A History of Harrow Bowls Club

One hundred and twenty-five years, in a few paragraphs

For those who want the shape of the story before the detail.

Harrow Bowls Club was founded on the second of June, 1902, by a retired watchmaker named Thomas Dell. He was sixty-eight years old, a widower, a churchwarden at St Mary's on the Hill, and a Liberal of the energetic Victorian kind. His vicar, the Reverend F. Wayland Joyce, had suggested he might enjoy starting a bowls club. He took the idea seriously. By the end of that summer, the new Harrow Bowls and Croquet Club was using a converted lawn in Harrow Recreation Ground — the same Recreation Ground that had been opened to the public seventeen years earlier through the campaigning of a Harrow School housemaster, Charles Colbeck.

For the first two decades the club shared its space and its modest fortunes with croquet players, ladies excluded. The croquet section faded, the men's bowling grew, and by 1922 the club had persuaded the local council to lay a proper square of Cumberland turf, transplanted by special train from the salt marshes near the Solway Firth. That same turf — six rinks across, alternating in the direction of play — is the surface members bowl on today.

The 1920s were the club's first golden age. Under the spell of Tom Potts, a Cheshire-born buyer for a Manchester firm who happened to be one of the finest bowlers in England, Harrow won the London & Southern Counties Shield in 1928 and 1929 and reached the final of the English Bowling Association fours at Brighton in 1927. Potts, capped seven times for England, was due to become president of the EBA in 1930; he died of lung cancer the previous spring, aged fifty.

The Harrow ladies, who had bowled at the men's club as associate members since 1917, founded their own club in 1923 on a smaller patch of ground a hundred yards away. Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club ran for fifty-eight years before falling membership and rising rates ended it in 1981. Its surviving members crossed the path back to the men's club in the spring of 1982, when Harrow Bowls Club voted — narrowly — to admit women as full members. It has been a mixed club ever since.

The post-war decades brought a steady decline in the place of bowls in English public imagination, and a corresponding pressure on subscriptions, rents and recruitment. Through it all the club kept playing, kept winning enough to matter, and kept its clubhouse intact — including a major rebuild in 1986, paid for by a council loan, a Sports Council grant, and the labour of members. By the turn of the millennium the club was holding its own. Michael Rosenthal's centenary history, written in 2002 and the principal source for everything that follows, ends on a note of cautious optimism about the second hundred years.

In the quarter-century since, the club has weathered the usual difficulties of a small private institution in a changing borough — and the unusual ones, including a global pandemic that closed the green for most of 2020. The membership remains active, the green remains the same Cumberland turf, and in the spring of 2027 the club will celebrate its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary.

The Harrow into which the Bowls Club was born was a place in the middle of becoming somewhere else. For the better part of a thousand years, the settlement on the crown of the hill — the spire of St Mary's visible for miles across the Middlesex countryside — had been the only Harrow that mattered. Below it, a thinly inhabited landscape of orchards, market gardens and the occasional farmhouse stretched away towards London. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century a traveller from the City could have walked from Marble Arch to Harrow Hill and passed scarcely a building of substance.

Two pieces of nineteenth-century engineering changed that. The first was the lawnmower, patented by Edwin Beard Budding in 1830, which made manicured grass surfaces — including bowling greens of a quality previously unimaginable — practical for the first time outside the great country estates. The second, more consequentially, was the Metropolitan Railway, which reached Harrow on the second of August, 1880. The new station was sited not on the hill, where it would have been useful to Harrow School and inconvenient to almost everyone else, but at the foot of it, in the previously unremarkable hamlet of Greenhill. Within a generation, Greenhill ceased to exist as a distinct place and became, simply, Harrow.

The transformation that followed is the subject of much of John Betjeman's later poetry, but in 1902 it was still in progress and visible to the naked eye. Where there had been orchards in the 1880s, there were now terraced houses, churches, a newspaper office and the offices of solicitors and estate agents. The population of the new Greenhill parish, four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two in 1902, would more than double in the following decade. A whole class of new resident — the suburban professional, the commuter, the city clerk who could now afford a house with a garden — was filling the streets that ran below the hill. They wanted churches, they wanted schools, they wanted somewhere respectable to spend a Saturday afternoon. The answer, in the language of the day, was recreation.

The making available of land for that purpose was largely the work of one man: Charles Colbeck, an assistant master at Harrow School and a passionate believer in public sport. In May 1884 Colbeck convened a committee — Thomas Dell among its fifteen members — to raise funds for the purchase of a fourteen-acre field on the Pinner Road, intended for the use of the people of Harrow Town in perpetuity. The field cost £3,000, of which over £2,000 came from a public subscription of more than four thousand donors and £1,500 from a loan provided by the Earl of Bessborough at three and a half per cent interest. Colbeck himself stood as legal guarantor of the mortgage, to be repaid from the rents of clubs leasing plots within the ground. It is a piece of late Victorian civic philanthropy of a kind we no longer quite produce.

The Recreation Ground was opened on the ninth of May, 1885. The Earl of Bessborough was present, as was the Member of Parliament Mr Roundell; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London made the journey out from London to lend the day weight. There was a procession through the High Street, a parade by the Middlesex Rifle Volunteers, and a programme of athletics. J. W. Cunningham, founder of the Cunningham Building Society, gave the principal address. His words have a particular relevance to the bowls club that would form on this ground seventeen years later:

Remember all of you, young and old, that it is your property. Yours to guard, yours to keep from injury, yours to protect in every way you can. J. W. Cunningham, Harrow Recreation Ground, 9 May 1885

Bowls, it should be said, was already being played informally on Harrow Recreation Ground by 1891, almost certainly on a converted lawn-tennis court. There is no record of who played, or under what arrangements. It is reasonable to suppose that some of those informal games involved the watchmaker from 18 The High Street.

Thomas Dell was born in Totteridge, Hertfordshire, in 1834, the year before Britain abolished slavery in most of its empire and three years before the accession of Queen Victoria. He was educated at Tonbridge Grammar School, served an apprenticeship as a jeweller in St Albans, and arrived in Harrow on the Hill in 1855 at the age of nineteen. He had visited as a boy — an uncle, a Mr Read, lived at Wembley — and the place had stuck in his imagination. He bought a watchmaker's shop at 18 The High Street, with living quarters above, a small establishment in the parade opposite the Harrow School headmaster's house. The shop is gone; the parade was demolished in 1929. The site is now a garden.

From this modest base Dell built the kind of life that the late Victorian middle class made possible to those of energy and steady habits. He married Emma in 1863, raised five children, and spent more than fifty years behind the counter of his shop. He served in the 18th Middlesex Volunteers, where he won prizes for marksmanship. He became a churchwarden at St Mary's. He sat on the Harrow Local Board, which functioned as the closest equivalent to a town council, and on the Burial Board after its founding in 1884. He was, in the warm phrase of an obituary, a fine figure of a man; in the cooler one of his vicar, a man of high personal character and strict rectitude of conduct who seemed so utterly unable to attribute evil to others.

Dell retired in 1893, at the age of fifty-nine, and in 1898 — by then a widower of two years' standing — moved to a house called St Bees at 72 Roxborough Road, perhaps two minutes' walk from the gates of the Recreation Ground he had helped to establish thirteen years earlier. The house has not survived; like his shop it was demolished, in this case after the death in 1958 of his daughter Agnes, who lived there alone for the half-century after her parents' deaths. A block of flats stands on the site.

It was almost certainly the Reverend F. Wayland Joyce, vicar of St Mary's, who suggested to his churchwarden that he might find an occupation for his retirement in starting a bowls club. The two men were friends; both took the view that Harrow's growing population deserved organised opportunities for sociability. By the spring of 1902 Dell had assembled a committee of eight men, including Joyce himself, the printer William Joseph Overhead (proprietor of the Harrow Gazette), and the architect Alfred Farley. On the second of June, 1902, the Harrow Bowls and Croquet Club was constituted. Dell was elected captain, secretary and treasurer — the entire board, in effect, in one person — and remained in those offices until his death.

He was sixty-eight years old. He bowled, by his own admission, indifferently; he usually played at the third position in a four. The club's debt to him was administrative rather than athletic. He kept the books, he wrote the letters, he presided at the dinners. When he died, on the thirtieth of March, 1913, after a few days' illness with pneumonia during a particularly cold spell, the future captain Henry North spoke at his funeral of the father and founder of the Club we all honour and revere. He was buried, with his wife and (in time) four of his five children, in Harrow Cemetery, a few minutes' walk from the green.

The early years of any small voluntary association tend to leave thin documentation, and Harrow Bowls Club is no exception. The committee minute books for the period before 1970 were lost — almost certainly thrown out in some well-meaning clean-out of the old pavilion, the kind of small catastrophe that bedevils local historians. What survives is a handful of letters in the Harrow Council archives, occasional notices in the Harrow Observer, and — most usefully — the long oratorical recapitulations that Edwardian dinner-society inserted into every annual gathering. From these scattered sources the outline is clear enough.

For its first season the club used a converted shed for a pavilion, repaired at the members' expense. The first reported match, in July 1903, was against the bowling section of Rickmansworth Cricket Club. Harrow lost the away leg by twenty-six shots and won the return by five. The club paid an annual rent of £32 for the use of the green, and, in 1907, contributed £5 towards the cost of laying a new playing surface. Membership in these years hovered between twenty and thirty.

The croquet half of the dual-code club did not flourish. By 1908 Dell was reporting at the annual general meeting — held that year in his own front room at St Bees — that the members were showing a decided bias for bowls over croquet, and that it was a shame for the croquet players who had to face the same old opponents time after time. In January 1912 the croquet section was formally dissolved and the club renamed itself simply Harrow Bowls Club. By that point its membership had grown to thirty-eight and the green rent had fallen to £15.

The first annual dinner, in December 1911 at the Gayton Rooms in Station Road, marks the moment at which the club acquires the institutional outline it would carry through the twentieth century. Forty members attended. Henry North, who would shortly succeed Dell as captain, presented the founder with an illuminated address. A championship cup, donated by William McBratney, was awarded to the first club champion: S. Pleasants. McBratney's cup is still played for today, in the Men's Singles Championship, with each year's winner inscribed alongside Pleasants in an unbroken chain that runs to the present. It is, on its own, the longest continuous artefact of the club's history.

In 1913 — Dell's last year — the club narrowly lost the final of the Lipton Cup and the semi-final of the Middlesex rink competition (the Joseph Cup, which would not be won by Harrow until 1983). It won seven of its eight friendly matches. At the annual dinner that December, captain Henry North looked forward, in his phrase, with confidence to the year 1914. The remark would acquire, in retrospect, an edge of mournful comedy.

The First World War left no records in the club's archives. The honours boards record that the championship was contested every year except 1918, but who played, who won the friendlies, how the club managed the loss of younger members to the Western Front — all of this is absent. The club survived, presumably because most of its members were too old for active service. The pavilion stood, the green deteriorated through reduced maintenance, and at the end of the war the institution emerged battered but intact.

Two consequences of the war shaped the club thereafter. The first was the arrival, in 1915, of a new member: Tom Potts, a Cheshire-born buyer for the Manchester firm of J. and N. Phillips, who had been transferred to London and bought a house at 36 Hamilton Road, near the Recreation Ground. He won the club championship in his first season. He would dominate the club, and increasingly the wider game, for the next dozen years.

The second was the slow, uneven, and contested admission of women. The war had drawn women into roles — driving, factory work, agricultural labour — that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier, and the suffrage movement had achieved partial victory with the Representation of the People Act of 1918. The wives of Harrow bowlers, who had previously been confined to making tea, increasingly wished to play. In 1917, with reluctance the contemporary sources do not entirely conceal, the club voted to admit women as associate members — playing rights, but not full membership. The arrangement was always understood by both parties as provisional. By 1923 it had become clear that it would not survive: the women were too numerous to be associates, the men were unwilling to make them peers. The Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club was founded that spring, as a separate institution.

The third consequence was a near-mutiny over the state of the playing surface. By 1920 the green, neglected through five wartime summers, had deteriorated to the point at which the club was actively considering relocation. A public meeting at St Anne's Road School in November of that year debated a proposal to lease the ground of the Herga Lawn Tennis Club at a private rent of £20 a year, with the £800 cost of laying a new green to be raised from members. The meeting concluded that the cost of moving was too great. A counter-proposal was put forward instead: the club would offer to underwrite, with interest, whatever sum the Council might need to lay a proper new green on the existing site.

This was accepted, and through 1921 the so-called Green Committee — McBratney, Farley, Hastings, North, Baker, and Potts — pressed the Council to act. Work began in the autumn of that year. The new surface, of Cumberland turf transplanted from Kirkbride on the Solway Firth, was laid by Henry Burn of Stanmore to the specification of the Borough Surveyor. The green measured forty-two yards square and accommodated six rinks playing simultaneously. The financial arrangement was that the club would pay £110 in annual rent for seven years, after which the entire cost of the work would be considered repaid and the green would belong to the ratepayers of Harrow in perpetuity. The Council would maintain it thereafter.

The official opening of the new green, on Saturday the second of June, 1922, was the largest event the club had yet hosted. A refreshment marquee was erected; seating was provided for an enclosure of guests. The Member of Parliament for Harrow, Mr Oswald Mosley, attended with his wife Lady Cynthia Mosley, the daughter of the former Viceroy of India. Lady Cynthia was invited to deliver the first jack and the first wood of an exhibition match between Harrow and the Middlesex County Bowling Association, an honour she gracefully accepted. A photograph survives of the moment: Lady Cynthia in profile, mid-delivery, watched by Tom Potts and three other Harrow bowlers in club blazers.

The atrocious weather that summer abandoned the finals of every club competition. In other respects the season was a triumph. Captain Henry North, marking ten years in office, was presented with a silver service. The club had, in his words, the best green in the district and could now entertain visiting teams without being heartily ashamed. Tom Potts had been selected to play for England against Wales, Scotland and Ireland — the first international honour to come to a Harrow bowler.

The years between the laying of the new green and the death of Tom Potts in 1929 are, by every measure, the apex of the club's history as a competitive bowling institution. They have come down to subsequent generations, as such periods tend to, in the language of nostalgia: the golden era. The label is overworked but in this case approximately accurate.

Tom Potts was, in the technical jargon of his sport, an exceptional skip. He won the Harrow club championship seven times — the first in 1915, then three years in succession from 1923 to 1925, then again in 1928 — a record that has never been equalled. He was capped for England in every year from 1922 to 1927, retiring from international play only as his health began to fail. He served as captain of Harrow in 1924, president in 1925 and 1926, and as president of the Middlesex County Bowling Association in 1925. He sat on the executive committee of the Middlesex association and on the council of the English Bowling Association for four years. By the late 1920s he was the senior vice-president of the EBA and was scheduled to assume the presidency for the 1929 season. He was also a married man with three children; his wife played for the Harrow ladies; his brother Ted was the second-best bowler in the club and would in time take the captaincy himself.

The defining match of the Potts era — and arguably of the entire pre-war club — was the 1927 final of the EBA fours at Preston Park, Brighton, played in pouring rain. Harrow had reached the final by beating Cheltenham in the semi-final, the Cheltenham team retiring with the match at 14–3. The final was contested over four hours against Margate and lasted twenty-one ends. Harrow led by one shot going into the last end. With his final wood the Margate skip fired and ended up with two; Harrow lost by one. The runners-up trophy — a silver cup — has remained ever since in the cabinet at Harrow as the most expressive single artefact of how close the club once came to the top of the English game.

The following season the club won the London & Southern Counties Shield, defeating Dulwich in the final by fifteen shots, and reached the semi-final of the Joseph Cup. Tom Potts was champion for the seventh time. At the annual dinner in December 1928 the secretary of the EBA, G. E. Hills, announced that during Potts' year as president of the association — the coming 1929 season — he would lead the English team against the visiting Australians, and would have the honour of conducting the Australian players in person to a civic reception at the Mansion House. It was the highest formal honour that English bowls could confer.

Tom Potts did not see the 1929 season. He had been in indifferent health for some time; in December 1928 he travelled to Madeira in the hope of recovery. His condition worsened on the voyage home, and he died of lung cancer in early March, aged fifty. His memorial service at St John's Church in Harrow drew bowlers from across England; his funeral in Poynton, two days later, was attended by what one report called a Who's Who of English bowls. The club, as a tribute to his memory, won the L&SC Shield for the second year running. The team-sheet of the 1929 winning side reads identically to that of 1928 in every position but one: T. Potts is missing.

He had gained every honour in the game, and the last and greatest of all was within his grasp. Harrow Observer obituary, March 1929

His brother Ted assumed the captaincy. The club continued. But the high tide of competitive achievement — measurable in finals reached, county titles won, Englishmen capped — would not return for half a century.

The 1930s at Harrow Bowls Club are, in the manner of much of the country, a story of steady consolidation rather than dramatic incident. The club's playing strength was as deep as it had been at any point — there was no shortage of capable bowlers, and the green was acknowledged to be one of the finest in Middlesex — but the loss of Tom Potts had removed the figure around whom a national reputation might be built. In the words of one club report, the team often reached the latter stages of county competitions but was apparently just not good enough to reach the finals.

The 1930 season ended with defeat in the final of the Middlesex double fours, against Enfield. The 1932 season saw a Harrow bowler, S. Taylor, lose the final of the Middlesex singles to Constable of Uxbridge. The 1935 season produced runners-up in the L&SC fours against Mid-Surrey. After that, no major final until well after the war.

The interior life of the club, however, expanded. In 1931 — and very much in the manner of a respectable late-Victorian institution adapting to twentieth-century leisure — the club inaugurated a Winter Group for use of the pavilion in the dark months between the close of one bowling season and the start of the next. The group played snooker, darts, and cards. In 1932 a member named John Embleton suggested the purchase of table bowls, a parlour version of the lawn game played on a thirteen-by-five-foot board with a wooden ramp at one end and miniature bowls. It was sufficiently popular that a knock-out competition for the Embleton Cup was instituted, and the table-bowls section ran for over fifty years before being disbanded in 1986.

Subscriptions in this period were £1 10s a year. Membership held steady at around eighty-five, with a substantial waiting list. The annual rent rose from £110 to £125 in 1936, after a vigorous correspondence between the secretary and the council. The annual dinner moved, after the closure of the Gayton Rooms, to the Headstone Hotel and then to the Travellers' Rest in Kenton. The menu was elaborate and Frenchified — Hors d'Oeuvres, Poulet Roti à L'Anglaise, Bombe Vanille, Sauce Suchard — in a manner that now reads as touchingly aspirational. After-dinner entertainment came from a circuit of professional artistes who toured suburban sporting clubs through the autumn months: tenor singers, comic impressionists, and at least one Frank Raymond whose act, mysteriously, involved a shopping bag.

The Second War

War was declared on the third of September, 1939. At an emergency annual meeting in early October, the committee voted to severely curtail the fixture list, restrict matches to nearby clubs, and cancel the annual dinner indefinitely. The pairs and handicap singles competitions were suspended. The championship continued — except in 1944, when the V-1 flying bomb threat made it too dangerous to gather on an open green.

Many of the club's members were by 1939 too old to be called up for active service, and the green was not requisitioned for wartime food production: the dig for victory campaign passed Harrow Recreation Ground over. As a result, bowling continued through the war years at something close to its peacetime pattern, although there are no committee minutes to record the fact. The minute books of the Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club, which do survive, show that whist drives, ladies' days, and an annual fixture against the men's club were played throughout the war. The Harrow ladies also operated a knitting circle for the armed forces — over twelve hundred garments by 1945 — and raised more than £500 for the Red Cross and the Order of St John.

The end of the war on the eighth of June, 1945, allowed the 1945 season to be played to its full programme. The annual dinner was held that October, once again in the Gayton Rooms, with one hundred and thirty members, wives and guests. The club had played twenty-five matches and won sixteen; the champion was W. C. Webster, who, by the time he held the cup aloft, did so with a single hand — the other had been lost in a childhood accident.

It is convenient at this point to step out of the chronological story of the men's club and to recover, briefly, the parallel history of the institution that ran alongside it for nearly six decades. Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club was founded on the fifth of April, 1923, at a meeting of seven women in the front room of 46 Cunningham Park — the home of Mrs Apsey, wife of one of the men's club members. By the end of that first meeting a six-person committee had been elected, Mrs Apsey was secretary, Mrs Fairley was president, and a letter was being drafted to Harrow Council requesting the use of a small piece of land between the footpath of the Recreation Ground and Salisbury Road, sufficient for two rinks.

The land was granted, and in a generous and slightly paternalistic gesture the men's bowls club — which was about to demolish its own old pavilion to build the present clubhouse — gifted the old structure to the new club, on condition the women paid the £12 cost of removal. The first general meeting of Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club was attended by twenty-one women. The annual subscription was set at fifteen shillings. The membership cap was set at forty. Twelve chairs were purchased at eight and sixpence each, six mats, four jacks, and a primus stove (the gas connection was deemed too expensive). Tea, the first balance sheet noted, would be provided every Saturday afternoon.

The Ladies' Club existed throughout its life under a particular constraint, which was that the council would not consent to the laying of a Cumberland turf surface on the small ladies' green. When in 1934 the newly formed Middlesex County Women's Bowling Association ruled that all county competitions must be played on Cumberland turf, the Harrow ladies — who had been founder members of the association and whose secretary, Mrs Allott, had presented the Harrow Bowl as the runners-up trophy of the County pairs — found themselves unable to host a county fixture on their own green. The men's club agreed to allow the ladies the use of their green for any county competition for which the ladies had been drawn as challengers. The arrangement, modest in itself, illustrates something important about the social texture of the club's history. The men's institution and the women's institution were technically separate; in practice they were two halves of the same community, intermarried, mutually supportive, and increasingly difficult to distinguish.

The Ladies' Club won its first County title in 1933 — the inaugural Button Bowl, in fours, contested by Mesdames Armstrong, Ford, Schofield, and the formidable Miss Warn, who served the club as its first serious singles player. They went on to dominate the administrative side of the County association more than its competitive ladders, holding successive general-purposes positions for two decades. Outside competition success was modest; the small green and its uneven playing surface put a permanent ceiling on what they could achieve.

The slow decline of the club after the Second World War mirrored the general decline of single-sex bowls institutions across England. From a peak of just over forty members in the mid-1930s the Harrow ladies fell to twenty-five by 1959, seventeen by 1967, and twelve by 1981. Each year the rent and rates rose, each year a few more members died or moved away, and each year the gap between subscription income and operating costs grew wider. By the autumn of 1981 the treasurer was forecasting a required subscription of £25 per head against a probable membership of eight. There was no realistic future. The club was wound up at a final meeting on the first of December, 1981. The cash balance in the bank was distributed among the ten members of five years' standing or more: Mrs Amies, Mrs Westcott, Mrs Butler, Mrs Williams, Mrs Craven, Mrs Powney, Miss Johnson, Miss Gretton, Mrs Gee, and Mrs Bedborough.

Most of them crossed the path back to the men's club in the spring of 1982, as full members of an institution that — after a vote in August of the previous year — was newly mixed.

The two-and-a-half decades from the end of the Second World War to the start of the modern club's open era are the most thinly documented period of the club's history. After 1946 the Harrow Observer, which had sustained the early historical record with detailed reports of dinners and matches, ceased to give bowls anything more than the bare results. The club's own committee minutes for these decades have been lost. What remains is a sequence of fixture lists, dinner programmes, the long unbroken chain of championship and competition winners, and a few photographs.

The picture that emerges from these fragments is of an institution that was, on its surface, much like the institution of 1938. The same membership cap of around eighty-five, the same annual dinner, the same fixture list of forty-odd matches against local clubs, many of them — Lyons, the Met. Railway, Handley Page, the L. & S. Counties Shield — long since disappeared as the industrial geography of west London changed. The dinner remained at the Gayton Rooms until 1956, then moved to the Headstone Hotel, then in 1973 to Rayners Hotel, and in 1984 to its present home at Northwood Golf Club. The traditional menu — written, in 1946, in the French of the great London hotels — gradually anglicised through the 1950s into roast chicken and fruit sundae. The evening's entertainment shifted from a circuit of professional artistes to a live dance band. By the late 1980s the dreaded discotheque had made its first appearance.

Beneath these surface continuities, the slow modernisation of the club proceeded by inches. The 1947 fixture list is, alone among interwar artefacts, sufficiently full to allow comparison: of fourteen committee members, forty matches, eight Western Wednesday League fixtures, and a tour week against Eastbourne. By 1953 the club had won the H. & D. Bidgood Trophy in the inaugural year of that competition, repeated the win in 1955, and added the new Coronation Shield (instituted to mark the accession of Queen Elizabeth II) in the same year. Membership stood at around ninety. The annual subscription was three guineas.

The Diamond Jubilee, 1962

The diamond jubilee year saw the most consequential single act of modernisation in the post-war club: the introduction of electricity. Until 1962 the clubhouse had been lit by daylight, and by daylight alone; in the evening, members played until the Recreation Ground gates closed at dusk. Catering, which had been provided by Florrie Perkins and her successors on a Calor gas stove, was straightforwardly nineteenth-century. The diamond jubilee fund, supplemented by the regular accounts, paid for the club's first proper electrical installation. The mayor of Harrow, Alderman W. O. Allen, opened the season on the twenty-eighth of April, 1962, by switching on the lights.

The 1960s closed with a regulatory victory of which the modern club is the unwitting beneficiary. In 1968 the council, responding to a relaxation of the Sunday observance laws, approached Harrow Bowls Club with a view to varying the Trust Deed so that two of the six rinks would be available for public play on Sundays. The club refused, on the grounds that the rest of its lease arrangements would be undermined. After what must have been spirited negotiation between the secretary, Harry Clemow, and the council, an alternative was reached: the club agreed to a twenty-five per cent rent increase, to £250 per annum, in exchange for permanent exclusive Sunday use. The bowls club's private green dates, in effect, from this small administrative victory.

Two large social changes overtook Harrow Bowls Club in the 1970s. The first was the gradual erosion of its character as an exclusively middle-class institution. From its founding the club had drawn its members from the same world of solicitors, traders, and professional men. By the 1970s, that demographic was thinning, and a new kind of member was filling the vacancies: skilled tradesmen — carpenters, plumbers, electricians — who had benefited from the post-war expansion of skilled vocational employment and could now afford the subscription and the Saturday-afternoon leisure to play. The committee, characteristically pragmatic, soon realised that an in-house carpenter (Tom Cheshire, joined 1966) or plumber (Len Smith, joined 1968) was an asset rather than a social problem. Both men would become cornerstones of the club for the next thirty years.

The second change was demographic. The club's average age began to rise. The annual loss of older members was no longer being offset by a steady stream of younger applicants. National participation in bowls — which had peaked in the immediate post-war years — was in slow decline, displaced by a wider field of leisure options that included television, package holidays, golf, and the new indoor sports. The club's responses to this decline are the recurring theme of the next thirty years' history.

One immediate effect was the slow opening of the club to women. In 1972 the committee voted, by five to four, to allow women into the pavilion on most evenings, with Friday and visiting-team nights as exceptions. A new ladies' lavatory was constructed at the rear of the locker room. The vote at that year's annual general meeting confirmed the change by a large majority. It was — unmistakably — the thin end of a wedge. Florrie Perkins's death in April 1976, after fifty-four years of service, removed the last informal arrangement by which the men's club had managed without admitting women into operational roles. Wives took over the catering, and within five years the wider question of full membership would be unavoidable.

The integration vote, 1981

On the eighteenth of August, 1981, a sub-committee of John Everett, Alan Low, Len Smith, and F. Reynolds delivered to the full committee a recommendation that the club be reformed into a fully integrated mixed club. The committee approved it. The motion, formally proposed by Dave Stewart at the annual general meeting that autumn, was To accept lady members commencing with the 1982/83 season. After what one of the surviving accounts records as some opposition — a counter-proposal seeking to delay implementation was defeated — the motion passed by a large majority. The first eighteen women joined for the 1982 season. Most had been members of the now-defunct Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club, which had been wound up in the December of the preceding year.

She remembers the warm welcome and helpful bowling advice, and the feeling that she was a valued member of the club. The weather was probably the usual mixture, but looking back she can only recall sunny days on the green, good bowling and good comradeship. They were some of the happiest days of her life. Beryl Jones, on her first season at Harrow, 1982

It is hard now to recover the texture of the change. The men of Harrow had assumed, with something close to comic miscalculation, that admitting women would relieve them of the catering burden — a calculation which, as the next decades would demonstrate, did not survive contact with the women themselves. Beryl Jones, the first woman elected to the committee in 1983, took on the catering organisation but also took on the broader work of building a women's fixture list. Within two seasons the Harrow ladies had a full programme of weekend and midweek games. By the late 1980s women were entering the club's outside competition lineups in numbers that compelled the men's match selection committee to share decision-making with a parallel ladies' committee.

The 1983 season — the first full year of integration — produced one of the great competitive triumphs of the post-war club: a rink skipped by Kevin Bulman, with Stan Kirby, Ken Jones, and Ken Davies, defeated Masonian to win the Joseph Cup for the first time in the club's history. The Joseph Cup was the same Middlesex rink trophy in whose final Tom Potts had narrowly lost in 1924 and which Harrow had reached as semi-finalists in 1928. It had eluded the club for fifty-five years.

The 1923 pavilion — designed and built free of charge by member-architect Alfred Farley, who died of a heart attack three months before its completion — had been continuously modified, extended, and patched for sixty years. By the early 1980s it was no longer adequate. Six or seven break-ins a year had reduced the council to a position of essentially refusing further repair commitments. The integrated membership had pushed numbers above one hundred for the first time. The arrival of women had created a need for separate changing facilities that the existing structure could not be made to accommodate. Something had to be done.

In November 1983 the committee — led by President John Eastham, secretary Lew Bullard, and the indefatigable double-act of Alan Low and Len Smith — opened formal discussions with Harrow Council about the construction of an entirely new clubhouse on the opposite end of the green from the existing pavilion. The council had no grant funds available but was willing to offer a loan at favourable interest. Two newly-joined members, Maurice Ballard (a surveyor) and Ron Noble (a construction company director), began investigating prefabricated buildings and obtaining quotations. By March 1984 a £40,000 budget was agreed, the building selected (a Leofric Broadspan structure at £11,500), and an outline funding plan put in place: £20,000 from the council loan, £10,000 from the Sports Council, and £10,000 from interest-free loans by members.

An extraordinary general meeting on the first of April, 1984, considered the proposal. The case for the new building, as Eastham put it in his letter to members, rested on three points: the chronic security problem, the council's refusal to remain liable for the deteriorating roof, and the impossibility of providing changing facilities for women within the existing structure. Forty-four members attended the meeting; the project was approved unanimously.

Outline planning permission was granted that July. The council loan was confirmed in October. The Sports Council grant was confirmed in January 1985. By the spring of that year, member loans had exceeded the £10,000 target — fifty-six members had pledged sums of between £50 and £500, an aggregate of voluntary commitment which is, on its own, the most striking single artefact of the modern club's spirit. Excavation began in early August. The building was erected in two weeks at the end of August. The internal fitting-out — which had to be done by voluntary member labour after costs ran higher than expected — occupied the autumn and the early part of the winter.

The story of how the inside of the clubhouse came together is, on its own, a small portrait of what a working voluntary association looks like. Peter Clark's son, a bricklayer, built the internal walls, with brick and cement carried by Michael Rosenthal — later the historian of the club's centenary — whose back, by his own admission, never fully recovered. Rosenthal himself, an electronic engineer by trade, was volunteered to fit the wiring and the alarm. Len Crouch did the bar and kitchen. Jack Webb procured the tables and chairs and fitted the lighting. Len Smith did the plumbing. Alan Low oversaw the planning details. Ken Davies and Bill Robinson, between them, made the unfinished clubhouse their second home from October through to the spring.

One member did not see it completed. Captain Danny Hill — proprietor of Danny Shops, a chain of motor accessory shops, and one of the project's principal animators — died suddenly during the winter, before the new building was opened. The captain's chair at the opening ceremony was empty.

The new clubhouse was formally opened on the fifth of July, 1986, at a match against London Welsh. The club's longest-serving member, John Everett, with his wife Jean, cut the ribbon and presented the keys to the President, Ken Davies. It is the building members use today.

The decade that closed the twentieth century at Harrow Bowls Club was one of consolidation under increasingly straitened circumstances, and of competitive achievement at a level the club had not seen since the 1920s. The two trends ran in parallel; neither cancelled the other.

On the operational side, the news was uniformly difficult. The annual rent — held at £380 for most of the 1980s — was raised to £1,200 by the council at the 1991 review. After protest the figure was renegotiated downwards, but the trajectory was clear: the council, dealing with its own budget pressures, was looking to its tenants for a bigger share of operating costs. Insurance premiums rose after a major break-in in July 1993 caused over £3,000 of damage. A new alarm system, mandated by the new insurer, cost a further £3,000 — an outlay that effectively absorbed the insurance settlement. There were continuing problems with vandalism in the recreation ground; the croquet club's pavilion, on the other side of the path, was burnt down by vandals in 2001.

And yet, on the green, the period was remarkably successful. The arrival of Brian Elbourn — a parks-services manager for the council, who first won the championship in 1996 and would dominate the men's competitions for the better part of a decade — was the centrepiece of a generally rising standard. The ladies, now full members for over fifteen years, were achieving outside competition results of a calibre Harrow had not previously seen on the women's side. Pat Austin reached the runner-up's place in the County unbadged singles in 1995 and won the District singles in 1995. Beryl Clarke won the District two-woods in 1994 and the Middlesex County Singles in 1996. Jan Stern won the Middlesex Champion of Champions in 1991 and, with Anita de Meza, the Middlesex pairs in 1992. By the late 1990s Harrow had a winning hat-trick in the Three Counties (formerly Chesham Insurance) League.

The introduction of mixed bowling — symbolised most clearly by the Chiltern & Thames League and the Chesham Insurance League, both of which used mixed triples and rinks formats — pushed the club into a more demanding competitive environment than it had occupied in living memory. Captain Rod Gross's 1997 fixture list, with fifty-five matches, was the heaviest in the club's history. The club fulfilled all of them.

Two losses, 2000–2001

The new millennium opened with a double tragedy that the centenary historian could only characterise, in his own words, as unimaginable. In early January 2000 the President, Alan Low — the architect of the 1986 clubhouse, the cornerstone of the integration project, and one of the most consequential committee members of the post-war era — died of coronary disease at the age of fifty-eight. He had been a member since 1968, when he had joined to take the place of his father, Harold. He was the closest thing the modern club had to an institutional memory.

Three months later the secretary, Sam Lowe, a BBC engineer who had joined in 1983 and held the secretaryship since 1993, died of the same illness. Lowe was a different kind of figure to Low — a meticulous administrator rather than a political force — but the two had worked closely for nearly two decades and the club's committee culture was largely their joint creation.

The replacements that emerged from the crisis told their own story. Len Smith — Alan Low's closest friend, the plumber from the integration era, the man who had fitted the bathroom in 1971 and the new clubhouse plumbing in 1986 — accepted the presidency on condition that he could remain in post for the centenary season. Joy Cooper became the first woman to serve as secretary in the club's ninety-eight-year history. Cooper's appointment, in retrospect, has the quality of an institutional milestone passed almost without notice. The bowls club had, in 1981, voted to admit women as members; in 2001, almost without comment, it accepted that one of those women would be its principal administrator. Forty years, more or less, between the door opening and the threshold being crossed without remark.

The centenary was duly celebrated in the 2002 season. Michael Rosenthal, the electronic engineer who had carried bricks for the new clubhouse in 1985 and served as treasurer through the 1990s, had agreed in August 2000 to write the club's history. The result — a sixty-eight-page bound volume, drawing on press cuttings, council archives, the memories of long-serving members, and the archives of the Harrow Ladies' Bowls Club — was published for the centenary. Everything you have read up to this point in the club's story is, ultimately, his.

This final chapter is the one for which the documentary record is necessarily thinnest, because it is the period that has not yet been written. Michael Rosenthal closed his history with a cautious assessment of the club's prospects: a membership of seventy-one, a green-maintenance bill approaching £4,000, a basic operating cost of £7,000 against a subscription income that could not realistically exceed £5,000 without a step change in recruitment. His 2002 conclusion was that the club's survival into a second hundred years would depend on the willingness of that small dedicated band of bowling enthusiasts to hold things together until the wider environment for the sport improved.

Twenty-five years on, the band has held. The club has changed in ways large and small. The membership has stabilised in approximately the range Rosenthal projected; the green has been continuously maintained; the clubhouse he helped to build remains the seat of the institution. The competitive culture established through the long captaincies of Brian Elbourn and others has been sustained. New members have arrived; older members have died; the names on the honours boards have continued to lengthen. In May 2016 the club was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee — Harrow Bowls Club Limited — a small but consequential modernisation that put the legal structure of a small voluntary association on a contemporary footing.

Three external events of national consequence have left their mark. The first was the 2008 financial crisis and the long austerity that followed: council subsidies thinned, public sport budgets contracted, and the bowls club — like many similar institutions in similar boroughs — found itself negotiating each rent review against a backdrop of harder-headed municipal accounting. The second was the steady decline, through the 2010s, of two-club Harrow: West Harrow Bowls Club and Wealdstone Bowls Club both closed their doors at the end of the 2023 season, the last of a long sequence of local closures stretching back to the disappearance of Lyons in 1996. Harrow Bowls Club is now the oldest surviving bowls club in the borough.

The third was the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which closed the green for most of the spring and forced the cancellation of the great majority of that season's fixtures. The club survived. The membership returned. The green, characteristically, was unmoved.

In June 2027, Harrow Bowls Club will mark its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. The green that Lady Cynthia Mosley opened in June 1922 will be one hundred and five years old; the present clubhouse will be forty-one. Of the institutions present at the foundation, the club is probably the smallest, the least-known, and the most particular. None of the others has lasted in its original location. It is the longest continuously operating sporting institution in the centre of Harrow, and one of the oldest in the borough.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, writing about the small voluntary associations of late-Victorian Britain, described them as the cellular tissue of civil society. Most of them have long since been swept away by the closure of works canteens, the reorganisation of leisure time, and the slow centralisation of British life. Some, like Harrow Bowls Club, have not. The reasons for their persistence are not mysterious. They are kept alive, year by year and decade by decade, by the willingness of ordinary people to maintain them — to lay turf, to keep books, to fix plumbing, to teach a beginner how to roll a wood with a bias, to hold an annual dinner whether or not anyone strictly needs it. There is no large story here, only a small one repeated very many times.

Thomas Dell, looking down Roxborough Road from the front of St Bees in the spring of 1902, would have recognised the sound of woods clicking on the green a hundred yards away. He would not have recognised much else: the trains, the cars, the lights, the women on the rinks, the cream paper of the newsletter, the screen on which most members now read it. But he would have understood — and one suspects he would have approved — the thing that has not changed. The club is still there. Gaudeamus.