When did they steal our bowling green? ………..

Chorlton once had a lot of bowling greens.

Ken playing bowls, 1979

There was one beside the Horse and Jockey, another off Edge Lane, and the one that was destroyed to make a car park when the Irish Club opened.

And there was also one on the Rec in the northwest corner on the Wilton Road site.

It was certainly there by 1933, appears on the 1956 map but had gone by 1976.

I have written about it already, but have decided to make an appeal for anyone who can remember it.

And that is about it, other than to say it doesn’t show up on either photographs from the early 20th century or maps from the same period.

Leaving me to wonder if there is any reference to it in the newspapers or images held by people of long ago summer days in the Rec.

I hope so.

The former bowling green in the distance, 2020

And just to confuse things, Ken in the picture who was a keen bowler, was playing on the green at the Bowling Green pub when I took the picture.  

So not the Rec, but I like the photograph.

Two bowling greens for 1, 1934

And for the first memory comes from Steve Murphy, who tells me that, "In my very earliest memories of the Rec (we arrived in 1964), the NW corner was a bowling green, with a high hedge on the eastern edge separating it from the rest of the rec and the shelter, and a lower hedge on the south side with, if my memory is not playing tricks, a rose bed. 

At some point it was converted into a putting green. 

There was a small park keepers hut, where you could get a club and ball. I remember playing on there, but that lasted only a couple of years and was gone in the early 70’s".

To which Declan has added "it had gone before Colette moved in in 1986. 

The Park Keeper’s shed was still there when I joined her in 1991.  

It was demolished perhaps a year or three later due to vandalism". 

Before the bowling green, circa 1900

All of which seems a jumbled account but owes much to the inclusion of memories, and pit itches the bowing green to sometime in the early 20th century which had gone by the early 70s.

For those mystified by the red circle, this was an incendiary bomb dropped by a German aircraft in 1940-41

Location; the Rec, Beech Road, close to the barrage balloon.

Pictures; Ken playing at the “Bowler”, 1976, and the Rec, 2020, with the former bowling green in the distance, and the park keeper's hut, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the bowling green in the Rec, with an added one, 1934, from the OS map of  Manchester & Salford, 1934, and the Rec before the bowling green, circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection.

*When the Rec had a bowling green ………..https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/01/when-rec-had-bowling-green.html