Curious Questions: Who invented tennis?

published 7 July 2018

Thwack! Huh! Ahhh! Grunt. Wimbledon has begun and our Pimm’s-mellowed eyes are darting from left to right and left again. This year is particularly special, however, being the 150th anniversary of the All England Club, which runs the annual Championships and is only a few years younger than the game of tennis itself.

Originally called the All England Croquet Club, it was founded one heady summer at the height of a craze for the game, on July 23, 1868, by eight gentlemen at The Field magazine, at the request of a reader. Their reasons were as follows: ‘There can be no disputing the fact so often brought prominently before us by the admirers of the game, that croquet has become a strong rival of cricket, and has to a considerable extent superseded archery.’

The following year, the club found ‘a suitable playing area’ at Worple Road, Wimbledon. However, the fashion for mallet and ball was short-lived and, by 1874, a reader wrote in to complain that ‘the increasing skill required… takes away from the charm of the old game, in which talking and flirting formed the chief ingredients’.

Along came Maj Walter Clopton Wingfield, who, despite the existence of a remarkably similar game that had been popular in Leamington since the 1860s, patented his version of lawn tennis in 1874 and is credited by the Lawn Tennis Association as its inventor. He called it sphairistike, a word derived from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘ball skill’ – that name, thankfully, didn’t stick. His next idea was group bike rides to martial music, which also didn’t catch on.

Ladies Lawn Tennis Tournament at the Staten Island Cricket Club, NY, 1870s. Hand-colored woodcut

In 1877, the first tennis tournament was held in Wimbledon – not for its own sake, but as a fundraiser to buy a pony-drawn roller for flattening the croquet lawns.

The winner of the 22-man competition was a local cricketer called Spencer Gore who prophesied that ‘lawn tennis will never rank among our great games’.

The same year, the club’s name changed to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club and then, in 1899, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The rest is Grand Slam history.

A contemporary engraving of the first lawn tennis championship at Wimbledon for Men's Singles only in July 1877. The event was won by Mr Spencer Gore, a man whose name goes down in tennis history despite his clear disdain for the game!

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.