Spotlight on Bowls

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20055, 29 September 1939, Page 9

Spotlight on Bowls

(By “Mat”)

To-morrow’s Tournament Best support for to-morrow’s tournament, is coming from Poverty Bay, which club is contributing 62 competitors, almost half of the total entries. Gisborne club has nominated 40 and , Kahutia 36, making 138 altogether. There will be three games of 10 heads, play beginning at 1.30-pm.

This tournament has been organised by the Gisborne-East Coast Bowling Centre to assist the sports queen candidate’s committee, the proceeds subsequently going to swell the district’s, centennial fund.

Opening Next Saturday Saturday, October 7, marks the official opening in Gisborne of the 193040 bowling season. Mr. A. Slight, president of the centre, will perform . the usual opening ceremony on each of the three town greens, which will be bedecked for the occasion with flags and bunting. * * * # History of Bowls (Continued from last week.) There seemed to be no good reason for saying that England’s immortal bard not only frequented bowling greens, but was also a keen and capable player. Leigh Hunt is authority for saying that in Shakespeare's years he divided his time between books, his bowling green, and his daughter Susannah. Turn to “King John” or “The Taming of the Shrew,’’ and anyone will find indisputable evidence that Shakespeare was an expert player and knew all the quips and cranks of the game. “Well forward, forward! Thus the bowl should run, And not unluckily against the bias.” So that biased bowls were certainly the vogue in the sixteenth century. The popularity of bowls as a recreative sport was not confined to England. The game was equally attractive to Scotsmen. James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland commended his son to play it “moderately, but forbade the pastime to the commoner sort under pains and penalties. But it was banned by the Stuarts not so much on account of its leading to the desecration of the Sabbath as of the gambling it gave rise to. a In passing, it may be mentioned that Charles I on one occasion is said xo have lost £IOOO (a remarkably heavy stake in those days) on a single game played at Barking, Essex. Denounced in high places, lampooned by the poets of the day, and essentially the favourite pastime of profligate nobles, the game lost its high estate and rapidly fell into the lowest depths of infamy, one poet saying in 1635 that “The vulgar proverb’s crost, he hardly can Be a good bowler and an honest man.” To Scotland bowls owes its rescue from the parlous state into which it had fallen, and it was the northern nation that (to ,use the language of Manson) “stripped it of its undesirable surroundings, making it a beautiful game—an open-air pastime, without violence, second to none in its scienk tlfic and strategical possibilities, and, surpassing all in its promotion of good fellowship.” And in the Emerald Isle . (especially Belfast) and in Wales, bowls spread themselves over the face of the land. As the battles in Europe were said to have been won on the cricket fields of English public schools, so on the greens of Britain and her Dominions were to be found all those characteristics of steadfast attachment to King and constitution, as the embodiment of these splendid principles of justice, humanity, and equality on which the British Empire was based, and those

virtues of affection and comradeship which were the stamp of a common descent.

Owing to the war and the necessity of economising on newsprint, “Spotlight on Bowls” will be discontinued in the meantime.