Lawn tennis owes its origins to a mixture of individual invention, social change, new technology, and good fortune.
The first version of lawn tennis was played at 8, Ampton Road in the Birmingham district of Edgbaston. The house was the home of Spanish businessman Augurio Perera, and here he and Major Harry Gem (pictured) first marked out a tennis court on grass in Perera’s garden.
Though the first record of a game dates back to 1865, Gem wrote a letter to The Field in 1874 claiming that they had been playing what became lawn tennis there as long as six years before then. The net was at a different height than is used today, the ball was heavier and they called the game ‘Pelota’ (the Spanish for ‘ball game’), and later ‘lawn rackets’.
A handful of clubs sprang up or began offering lawn tennis in the years following its invention, close by Perera’s house. The world’s first lawn tennis club was established at Leamington Spa, to which Gem and Perera had moved, by 1872, and they published the first known rules of the game. Major Gem had previously been a member of Edgbaston Archery Society, which hosted tennis tournaments before 1875. That year Priory Club at Birmingham was established, and in 1878 a breakaway group from the Archery Society formed the Edgbaston Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club. It was here that Wimbledon’s first Ladies’ champion first won a tournament in 1881 – a Vicar’s daughter from near Solihull called Maud Watson.
Lawn tennis benefitted from the development of new balls using vulcanized rubber, which could bounce without damaging grass surfaces, and the growing sales of lawn mowers which promised a better playing surface. The sport gained its national profile when an enterprising friend of the Prince of Wales, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, designed a game using the same principles as lawn tennis but a differently-shaped court, called ‘Sphairistrike’ which sold a thousand kits in its first year, 1874-75. His social contacts, sparked a craze for lawn tennis, especially when the All-England Croquet Club, short of funds for rent and a new roller for their grounds, instituted a lawn tennis competition first held in 1877 which later became the Wimbledon tournament.
Lawn tennis reflects its time as well as it people – it found a ready role in late Victorian England as a game which could be played by the rising respectable classes in their new suburban gardens, and was open to men and women. Few would have thought then, though, that a game invented for two friends to play at home would become the immense sporting platform it is today.
Dr Matt Cole, Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Birmingham.
