do not.

The second is emigration. Jim Barnes was born in Lelant, Cornwall, and moved to the United States as a young man, where he won the first two PGA Championships in 1916 and 1919, a US Open in 1921 and the Open Championship in 1925. He is usually described as an American player, and he certainly built his career there, but he was English by birth. Cyril Walker, who won the 1924 US Open, was born in Manchester and followed a similar path. Neither man is a straightforward entry on anybody's list.

The third is the definition of a major itself. The modern set of four — the Masters, the US PGA Championship, the US Open and the Open Championship — is a twentieth-century construction, and it did not exist when Ball won at Prestwick. Before the Masters was founded in 1934, the amateur championships of Britain and the United States were regarded as majors, which is why the grand slam of 1930 consisted of the two Opens and the two Amateurs. Apply that older definition and the English record expands again, because English amateurs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were formidable.

This page uses the modern set of four for the men, notes the disputed cases where they arise, and treats the women's majors according to the set recognised at the time each championship was played.

The Great Triumvirate and the earliest English champions

The three men who dominated golf from the mid-1890s to the First World War were Harry Vardon, John Henry Taylor and James Braid. Between them they won sixteen Open Championships in twenty-one years, and the phrase Great Triumvirate has stuck to them ever since.

Only one of the three was English. Braid was a Scot from Earlsferry in Fife. Vardon was from Grouville in Jersey. J.H. Taylor was from Northam in Devon, and he is the foundational figure in English professional golf.

Taylor won five Opens: 1894, 1895, 1900, 1909 and 1913. The first of those, at Royal St George's, was the first Open Championship ever played in England, and Taylor's win in it — an Englishman taking the title the first time it left Scotland — is the neatest piece of symbolism in the whole history. He was also an organiser and an institution-builder. He was central to the founding of the Professional Golfers' Association, ran the Royal Mid-Surrey club as its professional for decades, and wrote and campaigned about the status of the professional golfer at a time when professionals were not permitted in most clubhouses.

Around Taylor sit the amateurs. John Ball's win in 1890 was followed by Harold Hilton, another Royal Liverpool man, who won in 1892 at Muirfield — the first Open played over 72 holes — and again in 1897 at Hoylake. Both were amateurs beating the best professionals of the era, which was possible then and would be inconceivable now. Ball won the Amateur Championship eight times, a figure nobody has come close to; Hilton won it four times and added the 1911 US Amateur. Their record is the reason English golf history cannot be told through the professional game alone, and it is picked up in more detail in our guide to the English amateur championships.

Arthur Havers took the Open at Troon in 1923, and then English success stopped for a decade.

English winners of The Open, era by era

The Open is where the English record is densest, and the pattern of it is instructive.

Champion	Years won	Notes
John Ball	1890	Amateur, Royal Liverpool, first English winner
Harold Hilton	1892, 1897	Amateur, Royal Liverpool
JH Taylor	1894, 1895, 1900, 1909, 1913	First champion at an English venue
Arthur Havers	1923	Won at Troon
Henry Cotton	1934, 1937, 1948	Ended a long American run in 1934
Max Faulkner	1951	Won at Royal Portrush
Tony Jacklin	1969	Won at Royal Lytham
Nick Faldo	1987, 1990, 1992	Muirfield twice, St Andrews once

Henry Cotton's three wins are the most consequential in the middle of that list. American professionals had taken the championship repeatedly through the 1920s and early 1930s, and British golf had begun to look permanently second-rate. Cotton's win at Royal St George's in 1934 arrived with a second round of 65, a score that gave its name to the Dunlop 65 ball, and it re-established that a British player could still win the thing. He won again at Carnoustie in 1937 in a field containing the entire United States Ryder Cup team, which is the more impressive of the two, and a third time at Muirfield in 1948 after the war.

Max Faulkner's win at Royal Portrush in 1951 is remembered partly for the venue — the only Open played in Northern Ireland until 2019 — and partly for Faulkner himself, who was said to have signed autographs as Open Champion before the final round had been played.

Tony Jacklin's win at Royal Lytham in 1969 mattered out of proportion to a single championship, and the reason is covered further down this page. Nick Faldo's three came in a six-year window built on a total reconstruction of his swing, and his win at Muirfield in 1992 is the most recent by an Englishman.

The venues involved are their own subject — our guide to English courses that stage the Open covers the rota, and the history of the Claret Jug covers what the winner actually receives.

Winning at home and winning away

Of the English Open champions listed above, only some won on English soil, and the split is worth noticing. Taylor's first win came at Royal St George's, Cotton's at Royal St George's and later Muirfield and Carnoustie, Jacklin's at Royal Lytham, Faldo's at Muirfield twice and St Andrews once. Faulkner won in Northern Ireland. Havers won in Scotland.

There is a common assumption that home advantage counts for a great deal at an Open, and the record does not obviously support it. The championship rotates around links courses that no player, English or otherwise, plays regularly, and familiarity with English weather is not the same as familiarity with a particular set of dunes. What does seem to matter is a player's comfort with links golf as a discipline — running the ball, controlling flight in wind, accepting bad bounces without unravelling — and that is a matter of upbringing rather than geography. An English player raised on inland parkland has no more of it than an American who arrives a fortnight early and practises.

Amateurs, professionals and the shifting meaning of a major

The distinction that governs the early part of this record barely exists now.

When Ball and Hilton were winning Opens, the amateur was the senior figure in British golf socially and, in a few cases, competitively. Professionals were tradesmen attached to clubs, expected to make clubs, teach members, and stay out of the clubhouse. The Amateur Championship was regarded as a title of at least equal standing to the Open, which is why Bobby Jones's 1930 grand slam consisted of two Opens and two Amateurs and was understood at the time as the complete set.

The Masters, founded in 1934, and the professionalisation of the American tour changed the hierarchy within a generation. By the post-war period the four professional championships had become the recognised set and the amateur titles had become a stage on the way rather than a destination. That reclassification is retrospective, and applying it backwards makes the English record look thinner than it was — Ball's eight Amateur Championships would, under the standards of his own era, have been counted alongside anything.

English players who have won the Masters and how they did it

Two Englishmen have won at Augusta National, and their four green jackets between them arrived in very different ways.

Nick Faldo won in 1989, 1990 and 1996. The first two were playoffs. In 1989 he made up ground with a closing 65 and won at the second extra hole after his opponent had missed a short putt on the first; in 1990 he won again in extra holes, becoming the first player since Jack Nicklaus to defend the title. The 1996 win is the one everybody remembers, and it belongs as much to Greg Norman as to Faldo — Norman began the final round with a substantial lead and shot 78 while Faldo shot 67. Faldo's own account has always been that he simply played the golf course and let the situation resolve itself, which is both true and an understatement of what it takes to shoot 67 in that position.

Danny Willett won in 2016. He had not been part of the conversation going into Sunday, several strokes back with attention fixed elsewhere, and he shot 67 while the leader dropped shots in the middle of the back nine. It was Willett's first major and it came in a week he had nearly missed entirely because his first child was due.

The two wins sit oddly together. Faldo's three were the product of a decade at the very top of the game, a player who had rebuilt his technique specifically to hold up under major-championship pressure and who won six majors in total, more than any other Englishman. Willett's was a single week executed perfectly. Both count identically.

English success at the US Open and the US PGA Championship

The US Open record is short and the gaps in it are enormous.

Cyril Walker, Manchester-born but by then working in America, won at Oakland Hills in 1924. Tony Jacklin won at Hazeltine in 1970 by seven strokes, the first British winner of the championship in half a century, and he did it the year after winning the Open — a double no British player had managed in living memory. Justin Rose won at Merion in 2013, closing with a four iron to the last that finished pin high and left him needing only a par. Matt Fitzpatrick won at Brookline in 2022, on the same course where he had won the US Amateur nine years earlier, which is a coincidence so neat it sounds invented.

The US PGA Championship is the anomaly. No Englishman has won it under the modern stroke play format, and the only English-born winners are Jim Barnes's two titles from 1916 and 1919, when the championship was contested at match play and Barnes was established in America. The event ran as a match play championship until 1958, which changes the nature of the record considerably: match play produces different winners from stroke play, and a comparison across the 1958 boundary is not comparing like with like.

Why the PGA specifically has resisted English players is not obviously answerable. It is played in high summer on American parkland courses, usually soft, usually long, in heat that British players historically found difficult, and for much of its history it fell at an awkward point in a European-based player's season. None of that is a full explanation. It may simply be that four championships a year over a century is a small sample and English golf has not produced enough contenders for the gap to be meaningful.

The long droughts and why they happened

Set the wins out chronologically and the pattern is not a steady trickle. It is bunches, separated by silence.

Period	English majors	Length of gap
1890–1913	Ball, Hilton, Taylor	Regular success
1923–1951	Havers, Cotton, Faulkner	Sparse but present
1951–1969	None	18 years
1969–1970	Jacklin, twice	Two in thirteen months
1970–1987	None	17 years
1987–1996	Faldo, six majors	The most concentrated run
1996–2013	None	17 years

Three separate gaps of roughly seventeen or eighteen years. That is not bad luck; it is structural.

The first gap has an obvious explanation. The 1950s and 1960s were the period in which American golf pulled decisively ahead — better agronomy, a well-funded professional tour, college golf as a development system, and the arrival of Palmer, Nicklaus and Player. British professionals of that era were mostly club professionals who competed around a job. They were not full-time tournament players in the way their American counterparts were, and they arrived at the Open having spent the summer teaching.

The second gap, after Jacklin, is harder. Jacklin himself had shown it could be done, and British golf did not follow him. The European Tour was only established in the early 1970s, and it took a decade to become a circuit strong enough to prepare players for major championships. The players who eventually broke through — Ballesteros, Lyle, Faldo, Woosnam — were the first generation to grow up with that tour as a realistic career.

The third gap, from 1996 to 2013, is the strange one, because it happened while English golf was in every other respect strong. Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Paul Casey and Luke Donald all spent time in the top handful of the world ranking during it. Donald reached world number one. The wins did not come. Any explanation offered for that period is speculation dressed as analysis, and the honest answer is that four majors a year is a very small number of opportunities and being consistently excellent does not guarantee catching one.

Near misses, playoff losses and the runner-up record

The list of English second places is longer and in some ways more revealing than the list of wins.

Lee Westwood is the central case. He finished runner-up at the Masters and at the Open in the same year, led or contended at several others, spent time as world number one, and never won a major. His major record contains more top-three finishes than most champions accumulate in a career. The absence of a win from it is the single most-discussed fact in modern English golf and it does not admit of a tidy explanation.

Ian Poulter finished second at the Open at Royal Birkdale in 2008, on a week when the weather made scoring close to impossible. Tommy Fleetwood has been runner-up in majors on both sides of the Atlantic, including a final round of 63 at the US Open that equalled the lowest round ever shot in the championship and still left him a stroke short. Nick Faldo lost a US Open playoff at Brookline in 1988 to Curtis Strange, between his Open and Masters wins.

The runner-up record matters because it is the honest measure of how competitive English golf has been. A country that produces regular contenders and occasional champions is in a different position from one that produces neither, and by that measure the 1996 to 2013 drought was a drought of results rather than of quality.

English women's major champions and their achievements

The women's record is smaller in number and larger in individual significance, and it comes with its own definitional complication: the set of women's majors has changed more than once, so a championship that counts as a major now did not always.

Laura Davies is the outstanding figure. She won four majors — the US Women's Open in 1987, the LPGA Championship in 1994 and 1996, and the du Maurier Classic in 1996 — and she did it while playing a genuinely global schedule at a time when almost nobody did. The 1987 US Women's Open came in a playoff. Davies had turned professional only a few years earlier and was not an established American tour player, and she won the biggest championship in the women's game against opposition that included the era's leading names. Her career total of professional wins worldwide runs into the dozens across multiple tours.

Alison Nicholas, raised in Sheffield, won the 1997 US Women's Open, holding off Nancy Lopez in a final round in which both players went low and Nicholas did not crack.

The Women's British Open became a major on the LPGA schedule in 2001, which is why the two English wins in it that count are Karen Stupples at Sunningdale in 2004 and Georgia Hall at Royal Lytham in 2018. Stupples's win is remembered for the start of her final round, which opened with an eagle and an albatross in the first two holes — an opening nobody has matched in a major. Hall's win at Lytham was played in front of a large English crowd and she won it in a head-to-head that went to the closing holes.

The comparison with the men's record is not straightforward, because the two games had entirely different economics for most of the twentieth century. Davies won her majors in an era when a British woman wanting a professional career had to base herself in America or accept a fraction of the prize money, and the Ladies European Tour has never approached the LPGA's purses. A player choosing between them is choosing between money and home, and most of the English women who have won majors made that choice in America's favour at some point.

That context makes the four names above more impressive rather than less, and it also explains why the list is short. A pathway that requires a teenager to relocate across the Atlantic filters out a great many players who would have flourished on a domestic circuit. Our guide to the Women's Open Championship covers the championship's own history and its route to major status in more detail.

How English majors compare with Scottish, Welsh and Irish totals

Any comparison across the home nations runs immediately into the nineteenth century.

Scotland's raw total is far larger than England's, and most of it was accumulated before 1900, when the Open was effectively a Scottish championship contested by Scottish professionals from a small number of towns. Old Tom Morris, Young Tom Morris, Willie Park and their contemporaries won repeatedly against fields that included almost nobody from anywhere else. Counting those as equivalent to modern majors flatters Scotland enormously. Restrict the comparison to the modern era and Scotland's record is Sandy Lyle's Open and Masters, Paul Lawrie's Open at Carnoustie in 1999, and Catriona Matthew's Women's British Open. That is a smaller total than England's over the same period.

Wales has one male major champion: Ian Woosnam, who won the Masters in 1991. For a country of its size and its number of golf clubs, one is a respectable return; it is also a single player rather than a tradition.

Ireland and Northern Ireland together have had much the better recent record. Fred Daly won the Open in 1947. Then, after a long gap, Padraig Harrington won three majors in two seasons, Graeme McDowell won the US Open at Pebble Beach in 2010, Darren Clarke won the Open at Royal St George's in 2011, Rory McIlroy assembled four majors between 2011 and 2014 and later completed the career grand slam at Augusta, and Shane Lowry won the Open at Royal Portrush in 2019. Measured per head of population that is the strongest record in these islands by a wide margin, and it is worth English golf's attention precisely because Ireland's golfing infrastructure is smaller than England's, not larger.

What each win did for participation and coaching in England

Jacklin's Open win in 1969 is the clearest case of a single result changing a country's relationship with a sport.

British golf at the end of the 1960s was a club game with a small and underfunded professional wing. Jacklin winning the Open, and then the US Open eight months later, put golf on the front of newspapers, gave television a British champion to build coverage around, and made a professional career look achievable to teenagers who had assumed the game's summit was American. The subsequent growth in course construction, in club membership and in coaching provision through the 1970s cannot be attributed to Jacklin alone, but the timing is not a coincidence.

Faldo's run in the late 1980s and 1990s had a different effect, and a more technical one. Faldo's public rebuilding of his swing under a coach, and his willingness to talk about the process, changed what English club golfers thought coaching was for. Before that, a lesson was something you took when your game had gone wrong. Faldo's example established the idea of a long-term technical relationship between player and coach, and the modern English coaching profession — with its video analysis, its launch monitors and its structured development pathways — grew out of that shift more than out of any governing body initiative.

Willett's Masters win in 2016 and Rose's US Open in 2013 arrived into a mature system rather than creating one. Their measurable effect was on junior sign-ups in the weeks afterwards, which is a real but short-lived spike. Converting it depends entirely on whether local clubs have a junior structure ready to absorb it, which is a question about joining a golf club in England rather than about the champions themselves.

The pathways that produced English major winners

The routes have changed completely across the period this page covers, and each generation's path is unrecognisable to the one before it.

Ball and Hilton were amateurs of independent means attached to one great club, Royal Liverpool, who competed because competing was what serious amateur golfers did. Taylor came up as a caddie and a greenkeeper's assistant and turned professional because it was a job. Cotton was a public schoolboy who chose the professional game deliberately, which was unusual enough at the time to be commented on for years, and who then spent a career arguing for the professional's social standing.

Jacklin came out of a working-class background in Scunthorpe through the assistant professional system, the standard route of his era: attach yourself to a club, serve in the shop, teach, and play in whatever tournaments you could reach. Faldo came to golf late, at fourteen, after watching the Masters on television, and progressed through the English amateur system and its county structure before turning professional.

The modern pathway is more formalised and considerably more expensive. It runs through county golf, the England Golf performance squads, national amateur championships, sometimes an American college scholarship, and then either a tour school or a developmental circuit. Rose and Fitzpatrick both came through the amateur system with international records behind them before turning professional. The county golf structure is the base layer of it, and England Golf's squads sit above that.

The obvious risk in a formalised pathway is that it selects early and selects for the players who can afford the coaching, the equipment and the travel. A route that would have found a caddie from Northam in 1890 does not obviously exist any more. Whether that matters to the eventual production of major champions is unproven, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, but it is the question the English game keeps returning to.

For the team competition where these players appear together rather than individually, see our guide to the Ryder Cup from an English perspective. Broader coverage sits in the England section and across the golf pages.