A.E. Crawley’s brother, Walter, also a tennis dude.
During the lockdown of 2020 I wrote several pieces on tennis history, starting with a piece pondering the origins of the tennis scoring system.
My research into tennis history has broadened and deepened since the summer of 2020. This week (mid-March 2024) I was burrowing through some old books in the MCC library, like I do, when I discovered an extract from and reference to an article in The Observer, in 1920, by A.E. Crawley, on this very topic.
The content and conclusions were remarkably similar to those I formed myself, over 100 years later.
Being a subscriber to Newspapers.com, I knew that I should be able to find and clip that article easily enough – indeed here it is:
A.E. Crawley Origins Of Scoring System Observer 18 January 1920 18 Jan 1920, Sun The Observer (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
I don’t know whether to be delighted that I reached very similar conclusions without standing on the shoulders of such a giant…or to be irritated that I did all of that research only to reach conclusions that had pretty much been reached 100 years ago. Mostly the former, especially as I enjoyed the journey so much.
The residual irritation is that the Wikipedia entry on this topic persists with the temporally nonsensical theories around floor markings (never standardised) and clock faces (unknown until long after the emergence of the tennis scoring system).
Someone needs to get busy on that Wikipedia page. I might ask Ged look at it if no-one else picks up on this in the coming weeks.
Parenthetically, it seems to me that A.E. Crawley had a particular reason to raise this topic in The Observer in January 1920. Here, his piece from the same newspaper in February 1920 about a “Bolshevik” move by the US lawn tennis authorities to replace the use of fifteens with single unit scoring:
A.E. Crawley Bolshevistic Scoring Observer 15 Feb 1920, Sun The Observer (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
A radical change that would indeed have been.
A la paulme que maintenant
J’ay quarante cinq; sur bon gage
Nous jouons, non pas por neant.
Assez me sens fort et puissant
De garder mon jeu jusqu’a cy,
Ne je ne crains riens que Soussy.”