The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  The current owners are tolerant. But the sport itself has receded much from the public eye since the 1970s when the Waterloo Cup at Blackpool’s Waterloo Hotel, the FA Cup Final of the Sport, was shown on terrestrial TV. (It’s being streamed live on the internet these days.) In truth, Eric thinks that bowls has never really worked on the telly. ‘If you’re playing end to end across a big, difficult green, being a yard away from the jack is bloody good bowling. But on the box it looks miles off. It looks rubbish.’ Waterloo’s prize money is £2,000, while the World Championship’s is £20,000, probably equivalent to Wimbledon’s barley water bill. But still the game is a part of the fabric of British sporting life in its quiet, dogged, homespun way. Attendance for decent handicap tournaments at a pub or club will be between 50 to a 100, but three or four times that for big matches. Tonight about 30 or so – including the pizza-munching volunteer judges and scorers – have gathered around the sunlit green. Among them are a family in matching leisurewear, two spectacularly elegant ladies in their late sixties, the retired, flat capped elderly men you might imagine and an interesting pairing of a steely-haired short cropped grandma with a pint of Stella and her granddaughter with an iPad and Beats wireless headphones.

  The sun drops behind the sheltered housing, the lager foam slides down the sides of a hundred glasses and Buddenburg pull away from the home team with every end. Eric, known to all it seems, drifts away to chat with judges and the warm Chorlton night fills with sounds and smells, from the curry houses and tapas bars, to the old school boozers, to the trendy brew shops where the hipsters tap at laptops.

  A few months later, I am sitting at mine one chilly January typing up my notes and posting the odd tweet about how the researches are going. I mention enjoying my warm summer evening at the bowls. Several replies ask me about the evening, wonder if the terminology is still the same as they remember from watching the old men at the municipal park, some even think they know Eric. One, though, piques my interest more than the rest.

  ‘You should go to the Panel in Westhoughton. The only one left.’ Of what? I wonder. ‘Professional crown green bowling. The best players in the world. Playing for money. With betting. Every week day. Whatever the weather. Unbelievable but true. Best kept secret in sport.’

  I look out of the window, at the snowflakes drifting under the street lights, turning to sleet, glassing the pavements, and I check the times of the trains to Westhoughton.

  CHAPTER 3

  HAVING A FLUTTER

  Bowls with the ‘Keawyeds’ of Westhoughton, races with Wolves, going to the dogs in Perry Barr and eyes down in Salford

  I grew up in houses full of women. This was the case for many northern men of my background, though usually of an earlier generation. If it wasn’t foreign wars or frothing lungs or collapsing coal seams, it was gelatinous pies, best bitter and ready rubbed that did for all our granddads early. They lingered on stern-faced and blurry in photos on mantelpieces, standing proudly outside churches in wedding albums or tanned and uniformed in foreign ports. They were still there in the dark suits kept at the back of wardrobes, in watches and cufflinks and lighters kept in musical boxes.

  I never knew either of my grandfathers. But stories about them filled the house like pipe smoke when I was a kid. There was my Scottish granddad, Granma Coney’s husband, born in a tiny house in Edinburgh behind Holyrood Palace on a street with the wonderful name of Croft-an-righ Wynd. (I fully intend to write a series of period detective novels featuring ace sleuth Croftanrigh Wynd one day.) He once came home drunk on rum and cooked himself an impractical late snack of a rabbit acquired from a poacher mate but which rapidly ‘re-appeared’, shall we say. My terrified grandma apparently thought that, in his cups, he had managed to violently expel his own liver and ran down the street for an ambulance.

  There were fewer rakish or oddball tales about my maternal granddad. From the pronouncements of his that were handed down, he seemed drearily upright, severe even. But from time to time, if I were to toss a coin or play with a deck of cards, it wouldn’t be long before Nana told the story of the day Granddad got chased by the ‘bobbies’ for playing pitch and toss. It was told with a mixture of shame and illicit thrill. My granddad, the sober suited Methodist miner on the mantelpiece, a maverick backstreet gambler on the run from the law.

  ‘Pitch and toss’ or ‘pitching pennies’ or ‘liney’ or ‘jingles’, depending where you’re from, was getting blokes into trouble a long time before my granddad. The Ancient Greeks played it with bronze coins; some think it was played at the earliest Olympics. It’s simplicity itself. Players throw coins at a wall from an agreed distance. The one whose coin lands nearest the wall wins all of them. In some variants, the coins must hit the wall first and some play an extra round where the coins are chucked up in the air and guesses made as to how they’ll fall are made, but basically that’s it. It’s not the world’s most riveting spectator sport. It’s all about the winning of money.

  And it was illegal. This seems ludicrous now. Wagers in gentleman’s clubs such as the one that sent Phileas Fogg around the world were seen as gallant and sporting. Not so coal miners lobbing money around in the street apparently. Pitch and toss, played fiercely and furtively, seems to have been a facet of working-class life in nearly every corner of urban Britain, up throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Its heyday was relatively recently, the 1950s in fact, which I guess is when my granddad got busted for it, and its decline came only with the growth of TV and the coming of modern legal bookmakers following the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960.

  Sometimes the game would be played by just a few in a back alley, as was the case with my granddad and his mates, who sprinted away when the local bobby surprised them. But often the pitch and toss schools were huge, organised and bloody rough. The sites of these schools were known to all. In Glasgow, they played in huge numbers by the canal in Port Dundas, and witnesses recall hundreds of pounds changing hands on the fall of the coins. A ‘copboy’ would yell when he saw the police and then came the scatter. Some of the gamblers would escape the police by jumping into the canal and swimming to the opposite bank. In Sheffield, the biggest ‘Pitching’ site was on ‘Sky Edge’, a promontory looking over the city immortalised in a Richard Hawley song. In northern England, the lookouts were known as ‘crows’ and took high vantage points where they could spot trouble from afar. A ‘towler’ or ‘toller’ took a cut of all bets placed and ‘pikers’ would patrol carrying sticks and breaking up fights. In Seaham, County Durham, local metal detectorists regularly turn up old coins left in the undergrowth or buried after ‘scatters’ on a famous rough ground site.

  Pitch and toss has all but disappeared now. But gambling or gaming thrives and the laws surrounding it are detailed and complex. Until that 1960 legislation, off-course betting on any sport in person was illegal, and ‘bookies runners’ dashing from pubs and callboxes to the bookmakers, taking surreptitious illegal bets, were a common sight and fixture of industrial towns. Until 2005, the ‘betting and the passing of betting slips’ on licensed premises was illegal except for six specific games – pool, cribbage, darts, bar billiards, shove ha’penny and dominoes – which could be ‘played for small stakes on those parts of the premises open to the public’, but only if a notice to this effect was displayed prominently. Nowadays, dire adverts for bookmakers punctuate every Sky TV football match, and we gamble openly on our phones and our laptops with not a copboy, towler or piker to be seen.

  Culturally, gambling hovers somewhere between the toxic and the trivial. My friend Lydia won 50 quid on this year’s Grand National. She bought herself some felt pens and stationery with her winnings. She’s just turned ten. Some people might be scandalised by this, but most seem to think it’s cute and funny. On the other hand, the haggard men in the harsh light of the late-night bookies seem anything but.

  Money and class frame our feelings towards gambling too. The free-spending rich man is seen as a ‘playboy’, c
arefree and glamorous. The poor man at the fruit machine is merely a ‘gambler’, a sap and an addict. The playboy is assumed to have no dependents. The gambler conjures in the imagination something from an Edwardian illustration; the empty table, the hungry child, the weeping wife. When New Labour announced that they were going to build projected ‘super casinos’ with £1 million jackpots in blighted Blackpool and run-down east Manchester, critics painted pictures like this and talked of the human and social cost of gambling addiction.

  A University of Illinois Policy Forum magazine of 2000 claimed that a third of all the money spent in US super casinos came from addicts and the associated problems and debt led to assault, rape, robberies, burglary, car theft, embezzlement, fraud, lost productivity, unemployment, bankruptcy, anxiety, depression, heart attacks, wife beating, child neglect, child abuse and suicide. It concluded that problem gambling in the US cost the nation about $54 billion a year.

  Minister Tessa Jowell said that such objections had the ‘whiff of snobbery’ about them. Political commentator Nick Cohen, writing in the Guardian, thought differently though:

  If you believe that people should be free to spend their money how they choose, then you will doubtless shrug your shoulders and say these prices are worth paying.

  Still, even the most committed libertarian should retain a sense of the ironies of political history and marvel at the spectacle of the Labour party encouraging the poor to redistribute what wealth they have to the rich.

  But I did not know that any of these concerns could apply conceivably to crown green bowling, which is why I take an empty, freezing, ramshackle train to Westhoughton on a cold, hard January afternoon.

  The snow had become sleet as I detrained at Westhoughton station. This small Lancashire town is about five minutes from where I grew up but was as alien as Neptune to me. We can be terribly insular up here, you know. When my Uncle John married a girl from Westhoughton and moved here in the 1960s, my family seemed to think that he was going to live in Albania. When I mentioned to my mum that I was going to a bowling green in Westhoughton, she said, ‘Your Uncle John will know it,’ in the same way that New York cab drivers will ask if you know their cousin in London.

  Westhoughton is a somnolent industrial suburb now, but it has a lurid past. It was the scene of a bloody civil war battle where Lord Derby’s Cavaliers from the Wigan garrison clashed with Parliamentarians. In 1812, 12 Luddites burned Westhoughton Mill down and were publicly hanged for their actions.

  Wigan folk tell a story about their less sophisticated Westhoughton neighbours to explain their local nickname of ‘Keawyeds’ (cow heads). Apparently a Wiganer once came across a Westhoughton farmer whose cow had got its head stuck fast in a five bar gate. ‘I have a hacksaw you can use,’ offered the Wiganer helpfully. Gratefully accepting it, the farmer promptly sawed the cow’s head off. Depending which town you come from, you read this implausible tale differently. Wiganers cite it as an evidence of the none-too-bright nature of Westhoughton residents. But the Keawyeds themselves claim that, as the gate was worth more than the cow, the tale just shows how shrewd and canny Westhoughtoners are.

  The station is on the border with Wingates, home of one of the world’s best and most celebrated brass bands who recorded an album with Michael Nyman recently. But I’m pretty sure I need Westhoughton proper, and that’s down the hill. I pop into a general store across the road for directions. The proprietor and his sole customer are engrossed in the latest edition of the Bolton News with its striking headline ‘Skirt Fetish Voyeur Jailed’. Tearing themselves away from this, the customer, a younger, heavily tanned man, says, ‘Ah, tha wants Panel, Red Lion pub, just walk darnt streyt, than carn’t miss it, they’re knockin it dairn, tha’ll see all’t scaffolding.’ Normally, I hate phonetic transcriptions of local speech. It’s usually employed by a snob to patronise. But the dialect of Westhoughton and Bolton is so distinct, with its rolling almost West Country cadences, that it needs to be at least approximated.

  The street I’m told to walk down is Wigan Road, a melancholy thoroughfare with a handful of shuttered and derelict pubs (one called, with hollow irony, ‘The Commercial’), Compensation 4 U lawyers, a fruiterers that has had to close after several decades ‘because of illness’ and one sleepy pie shop where I buy my lunch, a hot meat and potato pasty. I know you would be disappointed in me, dear reader, had I passed it by.

  At the bottom of the lane, just past the war memorial, is the Red Lion pub. Half of it has become a dementia care home, half of it is decrepit and boarded up. Across the street from this, beside a wrecker’s yard, is an ugly patch of waste ground that’s being used as a car park. Beyond that, on a concrete wall, is a fading sign that reads: ‘This is the home of the Professional Crown Green Bowling Association. Welcome to the Panel.’ Beneath it is a shabby green door. As homes of sport go, it is some way from St Andrews, Lords or Wimbledon. But this is indeed the home of the Panel, a mysterious name I never quite get to the bottom of but which is the designation of the only version of Crown Green bowls for which money, and quite a lot of it, changes hands.

  I knock on the green door. It opens and behind it is a well-kept green and a collection of men in their fifties upwards, mufflered and overcoated against the winter afternoon. ‘Who’s tha looking for, son?’ asks one, in a not unfriendly way. Well, no one really, I shrug, I’ve just come for the bowls. ‘Oh, you’ve come to the right place then, come in.’

  The green is surrounded by a high wall, and beyond it stands a row of houses from whose upper windows I guess you’d get a good view of the action; quite the des res if you’re a bowls nut looking for bedroom action, as it were. On our side is a covered gallery with a little heated glass enclosure promising hot drinks, and a few sheds and outbuildings of obscure purpose. Clearly, everyone here knows everyone else and has been coming for years, so a newcomer like me is naturally the object of some curiosity. I’m asked a few good-natured questions which I fend with some vague noises about ‘writing a book’. I offer to pay but Ian, a club official, waves my money aside.

  ‘Your first visit is buckshee. Keep your eyes and ears open and you’ll get a good article.’ He turns out to be right, though I should say that reported verbatim it would be a largely unprintable one. Bowling may sound awfully genteel, particularly if you’ve seen those nice old chaps down Hampshire way in their white flannels and caps on BBC2. But crown green is different and the all-male environs of the panel are like many all-male working-class environs, that is to say a Lancashire Goodfellas, the air thick and blue with colourful profanity. One man in particular seems to be in some kind of sponsored Swearathon. Ian, by contrast, is calm and genial. He introduces me to some of the regulars who are unfailingly helpful and informative. There’s Roy, who patiently answers my daft newbie questions, and one nice bloke turns out to be Jackie Edwards, dad of former England rugby league captain Shaun and a legendary player himself for Warrington. I mention that I once ‘hung out’ with Shaun in Vienna and Hull on tour with M People, when he was married to singer Heather Small. Edwards senior says he’ll remind him of this when he calls that night from South Africa, where Shaun’s currently working. ‘Write your name down there,’ he says, then, ‘No, no, not on my bets!’

  More of the betting in a moment, since that is why we’ve made a second visit to a bowling green. The panel used to be played all across this area, with eight greens in Wigan and Bolton with licensed greenside betting. The daily papers would carry fixtures and results in columns such as the Mail’s ‘Bowler’s Diary’. Now only this one venue remains where it is legal to bet, the players are pros and where they play every weekday whatever the weather. There’s a Polaroid on the noticeboard of two men shovelling a trench of snow exposing a track of green just wide enough to bowl on. Jackie has helped clear thigh high snow to get matches on. Roy can only recall two cancellations in the last five years, for blizzards.

  The two men on the green at the moment are Noel Burrows and Chris Morrison. They are unrem
arkable blokes in cagoules and trainers, the sort you might see in the car park of B&Q loading some planks into an estate car. However, they happen to be the two greatest crown green bowlers in the world. ‘And that chap there,’ says Jackie Edwards, indicating a man in his sixties in a waterproof jacket leaning on the rail and chatting casually, ‘is Brian Duncan. In most sports, you get debates about who’s the greatest player ever. But in bowls, there’s no argument. He is the greatest crown green bowler there has ever been.’ Yes, that fellow there in the anorak and woolly hat smiling shyly over to us. It occurs to me that, in footballing terms, I am watching Ronaldo and Messi in competition while standing next to Pelé. Here, between a dementia home and a scrapyard in Westhoughton.

  Friday is the big day here. ‘We’ll have a good time today,’ says Roy. ‘All the big betters come down today. That bloke there,’ and he indicates a younger chap with a Scouse accent, craggy,, padded jacket and a thick Bible-sized notebook, ‘he’s a professional gambler … bowls, dogs … he’ll be looking to win or lose three or four hundred pounds today.’ Jackie just wants to win a fiver. That’s his daily target. It might take him two pages of bets to get there, but he’ll usually do it.

  The match ends when the first player reaches 41 on the board. Actually its 31, since numbers were reduced to shorten the games for the players and spectators who’d come long distances and had to travel home. However, since 41 is so ingrained in the panel player’s mind as the winning total, they start with ten on the board and still play to 41. ‘So they don’t get confused,’ says Jackie, with a smile, as if talking of a much-loved but slightly senile old Labrador. The ‘professional’ tag is ‘really more historic than anything. They used to get paid to play but now they pay a tenner and the winner takes home 40 pounds.’