‘Flannelled Fools are Strutting About Tennis Courts’: Lawn Tennis in Britain During the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the connections between (lawn) tennis in Britain and the Great War (1914–1918). While previous historical research has suggested a four-year hiatus, in fact the sport continued to be played during the war, recreationally and among servicemen/women and more elite players in exhibition matches. Anecdotes about the cessation of tournaments and restricted play were interspersed with debates about the appropriateness of continuing play recreationally, as the ‘gentleman in tennis flannels’ became a symbol of public censure. Alongside enlistment, tennis players responded to the call byoffering their club facilities to the war effort, digging up courts to plant vegetables, hosting charity matches, and providing entertainment for convalescent soldiers. This analysis highlights the significance of tennis as a vehicle to promote a kind of British identity, as responses to the war as seen through tennis reflected broader sporting ideals, privileging amateurism, fair play and the ‘stuff upper lip’.

KEYWORDS:

• First World War
• tennis clubs
• Great Britain
• Lawn Tennis Association
• discourse analysis

Notes on contributor

Robert J. Lake is in the Department of Sport Science, Douglas College, Canada. He has written extensively on various aspects of tennis history. His first book ‘A Social History of Tennis in Britain’ (Routledge, 2015), won the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize in 2015 awarded by the British Society of Sport History. He is currently associate editor of Sport in History and The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Notes

1 Interestingly, in some locations it seems the general public overestimated the extent to which tennis equipment would be used by men at the front, as a complaint came through in 1915 of an accumulation of unwanted gifts for the front line; chief among them were tennis rackets! (Times 9 Apr 1915, p.11).

2 Between 1900 and 1914, the profits from The Championships increased by almost 1750% (from £311 to £5,741 over the 14-year period), and, while exact figures were never recorded, the crowds at Worple Road before the war were said to be in excess of 6000 and ‘very congested’ (Wimbledon History, 2007).

3 Tennis had become one of the most international of sports, exhibited through the exciting play of the leading male exponents such as Norman Brookes (Australia), Anthony Wilding (New Zealand), Maurice McLoughlin (United States), Max Decugis (France) and Otto Froitzheim (Germany).

4 In May 1915, news came that racing was to be banned by the government ‘because it causes undue stress on the transport system which is needed for the war efforts, transporting troops and munitions’, but tennis was singled out as ‘special’ because, apparently, ‘it can be pursued simply and solely as a recreation without interfering in any way with the military efficiency of the nation’. It was claimed: ‘Our game is the ideal recreation in war time for men of athletic propensities who have to content themselves with the role of non-combatants’ (LT&B 28 May 1915, p.363).

5 Unsurprisingly, the French Riviera cancelled many of its winter tournaments owing to: ‘The number of players out there this year is not large and promises of support are not sufficiently numerous to justify the executives of the proposed meetings in attempting to “carry on”’ (LT&B 18 Mar 1915, p.237).

6 Once enlistment began in January 1916, single men aged 18–40 were liable to be called up unless they were widowed with children or religious ministers. Married men were exempt until the rule changed in June 1916.

7 Professional football was considered a working-class occupation, while middle and upper-class exponents, steeped in the amateur ideals of athleticism, ‘launched an embittered literary attack upon the working-class reaction to the national crisis’, using the issue of one’s moral duty to enlist as a vehicle to criticise ‘the social changes which had occurred in football in the previous thirty years’ (Vietch, 1985, 367). Similarly, the debates in cricket around the continuation of play were punctuated by a class-based and hypocritical form of anti-professionalism. Williams (1998, 6) noted that ‘most professional cricketers did not join up with the same alacrity as amateur county cricketers’, but that many clubs followed the MCC’s lead in tacitly encouraging the continuation of play by organising charity matches, placing their grounds and buildings at the disposal of the military and sending cricket equipment to military sides at the front. Thus, they fostered the playing of cricket ‘but in a manner which appeared to be assisting the war effort’ (Williams, 1998, 6). This arrangement did not appease all, however, as indicated by W.G. Grace’s open letter to The Sportsman (27 Aug 1914) condemning fellow ‘able-bodied’ cricketers as ‘pleasure-seekers’ who continued ‘playing day by day’: ‘There are so many who are young and able and are still hanging back. I should like to see all first-class cricketers of a suitable age set a good example’. Despite Grace’s comments, argues Berry (2014, 4), cricket was seen as one of the most obliging respondents to the war.

8 See Williams (1998, 6) for a similar discussion of cricket in this regard.

9 The phrase ‘flanneled fools’ first appeared in The Times in 1902 and coined by Rudyard Kipling in his poem The Islanders, which protested England’s slack preparations for the Boer War.

10 Criticisms returned briefly and at specific moments later on, for example when ‘A Business woman’ criticised those ‘single men, especially in Government Departments’ who played tennis outside of their 11am–4pm work hours instead of ‘acting as “specials” or training as Volunteers. Men who can play tennis are surely fit for khaki’ (Daily Mail 8 Apr 1918, p.2). A month later, public schools were criticised for preventing healthy men of military age from being called up by making bogus claims of their apparent necessity at home, as ‘assistant and house masters’: ‘I contend that there are a surprising number of so-called indispensable men in our public schools […] sheltering from military service’ (Times 2 May 1918, p.9).

11 In the first half of 1915 alone, newspapers revealed that three new clubs formed: public courts in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, were opened, alongside clubs in Melbourne (Derbyshire) and Droitwich.

12 Such was the prevalence of tennis within his own Surrey village, the renowned author A. Wallis Myers in The Field talked about it being ‘invaded’ by soldiers training, and that they had ‘waged five fierce sets with some of them on the courts’ (LT&B 1 Oct 1914, p.1001).

13 See, for example: LT&B 20 Aug 1914, p.914; LT&B 10 Sep 1914, p.961.

14 Dorothea Lambert Chambers was a seven-time Wimbledon singles champion; Phyllis Satterthwaite was the 1913 Wimbledon singles quarter-finalist and subsequent 1919 all-comers finalist; and Stanley Doust was the 1909 men’s doubles finalist from Australia.

15 Charlotte Cooper-Sterry was a five-time Wimbledon singles champion; Winifred Beamish was a future three-time Wimbledon singles semi-finalist in 1919, 1922 and 1923; and Charles Dixon was a Wimbledon singles all-comers finalist in 1911 and a British Davis Cup player from 1909-13.

16 Norman Brookes was the 1907 and 1914 Wimbledon singles champion and M.J.G. Ritchie was the 1909 Wimbledon runner-up and three-time all-comers finalist, 1902-04.

17 See also: LT&B 4 May 1916, p.54.