Beyond SW19: Tournament Tennis in Britain since the 1880s

By Kevin Jefferys

Wimbledon has long stood at the pinnacle of British and world tennis. But, as Kevin Jefferys shows in this ground-breaking new study, Britain has a rich history of international standard play beyond SW19, in top-level tournaments and Davis Cup competitions at iconic venues such as Queen's Club, Eastbourne and Edgbaston. The book traces the fluctuating fortunes of a dozen or so tournaments that have brought the world's finest players to English shores during the 140-year history of lawn tennis. Taking a tour around different regions of the country, the author sheds fresh light on the best-known events and on largely forgotten but once high-profile tournaments held in Bristol, Torquay and Scarborough. Both a record and a celebration of England's tennis heritage, the book is packed with stories about memorable players and matches, full results for singles finals and anecdotes about quirky or controversial incidents, ranging from the courtside fire that halted a tournament final to the anti-apartheid protests that disrupted a Davis Cup tie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785319419

Book preview

Introduction

FOR A sport that originated as a genteel English garden-party pursuit – and was derided by critics in its formative years as mere ‘pat-ball’ – lawn tennis has a surprisingly long history of keen competition. The knockout tournament, pitting players one against the other and embedding a strong culture of winning and losing, has been a staple of the game since it began and started to spread in the 1870s. This book sets out to illustrate the longevity, high quality and variety of competitive tennis that has taken place on English shores outside of Wimbledon.

Before saying more about the tournaments and locations that provide the focus of the individual chapters, it’s important to set the scene by outlining the framework in which top-tier meetings operated. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that in the 140-year history of lawn tennis so far there have been three overlapping but quite distinct phases in the evolution of what the LTA in 2020 described as ‘world-class tennis around the country’.

The first phase runs from the 1880s through to the First World War in 1914, and witnessed the emergence and development of a flourishing tournament scene, such that the United Kingdom – as might be expected of the nation that pioneered the sport – led the world in the hosting of highly regarded open tournaments. In the late-Victorian period and beyond, the term ‘open’ referred to events in which any amateur player was eligible to compete, as distinct from the ‘closed’ meetings, or parts of meetings, restricted to those from a particular locality, club or county (these closed events were themselves popular and widespread, but are not a central concern in these pages). It was axiomatic, in a game governed from the start by strict amateur rules, that no paid professionals – in this era primarily tennis coaches – were allowed to participate in the same events as amateurs.

A revealing insight into the expansion of tournament competition is provided by F.R. (Fred) Burrow, the chain-smoking referee at scores of meetings of variable size and quality (including Wimbledon) before and after the 1914–18 war. Burrow recalled in a book of reflections that in his own playing days, when he was a student at Oxford in the early 1880s, there were only a handful of tournaments in existence. Most of them, he noted, had small numbers of entrants and they were nearly all played on grass courts and concentrated into a few summer weeks in June and July. But within a few years, the numbers being organised and of those participating started to rise sharply, and it’s worth outlining in detail his recollection of a single season, that of 1889, to appreciate the speed and scale of growth.

Burrow’s list of elite-level events taking place in the UK that year included the Irish Championships, Bath, Cheltenham, Whitehouse, Waterloo, the Welsh Championships, the Scottish Championships, Macclesfield, Beckenham, the Northern Championships, Edgbaston, Blackheath, The Championships (Wimbledon), Stafford, Hull, Nottingham, Chiswick, Leamington, Leicester, Whitby, Market Harborough, Taunton, Torquay, Darlington, East Grinstead, Exmouth, Keswick, Sheffield, Buxton, Teignmouth, Bournemouth, Scarborough, Weston-super-Mare, Leyton, Brighton and Eastbourne. All these, he noted, were ‘played in the order given’.¹

Burrow’s overview was not fully comprehensive, but it indicates that with additions – we know of several other tournaments that took place in 1889 – regular annual fixtures in the summer season, running from May to early September, totalled at least 40 each year; a figure that, by Burrow’s estimation, thereafter more than trebled to over 140 by the time hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914 (after which tournament play went into abeyance for the duration of the conflict). Exact numbers are hard to pin down, depending on which types of gathering are counted, but the upward trajectory prior to the Great War is clear. What characterises this first stage, ultimately, was the rapid geographical spread of tournaments, to cover all regions of the country, and the sheer variety of meetings on offer. These ranged from short, after-work or seaside holiday gatherings, where local club and county players often mingled with wealthy visiting hopefuls, to the longer, highest-level tournaments dominated by the crème de la crème, the so-called ‘cracks’, of the day.

In the second of our three phases, the half-century between 1918 and 1968, the UK experienced the golden age of its tournament history beyond SW19. With lawn tennis rising sharply in popularity across much of the globe after the First World War, England, especially, of the home nations developed a much longer playing season – stretching over six months from spring to late autumn – and hosted a range of meetings that showcased world-class tennis for both men and women. Hence, as the following chapters show, prestigious events on different types of court surface became commonplace, including one of the most important indoor tournaments in Europe (at Queen’s); a national hard-court championships that attracted strong international contenders (at Bournemouth); and popular grass-court meetings such as those seen as essential dress rehearsals for Wimbledon and those among the largest tournaments anywhere in the world (at Beckenham and Eastbourne respectively).

One young overseas player, South African left-hander Gordon Forbes, kept a 1950s diary indicating that the English tournament scene was renowned for being both competitive and fun at the same time. Despite the presence of irritating ex-military-type referees, who Forbes wrote ‘used to lay down the law in a very British way’ – and notwithstanding some inevitable poor weather – he described with affection his 1954 tour around numerous meetings ahead of Wimbledon: at Bournemouth, Hurlingham, Paddington, Newcastle, Manchester, Surbiton, Beckenham and Roehampton. Amateur rules continued to officially ban prize money (except for inexpensive shopping vouchers), but Forbes noted that there were other compensations, including free accommodation with welcoming local families and small-scale, permissible expenses. In addition to 50 shillings in cash and second-class rail fares, players were given, he said, ‘books of lunch tickets which enabled us to eat egg and ham pie and lettuce in dampish tents. Blissfully happy, we played for our lives’.²

Throughout this period, smaller meetings in particular (as they had before 1914) tended to come and go. Tournaments were discontinued for a range of reasons. The retirement of a key organiser might affect a club’s ability to continue hosting; entry numbers could suddenly or unexpectedly fall away; bad weather sometimes ruined finals, so contributing to a financial loss that made future meetings unviable. But the upward trend in overall tournament numbers continued, at least for a couple of decades after the Great War. Precise figures are again not easy to collate owing to different methods of calculation, but one authoritative source claims that the LTA sanctioned 155 senior tournaments in England and Wales in 1934.³ This peak was never to be surpassed, but there was another mini revival after the Second World War. Starting from a low base – as competitive tennis was again severely curtailed during the 1939–45 war – about 100 tournaments took place in 1953, followed by a small drift downwards thereafter; 83 were reported as going ahead in 1966. The number of entrants between these two dates fell from over 14,000 to around 9,400.⁴

Despite the continued vibrancy of larger gatherings in particular – several of which were regularly covered by national newspapers and also by the emerging medium of television – the dwindling number of events and entrants indicated strains in the system by the 1950s. As the global tennis calendar became more congested, and with air travel allowing elite players to move more easily across the world all year round, English tournaments beyond SW19 found it ever harder to attract the best to their own meetings. It was an open secret that – in contravention of the creaking amateur rulebook – top stars sought and were offered generous inducements to appear at concurrent events taking place in the United States or mainland Europe. Unless willing to emulate such practices, tournament committees in England found it hard, doubly so after Wimbledon was finished each summer, to continue attracting the calibre of player who would bring in the large paying crowds necessary to cover costs. While most of the gatherings featured in these pages managed to stay afloat going into the 1960s, for others the writing was already on the wall.

In the third and final of our chronological stages, running from the early 1970s to the present day, we find the non-Wimbledon tournament scene contracting sharply, before eventually adapting and reinventing itself. The number of top-tier senior meetings around the country fell to 56 by the end of the 1970s, and the decline continued apace thereafter.⁵ What gradually emerged after a period of protracted upheaval was the more streamlined tournament structure of today, with world-class tennis still on offer but now mostly concentrated into a short grass-court swing of five to six weeks ahead of Wimbledon. The elongated English season stretching from March to November, characteristic of the former heyday, now shrunk and almost disappeared, although not entirely. London, as we will see, remained the home of several important autumn meetings held indoors, ranging from the Rothmans International and Dewar Cup competitions at the Albert Hall in the 1970s through to the hugely prestigious men’s tour World Finals at the O2 Arena in recent years.

The chief cause of the diminished scale of high-quality tennis beyond SW19 was the long-term impact of professionalism following the arrival of Open tennis. After 1968, the definition of open and closed events, as used in former times, was superseded by the notion that elite events were open to all categories of players, whether amateur or professional. Prior to this, since the 1920s, the small bands of professional players who toured the world receiving above-board payment for their endeavours were barred from all amateur meetings, including the grand slams. The seismic effects of the move to Open tennis were not immediately apparent when the international authorities gave the go-ahead for ten experimental tournaments to take place across the world in 1968. It was an illustration of the hard-earned global status of English tournaments that four of these ten Open events took place on home shores: at Bournemouth, Beckenham, Queen’s Club and Wimbledon.

Within a few years, however, several long-standing and cherished meetings (including Bournemouth and Beckenham) had gone out of business. The reality was that the Open era saw the elite game transformed in a multi-million dollar enterprise, attracting massive TV and media interest and making it difficult for home events outside of Wimbledon to offer the rocketing levels of prize money required to attract the world’s best. As will be shown in the individual chapters that follow, some tournaments secured good sponsorships deals, enabling them to continue in adapted forms, becoming valued parts of separate men’s and women’s tours overseen by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) respectively. But for others, large-scale sponsorship was difficult to find and sustain as configurations elsewhere in the global calendar – notably on European clay courts in the spring and American hard courts ahead of the US Open – consolidated their hold and contributed to squeezing the life out of traditional English gatherings.

By the end of the 1980s Wimbledon was the only grand slam event still played on grass (the US and Australian Opens having switched to hard surfaces), further reducing the appeal of the UK’s formerly extended grass-court season. Yet the story of recent decades is not entirely one of gloom and doom. With assistance from the LTA, the fittest of the English meetings not only survived but were able to flourish. By the end of the 20th century a strong schedule of high-quality tournaments remained an established part of the annual circuit, some ATP events showcasing the skills of top men (as at Queen’s) and other WTA meetings featuring leading women stars – at Eastbourne, for example, which moved with the times by abandoning its old September date in favour of a pre-Wimbledon slot. Hence, today, the LTA is still able to promise tennis fans, coronavirus aside (at the time of writing the fate of the 2021 summer season remained unclear), the prospect of witnessing – if not on the scale of yesteryear – ‘world-class tennis around the country’.

* * *

Moving from the general historical picture to the specific, the ten chapters that follow look to explore a range of venues and competitions (including Davis and Wightman Cup ties as well as individual tournaments) that have featured international-standard tennis in the past and/or the present day. The aim is to shed fresh light not only on some of the best-known annual gatherings, at the likes of Queen’s, Eastbourne and Edgbaston, but also on once high-profile but now-defunct and largely forgotten meetings in places such as Torquay, Scarborough and Wembley Arena.

Each chapter, drawing from materials including tennis journals and magazines, newspapers and memoirs by players, officials and journalists, includes background about the geographical setting and the origins of the tournament concerned. This is followed by discussion of the highs and lows in the evolution of the event (all the tournaments covered, we shall see, experienced ebbs and flows at various points in time) and by stories about key matches and the top stars who participated and lifted the main trophies. Particular attention is paid to examining why certain meetings managed to adapt to the demands of commercialism that came with the Open era, whereas others faltered and were consigned to the record books.

The running order of chapters is determined not by the relative status of individual tournaments but rather takes the form of a round-the-country journey, starting in the heartland of British tennis, at Queen’s Club in London, and then working outwards and onwards in a roughly (though not precisely) clockwise fashion around England. These travels take us far and wide across regions, towns and cities, from Eastbourne and Bournemouth on the south coast to Bristol in the west country, and to Manchester, Liverpool and Scarborough in the north before returning via Birmingham to the capital to end by focusing on major indoor venues in London including Wembley and the O2 Arena.

Ireland, Scotland and Wales all have creditable records in staging top-quality tennis (including, in the contemporary era of Andy and Jamie Murray, several crucial Davis Cup encounters), but those areas of the UK are not covered in these pages, partly because of space constraints and partly as they warrant and have received separate treatment in their own right. The Irish Championships – which began only two years after Wimbledon and for a couple of decades had strong claims to rival the All England Club meeting in terms of prestige – has attracted much attention from historians in recent years.⁶ Detailed coverage can also be found elsewhere of the Welsh and Scottish Championships, the latter of which has been described in Max Robertson’s authoritative Encyclopedia of Tennis as holding for many years a place ‘of high esteem in the British calendar’.⁷

Interspersed in the text of the ten chapters – with the aim of allowing readers to gauge tournament outcomes for every year covered – are lists of results for the men’s and women’s singles at the meetings under discussion, ranging from the London Grass Court Championships in chapter 1 to the ATP World Finals in the last chapter. Many tournaments in their early years adopted (as did Wimbledon) the practice of stipulating that reigning champions who chose to defend their title only had to face one ‘challenge round’ final against the best of the ‘all-comers’, the remainder of the entrants who played through the draw. All the lists embedded in the chapters, it should be noted, show winners of all-comers’ finals in cases where the title holder did not defend; this avoids excessive usage of the technically correct term ‘walkover’, as there were numerous examples where reigning champions did not take part at the challenge round stage.

The results lists, compiled from multiple published and online sources, bear witness to the scale and significance of international-standard play that has characterised English tennis history. Nearly all of the great names of the sport over the past century and more – from the likes of the Renshaw brothers in the 1880s to Roger Federer today – can be found on the roll of honour at one or more of the tournaments featured. In general terms, overseas victors became increasingly regular and numerous from the time of the First World War onwards. For ease of reference, the winners and runners-up named in the results lists are from the UK unless indicated otherwise; a guide to the abbreviations used for players of other nationalities follows on at the end of the last chapter.

Also interspersed in the body of each main chapter – with the intention of providing additional texture and colour – are a series of descriptions, in italicised text, of some unusually short or excessively long contests, and of quirky, humorous or controversial moments associated with individual tournaments. Most of the categories covered in these vignettes are self-explanatory (e.g. ‘memorable match’), although it’s worth mentioning that ‘underrated champion’ refers not to a player’s career achievements across the board but rather to giving fuller recognition to that man or woman’s record at top-level English tournaments other than Wimbledon.⁸

By including a wealth of anecdotes alongside extensive lists of winners, Beyond SW19 seeks to avoid the pitfall once identified by Times correspondent Rex Bellamy, namely that