“More exciting than curate’s croquet” — reconstructing the origins of South Africa’s lawn tennis tradition, 1860–1900

ABSTRACT
During 2023, South Africa marked 120 years of organised tennis on a national basis. Over this period, a number of players of both sexes achieved international fame on a number of iconic courts in a range of competitions. In the recent past, the national honours list which for more than a century only reflected the achievements of people of white and European descent, witnessed the addition of the names of a number of black achievers. This notwithstanding, the real origins of the South African lawn tennis tradition remain largely unknown and the cause of speculation. This article, using a range of contemporary historical newspaper archives, provides a new reconstruction of the origins and development of tennis within both the white and black communities in the period before the Second Anglo-Boer War (South African War).
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