WHEN is a centenary not a centenary? asks Bill Allen

This year the village cricket club at Edgworth will celebrate 100 years. They have a centenary dinner planned and have secured a very impressive-looking centenary fixture against a visiting MCC side.

No one seems overly concerned that the club has been playing cricket in Edgworth since 1895 and their official formation date was actually 1902, not 1906.

So why, if the club was founded in 1902, is next year a "centenary" celebration year?

"Well, we started off at nearby Know Mill but have been playing on the Barlow Memorial Institute ground since 1906. That's where the centenary comes in. And with a new clubhouse opening, 2006 will be a pivotal year for the cricket club, so we feel that is a good reason to mark it," insisted development officer Steve Simpson, aged 58.

The fact is that the cricket club rather missed the centenary "boat" in 2002, when Steve, a former player, was recovering from heart surgery and was "convalescing" by launching an exhausting bid to wrest £160,000 from Sport England to help pay for a new clubhouse. It took three years of toil to get the money and the past 12 months to complete the build.

"We don't have a club historian so we are a bit unsure on dates. But whether it is the 'true' centenary or not isn't really the point," says Steve. "We know cricket has been played here for at least 100 years and during that time there has been more than one serious threat to this clubs future, most recently during this grant application to Sport England when it was touch-and-go for a while.

"Now, with the provision of this new clubhouse, and the development of the ground that it will enable us to undertake, our long-term future is secure, really for the first time. And that is certainly something for us all to celebrate."

Those historic "threats" Steve referred to were in many ways peculiar to village cricket and to a club constrained by the rather puritan views of a Trust committee upholding the watertight covenant conditions imposed by a local benefactor.

Sir Thomas Barlow was born into a cotton mill-owning family at Brantwood Fold, Edgworth, in 1845. At the beginning of the last century he had the Institute built in memory of his parents and provided "in perpetuity" an outdoor swimming pool, tennis court, bowling green and recreation ground for the benefit of the community - all of the community, and not just the cricketers!

But physician Sir Thomas, a devout Methodist and later president of the National Temperance League, included a "no alcohol" clause which was to prove a fund raising millstone around the necks of cricket club officials struggling to make ends meet. At times it has precipitated desperate, even bizarre, attempts at fund raising, including Steve Simpson sitting on a toilet for 60 sponsored hours and a more recent photo-shoot to produce a "Women's Institute"-type calendar.

The club was not without success on the field - they have won the league championship 11 times, more than anyone else - though not everyone appreciated the rustic charms of the overgrown Institute ground and a visit there was never any team's favourite away fixture. In 1974, the Bolton Association finally lost patience with them, demanding improvements which the club committee said they were unwilling to pay for.

Exasperated, they complained that under the terms of the covenant they would always be sharing the facilities with the rest of Edgworth's village community, and some of its youngsters who thought "recreation" was practising graffiti-art on buildings or riding their bicycles across the well-tended cricket square. The cricket club had no security of tenure and seemingly no prospect of getting it. Its hard-up members had spent £6,000 in the previous three years and were tired of throwing good money after bad. Officials decided to quit the league at the end of that summer and leave the well-being of the ground to the Trust and to Nature.

Their resignation was never put into effect, their headline-making decision galvanising the members of Turton North Parish Council, who administered the Trust. They granted them a five-year lease with exclusive use of the ground and they also limited recreational use of the playing field to try to reduce vandalism.

It got the club through a crisis but did little to remove the long-term inertia and lack of motivation of cricketers confronted by one problem after another. Three years earlier they had succeeded in getting the alcohol ban removed, but now they faced more pressure from the league to provide changing facilities on the ground (they had, up to that time, used the Institute). As a result, a prefabricated hut which Blackburn Council was ready to scrap was dismantled and re-erected in Edgworth, and though in a deteriorating condition from Day One it was to serve the club for more than 20 summers.

Now, Edgworth Cricket and Recreation Club has a new, near-£300,000 licensed social club, two-thirds of which has been paid for by a grant from Sport England and the rest from a generous Thwaites Brewery loan and £60,000 from the club itself. But the grant process was not without drama!

Steve had to spend dozens of hours filling in myriad forms to support two successive applications. He had to come up with a strategic plan, a five-year business plan and, in order to meet crucial criteria about multi-purpose community use, he had to demonstrate that they had in place development programmes for junior cricket and, in turn, for tennis, rounders, cycling and football. Schools were engaged and, outside of sport, there needed to be daytime social provision for the elderly. Steve Simpson proudly describes what they have achieved there as "a microcosm of everything that Sport England is trying to achieve in the north west".

But as the grant procedure stalled and club officials got edgy, questions were asked in Parliament by Rossendale MP Janet Anderson. Then, after a reorganisation within Sport England, the finished draft had to be delivered within four weeks.

A key man in that process was local builder Mike Robinson, who helped unravel much of the red tape and has now produced "a building of outstanding quality". Phase 2 will see a new bid to Sport England for a grant towards changing rooms.

If the new club is the tangible proof that Edgworth CC has moved into the modern era, then that change was undoubtedly made possible by the restructuring of the unwieldy Barlow Institute Charity Trust management committee in 2000. After welcome intervention by the Charity Commissioners, a devolved management structure was brought in which effectively established the cricket club as the Trust's "business arm", giving it virtual autonomy to raise money and fulfil the requirements of the Barlow covenant to provide all-round recreational facilities for the village.

Steve said: "If 1974 was the nadir for Edgworth Cricket Club then we are nowhere near seeing the zenith of its achievements. This new clubhouse will be the catalyst for its complete rejuvenation as a social and community centre for the village over the next few years."