R.I.P. Bob Swan
Rest in Peace
Really sorry to report that Cowcliffe stalwart member Bob Swan passed away on Tuesday evening at his home, two doors away from his beloved home green. It is how he would have wanted it. Bob wasn't just a club man he was involved in bowling at all levels as a former Competition Secretary of the Huddersfield League and a variety of rcompetition related roles for the Yorkshire CGBA.
Local bowling has lost one of its most respected figures. Bob was also a good friend to the Winter League, sponsoring a trophy for the League in memory of Tedbar Tinker, a former bowler and steward of the Cowcliffe Club.
During my time as League Secretary for the Huddersfield Veterans League I used to produce a monthly newsletter that eventually stretched to 24 sides of A4. It would usually include an article about a prominent local bowling individual. In December 2017 the 'My Bowling Life' featured the story of Bob Swan. That article is reproduced below in its entirety and, as it was then, it is a tribute to a man who gave so much to bowling and will be long remembered for that and more.
My Bowling Life BOB SWAN December 2017
The first thing that Bob told me when we met to discuss his bowling career was that he had never been a particularly good bowler. His one claim to fame being that he has the record of losing more games for Cowcliffe than any other bowler in the club’s history. That isn’t so surprising when his records show that he has played 1,849 matches (won 542) for his beloved Cowcliffe.
Those same meticulously kept records also support his statement, as in only one season has he passed the 50% win rate (57% in 1996 when winning 30 out of 53 games when aged 65) and he is quick to state that he only ever won one trophy as an individual but often had the good sense to bowl for good teams. That single success coming back in 1975 when as a member at Fartown WMC he lifted the club competition for the Boothroyd Cup when winning six matches of 15-up off a +1 handicap.
However he was a regular member of the very successful 1976 Cowcliffe Huddersfield League team which gained promotion from the Littlewood Cup and was the non-playing captain of the 2006 team that won promotion from the Drayton Cup and also reached the final of the Henry Taylor Cup. He had given up his bowling for that season to help the team out as no one else would take on the captaincy and as Chairman of the club’s Bowling Committee felt obliged to assume the role and once more put the club before himself, typical.
A Cowcliffe club member since first joining in 1970, 47 years ago. That association isn’t so surprising as he has lived three doors away from the green for those same 47 years and can even view activity on the green from his upstairs windows. However that association wasn’t immediate as he had moved in to the new bungalow after marrying Betty in 1957 but it was to be a further 23 years before he ventured on to the green for the first time.
Even then it took a bowling interest by his wife Betty to stir that original connection as she took to the green first and persuaded him to join her in practice one Spring Bank Holiday from when he has been hooked on the game. Bob is quick to point out that Betty was a much more successful bowler than him, once reaching the Huddersfield Ladies Merit Final.
Betty captained a successful Cowcliffe team in the Huddersfield Ladies League where they enjoyed considerable achievements in League and Cup competitions and eventually Betty became President of the League.
Bob can recall his first set of bowls being Thomas Taylor Lignoids 2lb 14 oz with a 2¼ bias. There were no standard jacks in the League at that time and he started out in the Cowcliffe third team in the Binns Cup. He also played for Hollidays in the Works League at Bradley Mills where they won the Division 9 title which took them through to the Sallis Cup competition. In 1971 he joined the Cowcliffe team playing in the Liberal League before joining their Mirfield League team as well.
His memories of the structure of the Huddersfield League at this time are worthy of recording as well. At the end of the 1971 season it was decided that matches would be played on a home and away basis. This was because a lot of clubs were not getting sufficient games allocated to their greens so being under-used and failing to attract the income required to keep them viable.
Prior to this change the format was, for example, where the Subscription Cup competition was split in to four sections, each consisting of four teams. Games were played on a Round Robin basis with results determined on the aggregate score alone. The four section winners then played a straight knock-out competition with the final played on a neutral green. So for all the league also-rans their season was over before the knock-out stage had even begun.
Bob recalls the meeting where the decision to change was made when Teddy Pearson from the Cowcliffe first team turned up but was not allowed to vote on the matter as he wasn’t the club delegate. Teddy took umbrage at this and, along with six other star club bowlers, left Cowcliffe to join Huddersfield Cricket, Athletic & Bowling Club where they also recruited other prominent local bowlers including Tony Powell, Frank Howlett, Bernard Sigsworth and Fred Whitehead.
Bob also played for Rastrick which he joined in the late 1970s to take advantage of joining their team in the floodlit Winter League. Some 25 years later he was awarded life membership of the club. In 2001 Rastrick entered a second team into the Veteran’s League and Bob, along with some other Cowcliffe bowlers, joined the team which started life in Section 5, captained by Tony Lenehan, finishing third in their first season some 17 points behind their neighbours and Champions Hillhouse & Birkby.
With the closure of the second green at Rastrick, now a car park, it was agreed that this team would relocate to Cowcliffe and they were promoted to Section 4 for the 2002 season. This wasn’t the first time that a Veteran’s League team had played on the Cowcliffe green as HC&AC had bowled there in the 1988 season after the demise of their own green. However they didn’t enjoy that arrangement which lasted only one season.
Bob opted to move with the team to Cowcliife although he had mixed feelings about leaving Rastrick as he had been a first team regular in Section 1 and had enjoyed a fruitful pairing partnership with Tommy Mather which resulted in him playing over 70 matches at the top level.
The relocated team were renamed as Cowcliffe, although Dennis Iredale and Tony Wilcox opted to remain with Rastrick they did take the rest of the second team and also recruited Cowcliife regulars Stan Broadbent and Tommy Bentley along with Frankie Sykes who had just won the Veteran’s Rose Bowl when bowling for Bradley & Colne.
Tony Lenehan began the season as captain but then stood down which is when Bob took over and led the team to the Section 4 title with an unbeaten home record and only four defeats on the road finishing with 122 points to lift the William Curedon Trophy as Champions. More Rastrick bowlers were attracted to Cowcliffe to eventually help push them in to the top Section where they proudly sit today. They were pleased to be joined last season by their neighbours and biggest rivals from Rastrick although that fixture has now been lost with Rastrick’s relegation last season.
During his time at Rastrick Bob provided sponsorship for the Veteran’s Over-80’s competition and recalls fondly the 2000 tournament when Kevin Stringer of Bradley & Colne won the coveted trophy. His recollection is not just about the bowling that year but the chance meeting in an earlier round of two former army colleagues who hadn’t seen each other for over 60 years. Kevin Stringer and Bill Thewlis (who was bowling for Rastrick) had served together in the Leicester Regiment in Burma, the Middle East and Crete in the 1940’s and hadn’t see each other since then.
Bob has retained the Cowcliffe Veteran team’s captaincy since 2002 and although he has a non-playing captain’s role nowadays he never misses a game although he says that the job is easy as he has such a regular team of bowlers that minimum effort is required to manage the setup. Bob may be under-selling himself once again here as anyone who runs a team in any league will quickly point out the effort and organisation that goes in to running any team is not a stroll in the park.
That ‘easy’ role may be a tribute to Bob’s organisational skills as he has a history of being involved in administrative roles in the bowling world. More of that later but first turning to Bob’s working life after leaving Hillhouse Central School in July 1946. He didn’t know what sort of career he really wanted although chemistry was a real interest and the possibility of getting involved in pyrotechnics was attractive and not just because his birthday was on 4th November.
He had made good use of a chemistry set bought for his 14th birthday and recalls experimenting with it in the cellar of the family home in Woodhouse Grove in Fartown to produce hydrogen sulphide (bad egg gas) which quickly ended the card school being enjoyed by his mother and friends upstairs.
Parental advice was to apply for jobs with two prominent local firms – Hollidays or ICI. Two former Air Raid warden colleagues of his father swayed his preference for Hollidays with the promise of better all-round training.
An interview was arranged with a Mr Benjamin Oliver Schofield which took place at his home on Bradley Road. He was successful and started the same month as leaving school which happened to be the week before the Huddersfield Engineers holiday week.
After reporting to the Police Hut on Leeds Road he was taken to meet his first boss Mr Fred Montgomery on the same day as another new starter, Harold Blackburn, who was to work for Mr George Keir, an Azo chemist. As it worked out both Montgomery and Keir were on holiday so they were allocated to Mr Montgomery’s assistant Donald Cutts and were based in Number 10 Laboratory.
He later found out that Mr Keir’s predecessor was James Herbert Wilson, known as Azo Wilson, who was to become the father of the future Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. At this time, a year after the end of the war, there were still a number of German Prisoners of War working in the Azo Plant. Ironically the site of the Hollidays plant is now the home of a Huddersfield dealer for a German car.
His new career was interrupted by having to serve two years National Service in the army where he served as a wireless mechanic with postings to Egypt and Tripoli.
Bob had an initial weekly wage of 17/6d (about 85p today) plus a half-crown (12p) bonus which didn’t get paid if you had a problem with timekeeping that week or broke too much equipment. The Laboratory junior staff started work at 8.30am by collecting a bucket of ice and started testing of samples before the chemists and senior staff arrived at 9am.
At this time it was customary for each department to carry out their own experiments, one of which went wrong for Bob when a concoction containing sodium sulphide erupted and sent the contents into Bob’s face. Fortunately Mr Montgomery quickly rinsed Bob’s eyes under a water tap to flush out the caustic solution before any permanent damage was done. However it did mean him wearing an eye patch for a few days which drew comment the following Saturday when, as was usual, playing for Huddersfield Chess Club.
Health & Safety standards had a long way to go in those days and goodness knows what the authorities of today would have made of the practice of transporting acid or caustic liquor from railway containers in their own sidings to the adjacent acid store and then on to varying areas on the plant as required. One means of transport being to use 10 gallon containers called glass carboys which were carried by two men in metal frames and held in place by straw.
One day Bob was helping to carry a carboy up some stairs when the carboy shifted and broke sending nitric acid down his legs. Only the prompt action of drenching him under a tap saved him from a serious lasting injury.
Two lasting memories for Bob from this time was the wise investment he made from his early wages in buying a bicycle on the ‘never-never’. Although he only got 45 minutes for lunch that was long enough for a cycle dash along the canal bank to his Fartown home. The biggest delay being finding his bike from the hundreds stored in sheds where a car park was to appear in more affluent days later.
Then in his teenage years he recalls a train trip to Blackpool with the whole Hollidays workforce paid for by Major Holliday where he entertained everyone to a meal at the Winter Gardens to celebrate his son’s, Lionel Brook Holliday, 21st birthday. All was not well however and the day before his 11th wedding anniversary he was made redundant after 35 years service to Hollidays. That led to him successfully applying for a position with Croda Colours in Brighouse which involved textile and leather dyes. This in turn saw him turn to related areas including producing coloured flumes which were taken up by the Red Arrows aerobatic display team.
This was the mid-1990’s and there was a lot of uncertainty in the textile and related industries with Croda bidding to take over Hollidays and then Burma Oil trying to do the same to Croda. Bob moved on again to work for Hays Colours before deciding to retire after more than 50 years in the chemical and dye industry.
Returning to Bob’s involvement in the administrative side of bowling which really started in 1986 when he assumed the position of Competition Secretary for the Huddersfield League, a role he held for four years following which he was awarded the position of Vice-President.
Bob was recommended for the position of Competition Secretary post by the then Secretary/Treasurer Stephen Bricklebank. (‘I knew Stephen from our earlier time at LB Hollidays and more recently as the plant chemist at Croda Colours; he was instrumental in my obtaining a post with the company’). He succeeded Bill Blackburn in this position and initially spent a lot of time with Bill learning the ropes and he also passed on to him a decorator’s table! This had to be taken on a roof rack to competition finals to hold the score cards.
His first competition was the Barker Sports Easter Handicap for which there were 302 entries. The entry forms flowed into his house, as well as the occasional telephone entry (the assistance of a devoted wife, Betty, being indispensable). The draw for the preliminary round was made at a full meeting of the Association at Paddock I&C as follows; sixteen bowlers representing the clubs staging the prelims sat with draw sheets and recorded the bowler’s details from tickets brought to them by runners from the top table. After a thorough check of the sheets a copy was given to the Huddersfield Examiner and finally, on Friday night he took the draw sheets to the selected clubs. On Saturday evening the names of the qualifiers were ringing in so the final programme could be drafted and submitted to the late Pat Durrans for printing.
Finally the big day, Easter Monday on March 31st, and Bob recalls how he loaded up his Austin for the trip to Meltham. The late Stuart Richardson (Richie), a stalwart of the bowling world, was there to help, including getting the entry fees from club members! When the match finally started the earlier light covering of snow had disappeared. The cup was won by Milko Pejica, then of Crosland Moor, and presented by John Metcalfe of the sponsors.
Over the remaining 6 months a further 16 competitions were organised for Huddersfield and Yorkshire associations these included Boys and juniors. (The local junior bowling association had not yet ben founded). Finally he had the rewarding job of inviting winners from the Huddersfield and other County districts, to the end of season Champion of Champions final.
In 1985 Bill Blackburn had compiled a glossy programme for an era of sponsorship by Tetley’s. To this end Bob drafted a CV form for the invitees to complete and return together with a photograph. On receipt, he was able to compile a series of mini biopic to include in the programme and he still retains copies of the programmes over the eight years it was run. The custom was to invite the current Yorkshire President to attend together with the Huddersfield President as referees. In addition to Dennis Halloran from YCCGBA he also invited the President of the new South Yorkshire County to attend; who duly attended, enjoyed the day, and expressed his disappointment at the division of the county.
Bob continued for another four years in this role and fondly recalls the preliminary rounds of the Yorkshire Boys and juniors held on the same day on Moldgreen Conservative green in 1996 and in particular remembers the impression created by the skill and enjoyment displayed by the youngsters.
A highlight of his final year was Cowcliffe winning the Norman England, 4-pairs team trophy. The first prize was £400. One year they had 64 teams enter at a time when pairs bowling was very popular. Other memories were of the many respected bowlers, officials and sponsors that he met at the Huddersfield, and also Yorkshire, finals, over the 5 years several national competitions that are no longer with us were organised.
Following his retirement from the post he was delighted to receive a lovely letter from Derrick Radley thanking him for his assistance with Yorkshire and other competitions.
When he retired from the post after 1990 he was fortunate to meet a potential successor, Peter Firth, from Kirkheaton. Talking after a Liberal league match he told me he was just retiring from the GPO and would love to take up the post. He took over in 1991 and ran it successfully for 3 years until his untimely death.
At the same time as taking up the Competition Secretary role Bob was invited to join the County CGBA Committee where he stayed for many years and he recalls that in the early days it was the Committee’s responsibility to assume measuring duties in major matches as there was no referee organisations in those days. It was later that he qualified as a referee. Bob has been a good friend to the Veteran’s League having sponsored the Over-80s KO competition for a number of years as well as being a most competent club representative for many years.
As stated earlier, in those days Pairs bowling was very popular and Bob can recall bowling in a number of Pairs competitions including the Liberal Mixed Pairs with his wife Betty in 1973 eventually losing in the final to Reggie Dyson and partner from Primrose Hill. In the same year he partnered ‘Tommy’ Cooper in the end of season Thorpe Green Pairs competition and can recall beating JD Wright and Norman Snowball after annoying them by calling for a ridiculous measure at one end.
Two Pairs competitions stick in his mind from 1975 the first being the Mirfield Pairs when partnering Raymond (Dickie) Blamires to reach Finals Day to be beaten by the eventual winning duo of Geoff Mellor and Eric Newton. Then a Cowcliffe club competition for the Wilkinson Shield that year saw Bob reach the final with partner Steve Batler in a marathon game against Brian Morley and Graham Worsley. It went on so long that it eventually had to be adjourned as Graham was due to play the organ in a concert at Rastrick. They continued the next day where an eventual 20-21 scoreline denied Bob a first trophy. Bob also reached finals day of two more local Pairs competitions in the Hills Supplies Pairs in 1989 and the Works League Pairs in 1996 without ever threatening to win either.
Although Pairs bowling has declined in popularity over the years the opposite is true of ladies bowling and Bob has been a big advocate of equality as far as involving ladies more in the game. He recalls when he began bowling in 1970 the Yorkshire Crown Green Bowling Association covered eight even county districts. These were Barnsley, Doncaster, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Skipton, Wakefield and the West Riding Central district. Apart from the Skipton district the area covered was mainly industrial and mining towns. When the workers joined their clubs they were essentially regarded by men as an escape from their domestic home life! The ladies were only admitted as spouses.
He remembers one of the Cowcliffe club bowlers complaining when women started coming into the club on “Men’s night - Friday nights! In such a climate it was unthinkable to suggest that ladies could take part in the Yorkshire Cup competition! By the eighties times were changing, in 1986 he became the club President and in due course was instrumental in introducing a rule to allow women to have full membership in their own right. A few years later when the club could not raise a committee, four ladies, including his wife Betty, stepped in to save the day. Ever since then the ladies have been invaluable in keeping the club going’.
By around 1980 the picture had changed at Yorkshire level; the creation of a new South Yorkshire district, combined with introduction of new, more rural, districts changed the composition of the membership. A proposition to allow ladies full membership was twice defeated before Secretary Alan Stephenson suggested the introduction of a new mixed competition and this was approved at the AGM. In 2004 the Eric Hutchinson Memorial Cup for ladies was inaugurated. The first round took place on Saturday April 24th with the only round in Huddersfield being on Cowcliffe green.
In 2006 a new competition, the Radley Cup, similar to the Henry Taylor Cup for first round losers, was introduced .The trophy was donated by the former county competition secretary Derrick Radley. In 2010 the association amalgamated with the Ladies association and by 2017 the BCGBA registration absorbed the ladies membership with the men. Job done.
Bob has a wonderful collection of bowling records going back to Cowcliffe team records from the mid-1950’s which is before his time but he has added to them since becoming involved from 1970. His meticulous records provide details of his playing records ever since he took up the game and team records ever since he became team captain all kept in small exercise books religiously maintained in date order in his bulging bookcase. Many of these records have been transferred to his computer where he can produce printouts of any period in his bowling history. The same bookcase is home to a wonderful collection of bowling related photographs, all carefully presented in dated albums.
Betty died in 1984. They had a daughter Amanda (Mandy) who qualified as a pharmacist and now works at Manchester Royal Infirmary. Bob still lives in the same bungalow three doors away from the Cowcliffe green. He has a wonderful collection of bowling records and photographs to dive into whenever he feels the need.
Winter is a time to take up his other hobbies including genealogy as he traces his family history back and he already knows that his father was a keen bowler but that gene didn’t get passed to Bob until much later in life. You get the feeling that he is still trying to catch up on missed days. He shows no sign of handing over the Cowcliffe Veteran’s team captaincy and although he is now an emergency reserve bowler he will still be at every match playing every end for every teammate.
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