MANY years ago the Bolton Evening News used to carry the results of professional bowling contests which took place on many greens in the area. It was called Panel Bowling, where you could even place bets on the results.

It went on through the year, whatever the weather. Paying spectators used to turn up in their hundreds.

Bolton, Wigan, Bury and Chorley were the strongholds of professional bowling, which was organised by the Lancashire Professional Bowling Association (although in the early days the Green Owners and the Players Protection Association was also involved). Only once in the history of the Panel was a match started and not finished.

Snow did not deter these hardy souls, or the people who made a living betting on the outcome of the matches. They just scraped the snow off the green, and got on with the game. The only days on which play did not take place were Christmas Day and Good Friday.

Even in thunderstorms and downpours the game continued, sometimes with just a brief break to allow the rain water to drain away. If there was thick fog, a man wearing a white apron would stand by the jack with a hurricane lamp so that play could continue.

There were times when the green was flooded. No problem. The competitors then had a "cobbing match", throwing balls instead of rolling them, and spinning them so that they skidded over the puddles. At one time the bowlers would put a hot potato in their pockets to keep their bowling hands warm -- and the bowls themselves were dipped in buckets of hot water to remove snow and ice picked up in play.

A story is told, however, of a game played over fairly deep snow when the warmth of the bowling hand has caused the jack to sink into the snow at the end of its run. The following wood actually ended up on top of the jack!

The bowling association has existed for about 100 years, and was started mainly by miners who went bowling as soon as they got off work at 2pm. It developed into a panel of professional bowlers who visited about 50 Lancashire greens a year, and who were paid a percentage of the gate money. Indeed, in the early 1900s, the panel bowlers were the best paid sportsmen in the world, earning up to £750 a year.

It cost 6d (2p) to watch, the players got 4d and the green keeper the rest.

Two matches were played in the afternoon, and betting was undoubtedly a skilled job. Anyone could take or lay a bet, but the outsider seldom saw a bet being laid; the ritual and the regulars were so well known that the transactions were as imperceptible as bids at Sotherbys.

Many local pubs had bowling greens -- among them the Gibraltar Rock on Deane Road, the Queens Hotel, Bradley Fold, the Hulton Arms at Four Lane Ends, the Red Lion at Westhoughton, and the Sunnyside Hotel.

In 1969, Fred Eaton wrote a series of articles in the Buff on local professional bowlers, called Giants of the Greens.

In one of them he said: "The 1930s and 1940s will be remembered as the Golden Age of profession bowling; the men who dominated the scene during those years were known as the Big Four -- Jackson, Rothwell, Winstanley and Mayor." But there were others later, such as Brian Duncan, the Robinson brothers, Norman Fletcher, Jim Cunliffe, Jack "Thatch" Martin, Bill Lacey.

The player Mayor mentioned above was, in fact, Tom Mayor, a distant relative of mine (his mother Eliza, who at one time ran the Millstone at Anderton, was a Gent from Adlington, the same as me, but a couple of generations before me! She came to live in Bolton after her husband William suddenly dropped dead and she had to give up the pub).

I don't want to go into all the details of Tom's success, because it would take up far too much space, but some details about him might give you some idea of the life of these professionals. Tom was, in fact, described as the best professional bowler of his time, and played in his career about 3,500 "money matches". He played his first big tournament at the age of 17, in 1911, when he figured in the Blackpool Talbot. The following year he was refused entry because he was too young, but the ruling had to be reversed when he told them he had played the previous year!

In the first world war he joined the Army, then the newly formed Air Force, and later the family business restricted his bowling until 1930, when he found the time to put in the long hours of practice he felt necessary to move forward in the game.

He had great successes, including winning the Bradley Fold Handicap three times before 1923, and the Bolton Royal Infirmary Open Charity Bowling Handicap at the Gibraltar Rock in 1934 in front of large crowds (panel bowling was almost a religion in those days, supported greatly by the working man).

In 1935 he began playing panel bowling proper. In one spell in 1944 he won 37 out of 44 matches. However, in 1956 he retired from the professional scene, the hard winter campaigns eventually taking their toll.

By 1960 he had learned to live with his aches and pains, and what could be more natural than his limbering his muscles on the bowling greens.

Two years later he felt fit enough to enter the handicap season, and in 1963 realised one of his life ambitiions when, at the age of 70, he won the highest honour in the game, the Waterloo Tournament in Blackpool (the previous year he had lost in the final) beating Dennis Hogarth, a player who had not even been born when Tom Mayor first joined the professional panel.

Another report said: "Tom is a shrewd man who remembers well the gamesmanship of panel bowling in his time when opponents would stop short only of gouging and hacking to distract one another -- a favourite trick in wet weather was to flap their drying clothes at the opponent just as he was sending his bowl. Oh, dear, talk about dirty tactics...

Over the past 30 or so years, though, many bowling greens have been closed down, and professional panel bowling has virtually disappeared. I'm told by the Bowling Association that the only place in the country where it still takes place is at the Red Lion, Westhoughton.