‘Sandwich-Men Parade the Streets’: Conceptualizing Regionalism and the North-South Divide in British Lawn Tennis

Abstract

The bulk of tennis historiography has tended to project a Southern-centric image of the sport, through descriptions of its clubs and tournaments, its players, and associations. Both the Lawn Tennis Association and the Wimbledon Championships began and have remained bastions of Southern hegemony, but there existed (and continues to exist) a large and active ‘tennis culture’ in the North that has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to critically explore the notion of a north-south divide in tennis, commencing from the late nineteenth century to the early post-war period. Comparing both northern and southern regions, including Scotland and Wales, it focuses on the emergence of clubs and tournaments, the attitudes, values and behaviours of players and spectators, and the formation of associations. Evidence suggests the existence of a north-south divide, but one that is qualitatively distinct from that experienced in popular team sports; less a reliance on the construction of Northern sporting heroes, with their concomitant representative personalities and characters, and more a focus on the construction of regional stereotypes of clubs, tournaments and players, and the focus on different values, all set in broader historical contexts of rising and waning fortunes of Northern regions in industry and commerce.