A remarkable find in a family archive has shed new light on the earliest days of Scottish tennis. The minute book of the Glasgow Lawn Tennis Club, founded in March 1877, has resurfaced after years at the back of a drawer, and is now with the Mitchell Library in Glasgow having been donated by a descendant of an original member.
   As no other tennis club north of the border is known to have existed this early, the discovery of this leather-bound book could give Glasgow the honour of being Scotland's first lawn tennis club.

The Glasgow Lawn Tennis Club was established by men who were members of the city's prestigious Western Club and they were soon flooded with subscriptions from prospective members, with equal numbers of men and women being allowed to join.
   The committee ordered two sets of equipment from London, and the minutes record carefully all their early activities as the club got under way. It will surprise many to learn that they played primarily indoors, renting Burnbank Drill Hall, off Great Western Road.
   They were clearly a vibrant organisation, playing for at least a decade, and were unusual for a Victorian sporting body as they gave equal playing status to male and female members. Gentlemen had to be over 21 years old and their subscription was one pound, while ladies were 17 or over and paid ten shillings, and they were all clearly of the prosperous middle classes, with many who were or became prominent citizens.
   While many of the meetings focussed on administration and finances, the minute book also has some fascinating social detail.
   In February 1878, one can almost hear the gasps of horror when the Chairman informed the committee that complaints had been made by ladies that some gentlemen had been playing in their shirt sleeves, without coats! Decorum had to be restored, and the Honorary Secretary was tasked with placing a notice in the Gentlemen's dressing room: 'In deference to representations by some of the lady members of the club, the Committee request that gentlemen removing their coats for play will substitute a light jacket while ladies are present. By order.'

The club held its first tournament in 1879, although sadly the winners are not recorded, and the minute book continues to detail meetings up to November the following year. After that, member subscription lists are detailed up to 1885, but what happened to the club after that is not known.
   Lawn tennis was still a new sport when the Glasgow club was set up, invented by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an English sportsman who patented his invention in 1874 and called it Sphairistike. He marketed it as a boxed set costing upwards of five guineas and although he sold over a thousand sets in the first year, because of the expense it went primarily to the well-heeled country house set. Lawn tennis was seen initially as a summer recreation for garden parties rather than a competitive sport.
   However, tennis developed rapidly as it captured the imagination and the first clubs were established in England, leading to the creation of the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. By the time the first national championship was held in the summer of 1877 – the forerunner of the Wimbledon we know today – the modern game was taking shape with a rectangular court, where the cloth-covered ball and the modern racket shape had been introduced.

In Scotland, the earliest known recreational players were in Edinburgh. Sir James Patten McDougall KCB – then plain James Patten, a young lawyer – recalled sending off to London for a tennis set in 1874 and setting it up with some friends at the Grange Cricket Ground in Raeburn Place. He described the game as it was then: 'The racquets were light, longer in the head and shorter in the handle than now. The balls were uncovered rubber, about two thirds the diameter of the modern ball, with a hole in them. The court was shaped like a sandglass, narrower at the net than the backline.'
   After experimenting outdoors, like the Glaswegians they played indoors at a specially constructed hall at the Grange Club, built by the Edinburgh Lawn Tennis Company and known as the 'old tin hut'. It was there, in the summer of 1878, that Patten won a tournament which was later recognised as the first Scottish championship, even though it was a purely Edinburgh affair.
   Over in the west, the Glasgow Lawn Tennis Club played an important role in getting tennis off the ground in the city, and was clearly a success, but what happened after the first decade remains something of a mystery: there are no known mentions of the club in the newspapers of the day or in tennis histories, and its existence might never have been discovered had it not been for the chance survival of the minute book.
   The handwritten records of this pioneering club show that there are still significant discoveries to be made in the history of Scottish sport.
 
 
* I am immensely grateful to Jamie Donald, great-great-nephew of club member Thomas Francis Donald, for recognising the significance of the minute book which had been kept in the family for generations, and for letting me read and photograph it on its way to the Special Collections Department of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
 

Glasgow Lawn Tennis Club
Founding Committee, March 1877
 
Donald Matheson (1832-1901), Chairman. East India Merchant, later Brigadier-General Sir Donald Matheson KCB.
Captain Robert Mercer-Tod (1839-1903), Honorary Secretary. 43rd Light Infantry.
Captain William Bannatyne (1839-1925). 8th (The King’s) Regiment.
Robert Martin Barklie (1846-1903). Architect, Royal Engineers.
William Richard Buchanan (1847-1901). Wine Merchant.
William Crouch (1840-1927). Civil Engineer.
Thomas Robert Johnston Logan (1837-1913). Iron and Coal Master.


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