HONOURED: Poverty Bay Bowling Club life member Dawne Abraham and honorary member Eric Craill enjoy the camaraderie of the bowling community, and feel the roles they have performed are simply part of being a club member. Picture by Paul Rickard
Two members who are part of the fabric of Poverty Bay Bowling Club have been honoured by the club.
Dawne Abraham has been made a life member and Eric Craill has been made an honorary member.
Dawne was the first president of the Poverty Bay Women’s Bowling Club, which was formed in 1985. Men and women are now combined in the one club.
She now becomes the first female life member of the Poverty Bay Bowling Club.
Eric Craill started playing bowls at Gisborne Bowling Club and was soon helping with the greens and odd jobs, and then joined Poverty Bay as well.
It wasn’t long before he was helping mark up the greens, “painting this and doing that”.
Now 88, he doesn’t do quite as much around the club as he used to, but he still enjoys its camaraderie.
All the work has been voluntary.
“The wages aren’t good,” he said.
“You just do it because you are a club member.”
Dawne Abraham is a member in similar vein.
Her late husband Herbert (Hub) Abraham was a keen bowler, and Dawne and many of the other wives would go to the clubrooms in Ormond Road the night before Saturday tournaments to prepare the food for morning and afternoon teas and lunches.
“We’d have 20 loaves of bread for sandwiches,” she said.
“Some would make scones and pikelets.
“It was all unpaid, but it was good fun and a social time.”
While they enjoyed the social side of providing food and refreshment for tournaments, the women wanted to play the game they’d seen the menfolk enjoying so much.
“We were doing this work and thought, ‘Why can’t we form a women’s club and play bowls as well’,” Dawne said.
Gisborne had Riverside and Kaiti women’s bowling clubs at the time, but Dawne and her friends wanted to play on club greens to which they already felt connected.
In August 1984, a notice was put up, calling for women to sign it if they were interested in playing bowls. Dawne Abraham’s name was at the top of the list. That piece of paper, now pasted in an oversized club scrapbook, shows 33 names.
On September 25, 1985, the Poverty Bay Women’s Bowling Club had its official opening, and Dawne, as president, sent down the first bowl. She was followed by first vice-president Zillah Smith, first secretary Norma Starr (now Peck) and first treasurer Marie Hill.
Dawne recalls the corsages the committee wore, and the cake — it’s pictured in the scrapbook — that was topped by a woman about to deliver a bowl along a mat of green icing.
The date seemed auspicious to Dawne. Her father’s birthday was the day before.
In two years, the women’s club grew to nearly 70 members.
For the first few years, the women bowling in Gisborne were affiliated to the Hawke’s Bay centre through some administrative quirk.
That anomaly was put right when they all became part of the Gisborne-East Coast centre, and now all the clubs in the district are open to men and women alike.
But Poverty Bay was the first mixed club in Gisborne, taking that step around the year 2000, Dawne said.
In the time since the women started playing on the Poverty Bay club greens, the playing area has been halved, with the sale of one of the greens for housing development.
But the club has catered for more weather-resistant play with a move to synthetic surfaces. The first artificial green was opened in March 1993. Since then, refinements to the product have improved the quality of the green, and the club is now on its third synthetic surface.
Dawne, who turned 81 on the first day of this month, still coaches new bowlers on Monday mornings, and gets a kick out of seeing them develop.
Still enjoying the camaraderieAnd while she doesn’t get through the number of sandwich loaves she used to, she still enjoys the camaraderie of bowling club life.
Dawne has a link with the Gisborne football community, too.
The knockout cup contested by Eastern League Division 2 teams is called the Chris Moore Cup, in memory of her first husband, who died when they were a young married couple.
Eric Craill joined a bowls club relatively late in his working life.
He was a baker by trade, and in his 20s he went to Cook Hospital to work in the dietitian’s kitchen.
But the outdoors beckoned and he joined the Post and Telegraph line staff.
He was three-quarters of the way up a ladder in Awapuni Road when the March 1966 earthquake struck.
“I thought someone was shaking the ladder,” Eric said.
His fall from the ladder caused him injuries that had him taken off line work and “cooped up in the bottom of the exchange building repairing and cleaning phones”.
He found that wasn’t the job for him.
“I like meeting people,” Eric said.
He applied for a job as a forecourt attendant at the Foster and Tyler service station in Ormond Road and stayed almost 20 years.
When the business was sold, Eric decided the time was right to retire. But word got around.
“Graham Gooch rang me up. His main joker selling petrol at Mangapapa Garage wanted to go, so he asked me to help out.
“I told him I’d retired. He said it was only temporary.
“After a month I said, ‘You haven’t advertised this job’. He said, ‘It’s all right’.
“I was there 12 years. I retired again when the pumps were taken out, when I was 75.”
He was invited along to bowls while he was working at Foster and Tyler, and helping out came naturally to him.
“It’s not what the club can do for you; it’s what you can do for the club,” he said.
“You get so much out of it, it’s unbelievable . . . the friendships, the comradeship.
“You are only down here to play good bowls. Leave your dirty washing at home.
“I come here to play bowls, not hear sad stories. If I want sad stories, I can watch TV.”