BACKGROUND

During the first decade of tournament lawn tennis there were two players who stood out from the pack in their influence on the way the game was played - William Renshaw and Herbert Lawford.

The modern game was born at the first Wimbledon Championships of 1877 and these two stepped into the sporting limelight in 1880 with major victories in the principal championships. They were to stay there for the next nine years.

They were both great competitors, rising to the occasion in major finals before a public gallery of thousands, but in the early years they represented very different schools of thought. William preached the gospel of the volley, advocating dominance from the service line, while Herbert was of the groundstroke faith, steadfast in his attachment to the baseline. The inter-reaction of the two approaches yielded the all-court game.

The rival protagonists learnt from each other over the years and extreme beliefs were tempered, William was driven back from the service line by improved ground-stroke play and Herbert was drawn to the net by the effectiveness of close-range volleying. Nevertheless William was the superior player - Wimbledon champion for seven of those early years – and Herbert had to settle for second best during the years of their rivalry, champion just once in 1887

Physically they were very different – similar in height but Herbert heavily built, mastiff versus greyhound to use his words, or Boris Becker versus Bjorn Borg for a human comparison – and their upbringing and lives off the court were also a sharp contrast.

Herbert was fairly typical of the working upper middle class while William had a mixed private education and lived a bachelor life supported by independent means, able to concentrate his energies on travel and the sports of his choice.

Herbert passed through boarding prep school, public school and university, embarked on a stock exchange career at the age of nineteen, and was a partner in a leading firm of stockbrokers, married and contemplating fatherhood, by the time he won Wimbledon.

His personality was big, like his physique, with some similarities to W.G. Grace, but he was more representative of the first generation of tournament competitors than William and his story perhaps offers a greater insight into the nature and origins of the tournament game.

His biography, and an account of the origins of tournament tennis in the Renshaw home town of Cheltenham, is presented by this website as a free download in the PDF format, so you can download it to your device or print it off to read at your leisure. The author is a Lawford so a bias must be declared, but without serious apology as generally the facts speak for themselves.