Advantage Telford
A History Of Telford Park Lawn Tennis Club
When you come across a tennis club nestling serenely within a square formed by four residential avenues there is a question which inevitably springs to mind. Were the houses built around the club or did the club develop because the ground became available after the architect had completed the residential development? In the case of Telford Park Lawn Tennis Club it can be said it’s history really begins when two quite unrelated conceptions took shape in the same year in almost adjoining areas of South-West London. The areas were S.W.19 and S.W.2 and that significant year was 1877.
Popular New Sport
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century various experiments were conducted to regularise the old game of real or royal tennis, but it was the game of SPHAIRISTIKE, devised by Mayor Walter Wingfield, that is the true ancestor of the game we know today. He first demonstrated it on an hourglass-shaped grass court in Wales in 1873 and it achieved such immediate success that it was not long before it was being played on lawns all over Britain.
Barely two years later the All England Croquet Club, formed in 1868, set aside an area of ground on which members could try this new sport and the Marylebone Cricket Club, governing body of the old game of real tennis, drew up the first code of rules for lawn tennis. In 1877 the All England Croquet Club became the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, and in July of that year conceived the idea of holding the first lawn tennis championships. It was decided that the hourglass layout should be changed to one of a rectangular form with measurements very similar to those of today. However, the net was 5ft high at the posts and only 3ft 3 inches at the centre. Lowered to 3ft 6 inches at the posts and 3ft at the centre in 1882 it has so remained. Only 22 men entered the competition and the winner was Spencer Gore, the first Wimbledon champion. He lost his title the following year in the final but the most bizarre finalists in all of Wimbledon’s chequered history played their deciding match the very next year, 1879. The winner was the Reverend J.T Hartley who would play a round at Wimbledon and then return to his Yorkshire parish to conduct a service. His beaten opponent bore the grand name of V.Saint Leger Goold, who was later to be convicted of murder in France and sent to Devil’s Island Prison where he died.
Telford Park Tennis Club Entrance
