From a nine-year-old on the green to a 95-year-old still rolling up on a Tuesday afternoon, Pete Babbage says the club that won the Bowls England Championship has a place for absolutely everyone. The hard part is convincing people to walk through the gate.
Peter Babbage did not find bowls. Bowls found him. His in-laws were members at Cheltenham Bowling Club long before he was, and it was at their encouragement that he eventually wandered down to the Ashburne Green and gave it a go. That was ten years ago. He has been the club’s voluntary secretary for several of them, turning up week in, week out to keep the administration running on a club that has been part of this town’s sporting fabric for well over a century.
He is under no illusions about the perception problem bowls carries with it.
“It’s always been, oh, I’ll do it when I get older,” he says, with the good-natured resignation of a man who has heard the same line too many times to count. The image of bowls as something you graduate into after retirement, a gentle pastime for people with time on their hands and sensible shoes, is one the sport has been trying to shake for years. At Cheltenham, the membership tells a different story. The club’s age range runs from nine to 95, a spread that challenges almost every assumption about who the game is for and what it demands of the people who play it.
The achievement that perhaps best illustrates that point came a few years ago when a team from the club entered the Bowls England Championship, a national competition that drew around 780 entrants. They won it. The finals are held at Leamington, the spiritual home of competitive bowls in England, and Cheltenham were there lifting the trophy. It is the kind of result that rarely makes the back pages of the national press but matters enormously to the people who were part of it, and to a club that takes genuine pride in competing at the highest level the sport offers.
That competitive thread sits alongside something quite different. On any given afternoon at the Ashburne Green, you might find county players warming up on the same rink as someone who joined last month and is still working out which hand to hold the bowl in. That mix, Pete insists, is not an accident. It is the whole point.
“We’re here for social bowlers, for serious bowlers,” he says. “We’ve got people that come along and just roll up for a bit of exercise outside.”
The route in for a newcomer has been deliberately kept as uncomplicated as possible. Turn up in flat-soled shoes. The club will provide everything else. If you want to see what it is about before committing to anything, there is a pay-as-you-go green fee of £5. If you are thinking about joining properly, they will let you come along three or four times for nothing, just to make sure you enjoy it. No forms, no pressure, no commitment until you are ready. The only criteria, Pete says, is that you show up.
From there, the club’s coaches take over. Most people, he finds, underestimate the learning curve. Bowls looks straightforward from the bank. A gentle roll along a flat surface, a ball coming to rest near a small white jack. It is only when you step onto the green that the variables reveal themselves. The weight of the bowl changes with the weather. A green that played fast on a dry Tuesday will play completely differently after overnight rain. And then there is the opponent, who has their own ideas about where that jack should end up and is prepared to use a good deal more force than you were expecting to make their case.
“It’s quite a competitive game,” Pete says, “probably in the friendliest of ways.”
The club runs through the year. The outdoor season on the greens runs broadly from late April through to October, when the heavy machinery comes out to begin the recovery process, cutting the grass back gradually from eight millimetres down through seven, six and five as the new season approaches, repairing the bare patches that accumulate on the edges of the rinks over months of use. Inside, the short mat area keeps things going through the winter, and the social calendar is built around the awareness that for some of the older members, the club is as much about community as it is about sport.
“In the winter, a lot of the older members hibernate unless we put something on for them,” Pete says, with a matter-of-factness that speaks to how well the club knows its own people.
Running all of this on a sustainable basis requires a careful balance. Cheltenham Bowling Club operates as a non-profit, which means that everything coming in goes back into the facilities, the greens and the day-to-day running of the place. Two members of staff handle the core operations, one managing the bar and interior, the other the greens. Around them, a core of perhaps ten key volunteers do the heavier administrative and organisational work, supported by another 20 or 30 who take on smaller but no less necessary jobs. It is the kind of structure that only works if enough people feel enough ownership of the place to give their time freely, and Pete is conscious that keeping that culture alive requires constant attention.
Membership currently stands at £195 a year for a full member, with a reduced rate of £100 in the first year to reflect the learning period and lower involvement in competitive fixtures. The increase from the previous rate of £150 was driven by a practical problem. Not enough members were playing in club matches, which meant the ones who did were effectively subsidising the costs for those who did not. Consolidating the fees and removing additional charges for rink fees and post-match catering straightened that out and, by Pete’s account, has been broadly accepted.
The summer ahead carries a specific opportunity. The Commonwealth Games in Scotland this year include bowls across seven or eight days of television coverage, a platform the sport does not often get. Pete sees it as a chance to reach people who might never have thought about picking up a bowl. The club is planning to make the most of it.
Whether that translates into new faces at the Ashburne Green remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that when those faces arrive, the club will be ready for them. Whether they are nine years old or 90, whether they want to win national titles or just get outside for an hour and enjoy the fresh air, Cheltenham Bowling Club has been making room for all of them for well over a hundred years. Pete Babbage, voluntary secretary, ten-year member, reluctant convert who never quite managed to leave, is fairly confident it can manage a few more.
