Dan Snow's History Hit - A People's History of Tennis

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

David Berry joined me on the pod to discuss a people’s history of tennis. From the birth of modern tennis in Victorian Britain to the present day, we talked about struggles around sexuality, gender, race and class that have transformed the nature of tennis and sport itself.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about a bit of sport today, a bit of tennis. We hear from across the UK and I have no reason to doubt it's any different anywhere else. Tennis is on the rise, the popularity of tennis is on the rise. People want to get out, they can do it, it's an urban sport. Tennis courts are impossible to book, we're told, as people blow the dust off their rackets, their balls, head out and play some tennis. So this is a history of tennis, this podcast. We're looking back at this illustrious game, where it began, how it began, and where it acquired its slightly twee reputation,

when that reputation is justified. I've got David Berry on the pod. He's a writer, journalist, filmmaker. He's written a new book about the history of tennis. We had a good old chat. And there's lots of surprising things that I did not know about tennis, even though I am someone who has played on the real tennis court at Hampton Court Palace with Pat Cash.

Fact. When I say played, I of course mean hit a few shots for the camera to record. The idea that I could in any way engage Pat Cash on a tennis court in the sport is absurd. If you want to listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, they're only available five years' worth at History at TV, along with hundreds of hours of documentary. It's like the Netflix for history. Just head over there, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1,

you get a month for free, and your second month is one pound, euro or dollar. But in the meantime, everybody, is david berry talking about tennis enjoy thank you very much for coming on the show very 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 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 the kind of sort of spectators that you see on on or you imagine you're seeing on the BBC television it's very very diverse these days in fact it reminded me down a bit of Glastonbury it's 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 with it. 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 Henry VIII's indoor tennis court in Hampton Court. 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 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. It'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 in one of the tennis courts before it was actually sacked, you know, because it seemed to symbolise, you know, that kind of world. Lawn tennis, as I suppose, you know, what we call tennis now, started much later than that in the late 19th century 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 this time as 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 were talking about playing with Pat Cash is a hardball inside it's a very very different kind of game. Yeah, well, I'm reminded of the, 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 the 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 a sport for the aficionados, really. And when lawn tennis started in the 1870s, there was no indication that it would end up in exactly the same way. It was fashionable for a while.

But after about five or ten 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 bad of entrepot i mean do 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's a great sports craze and it's helped enormously by the kind of uh you know the the developments

of empire which had created massive 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 spend on leisure. So there was that sense that this was the fruits of empire, they could actually enjoy now. And I think all the sports at the time

were kind of developed into different forms. And tennis was one of the new sports, or lawn tennis was one of the new sports that, or lawn tennis is 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 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 can 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 you've 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 probably in the first few years very oddly. 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. There were various 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 its 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 Victorianorian kind of lady and a victorian mother before that was a sort of 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 law it didn'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 wimbledon was originally a croquet club originally set up to play croquet it just uh took on tennis

when uh the the fashion for croquet suddenly suddenly suddenly we got lost um so when croquet it just took on tennis when the fashion for croquet suddenly suddenly suddenly we got lost so when croquet started we can be getting a bit bored with croquet tennis seemed to be something that there was just a little slight shift there's a bit more physical effort but it 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 realise that it was going to develop into quite the physical sport that it did. And when people did realise that a few years later,

there were attempts to marginalise the women's tennis to make it a much softer game. I think Wimbledon was behind that, wanting to have rules that made the court smaller for women and the ball larger and things. The women that started playing resisted it and fought very hard to keep the sport

to have the same rules and the same courts as men. And eventually the men gave in in the 1880s, 1890s or so. That was the reason why today we have such a kind of vibrant sport 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. 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

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There are new episodes every week. Tell me about, speaking of women, tell me about the remarkable Lottie Dodd who appears in your book. I think she was one of them really. I mean one of the kind of, you know, she was quite an extraordinary character. I mean she was, there were lots of restrictions on dress uh for women playing tennis to start with and that was uh but 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, sort of 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 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 attempt to really whack the ball um 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 the Alps, and then went off and, you know, went off and, you know, 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. But an incredible woman and a woman that actually a lot of the modern players today really see as somebody, as 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 I mean, it feels like a sort of historic tournament. It is a remarkable experience. It wasn't

the first tournament. The first tournament was in the first major tournament was 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 a 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 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. It was in 1877. And it attracted a wide range of kind of, 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. 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 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 the non-tennis playing public and I think that's what Wimbledon has really you know sort of given tennis really and it carries on today you know without Federer and well I'm not sure about Djokovic 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, so it's it's captured that that sense always have been at the center of tennis because it's it's recognized 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 uh as much as winning the game i mean i think what i'm trying to do 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. And it's those people that have kept the game as it is.

I mean, without the people that watch every year or so, the game wouldn't have the richness that it really has. And it's interesting why tennis can actually kind of 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 Wormden 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,, it wasn't because he was Scottish, but it was because he was quite a tennis player, 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, they actually, you know, if somebody was a graceful, kind of elegant player, it didn't matter whether they were British, was a graceful kind of elegant player it didn't matter whether they're British or German or kind of African 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 winwoodham was bombed in the uh I think 1941 it was because the it was because uh not very widely known but the headquarters of bomber command was actually was at the Orlingen club and there was a sense that they were the Germans weren't trying to get rid of the tennis club but they're 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. 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, you know, 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 getting older and young people weren't taking it up uh i think i've been very heartened by the recent experience in terms of the lockdown for for the virus that uh a lot of people have gone back to tennis the tennis clubs um these summers been full tennis 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 that dominant generation. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. What's your book called? It's called A People's History of Tennis. And yeah, A People's History of Tennis,

published by Pluto Press. I think it's about £14 or so. Well, I hope you're booking your slots in the public courts and managing to get a chance to play this summer. Hi, everyone. It's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this,

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but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks. this is free come on do me a favor thanks