With their addition, the club now has five living life members.
Arthur Hawes said it was an honour to receive such a prestigious award.
He and Carol met through indoor bowls at the Glenview Bowling Club in Hamilton in the late 1970s.
After moving to Gisborne in 1982, Arthur joined the club and was the youngest player at 38 years of age.
Nowadays you could often see school-aged bowlers at the greens. It was a welcome sight for those promoting the sport to the younger generation.
Carol joined the club in 2009, when it started allowing women to become members.
Previously she was a member of the Riverside Women’s Bowling Club, a now-defunct club established in 1941 because the other clubs in town were men-only.
“It used to be much more male-dominated,” she said.
Arthur has twice been club president, while Carol was the first female president in the club’s history.
The Gisborne Bowling Club was established in 1884. It is the oldest club in New Zealand still on its original site.
The original clubrooms were housed in a temporary teepee for over half a decade, joining a handful of properties that had started developing on the eastern side of the Turanganui river after the bridge across was built.
