Barbara and Betty – Our Pillars of Social Bowls

Barbara and Betty – Our Pillars of Social Bowls

Someone must be doing something right when people turn up out of the blue from other clubs to play social bowls at Sorrento. That members of the bowling fraternity have walked through the doors of our Club from South Perth, Warwick and North Beach, to name just a few, to enjoy our social bowls experience is heartwarming. Likewise, bowlers from interstate and overseas have been known to rock up because the word has got out that Sorrento has social bowls available on Fridays and Sundays. Very few other clubs do.

But it doesn’t happen automatically. Without a solid core of volunteers to run our social bowls on those days the opportunity to enjoy a game of bowls without stress would be lost to dozens of people, mostly in their older years.

The very first article I wrote for Neville Odell to put in this magazine when I joined the Club nearly 15 years ago was a piece on Chris Tibbits and Barbara Spence, with an accompanying photo, at work running the Club’s Friday social bowls, with another photo of Stan McCullagh and Betty Stern hard at work on a Sunday afternoon. Stan has passed away and Chris relocated to another lucky club south of the city but, amazingly, Barbara and Betty are still at it.

Jennifer Page now shares organising Friday’s social bowls with the evergreen Barbara who has been doing the job for a staggering 20

50

years. Betty, who has been filling the job for almost as long as Barbara, is these days helped by Carole Ford and Liz Young on Sundays. For a while a roster system was tried with Stan Wood prominent but for the most the above mentioned have done all the heavy lifting.

Of course, they had a pretty hard act to follow because the bar had been set very high by Joe and Barbara Stowe who ran, for a very long time, both the Friday and Sunday social bowls. "Fat Cat’s Corner" in our clubhouse was named after the indefatigable Joe, who had a nickname for just about everyone – some of them quite wicked.

Many of our current Pennant bowlers cut their teeth playing social bowls while the reverse has occurred for many others. Bowlers who like to scale back can still enjoy a game of social bowls and enjoy the camaraderie afterwards after giving the Club many years of valuable and loyal service in Pennant Bowls.

The people who run our social bowls are pure gold. As Chris Tibbits said at the time, “Social bowls at Sorrento is a community within a community – a family affair and the very fabric of our Club”. Stan McCullagh also had very strong feelings on the subject. “Mixed social bowls has been the backbone of our Club for many years and many of us started our journey playing at this level,” Stan said. Wise words from wise people and their legacy is still alive and well thanks to the current “true blues” of our Club.

– Jim Woodward and Ron Taylor

Note from Denise and Neville Odell

Joe and Barbara Stowe, who were running social bowls when we joined, made us feel so welcome and we will always remember and appreciate what they did for us.