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Tuesday 29th April – Bowls – Alderley Edge Probus v Rex Probus
It was a beautiful spring morning at Alderley Edge Park to where Rex travelled to meet their friends from Alderley Edge Probus. There is always a hospitable welcome from the hosts and it is nice to meet up for the traditional opening fixture of the season.
The green was in tip top condition and the bowling matched the state of the green. It was a reasonably close encounter except for just two games. In the end the points gained in those two encounters swung the match in Knutsford Rex favour and saw them take the spoils by 88 points to 62.
Thursday 24th April 2025 – Club Meeting – Andrew Rowe, whose subject was “Are you sure there’s enough Lifeboats?”
Andrew began by mentioning a near namesake, George Rowe, who he’d noticed was a Quartermaster on the ill-fated Liner ‘Titanic’. Although George Rowe was not a relative, his investigating that possibility led to his interest in finding out more about the Titanic tragedy. The ship had been built in Belfast by Harland & Wolf and, on launching, became the world’s largest ‘moveable’ object at 882ft long and displacing 52,000 tons.
Andrew handed out mock ‘Boarding Passes’ to members and he cleverly detailed more information about each of the characters from these cards. A couple of passengers, ex-convicts, were professional gamblers and probably had their own agenda for being present on the voyage. A few passengers were tradesmen who were travelling purely to correct any problems with the equipment, fixtures and fittings on the ship.
On board were many wealthy individuals including a Birmingham confectioner travelling with his 19 year old mistress named on the manifest as his ‘wife’, also a member of the well heeled Astor family, and Bruce Ismay, the Chairman of White Star Line, the company that owned Titanic.
Andrew gave details about the lifeboat provision and the rationale for that capacity to be less than the passenger numbers travelling. This was loosely based on the fact that the ship was believed to be ‘Unsinkable’ and the lifeboats would be used to ferry passengers to other ships available nearby.
At 11.30pm on April 14th the Titanic hit an iceberg having received 7 warnings in the signals room but evidently only one of these warnings had reached the bridge team in control of the ship.
Many factors seemed to add to the ship’s demise. The lookouts in the ‘Crows nest’ had no binoculars, the helmsman turned the ship to starboard having received an outdated command traditionally used for ‘tiller’ helmed ships. The nearest ship ‘Californian’ had its radio receivers switched off during the night and the next nearest ship, the ‘Carpathia’ was 54 miles away. Eventually ‘Carpathia’ arrived 2 hours after Titanic sank but did manage to take on board 705 survivors from the lifeboats and four individuals were rescued from the water.
As a legacy from this disaster, certain regulations were adopted for passenger ships, particularly that the provision of lifeboats should be based on passenger numbers rather than the gross tonnage of the vessel used as the previous parameter.
It was recorded that 62% of the 1st class passengers survived including White Star’s chairman Bruce Ismay, whereas, down at 3rd class, survival numbered only 28% and then only 23% of the ship’s crew survived.
Thursday 10th April 2025 – Club Meeting – Speaker, David Skillen, with his talk ‘Britain’s Bloodiest Day’
David started by explaining this story was basically about 2 adversaries vying for the throne of England. A complex tale about a conflict between King Henry 6th from the House of Lancaster and King Edward 4th from the House of York. In actuality they were cousins and this war initially was called the Cousins War but became popularised as ‘The War of The Roses’ even though, as David explained it was nothing to do with Lancashire and Yorkshire.
For a short period in 1460, following on from a battle at Northampton when Yorkists captured Henry 6th, England effectively had 2 monarchs after Edward 4th returned from Ireland, having heard of Henry’s demise, claimed the throne of England for himself.
The Parliamentary Houses of Lords and Commons agreed together to ratify the ‘Act of Accord’ establishing Richard, Duke of York, as successor to Henry 6th but Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, wasn’t happy that her son would be disinherited so she raised an army to fight the Yorkists and put a stop to the succession plan. Several confrontations took place at Wakefield, Mortimer’s Cross, St. Albans after which both sides regrouped and moved north towards an eventual battle at Towton. The Battle took place in driving snow on March 29th 1481 which gave some benefit to the fighters facing downwind. It was a brutal fight using swords, poleaxes, bows & arrows resulting in a vast number of casualties but it was one of the first wars in English history when firearms were used too. Towards the end of the afternoon The Duke of Norfolk arrived from Norwich with reinforcements and, seeing this, the Lancastrian forces dissipated and fled the battlefield giving the victory to the Yorkists. It’s been estimated that 28,000 men died in this battle.
The site of the Towton battlefield has, in recent times, been comprehensively surveyed using metal detectors to geo-locate unearthed artefacts and allocating modern GPS co-ordinates to form a detailed plan. Nowadays, the local landowner, Mrs Verity, has become very involved in granting access to the battlefield area and a public pathway has been established with detailed plans of the area on the viewing platforms to provide a self-guided walking experience.
David suggested the site, near Tadcaster, was well worth a visit and showed a short film narrated by the Towton Battlefield Society’s former patron, the actor Robert Hardy.
Thursday 3rd April 2025 – Walk – Pickmere/Great Budworth
The Knutsford Rex Probus Club’s Walking Group met at the Red Lion in Pickmere for an amble around Pickmere Lake and over to Great Budworth village where they stopped for a coffee break outside The George & Dragon Inn. The pub recently made the headlines when Harry Styles took Taylor Swift there for an intimate lunch. Here the group posed aside the beautiful cottages that make Great Budworth such an iconic place. Following this they walked cross country towards Arley before swinging back to Pickmere to arrive back at the Red Lion. The walkers were joined by other Rex members for a nice lunch in the popular Pickmere hostelry.