Empire, War, Tennis and Me

By Peter Doherty

For those who look, and think deeply, new connections emerge.

Peter Doherty, one of the world’s foremost authorities on immunology, recipient of the Nobel Prize for medicine, and an active and respected commentator on public health, reflects in this book on empire, war and tennis.
Doherty identifies the origins of modern tennis within its imperial context, relating seemingly unlikely connections between the sport, its players and national militaries. He traces the fate of tennis-and its players-as a nascent force for internationalism and cultural tolerance within the context of World War II. And he personalises this account through an unsentimental but revealing depiction of his tennis-loving Queenslander uncles, at war and in captivity in the Pacific.
As Doherty shows, tennis and war have threaded their way through the lives of many people since the nineteenth century, in a way intriguingly unique to this sport.

This is part of Peter’s story. And, as we come to realise, it is also part of the story of our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522878578

Book preview

1

Introduction: War, Tennis, Family and Empire

WAR AND TENNIS? War and peace? Tennis versus war: the Janus faces of human conflict? An unlikely contrast?

War and football perhaps, especially American football, where every game is organised like a military campaign, with commanding generals (the coaches, specialists), the tackles and quarterbacks, body armour and big battalions that run on and off the battlefield. That hardly describes tennis, though, which is, after all, a non-contact sport where individual games involve, at the most, four players.

Think of the air war of 1914–18 where, soaring free in primitive biplanes and triplanes, a lone pilot, or a pilot plus an observer/gunner, battled in lethal games of singles or doubles above the ‘vasty fields of France’, as Will Shakespeare had it in Henry V. Those early planes were unpredictable, and it helped to have the light hand, reflexes and good eye for jumps and hazards of an experienced horseman or, maybe, a tennis player. Did it occur to any of those formerly grounded tennis players, now flying free, that they, in their flimsy machines, were like balls batted about the sky in some tournament of the gods at war?

The French Open is still played at a venue named for the gallant World War I fighter ace Roland Garros (1888–1918), a prominent amateur sportsman and occasional tennis player. A British cavalry major, Walter Wingfield, popularised lawn tennis. Many of the German air aces of WWI, including the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, were former cavalry officers. Landed gentry, like members of the British royal family, are often horsey people and tennis people.

Still, a book on empire, war and tennis? Why make the effort to travel this particular byroad?

The journey began with the story of my mother’s family, the Byfords, and the lives they lived before, during and after World War II. My uncles Charlie and Jack Byford were keen tennis players who, with absolutely no prior military involvement, volunteered in 1940 to fight for Australia and Empire. Theirs was the experience of so many in the great civilian-soldier conflicts of 1914–18 (WWI) and 1939–45 (WWII).

An infantry private, Jack was in the front line at the Kokoda/Buna–Gona, Markham Valley/Finisterre Range and Balikpapan campaigns. Charlie at first had an easier time as a paymaster staff sergeant, but then suffered the experience of being a prisoner of war on the Thai–Burma Railway. Back in about 1929, the two brothers got together with my grandfather Bert and friends to construct their own ant-bed tennis court. Born in 1940, I’ve long thought of that slowly degrading court as both a memorial to them and a symbol of a very different and now disappeared time.

While my initial idea for this book was to focus on tennis and war, reading into the subject soon led to thoughts about national aspirations, national pride and international competition in peace—tennis—and war. The story of the first seventy years of lawn tennis (1875–1945) is embedded in much bigger narratives about imperialist ambitions that led to smaller conflicts and then to both WWI and WWII. Through that timeline, the imperialist nations that are of particular interest from the Australian perspective are Britain, Japan and the United States, with France, Germany and the Netherlands being more minor players.

Lawn tennis spread rapidly through the various colonial dependencies. Requiring only two people for a spontaneous hit-up, it was the perfect fit for Europeans who found themselves marooned for a time in hot and alien places. A few games over an hour or less at the end of a tiring day were a perfect prelude to showering, drinks and dinner. Designed to keep the colonised at a distance, the exclusiveness of club memberships led to the rapid emergence of parallel tennis cultures in the upper echelons of local ethnic communities.

Now, readily viewed via our TVs or handheld devices, the top tennis matches attract massive audiences. People love, I think, both the gladiatorial and the nonviolent character of the game. What’s thankfully gone is any hint of racism, sexism or cultural divisiveness, at least within the official tennis culture.

The events that determined the WWII experience of many Australian families, including the Byfords, played out in the nations to our north that we now know as Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar (Burma), Papua New Guinea and Indonesia (the part of it that was called Borneo). Much of the war component of this narrative is thus focused on that region. Central to this story is the uniqueness of the Japanese warrior culture that, driven by internal tensions and imperial ambitions, evolved from the late nineteenth century. Details of these linked aspects were relatively unfamiliar to me and will be, I suspect, to most of you, so some space is devoted to them.

The ancient land of Australia was firmly under British control by the time lawn tennis came on the scene. Through the 1880s, both tennis clubs and intercolonial tennis championships were increasingly part of the social mix. Then, from the 1899 completion of the undersea/overland telegraph line linking the colonies to imperial HQ in London, sporting results were immediately transmitted and widely reported in the newspapers of the day.

By the time the first Australian Federal Parliament met (1901) in Melbourne, the International Lawn Tennis Challenge (called the Davis Cup throughout this book) was already established, while Wimbledon was recognised globally as the home of the sport. Lawn tennis had grown rapidly here. We were good at it and, even in those early days, it was a much more egalitarian pursuit both in this wide brown land and in neighbouring New Zealand than in most other countries. At first competing in partnership with New Zealand, Australia had many Davis Cup and Wimbledon triumphs to its credit by the time our seat of government moved to the bush capital of Canberra in 1927. With ups and downs as top players came to the end of their sporting careers, that pattern continued through until 1939 as WWII began.

This narrative tells of players and spectators, competition with racquets and balls, mayhem with bullets and bombs, and the politics of nation-states and empires. It explores the experiences and achievements of ordinary and extraordinary people who lived and died in extraordinary times. That complex weave is broadly organised on a continuing timeline, with digressions to fill in the before-and-after details of particular sub-stories. The lawn tennis thread begins with the ancestral game of royal tennis, as introduced by none other than William Shakespeare.

Researching the military history of tennis, it surprised me to realise how soon the names of famous sporting stars, like those of most war heroes, drop out of the popular imagination. There’s only room here to mention names or provide brief vignettes but, if you’re interested, the tennis triumphs of all who competed at the top level are readily accessed online. When it comes to leading players of the past, more details of their personal stories are also easy to find. On-court newsreel footage is available for some, including a few who are famous for other reasons.

You might think that a book with this title would be all about men. It’s not. Lawn tennis has, from the outset, been a game played enthusiastically by both men and women. A retrospective ‘Top 8’ analysis by Karoly Mazak lists several antipodean women, but no men, in the earliest decades. During WWII, tennis star and army captain Thelma Coyne Long achieved the highest military rank of any leading Australian player. Among the small group of tennis greats to survive being shot in WWII was the wonderful Alice Marble. Never heard of Miss Marble? Not being wealthy, she didn’t get to tour Australia. Along with Bobby Riggs, she took out the 1939 Wimbledon triple crown. She’s at least as intriguing as Agatha Christie’s fictional Miss Marple, and certainly much more athletic!

2

The Real Game

DURING MY FIRST two years at high school, we dissected a Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, and a history, Henry V. Writing to entertain the paying theatre crowd, Will Shakespeare structured his storylines in ways that would be inoffensive to the monarch: for authors who transgressed, the executioner’s axe was a contemporary possibility. However historically accurate it may be, Henry V, which was first performed in 1599, just happens to link family connections, imperial ambitions and the game of real, or royal, tennis.

England’s Plantagenet rulers laid claim to the crown of France via Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), a powerful and resourceful woman who married the King of France then, after two daughters and an annulment, Henry II of England. Demanding the return of Aquitaine, which had, after years of English control, been taken back by the French, Henry V (1386–1422) in Shakespeare’s play decides to invade and reclaim this inheritance. Part of the subtext is that, portrayed in Shakespeare’s earlier Henry IV as a playboy prince and a disappointment to his father, the young king is determined to establish his authority with the English barons. Much of Henry V Act I (scene ii) is taken up by a discussion he has with peers of the realm justifying his ‘lately sending into France’ to ‘claim some certain Dukedoms’. When he gains assurances that the nobles are onside, the ground is prepared for financing and mobilising his invasion force.

Seeking to discredit Henry in words delivered via ambassadors, the French dauphin—Louis, the heir to the throne—insists that ‘there’s nought in France that can be with a nimble gaillard [dance] won’. Adding insult to injury, the French delegation then presents Henry with a treasure. The King asks: ‘What treasure, uncle?’ Thomas Beaufort, the first Duke of Exeter, replies: ‘Tennis-balls, my liege.’ Enraged, Henry returns Louis’s big psychological serve with:

When we have match’d our rackets to these balls

We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set

Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler

That all the courts of France will be disturb’d

With chaces.

The dauphin did not show up to confront Harry’s ‘band of brothers’ (Henry V Act IV, scene iii). In late October 1415, with many of the King’s soldiers in poor health and outnumbered four to one, the English ‘happy few’ beat the hell out of the French at the Battle of Agincourt. Prepared by advance intelligence from a captured officer that the French attack would rely heavily on their knights, or heavy cavalry, Henry chose a location where dense woodlands channelled the charging horsemen into a narrow defile. Just as in lawn tennis and in other sporting codes where the playing surface is a major factor in how matches play out, terrain and how military leaders exploit their ground can determine the course of battles. Harassed from the flanks by the rapid-fire English archers, weighed down by heavy armour and mired in thick mud, the dismounted French knights quickly tired. And they kept coming on, leading to a massive and fatal pile-up.

Henry won, game, set and match. Though the exact numbers are not known, it’s likely that the French casualties, which included many aristocrats, exceeded the English losses by a multiple of at least five. Then Louis, the dauphin, died of either tuberculosis or dysentery in December of that year. In Shakespeare’s play, the victorious Henry V of England briefly courts (Act V, scene ii), then marries the French king’s daughter, Catherine of Valois.

For 250 or so years following Shakespeare’s death, anyone who mentioned the word tennis would have been referring to royal tennis. Still played by enthusiasts on some fifty courts in England, the United States, France and Australia (at Melbourne, Ballarat, Romsey and Hobart), the most widely known venue is at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace. While the scoring system for lawn tennis is based somewhat on that used in the older game and both versions have racquets, sets, balls and a server and a receiver, the rules of the two are very different.

Regarding Shakespeare’s use of tennis terminology, the receiver on a royal tennis court stands on the ‘hazard’ side. The ball has to bounce off the wall on service, and points are scored when it hits the end wall or goes through a small window on the full. Shakespeare’s ‘wrangler’ was familiar to me as a description for wizards at mathematics, but not tennis, while ‘chaces’ refers to lines on the court, or chasers. The rules are arcane, and I’ll refer you to the video listed in Appendix II rather than try to explain them here. Last, but not least, royal tennis is an indoor game requiring a court that, historically, would have been available only to the wealthy and powerful.

Henry and Catherine ruled much of western France until his death seven years after Agincourt. By 1558, in the decade before Shakespeare’s birth, the French had finally pushed the English out and regained Calais. The following year, Elizabeth I was crowned at Westminster Abbey. During her long reign (1558–1603), Britain moved on from any limited ambitions concerning Europe to embark seriously on the process of developing one of the most far-flung and powerful empires in the history of the planet.

Empires were nothing new, of course. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare reached back to imperial Rome for his tale of murder and political ambition. Alexandria in Egypt is named for the Greek imperialist Alexander of Macedon. The Holy Roman Empire, which morphed later into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, brought together a spectrum of what are now independent nations in Western and Eastern Europe. Apart from the Greeks and Romans, who navigated the Mediterranean, and the Norwegian Vikings, who raided and occupied ancient Britain and even made it across the North Atlantic, the spread of those early empires was mostly land based.

What changed—beginning with, as the poem by Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr has it, ‘in fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’—was that the print, map-making, wood, iron, wind and canvas technologies of Western Europe evolved to the point where adventurers could cross the major oceans, even circumnavigate the globe, and return safely with the spoils of their voyages. These conquerors of distant lands took horses, iron swords, muskets, cannons, and the monotheistic Christian religion. Other fellow travellers were diseases such as the plague, measles and smallpox, which devastated previously unexposed populations and contributed to their subjugation. The conquerors brought back gold, potatoes, tomatoes, exotic people and animals, and syphilis. Royal tennis was just too cumbersome to be exported to other than a few of the most stable dominions. The globalisation of tennis had to wait until the emergence of the outdoor game on grass.

3

Cricket, Lawn Tennis and the Galloping Majors

PART OF THE reason it took so long for lawn tennis to emerge from royal tennis was that, to state the obvious, lawn tennis requires lawns. True, lawn bowls had been around since the thirteenth century, being most notably played (as legend has it) by Admiral Sir Francis Drake as he delayed (in 1588) setting sail to defeat the Spanish Armada in order to end his game. But bowls, where a heavy ball is gently rolled along the ground, is eminently less damaging to a surface than the short spurts of speed and rapid changes in direction made by players as they position themselves to return a tennis ball.

Cricket also requires grass, but, apart from the compacted pitch, a paddock mowed by peasants with scythes and/or by grazing animals was perfectly adequate. Competitive cricket matches became increasingly important through the eighteenth century, attracting the attention of enthusiastic gamblers. With money involved, an agreed and consistent set of rules became essential. That led to the 1767 founding of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) based at Lord’s Old Ground, which, as the sport’s premier organisation, both wrote and curated the formal Laws of Cricket.

Later, the MCC, being the most respected and established sporting organisation in Great Britain, was to play a vital part in formalising the rules of lawn tennis. There’s a common theme in that cricket and tennis have always attracted highly competitive athletes who don’t necessarily have any great passion for contact sports. Charlie and Jack Byford played both games well, but had no interest in either of the Rugby codes that then dominated Queensland football.

Apart from involving the MCC as an oversight body, the emergence of lawn tennis depended on a couple of key technological advances. With cricket in mind, Gloucestershire man Edwin Budding invented the lawnmower. Patented in 1830, his cylinder or reel mower gradually evolved from requiring energetic labour to, for large areas, being pulled as a gang-mower by horses, or tractors powered by steam, and then kerosene or gasoline engines.

When it came to domestic use, American Elwood McGuire is generally credited with the 1870 development of light and robust hand mowers like those we can still buy today. Kids of my generation earned some of their pocket money pushing a Qualcast reel mower on summer weekends. The machine noise was intermittent and low-end and the job required moderate levels of effort, broken by the frequent need to empty the loosely attached wire-and-canvas grass catcher. A persistent memory is of the sweet smell of freshly cut grass uncontaminated by the pervading odour of petrol fumes.

The two other key advances needed to get lawn tennis off the ground related to the use of rubber. Back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the relatively small quantities of rubber required for commercial use were harvested from wild-grown trees in Central and South America and Africa. Later, seeds smuggled out of Brazil in 1876 led to the development of rubber plantations established and managed by British planters on the Malay Peninsula, and by the Dutch East India Company in Sumatra and Java.

Rubber soles and canvas uppers came together in the 1830s when the Liverpool Rubber Company developed the sandshoe for beach use. Light and comfortable, the shoes quickly became known in Britain as plimsolls. That somehow sounds effete to the Australian ear: we stuck with sandshoe. Slippery leather soles and hard heels are incompatible with tennis courts: the flexibility and resilience of rubber were essential for the energetic pursuit of a sport played on manicured grass.

The next big step was the invention of vulcanised rubber. Using technology developed by American Charles Goodyear (1800–60), vulcanisation describes a spectrum of chemical processes used to make organic polymers—such as native rubber—more elastic and durable by cross-linking the individual fibres. Prior to that, the balls used in royal tennis were filled with materials as diverse as cork, human hair, animal fur, pinewood shavings and, in fact, just about anything with a little flexibility that could be wrapped with wool, string, rope and sewn felt or flannel. While such balls bounced a bit on a wooden surface, it was obvious that they could in no way be useful on grass. Lawn tennis awaited the development of the vulcanised, air-filled ball.

Which brings us to the galloping majors. Put ‘tennis majors’ into Google and you come up with a list of the professional tennis tournaments. What we’re talking about here, though, are two men with the rank of major in the British military. One, Walter Wingfield, served as a combat officer in the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards (KDG), the tank corps of the day, while the other, Harry Gem, was a London-educated Birmingham lawyer, journalist, part-time soldier (in the 1st Warwickshire Rifle Volunteer Corps) and cricket and archery enthusiast. At age forty-three, to win a bet, he ran 21 miles (34 kilometres) from Birmingham to Warwick in under three-and-ahalf hours. That surely qualifies him as a galloper!

Harry Gem (1819–81) also played royal tennis, at Birmingham’s Bath Street Racquets Club with his friend Augurio Perera. Together, beginning around 1858, they developed the idea of a similar game that could be played on Perera’s croquet lawn, taking elements from both royal tennis and the Basque sport of pelota. Originally called ‘lawn rackets’ or ‘lawn pelota’, neither the rules nor the court they played on at Edgbaston were too different from what we know today in lawn tennis. The business partners moved to nearby Leamington in 1873–74 and, with local doctors Frederic Haynes and Arthur Tomkins, formed the Leamington Club to play tennis on the lawns of the Manor House Hotel across the street from Gem’s house. That became, at the end of 1874, the Leamington Lawn Tennis Club, which still exists, though it has gone back to an indoor racquet game and has added ‘& Squash’ to its title.

Invention is one thing, but most inventions don’t go far without enthusiastic marketing. That was the part played by Walter Wingfield (1833–1912). The son of an infantry major and a baronet’s daughter, Wingfield entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned as a cornet—the lowest cavalry officer rank—in the KDG. After serving in England and Ireland, he found himself on the high seas when the regiment shipped to India. Arriving at Calcutta in 1858, the KDG was based in Bangalore as part of the increased British military presence in response to the 1857 Indian Mutiny. That event had the perverse consequence of bringing India directly under the British Crown.

Wingfield was promoted to captain in 1858, the year