The Bowlers

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24769, 9 January 1946, Page 4

The Bowlers

Christchurch bowlers have the first and best right to welcome the hundreds of visitors among the 1866 entered for the tournament that opened yesterday, and there is no doubt that >the warmth of it will last till the last bowl has gone down—and longer. For there are two facts about this game which are beyond doubt. The first, the relevant one here, is that the great company of bowlers play the friendliest of all field games, or, if it is not the same thing, are the friendliest company any field game festers. Observers do not really see most of a game; but they are well placed to speak of some aspects of games, and what bowlers themselves probably take for granted impresses everyone who strolls into a green or looks over the fence. Bowlers not only enjoy their game; they enjoy themselves; they enjoy each other. Over what other sward may be heard that pleasant conversational buzz, punctuated, but not contradicted, by earnest strategic advice and groans of dismay or repentance, and accentuated by ripples of laughter and triumph? By contrast, the croquet lawn, for example, is populated by mutes and mourners. This is not to say that the bowler is too light-hearted to play seriously, and with a proper regard, like Mrs Battle’s, for the I rigour of the game. K there is any paradox in saying that the bowler is at once the most careful and thb most carefree of players, those whom it puzzles—having certainly never watched bowlers at play—may see the truth of it revealed on any green, any day this week, and in the best proof of tournament games. But it has not always been so. The earlier history of bowls has "sordid chapters of brawling and dissolute behaviour in |it. It is enough to open a single window upon the past, an ecclesiastical one. It was Bishop John Ayl|mer, of London, who, bowling on Sunday afternoons, used such language “as justly exposed his “ character to reproach ”. But through this single window, also, the second indubitable fact about bowls is to be glimpsed, as honourable as the first: it is the simple fact that no British field game, still popular, has a longer, continuous tradition, except archery. For 700 years certainly, perhaps for 800, it has given its followers exercise and delight. A thirteenth century manuscript (says Britannica) contains a picture, “ crude but spirited ”, which brings the middle ages and the modern into unity: Three figures are introduced, and a jack. The first player’s bowl has come to rest just in front of the jack; the second has delivered' his bowl and is following after it' with one of those eccentric contortions still not unusual on modern greens, the first player meanwhile making a repressive gesture with his hand, as if to urge the

bowl to stop short of his own; the third player is shown as in the act of delivering his bowl.

To which it may be added, appropriately, that like many ancient British institutions the game of bowls owes reform and improvement first to Scotland and then to the enterprise of Empire. Scotland gave rules—the Mitchell code—to the irregular southern game, and not only a code but the perfected art of laying down greens; and Australia led the way in organisation. The 1866 bowlers in Christchurch this week are the heirs of the ages, its fortunate children; and they know it.