Pub-goer Prince Charles is new darts champion

By Caroline Davies of the Daily Telegraph

The Prince of Wales yesterday threw his support behind the Save Our Darts campaign highlighted by The Daily Telegraph to prevent the demise of the game.
Waving a set of darts, he told publicans at a reception at Clarence House: "I'm doing my best to keep the darts tradition going."
His comments follow a survey revealing that the game is under threat from the rise of the gastropub, where leather sofas are more likely than darts areas.
Prince Charles was celebrating his Pub is the Hub campaign set up five years ago to encourage initiatives to save the rural pub.
At least three rural pubs a week were disappearing, and in urban areas that figure was as high as 10, he said. Some, he added, were reinventing themselves as "gastropubs - whatever that is - and which I have only just discovered seem to be threatening the future of pub darts".
"It's a rather a worry," he added, brandishing his darts before his 200-strong audience. "I was given these the other day. And I have to say I'm getting rather good at darts," he joked. "Except my younger son is a great deal better. I'll leave you to guess why."
The Pub is the Hub initiative aims is to keep villages thriving by using pubs for the "co-location" of other threatened services - for example post offices. In other cases the initiative has helped villagers band together to buy their local.
One example is the Church House Inn in Bollington, Cheshire, where a dozen regulars stumped up £5,000 each to take on the lease. It has diversified to such an extent that the local vicar holds services there on main feast days.
Prince Charles, it seems, has tried his hand at darts before.
"He joined our darts team, albeit just for one game," said Bryan Pearson, one of several regulars who saved the Dyke's End pub in the Cambridgeshire village of Reach.
The prince, meanwhile, pledged to keep his hand in. "I promise to visit some more of your premises in the future," he told the landlords, "thus allowing me to have a go on some of your dartboards".