History of British Grass Court Tennis Before Wimbledon

Two men on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston, some time around 1859, hitting a ball over a net with rackets. Harry Gem was a solicitor and clerk to the Birmingham magistrates; Augurio Perera was a Spanish merchant who owned the lawn. They called what they were doing pelota, adapted the scoring from rackets, and played it on grass because grass was what Perera had in his garden. Nobody was inventing a global sport. They were finding something to do with a lawn.

Everything British about tennis follows from that accident. The surface came first and the game arranged itself around it, which is the reverse of how nearly every other sport developed. This is the story of how an English garden pastime became a codified game with a fixed court, a national association and a summer circuit of grass tournaments — and of how much of that circuit has since disappeared. The Championships themselves are covered separately in the history of Wimbledon; what follows is the world that produced them and the one that grew up alongside.

Edgbaston and Leamington: the game before it had a name

Gem and Perera played their version for over a decade before anyone else took notice. What they had was recognisably tennis in its essentials — a net, rackets, a soft ball, a rectangular playing area on turf — and definitively not tennis in its details, since the scoring came from rackets and the dimensions were whatever the lawn allowed.

In 1872 both men had moved to Leamington Spa, and with two local doctors they founded a club at the Manor House Hotel to play the game. That club is generally accepted as the first lawn tennis club anywhere in the world, and its date matters because it predates the commercial version of the game by two years.

The reason Gem and Perera are a footnote and Wingfield is on the plaque is straightforward: they did not sell anything. Their game spread among people they knew in Warwickshire and stopped there. It had no printed rules anyone could buy, no equipment set, no marketing, and no name that meant anything outside the room. The pattern is familiar from the early history of several British sports — the people who first play a thing are rarely the people who codify it, and almost never the people who commercialise it.

A note on certainty. The Edgbaston story rests on a modest documentary base, and the precise year is given variously as 1859, the early 1860s, or simply "around 1860" depending on the source. That the game was played there, that it was played on a croquet lawn, and that the Leamington club was founded in 1872 are all well supported. The exact starting date is not, and anyone stating it flatly is being more confident than the evidence allows.

Wingfield's patent and the box he sold

Major Walter Clopton Wingfield applied for a patent in February 1874 for "A Portable Court for Playing Tennis". That phrasing is the whole business model in six words: the thing he was selling was not a game, it was a court in a box.

The set contained a net, poles, guy ropes, rackets, rubber balls, marking pegs and a printed rules booklet, and it cost enough to place it squarely in the market Wingfield was aiming at — country house owners with a flat lawn and guests to entertain. He gave the game the name Sphairistike, from the Greek, which is exactly the sort of decision a Victorian army officer with classical schooling would make and exactly the sort of name that does not survive contact with customers. Within a couple of years everyone was calling it lawn tennis.

His court was hourglass-shaped, wider at the baselines and pinched at the net. His scoring was borrowed from rackets, running to fifteen points. Neither survived. What survived was the box, and specifically the fact that a family could buy one, unroll it on the lawn on a Saturday afternoon, and play immediately without joining anything or building anything.

1. 1c. 1859, EdgbastonHarry Gem and Augurio Perera play a racket game on a croquet lawn in Birmingham, using scoring adapted from rackets.
2. 21872, Leamington SpaGem, Perera and two local doctors found what is accepted as the world's first lawn tennis club.
3. 31874, the patentWalter Clopton Wingfield patents a portable court and sells it in a box, giving the game commercial reach.
4. 41875, the MCCMarylebone Cricket Club publishes a set of laws that abolish the hourglass court and impose a rectangle.
5. 51877, WimbledonThe All England Croquet Club stages a Championship, fixes the court at 78 by 27 feet and adopts real tennis scoring.
6. 61888, the LTAThe Lawn Tennis Association is founded, giving England a governing body for a game barely a decade old.

The documented sequence by which lawn tennis acquired fixed rules and a governing structure in England. Dates for the Edgbaston origin are approximate.

Wingfield's patent was, commercially, a modest success and, historically, decisive. It is also the reason the origin question is argued about: he did not invent the game, he packaged and distributed it, and those two things have been conflated ever since.

How croquet lawns became tennis courts

Croquet was the sport of the 1860s in England. Clubs formed, lawns were built and maintained to a standard, and an entire small industry existed to service them. By the middle of the 1870s the boom was fading, and the clubs were left with an asset they could not fill: flat, closely mown, well-drained turf, laid out in rectangles, surrounded by members who had already paid subscriptions.

Lawn tennis needed exactly that and could be played on it immediately. The conversion required a net, some paint and a decision.

The All England Croquet Club at Worple Road in Wimbledon, founded in 1868, made that decision in 1875 by setting aside one of its lawns for tennis. Two years later it added the game to its name, becoming the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, and the sequence of those two events — the lawn first, the name afterwards — tells you how quickly the balance shifted. The club's own story is set out in the All England Club explained.

The same thing happened at scale across England. Croquet clubs in county towns and suburbs did the arithmetic, converted lawns, and either renamed themselves or quietly stopped mentioning croquet. Cricket clubs, which also had turf and groundstaff, added courts on the outfield or on spare ground and became the other great institutional home of English grass tennis — a pattern that still shows in club names all over the country.

None of this involved anyone choosing grass on its merits as a playing surface. Grass was the pre-existing condition.

Codification: the rectangle, the net and the scoring

Wingfield's rules lasted about a year before the game's growth outran them.

In 1875 the Marylebone Cricket Club — which had a hand in codifying more Victorian games than is generally remembered — published a set of laws for lawn tennis. The MCC laws replaced the hourglass with a rectangle. That single change is arguably the most consequential decision in the sport's history, because a rectangle is measurable, reproducible and neutral, and an hourglass is a proprietary shape belonging to whoever patented it.

Two years later the All England Club, preparing to stage a Championship, settled the rest. The court was fixed at 78 feet by 27 feet, and it has never changed: the 23.77 metres and 8.23 metres in the modern Rules of Tennis are those same 1877 figures converted. Scoring was taken from real tennis — fifteen, thirty, forty, deuce, advantage — rather than from Wingfield's rackets-derived count, which is why tennis has the most peculiar scoring system in world sport and why it is peculiar in precisely the way a medieval French court game was peculiar.

• 22Entrants, 1877
• 78Court length in feet, unchanged since 1877
• 1868All England Club founded
• 1888Lawn Tennis Association founded

Figures from the 1877 Championships and the founding dates of the two institutions that shaped the English game. The court dimensions set in 1877 are the ones in the current Rules of Tennis.

The equipment moved as fast as the rules. Early rackets were wooden, heavy by modern standards and, in the first years, sometimes made with a lopsided head inherited from real tennis. The ball changed the game more. Wingfield's sets contained uncovered rubber balls, which were fast, unpredictable and did almost nothing off a grass surface; covering the rubber in cloth gave the ball a nap that gripped the strings and let players impart spin. A covered ball on a mown lawn is what made lawn tennis a game of angles rather than a game of hitting hard, and every tactical development of the following century runs from that.

Other details took longer. The net in 1877 stood considerably higher at the posts than it does now and was brought down in stages over the following years as players found that a very high net produced a very dull game. The service line started further from the net and was moved closer. Both changes were made by trial, at a club, in response to what the tennis actually looked like — a process with no committee papers and no consultation, which would be unthinkable now and which produced a set of dimensions that has needed almost no revision in a century and a half.

Why grass became, and stayed, the British default

By the 1880s grass was not just the surface tennis started on, it was the surface the English game was built around, and three things locked it in.

The first was infrastructure. England had, and has, an unusual density of institutions that maintain fine turf — cricket clubs, croquet clubs, public schools, country houses, bowls clubs — with the machinery, the staff and the knowledge already in place. Adding tennis courts to that estate was cheap. Building a shale or asphalt court was a capital project.

The second was climate. English summers deliver enough rain to keep a sward growing without irrigation and rarely produce the sustained heat that bakes a loam court to dust. The same weather that makes England a poor place to play outdoor sport in February makes it an unusually good place to grow tennis-quality turf in June.

The third was class, and it should not be skirted. Grass courts required land, staff and money to maintain, and that made them a marker. Clubs that had grass kept grass, in part, because having grass said something. Municipal tennis, when it arrived in English parks in the twentieth century, was built almost entirely on shale and asphalt, because a local authority could not maintain turf for public play at any sensible cost. The result was a two-tier surface geography that persisted for decades and that has not entirely gone.

There is a linguistic fossil of this worth knowing. In British usage a "hard court" historically meant any non-grass court, shale and en-tout-cas included — which is why the British Hard Court Championships were played on clay, a fact that confuses every reader of tennis history at least once.

The Victorian and Edwardian grass circuit

The Championships were first, but they were never alone for long. Within a few years of 1877 England had a recognisable summer season of grass tournaments, and the shape of it would be familiar to anyone who follows the modern game: a spread of open meetings through May and June, the biggest event in early July, and a tail of festival tournaments running into September.

County championships were the backbone. Kent, Surrey, Yorkshire, Middlesex and the rest each ran an open meeting on grass, hosted by a leading club, and the better players moved between them through the summer. Seaside resorts ran tournaments as part of the season — Eastbourne, Torquay, Scarborough, Frinton — where the tennis was an attraction for visitors as much as a competition, and several of those meetings drew genuinely strong fields.

Wimbledon added the ladies' singles in 1884, with Maud Watson the first champion, and gentlemen's doubles the same year. The Challenge Round system, under which the previous year's champion sat out the whole tournament and played only the winner of it, governed the Championships until 1922 and was standard practice at the leading meetings.

The structure of an individual meeting is worth describing, because it bears very little relation to a modern tournament. A county championship ran across a week, with the championship singles as only one of several events on the card: a handicap singles in which weaker players were given a points start, doubles, mixed doubles, and often separate events for club members. The handicap event was frequently the bigger draw, and the handicapper's judgements were as argued over as any selection decision in the modern game. Play ran on grass courts laid across a club's whole ground, sometimes a dozen of them, and everything stopped when it rained because there was nowhere else to go.

Nothing about this circuit was professional. Players were amateurs, tournaments covered expenses within limits that were policed with varying rigour, and a player's ability to compete depended on having the private means to take a summer off. That constraint shaped British tennis for eighty years, and it is the reason the Victorian and Edwardian champions came so overwhelmingly from a narrow social band: the game was open to anyone who could afford to not work between May and September.

The Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1888 to bring order to it — a governing body for a game that had existed for fourteen years and already had a national championship, a rulebook and a circuit. That sequence, with the association arriving last, is very English and explains a good deal about the LTA's subsequent relationship with the All England Club.

Regional grass events that have since disappeared

The Victorian circuit was enormous and most of it is gone. A few losses are worth naming, because they were not minor.

The Kent Championships at Beckenham ran for well over a century at Beckenham Cricket Club and was, for much of the twentieth century, one of the two or three most important grass tournaments in the world outside Wimbledon. Champions there were champions anywhere. It no longer holds anything like that position on the calendar, and its decline is the single clearest illustration of what happened to British grass tennis when the professional tour consolidated.

The Northern Championships, played at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club in Didsbury, Manchester, was among the oldest tournaments in the game and for decades the leading grass meeting in the north of England. It is no longer part of the professional grass swing.

The West of England Championships in Bristol and a string of comparable county meetings — Surrey, Sussex, Yorkshire — followed the same trajectory: strong fields into the middle of the twentieth century, gradual decline as the tour's economics changed, then either a demotion to purely domestic status or disappearance.

The seaside festivals thinned out almost entirely. Frinton-on-Sea's grass tournament, the Scarborough and Torquay meetings, the smaller resort events that filled August — a handful survive in club or veteran form and most do not.

Event	Where	What happened to it
The Championships	All England Club, Wimbledon	Played continuously since 1877, the two wars excepted
Queen's Club Championships	The Queen's Club, West Kensington	Staged since 1890 and still the principal warm-up
Eastbourne	Devonshire Park	Tennis since the Victorian period, still professional
Kent Championships	Beckenham Cricket Club	No longer the major grass tournament it was for a century
Northern Championships	Northern LTC, Didsbury, Manchester	Gone from the professional grass calendar
West of England Championships	Bristol	Gone from the professional grass calendar
Resort meetings	Frinton, Scarborough, Torquay and others	Largely gone; a handful survive in club or veteran form

The causes were not mysterious. A professional tour needs events that can pay prize money, guarantee television, and sit in a slot that top players will travel to. Grass is expensive to maintain, the season is short, and the calendar has room for a handful of events between the French Open and Wimbledon and no more. Once the tour became the only thing that mattered commercially, tournaments that could not become tour events had nothing to become.

Two secondary causes are worth adding, because the story is usually told as though television did all of it. The first is the cost of turf. Maintaining enough grass courts to run a week-long meeting with several concurrent events became, from the 1960s onwards, an expense that county clubs could not justify for one tournament a year, and many converted the outer courts to hard surfaces and kept two or three for show. A meeting that cannot run twelve matches at once cannot run the old format. The second is the players themselves: once prize money existed, the incentive to play a county meeting for expenses vanished, and a tournament that cannot attract good players stops attracting spectators within about three years.

The wars, and what they interrupted

The Championships were not played from 1915 to 1918, nor from 1940 to 1945. The county circuit largely stopped with them, and the courts themselves were frequently requisitioned or turned over to food production.

In October 1940 a bomb hit Centre Court at Wimbledon, destroying somewhere in the region of 1,200 seats. The club was used for civil defence purposes and parts of the grounds were given over to livestock and vegetables. Clubs across England lost members, groundstaff and machinery, and many lost their courts outright — grass left uncut for six years does not come back as a tennis court, it comes back as a meadow, and restoring one required money and labour that post-war England did not have in quantity.

The second war did more lasting damage than the first, and the reason is turf. A grass court can survive a season of neglect. It cannot survive six. Clubs that reopened in 1946 often reopened with fewer courts than they had closed with, and a number of them took the opportunity to replace grass with shale, because shale needed no groundsman. The long decline in the number of English grass courts is usually attributed to post-war economics, and that is right, but the specific mechanism was the physical loss of the sward.

The amateur era and the road to Bournemouth

Post-war British tennis had a structural problem it could not solve: the best players turned professional, professionals were banned from the amateur tournaments, and the amateur tournaments were the only ones anyone watched. A player who won Wimbledon and then signed a professional contract was thereafter ineligible to defend it.

Fred Perry's three consecutive Wimbledon titles from 1934 to 1936 belonged to the amateur era; he turned professional afterwards and never played the Championships again as a competitor. The pattern repeated for three decades and hollowed out the fields at the events that mattered.

Britain, to its considerable credit, broke it. In December 1967 the LTA voted at a special general meeting to abolish the distinction between amateurs and professionals in British tournaments from the following year, in open defiance of the International Lawn Tennis Federation's rules and at the risk of expulsion. The ILTF, faced with a fait accompli from the country that ran the most important tournament in the sport, agreed to open tennis at a meeting in Paris in March 1968.

The first open tournament in history was the British Hard Court Championships at the West Hants Club in Bournemouth in April 1968 — on clay, despite the name. Ken Rosewall won it, beating Rod Laver in the final. Wimbledon that summer was the first open Championships, and Laver won it.

That is the most consequential thing British tennis administration has ever done, and it is striking how rarely it is mentioned. The list of British champions across both eras is in British Wimbledon champions.

Hard courts elsewhere, and British resistance

Grass was the surface of three of the four Grand Slams when the open era began. It stopped being so within twenty years.

The number of the four Grand Slam events staged on grass, by year. The changes are the US Championships leaving grass in 1975 and the Australian Open leaving Kooyong after 1987.

Show the numbers

Grand Slam tournaments played on grass

Item	Grass Slams
1968	3
1974	3
1975	2
1987	2
1988	1

The US Championships left the Forest Hills grass after 1974, moving to clay on the same site and then to hard courts at Flushing Meadows in 1978. The Australian Open played its last edition on the Kooyong grass in 1987 and moved to hard courts at the new Melbourne site in 1988. From that year Wimbledon has been the only Grand Slam on grass, and it has been alone for longer now than it was in company.

The reasoning elsewhere was practical. Hard courts play consistently, require a fraction of the maintenance, survive rain and heat, and can host tennis for eleven months a year. For a tournament in Melbourne or New York, grass was an expensive constraint with no compensating advantage.

Britain did not follow, and the resistance was not simply sentiment. Wimbledon is the most valuable tennis property in the world and a substantial part of that value is bound up in its distinctiveness — the surface, the white clothing, the queue, the whole apparatus. Converting it to hard courts would have been an act of commercial self-harm. Around that central fact, the LTA had a strategic interest in maintaining a grass circuit so that British players had somewhere to prepare, and the English clubs that still had turf had every reason to keep it.

The consequence is that grass survives as a professional surface almost entirely because of one tournament in south-west London and the ecosystem built to support it. That is a precarious position, honestly stated, and it explains most of the modern politics of the grass season.

Restructuring the modern British grass calendar

For most of the open era the grass season was a two-week window between the French Open and Wimbledon, which was absurd: the players arrived from clay, had one tournament to adapt, and went into a Grand Slam on a surface they had barely touched. From 2015 the gap was extended to three weeks, giving the grass swing an extra week of tournaments and giving players a realistic chance to adjust. It remains the shortest surface season in the sport, for reasons set out in why the grass court season is so short.

The British events were reorganised around that extension. The LTA now owns and operates the great majority of the grass tournaments in the country, which is unusual internationally and gives the calendar a coherence it did not previously have — Surbiton, Nottingham, Birmingham, Ilkley, Queen's and Eastbourne function as a planned progression rather than as six competing promoters. Event levels and the men's and women's allocation across them have been changed more than once, and are the sort of thing best checked against the current calendar rather than assumed.

The turf itself has changed too. Wimbledon moved to a hundred per cent perennial ryegrass sward in 2001, chosen for wear tolerance, and clubs across England followed. The courts are firmer and the bounce higher and truer than the grass of the 1970s and 1980s, which is why the argument about whether modern grass still plays like grass has a factual basis rather than being pure nostalgia. What that means for the tennis is covered in how grass courts play differently.

What survives of the old grass court culture

The Queen's Club, founded in West Kensington in 1886 and named for Queen Victoria, has staged a grass championship since 1890 and remains the fixed point of the British season outside Wimbledon; its own history and its trophy are covered in the Queen's Club history guide. Devonshire Park at Eastbourne has held tennis since the Victorian period and is the last of the great seaside meetings still operating at professional level.

Below that, more survives than the professional calendar suggests. Club grass tennis persists across England in a way it does nowhere else — county grass leagues, club tournaments, a handful of clubs where grass is still the primary surface rather than a summer indulgence, and the annual ritual in which courts open in May and close in August. The maintenance knowledge survives with it, passed between groundstaff at clubs that in some cases have been cutting the same courts since the 1880s.

What has been lost is the middle. The Victorian and Edwardian circuit had a full ladder between a club meeting and the Championships, and a good player could spend a summer climbing it. That ladder has gone, replaced by a handful of professional events and a domestic game with no serious grass competition between the two. It is the thing the old tournament results make you notice: not that Wimbledon was bigger, but that everything else was so much less small.

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