TENNIS
A hundred years of sporting history
Both past and present members of Amherst tennis club will gather in Amherst Gardens on Sunday afternoon 4 September to celebrate its 100th anniversary. There will be tennis competitions for all generations on its seven courts between 1pm and around 6pm, with cream teas served from the clubhouse from 3pm and the bar open all afternoon and evening.
Participants are asked to bring their old tennis photos, trophies and other memorabilia and encouraged to don an outfit from any previous era – long skirts, short shorts, or anything in between, taking into account that all-white clothing was de rigeur on the Amherst courts until 1985. Alternatively they are encouraged to dress up as their favourite tennis player from across the decades – expect a few John McEnroes, and (who knows?) a Maria Sharapova or two.
Amherst juniors at finals day 1990
Evidence of the club’s early history is scant. A letter dated 27 December 1922 addressed to F.C. Morgan Esq of St Helens Road from London solicitors representing the Cornwallis Hastings Estate, which at that time owned the land that is now Amherst Gardens, refers to the signing of an agreement with “the Tenants” in respect of “Amherst Gardens Lawn Tennis Courts”. The club’s archive also retains two invoices from household suppliers in Hastings addressed to Mr Morgan, now of Robertson Street, as representing “Amherst Lawn Tennis Club”. But the sports columns of The Hastings Observer in 1922 report only three tennis clubs playing regular cup matches between themselves during that year – Hastings Central, which played at the Central Cricket Ground in Priory Meadow; Hastings Valley, which had courts somewhere in Ore Valley; and Archery Gardens, in St Leonards – and that these were joined in the Hastings & District League for 1923 by United Banks and by Battle. There are also reports and detailed scores of matches contested with clubs in Eastbourne, Robertsbridge, Rye, Catsfield, Hawkhurst and other localities – no mention of any club at Amherst Gardens.
“An open space in perpetuity”
Fast forward to 1935. By that date ownership of the gardens had passed to a former mayor of the town, Alderman Arthur Davis Thorpe, but in May of that year he donated them “to be an open space for the Borough in perpetuity”, explaining that he had made the purchase some years before “just in time to save the land from the builder…with the definite intention of putting the gardens in the possession of the town at some future date”.
When W.H. Dyer, historian of Hastings, listed the town’s tennis clubs in 1937, Amherst featured, along with the Archery, the Crescent, the Green and the Junior Rotary. However, the club retains no press cuttings, photographs or other documents which show how it fared either in team results or as regards individual players over its first half-century of existence.
Junior coaching
From 1969, however, it became a hub for junior coaching sessions – started by John Mayo, continued by Mark Barham (who is still an active club member) and maintained up to the present day by a team led by another long-serving coach, Peter Farthing. Over the years, hundreds of junior players have developed their talents at sessions on the Amherst courts after school or on Saturday mornings, many of them going on to play the game for the whole of their active lives.
The demographic pattern of life in Hastings – children and teenagers brought up here but moving away to university or career paths elsewhere and seldom returning – means that this youth programme has filtered only limited numbers of first-rate players into the club’s adult teams. The photograph published on this page shows 25 juniors competing on a finals day in 1990. Many (most, one would hope) may still wield a racquet somewhere, but not a single one is known to do so in Hastings apart from Joe Adams (third from the left in the middle row, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shield) who is now head coach at The Green club in St Leonards.
There have, however, been competitive highlights. At adult level the championship title for the ladies’ team in the top club league in Sussex was won in 1982 by Amherst, and there was an equivalent triumph for the men in 1997, six out of the eight members of the team having come up through the junior ranks. There have also been exceptional players – not least, the Durham family, who dominated the courts in the 1980s and beyond. Yvonne Durham, a former Suffolk county player, and her daughter Susie, who won the Sussex junior championships whilst attending the Grove school in St Leonards, actually combined to win a world mother-and-daughter championship title in Texas in 1993.
Over the course of time, grass lawns have been replaced with artificial surfaces, floodlights have been installed for winter evening play on five of the seven courts, and a modern clubhouse was built in the last decade with funding from a generous legacy. Club president, Peter Dengate, recalls a more vibrant social life of the club in his early days, with annual dinner dances at the Royal Victoria Hotel and regular exchanges with a twinned club at Dordrecht in Holland. But the club has revived this international connection in recent times and has also experienced an upsurge in membership over the last couple of years, whether despite or because of the Covid pandemic. The club is certainly in buoyant mood as it marks its hundredth year.
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