Tournament Summer

Gordon Allan describes his journey around fifteen seaside bowls tournaments.

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There are open or seaside bowls tournaments going on somewhere almost every week of the summer in England, and in this book Gordon Allan describes his journey round fifteen of them, from Broadstairs in the east to Teignmouth in the west. He has not set out to give a blow-by-blow account of the play. Instead he has attempted to convey by thumbnail sketch the flavour of each place, its background, history and traditions, confining match facts to the bare results of singles finals. The author touches on the perennial difficulty of finding markers, remembers happy days bowling in Sussex and Devon, and ends the book with a list, with approximate dates, of the principal English tournaments, numbering nearly fifty. Open tournaments have been in existence in some shape or form for almost a century, and in the words of the noted England player, George Scadgell, they are 'the very finest entertainment in our game'.