A HISTORY OF REAL TENNIS AND BRISTOL REAL TENNIS CLUB

The Origins of a Royal Game

Real tennis is the ancestor of every racket sport played today, and one of the oldest games still played in something close to its original form. Its roots lie in medieval France, where monks and townspeople struck a ball by hand across monastery cloisters and market squares in a game known as jeu de paume — “the game of the palm.” Players called out tenez! (“take this!”) as they served, a warning cry that most historians believe gave the game its English name.

The bare hand was soon protected by a glove, then by a glove strung with cord, and by the sixteenth century by a proper strung racket.

The first known use of a racket in England dates to the very start of that century, and by 1592 the game had its first written rulebook. What had begun as a pastime for clerics and schoolboys became, within a few generations, the game of kings: Louis X of France is the earliest tennis player recorded by name, said to have died in 1316 after catching a chill following a match. Francis I and Henry VIII were the sport's two greatest royal patrons, each building and expanding courts — Henry VIII's court at Hampton Court Palace, begun in the 1530s, still stands and is in use today.

The game reached its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paris alone is said to have had as many courts as churches by 1590, and by some counts around 250 courts stood in the city at the height of its popularity. In England, over a hundred courts were built during the Tudor period alone, and by the eighteenth century courts could be found well beyond London and the royal palaces — in Bath, Birmingham, Liverpool, Dublin, and Bristol among them.

Decline, Revival, and the Modern Game

As the seventeenth century wore on, tennis at the French court became less a game to be played than a pretext for extravagant wagers, and courts across France and England gradually fell into disuse. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a long decline, hastened by the invention of lawn tennis in 1873, which offered a simpler, cheaper, outdoor alternative and borrowed its name from the older game — which thereafter became known as “real”, “royal”, or “court” tennis to tell the two apart.

A Victorian revival brought new courts to English country houses and schools — Hatfield House in 1842, Leamington in 1846, and courts at Cambridge and Manchester later in the century — and carried the game overseas, to Australia (Hobart, 1875) and the United States (Boston, 1876). Two World Wars devastated what remained: by the end of the First World War only a handful of courts were still in regular use. The sport survived, and slowly rebuilt, through the twentieth century under the governance of the Tennis and Rackets Association, founded in 1907.

Today real tennis is a small but thriving sport, played on around forty-five courts worldwide — roughly twenty-seven in the United Kingdom, with others in France, the United States and Australia. It remains, alongside golf, one of the few sports where players of markedly different ability compete on level terms through a handicap system, making it a game genuinely open to all ages and standards.

Bristol Real Tennis Club

Bristol's connection to real tennis is not a recent one. The city was home to a real tennis court as far back as the eighteenth century, one of the relatively small number that then existed outside London — evidence that the game had a following here long before the present club was ever imagined. That early court has not survived, and the story of today's club begins two centuries later, in the 1980s.

A Club Before It Had a Court

The Bristol and Bath Tennis Club, as it was first known, was formed in December 1985 by a small group of enthusiasts determined to bring real tennis back to the area. For its first decade the club had no court of its own at all: members played wherever a court could be found, most often travelling to Hardwick House. Remarkably, the club grew to more than two hundred members during this nomadic period — a measure of how much appetite there was locally for a game most people had never heard of, let alone played.

Building a Home at Clifton College

It took roughly ten years of searching — including an unsuccessful attempt to restore an old court in Bath — before a permanent home was found. Clifton College granted the club a 125-year lease on land at its Beggars Bush playing fields on Abbots Leigh Road, and a purpose-built court, together with club rooms, changing facilities and professional offices, opened there in 1997–98. The club took the name it holds today, Bristol Real Tennis Club, and has played at Clifton College ever since.

The Club Today

Since the court opened, several hundred players have tried real tennis for the first time at Bristol, and the club's membership has grown to become, in its own words, “the home of Real Tennis in the South West.” It welcomes members across the full range of ages and abilities — from complete beginners to players in their eighties — helped by the same handicap system that has made the sport accessible for centuries. A well-supported junior section introduces the game to the next generation, and the club's resident professional runs regular taster sessions for newcomers, who need nothing more to try the game than a pair of tennis or squash shoes.

More than three decades after a handful of enthusiasts set out to bring real tennis to Bristol with no court to play on, the club they founded continues to carry one of the world's oldest racket sports forward into its next chapter.

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