Known as the ‘father’ of lawn tennis, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield did more than anyone else to establish and codify the modern game. For the last ten years of his life his London home was on a corner of St George’s Square, Pimlico, at number 33 – part of a stuccoed terrace built in about 1850 by Thomas Cubitt.

MILITARY CAREER

Born in Wales in 1833, Wingfield went to Sandhurst Royal Military College in 1851, and was commissioned in the 1st Dragoon Guards as a junior officer. He served at home and then, from January 1858, in India during the Indian Rebellion (Mutiny). Stationed in the south in Bangalore, he was not involved in the fighting. However, he saw badminton being played, and was married there in November 1858, to Alice Lydia Cleveland, daughter of Major General John Wheeler Cleveland the commander of Indian Army forces in Mysore. 

In 1860, at the rank of captain, Wingfield was in China during the Second Opium War including at the capture of the Taku Forts and Peking (now Beijing). He returned to England in 1861 and, in the following year, retired from the regular army. In 1864, he joined a volunteer regiment, the Montgomeryshire Yeomanry Cavalry, in which he became a major in 1874. He moved from Wales to London in 1867 and in 1870 he was appointed by Queen Victoria to her ceremonial bodyguard, the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms.

The Father of Tennis

Wingfield is best known as an amateur inventor and for patenting the game of lawn tennis in 1874. Its basic principles were not new, but it was he who had the idea of formalising rules and standardising a tennis set that included racquets, balls, posts and a net. Inspired by a Greek word pertaining to ball-games, Wingfield called the sets ‘Sphairistike’ – a name which never caught on.

The sets were sold at five guineas a throw by Messrs French & Co at nearby 46 Churton Street, off Belgrave Street. Lawn tennis quickly became a very popular and sociable open-air pursuit for the middle classes. By 1877, the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon had added lawn tennis to its title, and many croquet lawns were turned into tennis courts. Four years later, the Daily Telegraph acknowledged Wingfield’s achievement in a special editorial:

The right medium has exactly been discovered between scientific skill and social amusement, and it would not be too much to say … that life has, on the whole been made pleasanter by lawn tennis and all that follows in its train.

However, the game developed rapidly from Major Wingfield’s original rules, which envisaged an hour-glass shaped court and a higher net than modern players would recognise. Later in life, Wingfield tried (and failed) to repeat his success by developing group bicycle-riding in time to martial music, as described in his book Bicycle Gymkhana and Musical Rides (1897).

Wingfield lived at number 33 St George’s Square for the last ten years of his life; it was here, too, that he died in 1912 at the age of 78.