Tennis; A Cultural History; Heiner Gillmeister

Heiner Gillmeister [+–]

University of Bonn, retired

Heiner Gillmeister is retired Chaucerian and linguistics scholar of the University of Bonn and a world authority on the history of ball games. That is why he was invited also to teach sports history at the German Sports University, Cologne. His theory that Association Football has its roots in Renaissance Italy and that golf and even cricket originated on the European continent has created an international stir. The German academic is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Oxford English Dictionary and to leading German newspapers such as Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

This is the second edition of the highly acclaimed and bestselling comprehensive history of tennis which was the first truly scholarly history of any individual sport. Supported by a startling wealth of linguistic and documentary research, Gillmeister charts the global evolution of tennis from its origins in 12th century France where it emerged as a more peaceful variety of ribald football played in monasteries. By the 16th century, it had become the favourite pastime of the European aristocracy and had, in the wake of the Spanish conquistadors, even reached the Americas. The prestige of the game also led to its popularity among Renaissance poets and playwrights. After a gradual decline in the 18th and 19th centuries the medieval game revived in the 1870s in the form of lawn tennis. The new game dispensed with the expensive walled courts, discarded the complicated rules of the old game and was played in a natural setting. From England with its famous Wimbledon tournament it spread to the European continent and to the United States where the Davis Cup was born.

Gillmeister debunks several firmly established myths about the history of the game and rare colour photographs and medieval and renaissance drawings generously adorn the text. A delight for the sports fan and the scholar alike, Tennis is the authoritative text on the sport.

Preliminaries

List of Plates [+–] vi

List of Figures [+–] vii-xi

From the Preface to the First Edition [+–] xii-xiii

Preface to the Second Edition [+–] xiv

Acknowledgements [+–] xv

Chapter 1

The Origins of Tennis: The Monks’ Racket [+–] 1-32

According to Caesarius of Heisterbach of the Order of Cîteaux tennis was known in Paris around the middle of the twelfth century. At the same time, the testimony of John Beleth suggests that at the beginning the game was played by monks in the cloisters of their monasteries. These early sources at least cast doubt on rather speculative theories of the origins of the game. Tennis is neither a continuation of ball games played by the Romans nor has it its roots in a fertility rite of ancient Egypt. That it goes back to a rural game which eventually found its way into the towns can also been ruled out. The uniformity of its rules and the almost exclusively French vocabulary in a real host of varieties the world over demonstrates that, to borrow a term from ‘sociology, the cultural surplus value of a majority, the clerical intellectuals of the Middle Ages, was imposed on a minority. By linguistic analysis it can be shown that the vocabulary of tennis was an adaptation from that of sports preceding it, medieval football and, ultimately, the chivalric tournament. Early tennis, therefore, can be conceived of as the more peaceful variety of football played in the cloisters. Tennis is first illustrated in the genre of the medieval book of hours and as early as ca 1300 instanced in a book from the workshops of Cambrai in the north of France. The miniature suggests that in the beginning tennis was a team game with several players on either side. In due course, the game of the cloistered clergy was encroached upon by young aristocrats who had received their education in the monastery and later established it in their castles and manors. It thus also became part of the education of princes and had even kings among its addicts. Unfortunately, we only learn about their passion from accounts of the fatal consequences it had for them. Notable examples of royal tennis tragedies were Louis X and Charles VIII of France and James I of Scotland. We are also informed about tennis playing kings in account books where their pecuniary losses at the game were documented. That tennis had kings among its practitioners has led to the erroneous belief that the name for the modern version of the old game, Real tennis, originally meant Royal tennis and that tennis, therefore, was the ‘Game of Kings’. However, the term Real tennis was coined in the late 19th century when its followers claimed that there were still playing the ‘real’ game and not lawn tennis, of late its immensely successful rival. Although there are throughout the Middle Ages many references to tennis playing monks we are mostly left in the dark as far as the nature of their game is concerned. The reason is that this kind of information comes from bans of the pastime from the monks’ superiors, sources from which a description of the demonized game could hardly be expected.

Chapter 2

The Tennis Games of the Middle Ages [+–] 33-82

The tennis court of the aristocrats mirrored almost exactly the original venue in the cloisters where the openings of the roofed galleries had served as goals. A special feature of the game was the so-called chase rule which seems to go back to attack and counter attack in medieval tournaments. It was a rather complicated rule which has in modern times been likened to a game of chess in which players at the same time scrambled after a ball in order to hit it. Although in the beginning tennis balls could also been kicked as in football they were nevertheless mainly struck with the palm of the hand, hence one of the early names for the game, jeu de la paume. The racket and also the net, indispensible in modern tennis, were late in coming. Both made an appearance at the turn of the 16th century and only very recently has it been discovered that the net in the form of a line spanned across the court preceded the racket. At first, fringed tassels had to signal whether a ball had been struck over or under the line. The net seems to have been introduced as late as in the 17th century only. The progress from line to net is well documented by 16th and 17th century illustrations. The penthouse of the cloisters had been the inspiration to start a tennis rally by serving the first ball onto the slanting roof of the side gallery, a custom preserved in modern Real tennis. Its original purpose seems to have been to keep the opposing party at a distance. The roof as the target of the first ball was simply indispensible. As time went on, makeshift roofs where appended to the gables of houses facing a market square or even erected on the countryside for a match on mother earth. In popular varieties of the tennis family the roof eventually degenerated into a slanting corn sieve or a stone slab onto which the first ball had to be bounced. At an early stage in the evolution of the game the pain caused by the heavy blows dealt to the hard tennis balls had led to the use of gloves in order to soothe it. When in the 1940s an autopsy of the mortal remains of St Francis Xavier brought to light a deformation of his hand characteristic of pelota players it was decided to make him the patron saint of Basque pelota, a distant relative of tennis. Wood bats called palet then took over before around the turn of the 16th century the racket strung with sheep gut became the final solution to the problem. The hardness of the medieval tennis ball was due to its being stuffed with hair and its cover which consisted of leather. As a rule, medieval tennis was a team game with three players on either side. In popular varieties teams with five, seven or even more players were by no means unusual. In most of them specific challenge rites apparently inherited from the chivalric tournament had to be strictly observed.

Chapter 3

The Language of Tennis [+–] 83-129

Since it was beneath the dignity of the medieval chronicler to deal with trifling subjects such as sports and games the only way to shed light on them is the analysis of traditional words used in them and which have come down to us. This is the job of historical linguistics. Well known is the dictum of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general who had called war a continuation of politics by other means. From linguistic analysis it appears that the medieval tournament was, as it were, a continuation of war and that competitive ball games like football or tennis were a continuation of the tournament by other means. Pivotal terms such as tennis and racket can be traced back to medieval warfare and the tournament and in particular a sub-discipline of the latter, the passage of arms. Two of the most frequently used terms in the tournament were those for attack and counterattack, namely chase and chase back. At a very early date, the northern French variants of them were adopted together with the game by the Frisians, a people settling on the coastal fringe of the German Sea. The tennis games of the Frisians are perhaps the most archaic of the whole family. They are unique in that only they do not avail themselves of the curious scoring method of all others by fifteen and must therefore be older than the beginning of the 15th century when this method was first recorded. An offshoot of them is the game of kaatsen in Belgium. The root of this word is preserved in English racket which originally denoted an implement for striking back or returning a tennis ball, and gave rise to the belief that tennis bats were strung with ‘catgut’. Incidentally, the chasing of the ball is also mirrored in the oldest word for tennis in Scottish imported from Flanders, caich. All Frisians games are also unique in that they preserved the term for the playing field, park, which in days of old was used for the wood enclosure of the tournament. At the beginning of the 17th century, the English lexicographer John Minshew had suggested that the word tennis went back to tenez! meaning ‘hold!’, a word which the French used when they struck a ball at tennis. That Minshew was right is now proved by a poem on the battle of Agincourt from the first quarter of the 15th century in which the cannons of Henry V’s army are represented as tennis players and make use of it alongside the curious scoring method by fifteens. Medieval tennis also served as a model for a children’s game known in England by the name of tip-cat. A variety of it survived in the Rhineland Palatinate until after the Second World War where it went by the name of Tennee-ui. Of course, here the first element represented French tenez! whereas the second element disclosed the secret what in the tournament as well as in the games depending on it the reply of the defending party was. It was either ui (= French oui) or wuplee (= s’il vous plait). Tennis history has been bedevilled by the secret behind the curious scoring method of the game. The most plausible explanation seems to be that it goes back to a medieval French currency since tennis was like many other games notoriously played for money. The gros denier tournois, the great penny of Tours, worth fifteen deniers may have been the gaming debt for the loss of a rally when at the same time town regulations forbade ordinary people to stake more than sixty deniers at a game. The tennis terms deuce and love are according to public opinion, above all in English speaking countries, both of French origin. The first is said to go back to the phrase à deux which means that a player is two points away from either losing or winning a game. The second is said to be based on l’œuf, the French word of egg. The first to have offered this explanation in all likelihood were English cricketers who in their game use the term duck’s egg for complete failure on the part of the batsman. However, historically as well as from the viewpoint of linguistics such an explanation is downright absurd. Against the background of other sporting terms from Dutch such as kayles and sley in the south of England it is not altogether impossible that we here have before us yet another example of this phenomenon. In Dutch, the euphemistic word for unsuccessful play was lof. If you played omme lof you played for the honour rather than for money. In the 16th century, Londoners may have heard it from players from the large Dutch community in the city and have mistaken it for English love.

Chapter 4

Tennis in the Renaissance Literature [+–] 130-145

Increasing popularity of tennis in the 16th and 17th centuries manifested itself in the literature of the time, and especially in two literary genres, lyrical poetry and drama. The predominant method applied in the first was one inherited from the Middle Ages, the allegorical. Since God had created a world in which even the most mundane and trivial thing was fraught with spiritual meaning poets strove to discover it in the game of tennis, its rules, equipment and all its paraphernalia. Perhaps the most skilful poem from this category is that by the last of medieval courtly poets, Charles d’Orléans, written during his captivity. On the day of his forty-fifth birthday the poet realized that the game of his life had now, on the allegorical plane, reached a very critical point as at the score of 45 in a tennis game. His poem therefore is, perhaps, the first in literature dealing with what is now commonly referred to as midlife crisis. Most examples belonging to the genre and notably those poems gleaned from emblem books are of a moral or religious nature. They are meant to improve the morals of their readers. Occasionally however, and very unlike the example of Charles d’Orléans, the scoring method in tennis was given a rather frivolous allegorical explanation and a poem incorporated into his Parnasse satyrique by scallywag Théophile de Viau can serve as a case in point. On the stage the subject of tennis serves a different purpose. Because the game was characteristically the favourite pastime of the upper classes, the foibles of their representatives were here exposed by sly allusions to tennis, much to the delight of the groundling gloating over the misfortunes of his betters. Of course, as in the genre of the lyrical poetry the dialogue on the stage was never devoid of ribald allusions to the game of tennis.

Chapter 5

Tennis in the German Ballhouse [+–] 146-209

The Germans got acquainted with tennis rather late. It was first passed on to them by their cousins in the west, the Flemish and the Dutch. Their model of the walled but roofless tennis court was adopted in the north of the country covering an area formed by Hanseatic cities such as Cologne – where it was known to the community of the Crutched Friars as early as 1450 – , Hamburg and Lübeck. In marked contrast to the north tennis was in the 16th century introduced to the Viennese court and the German south by Italians and Huguenots who had left France on account of religious conflicts. The courts in which Italian and French professionals taught the game to the Germans had a roof and went by the name of Ballhaus, literally ballhouse. These foreigners were either in the pay of a local ruler or themselves owners of the facility eking out a living out of it. As time went on the institution of the ballhouse also prevailed in the north where courts were built in places such as Berlin, Schwerin and Rostock. A peculiarity of German tennis was its becoming part of the education of young noblemen in the so-called Knights’ Academies (Ritterakademien) the most illustrious being that of Tübingen. Tennis in the Knights’ Academy is well illustrated in the literary genre of the Stammbuch (album amicorum, friendship book). It was a collection of sheets which students had presented to one another at the end of their studies. These sheets not infrequently contained an illustration of the student’s favourite pastime together with some memorable verse. Inspired by model institutions such as the Collegium Illustre in Tübingen tennis facilities were also placed at the disposal of students by the country’s universities and by colleges run by religious orders. It looks as if it had been the Germans’ firm belief that to play tennis could also be learnt by reading. A vast amount of books on how to play the game and written in dialogue form were printed in Strasburg and a German professional from Nuremburg even put pen to paper and authored a veritable tennis primer. A notable example of how tennis fared during the Thirty Years War is given by Europe’s rulers of the time involving high-ranking individuals such as the Emperor Rudolf II, the unfortunate Prince Henry and his relatives from the Rhineland Palatinate, the Electors Frederick IV and his son, the ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia, who had married Henry’s sister Elizabeth.

Chapter 6

Lawn Tennis: The Sturdy Bastard [+–] 210-248

At the beginning of the 19th century the old game of tennis led a rather drab existence. After several attempts had been made to take the game out of the stuffiness of its traditional courts into the open it was a retired military man, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who in the 1870s eventually decided to devise a tennis game that could be played on grass and that could be marketed into the bargain. Not least in order to acquire a patent for it he gave it a fanciful pseudo-Greek name, sphairistikè. At the same time another Major, Harry Gem, experimented with an outdoor variety of tennis in Leamington Spa, but after the extravagancies of Wingfield’s game had been by abolished by a rules committee of the MCC in 1875, his brand of tennis prevailed. When in 1879 the first grand scale lawn tennis tournament was staged on the grounds of the All England Croquet Club London became the hub of lawn tennis. As a consequence, it was here that in 1888 the LTA was founded which succeeded the All England Club as the governing body of the game until as late as 1913 the International Lawn Tennis Federation(ILTF) based in Paris took over. The first Wimbledon event was won by Spencer W. Gore, a rackets specialist, who overcame his opponents, most of them adepts of Real tennis, by volleying from a position close to the net every ball sent to him with the heavy undercut characteristic of their game. In the years to come, the question of what tactics to adopt and what kind of strokes to use in the new game on grass was a growing concern of the tennis community. It was eventually answered by the Renshaw brothers and their fierce antagonist, Herbert Fortescue Lawfort, whose all court game included strokes from the baseline, the volley and the smash. Unlike traditional Real tennis, lawn tennis was the first game to give women a break to play organized sport. However, it took some time to free themselves from the trammels imposed on them by contemporary society, namely the wearing of corsets, long dresses and broad-brimmed hats, glaring handicaps to play the game properly.

Chapter 7

Lawn Tennis in America [+–] 249-265

Lawn tennis was first played in the United States in August 1874 by Fred R. Sears and Dr James Dwight on the premises of William Appleton at Nahant, a place near Boston. Their pioneering act has been cast in doubt and a certain Mary Ewing Outerbridge has been credited with it. However, the claim of her having brought with her a tennis set from Bermuda as early as February 1874 on closer inspection does not hold water. Strangely enough and despite these beginnings, the first lawn tennis club of the country was not established in New England but in the south where the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club was founded by English cotton merchants on 15 December 1876. The first tournament in the New World was staged on the courts of the New York Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. It was won by Otway Edward Woodhouse, an outstanding English player who happened to be in the States on a business trip. A squabble over the quality of the balls provided by the tournament committee and other nuisances and involving again Fred R. Sears and Dr James Dwight led to the founding of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (USNLTA) at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York on 21 May 1881. Sears and Dwight, improving their game by frequent visits to England, in the years to come not only reaped US championships – Sears became seven consecutive-times US champion and record holder to date, but also held the office of presidents of the USLTA. The idea of a challenge match between the leading tennis nations Great Britain and the United States was born in the States and went back to the late 1870s, but materialized at the turn of the century only and after Dwight D.F. Davis, a millionaire’s son from St Louis, had offered the victor a precious Cup. The first Davis Cup match was contended at the Longwood Avenue LTC of Boston and won by the United States. The English had been compelled to send their second best because their tennis heroes, the unparalleled Doherty brothers, had been unable to compete and their makeshift team could not manage the country’s odd playing conditions. After the return match was called off in 1901 and another ignominious defeat in the year following the English took their revenge in 1903 due to the efforts of the reinvigorated Dohertys and because the Yankees had picked the wrong players.

Chapter 8

Continental Colonies: Lawn Tennis in France [+–] 266-284

An illustrated trade card and a small book containing the rules of Wingfield’s sphairistiké in the French language prove that the game arrived in France prior to the amendments made by the MCC in 1875. The new game made inroads into the country at her seaside resorts on the opposite shores of the Channel frequented by English short-stay holiday makers or on the French Riviera where the English well-to-do hibernated. After the English entrepreneur Thomas Robinson Woolfield had acquired a large property there in the 1840s, Cannes became one of the country’s tennis epicentres, especially in the winter. The place became the main attraction for players from the British Isles, Germany and even from far-away Russia and the United States. Among them were tennis aces such as the Renshaw brothers who according to local tradition were even credited, albeit wrongly, with having invented the very special sand courts of the place. The most famous courts were those of the hotel Beau Site, for decades the venue of spectacular tennis tournaments. Of course, tennis soon took also possession of Paris, the capital, where before long important clubs were founded. The most prestigious of these were the Racing Club and the Club Stade Français from which emerged the Union des Sociétés Françaises des Sports Athlétiques (USFSA; established in 1889) which until the foundation of when the French Tennis Federation in 1920 served as the supreme board also for lawn tennis and organized the country’ tennis championships. The most important achievement of French tennis is Olympic tennis which from the inaugural event of the Olympics in 1896 formed part of the Olympic programme. The first Olympic medallist, at a time when the gold medal was not yet invented, was a young Irishman, John Pius Boland, a student from Oxford who, after continuing his studies of law at the University of Bonn had travelled to Athens. Invited to compete in the lawn tennis event because of the scarcity of competitors he gained a surprising victory. Boland’s diary, which has come to light only recently, perhaps constitutes the most intriguing document in Olympic history.

Chapter 9

Lawn Tennis under the Kaiser [+–] 285-370

According to the order book of Wingfield’s partners, French & Company, the first to receive his boxed tennis set in Germany were, strangely enough, no Germans but an English lordship on holiday in the spa Bad Homburg and the German Crown Princess. She was as English as any since she was the eldest child of Queen Victoria. Her attempts to secure a place for an English sport in the martial education programme of her children – among them the future Kaiser William II – were frowned upon by the Prussian court. She was suspected to ween away her husband from Prussia’s military tradition and eventually even to upset the Prussian monarchy and to rule the country after the model of Britain. In the course of the 1870s lawn tennis became more and more popular among the steadily growing English community of Bad Homburg where an English lawn tennis club existed by 1876. Soon other German spas such as Bad Pyrmont and Baden-Baden followed the example of Bad Homburg and in the north the big cities of Berlin and Hamburg had become lawn tennis strongholds by the early 1890s. Of these Hamburg soon played a leading role due to the activities of one of her citizens, Carl August von der Meden. He has justifiably been called the Father of German Lawn Tennis. Von der Meden had as a young man settled in England and had eventually established himself as a Japan merchant in the city of London. On his daily travels from his office to his residence in Middlesex his train passed the grounds of the All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon and it is likely that he not only became aware of the sporting activities going on there but that he may even have been a witness to the inaugural tournament of 1877. Having returned to his native city Hamburg after his business had failed he joined the Eisbahnverein auf der Uhlenhorst, a skating club, on the grounds of which lawn tennis was played in the summer. As a member of its lawn tennis sub-committee he agitated for the introduction of lawn tennis tournaments in Germany after the Wimbledon model. From 1892 until 1896 only Germans and Austrians could compete for a Championship of the Germans, and from 1897 onwards these were contended alongside a Championship of Germany open to foreigners as well. Owing to the skating club’s financial straits both championships were transferred to Bad Homburg in 1898 in which year an open German Championship for the ladies was added to the list. It was in Bad Homburg that through the ingenuity of the spa’s inspector of parks and gardens the red clay courts of today came into being. The foundation of the German Lawn Tennis Federation in 1902 saw the return of the championships to the Hanseatic City where they were to remain until the Second World War. In the first decades of lawn tennis in the Fatherland two Germans and one American gained prominence. The first of the Germans was an aristocrat from Mecklenburg, Count Victor Voss. Belonging to the entourage of Grand Duchess Anastasia who used to spend the winter on the French Riviera he had the opportunity to play against the English tennis aces of the time and to outshine his tennis playing countrymen. After the turn of the century, however, Count Voss was as a player put in the shade by Otto Froitzheim whose lasting fame is due to the fact that in 1907 he was the first to wrest the open German championship from an Englishman, Major Josiah George Ritchie. The American was Charles Adolph Voigt the long forgotten manager of the famous Bad Homburg tournaments. He is worth being remembered for his having suggested as early as 1896 to contend the international tennis trophy which later became known as the Davis Cup.

End Matter

Notes [+–] 371-531

Bibliography [+–] 532-569

Illustration Sources [+–] 570-575

Index [+–] 576-599

Reviews

Reviews of the first edition:
...Gillmeister has once again trawled the archives to produce a narrative that adds significantly to the evolving body of knowledge of tennis history.
Journal of Sport History

The first edition awarded the 1999 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles award

Reviews of the first edition:
A definitive account of tennis a splayed from the Middle Ages to the present... will sate the curiosity of the most avid tennis enthusiast.
Publishers Weekly

Well Researched... [Gillmeister] keeps a light tone even when vilifying minute details like the physical layout of Henry V's tennis court.
Library Journal

Extraordinary
The Economist

. . . the book is exemplary, and the scholarship particularly of the first five chapters sets a high standard for the history of any sport.
American Studies International

For any budding tennis historian it’s required reading.
Robert McNicol, Librarian, Kenneth Richie Wimbledon Library on Wimbledon.com

If you’re into the true nitty-gritty of tennis history, this one is for you.
Tennis Identity Summer Bookshelf 2017

Professor Heiner Gillmeister’s Tennis, A Cultural History covers every aspect of the game from its beginning as court tennis and its evolution into lawn tennis. Originally written in German and translated into extremely literate English by the Professor himself, who taught English at the University of Bonn, Germany, it is a work of monumental scholarship that leaves no stone unturned ... and contains many wry and insightful observations of subtle and sophisticated humor.
Joseph B. Stahl address to the US Tennis Collectors Society at the New Orleans Tennis Club on October 5th 2019

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Tennis

A Cultural History

(Second edition)

Heiner Gillmeister [+–]

University of Bonn, retired

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