Dan Snow's History Hit - A History of Tennis

Episode Date: July 10, 2021

In this archive episode, David Berry joined Dan on the pod to discuss the history of tennis. From the birth of modern tennis in Victorian Britain to the present day, they talk about struggles around sexuality, gender, race and class that have transformed the nature of tennis and sport itself.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now some of you will have noticed that alongside a certain football tournament this year, there is a tennis tournament taking place. That tournament, Wimbledon, has been going on for some time. In fact, I discovered an athlete, a female athlete, this week who is still a record holder. She's called Lottie Dodd. She won Wimbledon this week in 1887. She was 15 years old. She still holds the record as the youngest champion. She won four more after that, four more Wimbledons. Then she won the British Women's Golf Championship, then played hockey for England, and then won a silver medal in the Olympic Games for Britain in archery. Archery.

This is what you call an all-rounder. I remember I swam once against Freddie Flintoff, a famous British cricketer for all you ladies and gentlemen listening abroad, and he was described as a bit of an all-rounder. He's good at different sports. Let me tell you something. Freddie Flintoff, he's got nothing on Lottie Dodd. Look her up. She then, by the way, served as a nurse during the First World War. She's a hero, a card-carrying hero. Anyway, this week we're reaching the climax of Wimbledon, as well as the climax of Euro 2021. So we've got

a bit of sport on the old pod this week. Lots and lots of you listening, giving feedback on the pre-game pod for the final Italy versus England. Lots of other episodes from Anglo-Italian history I've forgotten. Thank you for sending them all in. It's been fascinating seeing them and reading them all and cursing myself for not including them in the podcast. But we're going to take a break from the football now. We're going to talk about tennis. David Berry joined me a year or two ago on the podcast to talk to me about the people's history of tennis, how the modern game was born in Victorian Britain, and how it's evolved alongside us

as we've transformed how we look at class, sexuality, gender, race, all that kind of stuff. How has tennis changed? How has it changed us? This podcast is one from the archive. I hope you enjoy it. It's great to chat with David Barry. If you want to listen to other classic podcasts like this without the ads, you've got to go back to good old historyhit.tv. It's where all the old podcasts are at. None of them have ads on there because you pay a small subscription, you get unlimited access to those podcasts and hundreds of hours of history documentaries. You know what? You couldn't make it up at the moment. We scheduled for transmission this week on History at TV a documentary about a marauding danish army in england and then a documentary about buddhica buddhica fighting the romans brackets italians couldn't have made

up the most timely scheduling in the history of television so well done to the scheduling department of history at dot tv to check out those documentaries and many more. Head over to History at Dot TV, get a free month if you sign up today. In the meantime, everyone, here's David Barry talking about tennis. Enjoy. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Great pleasure to be here. So tennis, I must have got a pretty cliched view of tennis, especially coming from the UK. It's all people wearing flannels, white flannels, strawberries, creams, quite twee, and very English.

But you're presumably going to tell me that all those things are completely nonsense. Well, on one level, it's true. I mean, that's what you see at Wimbledon most years. And I think that is people who don't play tennis have that sense that it's not really for them. It's just a game for the toffs. And I don't think actually Wimbledon does very much dispel that

because when you go to Wimbledon, much as I love going there, it's very much kind of strawberries and cream, glasses of Pim's, cucumber sandwiches, and everybody being incredibly polite and deferential. But underneath that, I think tennis is a very different kind of game and it's even true in Wimbledon. I was at Wimbledon last year and the kind of people when you get there are much, much different from different kind of game. And it's even true in Wimbledon. I was at Wimbledon last year. And the kind of people when you get there

are much, much different from the kind of usual sort of spectators that you see on, or you imagine you're seeing on the BBC television. It's very, very diverse these days. In fact, it reminded me, Dan, a bit of Glastonbury. It was so exciting and so diverse

and so different and things. And then when you move out from Wimbledon to the tennis that I play every week and the, what, one or two million people that play in Britain every week, they're very, very different from that kind of image. You know, it's pretty much a sport that's representative of Britain as a whole. The kinds of people that play, you know, the state agent, teacher, quite a lot of kind of working people play in public courts all around Britain. It really is quite different from that image that people who don't play tennis have heard. Well, I'm one of the awful people that don't play tennis, but I'm trying to get my kids into it. And so I'm repairing the

damage there. Talk to me about the history. How far back? Of course, I know about Henry VIII. In fact, you are looking at a man who has hit with Pat Cash in Henryry the eighth indoor tennis court in hampton court um he uh we we would we did some rallying together for the one show on the bbc 10 years ago 15 years ago now that was my only experience of it recently but so is that the is the is the is the game is it in was it originally an indoor game played by royalty and that was one of its kind of uh uh originators i suppose it's a sport that we call now real tennis or royal tennis. It's played very much on a stone court inside and was really at its high point during Henry VIII's time.

I think in Paris, just shortly after that, there were over 100 real tennis courts. That's where the French aristocracy met and did business with each other, really. In fact, I think it was so much a symbol of the aristocracy that during the french revolution there was a meeting uh on one of the tennis courts before it was actually sacked you know because it seemed to symbolize you know that that kind of world lawn tennis as i suppose uh you know what we call tennis now started much

later than that in the late 19th century um and has elements of real tennis about it in the sense that it's called tennis and it uses the similar kind of scoring system but it owes more to the sport of rackets which is a sport that grew up in around prisons in the early 18th century or so and it also has some aspects of a sport called croquet even though croquet looks nothing like it, because all the people that started playing lawn tennis were playing croquet in the 1860s and 1870s. So lawn tennis, as it was referred to at the time, was a bastard sport. It kind of combined various different kinds of sports

into this strange pastime, which consists of using a wooden racket and a softball outside on the grass. And the real tennis that you're talking about playing with pat cash is a hard ball inside it's a very very different kind of game uh yeah well i'm reminded of the um is it july 1789 the tennis court oath taken at the start of the french revolution as the third estate refused to be dissolved until they had established constitution so yeah that's a bit more like squash is it really i suppose i think real tennis is a bit like squash

these days i've never actually played it myself. And there are some people, I think it has a kind of a few thousand people that still play it in Britain. It's still sort of a sport for the kind of aficionados, really. And when lawn tennis started in the 1870s, there was no indication that it would end up in exactly the same way. You know, it was fashionable for a while. But after about five or 10 years, it seemed to lose some of its kind of excitement and it could easily have ended up

a bit like real tennis today, a sport that only a few hobbyists play. So what's intriguing is why it took off, why it became the world sport that it is today. So the second half of the 19th century, something mad was going on. I mean, all the modern sports were basically evolving in this sort of entrepot.

I mean, did people have more money, spare time? Factories were able to make widgets like rackets and sort of badminton nets. I mean, what was going on? It was a great sports craze and it was helped enormously by the kind of, you know, the developments of empire, which had created massive wealth and also created a lot of spare time for people. So people were constantly, I call people, I mean the upper middle class and the more well-off aspects of the professional class. wealth and also created a lot of spare time for people so people were constantly what i call people i mean the upper middle class and the more well-off aspects of the professional class they had lots of time suddenly to actually kind of um you know spend on leisure so there was that sense that um you know this was the fruits of empire they could actually enjoy now and i think all

the sports at the time were kind of you know developed into their different forms and tennis was one of the new sports that that uh And tennis was one of the new sports that, or lawn tennis was one of the new sports that was on offer to keep these people amused. And so, yes, it was a kind of crucible, really. And I suppose, you know, one of the reasons, again, why this sport of tennis spread outside Britain was because of the links with Empire

and the connections that was made. It was very easy for people to start playing a fashionable sport like lawn tennis in the mid-1870s and then tell their kind of friends or their relatives in France or Italy or Brazil, all those places that the tentacles of empire spread out to. And that was one reason kind of why the sport was spread. But the main reason, if you want to go into a bit more detail, I suppose, is that tennis was an ideal opportunity for, how we put this a rapprochement of the british upper class and the upper middle class it was a it was a sense of kind of land meeting money it was an area in which kind

of uh you know the the aristocracy could could could move in and and and establish a game and yet connect in a social way with the kind of upper middle class who are beginning to develop power in the country. And so it provided a very useful form for that to take place. And did tennis spring like Athena fully formed from the head of Zeus?

I mean, with its strange scoring system and its funny language and all that, or was it obviously just a sort of slow progression? And when did it get properly codified? It was it obviously just a sort of slow progression? And when did it get properly codified? It was probably the first few years, very oddly. You know, it was invented by a strange man called Walter Wingfield, who was a retired military man.

He seems to have come up with the idea entirely on his own. I mean, there were various kind of other kind of games flitting around at the time. But lawn tennis, according to Major Wingfield, sort of came out of his own head, really. And because he wanted to make money, he wanted to give it a kind of, you know,

sort of aristocratic veneer. So he marketed it very much to the upper middle class as a country house game that would replace croquet. And one of his great innovations, I think, was actually to realise that there was money to be made marketing a sport aimed at men and women. Croquet had shown that. Croquet had shown that you could actually have a country house pastime where the women could participate just as much as the men and lawn tennis was a development of that and it's great kind of survival I think is

because all the time it was seen as a sport that men and women could play. Now the rules that Wingfield came up with in 1874, you know, some of them have changed but it's actually very recognisable now from even, you know, the rules of the game that he published in 1874. But the major changes happened a few years later in which the scoring system was developed from real tennis and fortunately they changed from Wingfield's hourglass court which was like a kind of egg shape to the rectangle that we have today and so from about 1878 it's been pretty much the same

I mean they did invent the tie break that was quite new I suppose that's about it really so yes it was pretty much you know formed right from the start and why when women were excluded from soccer rugby um golf i suppose why why did were women allowed encouraged to play tennis because of the links with croquet i mean there were very few i mean the whole notion of the victorian kind of lady and a victorian mother uh before that was a sort of uh a decorous one i mean these women of course while they uh worked very hard in the home couldn't be seen to actually

be involved in physical exercise because that was deemed unladylike and also deleterious to their health um but one or two sports were allowed in the 19th century for women archery was allowed because it required very little obvious physical effort and and uh and and um horse riding and then in this sport called croquet came over from ireland because it was just seen on a kind of on a lawn it didn't seem to be particularly kind of unfeminine or so and so women were allowed to play that and in fact they't seem to be particularly kind of unfeminine or so and so women were allowed to play that and in fact they turned out to be rather good uh some of the women were actually much better than the men and so when that fashion for croquet you know started kind of disappearing

around about 18 1870 or so remember the all england club in in wilmington was originally a croquet club originally set up to play croquet. It just took on tennis when the fashion for croquet suddenly got lost. So when croquet started, people became a bit bored with croquet, tennis seemed to be something that was just a little

slight shift. There's a bit more physical effort, but it didn't seem to be too much like the other physical sports like cricket and football. And so there was that kind of slight of hand almost. People didn't seem to be too much you know like the the other physical sports like cricket and football and so there was that kind of sleight of hand almost people didn't quite realize that it was going to develop into quite the physical sport that it did and when people did realize that a few years later and there were attempts to marginalize the women's tennis to make it a much softer game I think Wimbledon was behind that wanted to have rules that made the court smaller for women and the ball and the ball larger and things uh the women had started playing uh resisted it and fought very hard to keep the sport uh to have the same

rules in the same courts as men and eventually the men gave in uh in the 1880s 1890s or so so um you know that was that was that was the reason why today we have such a kind of vibrant sport, you know, for men and women, that the early women tennis players really had to fight very hard, both to be able to allow to play this physical sport and then to be allowed to play it with men.

You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking tennis, more after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. tell me about the remarkable lottie dodd who appears in your book i think she was one of them really i mean um one of the kind of um you know she was quite extraordinary character i mean she was um there were lots of restrictions on dress uh for women playing tennis to start with and that was uh but Lottie was able to get around it because when she started playing she was a school girl so she was allowed to play in in in school uniform or so and it's and because she'd been grown up with three brothers

um she was used to sort of hitting the ball with men and she had developed this amazing sense of being able to really strike the ball fearlessly. She just kind of, you know, won all the early women's championships and then started taking on men and she provided a really strong sense of a kind of a sort of symbolic figure for women because when the men started saying, you know, how on earth can you know some women play such a hard physical game? It was quite clear that Lottie Todd could and could beat most of them or so. And then when they, you know, then she started campaigning, you know, for to ensure that tennis was kept as a game for men and women.

And I think all this, Dan, came out of a strong sense of a privileged woman. She was, you know, sort of upper middle class woman that didn't have to work. Her father was a wealthy industrialist, but also a woman who identified with other women. I mean, it's not known really in terms of her own sexuality. But you get the sense that sort of she was, I mean, Billie Jean King described her as a kindred soul. And I think Lottie Dodd's strength was that she wasn't dependent on men throughout her whole life she she never married and she always was kind of determined to stand up for herself and was always as hard on women as men she used to get really cross when the early female tennis players used to try and hit the ball very softly she always used to tell them to really whack

the ball so a remarkable character who gave up playing tennis at the age of 22 after she'd won everything and then went on to become a british archery champion to do the kind of cresta run in uh in the alps and then went off and um you know um was um went off and um you know to to help the republicans in the spanish civil war in 1936 or so. I think she survived that. And I think she ended up sort of being, you know, much more fonder of tennis than of anything else. I think the story was that she sort of died listening in a nursing home in Hampshire, listening to kind of the Wimbledon Championships on transistor radio or so. on transistor radio or so.

But an incredible woman and a woman that actually a lot of the modern players today really see as somebody that is a symbol for the fight for women's tennis and making sure that women's tennis is a strong physical game that really serves women well. And then talk to me about Wimbledon because it looms so large here in britain it's uh it's one of those strange things that we brits think is um sort of unique in the whole world and then you have the depressing experience of going to the us or australia and you realize that they

think the same thing about their open championships as well um but that is was that the first i mean it feels like a feels like a a sort of um a historic. It is a remarkable experience. It wasn't the first tournament. The first tournament was in the first major tournament in Ireland in the Fitzwilliam Club. But it was one of the best organised, I think,

in 1877. As I was saying, the All England Club, which was set up as a croquet club, was in trouble. Financially, croquet had disappeared virtually as a kind of national game and they needed some way of kind of saving the club and so

Henry Jones one of the great sort of mavericks of lawn tennis suggested that they run a lawn tennis tournament and they thought well you know let's give it a go and it proved remarkably successful um it was an 1877 and it was attracted a wide range of kind of um you know the early tennis players and there was something about Wimbledon that made it work it was partly

because of Jones himself he's a great great organiser it's partly where it was it was just next to the railway station so it's very easy for people to get to um and it somehow kind of cornered the market in excellence very early on and i think it sensed and this was really quite an interesting thing about tennis which distinguishes it from other sports at the time which have just faded or always been enthusiast sports i'm thinking of a sport called badminton which has came about at the same time as tennis, but it's nothing like the presence that tennis has in the world today. I think Wilmerdon in 1877 sensed that

it was a sport that people would pay money to watch. And not just people that kind of played tennis, but people that didn't play tennis, but liked the whole spectacle. And so right from the start, it developed an interesting development of stars, players that were seen not only as great players, but as people that had character, that could perform, that had a sense of kind of the spectacle. And right from the very early stages of Wimbledon, they've always kind of found stars

that can really kind of connect with the public connect with a non-tennis playing public and i think that's what wilmington has really you know sort of given tennis really and it carries on today you know without federer and and well i'm not sure about jockovic but certainly without people like federer and nadal and even andy murray there is a sense of you know kind of theatrical performance as well as sporting excellence, I think, which Wimbledon captures. In other words, it is an event that people really enjoy kind of going to and things. And I think the All England Club

have been remarkably good at doing that. And, you know, in a way which I'm not entirely sure, I think the French recognise, but I'm not entirely sure the Australians or the Americans have done it that well, really. So it's captured that sense, always have been at the well really. So it's captured that sense always have been at the centre of tennis because it's recognised that tennis is more than a sport, it's actually a theatrical performance as well. I certainly remember a lot of that from my

childhood, you were almost rated on sort of theatricality as much as winning the game. I mean I think what I'm trying to say in my book A People's History of Tennis is that the spectators of tennis are just as important as the people who play. It's those people that have kept the game as it is. Without the people that watch every year or so, the game wouldn't have the richness

that it really has. It's interesting why tennis can actually do that, really, because it does it more than any other sport I think really you know just to attract people that aren't really you know that interested in the game but somehow kind of enjoy watching Wimbledon every two weeks in the year and I really wanted to really wanted to kind of you know sort of capture their experience as well and one of the things

that I really discovered, I suppose, well, I'm not sure it has been said before, but I think it's a really good thing about tennis and a good thing about Wimbledon, is that it's not, these spectators aren't nationalistic. I mean, people used to moan that they never used to support Andy Murray, for example. But that was because Andy,

it wasn't because he was Scottish, at least I don't think it was because he was Scottish, but it was because he was quite a tennis player. He was quite dour. He didn't have the kind of flourish of Federer and things. And I think the Wilmington crowd, right from the early on, have been great supporters of people, whatever their nationality. You know, if somebody was a graceful, kind of elegant player,

it didn't matter whether they're British or German or kind of African player it didn't matter whether they're british or german or kind of african or or american or so and i think that would be that's something that is quite radical about tennis and something other sports would do well to emulate really i've just been reading about polish pilots in the battle of britain i was very struck by that one polish pilot who bailed out of his aircraft landed on a tennis court and just took up the tennis as became the um took her doubles partner and played a game of tennis while he was waiting to be rescued by the RAF that's interesting there's another little story about um um a sort of um bombing and tennis as well which I include

in my book which was the thought that when Wimbledon was bombed in the uh I think 1941 it was because the it was because, not very widely known, but the headquarters of Bomber Command was actually, was at the Orlingen Club. And there was a sense that the Germans weren't trying to get rid of the tennis club,

but they were trying to get rid of Bomber Command. They didn't manage to get rid of Bomber Command, but they did manage to put a big dent in the centre court, which took, I think, about four or five years to repair. Just bring it up to the present day while we're here. Something happened to tennis, didn't it, in the 90s or noughties? And it's just now this, you know, I mean, an extraordinary

sport. They play a lot of it. It's one of the biggest sports in the world now, you say, in terms of money and participation. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yes, it has. Yes, I think it has been a gradual development. But, I mean, on one level, you know, I think it's the only really, you know, major sport in which women earn a lot of money. I mean, it is the kind of major place that sort of female sports people can earn money.

I mean, there aren't any other sports that can do that. So it's always had that kind of spectacle of men and women. And I think that has given it that kind of modernity now, which, you know, sort of other sports haven't quite got really. It also fits very neatly into kind of the television screen. I mean, when you're trying to film football or cricket, you try to move around all the time you know they weren't designed for the screen but a tennis court fits very

snugly into it so it's a very easily think sort of a I think it has kind of connected very well with the televisual age how it connects with the social media age I'm not sure there was a sense I think in Britain a bit that the sport was slowly dying

I think a few years ago it was slowly dying, I think, a few years ago. It was slowly getting older and young people weren't taking it up. I think I've been very heartened by the recent experience in terms of the lockdown for the virus that a lot of people have gone back to tennis. The tennis clubs these summers have been full. The public tennis courts have been, you can't get a public tennis court in London anyway. And a lot of that, I think, is because families have started going back to the sport. So that feels a kind of a heartening thing in the moment.

So I was wondering whether it would actually lose out in the social media rage. Well, I'm glad it hasn't. I'm going to be, I'm looking forward to it returning and looking forward to watching the young players come through and try and take over from the those dominant that dominant generation um thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast what's your book called it's called a people's history of tennis uh and um yeah a

people's history is published by pluto press i think it's about 14 pounds or so well i hope you i hope you're booking your slots in the in the public courts and managing to get a chance to play this summer. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it here. This episode of Dan Snow's History.

I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.