Submission for the Runnymede Borough Council Civic Awards
(Sports Club of the Year)
December 2022.
Secretary and Treasurer: Albert Tapper.
Headline Summary
· From five members to over one hundred in 18 months.
· Winner of the Bowls England “Story of the Year” Award.
· Over 1,000 locals attend Jubilee “Party in the Park” and Open Day (the largest in the Country).
· A new community café opens attracting an average of 50 customer transactions and £150 sales a day for trial period 12.03.22-14.11.22.
· Disabled and learning difficulties bowls started.
· The largest Junior membership section in Surrey emerges.
· New self-funded plans to reinvigorate Victory Park and boost local community.
Lawn bowls is a sport in crisis and communities built around
local clubs are imploding. Of 183 Surrey
bowls clubs in 2001, only 118 remain.[i] The number of English bowlers according to
Bowls England has declined from 150,000 twenty years ago to just 80,000 today. And the demise of Addlestone Victory Park’s
Bowls Club had been dramatic too. From
over 100 members in 2001, it was reduced to just five by March 2021.
Before the 2021 Season started, the remaining members held
an emergency meeting, voting 3-2 to stay open.
Here at least was a chance to try something new – the “gift of
desperation” as the Club Secretary described it - to overcome five perceived barriers
to recovery:
1) An old-fashioned club management that had made the Club inaccessible and excluding.
2) Local borough councillors threatening “consolidation” of local council clubs.[ii]
3) Declining public engagement in pubs and clubs as people “hunker down” at home.[iii]
4) The negative public image of lawn bowls as “old”, “slow” and “boring” and an unappealing playing experience.[iv]
5) Covid-19.
The problem with bowls, if one is honest, is of its own
making. It is not the fault of the
public, the Council[v]
(most clubs think subsidy is a right[vi]) and
Covid – or why were the golf clubs suddenly full post-lockdown?
Victory Park, like so many one-hundred year old bowls clubs,
was trammelled by sclerotic structures, out-dated and defeatist attitudes, a
lack of hospitality, arcane dress-codes, and a phobia of modern technology,
particularly social media. The only
aspects of the game that didn’t need changing were the flat green, the curving wood
and the long standing, well-evolved rules.
Into Action
The Club did have £3,000 in the bank. By June it had spent every penny on an all
-or-nothing Open Day and rent to the Council.
The Open Day was heavily promoted in social media, especially local
Facebook groups. 100 free cream teas
were given away to bring in the crowds.
New members were encouraged to join with a £10 annual membership offer, reduced
from £100.
It worked. Twenty-three
new members joined up and fixtures that had previously been cancelled were reinstated.
Unfortunately, some old attitudes remained, but one
incidence of bullying by a Committee member precipitated change. On
safeguarding grounds, a full meeting of the Club’s new membership was called in
August 2021, which voted unanimously for a full Committee change.
At the same time the whole club voted by a margin of 87 per
cent to adopt new guiding values of “Accessibility” (Opening the club up to all
the public) and “Inclusivity” (making everyone feel welcome and at home within
the Club).[vii]
A third value of “Financial Self-Sufficiency” was also
adopted. To be a community asset and not
a burden on local taxpayers, it was felt the Club should be self-supporting. Runnymede Council (R.B.C.) estimate it costs
£16,000 to maintain the fine turf and Clubhouse every year. The Club is committed to meeting these costs,
becoming fully self-sufficient, paying commercial rents and all its own
maintenance within five years. In 2021
it paid a total of just £2,400 to R.B.C.
By the end of the 2021 Season, the Club’s paid-up playing
membership had grown from 23 to 36. Via
Bowls Surrey[viii]
news of the goings on in Victory Park had now reached Leamington Spa,
headquarters of Bowls England. Here was
a pioneering Club with reversed attitudes that offered new hope for the
sport. It was shortlisted from over 100
nominations to the final three for the “Bowls England Story of the Year Award”,
and now subject to a national vote. The
Club placed park legend, the spur to change and now President, Barrie de Suys,
87, at the heart of its bid, not least for his Hannibal-like heroics walking
2,400 laps of the park in Lockdown, raising £10,000 for the RNIB.
Campaigning successfully within the supportive local community,
using social media, local BBC Radio Surrey and Sussex (twice), even broadcast
television to get the public to vote for Addlestone’s very own Captain Tom and
its amazing bowls club.
It won the national award (see video evidence).
But the job was not finished. In April at the start of the 2022 Season only
23 of the 36 members had paid the new membership fees, hiked to £100. This was barely enough members to fulfil a
now lengthy fixture list[ix]
and the Club no longer had any funds to offer subsidised £10 memberships. With the award won, and amazing community
goodwill, something was needed to maintain momentum, uplift membership and thank
the locals for voting for the Club.
£3,000 of funds[x] were
raised to hold an “Open Day” in May and a “Party in the Park” for the local
Community to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee in June (see video evidence). The Club’s new Sponsor, the local Gingerbread
Man Bakery, provided 600 boxed afternoon cream teas at a reduced rate. Team England Commonwealth Games para lawn bowler
Gill Platt hosted the Open Day with Disabled Bowls England, themed on the
inclusivity of Bowls for disabled persons.[xi]
200 attended the Open Day, making it the largest bowls club
Open Day held in England in 2022.
Astonishingly a staggering 800 locals attended the free Party on
Thursday 2nd June (see video).
All the cream teas were given out within an hour, but everyone over 18
got a free glass of Prosecco or two. The
most exciting result was the number of children (160) who played bowls for the
first time on the green.
Before long the playing membership[xii]
had quadrupled to over 100, including 18 Juniors and three additional needs
bowlers[xiii]. On top of that, the Club now has 24
non-playing social members – in total it now has 128 members.[xiv] A Club lottery registered with the Council
raised a further £1,100 and funded five new sets of junior bowls for the new
junior members, four of whom are now playing for Surrey Under 25s. The Club has run for the last two years a
weekly roll-up for Adults with Learning difficulties and this year offered a
month of coaching for all its new bowlers, from a fully qualified Bowls England
accredited coach, Carole Baker.
The Club continues to excel at online marketing and public
relations. It has over 750 friends and
followers on Facebook, a presence on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and a YouTube
channel with videos attracting 24,000 individual views, currently 3,000 a month.[xv]
It has a new website – addlestonebowls.com – and new branded merchandise with a
logo designed by a 17 year-old member.
It engages in the science of bulk personalised text messaging to a
database of over 1,000 local supporters. However, the extraordinary growth in 2022 and
transformation of the Club’s image has another cause – the new Clubhouse
community café – a glowing example of being accessible.
Clubhouse Café
Surveys of park-goers had shown a desire for food and
beverage provision. It was hoped that
the Club could eventually draw more people into the park – and towards bowls –
by opening a clubhouse café. This was
sanctioned by RBC as part of a trial to assess demand for further capital
expenditure on facilities, in a bid to Surrey County Council’s “Your Fund
Surrey” community development programme.
In thirty weeks of operation, it has gained a five-star food hygiene
rating[xvi]
and generated £9,000 in total weekend sales[xvii]
of Gingerbread Man Bakery product, from an average of 46 customers a day[xviii]
– nearly all of whom had never been inside the forbidding territory of a bowls
club.
Whilst Club turnover has grown from £5,000 to 2021 to
£25,000 this year, little financial profit has been generated, but the exercise
has proved the solution to the Bowls Clubs image problem. For ninety years it had been trying to keep
the public out. Now they were being
welcomed with open arms into the Club’s inner sanctum. How many bowls clubs would tolerate this? The high barriers between the public and the
bowls club came crashing down – people saw with their own eyes that the Club
was not intimidating, inaccessible, exclusive, old, slow and boring.
The Future
However, park footfall remains stubbornly low, and doubts
remain that new hospitality by itself, and a thriving bowls club, is going to restore
the fortunes of Victory Park – or will prove financially self-sufficient by
themselves. New non-bowling attractions
are required, to cross-fertilise new hospitality facilities and the existing
bowling.
In return for the promise for self-sufficiency within five
years, the bowls club is now asking the Council for deregulation and planning
permission for further development as part of a new park management plan. In particular, the land adjacent to the Bowls
Club - currently an underutilised croquet lawn area – could be developed as an
18-hole miniature golf course reflecting local history. This will be a multi-sports bid, with a new
clubhouse, café, licensed bar and changing rooms and tea facilities for park
footballers. £500,000 of capital
expenditure will come from an expanded Your Fund Surrey bid. The new facilities will be run commercially
by a new Community Interest Company (CIC), constituted and regulated to serve
local people, including supporting all park amenities, including the bowls club,
serving school groups, local business hospitality customers, other community
groups and residents of Runnymede of all ages and needs.
[i] Bowls
Surrey records. A large proportion of
these loses were Council owned clubs like Victory Park.
[ii] Peter
Winfield, Runnymede Borough Council’s then “Head of Green Spaces” reported that
the Community Services Committee were concerned at the levels of subsidy given
to local council clubs (four within four miles) with “dwindling memberships”
and “and little effort being made to open themselves up the local community”.
[iii] Putnam, Robert. 2001. “Bowling Alone”.
London, England: Simon & Schuster.
This argument, otherwise known as “declining social capital”, reinforces
defeatist attitudes within lawn bowls, that nothing can be done, and that the
bowls product is not to blame – the public are for hunkering down at home and
not going out.
[iv]
Bowls England public research for “Fit for the Future Strategy”, 2021.
[v] In
September 2022, Runnymede Borough Council was awarded the inaugural Barrie de
Suys award for services to the Club, presented to Shaun Barnes. See attached picture.
[vi]
For
two good examples being Luton West and Staniforth Bowls Club. See the
depressing story of Luton West (notice the composition of its membership – all
white, older and male) – see: https://www.lutontoday.co.uk/health/historic-luton-bowls-club-at-risk-as-council-pulls-funding-3509219 and also Staniforth
here https://www.thetfordandbrandontimes.co.uk/news/23105366.relief-bowls-club-saved-closure-rent-hike-compromise/ . Accessed 10.11.22
[vii]
A safeguarding and welfare officer was subsequently appointed and took a Coach
Bowls “Time to Listen” Safeguarding course.
See attached PDF file.
[viii]
See attached letter from the Secretary of Bowls Surrey (S.C.B.A.) in word file
format.
[ix]
See attached PDF file.
[x]
Particular thanks to local Addlestone County Councillor, John Furey, for a
large donation from his Community Allocation Budget. Funds were also raised via the Club’s new
“Clubhouse Café”.
[xi] See
Youtube video. https://youtu.be/dM28GWYpcE4
. Many thanks to Egham Bowls Club who
loaned Addlestone their Bowls Royce wheelchairs.
[xii]
Not including 24 social members.
[xiii]
See attached excel file.
[xiv] See
attached excel file.
[xv] As
of November 2022.
[xvi]
See attached image file.
[xvii]
See attached image file.
[xviii]
See attached image file.
