Reigate Priory Lawn Tennis Club
This one is particularly for family and friends. Nostalgia can be a cruel thing if mishandled - so let’s shove this in the box labelled ‘Enlightening accounts for ancestors, future historians and anthropologists’.
Our loft is a little clearer since stashing Christmas decorations and filling a few boxes for recycling to create more space. Various things came to light during that process and this post will share particular finds I made.
Reigate Priory Lawn Tennis Club survives today and backs up its physical presence of grass and clay courts with social media and a website. Over fifty-five years ago it was a hub around which a huge part of my life revolved.
I have nothing but great joy when thinking of those days. No regrets as to how I spent long hours of the day - even if those in highest summer might have necessitated the removal of just one basal cell carcinoma to date.
Scans on this page will ‘click’ open for easier reading.
Thanks to my father for his zealous - almost religious - snipping of anything from the world of print. He also had many more cuttings which had nothing to do with me or the rest of the family!
These record just two of the days from my own experience of tennis at the club in the town where I grew up.
As you see, the Surrey Mirror and County Post hadn’t gone digital when I was a teenager!
I failed to make it a hat-trick of victories before joining the senior ranks. So my 1968 Boys’ Singles win was my last as a junior. At the disco put on after that for all junior club members I claimed one more prize. Before the night ended I was entangled in my first prolonged and undeniably juicy kiss. Whatever the word might have come to mean now, at the time this was a momentously delicious ‘snog’. I remain in contact with that once very willing participant to this day. No tongues are now involved!
And I must resolutely refute the suggestion that my continued romantic exploits distracted me enough to prevent that hat-trick of wins. Yes - resolutely.
Winning the Senior Handicap Singles aged fifteen was quite an achievement. I was given a generously advantageous handicap but still had to overcome the feeling that I didn’t really belong in such company. Mind you, the committee had already voted that I was good enough to be invited to play with senior members. But the major factor had to be their recommendation that I be sent to Bisham Abbey for a week of coaching in August. This was when the site was in its infancy and before it became the full-blown National Sports Centre of today. Still important enough then for the LTA to employ the services of John Barrett. You might know him as a long-serving commentator for the BBC. Or maybe as one of only two couples to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame along with his wife Angela Mortimer - and in the fine company of Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi.
Apart from being taken to the Abbey’s hospitality bar by some older lads for my first under-age beer most of the time was spent on tennis courts where John Barrett took us through gruelling but effective sessions of Harry Hopman style ‘pressure tennis’ involving two-against-one play.
Effective enough to see me return to home courts in Reigate at the end of the month playing what I can only describe as shit-hot and, as it transpired, unbeatable tennis.
A club rule book from the late 1960s gives a distinct whiff of other times and membership fees which might have you searching for modern-day equivalent costs. A long day at the club would conjure up most people’s idea of the epitome of ‘Englishness’. Cucumber sandwiches were definitely a regular feature of the afternoon teas. And, please remember, this is a time when a Snickers bar is still called a Marathon. Oh - and Great Britain is still winning the Eurovision Song Contest!
Senior members are mentioned in the newspaper cuttings here. I remember them all. Masters from my school were there - I had to beat at least one to get to that handicap final. Marjorie Smith was club secretary at the time. She seemed ever-present for the juniors and kept us in order with a mix of stern reminders of the rules and mother hen clucks of encouragement.
I don’t think we stretched the rules too far. I managed to find a bird’s egg in long grass outside the fencing while looking for a stray ball. I threw the egg back onto court first where an eager junior girl attempted to catch it. A rotten egg. I remember much disgust over the chemistry lab stink but no further fallout - I reckon we conspired to cover up as best as we could.
Perhaps I toed the line for the most part but I still remember a host of indulgent senior members who were keen to accommodate and encourage me and the rest of the junior membership.
Local celebrities included Cliff Michelmore and his wife, Jean Metcalfe and almost opposite our family home lived the Farthings. Father, Donald, was ‘Mr Blossom’ who wrote a gardening piece in the Daily Express every weekend. Gillian, his wife, played regularly at the club. We juniors were polite about her generous physical proportions but I’m afraid we lost it big-time when she fell backwards over a bench one day. The resultant broad display of her white ‘bloomers’ might have been a reminder of her links to the world of horticulture but they were the source of instantly lowered standards and much guffawing among the youngsters.
My Mum was also a member. The courts didn’t distract her as much as me but she was still a fine club player. In my last year as a Junior she won tickets in the club’s ballot for Wimbledon. For the 1969 Gentlemen’s Singles semi-finals. Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver, Tony Roche and John Newcombe - “He can put his Dunlop Green Flash under my bed any day!” (that’s enough, thank you, Mum) - were my introduction to Centre Court and professional (Open) tennis. Among all the swirl of impressions from that day, my abiding image is of Fred Stolle out on a practice court. Asking for a high ball to be sent up he rose like a free-range giraffe and smashed it into oblivion. A perfect example of the power and majesty of a game played at the top level.
Those were heady days for me. I was not too pushy a teenager. Not so sure of myself as I sometimes affected to be. But, on the court I started to explore the endeavour towards competitive excellence which I continued only a little in other aspects of life but never expressed so eagerly as I have in playing tennis. As I write this I realise that I can apply a reasonably healthy perspective to that period of my life. This was a time which I will never get back. But any ‘cruel’ nostalgia disappears. The joy of tennis deeply embedded in the flush of youth was so rich and rewarding that I have no regrets about simply being able to preserve the memories.
Maybe the club have photos from that era. All I can offer is me in my school team photo. All the other boys were older than me but I held my own in most matches.
Stephen Habgood, who I beat in the 1967 final, is front row left. Next to him is Graham Mason with Steve Smith one further away. I’m just behind Steve, with my round-shoulders and a Beatle-cut, top right! All four of us were RPLTC junior club members. Goodness knows how many times we must have played each other.
Tennis followed me through university and adult life right up to bowing out due to the very real messages from a body which offered enough restricted movement and pain to override any enjoyment.
I have spared you much detail. Both to protect the innocent and fend off the litigious. Any survivors from the period I describe will be able to add their own memories. Present day membership are, of course, making their own.
I trust they are also looking after the young membership as well as they cared for my generation.
I can’t resist one more recollection. The racquet which accompanied me on most of my early tennis ‘journey’. A Pinterest image, I’m afraid. Lack of sentiment means that my original doesn’t survive - even in our loft.
