Woodham Golf Club was built by Ayclifffe and Perterlee Development Corporation. It was designed by James Hamilton-Stutt and opened in 1981. Initially it was run from a portacabin in the muddy car park by George Golightly. George was a serious golfer who was passionate about Woodham Golf Course encouraging people to play. In about 1985 the course started to offer memberships (until then it had just been pay and play) and it was George who got some of the ladies together to meet with the County officials and form the first committee. The first ladies captain was George's wife Kath. She would have admitted herself that she was not much of a golfer, but most of the other members of the committee were very new to golf and so voted her in. It was really Pam Heslop who became captain 1987 who got the section started. Once a female member joined the club she would not take "no" for an answer and got everyone playing on a Sunday.
From these small beginnings the ladies section grew almost continually until there were about 40 lady members of the club in the early 2000's. By this time the golf club had been purchased by Stan Roberts who owned a pipe laying company. He developed some of the land around the golf course in order to keep the club solvent.
He then sold the golf club to Washington Developments who had big plans to build a large number of houses on the land around the golf course. They did not manage to get planning permission for their first scheme, but did secure permission for a much smaller development but before work could commence they went into administration at the end of October 2013.
The course remained closed until August 2014 during which time the ladies section moved "lock, stock and barrel” to Oakleaf (the local municipal course) who made us feel very welcome allowing us to run all our competitions but it wasn’t “home”. Of course not every member of the Woodham Ladies Section moved to Oakleaf with some transferring to other courses whilst others stopped playing golf altogether.
In the June 2014 the Halls purchased Woodham golf club reopening it after undertaking some quite extensive draining work. At this point most of the ladies who had been playing at Oakleaf moved back to Woodham with other ladies joining or rejoining since and we now have a section of approximately 26 members.
The ladies section hold their competitions on a Sunday morning (teeing off at around 10:30am). Many of the ladies also meet up at 09:30am on a Wednesday morning to play a 9-hole stableford competition.