BOWLING.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18763, 17 January 1923, Page 8

BOWLING.

B* Jack. Up to the present the Dunedin bowlers have not met with outstanding success at the Dominion tournament which is at present being- played in Auckland. None of them reached the final stages in the singles and with such tine exponents of the game as E. Horraway, J. Tonkin, J, Rigby (last year’s winner), and A. Tlrothoway, taking part it is rather surprising that they did not go further. In the doubles J. Rigby

and J. Tonkin, winners of many a hardfought game, have won their section, and in the rinks Tonkin and Tretheway have won each of the two games which they had played up to the time of writing. Professor Walker, who is undoubtedly one of the finest bowlers in the dominion, is evidently in form, and should just about land the singles. He is the oidy two-lifer left in this competition. On Saturday the Milton and Bald nth a Bowling Clubs plaocl a match of throe rinks which ended in a draw, the scores being 61 all. In the lost head played Balclutha wanted one to draw and two to win, and managed to li/ one which the two skips were unable to affect. A draw is certainly rather unusual. In fact, under the Dunedin Centre’s rules, a section in any game cannot end in a draw, for if the scores are equal at the conclusion of play the last rink to finish is required to play another head.

Mr D. Harvey, a prominent member of the Hokomti Club, Gore, is at present spending a holiday in Dunedin. Mr J. Abbott wrote stating that the rinks tournament at Christmas could not be deemed a success financially owing to the entries being so small. He suggested the advisability of calling a meeting of delegates to reconsider the decision to hold a doubles tournament at Easter. He thought that if only doubles were held the entries would not bo largo enough to make the tournament the financial success that it should lie. Eitster would be some three weeks earlier this year than it was last ear, .and there would be a greater chance of getting fine weather. —The executive decided to hold a. meeting of delegates on Fobmairy 5 to consider the question of holding a rinks and doubles tournament at Easter. I am certainly strongly in favour of Mr Abbott’s suggestion. Experience has shown conclusively thnit a rinks tournament at Christmas does not meet with general approval among the bowling fraternity, and I am inclined to think that a doubles tournament at Easter would not meet with the measure of support necessary to ensure success. In the past a mixed tourney—doubles and rinks—has been well supported, so why make a change that is unlikely to prove popular. I shall be surprised if the delegates to the Centre do not look at it in this light. The Queensland bowlers are astonished to find that New Zealanders, as bowlers, proportionately outnumber themselves. They give, ns an instance, Palmerston North, with six greens, equalling one to every 2500 people; Brisbane, with 12, one to 17,000; and Ipswich, with one to 25,000. The four-rimk championship games will be resumed next week and the inter-club championship games on Saturday, January 27. THE ANNALS OF BOWLS. Writing under the above heading, “Matanga” in the Now Zealand Herald says: Like other ball games, it has a past that goes back to dim antiquity. There was a certain “in jactu lapidum” which the young Londoners of the twelfth century enjoyed on holidays, and it was more probably bowls than stone-throwing. The “lapidum” in its name is a reminder that stone bowls were long used; Scotland clung to them until the end of the seventeenth century. The spherical stone balls found in old Scottish ruins—so innocent of bias to be veritable “pokers” to modern players—and the similar relics discovered in sandhills at Tauranga, are regarded by some as evidence of the popularity of some such game as bowls ages ago among Scotsmen and Maoris, whose racial affinities have been enlarged upon by Dr Buck. Whatever truth be in conjectures about those stone balls and racial affinities, it is certain that Englishmen have for many centuries indulged in bowls. Old pictures in our Royal Library show them trying to lay the shot near a small cone standing on the green sward, a cone at either end of

the rink, which in later years gave place to the small object ball now called “Jack” or “Kitty,” according (apparently) to the measure of sentimentality actuating the player. BANNED BY LAW. Open-air greens were the original rule, till the fascination of the pastime produced roofed alleys, so that winter winds and summer rams should not put a limit to play. But the covered bowling alloy became the loitering place of the idle and the dissolute, and the fair fame of howls was injured. The game came under the ban; even the open-air game which was free from serious taint was discredited by the sordid doings in the alleys, and our English Statute Books are plentifully spattered with Parliament’s disapproval. This is due in part to the undue absorption of time that ought to have been devoted to archery, but there was worse than that. In the Close Roll of Edward 111 bowling is forbidden, with other “games alike dishonourable, useless, and unprofitable.” An Act of Henry VIII is particularly severe: “Artificers, husbandmen, apprentices, and others of the lower classes, are prohibited, on pain of 20 shillings, from playing at bowls or other unlawful games

out of Christmas, and in Christmas may play thereat in their masters’ houses or presence; no person shall play at bowls in open places out of his garden or orchard under pain of six shillings and eightpence.” These laws, however, must have proved hard to enforce, for it is common among old writers to deplore, as does Stephen Gosson in his “School of Abuse”/ (1579), the turning of “our courage to cowardice, our running to ryot, our bows into bowls, and our darts into dishes.” He adds that “common

bowling alleys are privy mothes that eat up the credit of many idle citizens, whoso gaynos at home are not able to weigh downe theyre losses abroad, whose shoppes are so farre from maintaining their play that their wives and children cry out for bread, and go to beddo supperlesse ofte in the yeer.” ROYAL PLAYERS. Henry VIII, however much concerned about the waste of time and money by the lower classes in the bowling alleys, abided dtie to the equipment of Whitehall; and soon greens came to be lokod upon as indispensable in the laying out of gentlemen’s gardens. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this garden pastime grew in popularity among all classes, and bowls were everywhere driven gaily through the statute law. In the spacious days when Spaniard and Englishman turned the high seas into a battlefield, there was no game so popular as this. The story about the English ad-

mirals is given in Patrick Fraser Tytler’s Life of Raleigh: “It is traditionally reported that when the news reached the British Navy of the sudden appearance of the Armada off the Lizard, the principal commanders were on shore at Plymouth playing bowls on the Hoe, and it is added that Drake insisted oh the match being played out, saying there would be plenty of time to win the game and beat the Spaniards too.” As Tytlor’s “History of Scotland” is not wholly superseded, though written nearly a hundred years ago, and as the British Parliament thought him worthy of a pension as a historian, his citing of the tradition without critical objection lends

to this doyen of bowling stories some credibility. Shakespeare’s characters are sometimes revealed as players of the game. Petruchio cries: Forward, forward, thus the howl should run, And not unluckily against the bias. Menenius Agrippa utters a bowling simile: Like to a howl upon a subtle ground, I have tumbled past the throw. The ladies, too, are infected with the game. In Richard II the queen and her ladies seek diversion: Queen: What eport shall wo devise here in this garden, To drive away the heavy thoughts of o.nre? First Lady: Madam, we’ll play at towls. Queen: ’Twill make me think the world is lull ot rubs. And that my fortune runs against the bias. There were royal players in those bygone days. Charles I was an enthusiast, even in captivity, and lost as blithely ns he won. The great diarists of the Stuart period both played and wrote about the game. Evelyn revelled in it, and dear old Pepys not only notes that “Whitehall Gardens and the Bowling Alloy (whore lords and ladies are now at bowles)” we As “in brave condition,” but could chronicle of at least one excursion. “Here very merry, ai;d played with our wives at bowles.”