Tim Dowe celebrates an incredible 60 years hand‑crafting racquets for Grays of Cambridge
The directors of Grays were delighted to host a lunch in Grantchester for Tim Dowe and his colleagues from our racquets factory in Coton to mark his incredible 60 year anniversary working for Grays. Tim kept us all entertained with his tales of working both at the original Grays factory in Cambridge and then at the current factory in Coton. Tim joined Grays 60 years ago this year, at the age of 15. He attended Coleridge School in Cambridge, where he preferred playing sports and was in all the teams. He also enjoyed using his hands in wood work, metal work and technical drawing. Tim decided that he would get a job at the age of 15. Tim's mum worked for one of the colleges with the wife of Sid Ashman - a long-standing employee at Grays who looked after the company archives for many years. Sid kindly arranged for Tim to have an interview with William Gray (the father of Richard and Paul and uncle to Nick, Neil and Jason). The interview went well and Tim was delighted to start work in 1965 in the glue shop the Playfair Works factory in Benson Street Cambridge. At that stage, around 300 people worked there making sports equipment out of wood. Tim remembers making badminton, squash, lawn tennis, real tennis and rackets racquets. Hockey sticks and other products, such as toboggans, were also being handcrafted in the Victorian building, close to Castle Hill.
He recalls spending happy years at the factory and a host of characters who worked there during his time. On one occasion, Tim recalls paying the target of a colleagues high spirits when he threw a small ferrule from a racket at Tim and hit him hard on the head. Being quite painful Tim decided to chuck it back, only to be spotted by the manager Frank Hyatt who called Tim in to his office. Fearing the worst, Tim was told to take a day off as a suspension but not to worry it wouldn't appear on his record! He he recalled other antics and mishaps over the years.
In common with quite a few colleagues, Tim has thoroughly enjoyed his time with Grays, so much so that he doesn't want to retire and will keep working as long as he can. The only sad point in his working career was when the old factory had to close in 1986. Graphite composite rackets were introduced and overnight there was no demand for wooden rackets. Tim was one of a small group of workers who agreed to carry on manufacturing wooden Real Tennis and Rackets racquets at the company’s former sawmill in Coton near Cambridge, where the Rackets are still handcrafted today. For a time, Tim also made snooker tables and bar billiards tables from components that had been machined at the Gray-Nicolls factory in Robertsbridge. In those days, the company ran a regular van service between the sites and Tim recalls one journey when he was pulled over by the police with a van load of Willow on the A21. Fortunately, he was escorted to the Tonbridge Weybridge where they decided that the weight was okay, but he had to move some of the load into the front cab (which also included some cut price paving slabs that Tim had spotted on the journey back)!.
Tim enjoyed representing the staff team – Grays Athletic - at football and some years later enjoyed having a go at Real Tennis and Rackets at Queens under the watchful eye of David Johnson with the rest of his colleagues on one of a number of visits to the home of rackets and real tennis. Another highlight was the visit of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Edward, who called into the factory to see the racquets being made.
In recent years, Tim has enjoyed re-creating the wooden lawn tennis rackets for the Wood tennis club in Australia. Inspired by the Rackets that Grays made for Bjorn Borg for his unsuccessful comeback in 1991, Tim and the team found the old equipment and recreated a small range of lawn tennis rackets that are now priced by collectors and are in use by an enthusiastic group of players that still use the wooden Rackets. The picture below shows Tim back on the glue bench, where he had started, making the latest batch of Wood tennis rackets. Clearly he's having as much joy and enjoyment from his job today as he has throughout his career.