To mark the end of the playing season, on Saturday 3rd October our President, Ian Vincent, hosted a well attended Alternate Stroke Doubles event, followed by the traditional Presidents’ Tea – appropriately socialy distanced this year – and presentation of club trophies. Increasingly heavy rain rather put a damper on planned games of Pirates to follow. However nothing could put a damper on the surprise presentation of the Croquet Association Diploma for outstanding service awarded to Martin Beacon. Martin has contributed to the club in innumerable ways over many years, including his role as pavilion manager, his work in regularly stocking the bar, acting as Grounds Manager for major events, and lending his expertise to assist the projects to sink a borehole and provide an automatic watering system. The full citation can be found here . Congratulations and thanks to Martin.
The three former bowling greens which have been used for croquet in recent years had deteriorated in turf quality, levelling and differential drying (the eastern third of each lawn being considerably faster than the rest in dry conditions), making them unappealing for club play, unsuitable for any kind of accurate play and particularly unsuitable for high class tournaments. They were taken out of commission after the Annual Tournament this year (22nd August) to have turf and top layers of soil removed, a new growing surface laid, levelled, prepared and seeded, and are now beginning to germinate. If all goes well (mainly weather-dependent) the new surface should be usable as four full sized croquet lawns and one half sized lawn some time in 2021.
The main contracters were Talbot Landscapes, with support of Irrigation Technology (Paul Graham) who had earlier this season extended our automatic irrigation system to include this new sward.
A chronological series of photos can be found HERE showing the state of the lawns before relaying, some of the processes, staff and equipment involved in the development work, and through to early germination (including Harriet the fake hawk, to scare off foraging seed-eating birds).
