The Hon Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane, Vanity Fair, January 1878
Synopsis
In 1872 the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) codified the laws of tennis, unifying the game. When lawn tennis emerged, burgeoning with multiple codes, just a couple of years later, it seemed reasonable that the MCC, which was the guardian of the laws of cricket, rackets and tennis, should take the lead.
That process, which started on the playing field of Lord’s in 1875, and continued in the columns of The Field magazine, is well documented. But what of the people at the heart of that process? Where was the Chair of the MCC Tennis Committee, Spencer Ponsonby, when this story kicked off? Why did Ponsonby reappear nominatively-extended, as Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, when he signed off the Laws of Lawn Tennis in May 1875?
What was tennis’s resulting existential crisis and how did high-falutin’ sporting lawmakers from Lord’s, Prince’s and All England resolve it within a few years? Across the pond in the USA, how did James Dwight change his mind about lawn tennis, having “voted it a fraud” when first he tried it around 1875? And in later years, what did Spencer Ponsonby-Fane do for the enduring benefit of both Lord’s and The Newport Casino (aka The International Tennis Hall Of Fame)?
Laying Down the Laws Before 1875 And All That
The process that led to the unified codification of laws for lawn tennis in the 1870s is well-documented and has been much discussed over the years.
In summary:
In 1872 the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) codified the laws (or rules) of tennis, unifying the game.
Around the same time (late 1860s to early 1870s), lawn tennis emerged, from various games played in gardens, loosely based on other sports and pastimes such as tennis, rackets and badminton. Major Walter Clopton Wingfield was one of those innovators who took his idea further, by patenting, in early 1874:
Sphairistikè or Lawn Tennis: A New and Improved Court for Playing the Ancient Game of Tennis .
Henceforward Major Wingfield’s agents (not he, a gentlemen, engaging in trade, good heavens no) sold boxed sets of his game to the great and the good.
But Major Wingfield was not the only person developing a lawn version of tennis around that time.
In Birmingham and then Leamington, Major ‘Harry’ Gem & his pal, Augurio Perera, developed a lawn game, which they variously named pelota, lawn rackets, and lawn tennis. By late 1874, they had codified and published the rules of their Leamington Club.
The Leamington crowd seemed content to play their game in their own way at their own club without seeking to impose their equipment or rules/laws on others.
But there was an alternative “boxed set” game, named Germains Lawn Tennis, produced by cricket and croquet enthusiast John Hinde Hale, in 1874, in competition with Major Wingfield’s Sphairistikè Lawn Tennis.
Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, a young Harvard graduate, James Dwight, returned in the USA after his post graduating European travels in Europe, in 1874, with a lawn tennis kit.
Dwight almost certainly bought and brought a Wingfield Sphairistikè kit, although contemporary writings were silent on that detail. The booklet presented to Dwight by WW Sherman as a replacement for his lost booklet of rules, now housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard, is unquestionably a first edition Wingfield. Dwight refers to that booklet in the preface of his 1893 book Practical Lawn Tennis.
Subsequently, of his earliest efforts, Dwight wrote:
Mr. F.R. Sears, the elder brother of the champion [Richard Dudley Sears], and I put up the net and tried the game. As we had no lines and as we hit the ball in no particular direction, very naturally we could not return it. So we voted the whole thing a fraud and put it away. Perhaps a month later, finding nothing to do, we tried it again and this time in earnest. I remember even now that each won a game, and as it rained in the afternoon, we played in rubber boots and coats rather than lose a day.
Clearly, despite the soggy nature of that second go, it was enough to inspire Dwight and his friends in Nahant, Massachusetts. They organised a neighbourhood tournament as early as 1876 and then Dwight founded the United States National Lawn Tennis Association in 1881. That year the first US National Singles Championship was held [here], at the Newport Casino.
But let us return to England in late 1874. The new lawn game was burgeoning with multiple codes. Debate about conflicting rules and anomalies was rife; discussion in the pages of The Field was fraught. It seemed reasonable that the MCC, which was the guardian of the laws of cricket, rackets and tennis, should take the lead in helping to unify the laws of this new game, having successfully unified the laws of tennis just a couple of years earlier. Robert Allan “Fitz” Fitzgerald suggested such in a letter to The Field on 28 November 1874:
The 1875
Lo and behold, in the February 1875 edition of The Field, letters from Fitz and John Moyer Heathcote, together with a formal notice from the former, announced an open meeting at Lord’s on 3 March 1875, preceded by, weather permitting, a practical exhibition of the game in its various forms.
Fitz was Secretary of the MCC in the hugely developmental years 1863 to 1876, becoming the first paid Secretary in 1865. In 1872, Fitz led the MCC’s first tour abroad, to North America, which he reported in light-hearted yet excruciating detail in his 1873 book, Wickets In The West.
John Moyer Heathcote was a great amateur tennis player, as well as a member of the MCC . He trained under Edmund Tompkins at the James Street Club from 1856, becoming amateur champion there, an informal competition, around 1859. When the MCC introduced the Gold Racket in 1867, Heathcote won and then held that title until 1882, holding either the gold or silver racquet until 1887.
The 3 March 1875 play-off on the “lawn” that is the Lord’s cricket ground outfield did go ahead; Wingfield’s Sphairistikè and Hales’s Germains Tennis were exhibited and various ideas were debated at length.
For the most part, it was Wingfield’s ideas that prevailed; in particular his distinguishing so-called hour-glass-shaped court.
Both of the box set codes used rackets scoring, as indeed did the (unrepresented) Leamington Club rules. Word is that JM Heathcote advocated a rectangular court and tennis scoring. He was a barrister by profession, but did not prevail when advocating for those matters in 1875. He got his way on those matters soon enough.
Where the real tennis expert Heathcote did prevail is in the manner of the serve and matters of the cloth. The May 1875 MCC Laws of Lawn Tennis that emerged in the aftermath of that March meeting decreed:
Rule 3 …the ball shall drop between the net and the service line of the court diagonally opposed to that from which it was delivered.
Rule 7 …Balls covered with white cloth shall be used in fine weather.
None of the pre-existing codes had regulated the serve as Rule 3 did, and much of the debate had been about the serve. The earlier codes had pretty much been unified in insisting that the serve land between the service line and the back line of the court, rather than between the service line and the net.
In early 1875, the Edinburgh Review had published the first ever journal article on lawn tennis: Lusio Pilaris & Lawn Tennis, anonymously authored by George John Cayley. It’s a fascinating read. Amongst many other things, Cayley fretted, as others had done in the columns of The Field, that big servers were dominating the lawn game. His solution was to have two nets, one high for the serve to go over (essentially mandating a lob or floated serve) and a lower one for all subsequent shots to go over.
What could possibly have gone wrong with that set up?
The May 1875 MCC solution to the serve problem is much neater than Cayley’s and largely survives to this day, as does the idea of cloth-covered balls.
The scoring system, which JM Heathcote described in his February 1875 letter to The Field as…
…the rather anomalous mode of scoring…only when hand-in (borrowed from racquets and Eton fives)…
…remained unchanged by the MCC in its initial, May 1875, published Laws of Lawn Tennis. But that important debate did not go away and we shall return to it later, as indeed did the lawn tennis powers in the late 1870s.
All this has been well documented elsewhere; there are copious references linked in the on-line paper. I hope the above summary is suitably neat.
Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane
Strangely, one central character from the 1870s story of the laws of tennis codification, real and lawn, is rarely mentioned in its context. The Chair of the MCC’s Tennis Committee; Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane.
Now there’s a name to get your mouth around. I must admit, as an occasional comedy writer as well as an occasional historian, that I don’t think I could make up a better, fictional-comedic name for a 19th century MCC grandee.
Better yet, Spencer Ponsonby is a fascinating character whose influence has almost certainly been understated by past historians, possibly because his methods of influence tended to be low key.
Spencer Ponsonby was born in 1824, the sixth son of John Ponsonby, the 4th Earl of Bessborough. Spencer was the tenth of fourteen children, born and raised in their home, 3 Cavendish Square. He was probably home educated and joined the Foreign Office at the age of 16, where he had a distinguished career for the next 17 years.
Spencer was close to his older brother Frederick, who went on to be the 6th Earl of Bessborough. Those two brothers, along with several others, founded I Zingari in 1845, an early example of a peripatetic cricket club, with strong links into the MCC, which was highly influential in the development of cricket in the mid 19th century. I Zingari effectively invented “jazz-hat cricket” several decades before jazz emerged.
They were also keen amateur dramatics folk; Frederick and Spencer also founded The Old Stagers in 1842, which had close links with Kent County Cricket Club and I Zingari, playing a central part in Canterbury Cricket Week for more than half-a-century.
Spencer served on the MCC Committee 1866-68, 1870-73, and 1875-78; then was Treasurer from 1879 until his death in 1916.
So where was Spencer Ponsonby when the hoo-ha about the laws of lawn tennis kicked off in late 1874? He was clearly on a rule-based break from the main MCC committee at that time and it seems that the MCC Tennis committee was still somewhat of an ad hoc affair. The earliest Tennis Committee minute book starts in late 1875, with the 1872 laws of tennis and 1875 laws of lawn tennis inserted at the front.
But there’s his name, on the Laws of Lawn Tennis published in The Field in late May 1875: Spencer Ponsonby Fane.
But wait! On the 1872 Laws Of Tennis, his name is Spencer Ponsonby. Now it is Spencer Ponsonby Fane How did Ponsonby-Fane gain his extra name?
The simple answer to that puzzle is interesting and easy enough to find, but some of the stories behind that simple answer are fascinating history and inform our story about this man.
The simple answer: Lady Cecily Jane Georgiana Fane, died in December 1874 leaving her estates, including a beautiful but crumbling ruin near Yeovil in Somerset, Brympton d’Evercy, to her nephew and godson, Spencer Ponsonby, on condition that he adopt the name Fane.
Before progressing Spencer’s story, let’s briefly wallow in Georgiana Fane’s biggest claim to fame; that she was romantically connected with The Duke of Wellington. Subsequently, after the Duke gave Georgiana the boot, she stalked Wellington in increasingly dotty ways. I have linked to two juicy accounts of this story in the on-line version of this paper.
Georgiana Fane Stalking Wellington 21 Jul 2002, Sun Sunday Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Parenthetically, I feel bound to point out that Lady Georgiana Fane was not Ponsonby’s only eccentric aunt who had been romantically linked with Napoleonic era superstars, including The Duke of Wellington himself. Lady Caroline Lamb, nee Ponsonby, was John Ponsonby (Spencer’s dad’s) sister. Lady Caroline Lamb famously described Lord Byron, with whom she had a tempestuous affair, as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. In her distress at the demise of her Byron affair, in 1815, it is widely believed that she had an affair with the Duke of Wellington, who, in any event, publicly comforted Caroline Lamb around that time.
The Duke of Wellington was, by repute, a keen tennis player. He accepted an invitation to become a member of the James Street Tennis Club in 1820, although it is not known whether he ever played there. Around the same time, the Duke built his own tennis court at his stately home, Stratfield Saye, near Reading. The Duke famously played tennis with Prince Albert there.
Anyway, as Oscar Wilde might have said in the context of Spencer Ponsonby’s aunts:
To have one eccentric aunt have a notorious affair with The Duke of Wellington may be regarded as misfortune, to have two looks like carelessness.
Let us return to the tennis turmoil of winter 1874/1875 and the spring of 1875. Ponsonby family legend, recorded in Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane’s writings on Brympton d’Evercy and elsewhere, suggests that Spencer & Frederick were in Ireland, “avoiding a subpoena”, when world reached them of Lady Georgiana’s demise and Spencer’s inheritance. The legend also suggests that the brothers played cards for the inheritance of that pile, which they envisaged as a liability more than an asset, and that Spencer lost.
I find the scandal element of that legend largely implausible. Both Frederick and Spencer were senior figures in society by late 1874, 60 and 50 years old respectively. Both went on to giddier heights as grandees in the ensuing years, which genuine scandal would most likely have snuffed out.
Further, I cannot find anything at all in the late 1874 or early 1875 press to suggest genuine difficulties for either of those Ponsonby brothers. More likely, the legend emerged from tongue-in-cheek scandal.
Around that time, Frederick Ponsonby was mentioned several times as an informant, in Charles Greville‘s sensational memoirs, which were posthumously published in late 1874.
It was that winter’s “big thing” in the press, as senior figures from the early 19th century, not least King George IV and the Duke of Wellington, were rubbished in those memoirs.
It is believed that Charles Greville especially wanted to stick the boot into Wellington, because Wellington’s affair with Greville’s mother had traumatised Greville’s immediate family.
Wellington really did have a lot to answer for in polite society.
In the mid to late 19th century, criticising recently dead monarchs and war heroes was an outrageous thing to do, which explains why Charles Greville directed that his memoirs be kept under wraps until several years after his death.
The Daily Telegraph vented its utter outrage at Greville’s memoirs being published…by serialising extracts from them. Nothing much changes in 150 years! Here is one mentioning Frederick Ponsonby in late October 1874:
Frederick Ponsonby Mention In Charles Greville’s Memoires, October 1874 26 Oct 1874, Mon The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Here’s another extract from Greville’s diaries in a newspaper, this time from The New York Daily Herald, 13 December 1874. This sales-generating gossip column no doubt played some small part in funding the building of James Gordon Bennett Jr’s Newport Casino. As we Londoner’s say when flabbergasted…Gordon Bennett!
Another Frederick Ponsonby Mention in A Greville Extract 13 Dec 1874, Sun New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) Newspapers.com
In truth, Charles Greville must have been talking about “our” Spencer and Frederick’s uncle, Major-General Frederick Ponsonby, who had fought with heroic distinction in many Napoleonic period battles, not least Waterloo.
But Charles Greville had been a cricketer of some distinction and was an MCC man, so the brothers Frederick and Spencer would doubtless have known him and many people might have supposed that the Frederick in question was the I Zingari fella.
In reality, “our” Frederick Ponsonby was therefore more likely to have been avoiding a tongue-in-cheek, faux subpoena, with regard to the Greville memoirs sensation, than at risk of a real subpoena.
The brothers might have discussed at length, the financial commitment of taking up the inheritance from Georgiana Fane. Frederick was in commerce, a senior figure in the railways. He was unmarried, childless and was next in line for the Earldom. Spencer was a senior civil servant – Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office…don’t ask – with a wife and eleven children. Frederick would almost certainly have been in a much better financial position to take on the crumbling Brympton d’Evercy estate.
But the notion that the brothers “played cards for the inheritance and Spencer lost” must be a family in-joke or turn of phrase. I took the trouble to acquire a copy of Georgiana Fane’s will from the Probate Office archive; her will steps that inheritance through several other family members if Spencer fails to take it up, but Frederick Ponsonby isn’t one of those named.
The Western Gazette reported Georgiana Fane’s death and funeral. It mistakenly thought that Spencer was called Stephen in the 11 December 1874 obituary:
Obituary for LADY Fane 11 Dec 1874, Fri Western Gazette (Yeovil, Somerset, England) Newspapers.com
Obituary Part Two 11 Dec 1874, Fri Western Gazette (Yeovil, Somerset, England) Newspapers.com
Spencer, properly named a week later, was reportedly at Georgiana Fane’s funeral, as was kid brother George, whereas Frederick was not:
Georgiana Fane Funeral reported 18 December 1874, presumably 11 December 1874 18 Dec 1874, Fri Western Gazette (Yeovil, Somerset, England) Newspapers.com
Many papers reported the will and bequests in some detail.
Will & Bequests Georgiana Fane 23 Jan 1875, Sat Liverpool Daily Post (Liverpool, Merseyside, England) Newspapers.com
Spencer went about the business of changing his name by Royal Licence pretty quickly. Georgiana Fane’s will was proved on 26 December 1874 – the date being an interesting fact in itself, as Boxing Day had become a statutory holiday in 1871.
Someone was working in the Probate Office despite it being a public holiday that day. Just imagine. Anyway, just a few weeks later, according to the Index of Name Changes:
Ponsonby-Fane : Ponsonby, S. C. B. 5 Feb., 1875 (547).
Clearly Georgiana Fane’s estate was a problematic one. Spencer Ponsonby-Fane sought redress through the Court of Chancery against his cousin/executors. Here is a summary of Spencer’s letter to his cousin William Dashwood Fane on 20 February 1875:
The Chancery suit for permission to sell Nassington and the heirlooms moves so slowly that he sees no possibility of giving him a positive answer as to Brympton before the time Fane needs to give notice to his present landlord. Therefore he must abandon the hope of having him as tenant. Will try to live there in a hugger mugger way for a couple of months, and let it for hunting in the winter.
William Dashwood Fane was a barrister of some repute; it would have taken some guts for Spencer to make an adversarial challenge to that executor in court. But more likely, the suit was a collaborative effort to have the court determine potentially contentious elements of the distribution.
Here is an extract from the Lincolnshire archive with regard to the court petition itself, in March 1875:
Bill of complaint in Chancery
The Hon. Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby Fane plt. v. William Dashwood Fane and Charles Fane, defendantsLady Georgiana Fane died possessed of an estate at Brympton, Som. (1235 ac.), annual rental about 23,000; of an estate at Nassington, Northants. (54lac.), annual rental about £900, and an estate in Prince Edward Island; and of personal estate worth £16,363.16.6, with plate and jewelry bequeathed as heirlooms or specifically bequeathed worth £12,121. The Brympton and Nassington estates are subject to mortgages for the principal sums of £32,076 and £18,111.8s. respectively, and the annual interest amounts to £1303.8s. and £765.11.4. The Brympton mansion, being on a large scale can only be kept up at considerable expense. The beneficiaries under the will have therefore presented a petition to Chancery for selling the Nassington estate and applying the proceeds of sale in discharge of the incumbrances on the Brympton estate. Expedient also to sell the plate and jewelry settled as heirlooms to help discharge mortgage debt and enable plaintiff to reside at Brympton.
Difficulty of defendants in selecting from testatrix’s jewelry in order to carry out bequest to earls of Westmorland. Difficulty in deciding which of the diamonds shall be considered heirlooms.
The plaintiff prays that the trusts of the will and codicil may be carried into execution and her estate administered under the direction of the Court.
Families, eh?
Still, none of this stopped Spencer Ponsonby-Fane from being re-elected to the MCC Committee in May 1875 and signing off the Laws of Lawn Tennis that month. But his inheritance of Brympton d’Evercy was, by all accounts, life-changing for Spencer Ponsonby-Fane. He made it his life’s work for the remaining 40 years of his life to turn that place into a cricket festival idyll, with apparent sustained success.
After May 1875…
The 1875 MCC Laws of Lawn Tennis did not eliminate debate in the pages of the Field. In the very next issue, June 1875, Henry “Cavendish” Jones requested several points of clarification, while applauding the issuance of unifying laws. Interestingly, Cavendish’s June 1875 piece is shown under the “Tennis” heading in The Field. Previous lawn tennis listings, including the publication of the May 1875 laws, were shown under Pastimes.
Dr Henry “Cavendish” Jones was a doyen of whist and croquet; a founder of the All England Club, an early enthusiastic experimenter with the new game of lawn tennis and a lover of rules.
In September 1875, Cavendish lamented the idea of Prince’s Club setting up a rival code to the MCC’s unifying code, while suggesting a few matters for further discussion and possible revision.
Cavendish was not the only correspondent in The Field to talk about lawn tennis, but he was the most persistent one. In June 1876 he raised, head on, the question of the scoring system. A lengthy piece, Cavendish cuts to the chase in the first sentence:
Sir, I have lately been scoring the strokes at lawn tennis in the same way that they are scored at real tennis, and I think this so great an improvement to the game that I write to advocate its general adoption, and with the hope, if this plan finds general favour, that it may be placed as an alternative method of scoring in the MCC rules should they be revised.
Parenthetically, I think this June 1876 letter is the first published use of the term “real tennis” to distinguish the original game from lawn, although Heathcote describes lawn as “no bad substitute for the real game” in his letter of March 1875.
Several of the suggestions from Cavendish and others, published in The Field between June 1875 and June 1876 were taken into account in the minor revisions of the Laws of Lawn tennis published by the MCC in August 1876…
…but not the one about the scoring system, which remained relentlessly rackets/badminton style in that version.
The Tennis Committee Minute Book suggests that the 1876 revisions were approved before Cavendish’s letter of June 1876 was published.
Here, for the record, is a table of the dates, locations and attendees of the minuted meetings 1875 and 1876:
| Date | Location | Attendees |
| 27 August 1875 | Lord’s Pavilion | T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald, Hon E Chandos Leigh, Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, W H Dyke, Hon CG Lyttleton, CE Boyle, GB Crawley |
| 5 November 1875 | Lord Chamberlain’s Office | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, CE Boyle, T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald |
| 11 November 1875 | 22 Portland Place | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald |
| 1 February 1876 “5” | 22 Portland Place | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald |
| 7 February 1876 | Lord Chamberlain’s Office | T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald, Hon E Chandos Leigh, Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, Sir W H Dyke, GB Crawley |
| 6 March 1876 | St James’s Palace | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, GB Crawley (Rule changes to 1872 Tennis Laws) |
| 4 April 1876 | Lord’s Cricket Ground | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane alone attended. |
| 4 May 1876 | Lord Chamberlain’s Office | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, CE Boyle, T Burgoyne, RA Fitzgerald |
| 1 June 1876 | Lord’s Cricket Ground | Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, JM Heathcote, T Burgoyne, H Perkins |
The only person who attended all meetings was Spencer Ponsonby Fane – even if we exclude the April 1876 meeting that he minuted attending alone.
A sad MCC note at the end of that list is the replacement of RA Fitzgerald with Henry Perkins in mid 1876. Fitz had been “asked to resign” due to ill health, believed to be neurosyphilis.
There’s then a break in the minutes for more than 10 months, until a hugely significant meeting at St James’s Palace on 23 April 1877:
23 April 1877 St James’s Palace.
Hon S Ponsonby-Fane, Sir WH Dyke, JM Heathcote, T Burgoyne.
At the request of the committee, Mr Julian Marshall was also present.
It was reported that JM Heathcote had retained possession, unchallenged, of the Gold Tennis Prize. and tat Mr RD [Russell Donnithorne] Walker had won the Silver Prize for 1876.
A proposal to employ Gray, the Harrow Racquets marker, during the season, was considered but postponed.
Sir William Dyke moved & Mr Heathcote seconded the following resolution: That the present Tennis Court is insufficient to meet the large amount of play, and the demand of members for the court, and that the Tennis Committee call the attention of the Committee of MCC to the receipts of providing another court, if possible, with as little delay as possible, to meet the requirements of the members.
Mr Heathcote called attention to the correspondence in The Field with regard to the Laws of Lawn Tennis & expressed an opinion that the time had arrived for altering and amending them.
The subject was discussed at some length and adjourned.
It was proposed that Mr Julian Marshall be elected to the Tennis Committee.
This April 1877 minute is, I believe, illuminating in many ways. Interesting to see the tennis Silver Racket won by one of the great cricketing Walker Brothers of Southgate, who founded Middlesex County Cricket Club and governed it for the rest of the 19th century and a bit beyond.
For most of the 1870s, Middlesex CCC played most of its cricket at Prince’s Club, in Knightsbridge, which was in its pomp at that time. In 1877, Middlesex CCC switched to Lord’s. Whether this switch was due to Prince’s locational vulnerability in Knightsbridge, or was part of the cause of that vulnerability, is unknown and probably unknowable.
At Lord’s itself, this April 1877 minute indicates that there was a change of influence, to which Spencer Ponsonby-Fane was party, if not the direct cause. Rackets was falling from favour and tennis was in the ascendancy.
Of course, the proposal to build a second tennis court at Lord’s continues to bounce around, even to this day. But co-opting Julian Marshall onto the MCC tennis committee was a masterstroke. By April 1877, The Field was well into its serialisation of Marshall’s Annals of Tennis. He was also on the All England committee, which must have been well into the planning stage of the first Wimbledon tournament by April 1877.
This leads me to contend that the prevailing view, that the All England tournament pioneers dragged the MCC reluctantly into accepting tennis scoring rather than rackets scoring for lawn tennis by unilaterally applying tennis scoring to the 1877 Wimbledon tournament, is a misreading of events.
CG Heathcote’s telling of the story in The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes (1st edition published 1890) is melodramatic in style and, to my mind, tongue-in-cheek. He describes the debates about the shape of the court and the scoring system as an existential crisis…
…”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…
…Compared, indeed, with the M.C.C. code, the new rules might appear revolutionary…”
While CG Heathcote described the idea of a rectangular court and tennis scoring as “revolutionary”, his brother, JM Heathcote, had advocated precisely those things at the March 1875 open meeting at Lord’s. Cavendish was not a member of the MCC, but Julian Marshall was. After adding Julian Marshall to the MCC Tennis Committee, there was a clear groundswell on the MCC sub-committee to adopt the ideas that the AEC<C was about to put forward for its 1877 competition, and the rest, as they say, was history.
In 1877, the MCC would not have looked on the All England in Wimbledon as being a competitor with the MCC at Lord’s. Further, the All England, at least as represented by Cavendish in the pages of The Field, seemed keen to ensure that there was a single code of lawn tennis and wanted the MCC to be the guardian of that code.
From an MCC perspective, I suggest that only Prince’s Club will have been seen as a threat to Lord’s in the 1870s. Prince’s, with its high-falutin’ membership list, its Turkish Bath, multiple rackets courts, two tennis courts, two lawn tennis courts and a cricket pitch, located in increasingly fashionable Knightsbridge. Prince’s, in its pomp at the time, seemed willing, perhaps even keen, to apply its own codes to sports and pastimes where it chose to differ from the MCC code. Prince’s appears to have been arguing strongly for rectangular courts and net heights of its own liking, but not for a switch away from rackets scoring.
My contention is that lawn tennis’s switch from rackets scoring to tennis scoring for lawn tennis was a collaborative effort between the doyens of the MCC and the doyens of the AEC<C between the summer of 1876 and the spring of 1877. Such a collaborative, strategic manoeuvre has the hallmarks and fingerprints of genial autocrats such as Spencer Ponsonby-Fane and (possibly) the new MCC Secretary Henry Perkins, as well as advocates of the new game such as Cavendish, Julian Marshall and the Heathcote brothers.
The closing stages of that first Wimbledon tournament of 1877 was a bit of a family affair. Among the six quarter-finalists (don’t ask):
- Julian Marshall himself was one of them, losing to…
- …Charles Gilbert Heathcote himself, who lost his semi-final to the eventual champion.
- William Marshall was Julian Marshall’s cousin – William won his quarter final then got a bye to the final where he lost to…
- Spencer Gore, the inaugural Wimbledon Champion, who was, it transpires, a nephew of the Hon Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane.
After the dust settled, in 1879, Julian Marshall published a small book
Lawn Tennis & Badminton, With The Laws Adopted By The MCC and The AEC<C, by Julian Marshall, 1879
The laws are quoted verbatim with permission. Laws 1 to 23 specify tennis scoring. Laws 24 to 30 set out an alternative permitted method of scoring – our old friend rackets/badminton first to 15 hand-in points. A very MCC-style compromise. But tennis scoring was bound to prevail quite rapidly, and so it did.
Spencer Ponsonby-Fane’s Later Years & Influence
In 1879, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane became the Treasurer of the MCC and remained so until his death in 1915. He was honoured with laying the first stone of the iconic Lord’s Pavilion in 1889.
Spencer Ponsonby-Fane remained Comptroller of The Lord Chamberlain’s Office until 1901 and remained the Governor of I Zingari until his death in 1915, despite having found a “spiritual home” for his style of festival cricket at Brympton d’Evercy in Somerset. He also chaired Somerset County Cricket Club in his dotage.
But perhaps Spencer Ponsonby-Fane’s most lasting contribution to the MCC and Lord’s was his championing of the MCC Collection, now the MCC Museum, Library and Archive. In particular during his several decades as Treasurer, the collection progressed from a casual assortment of items arising from a vague invitation to members to donate stuff (c1864) to a formal collection of art works, artefacts and books.
In his own words from the introduction to the 1912 MCC Catalogue:
I am indebted to SPF for the facilities that made it possible for me to research this piece, almost to the extent that I am indebted to the people listed below who helped me in various ways to research and produce it.
It seems more than fitting for me to be talking about SPF at Newport, where Tennis’s International Hall of Fame is located. SPF’s vision around curating the art and history of the game of cricket has been transplanted into many other sports, not least tennis, here in Newport.
I’m not convinced that SPF cared all that much for lawn tennis. Late in life, in 1901, SPF wrote a whimsical booklet for the Railway Passengers Assurance Company to help them promote their accident insurance policies, which they were promoting to sports and pastime enthusiasts.
Here’s what he says about cricket:
And here’s what he says about lawn tennis:
Indeed, while preparing this piece I have oft wondered about the extent to which SPF was an enthusiast of and/or a fine player of real tennis. After all, cricket really was his main thing and he was certainly seen as a fine amateur cricketer. But SPF was past his prime by the time we get any documented records of tennis competitions.
The evidence is purely circumstantial. He remained Chair of the MCC Tennis Committee, certainly until 1895 and possibly his death. (The Tennis Committee minute books between 1895 and 1925 are missing). That role might have been by dint of rackets as much as, or more than, tennis, but I doubt it. In his late dotage, SPF was President of the Royal Tennis Court, Hampton Court, for nearly 20 years, 1896 to 1915. An unlikely honour in the absence of some real tennis pedigree. I mean real, real tennis pedigree.
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to Alan Rees in the MCC Library, who has been incredibly helpful and patient with me. Thanks also to Alastair Robson, Nigel à Brassard, Tony Friend, David Best and others for helpful ideas, materials and encouragement.
Especial gratitude to Janie, for tolerating me while I spend many hours researching, writing about and paying more attention to dead sporty-folk, than I do to her. Bad form is temporary, class is permanent.
Further Reading & References
MCC: More Than A Cricket Club, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2020
The Birth of Lawn Tennis: From The Origins Of The Game To The First Championship At Wimbledon, Robert T Everitt and Richard A Hillway, Vision Sports Publishing, (updated edition), 2024
Sport and the Making of Britain (International Studies in the History of Sport), Derek Birley, Manchester University Press, 1993
The Game Of Sphairistikè or Lawn Tennis, A Facsimile Of the Original (1874) Rules Of Tennis, Walter Wingfield, Wimbledon Society Museum Press
Really Ancient History (On-Line Forum “Classic Racquet Talk”)
Lawn Tennis, James Dwight, Wright & Ditson, 1886
Practical Lawn Tennis, James Dwight, Harper & Brothers, 1893
Lawn Tennis: Its Past, Present, & Future, J Parmly Paret, The MacMillan Company (New York), 1904
Wickets in the West: or The Twelve in America, Robert Allan Fitzgerald, Tinsley Brothers, 1873
Lusio Pilaris & Lawn Tennis, The Edinburgh Review 1875-01: Vol 141 Iss 287, pp52-88
The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes Tennis: Lawn Tennis: Rackets: Fives, Longmans, 1890
Rackets, Squash Rackets, Tennis, Fives & Badminton, Lord Aberdare (ed), Lonsdale Library Volume XVI, Seeley Service & Co, 1951
The Harry Gem Project: https://theharrygemproject.co.uk/ . In particular, the article “Early Lawn Tennis”: https://theharrygemproject.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Early-Lawn-Tennis-Print.pdf
Spencer Ponsonby-Fane Wikipedia Entry.
Wellington’s Places: Stratfield Saye (AgeofReveolution.org).
Brympton d’Evercy, Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane, English Life Publications Ltd, 1976 (1980).
The Annals Of Tennis, Julian Marshall, “The Field” Office, 1878
Lawn Tennis & Badminton, With The Laws Adopted By The MCC and The AEC<C, by Julian Marshall, 1879
