Henry “Cavendish” Jones
The first three parts of this tetralogy explained the possible origins of tennis scoring and the rather murky world of tennis odds, or handicapping. If you missed the start of the series, you might choose to click here or below to start with the first piece.
This final piece explores in a little more detail the origins of the modern game of tennis and explains how handicapping was central to modern tennis’s development in the late 19th century and then subsequently those modern tennis developments to handicapping pervaded real tennis.
The Emergence of “Modern” or “Lawn” Tennis
In my earlier pieces I relied quite heavily, as most writers on the history of tennis do, on Julian Marshall’s 1878 book, The Annals Of Tennis, which you can read in full on-line if you wish – click here.
Less well-known is Marshall’s short book, booklet really, on Lawn Tennis, published in 1879 – click here or the link below – again the whole thing is in the internet archive.
Lawn tennis was very new when Julian Marshall wrote that booklet in 1879. The first All England Club competition (Wimbledon) had taken place in the summer of 1877, just a couple of summers after the game was first introduced to that (until then, i.e. from its founding in 1868, croquet) club.
In truth, it had all happened rather quickly for that modern version of the game. In the mid 19th century, lots of sporty folk had experimented with garden-based adaptations of tennis in various forms. A club for one form of lawn tennis, named pelota, was founded in Leamington Spa in 1872. Major Clopton Wingfield applied for a patent on his version of lawn tennis, Sphairistikè, in 1874.
The Marylebone Cricket Club, which was, by the 1870s, the guardian of the laws of tennis as well as of cricket, got involved around 1875, in an attempt to codify and standardise the laws of lawn tennis.
There followed a rather controversial set of processes, from which emerged, in the end, the laws of lawn tennis in a form very similar to those we know today, but not without some evident deep debate and acrimony.
Prince Otto von Bismarck famously said that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.” He was probably right. Perhaps for that reason, Julian Marshall’s early booklet on lawn tennis is silent on the controversy around the laws, it merely sets them out.
But I’m going to have a go at exploring the controversy and the somewhat tortuous journey.
The MCC Got A Bunch Of Lawyers & Sport Enthusiasts Together To Codify This New-Fangled Lawn Tennis Game…What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
A comprehensive account of the controversy is contained in the Lawn Tennis section of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (1st edition published 1890) – click here or image below to see full text, authored by CG Heathcote, younger brother of the slightly better known JM Heathcote. Both are protagonists of the story; the latter was the author of the (real) tennis section of the same book.
According to the younger Heathcote, by 1875 lawn tennis was becoming chaotically ubiquitous in the gardens of England; opinions in The Field magazine were united only in the view that things could not go on like this, so the tennis committee of the MCC was deputed to form a code for this new game.
That committee was a high-falutin’ bunch in those days; Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, Edward Chandos Leigh, CG Lyttelton, William Hart Dyke & John Moyer Heathcote.
The scoring method that these esteemed gentlemen came up with was, basically, the method used in rackets. Only the server (hand-in) could score points; serve only changed hands when the receiver (hand-out) won a stroke; a game was first to 15 (with some additional clever stuff to “set the game” if the game gets to 13-13 or 14-14).
The original MCC code seems to have been little used. CG Heathcote briefly documents one or two matches played that way.
The code did make it to the USA, where, it is claimed, the first lawn tennis tournament was played, in 1876, on handicap, using rackets scoring. James Dwight prevailed, playing at scratch. 12–15, 15–7, 15–13.
We’ll return to Dr Dwight later in this piece.
The attempt at standardisation started to get messy again, when Henry “Cavendish” Jones, one of the doyens of the All England Croquet Club, who had been instrumental in introducing lawn tennis to that club, decided, in 1876, to advocate the use of tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring for lawn tennis.
Jones advocated the use of tennis scoring on the grounds that:
interest is better sustained and handicapping facilitated.
CG Heathcote describes this turn of events as “a crisis”, exacerbated by the fact that John Henry “Stonehenge” Walsh, then editor of The Field, was honorary secretary (having been one of the founders) of the All England Croquet Club. He was more a dogs and guns man than a tennis and croquet man in truth; he regularly organised field gun trials, often using the All England Croquet Club fields for that purpose. Don’t ask.
By 1877, not only had the objects of the All England Croquet Club been changed to include lawn tennis but the name of the club had become All England Croquet & Lawn Tennis Club (AECLTC) and a lawn tennis tournament announced for July 1877.
At this juncture of the story, CG Heathcote’s essay on lawn tennis gets a bit melodramatic:
“…a graver crisis was at hand, which should determine whether the game was to bask for a few seasons in the smiles of fashion, and then decay and die, as rinking [rollerskating] had done, and as croquet also for a while did; or whether it was to take its place permanently among recognised English sports, and so contribute to the formation of English character and English history.”
Just in case the above paragraph does not render you, dear reader, ashiver, Heathcote goes on:
“A vehement controversy had been maintained in the press on the relative merits and demerits of racket and tennis scoring respectively; nor was this the only topic for acrimonious discussion.”
He’s talking about the size and shape of the court, the height of the net, the position of the service line, the question of faults on serves…
“…had been argued at great length and with considerable bitterness, and yet unanimity seemed as hopeless as ever.
A small sub-committee of the AECLTC was formed for the purpose of framing the rules for the 1877 tournament. Step forward Julian Marshall (he of The Annals of Tennis, most of which was being pre-published as articles in The Field during 1876 and 1877), Henry “Cavendish” Jones and CG Heathcote, whose interest in “bigging up” this story might be connected with his role in the controversy’s resolution.
Needless to say, this second committee opted for tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring, although that original publication offers rackets scoring as an alternative method allowed within the rules if the players so choose. A type of hedge that might have graced many a fine field in Wimbledon or St John’s Wood.
All three members of that triumphant sub-committee played a significant role in the 1877 tournament. Henry Jones umpired. Julian Marshall was a losing quarter-finalist, losing to CG Heathcote, who went on to lose his semi-final but was awarded third place on a play-off. The winner of that first championship, Spencer Gore, was a local (Wimbledon) chap; primarily a cricketer and rackets player.
As an aside, the 1878 Wimbledon Championship was also won by a rackets player, Frank Hadow, who defeated Spencer Gore in straight sets in the final. Frank Hadow defeated everyone he played in that championship in straight sets. He also chose not to defend his title, thus becoming the only tennis player in history never to have lost a championship match. When asked to defend his title, Frank Hadow allegedly said:
“No sir. It’s a sissy’s game played with a soft ball.”
I don’t personally agree with Mr Hadow’s disparaging view of lawn tennis; I am merely reporting it to you.
The rules as used for that first Wimbledon Championship in 1877 and the resulting codification, The Laws Of Lawn Tennis, adopted by the MCC (perhaps somewhat grudgingly) and the AECLTC can be found in full in Julian Marshall’s 1879 booklet, Lawn Tennis – here’s the link again. Those rules are remarkably similar to the rules of lawn tennis that remain in use to this day; quite an achievement and perhaps testament to the natural elegance of the tennis scoring system.
Handicapping In Lawn Tennis
By all accounts, in the early days of lawn tennis, the use of handicapping was near-ubiquitous, apart from championship-type matches. Rules 14-22 in the 1879 Lawn Tennis booklet set out the handicapping system for lawn tennis.
Much simpler than that for real tennis – the only cramped odds on offer for handicapping are “half-court” given by the stronger player. Numeric odds on offer are only points given, perhaps enhanced or mitigated by a bisque or two. See part three of this work, Odds Oddities, for more detailed notes on the various cramped-odds and points-based odds used in real tennis.
Note also that rackets-style scoring, offered as an alternative method in rules 24-30 of the Lawn Tennis book of laws, also come with some handicapping (odds) in rules 31 to 33; one or more points given, the privilege of retaining hand-in (serve) two or more successive times and/or half-court.
Lawn tennis odds started to take a shape of their own around 1883, according to CG Heathcote in his 1890 Badminton Library treatise:
…by Mr Henry Jones in a letter to the Field under date July 7, 1883. The bisque, now abolished, was the unit, and all the possible degrees of merit were indicated by classes separated from the other by one bisque. For bisques there have been substituted at first quarters and now sixths of fifteen as the unit, but the general principle will be the same.
Henry “Cavendish” Jones, you might recall, was the geezer who advocated the use of tennis scoring in the Field back in 1876 and who umpired the first Wimbledon Championship. He went on to write his own small treatise on lawn tennis in 1888, which you can read in full on the internet archive, if you wish, by clicking here. But if you simply want to see/read what he was talking about in the matter of handicapping, I have extracted the relevant tables and pages from this public domain work and present them below. You can click through the images to the on-line book and zoom in on the pages that way.
You might want to get out your slide rules and logarithm tables to get your head around those odds.
Seriously, though, two important and influential ideas were introduced into handicapping by Henry Jones’s (or should I say Cavendish’s?) innovations.
Firstly, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds. In other words, the notion that the superior player might start behind love – on minus fifteen or minus thirty instead of, or as well as, the inferior player starting ahead by fifteen, thirty etc. For those of us who play tennis using handicaps today, the notion of owed odds as well as received odds is quite natural, but in the 1880s it was an innovation, at least to the extent that there doesn’t seem to be any documentary evidence of owed odds being used prior to that suggestion.
Secondly, the tabular format for calculating the handicap to be used for lawn tennis is a precursor to the algorithmic method we use today in real tennis.
Even before Cavendish published his own treatise together with the laws and his handicapping methods, his suggested use of owed and received odds had found wide favour in lawn tennis.
James Dwight (he of that primordial American tennis tournament) published his treatise on tennis in 1886 – another book you can simply click through to and read here, on the internet archive. His short basic chapter on odds reproduced below and linked through to the on-line book:
There follows, in the Dwight, a more lengthy exposition about bisques; not only a great deal of thought on when to take them but also some thinking about what their computed value might be, compared with the more regular forms of numeric odds.
Unsurprisingly, the use of bisques was soon superseded by the use of fractions of fifteen; sometimes quarters, sometimes sixths of fifteen. The example below from The Badminton Library Lawn Tennis appendix of 1890.
Despite this added complexity, the use of handicapping in lawn tennis matches was ubiquitous in those early decades of the game’s popularity, used at pretty much every level other than the major tournaments, which (as with real tennis) were played at scratch. Perhaps that complexity did for handicapping in lawn tennis in the end; it is barely used at all in modern tennis; regrettably in my view. Perhaps handicapping will return to regular use in modern (lawn) tennis some day.
Early 20th Century: Yet More Mileage In Handicapping
Eustace Miles, author of the 1903 book Racquets, Tennis & Squash, – click here to read or download the whole thing from the internet archive – was an intriguing character, famous not only for real tennis (1908 Olympic silver medallist, no less) but also for his advocacy of vegetarian and healthy diets, in his capacity as a restaurateur. You can read about him on Wikipedia – click here. (The bit in that piece about him living on two biscuits and a lentil was a standard “Punch gag” about veggies at that time and has no place in a serious article about a chap. Although other facts about him do suggest that he was one of those fellows who was rather asking to be the butt of jokes.)
Received wisdom appears to suggest that he was deemed to have had some odd ideas about many things, including odds, i.e. handicaps.
Miles, for reasons that I cannot fathom, deems “owe” handicapping to be impossible in real tennis:
Handicap by points are simple – they have not yet been brought down to the fineness of Lawn Tennis Handicaps. They still are only – Half-fifteen; Fifteen; Half—thirty ; Thirty ; and so on . One cannot owe Points : the system of Chases makes this impossible.
Those of us who use handicapping regularly know that this assertion about chases negating the use of owed odds is simply untrue. But this does indicate that, twenty or so years after owe handicapping was introduced into lawn tennis, it had not yet found its way into real tennis.
I very much enjoy reading Eustace Miles other ideas on handicapping, some of which I like for their weirdness, but wouldn’t attempt them myself, others (possibly still weird) which I enjoy trying or wouldn’t mind giving a try.
Take his thoughts on Handicap by Implements, for example:
Personally I find a Cricket bat to be the best practice. It develops the wrist and the arm, though it may strain them also. It involves a very accurate timing of the ball, and a very accurate position of the body, and a very full swing. Pettitt is an adept with a small specially-shaped piece of wood: I believe that the original piece of wood was part of a chair. Needless to say, such an implement compels one to be extremely careful. An inch or two of misjudgment, and one’s stroke is a failure . Older players played with some other object, as a soda-water bottle.
Racquets Tennis & Squash by Eustace Miles, pp218-219
Don’t try the ideas from the above paragraph at home, children…nor adults come to that. Miles also elaborates at length on cramped odds in those pages – it is well worth reading through to the end of that chapter on p221.
What I particularly like about Miles’s thinking on handicapping is his desire to encourage good sport and handicaps that help both players to develop their game.
Miles’s suggestive Chapter XLIV on Handicaps and Scoring pp303-306 has a great many ideas, some more practicable and sensible than others. Again it is well worth a read. He believes as a matter of etiquette that players should be prepared to take or give handicaps; he also suggests some subtle cramped-odds type things that the superior player might apply if the opponent stubbornly refuses to accept a handicap.
He advocates moving handicaps – i.e. making the handicap rise or fall as the match progresses. I particularly enjoy using these in friendly matches, especially in circumstances when the algorithmic methods of the modern computerised handicapping system are unlikely to work well enough; often the case in doubles where one player is recovering from injury or where one player is an unknown quantity.
Miles also advocates the use of left-handed play, both for the benefit of players’s bodies and also as a method of handicapping at times. I use this method myself, for the former reason in real tennis and for both reasons when I play lawn tennis with my wife, Janie. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Janie and I also use moving handicaps – owed and received – when we play lawn tennis, to great positive effect.
From The Tables Of The Late 19th Century To 21st Century Algorithmic Handicapping
Actually, the principles involved in the sophisticated lawn-tennis table-based handicapping of the late 19th century are remarkably similar to those we use today in the algorithm-based handicapping system at Real Tennis On-Line through the Tennis & Rackets Association.
On that site, following the centuries-old tradition of placing learned works about tennis on-line, in the public domain for all to see, Roger Pilgrim’s 2010 definitive guide to handicapping explains everything you ever wanted to know about the modern system of handicapping…but were afraid to ask. Click here to read and/or download that definitive piece.
Roger Pilgrim seems to make it his business to avoid being photographed at tennis matches, perhaps because he has no enormous beard or moustache to show off to the camera, unlike the Victorian and Edwardian folk who have mostly populated this piece.
But Roger has graced the tennis court with me, on several occasions. Despite the fact that he is far more experienced and a much better player than I shall ever be, we are able to enjoy playing tennis together through the wonders of the tennis handicapping system.
