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TENNIS
 SPORT AND SOCIETY

Series Editors
Aram Goudsouzian
Jaime Schultz
Founding Editors
Benjamin G. Rader
Randy Roberts

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
TENNIS
A History from American Amateurs
to Global Professionals

GREG RUTH
© 2021 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ruth, Greg, 1986– author.
Title: Tennis : a history from American amateurs to
global professionals / Greg Ruth.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press,
[2021] | Series: Sport and society | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056076 (print) | LCCN
2020056077 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252043895
(Cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780252085888
(Paperback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780252052798
(eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Tennis—History. | Tennis players. |
Women tennis players. | Tennis—Tournaments.
Classification: LCC GV992 .R88 2021 (print) | LCC
GV992 (ebook) | DDC 796.342—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
2020056076
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
2020056077
For Courtney
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi

Introduction: Tennis Amateurs
and Tennis Professionals 1
1 Amateur Associations along the American
Atlantic Coast 7
2 The West Coast Game 29
3 The Cause Célèbre of the Pioneering Professional 46
4 Depression-Era Developments in Amateur and
Professional Tennis 63
5 Wartime Southern California Professionals 81
6 The Cultural Contexts of Mid-Century
Women’s Tennis 98
7 The “Kramer Karavan” 115
8 The World Champion from “The Wrong
Side of the Tracks” 138
 9 Tennis Opens 162
10 The Rise and Demise of World
Championship Tennis 181
11 The Impact of Sports Agents and Agencies
on Professional Tennis 199
12 Women’s Professional Tennis in the
Early Open Era 217

Conclusion: Professional Tennis as
Global Entertainment 237

Notes 243

Selected Bibliography 293

Index 307

Photographs follow pages 80 and 180

 Acknowledgments

Playing a tennis match may seem like only an individual effort. It is not. A
whole team often works behind the scenes. The same goes for writing a book
on tennis.
Archivists and librarians across the United States aided me in my research.
A few deserve special recognition. Meredith Richards and her colleagues at the
International Tennis Hall of Fame hosted me on more than one research visit.
Kirstin Kay and her colleagues in Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, went above and beyond dur-
ing my many days there. This project would not have been possible without
the efforts of interlibrary loan librarians Jennifer Stegen of Loyola University
Chicago and Carolann Adams of the Collier County Public Library in Naples,
Florida. For the many librarians who helped with image rights and reproduc-
tions, thank you.
Several historians also improved this work. Tim Gilfoyle’s reading refined
the project as a whole. He continued to offer excellent advice throughout the
publication process. Michelle Nickerson encouraged me to sharpen my think-
ing on gender history in particular. Elliott Gorn saved me from several gaffes
all the while encouraging me to tell a readable story. Ben Rader prompted me
to think about where this project fits into topics of interest to sports historians.
I extend special thanks to the three anonymous peer reviewers whose reader
reports made the details and the arguments of this book much stronger.
 Acknowledgments

An author could not have asked for a better publisher than the University of
Illinois Press. From initial correspondence, acquisition, and into production,
Danny Nasset skillfully guided this book to publication. Ellie Hinton speedily
reviewed accompanying materials to move the book into production. Series
editors Aram Goudsouzian and Jaime Schultz are true experts who shaped
the pages that follow for the better. Tad Ringo and his colleagues managed
production with great care. Dustin Hubbart created the exciting cover. Kevin
Cunningham, Michael Roux, and Roberta J. Sparenberg helped promote the
book. Jill R. Hughes skillfully copyedited the manuscript. Kate Blackmer of
Blackmer Maps drew the wonderful maps. Sheila Hill prepared the helpful
index.
A number of tennis players and enthusiasts also aided this project in less
direct but still impactful ways. The online members of the Talk Tennis at Ten-
nis Warehouse hosted community threads that inspired me to look further
into historical newspapers to track down which professionals played when
and where. Mike Terry was my first tennis coach, and throughout this proj-
ect he remained an enthusiastic supporter of the history of the game. The
many tennis players I have instructed over the years, my fellow United States
Professional Tennis Association and Professional Tennis Registry teaching
professionals, and my United States Tennis Association league teammates,
all aided in this project by helping me to better understand how the game is
played. The same goes for my college teammates.
Personal thanks go to my family. My parents, Jenny and Harry Ruth, un-
wittingly started this project by encouraging me to start playing more tennis
than football. They have been beyond supportive to me from long before this
project began. I love you both. My sister, Libby Campbell, and brother-in-law,
Seth Campbell, also encouraged me along the way. Thank you both.
My wife, Courtney Burris Ruth, has blessed my life beyond measure. She,
more than anyone, knows what this project took because she was with me
every step of the way. I love you.

x
 Abbreviations

AELTC All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

ATA American Tennis Association
ATP Association of Tennis Professionals
ELTA Eastern Lawn Tennis Association
FFT Fédéderation Française de Lawn Tennis
FIT Federazione Italiana Tennis
ILTF International Lawn Tennis Federation
IMG International Management Group
IPTPA International Professional Tennis Players’ Association
ITF International Tennis Federation
ITHF International Tennis Hall of Fame
LATC Los Angeles Tennis Club
LTA Lawn Tennis Association (of Great Britain)
LTAA Lawn Tennis Association of Australia
MIPTC Men’s International Professional Tennis Council (aka Men’s
Tennis Council)
NTL National Tennis League
PLTA Professional Lawn Tennis Association (of the United States)
PSLTA Pacific States Lawn Tennis Association
SCTA Southern California Tennis Association
TPASC Tennis Patrons Association of Southern California
 Abbreviations

USLTA United States Lawn Tennis Association

USNLTA United States National Lawn Tennis Association
USPLTA United States Professional Lawn Tennis Association
USTA United States Tennis Association
WCT World Championship Tennis
WITF Women’s International Tennis Federation
WLTM Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
WPT Women’s Professional Tour
WPTI World Professional Tennis Incorporated (aka World
Tennis Incorporated)
WTA Women’s Tennis Association / Women’s International
Tennis Association

xii
 INTRODUCTION

Tennis Amateurs and Tennis Professionals

In January 2016, reports emerged from the Australian Open—one of ten-

nis’s so-called Grand Slams or four major tournaments—that the winningest
men’s tennis professional of all time, Swiss champion Roger Federer, would
inaugurate a new tennis team competition named after the great Australian
champion Rod Laver. Team8 and Tony Godsick, Federer’s sports marketing
agency and agent, respectively, would work out the details for a handful of
top European players to compete against a handful of the best players from
the rest of the world. Reports characterized the event as akin to golf ’s Ryder
Cup, but Federer thought of the event as a way to honor the great champions
of his sport’s past.1
Widely thought of as a tournament-centric individual sport, tennis has
seen events similar to the Laver Cup before. Before the days of so-called open
tennis—which took place in 1968 and in which tennis professionals were first
welcomed to play against amateur players in game’s most hallowed venues
and in the most historic tournaments—tennis was a sport divided against
itself. Professional barnstorming players competed night after night across the
United States and around the world to get paid for popularizing tennis while
amateur tennis associations staged tournaments on expansive sporting club
grounds. Jack Kramer, the most consequential of the professionals in shap-
ing the sport in the twentieth century, put on the first Kramer Tennis Cup in
the fall of 1961. Since the end of the Second World War, Kramer had led the
 Introduction

professionals, first as a touring player and later as a touring promoter, only to

find both the amateur and professional game ailing for want of spectators by
the 1960s. His solution was to relinquish some of the contractual control he
held over a half dozen touring professionals to a newly formed players union
called the International Professional Tennis Players’ Association (IPTPA).
Made up of around twenty professionals, this organization decided to install
Kramer as their first leader and to hold international tennis team competitions
for the world’s best professionals akin to the Davis Cup competition for the
best amateur tennis players from the sport’s leading nations.2
“The pro tours are a major factor in the development and growth of the
game throughout the world,” wrote William “Bill” Lufler in 1963. “The profes-
sionals continue to bring the best tennis in the world to the four corners of
the globe.” As head professional of the West Side Tennis Club of Forest Hills,
New York, Lufler saw the best amateur tennis players in the world as his club
hosted the U.S. National Championships. From 1963 to 1966 he also served
as the president of the United States Professional Lawn Tennis Association
(USPLTA). That organization represented around 550 tennis coaches and
instructors in the United States, many of whom were affiliated with private
clubs, few of whom ever traveled to play tennis matches for paying specta-
tors, and none of whom had any say over the governing body of the game in
America, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), as that orga-
nization generally disallowed anyone who earned income from the sport of
tennis from membership. Lufler made the relationship between the IPTPA
players and the USPLTA coaches seem harmonious, but in reality the teach-
ing professionals and touring professionals competed just as much as they
cooperated with one another to secure the limited dollars in the professional
game before 1968. Far stronger competition, however, existed between the
touring professionals, the USLTA, and the various national tennis associations
that made up the world governing body of the game, the International Lawn
Tennis Federation (ILTF).3
Laver himself was the perfect player to honor both the amateur and profes-
sional tradition in the sport. He won the Grand Slam of the sport—that is, a
calendar year sweep of the Australian Championships, the French Champi-
onships, the Wimbledon Championships, and the U.S. Championships—as
an amateur in 1968. He repeated that feat as a professional in 1969, the first
year that all four of those championships became open to professionals and

2
 Introduction

amateurs alike. In between he led the Australian professionals in winning their

third and final Kramer Cup before the competition ceased in 1963.4
As a participant observer, Laver has even made a compelling case that
Australia dominated postwar world tennis from the mid-1950s up to and just
past the beginning of the Open Era in 1968. Match results support much of
that claim, just as evidence compiled by historian Kevin Jefferys also shows
Great Britain to have exercised the major pull on the sport of tennis from the
game’s beginnings in the late 1870s through the mid-1920s. In a book focused
on British tennis, Jefferys nonetheless concludes that when the entire history
of the game is taken into account, the United States stands above all tennis
nations.5
Sports historian Robert J. Lake has charted the recent upswing in tennis
scholarship in a state-of-the-field essay in which he followed the number of
articles that address tennis in two dozen leading English-language academic
journals. He finds that no articles appeared in the 1960s, only a few in the
1970s, and just over a dozen each in the 1980s and in the 1990s. In the last
twenty years, however, 126 social scientific articles have appeared that either
address or focus on tennis in some capacity. Add to that the 45 essays that
make up the recent Routledge Handbook of Tennis, in which his essay appears as
the lead, and the time seems right to answer Lake’s “call to arms” to continue
to push the study of tennis in new directions.6
Book-length studies of tennis by academic historians are fewer but on the
whole excellent in having deepened understanding of the sport. Heiner Gill-
meister has traced European origins of the game in rich detail. Lake has used
lawn tennis as a lens to view British social values during the late nineteenth
century and throughout the twentieth century, in the process offering a nu-
anced view of major issues involving the governance of the sport. E. Digby
Baltzell set a similar example for the United States following the celebration of
amateurism in elite clubs and associations on the American Eastern Seaboard
within a broader look at the sport in American society. Warren F. Kimball has
plumbed internal records to produce a definitive institutional history of the
USLTA that also explores the influence of that organization on many aspects
of the game. Susan Ware has analyzed the impact that the match known as
the “Battle of the Sexes,” pitting Billie Jean King against Bobby Riggs in 1973,
had on women’s sports in late twentieth-century America. Eric Allen Hall has
shown how Arthur Ashe used his status as a tennis champion to become a
civil rights leader. Sundiata Djata has written about the remarkable successes

3
 Introduction

of people of color in tennis in the United States and abroad. Elizabeth Wil-
son has looked at the game from a literary point of view and offered a strong
overview of important cultural moments in the sport.7 This book, by contrast,
both partners with the above scholars and plays its own game in putting events
like the Laver Cup and Kramer Cup into historical context, in the process
advancing a periodization of the sport of tennis into three constitutive eras.
Period one began in 1873 with the first lawn tennis match hosted by Brit-
ish military officer Walter Wingfield in Wales. The game moved from there to
America, Australia, and around the world but remained an exclusively amateur
sport defined more by cooperation than competition among fledgling ama-
teur tennis associations who codified the rules, established governance, and
sponsored interclub competitions, matches, and tournaments. As the game
diffused around the world, particularly from the East Coast to the West Coast
of the United States, competition between amateur associations intensified
while cooperation continued. The first era came to an end when Frenchwoman
Suzanne Lenglen and her American promoter Charles C. “C. C.” Pyle orga-
nized the first international professional tour throughout the United States in
1926, thus presenting professional tennis as a both popular and professional
sport that rivaled the game as a pastime for the social elite.
The cardinal characteristic of the second era, which began in 1926 and
concluded in 1968, was intense competition over the commercialization of
the game. That competition existed between tradition-oriented associations
who wanted the game to remain exclusively an amateur pursuit and profes-
sional players and promoters whose embrace of tennis touring was both an
attempt to earn a living from the sport and a challenge to the authority over
the game exercised by the tradition-minded amateur associations. Finally, after
1968 steady pressure from the professionals and occasional mismanagement
by the amateur associations’ leaders spurred the opening of competition be-
tween professionals and amateurs that has continued into the present. Money
became the defining feature of this third period, but, as this book suggests,
money matters always marked tennis as a sport both apart from and, in that
way, crucial for understanding the history of sports and commercial enter-
tainment in the twentieth century.
The string tying together these three periods was competition for control
over the direction the game would take and the money to be made from the
game. Nowhere else in the world did that competition come into such sharp
relief than in the United States, which, as the twentieth century advanced,

4
 Introduction

accrued more and more influence in shaping global popular culture, in which
spectator sports were an important part.
The aristocratic prehistory of tennis as the sport for the royal court con-
founds more than explains why tennis remained primarily a pastime for ama-
teurs long after so many other spectator sports embraced professionalism. The
first court tennis championship in the world with matches between profes-
sionals and amateurs took place back in 1740. By contrast, boxing, the sport
most associated with professionalizing first, did not do so until more than a
century later, in 1882. As with boxing, horse racing and cricket were sports
popular with gamblers. Money attracted and refined talent to a degree that
both sports had strong professional elements by the 1850s and ’60s. In the
United States, cricket had morphed into America’s pastime by the Civil War.
The Cincinnati Red Stockings became baseball’s first professional team in
1869. Two years later the Cleveland Forest Cities took the field against the
Fort Wayne Kekiongas in the first all-professional game in the newly formed
National Association of Professional Baseball Players. A YMCA physical
education teacher named James Naismith created the game of basketball in
Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. Five years later in Trenton, New Jersey,
the players of the Trenton Basketball Team became the first paid professionals
in a spectator sport on the rise. Professional soccer began in Great Britain in
1886. In the United States, British rugby had evolved into American football
by the 1880s and soon became the centerpiece of college sports. That the game
remained so popular and profitable on university campuses explained how
football could so quickly make room for professionals with the formation of
the American Professional Football Association in 1920.8 At the same time
that these sports embraced professionalism to varying degrees, the new sport
of lawn tennis that began in 1873 maintained a near-absolute commitment to
amateurism in all aspects of the game.
Country clubs boomed in Great Britain between 1873 and 1900 as England
reaped the rewards of being the center of a global empire. Wealthy Americans
looked across the Atlantic, saw the places of leisure that came with prosper-
ity, and set about building the same sort of spaces in the United States. The
proliferation of private clubs along American seaboards helped to organize
sports like tennis into ostentatious pastimes rather than profit-making en-
tertainments. The National Association of Amateur Athletics in America,
founded in 1879; the Amateur Athletic Union, founded in 1888; the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1905; the American Association

5
 Introduction

of Amateur Oarsmen, founded in 1872; the League of American Wheelmen,

founded in 1880; the United States Golf Association, founded in 1894—all
attested to the strength the amateur ideal had among moneyed men in North
America. In the minds of these men, sports needed separation between ama-
teur and professional players, and in the main they achieved that separation
by 1900.9 Despite occasional challenges from outsiders who wanted to earn
a living playing tennis, the clubs and associations run by amateurs held firm
control over the game for its first fifty years.
Government and individual responses to the major upheavals of the Great
Depression and World War II greatly undermined the authority of the amateur
associations by creating conditions under which a whole new generation of
tennis players with social backgrounds different from those of the men who
ran the amateur associations could take up the game. The best of those play-
ers held far more liberal views when it came to money in their sport, and they
shared those views across the country and throughout the world year after
year on professional barnstorming tours in the late 1940s through the mid-
1960s. The visibility and viability of those tours eventually coaxed reluctant
amateur association members to vote to allow the opening of tennis’s major
tournament venues to professional players in 1968. Almost simultaneously,
sports marketers, professional promoters, sports publishers, and ultimately
the players themselves popularized the game into much the same form that
it retains today.

6
 CHAPTER 1

Amateur Associations along

the American Atlantic Coast

The first game of lawn tennis took place on the expansive green lawns of a
Welsh country estate in the late summer months of 1873. Major Walter Clop-
ton Wingfield patented his game in February 1874 with a rhomboidal rather
than rectangular court demarcated by taped lines and a triangular net strung
between two posts hammered into the ground at a distance of twenty-one
feet apart. His patent proposed the spread of the game throughout the Brit-
ish Isles, and he purported that his new design took tennis outdoors for the
first time and thus “placed within the reach of all” a game that only Europe’s
wealthiest had previously enjoyed. His patent approved, Wingfield wrote the
earliest tennis rule book, where in that pamphlet’s second and third editions,
he changed the name of the game to sphairistikè before he finally settled on
calling it “lawn tennis” in the fourth edition. In addition to patenting, writ-
ing the first rules, and titling the game, Wingfield produced the first pieces of
tennis equipment for commercial use. His kits came in a wooden box large
enough to fit four racquets, a net, two net posts, two tennis balls, and a rule
book. Favorable press coverage helped Wingfield sell over a thousand of his
tennis sets in the first year. Britain’s proximity to France helped the game
spread quickly to the European continent, via either British holidaymakers
or expats.1
The ways the game’s early players interacted with their racquets revealed
the earlier roots of lawn tennis and its subsequent spread after 1874. Over the
 CHAPTER 1

next quarter century, that diffusion resulted from the strong cooperation and
gentle competition between members of the leisured classes on both sides of
the Atlantic. During the first few years of the sport, most lawn tennis players
held their racquets with a continental grip, which allowed for both forehand
and backhand strokes without moving the hand position of the index finger
knuckle pad on the second bevel of the racquet’s handle.2 The grip’s name
reflects the antecedents to the British lawn tennis found in the games of rac-
quets and court tennis originating on the European continent. Played mainly
in France, these games required participants to execute strokes off a wall or
close to the ground, therefore necessitating a grip that positioned the racquet
at such an angle so as to not scrape the ground.3
As with the racquet, the early manufacture of tennis balls made plain the
origins of the global spread of tennis in British colonialism. The felt and stitch-
ing of the ball were all white. The cost of the balls prohibited all but the rul-
ing class from purchasing them. The balls even carried names like the “Hard
Court” ball, which signified where a player should play, and the “Demon Ball,”
which signified what kind of player should hit with them. The manufacturers
made those linkages between British colonialism and British sports explicit in
an advertisement for Slazenger’s “Colonial Ball,” made specifically for humid
conditions in places such as “India, Australasia, Africa, and South America,
and indeed all Countries situated at a great distance from where the Ball is
made, and where extremes of temperature have to be contended with. . . . Its
reputation, however, is world-wide, and it is an admitted fact that our Colonial
Ball will retain its resiliency and wear longer than any other Ball produced.”4
The players themselves hoped the same could be said for their colonies.
The British Empire did not include the United States in the second half of
the nineteenth century, but during those decades cultural exchange remained
strong. As the ranks of the middle class swelled in Victorian America, a tension
between a belief in personal industriousness and the desire of members of
the middle class to define their identities as separate from the growing urban
working class became more pronounced. Urban and rural recreation, restor-
ative practices, and leisure were major avenues through which people could
promote their class distinctiveness. Before the Civil War, most Americans
never ventured much beyond their local county seat. The improved trans-
portation network and homestead legislation that was passed during the war
stimulated settlement west of the Mississippi River. More importantly, travel-
ers to the West brought back fantastic stories of the wonders of the frontier

8
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

to share with people living in the Midwest and the East. These stories in turn
encouraged the growing middle class to travel on the developed rail lines to
sites of natural beauty and a burgeoning network of camps and resorts in
scenic locales. The American vacation was born.5
In the cities, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era were moments for the
first massive reorientation of the nation’s recreation space by newly trained
planning experts. Frederick Law Olmsted, the era’s foremost landscape ar-
chitect, designed America’s most famous urban leisure ground in New York
City. Occupying 843 acres of Manhattan real estate, Central Park embodied
the growing importance that urban planners, municipal reformers, and city
residents alike assigned to restorative and open space in ever more crowded
cities. Moreover, urban parks could mirror class relationships found in neigh-
borhoods, the workplace, and all walks of life. Central Park itself featured no
fewer than four separate entrances, each for a different rank of person entering
the park. In Chicago special promenading thoroughfares and private beaches
were designated for the city’s elites, but the city did not have a public swim-
ming area along the lake until Lincoln Park opened one in 1895. The city center
of Denver, the boomtown of the mountains, featured wide walking paths for
the conspicuous walking of the city’s new money merchants. In the last two
decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth
century, cities from Boston to Cleveland and from Kansas City to Los An-
geles increased their parkland by up to 600 percent, a massive reorientation
of space catalyzed by a burgeoning middle class interested in assuming some
of the authority to plan and the pleasures to play that previously had been
enjoyed only by elites.6 Within the cities themselves, parks simultaneously
met the leisure needs of everyone and reminded everyone of their particular
position in society.
In a far more discreet way, urban elites had long hidden themselves away
in private men’s clubs. In the first third of the nineteenth century, those clubs
usually took the form of militia companies. Some exceptions, such as New
York City’s Union Club, were more social in nature. Beginning in the 1840s
and ’50s, cricket clubs sprouted along major thoroughfares and in wealthy
pockets of cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In these cities
and secondary cities, like Chicago, baseball also grew in popularity, especially
with the cadres of clerks and manual laborers who formed clubs and leagues
comprised wholly of white-collar workers and mechanics.7 Shooting and hunt-
ing clubs like the New York Sporting Association had origins in the antebel-

9
 CHAPTER 1

lum years, but by the late nineteenth century, game was increasingly scarce in
all but the farthest-afield areas of the country, leaving wealthy men with little
alternative but to seek other recreational outlets.8 These clubs shared a fond-
ness for sport, they helped to reinforce male solidarity, and they expressed the
awareness of class boundaries within urbanizing America. They also exposed
the physical limits of recreation in the city.
Genteel resorts such as White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and New-
port, Rhode Island, recreated and even enhanced class solidarity among the
wealthy and socially connected when these people traveled away from home.
Moreover, while most of the social clubs and workplaces in Eastern cities
practiced rigid gender segregation, resorts brought women and men into
daily contact on the croquet pitch, in the mineral spring, and on the dance
floor. Starting around the turn of the century and continuing through to the
Great Depression, many members of the urban working class increasingly
looked to recreation outside the city in addition to the amusements they en-
joyed within. Recent immigrants and African Americans also considered rural
vacations viable, either by camping or by renting a room in an inexpensive
boardinghouse. The oldest and most established resorts remained firmly in
the hands of the upper- and middle-class elites, a grip that tightened when
the Depression eliminated the little extra income most Americans relied on
to visit an attraction.9
The same decades that witnessed the growth of scenic urban parks, secluded
elite resorts, and middle-class vacations also saw a remarkable upswing in bet-
ting and games of chance. The Gilded Age gambler shot pool, rolled roulette,
threw dice, and flipped cards, all the while pursuing a payoff through what
historian Jackson Lears has identified as “providential arrangements of rewards
and punishments” that were not unlike the creed espoused by the era’s most
notorious robber barons.10 In growing cities, gambling dens catered to men of
all classes. Blueblood resorts also indulged this ethos by building casinos and
racetracks that catered to the wealthy people’s appetites for cash and chance.
In the millionaires’ playground of Newport, Rhode Island, for example, crafts-
men laid the last shingle on the magnificent Newport Casino in the summer of
1880, with the gaming tables opening to immediate acclaim. There the country’s
wealthiest men and women threw money hand over fist decade after decade
until the music finally slowed with the onset of the Great Depression.11
At the same time that games of chance proliferated, a countervailing trend
that championed games of skill took shape. Mastery of mind and body through

10
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

vigorous exercise had origins in religious convictions such as the “muscular

Christian” tradition, which began in England during the first decades of the
nineteenth century before making it to America during the Civil War and
in the postbellum years. No reformer espoused exercise for everyone more
vigorously than Diocletian Lewis, who, during the 1860s and ’70s, cham-
pioned a “New Gymnastics” with men and women alike stretching limbs,
grasping rings, lifting wooden dumbbells, and swinging Indian clubs. Exercise
advocates suggested that team sports like football instilled young white-collar
workers with industrious habits that led to a more productive workplace. Chil-
dren too were encouraged to participate in structured play so that they could
learn what it meant to be an American. Living in squalid tenements, recent
immigrants and many in the working class felt the ability for self-betterment
through athletics even more strongly. For these young men, individual ac-
complishment in team sports like baseball and individual sports like boxing
served as a way to earn respect in a highly localized ethnic community and,
in rare cases, a means of financial improvement for the most talented athletes.
Throughout American cities, ethnic athletic clubs proliferated. The farthest-
reaching consequences of the trend for masculine martialism came in the
realm of foreign policy, where leaders of the United States believed outdoor
exercise connected to the expansion of an American empire.12 Tennis stood
within all of these broader contexts of class, gentility, and leisure with one
important exception. Women had played the game of lawn tennis from the
beginning, and they would continue to play as the game grew in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
The conventional story of the spread of lawn tennis to America credits a
woman. In under a year, Major Walter Wingfield’s sphairistikè had gone out
from his Welsh garden party to the British Caribbean with British military
officers and colonial officials. In April 1874 Mary Ewing Outerbridge left
Bermuda to return to the United States with a lawn tennis kit that included
racquets, balls, net posts, and a net. Stateside, she introduced the game to
her brother, A. Emilius Outerbridge, who, as director of the Staten Island
Cricket and Base Ball Club, arranged for the marking of a section of the club’s
grounds for a lawn tennis court. Over the next two decades, the club grew
from a dozen or so founders to six hundred members, many of whom com-
peted in the yearly handicapped tennis tournament, which compensated for
differences in player skills by giving weaker players a score advantage at the
beginning of every game against stronger players. Much like getting strokes in

11
 CHAPTER 1

match-play golf based on players’ eighteen-hole handicap, handicapped tennis

tournaments were the norm rather than the exception in the late nineteenth
century, because grinding players’ ability to the lowest common denomina-
tor rather than forcing them to play up to the skills of the best player in their
group encouraged the growth of the game during its infancy. Over those same
years, America’s well-to-do continued to bring back lawn tennis kits from their
transatlantic travels and mark off courts on the grounds of their sporting clubs,
like the Germantown Cricket Club of Philadelphia, while in other instances
they built private courts on their private estates.13
By 1880 the popularity of the game with the leisure class had risen to a de-
gree that private courts and cricket clubs with a single lawn tennis court could
no longer accommodate demand. Tennis-specific clubs began to proliferate in
American cities, where a great density of wealthy citizens with the disposable
capital necessary to purchase and hold large swaths of real estate in the quickly
urbanizing United States could be found. This meant most lawn tennis clubs
concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard of the Mid-Atlantic and New Eng-
land. The West Side Tennis Club was one of the first and most prominent clubs
in the country. Founded in 1882, the club had expanded to two locations by
1904. The clubhouse was located in the Bronx at 238th Street and Broadway,
where members could also play on several courts. Female members had first
claim on the courts at 117th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside
Heights. Men were allowed to play there only through a formal petition to and
with approval from the club’s governing board. Victorian women generally had
more opportunities to play tennis than other games offered by athletic clubs
in America, and such cooperation and competition between the genders put
tennis on a different path than other sports in the United States.14
The West Side Tennis Club capped total membership at 550, with the only
stated requirements being that a potential member be older than sixteen and
that two or more current members vouch for her. While not overtly stated,
in practice this application process effectively barred African Americans from
joining the club, as the all-white membership listed on the club’s membership
rolls perpetuated year after year until at least the eve of World War I. A similar
class barrier was also in place, albeit with a little more malleability, as players
who proved themselves talented in the many sanctioned tournaments held
under the auspices of the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association and Metropolitan
Association sometimes found their names listed on the membership rolls

12
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

regardless of their personal equity. The wrong color skin or the wrong family
kept someone out of the tennis club, but being a woman did not.15
Women members were in fact a draw to elite tennis clubs. In August 1890,
along with benches full of male and female spectators, an elderly woman sat
on a porch and watched four ladies play a doubles match on the lawn tennis
court. The venue was the Brighton Beach Hotel, a popular spot with the Man-
hattan Park Avenue crowd. The woman grew frustrated with the women’s poor
play and divided attention. She believed the players were too interested in the
glances of the young men watching the game; however, her scorn centered
less on the “attention” they sought and more on the cumbersome outfits that
hamstringed their tennis strokes. Their Victorian outfits fit so inappropriately
that the servers used underhand strokes, as the tight-fitting sleeves restrained
the extension and pronation of the arm that were necessary for an overhand
service. “Hampered by graceful, but far too heavy skirts, big knotted sash,
jaunty jacket, and a hat which will not sit just exactly straight if the head is
moved violently,” the old woman wrote, how could these ladies play any bet-
ter? Her observations revealed the competing ideologies of style and success
in the sport of tennis.16
Grace did not equal performance, but measures of both categories de-
pended on whether the players were women or men. F. A. Kellogg, a leading
writer on recreation and editor of Outing magazine, considered tennis an ex-
ceptional sport in three ways: First and foremost, tennis was the “youngest
of athletic” sports popularized by the British that had spread to much of the
world by the late nineteenth century. Second, more than most sports, tennis
espoused refinement in the people who played the game and thus deserved
to be played by the refined themselves—the lawyer, the doctor, the university
student, the clergyman, and the college professor. Third, and most uniquely,
the pioneers of tennis from the beginning had stressed the suitability of the
game for “the gentler sex” and had worked tirelessly to make sure women par-
ticipated.17 Women participated as players in large numbers, but men reserved
the governance of the game for themselves in the boardrooms of private clubs
and in the tennis amateur associations they created.
Lawn tennis competition at and between urban athletic clubs and suburban
country clubs was less well organized than cricket and baseball competitions
because of the comparative novelty of the game compared to those older
sports. That changed on May 21, 1881, when representatives from prominent

13
 CHAPTER 1

athletic and country clubs sat in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City and
created the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (USNLTA).18
The principal reason those thirty-four East Coast and Mid-Atlantic clubs
agreed to meet in 1881 was due to a tennis match, or rather lack of a match,
the year before. After visiting the Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball Club
for an interclub meet, Bostonians James Dwight and R. D. Sears refused to
compete in singles matches when they found that the balls the New York-
ers proposed to play with were far inferior to those they played with in New
England. Other equipment differences concerned the nets, which varied in
height, and the shape of the court, which varied in size. Different clubs even
counted score in different ways. Club secretary E. H. Outerbridge realized
that without a codification of rules and equipment, interclub matches would
suffer, and without interclub matches, the game had little chance of growing
as it had in England and throughout the British Empire.19
Outerbridge actually found garnering support from different clubs easy.
Their boards of directors shared membership rolls that resembled one an-
other’s in terms of wealth and community standing. “I knew many of the
members and some of the officers and directors of most of the clubs where
lawn tennis was then being played, as most of them were cricket clubs, and I
had been playing matches on their grounds as a member of the Staten Island
Cricket Club, which practically every year visited Boston, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore to play such matches,” said Outerbridge. Urban elites along the
Eastern Seaboard showed that shared leisure time reinforced their social and
commercial networks when they quickly replied that they would attend Out-
erbridge’s Fifth Avenue Hotel meeting. Chaired by the Staten Island Cricket
and Base Ball Club’s George Scofield, the attendees ratified the USNLTA’s
constitution in under half an hour. Most of the rest of the meeting then ad-
dressed the standardization of equipment and rules: the ball would now weigh
between 1.87 and 2 ounces and have a diameter between 2.5 inches and 2.56
inches; all clubs would use the rules developed by the All England Lawn
Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon Village, which the USNLTA would
distribute in pamphlet form; and the USNLTA Executive Committee would
decide further tournament policy as the association grew. Fifteen additional
clubs joined the association via proxy.20
Four years later the association had grown to include 51 member clubs,
which competed in association-sanctioned tournaments and a year-end cham-
pionship. By 1893, 107 clubs belonged to the association, with each and every

14
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

one of them subscribing to the amateur ideal initially discussed at the Fifth
Avenue Hotel first annual meeting. At the same time, the executive commit-
tee made Music and Drama: A Journal Devoted to Sport, Music, the Drama, and
Other Things the official publication of the association. While that publica-
tion never really covered tennis, resulting in the association’s quickly finding
another publication to serve as the USNLTA’s official organ, such short-lived
action nonetheless revealed the degree to which the society types who ran
the USNLTA thought of tennis not so much as a competitive sport but as just
another leisure activity on their social calendars.21
Together with their British counterparts at the All England Lawn Tennis
and Croquet Club (AELTC) and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), USN-
LTA representatives in the late nineteenth century set out a basic standard
of amateurism that held considerable sway in what historian Kevin Jefferys
has called “the heyday of amateurism” in tennis.22 In May 1882, at their first
annual meeting, association members concerned themselves with the bound-
aries of amateurism and professionalism in the fledgling sport of lawn tennis.
“None but amateurs shall be allowed to enter for any match played by this
Association,” members emphatically agreed by vote. Such a ruling positioned
who and who was not an amateur in the early moments of the organization,
both a symbolic and practical measure of the seriousness with which USN-
LTA officials meant to patrol the social boundaries of the sport. The top of
the organization, the executive committee, of which Dr. James Dwight was
elected president, reserved for themselves the ability to rule on the issue of
amateur status. Throughout the end of the nineteenth century and much of
the twentieth, the most-senior members in the association would use their
changing definition of amateurism as the gatekeeper that opened the sport
of tennis to some and kept it closed to others.23
In its first decade of existence, the USNLTA laid out five basic provisions
that if violated forfeited a player’s amateur status and therefore removed the
guilty member from the association: First, the guidelines prohibited a member
from accepting any money in exchange for playing tennis for the enjoyment
of others. Second, a member could not compete against a professional in any
sort of public match that involved any recognition of a winner and a loser even
without the involvement of money. Third, the teaching of tennis—or any other
sport, fitness, or health routine, for that matter—was prohibited. Fourth, a
player associated with a tennis club, as all players were in the 1890s, could not
remain a member of a club if the player’s association at the respective club

15
 CHAPTER 1

benefited the club or the player financially in any way. Fifth, a player could
not work for a sporting goods company because of his or her skills in tennis
or any other sport. Members immediately challenged the amateur require-
ments with questions, such as whether or not a sportswriter, employed by a
newspaper but participating as a player in an USNLTA tournament, violated
provisions against material “gain” from tennis; in their replies, Dwight and
other association leaders set the precedent of a hardline policy against money
in tennis with the flexibility on the association’s part to enforce that prohibi-
tion selectively.24
Criticism of the USNLTA’s draconian stance against any money in the sport
grew as the game grew. The most effective critique labeled the association as
classist, a claim that prompted defensiveness from executive committee mem-
bers. In 1899 Valentine Hall, the USNLTA secretary, addressed that criticism
on behalf of the association when he published Lawn Tennis in America, the
central section of which not only defended the amateurism of the game but
also celebrated the aristocratic “parentage” that lawn tennis in the United
States enjoyed from European court tennis. Hall went beyond royalty to draw
connections between Greek and Roman republican virtues and the character
of the USNLTA player leadership who had popularized the game in America:
Richard Sears, a Boston Brahmin and 1880 Newport champion; Henry Warner
Slocum Jr., son of a Union general and reigning national champion; Robert
Livingston, born into a dynasty of political leaders and financiers, himself an
active member of the New York Stock Exchange at the same time he served the
USNLTA; Dr. James Dwight, a scion of the game both in America and during
his lengthy holidays in England; Howard Taylor, Harvard graduate and dis-
tinguished lawyer; and a dozen other players of tennis talent and equally high
social standing who ran the association. Taylor’s legal background prompted
Hall to solicit a treatise on amateurism from the lawyer, which was reprinted
in full in the book. Taylor reminded readers that tennis had grown as a sport
with official laws against professionalism and that to loosen the amateur codes
by obfuscation or by outright elimination would dilute the purity of tennis
to the level of some other sport in the eyes of the public both at home and
abroad. If people from his own privileged status faced the temptation of ac-
cepting free balls, racquets, or hotel rooms, how, then, could people from
middle-class or working-class backgrounds resist such temptations? Keeping
tennis reserved for “gentlemen,” Taylor suggested, would actually protect “the
growing hybrid class” from the corrupting nature of money in sports. The

16
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

amateur rules—in the eyes of the executive committee, at least—expressed

the benevolent paternalism that USNLTA officials believed they exhibited.
These men wished to extend the social and class positions they learned and
practiced in the business world to that of the tennis world.25 But competition
was inevitable; this was the Gilded Age, after all.
Conflict between the United States and Spain almost killed tennis in Amer-
ica before it began. While the growing popularity of golf had taken some of
the wind out of tennis’s sails in the mid-1890s, the war fever that followed the
sinking of the USS Maine on February 15, 1898, led USNLTA membership to
shrink from 106 clubs to 44 clubs. Just as internationalism in the form of con-
flict negatively affected tennis in the United States, so too did internationalism
in the form of both cooperation and competition positively affect tennis in the
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.26 Historians Robert
J. Lake, Simon J. Eaves, and Bob Nicholson have pointed out that turn-of-the-
century British and American tennis matches took place in evolving “Anglo-
American relations” that saw the United States gaining ground on Britain’s
world-leading economic and political position. That process, Eaves and Lake
maintain, helped to allow a wealthy American, rather than the actual “combined
efforts of several men,” to assume near-total credit for founding the most sig-
nificant of nation-versus-nation team tennis competitions: the Davis Cup.27
The standard account goes like this: The first internationalism in tennis
came back in 1885 after the USNLTA leadership approved allowing foreign
players to participate in the U.S. National Tournament, yet the important
moment did not come until 1897, when the St. Louisan turned Harvard ten-
nis player Dwight Davis first voiced willingness to financially sponsor a visit
from England’s top players to the United States to compete against America’s
best. That offer went unaccepted on the part of the LTA, although three Brit-
ish players did travel to the United States on their own after they received
an offer to play not in a team match but in the U.S. National Lawn Tennis
Championship at Newport, Rhode Island. The international players finished
third, fourth, and fifth.28
The excitement that private visit caused convinced Davis to redouble his
efforts to inaugurate an international team competition between the British
and American players. Davis further realized that such private tours would
continue by foreign players unabated; better for the USNLTA to sponsor
them so that they could control the game and keep hold of what would likely
prove a revenue source for the association. To accomplish that objective, in

17
 CHAPTER 1

1900 Davis donated a silver trophy first called the “International Challenge
Cup” but later named after its bequest the Davis Cup. The hardware incentiv-
ized the LTA to send Arthur Gore, Ernst Black, and Roper Barrett to play the
onetime Harvard players Holcombe Ward, Malcolm Whitman, and Davis for
the championship. Contested on the lawns of the Longwood Cricket Club in
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, the Americans swept the British. The real test
came not on the court but in the second match between the British Isles and
the United States. That tie took place in 1902 at the Crescent Athletic Club
in Brooklyn, New York, with the Americans again victorious. Attendance was
excellent at both matches, and the second challenge could have gone either
way. A rivalry blossomed, with the British winning their first Davis Cup in
1903, a victory that solidified the longevity of the competition. The Davis Cup
event single-handedly enlarged the USNLTA’s treasury from $271.04 in Feb-
ruary 1900 to $2,458.48 in 1904. Association membership likewise climbed
to eighty-three clubs and twelve sub-associations by 1900. Attendees at the
USNLTA’s 1901 annual meeting reached the consensus that the Davis Cup
“put lawn tennis on a higher plane and assured its permanency as a sport.”29
That elevated position seemed constantly under threat, with no foe scarier
than the fledgling sporting goods industry. The explosive growth of the first
truly national market for consumer goods in the final two decades of the nine-
teenth century left the USNLTA fearing that “dealers” might get their “crack”
players addicted to money in the game. From the colonial period up through
the young republic, one made, shared, or bartered for recreational equipment.
In the 1850s, for the first time, cricket bats and hunting equipment went on
sale in numbers noticeable enough for historians to date the beginnings of a
market for sporting goods. In the 1880s and piggybacking off of the growth
in baseball after the founding of the National League of Professional Base-
ball Clubs in 1876, major sporting goods firms such as Albert G. Spalding’s
company began to make and market bats, gloves, and all sorts of equipment
in quantities large enough to help make baseball a $10 million business in
1890. The 1890s also marked the appearance of the nation’s first truly mass-
manufactured good in the bicycle through its complete interchangeability of
parts, which in turn propelled a bicycle bonanza that lasted until about 1900
and netted the sporting goods industry $100 million.30
Though never approaching the production levels and the payoff of base-
ball or bicycling, the game of tennis required equipment of just the right size
and at the right price point for the fledgling sporting goods industry. All that

18
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

was needed were contacts who were familiar with this new and relatively
unfamiliar game, but both the LTA and the USNLTA took mixed steps to
prevent such partnerships between members and for-profit companies from
becoming too strong. For example, in Britain the Slazenger sporting goods
company published both the LTA’s official periodical, Lawn Tennis and Bad-
minton, and employed the AELTC’s secretary, Archdale Palmer. Palmer stood
down as AELTC secretary, and Slazenger ended its publishing arrangement
under LTA scrutiny. While softening its original stricter ban on working for
a sporting goods company, the USNLTA did cap a member’s tennis goods
sales at half or more of his total accounts—an uneasy compromise. Likewise,
tournaments could receive no sponsorship from sporting goods firms.31
Such a strong-handed move into the livelihoods of USNLTA members,
not to mention the material growth of the game itself, was a bold attempt on
the part of the association to regain control over the explosive growth of the
game in the first two decades of the twentieth century. USNLTA leadership
therefore stood somewhat apart from the governance of the game in other
parts of the world by initially refusing, along with Canada and Norway, to
join the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF)—a global governing
association for the game founded in 1913. In reality, the ILTF did not really
exercise much control over the game until after World War I with the estab-
lishment of the federation’s International Rules Board in 1922, the subsequent
publication of the “Rules of Tennis” in 1924, and the Americans joining the
ILTF in 1923. The USNLTA’s decade-long reluctance to join the ILTF initially
stemmed from an unwillingness to countenance Wimbledon as the “Cham-
pionship of the World.” From within the ILTF, the USNLTA likely could
have done little to stop that, as the LTA exercised a decisive voting strength
over other nations in recognition of Great Britain’s place as the birthplace of
the game. Moreover, the seriousness with which the USNLTA took decid-
ing the specifics of its own amateur rules would come under the purview of
the ILTF just as the sporting goods companies pressed the amateur issue. In
1919 a full third of the thirty highest-ranked male players worked for sporting
goods companies. Sporting goods companies would, more often than not,
grant employee-players long vacations with pay during tournament times,
while the amateur rules did little to dissuade sporting goods companies who
actively sought the best players to work for them.32
The following year the USNLTA changed its name to the United States
Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA). This newly named association reexam-

19
 CHAPTER 1

ined amateur rules by devising narrower restrictions. Players soon faced an

age restriction of thirty-five and a minimum employment period of ten years
at a sporting goods firm if they wanted to maintain USLTA tournament eligi-
bility. A member could also lose USLTA eligibility if he or she availed them-
selves of any article of sportswear, shoes, or tennis gear outside of racquets
and strings. Furthermore, racquets could find their way into an association
member’s hands only if the member’s sectional association certified the rac-
quets as being direct from the manufacturer and restricted the amount of
string the player received. The association certified a maximum number of
only six racquets when these rules came into effect after World War II, even
though a top-caliber player might go through a half dozen racquets during
a single match. Instead of taking the view that the growth of the American
sporting goods industry could promote the growth of tennis by making sure
the best American amateur players came outfitted for every match with new
equipment and clothes, USLTA officials prioritized their own control over
the marketing opportunities accruable by their sport’s biggest personalities.33
Association national officials, committed to amateurism in every aspect
of tennis, also balked at the rise of the sports press. The penny press papers
of the antebellum and postbellum decades made a point to cover boxing and
other contests that were popular with the working classes, thus helping to
create spectator sports in the fastest-growing cities of the North. The scale
and the scope of spectatorship grew dramatically in the 1880s with sporting
weeklies for male audiences such as Richard Fox’s National Police Gazette sell-
ing hundreds of thousands of copies for issues that covered highly anticipated
fights. On the other side of the class divide, magazines such as Lippincott’s
Monthly Magazine, Outing, and North American Review ran articles on sports
that catered to wealthy and middle-class men. For their part, city newspapers
reported the latest schedules and scores on special pages dedicated exclusively
to sports.34 On the pages and behind the lines of these newspapers and maga-
zines, the most prominent American tennis player of the 1920s, William “Big
Bill” Tilden, challenged the USLTA’s amateur by-laws that barred association
members from tennis journalism.35
No American tennis player better exemplified the USLTA’s amateur ideal
than Tilden—that is, until he ran afoul of the rules. The young Tilden was
born in 1893 in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, in a large
house just down the road from the Germantown Cricket Club. By 1900 the
Germantown Cricket Club had largely abandoned its namesake sport and

20
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

become one of the most prestigious places to play lawn tennis in the entire
United States. Tilden’s father had made a name for himself in the elite social
circles of Philadelphia, opening doors for the young Tilden to attend German-
town Academy followed by the University of Pennsylvania, where he played
varsity tennis. All the while, Tilden’s social standing allowed him to play on
the tennis lawns of local clubs, where he gradually moved himself to the top
of the interclub matches and the number two ranking in Philadelphia by 1917.
Tilden followed up those advancements in 1918 by winning his first national
singles title on clay courts in Chicago, his first national doubles title at Boston’s
Longwood Cricket Club, and falling in the final to champion Robert Lindley
Murray in the U.S. National Championships held at the West Side Tennis Club
in Forest Hills, New York. Tilden had put the tennis world on notice.36
The following year Tilden did not meet expectations to win the U.S. Cham-
pionships, finishing the year rated number two in America. In 1920 he trav-
eled to England, where he became the first American man to win Wimbledon
Championships. He went on to sweep his Davis Cup matches and returned
to the United Sates, where he beat William “Little Bill” Johnston for his first
National Singles Championship. Tilden’s stellar 1920 year ended with a Davis
Cup Challenge Round victory over a combined New Zealand and Australia
team. He essentially repeated his 1920 victories the following year by defend-
ing his titles at Wimbledon, in the U.S. Championships, and in the Davis Cup
Challenge Round played at Forest Hills. Through his complete game and
what a contemporary observer called “rare judgment,” by 1921 Tilden had
established himself as the player to beat.37
Tilden and the USLTA may initially have begun to sour on each other in
1922. In the spring the USLTA announced it would not fund Tilden’s trip to
England to defend his Wimbledon Championship, claiming budgetary rea-
sons and the need to keep Tilden healthy for Davis Cup play. At about the
same time, his book, The Art of Lawn Tennis, was reissued in a second edition
in the United States. Throughout the first half of 1924, controversy over the
so-called player-writer raged across the USLTA with different association
member clubs taking sides over the merits of the “Amateur Rule,” whether
or not Tilden had violated it, and, most consequentially, whether or not that
violation should bar him from Davis Cup play. The popular sports press wrote
overwhelmingly in support of Tilden as did the editor of American Lawn Ten-
nis, Stephen Wallis Merrihew, who published Tilden’s writings. With their
membership divided, the USLTA Executive Committee decided to punt on

21
 CHAPTER 1

the issue until the winter of 1925, paving the way for Tilden to lead the United
States to a fifth consecutive Davis Cup with a September victory over Aus-
tralia at the Germantown Cricket Club. The USLTA went on that winter to
rewrite its amateur rules, but the matter remained less than settled, with the
USLTA threatening to ban Tilden from tennis if he refused to stop writing
about his matches. The opposing sides reached an uneasy compromise not
long after, in which a player could receive some monetary compensation for
an article as long as he or she did not play in the tournament they planned to
report on and did not promote their own tennis skills in their journalism and
media productions. Despite his apology letter kowtowing to the association,
Tilden had no intention of giving up his syndicated columns in outlets such
as the San Francisco Chronicle and New York World.38
The USLTA Executive Committee continued to warn Tilden until his
match reporting as player-captain of the 1928 Davis Cup team embarrassed
the USLTA to the degree that leaders of the organization felt they had no re-
course but to suspend him on July 19, just days before the upcoming semifinal
tie against Italy “because of [Tilden’s] having exploited for pecuniary gain his
position as a tennis player, or because of having acted in a way detrimental to
the welfare of the game.” The USLTA Amateur Rule Committee and Execu-
tive Committee may have congratulated themselves on the fairness of their
ruling, but the fact that they issued a six-page press release detailing the string
of events leading up to Tilden’s Davis Cup suspension revealed just how much
they realized a significant number of American sports fans might find the as-
sociation’s amateur principle absurd if its enforcement actually meant side-
lining the country’s top tennis talent from the most important international
competition. The USLTA viewed Tilden’s defiance as an internal membership
issue. The outcry raised by sportswriters made the issue much more public
than the USLTA wanted.39
The rising popularity of tennis quickly escalated Tilden’s case from an in-
ternal issue to a national and international brouhaha. After defeating Italy on
July 22, 1928, the U.S. Davis Cup team prepared to face off against the French
champions in the Davis Cup Finals beginning on the 29th. The Fédéderation
Française de Lawn Tennis (FFT) knew Tilden’s popularity and lobbied My-
ron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France, to confront the USLTA about
Tilden’s ban. Herrick agreed with the FFT’s argument that the ban on play-
ers as paid writers amounted to a self-serving position apart from the thirty-
two other nations that played in the Davis Cup. Herrick worked to convince

22
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

USLTA president Samuel H. Collom to permit Tilden to participate in the

match against France. With such controversy swirling, the United States lost
pathetically to France, and the USLTA promptly re-suspended Tilden from
association-sanctioned tournaments. Howls of protests from within USLTA
member clubs and from sports fans reached the association’s national offices
in the form of letters supporting Tilden and urging the USLTA to reconsider
its ban. Tilden appealed his suspension while he served it, returned to amateur
tennis in February 1929, and continued to write and spar with the USLTA
before turning professional at the end of 1930. In a later irony indicative of
the 1928 suspension and the sources of support he did and did not receive,
Tilden continued to garner more succor from the tennis federations of other
nations than from his own country’s governing body. This signaled that com-
peting personalities as much as policies were at play given that USLTA rules
fit squarely within ILTF articles 12 and 23 governing amateurism, compared
to, for example, the LTA, which actually went further in restricting writing
and competition tennis.40
The significance of the 1928 Tilden controversy was twofold. Concretely,
the USLTA wanted financial control over the tennis talent in America, but
the 1928 Davis Cup ban also highlighted another serious threat to amateur
standards in a sport whose international footprint had grown to the point
that the best players spent much of their time not only playing tennis but
also competing in other countries. USLTA officials could not regulate play-
ers representing the association abroad to the degree that they could in the
United States, because in America all of the clubs that hosted tournaments
belonged to the USLTA. That belonging gave the Amateur Rule Committee
and the National Executive Committee eyes and ears at every match. Under-
standing the impossibility of enforcing a ban against accepting money in other
countries governed by different tennis associations, the USLTA enacted an
“eight tournament rule,” in which a player would have to pay their own way
in all but eight tennis events a year. Given that the U.S. tournament calendar
alone totaled dozens of matches, the rule essentially meant that any foreign
tournament a player traveled to could not provide the player with travel, lodg-
ing, or meal expenses, because the player would have already exhausted his
or her tournament expense quota domestically. The committee members
congratulated themselves on another compromise between the pecuniary
temptations facing players and the necessity of maintaining the integrity of
amateur sports. USLTA officers suggested that the absence of specific penalties

23
 CHAPTER 1

and the discretion the executive committee could exercise in not punishing
certain players from extending their season at certain tournaments would
stave off flagrant violations of the amateur by-laws, but in reality, violations
proliferated with such selective enforcement. For example, in 1948 the United
States’ best doubles team, William “Billy” Talbert and Gardnar Mulloy, asked
the USLTA to grant special permission for the payment of expenses related
to the Rio de la Plata Championship in Buenos Aires, despite the fact that
the tournament not only took place outside the normal tournament calendar
for which the USLTA authorized expenses but also exceeded the number of
eight events for which Talbert and Mulloy had already received expenses paid.
Members of the Amateur Rule Committee griped about Talbert and Mulloy
“living off the game” but allowed the players to take the money.41
One of the principal ways that tournament players lived off the game was
by instructing players who were less capable. In late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Britain, tennis club members viewed Anglo teaching pro-
fessionals—Harry Cowdrey, George Kerr, and Charles Hierons, among oth-
ers—as essentially members of the laboring class and destined to serve. Club
members, by contrast, tried to emphasize how little effort it took to learn to
play a good game of tennis. That leisure-class identity conflicted with the work
life of the British teaching professionals to the degree that some of the most
prominent paid coaches chose to move to France, where they could teach
tennis in less hierarchical clubs.42
In America the class divide was not quite as rigid. Teaching and coach-
ing could keep a top player on the court in order to keep their own game in
shape while at the same time creating relationships with wealthy members of
private clubs who were all too eager to hit a few balls with the country’s best
“racketeers.” The USLTA did not allow members to earn income from teaching
tennis—whether at a university, in a physical education class, park district, or
private club—until the 1950s. Officially, there were no paid tennis teachers in
America before 1910. Through the 1910s and mid-’20s, some players accepted
money, club dues, and travel expenses under the table in exchange for teaching
wealthy club members. That pay-for-instruction arrangement became official
in 1927, when the Professional Lawn Tennis Association (PLTA) formed af-
ter a meeting in New York. USLTA officials so abhorred the idea that anyone
should get paid to play tennis, even if payment was made to members of a
different organization whose sole purpose existed to promote the livelihood
of tennis instructors and thus grow the game, that the association’s executive

24
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

committee banned any competition between USLTA amateurs and PLTA

teaching professionals. As with all of their “no money in the game” rules, the
Amateur Rules Committee enforced the disassociation between PLTA and
USLTA members selectively so that when the U.S. military asked USLTA
president Lawrence Baker for his approval of interservice matches involv-
ing both professionals and amateurs, the Amateur Rule Committee gave the
military the association’s blessing.43
Such lax enforcement had less to do with USLTA benevolence and more
to do with the reality of how tennis had worked in America from the very
beginning. Many clubs essentially sponsored top players whose association
with the club brought prestige and potentially new members. Since the turn of
the century, many clubs had ignored a player’s class background as long as the
player delivered on the courts. Local clubs preferred flexibility; the national
association preferred policy. As the profile of the game increased, clubs poured
more resources into the practice time and travel expenses of their top players
while forgetting to mention this support to the USLTA. These omissions flew
in the face of USLTA rules that since the 1880s had strived for a complete
accounting of players’ tournament expenses. USLTA officials had floated a
ban against all player expenses without success and thus found themselves
constantly checking in with private clubs about members’ expense accounts.
Unreliable assistance in enforcing player expense accounts exemplified the
executive committee’s and the Amateur Rule Committee’s heavy reliance on
private sports clubs enforcing rules that often hurt the member clubs’ bottom
lines despite the national office’s claims to the contrary. Counting a famous
player as a club member was more important to most club managers than
keeping a USLTA official in the national New York offices happy. The asso-
ciation’s top amateur tennis talent felt the game “owed them a living,” and all
but the most genteel of club members were prepared to provide them with
that living, albeit with a nod and a wink, while simultaneously espousing the
“high ideals of sportsmanship and amateurism” that the association stood for,
wrote Holcombe Ward at the conclusion of his decade as USLTA president.44
The USNLTA’s commitment to amateurism created more opportunities
for tennis players who were willing to play by the association’s rules. By 1908
the USNLTA sanctioned ninety tournaments in the summer season alone.
Leaders in the USNLTA national office formed a committee that strenuously
advocated junior development by pressuring reluctant private clubs to host
junior tournaments and matches. The association also advocated for the cre-

25
 CHAPTER 1

ation of an intercollegiate tennis league, which many universities embraced.

For instance, by 1908 Harvard claimed a forty-court facility at Soldiers Field in
Boston. A dozen years later, Charles S. Garland of Yale won the first Intercol-
legiate Championship endorsed by the association. The USNLTA also encour-
aged new players both abroad and at home. On May 1, 1908, the Mexico City
Country Club hosted the first lawn tennis championship in Mexican history,
with a dozen or so of America’s best players traveling south of the border for
the tournament—thanks in large part to the USNLTA’s encouragement and
financial assistance. Unlike opportunities found in many team sports, women
could find tennis matches and tournaments endorsed by the association and
covered by the USNLTA’s official publication. “These women can play tennis,
tennis such as the novice would marvel at, swift and accurate and, indeed, far
superior to the game that the ordinary man who thinks that he can play some,
is capable of,” said one such report on a 1908 women’s indoor tournament in
New York City. Players in most parts of the country could also find a tourna-
ment to test themselves from rural California to the Northeast.45 (For hosts of
the most prestigious USLTA tournaments before the Open Era, see map 1.46)
Such opportunities came with a cost for participants. Players needed to sub-
mit to the association’s desire for control over every aspect of tennis. Nowhere
did that exercise of control appear in starker terms than within the Eastern
Lawn Tennis Association (ELTA), which dominated the national course of
amateur tennis from the start. While the ELTA officially formed in 1922, tennis
officials from around New York City first organized themselves in the Metro-
politan Lawn Tennis League on March 15, 1904. That organization consisted
of the West Side Tennis Club, the New York Lawn Tennis Club, Kings County
Tennis Club, Montclair Athletic Club, New York Athletic Club, Crescent Ath-
letic Club, and the Englewood Field Club, with the league functioning until
1912 as an arbiter of tournaments and matches between the clubs’ teams and
players. A similar league named the Metropolitan Association appeared four
years later and organized a round-robin tournament among metropolitan
tennis clubs. In 1914 the West Side Tennis Club found a “permanent home”
in Forest Hills, New York, and that same year the club hosted the Davis Cup
Challenge Round between the United States and Australia. The financial suc-
cess of that match prompted the relocation of the national championships
from the Newport Casino to Forest Hills for the 1915 tournament.47
The money made at popular events seldom reached far beyond a narrow
orbit of clubs clustered along the Atlantic seaboard. The few officers and per-

26
 Amateur Associations along the American Atlantic Coast

Map 1. Hosts of the most prestigious USLTA tournaments before the Open Era

manent employees such as Field Secretary Paul B. Williams originated from

those parts of the country and preferred to funnel dollars back to the clubs to
which they belonged. At about the time of the 1915 Forest Hills championship,
the ELTA began a junior development program for players within its section
funded by a combination of national and sectional monies. The advantage of
hosting the big tournaments and running the association’s day-to-day business
mattered a great deal when combined with its refusal to grant proxy voters
from clubs who—because of their location far afield from New York City
(the Midwest, for example)—could not send representatives to association
meetings. A general pattern of setting agenda business at the annual meeting
itself, rather than informing member clubs ahead of time via the organization’s
official publication, became commonplace. Those policies allowed New York
City clubs to exercise disproportional control over the national organization
and ensured that the tournaments that offered the highest rating points, and
thus attracted the best players, who in turn brought in the most paying spec-
tators, stayed in the New York metropolitan area and kept the coffers of the
host clubs full when compared to clubs in other regions of the country.48

27
 CHAPTER 1

World War I disrupted that pattern. The association’s “Patriotic Tourna-

ments” earned money that did not go directly to the host clubs but instead
went to a general fund for the War Department. Nonetheless, at the end of
World War I, the USLTA Eastern Section regained more than its former
strength by meeting on March 12, 1921, where thirty-four clubs passed a
constitution and by-laws that chartered the New York Lawn Tennis Associa-
tion. Less than a year later, on February 4, 1922, the USLTA’s membership
accepted that body into the national association at the annual meeting. While
not officially called the “Eastern” Lawn Tennis Association until February 5,
1927, the New York clubs effectively controlled their sectional association,
the national association, and, by extension, the game of tennis for the entire
nation through the 1920s.49 Cooperation between close-knit clubs would not
go unchallenged, however, as tennis gained popularity in California.

28
 CHAPTER 2

The West Coast Game

The real challenge to the USLTA’s early control over amateur tennis in America
came more from inside rather than outside the amateur game. In the capable
hands of amateur officials who were more concerned with growing the game
of tennis in their local area rather than in following the amateur precepts laid
down in the USLTA’s or the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s (ILTF’s)
distant offices, those amateur tournaments could actually turn tennis into
a commercial sport that called the stated commitment of amateurism into
question. Competition between different factions within the USLTA helped
popularize tennis and pave the way for professionalism to enter the sport. In
this the American West Coast would lead the way.
Since the 1880s, wealth and youth had moved into California. Tennis grew
alongside this migration of people with capital. The game first came to South-
ern California around 1880 when a Canadian man by the name of William
H. Young settled in Santa Monica after having attended Oxford University.
Young befriended the Allen family, who—on their own holiday travels—re-
turned to their home with one of Maj. Walter Wingfield’s lawn tennis kits. Two
years after Young and the Allens’s first match, tennis enthusiasts started the
San Gabriel Lawn Tennis Club, the earliest effort to organize California ten-
nis along the lines of the cricket clubs on the East Coast. Mainly women, the
club sponsored their first tournament in June 1882. Over the next five years,
several other clubs sprouted, including the Boyle Heights Club, the first ten-
 CHAPTER 2

nis facility in urban Los Angeles. The three most important clubs in the area,
Casa Blanca Tennis Club of Riverside, the San Gabriel Tennis Club, and the
Pasadena Club, chartered the Southern California Tennis Association in March
of 1887. The following year, the California Lawn Tennis Club of San Francisco
put on the Pacific Coast Championship tournament on the grounds of the
Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California, marking the first time local tennis
clubs hosted a tournament sanctioned by the USNLTA. The California clubs
mirrored their East Coast contemporaries by hosting more small tournaments
and standardizing play on their uniquely year-round courts. In the words of
the association’s annals, “tennis had officially crossed the continent.”1
One of the earliest organizations for lawn tennis on the West Coast began
on July 3, 1890, when a group of Bay Area tennis clubs formed the Pacific States
Lawn Tennis Association (PSLTA). Much like on the East Coast, the PSLTA
formed with a primary purpose of standardizing the rules of the game among
different member clubs, but the PSLTA differed in the geographic scope in
which it sought to standardize the game. “Any Lawn Tennis Club in the States
of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, the Territories of Utah and Ari-
zona and British Columbia, shall be considered eligible to membership,” read
the PSLTA’s constitution. The association’s treasurer collected five dollars a
year in dues for clubs whose membership fell below fifty players and another
five dollars a year for each additional fifty members of a club’s membership.
Monies collected supplemented the various clubs’ hosting of tournaments
and interclub matches as on the East Coast.2
The PSLTA’s by-laws detailed essentially the same definition of amateur-
ism in force on the opposite side of the country. Players could not compete
in a PSLTA-sponsored event unless they belonged to a PSLTA club, and they
could not belong to a PSLTA club if they had ever “taught any sport as one
of [their] ordinary means of livelihood.” Following much the same rules as
clubs on the East Coast did not stop clubs in the American West from express-
ing pride in their region in other ways. They held an annual championship
attended by hundreds who paid fifty cents for day pass admittance. PSLTA
member clubs partnered with local sporting good firms such as F.M.L. Peters
& Co. of San Francisco to manufacture racquets “expressly for the Pacific
Coast trade.” Racquets with names such as the “Pacific” featured “Oriental
Gut” strings, touted as the best string for both playability and the economy of
Pacific Rim trade. Taken as a whole, throughout the first two decades of the
game, California tennis associations exercised a far greater tolerance of money

30
 The West Coast Game

in tennis in their game than did the associations on the East Coast, even go-
ing so far as to allow some competition between teaching professionals and
amateur champions, such as when professional Joe Daily defeated Sumner
Hardy 7–5, 8–6 on the courts of San Francisco’s California Club. Growth of
the game of tennis on the West Coast went hand in hand with the economic
growth of places like the Bay Area.3
The westward migration of the sport of tennis gained further momentum
around 1900 and reflected larger social migrations of people to places like
Southern California. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Los
Angeles’s population tripled from 102,479 to just over 300,000. The beau-
tiful climate, an agriculturally productive landscape, and a budding urban
economy provided city boosters with plenty of enticements to dangle in front
of potential settlers.4 The physical environment in particular impacted the
materiality of the tennis courts in the West, where a Mediterranean climate
made smooth lawns of green grass scarce. After the first games on dirt lots,
private clubs and, later, municipalities started to build courts with a concrete
surface because year-round warm weather prohibited lawn courts.5
Beyond the steeper up-front cost, hard courts were a better investment
because they required less maintenance, lasted longer, and could be built on
ground that was unsuitable for grass courts. The materiality of the concrete
courts produced a higher bounce of the ball, allowing players to adopt a style
of play that was different from what worked on the lawns of the East Coast.
Rather than the popular underspin shots common on grass, hard-court players
favored flat or topspin shots—that is, shots that either moved the ball across
the net relatively parallel to the ground or lifted the ball high over the net be-
fore the spin brought it quickly down on the opponent’s side of the court. To
best accomplish the desired ball flight, players shifted their grip over to the
fourth, fifth, or even sixth racquet bevel. The revolutionary hand placement
became so popular with the hard-court players of Southern California that
champions and tennis writers like Bill Tilden came to call it the “Western
grip.” A Philadelphia native, Tilden advocated the Eastern grip because of his
own success in winning the East Coast lawn court tournaments with a grip
better suited to the low skidding shots that were common on grass courts.6
In short, the material conditions of the court established the styles of players
hailing from different regions of the country.
What Tilden failed to note was that Eastern USLTA sections tried to hold
on to their control over the game through the surface of their courts. Through

31
 CHAPTER 2

a stranglehold on the grass-court summer tournament schedule, where play-

ers earned the most ranking points, the USLTA leadership kept themselves
relevant long after the rise of California tennis as the world’s epicenter of
competitive players.7
California also held an abundance of open space for the construction of
parks and tennis courts when compared to the more densely populated East-
ern Seaboard. While San Francisco likely suffered the same parsimoniousness
on some public improvements and wastefulness on others that characterized
the budgets of cities in Progressive Era America, the Bay Area nonetheless
got big parks built for their citizenry that afforded recreation for everyone
who visited. In the late nineteenth century, the San Francisco Recreation
and Parks Department operated a dozen or more courts in Golden Gate Park
alone that allowed players of any income level to hit a tennis ball. By the 1910s,
tennis courts even appeared 4,213 feet up the side of Mount Hamilton near
San Jose in Santa Clara County, where astronomers played the sport when
not gazing at the stars through their telescopes at the Lick Observatory. Far
from widespread when compared to the tennis court–building boom of the
late 1930s, the abundance of California courts before the Great Depression
nonetheless set the West Coast apart from the East Coast and the Midwest
in the first few decades of tennis in America.8
Similar to the evolution of the game on the East Coast, private universities
played a role in growing tennis in Southern California. One such institution
was the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, whose most
famous early twentieth-century tennis star was Ellsworth Vines. Vines was
born in Los Angeles in September 1911 to tennis parents who enjoyed both
the readily available courts in Southern California and the blissful weather
as compared to the East Coast. Between 1877, the first year the U.S. Weather
Bureau measured annual temperature and seasonal rainfall, and 1930, the
average daily temperature in Los Angeles hovered between sixty and sixty-
five degrees. In the same fifty-year period, rainfall exceeded twenty inches
of rain only five times. This remarkable weather made Southern California a
veritable Eden for outdoor activity, of which the Vineses and thousands of
others took full advantage. Ellsworth’s father gave the boy his first racquet at
the age of five. Over the next dozen years, Vines played in many of the local
tournaments for students in Southern California. His success in high school
tennis secured him an offer to play for the USC Trojans, where he excelled dur-
ing his freshman and sophomore seasons. Toward the end of his second year,

32
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
supposed to be the happy owner of nine wives, and the others had
almost as many.
The eldest daughter of the Maharajah was about fifteen. She very
often came to see me, in company with nine or ten other girls of the
same age, of whom more than half were royalties. The Senaputti
used to bring them, and they loved running all over the house,
examining everything. They liked most of all to go into my bedroom
and try on my clothes and hats, and brush their hair with my
brushes, admiring themselves in my long looking-glass. They used
to be very much surprised to find that my dresses would not meet
half-way round their waists.
The Senaputti generally waited in the drawing-room talking to my
husband. After the party had explored my room, we used to rejoin
the others, and take them all out into the garden, allowing them to
pick the flowers, and decorate each other, and then my husband
would photograph them. They were always amused with the
monkeys and rabbits, the latter particularly, as those animals are
wholly unknown in Manipur. In fact, these Manipuri children were
very much like any other children in their delight at seeing new
things. They liked going into the dining-room when the table was laid
for dinner, and asking us what all the knives and forks and spoons
were used for; and they enjoyed sitting on the sofas and in the big
armchairs, ‘just like the Memsahib,’ they said.
Once we had a water-party on the lake in the grounds. The big
pink water-lilies were in full bloom, and we had about five boats
crammed with these children and some of the little princes, and we
all pelted each other with water-lilies and got very wet, and enjoyed it
immensely. Of course it was always a drawback not being able to
offer them anything to eat or drink, as their caste forbade them
taking anything of the sort; but we used to give them flowers, and
Japanese fans, and beads, and those kind of things, with which they
were very delighted. Some of the Manipuri girls are very pretty. They
have long silky black hair as a rule, and fair complexions, with jolly
brown eyes. They cut their hair in front in a straight fringe all round
their foreheads, while the back part hangs loose, and it gives them a
pretty, childish look. They dress very picturesquely in bright-coloured
striped petticoats fastened under their arms, and reaching to their
ankles. Over this a small green velvet zouave jacket is worn, and
when they go out they wear a very fine muslin shawl over their
shoulders, and gold necklaces and bracelets by way of ornament.
Very pretty these little damsels look as you meet them in twos and
threes along the road going to their dancing-lessons, or to market or
temple. Every child is taught to dance in Manipur. They cease when
they marry, but up till then they take great pride in their nautches.
The Manipuris do not shut up their women, as is the custom in
most parts of India, and they are much more enlightened and
intelligent in consequence. As soon as a woman marries she puts
back her fringe; but no other restrictions are laid upon her. They do
not marry until they are fifteen, and I have seen girls of seventeen
unmarried. From going so often through the bazaar in the evenings, I
got to know several of the women very well, and they liked my
coming and having a chat with them. I learnt all their little troubles
and anxieties—how so-and-so’s baby was teething and generally
ailing, and how someone else’s had grown an inch, or who was
going to be married, and who had died. I liked talking to them, and I
learnt a good deal of the language by doing so.
 CHAPTER V.
Trips to the Logtak Lake—Beautiful scene on the lake—Tent pitched on an island
in it—The Pucca Senna accompanies us—Crowds collect to see us—Old
women dance—Natives laugh at my riding habit—Moombi—Steep ascent—
Chief of the village threatens us—Unpleasant quarters—Wet condition and
hostile reception—My husband teaches the Prince English.

From April to the end of October was the rainy season in Manipur,
and from October till the end of March the weather was as perfect as
could be, very cold, and yet bright and sunshiny, with never a drop of
rain to trouble one. All our winter went in camp. We used to go out
for a month at a time, and then return to the Residency for a few
days before starting out again in another direction. We generally
managed two trips to the Logtak Lake. This lake lay to the south of
the valley, a day’s journey by boat, or two days’ if one rode. We
preferred the boating. We used to start off early in the morning and
ride about fifteen miles, where the boat would wait for us, with all our
luggage packed in one end of it, and a well-filled lunch-basket to
keep us going by the way. These boats were long and narrow, and
were called ‘dug-outs,’ because each one was hollowed out of a
single tree. We spread the bottom with lots of straw, and put rugs
and pillows on the top, and then lay down on them and found it very
comfortable.
About five in the evening we arrived at the mouth of the river, and
had generally to wait some time there to allow the wind, which
always got up in the evenings, to subside, as the lake was too rough
to cross while it was blowing. Even when we did cross, two hours
later, the waves kept breaking into the boat, and we had to set to
work to bale the water out. I don’t think I shall ever forget the first
time I saw the lake. We did not arrive till late, and the moon was high
up in the heavens, shedding a glorious silvery light on the broad
expanse of waters, and making the islands, each one a small
mountain in itself, appear shadowy and far off. Far above our heads’
flew strings of wild geese going off to feed, and uttering their strange
hoarse cry as they flew. Here and there as our boat shot past some
sheltered nook or tiny islet two or three ducks would paddle out,
scenting danger, and curious water-birds would rise from the
swampy ground and noiselessly disappear in the far distance. But
the stillness on all around us, and the beautiful lake, whose surface
the now dying wind still gently ruffled, had a great effect upon one’s
imagination, and I was quite sorry when we shot through a narrow
creek and came suddenly upon the camp.
Our tents were pitched on one of the largest and most beautiful
islands, under a big tree, and at the end of a long village, which was
built picturesquely on the shore of the lake. The villagers and our
servants came down to help us out of our boats with torches and the
inevitable bugler, who played us up to our tent in grand style. We
were very glad to get in and find an excellent dinner awaiting us, and
still more pleased to get to bed. Every day we used to start out at six
in the morning, before the mist had cleared—I in one boat, and my
husband in another—and creep round the little islands after duck,
and we generally returned with a large bag.
In two days once my husband got eighty-two ducks and thirty
geese. He did great execution with an eight-bore he had, and
generally knocked over half a dozen or so at a time with it. Duck-
shooting is very exciting, and hunting wounded birds a lengthy
operation. They let you come quite close to them, and you think you
have got them safely, when they suddenly dive under your boat and
appear again yards off; and by the time you have turned your boat
and gone after them again they are still farther away. I never liked it
when we had caught them and they used to be consigned to my
husband’s boat, as I could not bear to see them killed. Sometimes
they were so tame that we let them alone, as it seemed butchery to
shoot them.
One year when we went to the Logtak the Pucca Senna (the
Maharajah’s third brother) asked if he might come too. We were very
pleased to have him, so he arrived, and every day he went out
shooting with us, and as he was a good shot he made a welcome
addition to our party. He shot everything he could see, whether it
was game or not, but he shot well. We sent all the birds we could not
eat up by boat to Manipur for the Sepoys of our escort, who were
very grateful for them. We stayed a week the time the Pucca Senna
was with us, and he came on afterwards on a tour along the
southern boundary of the valley to some very curious places, where
they had never seen an English lady before, and where the people
exhibited the greatest curiosity and excitement over my advent. We
were always coming upon crowds collected at different places on the
roads, who had journeyed many miles to see me. They all presented
us with a few eggs or fowls, as the case might be, in the hope that
the presentation of them would delay us, and that they would be able
to get a good view of me.
Sometimes, instead of giving us anything, they brought four old
women to dance before us, and we would come upon them suddenly
over the brow of a hill and find them jumping about on the other side
like so many old monkeys for our edification. We were, of course,
obliged to stop and look at their exertions, and present them at the
end of the performance with rupees. They always came round me
and touched my clothes and hands, and seemed to be surprised
when I turned up my sleeve and showed them that my arm was
white too, like my hands. My clothes caused much curiosity. It was
the time then of large dress-improvers, and they had seen me
walking out at one village we stopped at in a fashionably-made
costume, with at least three steels in it.
The next day I went out on my pony in a riding habit, followed by
the usual crowds. We stopped for a few minutes, and I saw our
interpreter in fits of laughter over something. I asked my husband
what the man was laughing at, and after a little persuasion the
interpreter told us that the villagers wished to know what I had done
with my tail! At first I had no idea what they meant, but after a little
while they explained, and then I discovered that they had imagined
the fulness at the back of my dress had concealed a tail, and they
could not understand why the habit looked different. We were very
much amused, and when we got back to the camp I showed some of
them the steels in my dress. They thought it a very funny fashion
indeed.
 We went away the next day, much to their disappointment, to a
place a long way off in the hills, and had a number of queer
adventures. The Manipuris told us that this place, called Moombi,
was about eighteen miles distant, so we started very early. I
commenced by riding, but before we had gone very far the hills
became so steep that I got into my long chair and was carried by
Nagas. My husband had to walk, and so did Prince Pucca Senna,
much to his disgust, as he was a very lazy individual, and never
cared to use his legs much. This time there was no help for it, so he
puffed and blew as he came up the hill, and said he felt very ill
indeed. It must have been thirty miles instead of eighteen, and it was
very tiring. I had to hold on to the arms of my chair to keep myself in
it at all, and the road got worse and worse, until at last I had to take
to my hands and knees too, as by this time the rest of the party were
crawling up on all-fours like a string of ants.
We got to the top at length, and were going on up to the village,
which was a few yards ahead, when a message came down from the
chief of the village, sent by one of his slaves, saying that if we came
any farther he would shoot at us. This was rather alarming at the end
of a long and tiring march. The messenger went on to say that they
had built a grass hut for us a little below the place we had halted at,
and that no one would molest us if we stayed there, but we were not
to go into the village. I think if we had had a sufficient armed force
with us that my husband would have gone on, but as we were only
travelling with a small escort of Manipuris, who seemed much more
inclined to run down the hill instead of up it, we agreed to remain in
the hut they had built for us, to which we then proceeded.
 TRIBESMEN OF MANIPUR.

There was no mistake about its being a grass hut. It was built of
green grass, something like pampas grass, with flowery tops which
they had not cut off, but left to wave in a sort of archway over our
heads. The roof was very light and airy, and full of large spaces to
allow of rain or hail entering the abode if the weather were stormy.
The floor was covered with loose, ungainly-looking planks, thrown
down anyhow all over it, and if you trod on the end of one suddenly,
it started up at the other end like a seesaw. Fortunately we always
took a small tent with us to be certain of shelter in case any of the
arrangements should fall through, and we had it on this occasion.
We soon unpacked it, and got a place on the side of a hill cleared,
and began putting it up, hurrying over it as fast as we could, as the
clouds were gathering up all round us, and we knew rain was
coming.
Long before we had finished erecting it, however, the storm broke.
I have rarely seen such a storm. The wind blew so strongly that it
needed all our forces to hold on to the tent-ropes to prevent the
whole being blown down the hill on to the top of the unfortunate
prince, who, by the way, was housed below us in a wretched grass
shed, a copy of ours, only very much smaller. The thunder and
lightning were dreadful, as the hills around us re-echoed every peal,
and the lightning shone out so vividly in the darkness which had set
in. At length the wind went down somewhat, and we adjourned to the
hut for dinner, where we sat under one umbrella with our feet on the
bath-tub turned upside down, and our plates in our laps. The rain
poured meanwhile through the so called roof, and the nodding grass-
tops dripped on to our heads. We got to bed about two in the
morning, when it cleared up, and the stars came out, as it were, to
mock at us for the general soppiness of ourselves and our
belongings. We did not dare inquire for the well-being of the prince.
Streams of water we knew had rushed down the hillside quite
powerful enough to carry his hut away.
Next morning very early one of his followers came up to say that
his master had not been able to sleep all night, as his house had
been swept away and many of his valuables lost; and that he
presented his salaams to the Sahib and the Memsahib, and hoped
that we did not intend remaining in so horrible a place.
It had been our original intention to stay at Moombi three days, but
our wet condition, coupled with the hostile reception from the chief,
decided us to make a move down the hill. First of all, though, my
husband insisted that the chief should come down and pay his
respects to us, which, to our great surprise, he did after a little
persuasion, bringing his three wives and a number of followers, all of
whom were armed with guns of very ancient design, with him. They
wore very few clothes, and were not pleasant-looking men, and the
women were all very short and dumpy-looking, and, oh! so dirty.
They presented us with eggs and melons, and the wives gave me a
curious spear and some baskets of rice. My husband asked them
what they meant by greeting us with such an alarming message the
night before, to which they replied that they had made a mistake,
and did not mean that they would fire on us. We found out
afterwards that they thought we were coming to collect some
revenue which they had owed to Manipur for some time and refused
to pay, and that they were afraid we intended marching into their
village and forcing them to pay.
My husband hauled the chief (who, by the way, called himself a
Rajah) over the coals for it, and told him that he was to come into
Manipur, where the revenue case would be inquired into; but we
parted very peaceably after going up to the village by the chief’s own
invitation, where we inspected the outside of his house. It was
fenced all round with strong stakes, and on the top of each stake
was a head, and more than one of them unmistakably human skulls.
Whether the original owners of them had died natural deaths, or
whether they were trophies of war, we did not inquire. There were
some beautiful elephants’ tusks in the chiefs veranda, and some
fine-toned Kuki gongs, one of which he presented to us. We left with
many expressions of affection from the Rajah of Moombi and his
wives, but we were very glad when we found ourselves at the foot of
the hills leading up to his kingdom, and solemnly made a vow never
to return there again. We visited the iron wells on our way home.
There are about seven of them, and it was very interesting watching
the men at work.
My husband amused himself in the afternoons by teaching the
prince English. He used to read out of a queer old spelling-book,
filled with words that one would really never use. One sentence was
—that is to say, if one could call it a sentence—‘an elegant puce
quilt.’ Now, I don’t think his highness would ever have used either
word, but it amused me greatly to hear him trying to pronounce
‘quilt’; it developed into ‘kilt,’ and never got any farther. I laughed so
much that I had to beat a hasty retreat. There was one expression
the prince did learn, and that was ‘good-bye’; but it was a little
embarrassing to meet him on arrival and be welcomed by a shake of
the hand and a solemn ‘good-bye.’ It rather damped one’s ardour.
He never could understand that it was a farewell salutation, and not
a general greeting.
 CHAPTER VI.
Society at Manipur—Band of the Ghoorkas—The bandmaster—His peculiar attire
—The regiment ordered away to our regret—Worse news—We are ordered to
leave—Parting views—Mr. Heath appointed—Son of the Tongal general—His
good and bad qualities—Magnificent scenery—The Ungamis—Their
quarrelsome character.

When we first went to Manipur we had a certain amount of society,

as it was then the headquarters of a Ghoorka regiment, which was
stationed four miles away from us, at a place called Langthabal; not
a pleasant spot by any means, as it had only been roughly cleared
for a cantonment, and the roads about it were little better than paths.
The officers lived in huts made of bamboo, and the walls had a thin
covering of mud on the outside, which some of the more enterprising
inmates had painted with whitewash, making them look a little more
like the habitations of civilized folks. Some of the huts had very pretty
gardens round them, but small, of course, though the flowers there
seemed to do twice as well as ours did in the Residency garden. We
saw a good deal of the officers in the 44th Ghoorka Rifles, the
regiment there when we arrived. They used to come in for polo twice
a week, and to what I was pleased to call my ‘at home’ every
Thursday, when we played tennis and had the Maharajah’s band
from four o’clock till six.
This band was composed of Nagas, and it was wonderful to hear
how easily they learnt English music. Waltzes and any dance music
came easiest to them, and they kept excellent time; but they could
manage anything, and I have heard them play difficult selections
from the great masters without a mistake. Their bandmaster was
very talented. As a young man he had gone to Kohima to be taught
by the bandmaster of the 44th Ghoorka Rifles, and he had a natural
ear for music, and could even sing a little. He used to get very
impatient at times when the bandsmen were more stupid than usual,
and on one occasion he took to beating them, and they refused to
work any longer under him. They were imprisoned, and many of
them beaten, but at last, after a great deal of persuasion, backed by
a few rupees, they were induced to begin again, and the bandmaster
promised to cease from castigating them whenever they played a
wrong note.
I shall never forget my first introduction to the bandmaster. He
arrived dressed in what he called his ‘Calcutta clothes,’ of which he
was immensely proud. They consisted of a white frock coat, made in
a very old-fashioned way; black broadcloth continuations, rather
short and very baggy; a red-corded silk waistcoat, with large white
spots, and tie to match; turn-down collar and ancient top hat,
constructed in the year 1800, I fancy. He had a small peony in his
button-hole, and last, but not least, patent-leather boots stitched with
white and covered with three rows of pearl buttons. He carried a light
cane, surmounted by the head and shoulders of a depraved-looking
female in oxidized silver as a handle. He showed this to me with
great pride, and really it was a marvellous machine, for when you
pressed the top of her head attar of roses came out of her mouth
and nose, and if you were anywhere near you were covered with that
pungent liquid. It was very difficult to avoid laughing at this curious
get-up, and when he had safely embarked on a long overture from
‘William Tell,’ I disappeared for a few minutes to give vent to my
amusement. He was quite a character, and always afforded me a
weekly surprise, as he seldom appeared in the same clothes twice
running, and his wardrobe seemed as endless as it was select.
Being able to have the band when we liked was very pleasant. It
brought the officers over from Langthabal once a week at any rate,
and we always rode out to see them every week. We were very gay
there in those days, and we used to have dinner-parties, and I
enjoyed the change of going to the mess to dinner now and then. Of
course the four miles’ journey there was a little trying. The Manipur
roads never admitted of driving, so I used to be carried in a long
chair by hospital Kahars, and my husband used to ride. It was
terribly cold coming back late at night, and often very wet, but we did
not mind that very much to get an outing occasionally.
 Terribly sorry we were when the decree went forth that we were to
lose the regiment. We knew that they might go any day, and a Chin
expedition cropped up in the winter of 1888, which took our only
neighbours off on the warpath. We were very depressed at the idea
of losing them, but perfectly desolated when a letter came saying
that we ourselves were to go to another station. We were out in
camp when it arrived, and I never shall forget the hopeless silence
that fell upon us both at the news. We had counted upon being
safely installed at Manipur for three years at the least, but, alas! a
number of senior men were coming out from furlough, and had to be
provided with districts before the juniors. We had taken so much
pride in the place during our ten months’ residence there that we
were very loath to go. We talked it over, trying to find some way of
getting out of leaving, but came to the conclusion there was none.
That was in December, but we did not really leave until February, as
the officer who was to relieve us had to come a long distance from
the other side of the Assam Valley, and he took as long as he
possibly could in coming, being as loath to take the place as we
were to give it up. Sadly we walked round our gardens, noted the
rose-trees only lately arrived from Calcutta, which we had been
counting on to make the place beautiful during the coming year, and
gazed mournfully at the newly-made asparagus-bed that we hoped
would have fed us in three years’ time. I almost felt inclined to
destroy everything, but my husband was more magnanimous, and
even went as far as to say he hoped Mr. Heath (our successor)
would enjoy it all.
We made the most of our last two months in Manipur. Two
shooting expeditions to the lake, and a journey to Cachar for the
Christmas race-meet, occupied most of our remaining time; but, like
all things, it came to an end—all too soon for us—and one morning
the guns boomed out a salute to our successor. It was a case of ‘Le
roi est mort. Vive le roi!’ The same elephants, covered with the same
crimson coverings, welcomed him in the identical manner that they
had welcomed us. The red-coated Chupprassies hastened to pay
their respects to the new Sahib and attend to his wants, heedless of
those of the old Sahib, and I think we both felt then what leaving the
place would really mean to us.
 Mr. Heath was much impressed by all the glories prepared for him,
but he had not been in the house very long before he told us how
much he disliked coming to Manipur. He hadn’t a good word to say
for it, and I felt very sorry for him, as he really seemed to dread the
loneliness terribly. Lonely it certainly was, and the outlook was worse
for him than it had been for us, as we had each other, and the
regiment was four miles off. He had no one. I knew well how the
solitude would weigh on him before many days were over. It had
been dreadful work for me at times, when my husband was kept in
the office till late in the evening, and I had to amuse myself as best I
could from eleven in the morning until dinner-time. There were no
books or papers to be got under three weeks or a month’s post, and
then one had to buy one’s books, as there was no going to a library
for them. So I felt very sorry for poor Mr. Heath, as he seemed far
from strong into the bargain. However, I did my best to cheer him up
by taking him all round the gardens and over the house, and
showing him that, as far as the place went, he could not wish for a
better.
Then we went for a walk through the bazaar and on to the polo
ground, and eventually, when we returned in the evening, he
seemed in a happier frame of mind, and the band playing whilst we
were at dinner cheered him up considerably. But next day, when the
time came for us to depart, he was very gloomy, and as I was worse
myself, I could not put on a pleasant outward appearance. It was
very hard to leave the place, having to bid good-bye to all our pets,
leaving them in the hands of the servants who might or might not
look after them. I took the three little monkeys with me, as I would
not part with them, and they were travellers already, as they had
come to Manipur with us. My husband did suggest letting them loose
in a large grove of mango-trees not far from the Residency that was
filled with monkeys which we often used to go and feed with rice and
plantains, but I knew how they fought amongst themselves, and how
the big ones bullied the little ones, so I preferred taking my three with
us. I took a last walk round the grounds, and almost directly after
breakfast our horses came to the door and we had to make a start.
All the servants that were remaining behind came and bid us good-
bye, and some of the red-coated Chupprassies gave us little
presents of dried fruits and nuts. We rode out of the place very
slowly, but as soon as the quarter-guard gates had closed behind us
we put our ponies into a gallop, and never stopped till three or four
miles lay between us and the Residency, and neither of us spoke
much for the rest of the ten that limited our journey that day.
We were going to a place over two hundred miles away called
Jorehat, in the Assam Valley, near the Brahmapootra, and to get to it
we had to pass through Kohima, in the Naga Hills, ninety-six miles
from Manipur. It was my first visit there, and I enjoyed the eight days’
journey to it immensely. We were accompanied as far as Mao Thana
(the boundary between the Manipur state and Kohima) by the eldest
son of the Tongal General.
Before going on, I think some description of the latter officer will
not be amiss, especially as he has played so important a part in the
late rebellion. He was an old man, nearer eighty than seventy I
should think, taller than the average Manipuri, and marvellously
active for his age. He had a fine old face, much lined and wrinkled
with age and the cares of state which had fallen upon him when he
was quite a young man, and had in no wise lessened as his years
increased. He had piercing black eyes, shaggy overhanging white
eyebrows, and white hair. His nose was long and slightly hooked,
and his mouth was finely cut and very determined. He was fond of
bright colours, and I never remember seeing him in anything but a
delicate pink silk dhotee, a dark coat made from a first-rate English
pattern, and a pink turban, and when the orchids were in bloom, he
seldom appeared without a large spray of some gorgeous-hued
specimen in the top of his turban.
The Tongal always reminded me of an eagle. He had the same
keen, rugged expression and deep-set, glowing eyes. Few things
happened without his knowledge and consent, and if he withheld his
approbation from any matter, there would invariably be a hitch in it
somewhere. He was credited with more bloodshed than any man in
the kingdom. If a village had misbehaved itself, raided on another, or
refused to pay revenue or do Lalup, the Tongal would travel out to
that village and wipe it off the face of the earth. Men, women, and
children were cut down without the slightest compunction. Few
escaped, and these travelled away and joined other villages; but
every house and barn and shed was burnt, pigs and fowls destroyed,
and ruin and devastation reigned where prosperity and plenty had
held sway before. I believe in later years restrictions were brought to
bear upon the Manipur durbar which prevented such wholesale
slaughter; but in earlier days the Tongal had, as he expressed it,
‘nautched through many villages’ in the style described, and brought
desolation into many a hillman’s peaceful home.
If he had his faults, he had his virtues also. He was very
enterprising, fond of building bridges, and improving the roads about
the capital. Like the Senaputti, he was a keen soldier, enjoyed
watching good shooting, and had been in his younger days a first-
rate shot himself. He was an obstinate old man, and it was very
difficult to get him to listen to any proposition if it did not please him
at the outset; but when once he had promised to get anything done,
he did not go back from his word, and one knew it was reliable. He
lived in a large house some distance to the south of the palace, with
his family. Of these, only two sons were of any importance—the
eldest, called Yaima, and the second son, a very handsome young
fellow, named Lumphel Singh. The latter was perhaps the most
influential, and my husband always said he thought that he would
take his father’s place in the state when anything happened to the
old man. Lumphel was the favourite aide-de-camp of the Maharajah,
and he was the officer in charge of the hundred and twenty-eight
miles of road between Manipur and Cachar. At durbars he used to
stand behind the Maharajah’s chair with a very magnificent uniform
covered with gold lace, and a gold turban.
Yaima, the eldest brother, was not good-looking at all, but a nice
young fellow, and very hard-working. He came with us on our
journey to Kohima at the time of which I write, and was very obliging,
and ready to put himself out in any way in order that we might be
comfortable, which, considering that we were departing, as we then
thought, for good from the place, was very courteous on his part. We
were very sorry to part with him at Mao Thana.
The scenery on the road between Kohima and Manipur is
magnificent. Some of the hills run as high as nine thousand feet, and
yet until you are within three days’ journey of Kohima the road is
almost level, winding in and out along a narrow valley. Forests of oak
abound the whole way, and in the cold weather the trees lose their
foliage, making it look very English-like and wintry.
Sometimes you find yourself riding along a narrow path which
skirts round the side of a steep hill, while below you is the river, clear
and blue and deep, with an occasional rapid disturbing the calm
serenity of its flow. The hills around are studded with villages, and
peopled by various tribes. The Nagas in the immediate vicinity of
Kohima are perhaps a finer race than any hillmen to be found in
Assam. They are called Ungamis, and are very fine men, most of
them six feet high at least, broad shouldered, and powerfully built.
Their dress is curious, and quite different to any of the Nagas about
Manipur. It consists of a kind of very short kilt made of coarse black
cloth, trimmed with three or four rows of shells like cowries. In old
days, before Kohima was as settled and quiet as it is in these days,
these rows of shells are said to have borne a meaning—a man who
had never taken a human head was not allowed to sew them on to
his kilt. For every head taken they affixed so many cowries, five or
six at a time, as the case might be, and a warrior with three rows on
his kilt was considered a great gun indeed.
The Mao Nagas were Ungamis, and used to be rather a handful
for the Manipuris to manage. They were always getting up feuds with
the villagers over the border, and the Manipuris were very often
afraid of hauling them over the coals for it, for fear of getting the
worst of the fray. We stayed two days at Kohima on our way to
Jorehat, and travelled after leaving there through the Namba forest
to the next station, called Golaghat. We took eight days to do this bit
of our journey, as the weather was delicious, and we wanted to make
the most of our time on the road, being in no hurry to arrive at our
destination. This Namba forest covers an enormous area. It extends
hundreds of miles each side of the road, which is constructed right
through the middle of it. The scenery is wonderful. High forest jungle
rises each side of you as you ride along. Here and there you come
across a river, whose sandy banks show the footprints of many a
wild beast. Bears, tigers, leopards, and elephants swarm in the
jungle around, but one seldom sees anything more exciting than a
harmless deer browsing by the wayside, or a troop of long-tailed
monkeys crossing the road. It is all very wild and beautiful, and when
we eventually came to the end of our eight days’ march through the
Namba, and reached cultivated regions once more, we were quite
sorry. We stayed two days at Golaghat, the first station reached after
leaving the forest, and then proceeded to our new subdivision,
arriving there at the end of three days.
 CHAPTER VII.
Short stay at Jorehat—My husband appointed to Gauhati—Value of the bearer in
India—His notions and mine not always in harmony—Arrive at Gauhati—
Illness and death of Mr. Heath—Presentiments—My husband returns to
Manipur—I remain at Shillong—Delicious climate.

There is no necessity to give a detailed account of the time spent

between our leaving Manipur and our return there. It extended over a
period of some ten or twelve weeks only. Instead of remaining at
Jorehat three months as we had at first expected, we were there
only ten days, just long enough to get everything unpacked and
stowed away, when a telegram came from Shillong, ordering my
husband to another station called Gauhati, on the Brahmapootra. As
it was a better appointment, he accepted it, but it was very hard work
having to start off on the march again before we had had time to rest
ourselves after our long journey from Manipur. That wonderful
domestic whom we could never do without in India, the bearer, soon
repacked all our things.
Why haven’t we someone like a bearer in England? He is a perfect
godsend in the shiny East. He is valet to the Sahib, makes the beds,
dusts the rooms, cleans the lamps and boots, and is responsible for
all the performances of the other domestics. If they fail to do their
duty, or break your furniture or crockery, you scold the bearer. If one
of your horses goes lame or gets out of condition, the bearer knows
of it very soon, and if your cook sends you up anything nasty for
dinner, or the butter is sour or the milk turned, your bearer is
admonished. No doubt he lectures the other servants for their
misdeeds, and takes many gratuities from them, varying in bulk, for
pacifying his irate master or mistress. He generally gets on amicably
with the whole establishment, but sometimes he makes an enemy of
one or other of the servants, and ructions are as constant as they
are noisy. The two bearers (for they generally hunt in couples) that
we had had been with my husband for many years. They were both
very excellent servants, though the elder of the two gave himself the
airs and graces of a Maharajah.
My advent into the menage did not please him at all. Well he knew
that his little sins of omission and commission, so easily perpetrated
in a bachelor establishment, would all vanish and be things of the
past when a Memsahib came out from Belat[6] to rule the roost.
Many a battle have I had with Mr. Moni Ram Dass, as my husband’s
chief factotum was called, before I could get him to see that my way
was not his way sometimes. For instance, on one occasion shortly
after my arrival in India I found him airing the whole of my husband’s
wardrobe in my drawing-room at an hour when visitors were
certainties. Now, there are some garments in a man’s outfit—and in
a woman’s, too, for that matter—which, with the best intention in the
world, could never be made to look fitting ornaments for a lady’s
drawing-room. I expounded this theory to the bearer on this
occasion, but it was some time before I got him clearly to understand
that his master’s wardrobe was to be confined to the limits of the
dressing-room and back veranda; and when he did carry off the
garments in question, it was with an expression on his face of severe
displeasure at my want of taste in not considering them in the light of
ornaments to my drawing-room. One virtue in this estimable
individual certainly was worthy of all praise: he knew how to pack.
When we were leaving Manipur, he had packed all our belongings,
and on our arrival at Jorehat, after a long, rough journey, we found
everything in perfect order, and not even a cup broken. He repacked
our things when we had to leave there again, and took them himself
to Gauhati, saving us all the trouble of having to look after our heavy
baggage ourselves, and enabling us to follow on in comfort some
days later.
It was beginning to be hot when we arrived at Gauhati early in
April, and I dreaded having to spend the hot season in the plains. It
was to be my first experience of great heat, as the summer before in
Manipur we had never needed punkahs, and on the hottest day we
ever had, the thermometer registered only 87°.
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