Archaic form of tennis alive and well in Australia

Press, 11 March 1983, Page 18

Archaic form of tennis alive and well in Australia

By

TIM DUNBAR

If Henry VIII had played royal tennis a little more regularly, he might never have has all those problems with his girth. I went to Australia recently to watch the World Series cricket, but enthusiasm for that fizzled out in the best-forgotten debacle at Melbourne. There were considerable compensations, however, in the discovery of this most ancient of games, very much alive and well thousands of kilometres away from the country where it began. If you happen to be staying in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Richmond and someone says he has just played a few sets of tennis, then there is a fair chance of confusion. The “tennis” casually referred to might easily be the parent game instead of the popular version played on grass. Royal tennis, as it is known in Australia, is called real tennis or just tennis in Britain, court tennis in the United States, and le jeu de paume (game of the palm) in France where it originated about 1000 years ago. As the historic French name indicates, the game was originally played with a bare hand. Later a glove was used, then a shorthandled battoir. A long-handled racket was eventually invented about 1500. The racket used these days is more weirdly shaped than Lance Cairns’ bat. The game started in open fields, was adopted by the clergy, and by the eleventh century was being played in the cloisters of monasteries. Royal tennis courts still resemble a monastic courtyard and one of the features is a grille (thought to represent a buttery hatch) through which monks doing penance were said to poke their heads and be peppered with balls. Along three of the walls is a wooden roof known as the penthouse. From the church the game of tennis spread to the palace. It was taken up by the French kings and became a royal and aristocratic game, and from France it spread throughout Western Europe. There were attempts to reserve it for the nobility but it became popular with all classes in France, Italy, England, Spain, and Germany.

By 1600 tennis was a national pastime in France and there were reported to be more than 1000 courts in Paris alone. Most, however, did not survive the Revolution. In 1930 there were still 60 courts left in the world, but now only 30 remain. Others have suffered such diverse fates as being turned into borstal gymnasiums, farm sheds, museums (Versailles and the Tuil-

leries Gardens, Paris), bowling alleys, chapels, and housing for battery hens. There are 17 playable courts in Britain (15 in England, two in Scotland), eight in the United States, two in France, and three in Australia. Australia’s first royal tennis club was opened in 1875 at Hobart, Tasmania, thanks to the conversion

of the town’s first brewery. The Royal Melbourne Tennis club (which adopted Henry VIII as its ex officio patron and symbol) built a court in 1882 and celebrated its centenary in lavish fashion last April. Now the club's old Exhibition Street site has become a second-hand car market and a move has been made to Sherwood Street, Richmond, where two new courts were opened in 1975 — the first built anywhere in half a century. In 1974, according to “The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games,” edited by John Arlott, there were probably about 2000 royal tennis players, most of them in England. Now, it seems, more royal tennis is played in Australia than anywhere else. Exposure through films such as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” in which Jeremy Irons languidly goes through the motions on a tennis court, can only help. The R.M.T.C., once in danger of extinction, has 500 members and a waiting list. New members can be proposed only by people who have known them for five years. And in April an entirely new club, financed by a millionaire enthusiast, will be open in Ballarat. New Zealand, however, has never had a real tennis court. “I’d like to build one if someone gave me a couple of hundreds thousand dollars!” says Mr lan Campbell, headmaster of Kings College, Auckland. Mr Campbell, who won a blue in royal tennis at Oxford after being captain of the team in 1949-50, has to go to Australia these days if he wants a game. Oxford and Cambridge have a court each. “At Cambridge they play with red balls on black walls,” Mr Campbell said. He was fortunate to be educated at Canford, the only school in England with its own court. Even if he flew to Melbourne Mr Campbell would have to have his booking made (by a club member) well in advance. Australia’s courts are booked for more than 10 hours per court, every day, 365 days a year. The Melbourne club has great facilities — a sauna, swimming pool, a barbecue, lounge and dining

facilities, and two squash courts. The squash courts are hardly used by comparison with the tennis courts. “It’s the best place in Melbourne for the squash player," says Barney Rivers, a businessman who took up royal tennis two or three years ago and now hardly ever plays lawn tennis. Many people join the club to play squash and end up getting hooked oh the other game, members say. Two stiff sessions of royal tennis were more than enough to show that the ancient game is both physically demanding and technically difficult. Old King Hal must have been a masochist. Most games with balls and rackets either have a net over which the ball must be hit or walls against which it must be hit. Royal tennis uses both. The racket, which has a pearshaped head, is quite weighty and you are . told to grip it halfway up the handle and try to retrieve it in the “commode” position. The balls, which are heavy and react significantly to spin, are hand-sewn by the club professionals. A cane basket of 60 balls or more is used for a match and they have to be re-covered every fortnight, although the cores can last for 50 years. Among the devilish traps which complicate the game is the buttress (or tambour) along one wall on the aplty-named “hazard” side of the net. From the buttress the ball shoots at horrible angles. Reading shots, even from the service, is most difficult at first and a wong interpretation can bring a miss of embarrassing width. The service is not made over the net (which droops in the middle), but along the sloping roofed structure known as the penthouse. The dimensions of a royal tennis court (the ones at Melbourne have both natural and artificial light) are spectacular. Playing area at floor level is 29.3 m by 9.8 m (a lawn tennis court measures 23.8 m by 11m) and above the penthouses it is 33.5 m by 11.9 m. The sidewalls are in play up to about 5.5 m where the windows begin and the end wall up to about 7m. The penthouses start at 2.1 m and go to 3.2 m. The net, 1.5 m high at the sides, sags to 0.9 m in the middle. Tennis scoring is used, but with the addition of something called “chases” (points held in abeyance) to make things more difficult. Both ends and service can change during a game. Outright winners can come through hitting the netting (dedans) along the end wall beneath the penthouse on the service side of the court or hitting the grill at the other end. For anyone who has never seen it, no description could give an accurate idea of game. For the novice, getting a rally of two shots or more is an accomplishment; at a high level the game, singles or doubles, can produce quite lengthy, exciting rallies. Royal tennis players have no hesitation in claiming it as the most difficult and skilful of all ball games. It has been likened to a mixture of squash, lawn tennis, and chess, but mainly chess. Squash players would adapt more easily than those who have previously wielded only a tennis racket. Royal tennis was certainly the

game of kings and its most famous patron, Henry VIII, played on courts built in 1530 at Hampton Court Palace, a gift from Cardinal Wolsey, who was later to fall foul of the monarch after failing to get papal sanction for his “divorce” from Catherine of Aragon. The court remaining at Hampton Court is the oldest one still in use. Henry VIII, who also built courts at Whitehall and St James, sometimes found royal tennis a costly business. Despite taking his own marker (Anthony Ansley) with him he often lost heavily. On October 22, 1532, his privy purse expenses show that he had to pay out £46 13s 4d to two opponents. Royal patronage, however, goes back well before that. An early royal victim was Louis X who died of a chill after a game in the forest of Vincennes in 1316. In 1506 Philip I of Spain suffered a similar fate.

During the sixteenth century four French kings were devotees of the game. The game is mentioned in six of Shakespeare’s plays. Henry V received a gift of tennis balls from the Dauphin of France in 1414 and that is chronicled in the play of the same name. During the seventeenth century the Stuarts were great fans. Charles I played at Oxford during the Civil War, Charles II used to play regualrly at 6 a.m.; and James 11, who played at the age of eight, spent his exile at St Germain where tennis was available! Several courts (which could be brought back into play) were also built in Leningrad during the reign of Catherine the Great. While Britain still has a good quota of courts and the university match has been an annual affair since 1859, France now has to be content with a single court in Paris

and another in Bordeaux. The United States courts include the luxurious Tuxedo club in New York, the Philadelphia Racquets Club, which boasts Turkish baths, and the beautiful Georgian Club in Lakewood, New Jersey, which was recently reopened. In the past women did not play the game and the New York Racket and Tennis Club, (built in 1918) at 370 Park Avenue, remains an upperclass for men only, where trousers are pressed and shoes shined. But. there are a number of very keen female players at the Royal Melbourne Tennis Club, where the one senior and three assistant professionals are kept busy giving lessons, marking games, stringing rackets, and making balls. Members who prefer socialising in the bar to actually playing are not encouraged to stay in the club because of the big demand for membership.