Image ID: 08866

Newark Town Bowls Club: Hickman Cup winners, 1979

Courtesy of Newark Town Bowls Club

Newark Town Bowls Club, off London Road
Newark on Trent
England

Back row - left to right - 1) Jack, 2) Cyril Holland ?, 3) Eddie Thompson, 4) Les Smith, 5) Jack Hickling, 6) Bob Dixon. Front row - left to right - 1) Vic Chawner, 2)?, 3) George Mitchell, 4) Frank Sperring (president), 5) Les Carswell (Secretary), 6)?. Newark's oldest bowling club, however, is the Newark Town Bowling Club which can trace its history back almost 200 years to 1809. The club is certainly the oldest bowls organisation in Nottinghamshire (its nearest rival, Mansfield, dating from 1829, is a relative newcomer) and is thought to be among the two or three oldest in the country. The Newark Town Bowling Club has its ground just off London Road (just behind the Castle and Falcon public house) and boasts a club house which, with its richly ornamented Regency gothic pediment and elegant balcony, has been identified as one of Newark's foremost architectural gems. It bears a fascinating inscription, 'let no man be biased' which may seem as a most laudable call for fair play to all who enter into contests on the green below. The club's green was officially opened Monday, May 8, 1809, with a report in the old Nottingham Journal newspaper noting that the ceremony was attended 'by a numerous assemblage of the subscribers, who are about 80 in number'. With reference to the pavilion building, the report continues: 'it is delightfully situate, with a fine salubrious air, on an eminence near Castle and Falcon Inn; and bids fair to cement that union amongst the inhabitants so universally conspicuous'. Two weeks later the Journal followed up its report by stating that: the subscribers to the new bowling green..mean to celebrate the opening by a public dinner at the Castle and Falcon Inn on Thursday 1st June next; when the company of such gentlemen as are promoters of the amusement of bowling (we are assured) will be esteemed a favour'. Although the names of those presentis not recorded, one of the founder members is said to have been Mr Joseph Gilstrap, father of the successful local malster Sir William Gilstrap. Another glimpse of the bowling club in its early years is provided by R.P.Shilton in his History of Newark (published 1820) when he notes that the green was 'surrounded by a terrace, excellently gravelled, and bordered by evergreens, interspersed with flowers. The greenkeeper's house (i.e. the pavilion) is gothicised with much taste (with).. a card room on the chamber storey, and upon the whole, the place is excellently calculated for their relaxation of an hour'. The neatly tended gravel walks remain to this day and until as recently as the Sixties the basement portion of the pavilion was till being used as a residence, latterly by a Mr Robert Thorburn, but for many years by Mr William Rowe. The club originally played on a Crown Green which continued in use right up until the time of the first world war when, owing to a lack of opponents with similar greens, it was converted into the flat green of regulation size we see today. Commemorating the Newark Town Bowling Club's centenary in 1909, the Advertiser commented that throughout its first 100 years of existence the team had never been beaten when playing on its home ground

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Newark Library