Early summer is upon us and that means, in London, that the Championships of the All English Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, aka. Wimbledon, is in full swing. The tournament was founded in 1877 and was as significant and popular a sporting event in the interwar period as it is today. As this newsreel footage from the 1928 Men Singles Final (won by René Lacoste) shows, although the players wore shirts and long trousers, the quality and pace of the game were well-developed.

Tennis originated as a lawn sport played at country houses by the upper classes. By the interwar period, however, the game had popularised and, to a certain extent, democratised.[i] Although it never reached the mass appeal of football, public tennis courts became increasingly available and numbered around 800 in London at the start of the 1930s. Suburban tennis clubs also facilitated access to the sport.[ii] And, unlike other sports, tennis was equally accessible for women as it was for men. The spectator crowd at Wimbledon in the footage embedded above is mixed. Female professional tennis players of the period, such as the French Suzanne Lenglen and the American Helen Wills, attained great fame. At the amateur level, tennis clubs were considered appropriate spaces for middle-class men and women to mix and potentially find a life partner.[iii]

The 1924 instructional film ‘Tennis: The Most Democratic of Games for Both Sexes’ foregrounds the equal access women and men had to the game in its title. The twelve minute silent film opens with an intertitle warning the viewer that ‘If you really wish to play tennis, Don’t aimlessly knock a ball about for practice – Get taught early – Faults – like trouble – come easily.’ This insistence on hands-on teaching seems to rather undermine the purpose of the film! The opening shot is of a family group in a garden setting, with one of the women removing frames from tennis rackets and handing them out to various children. All are dressed in light-coloured clothing and mostly in short sleeves, implying that it is a summer’s day. The children then move to a tennis court elsewhere in the garden, where they demonstrate some basic techniques.

The film then introduces two professional (male) tennis players, Charles Read and Charles Hierons. In the next, most substantial, segment of the film, Read and Hierons demonstrate various tennis techniques. Here the film makes liberal use of slow-motion to allow the viewer to understand the players’ movements. Slow-motion was not often used in films of this period (in fact, comedy films tended to speed up action rather than slow it down) but its use here is seamless and sensible. The demonstration shots are interspersed with intertitles providing more explanation. Read and Hierons appear to be playing on an inner-city court, perhaps one of the public tennis courts so recently introduced in London at this time.

After this extensive segment, some shots of Helen Wills in action at a championship are included, presumably to demonstrate the ‘democratic’ nature of the sport. The film ends with a segment of a young girl, identified as ‘Betty’, playing against an unseen opponent in a private court. The focus is on her ‘beautiful footwork’, with some of the shots focusing only on her legs below the knees. This adds an odd tone of potential titillation to this supposedly instructional film, further problematised by Betty’s young age.

Throughout the interwar period, professional tennis continued to receive regular attention in newsreels, even if Britain’s successes on the international tennis stage were limited.[iv] Despite the sport’s democratisation, it continued to be endorsed by the upper classes too, culminating in the Duke of York (later King George VI) playing in the men’s doubles at the 1926 Wimbledon tournament. Although the Duke was of course not a professional player, he was able to enter because his doubles partner, Wing Commander Sir Louis Greig, qualified for Wimbledon because he was the RAF tennis champion. The couple was soundly defeated in the first round: 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.

[i] Joyce Kay, ‘Grass Roots: the Development of Tennis in Britain, 1918-1978’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 29, issue 18 (2012), p. 2534

[ii] John H. Goldthorpe, ‘Class and status in interwar England: Current issues in the light of a historical case’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (2021), p. 246

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Robert J. Lake and Simon J. Eaves, ‘Defeat, Decline and Disconnect: A Critical Analysis of Attempted Reform in British Tennis during the Inter-war Period’, Sport in History, vol. 37, issue 1 (2017)