THE GAME OF BOWLS .

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4530, 13 November 1930, Page 4

THE GAME OF BOWLS .

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

As howls is one of our most time-honoured pastimes, a little dip into the dim recesses of the past may for once not he out of place. According to one William Fitzstephen, who was quite a personage in the twelfth century, and achieved fame as the biographer of the ill-fated Thomas a’Becket.t, the youth of London took their pleasures in “jactu lapidum;” and from the fact that balls of stone were used in the earlier forms of the game, this allusion has been held to refer to bowls. One certainly gathers that ye olde time method of play must have been a somewhat fearsome diversion in I lie days when knights were hold. At a later period bowls were forbidden by several Parliaments grown anxious about the decay of archery; and the evil reputation (ugh!) of the howling alleys, which were usually associated with taverns, led to further •(restrictions. That model of rectitude, Henry Vlll y , broke his own lawns when he played howls at Hampton .Court 'Palace to amuse fair Anne Boleyn; and the famous incident of Sir Francis Drake playing at Plymouth Hoe after the Armada had been sighted is probably aullientf?'. Charles 1. was an ardent bowler, and tradition has it that he was engaged in a game when Cornet Joyce arrested him. During the Georgian regime the bowling green was the favourite rendezvous of the wits.

In course of time the game was taken more seriously, especially in Scotland, where many greens were laid with sea turf, the accurate smoothness of which enabled the game to he played scientifically. Tl was long ago felt that the game should b_e macro the subject of unfform laws, and rules were formulated in 1893 by (lie Scottish Bowling Association, a society which bears to bowls much the same relation that the M.C.C. bears lo cricket, juid the .Royal and Ancient Club of St. Andrews to golf. "flic 'first year of the 20th century saw a visit to the Mother Country of a team of boiwlers from Australia and New Zealand, who played with varying success the strongest clubs in the British Isles. Since then exchange of visits between English speaking countries lias not infrequently been made. In order to adjust the points of difference between the colonial and the British games, the Imperial Bowling Association (founded 1899) undertook to codify the laws, and their “new code” was issued in 1901.

To-day bowls is in favour wherever an English-speaking community can find a suitable sheet of turf, and particularly is this the case in our own generously endowed isles.