BOWLING.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 27, 31 January 1920, Page 18

BOWLING.

"Bowling," says Professor Jlaxwell iValker, "is the national game of New Zealand,' , comments "John Doe" in the Herald." A friend -with a ivide experience of bowlers and 'bowling tells mc that llr. Walker is, he thinks, the best bowls player in New Zealand. Even 60, don't let him persuade you that jowling is our national game. Bowls is :nore a pastime than a game—the idea jf a game is something more vigorous:football is probably the game most widely played by the youth of Sew Zealand. But even then football and bowls ire played only by men. Tennis is really the one game played by both sexes, except that cricket is mildly played by a few schoolgirls. Bowling is unfortunately played b}- a large number of young fit men under 35 who ought to be playing cricket preferably, the Snest summer game, or tennis. Even as a pastime bowls is partaken of by less people than is dancing, and dancing is far more energetic than bowls. Bowls is a very old game. At Torquay, in Devonshire, are the pair of bowls, old and black and not at all like a modern pair of "Jaques," that Sir Francis Drake "was bowling "with at Plymouth Hoe that evening "about the lovely close of a warm summer day" when news came of the sailing of the Great Armada. And JYancis Quarles, who wrote about 1630, lias a poem on bowls—to ■which by the way is prefixed the verse St. John S, v. 44! "Here's your right ground; wag gently o'er tils black: "Tls a short cast: y'are quickly at the jack. Rub. nib, an inch or two; two crowns to On this bowl's side; t>low, wind, 'tis fairly And he goes on to describe a game with the peculiarities in the players that we note to-day as in 1630— "See bow their curved bodies writhe and screw Such antic shapes as 'Proteus never knew. One rubs his itchless elbow, shrugs and laugfts, The t'other bends his beetle brows and chafes." And he goe= on to moralise that— •The world's the jack; the gamesters that Are Cupid, Mammon: that judicious friend That gives the ground is Satan, and the bowls re foolK."