Father was a 'round peg' bowler
Warwick and Worcester
Crown green style
Running the woods in sunshine and rain
Whilst mother boiled Monday
To get out the stains of mown grass
From his  whites and saturday nights
Became the home of the blues
Whenever they lost
Father was never a good loser
At the best of times
But we stood in line after tea
So he could see we cared
Striving to hide our dared
Smirking glee to his inquision
Father dear father
Should we look no further  
Than the captains fault
Will we be so bold as to suggest
Twas his faltering decisiveness
Oh no the captain is you
Then what will you do
I tell you what
You simply have got 
To drop old Joe he simply  must go
And so has young Ted along with Fred
Who should have fired at the head
Of the last but one end
To send the Jack to the ditch
And make the end dead 
Poor bloody Fred
Should have known
That bowls of the crown green style 
Falls short by a mile of being
A gentlemans game 

There are two codes of lawn bowls. The oldest of these and the game that Sir Francis Drake was allegedly playing as the Spanish Armada approached, is flat green bowls.
In this game the 'jack' or target bowl is white and has no bias.

For the uninitiated a bias is a narrowing of the diameter of the bowl or wood, which is 'turned' in during manufacture. The effect of the bias is to make the bowl turn to one side as it slows down at te end of its run. This allows th bowler to delicately place his bowl against the jack having sent it some 21 yards down the green.

In flat green bowls the green itself is flat and the game is played in lanes marked on the green with white chalk. The player who has won the coin toss takes the jack and sends it down the lane and must bowl it at least 21 yards.
The referee then takes the jack and places it in the middle of the lane at that distance. each player then takes his turn to send his bowls down the lane to the target jack. in flat green bowls each player has four woods or bowls.

Scoring is on the basis of the nearest bowl to the jack wins the end as these games within a game are called. Each bowl that is nearer than the other players scores a point. Thus a player could score a potential of max four points on each end if his bowls are all nearer than the other players bowls.
That rarely happens and often only one bowl from a player is nearer than his opponent.

In flat green bowls the skill is to try and knock a scoring bowl away gently enough for the colliding wood to stop and become a scoring bowl.

In flat green bowls the woods as they are called are much larger than in the second version of the game, and they have a larger bias or chamfering on one side than do Crown green woods. Flat green woods typically have a number 3 or 3.5 bias turned on them, where as Crown green woods of which I will shortly explain are smaller and have only a 2 to 2.5 bias.

An important distinction of the flat green game is that the jack is live where ever it sits. The end never becomes 'dead' null and void  if the jack is knocked off the green. The distinction of this will become clear as your read on. 

Crown green bowls is an entirely different game though the principles of scoring are exactly the same.

The game is played on a green which is effectively shaped like an upturned saucer, i.e it has a crown or summit in the middle of the green. This summit is barely noticeable but it is there. The game is  played to a jack that is 'cast' or bowled to any position on the green. That jack itself has a bias turned onto it. so that it  will follow all the contours of the green  as it is bowled. Players then play to the position that the jack ends up provided it is a distance of at least 21 yards.Therefore in crown green bowls it is important that each player watches closely as the jack travels across the green and ascertains its behaviour. Because the jack itself has a bias the player 'casting' the jack must tell his opponant on what side the bias is as the jack is bowled.

Thus having cast the jack and established a mark, the first player sends his wood in an attempt to follow the track of the jack and achieve the closest position. Then his opponent does likewise.

An essential difference in the two codes goes to the heart of tactics in each. In crown green bowls the jack becomes dead if it is knocked off the green and the end becomes null and void and is played again from the start.

Each player in crown green bowls has only two woods, therefore the tendency to play a wood to draw or gently collide off an opponents wood into a 'shot' position, 'Shot' is a term used denote the nearest wood to the jack, is not so prevalents as it is in flat green bowls where each players has four woods.

Rather in crown green bowls the play is centred on accurate 'touchers'  to the jack, that is a wood which sits actually touching the jack.

When that is achieved it is as a result of perfect weight and trajectory of the bowl. The 'head' which is the name given to the cluster of woods around the jack however, becomes a very large target. In desperate situations when a game is almost lost, the temptation to make the end null and void  so that it can be played again becomes  too much. Then and only then does the bowler employ negative tactics. Those tactics are an inevitable part of the Crown green game when the bolwer decides to 'fire' . 'Firing' is bowling the Wood very fast at the head so that the spedd of the wood or bowl overcomes the effect of the bias. It thereby essentially behaves like a skittle ball in ten pin bowling. Designed to destroy the 'head' in a last ditch measure to save a game, it is an acceptable if ungentlemanly tactic and used much more often in Crown green bowls than in flat green.

My father was a 'round peg' bowler. That is, he cast the jack one way let his opponents see that , but sent his woods the opposite way round in a big looping track opposite to that travelled by the Jack. He always had to do things the hard way.