Historic milestone for urban oasis
Lawn-bowling club celebrates 100th anniversary with matches, high tea
Cap Gibson hasn’t thrown a ball across Westboro’s closely-cropped grounds for 10 years, but she was on hand Saturday to ring in a century of lawn bowling at the neighbourhood’s local club.
The 96-year-old first played tennis as a young girl on the adjacent courts, now taken up by houses and brick buildings.
Eventually, Gibson tried lawn bowling and stuck with it for 40 years, making her one of Highland Park Lawn Bowling Club’s longest-standing members. She said the lawn is an oasis in an area she lived all her life, but now barely recognizes.
“It’s just like coming back home,” said Gibson, who is now a social member to support the club.
More than 100 bowlers and community members made it out to Saturday’s high tea, which featured scones and fresh strawberry cake, to fete the centennial. The club is privately owned by members like Gibson and Muriel Comer, the only one like it in Ottawa, but that means the club must cover costs — like taxes and the expensive yard maintenance — unlike the other, city-owned locations. “This is a gorgeous thing in the middle of a city,” said Comer, who joined the club in 1982. But as long as she can remember the club has struggled to keep afloat.
“I hope they don’t let it get developed into condos like everything else,” she said.
Member Bob Grainger agrees the club faces “tremendous pressure” to sell. Its location at Golden and Byron avenues, just up from Richmond Road, means developers approach the club to coax it into converting its prime real estate into condominiums, and always for a good price.
“They’re just salivating,” Grainger said.
He said one buyer suggested keeping the club, but putting a lawn on the roof of a condo. “That didn’t go over well,” he said with a laugh.
Many of the club’s oldest records were lost due to flooding but Grainger, who is also the club’s amateur archivist, said a couple of key documents remain. One, a clipping from 1914, listed the launch of the club after local farmer John E. Cole agreed to convert some of his land to lawn. In those days, the electric railway ran streetcars along Byron Avenue.
The original Cole Cup, its metal dull from age, still sits on a table inside the clubhouse and traces district winners from 1919 through to 2000 on small etched placards.
In the early days, membership cost $10. Now that rate is $100 for first-time members. The current club membership numbers about 65, roughly half of what Highland Park had when it first started.
It was a popular sport at the turn of the 20th century, Grainger said, drawing from its English roots. Back then it was considered a “gentlemen-only” sport. Highland Park’s first recorded female members came in 1935, but the influx of women didn’t come until the tennis courts were incorporated with the club in 1941.
That was a big year for Westboro’s lawn bowlers: Cole agreed to sell the land for $1,000 and a lifetime membership.
Now, Grainger said it draws an older crowd.
“It seems lawn bowling has this image of being the sport of last re- sort,” said Grainger with a chuckle. But he doesn’t mind the stereotype.
“It really does require a lot of concern, a lot of careful thinking and delivery and practice.”
In the background, men dressed in white from feet to round-brimmed caps roll the oddly-shaped balls. At one angle, it’s a perfect sphere, but flipped the other way, the ball changes shape and flattens, making for a tricky straight throw, Grainger explained.
And although the club has become neighbourhood icon, Graiger said the sport, like the neighbourhood, is anything but predictable.
“In lawn bowling, you never deliver at the place where you want to end up.”