Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Strand Magazine, August 1929
WHEN I received a letter from the Editor of The Strand Magazine asking me to write a crisp, chatty article on the form of the more generally fancied contestants for the forthcoming Lawn Tennis Championships at Wambledon, I confess I was a little surprised. As one who goes to that bracing seaside resort every summer to recuperate from the fatigues of the London Season, I naturally felt a patriotic thrill; but at the same time I was, as I say, somewhat puzzled. We who love Wambledon-on-Sea yield to none in our appreciation of its ozone-filled breezes, its water-supply, its Esplanade, and the inspiring architecture of its new Assembly Hall; but I should have thought myself that its tennis was scarcely of a calibre to excite nation-wide interest.
However, editors know what they are doing. They have their finger on the public pulse. If the public wishes to know all about Wambledon tennis, it simply shows—well, I cannot at the moment think just what it does show, but it obviously has a significance of some sort.
Tennis at Wambledon is confined mostly to the residents. Owing to the fact that the words “On Sea” are really justified only twice a day, and that at other times all that meets the pleasure-seeker’s eye is a waste of grey mud picked out with broken bottles and dead starfish, we get few visitors. And our isolation is increased by the supine policy of the railway company, which refuses to bring the branch line any nearer than Gluebury Mortimer. It is among the native sons and daughters, then, that we must seek for the winners of the handsome pewter cups so generously presented by Squire Bloomenstein of Wambledon Hall.
Of the Ladies’ Singles there is little that one can say. It is always an open event. Matilda Jervis has outgeneralled her rivals by securing a Helen Wills eyeshade. Jane Willoughby, on the other hand, has a larger collection of autographs of tennis celebrities. Muriel Debenham’s aunt met Borotra last winter in the South of France. In these circumstances, form is hard to estimate, and I should prefer not to commit myself, but to hasten on to the bonne-bouche of the day,
THE MEN’S SINGLES,
which, in the general consensus of Wambledon opinion, lies this year between four men. I allude to George Murgatroyd, Arthur (“Grandpop”) Binns, Archibald Twirling, and John Jasper Jones—the last-named our courteous and popular undertaker.
In every event of a sporting nature there is, of course, always the possibility of a dark horse coming along at the last moment to upset the form-book; but to me—and I am supported in the view by the knowledgeable editor of The Wambledon and West Worsley Intelligencer and Farmer’s Gazette—it seems that when, as Kipling finely says, the tumult and the shouting have died—and I hope those boys will try to be a little quieter this year, especially during the rallies, and, more particularly, will refrain from throwing portions of fish at the players—when, I say, the tumult and the shouting have died and the captains and the kings have departed, the handsome pewter cup will be found on one of these four mantelpieces.
Let us, then, concentrate upon this quartette and endeavour, by a minute examination of their methods when in action, to find the answer to the question,
WHO WILL THE VICTOR BE?
A few weeks ago, had I been asked to prognosticate, I should doubtless have confined my observations entirely to the first-named. And this though I am fully alive to the many merits of the other three. Like everybody else in Wambledon, I was dazzled, and I am man enough to admit it. It was early in June that
GEORGE WINSTANLEY MURGATROYD
made his initial appearance on our tennis-court. A graduate of Cambridge University, he had been engaged by Squire Bloomenstein to act as tutor to his son Oscar, a charming but somewhat backward boy; and it is not too much to say that he caused a veritable sensation. I was standing chatting when he arrived, I remember, with little Euphrosyne Burwash, daughter of the well-known contractor and surveyor, and I can testify that she shook like a jelly. At the moment she had been speaking with a good deal of enthusiasm of Ronald Colman; but at the sight of George Murgatroyd the words died on her lips, a strange light came into her eyes, and a bag of pear-drops fell from her nerveless fingers. She was discovered at a late hour that night, seated on the breakwater, reading Elinor Glyn and at intervals uttering little moans.
And I, for one, cannot blame her. No such magnificent vision had ever been seen before in the Wambledon arena. About George’s well-modelled shoulders there hung the prismatic scarf of his old college, loosely draped over the throat and blending subtly with the green, orange, and purple blazer of a dining-club to which he had belonged when at the University. He had a lovely tan, and on his snowy trousers and gleaming shoes there was no spot or blemish. Add to this the fact that he carried his racket in a case, and it will readily be seen that here was no ordinary man.
BUT now, as far as his actual tennis is concerned, the impression created by George Murgatroyd’s advent has to a certain extent been blunted by familiarity and the passage of time. That was June. This is July. And in the intervening weeks we have seen George do his stuff, and the scales have fallen from our eyes.
For some days it seemed as though no opposition could live against George Murgatroyd. Nothing like his first serve, the fast one, had ever been seen at Wambledon. It astounded all beholders, dismayed all adversaries. And then, little by little, critics arose to point out that this serve, superb though it was in conception and magnificent as a mere spectacle, had never yet succeeded in getting over the net.
It was a serve that relied entirely on moral suasion. It was a sort of frightfulness. Leaping some feet into the air, George would hurl the ball to the clouds, strike it with hideous violence, and return to earth with a loud grunt. And his pallid opponent, cowering on the other side of the net, was invariably so unnerved by these phenomena that he nearly always failed to return the second serve, which was of a milder nature and more semicircular, reminiscent rather of the gentle rain after a thunderstorm.
But now, as I say, criticism has done its deadly work. His antagonists of late have been plucking up heart. They cower as before, but rally more swiftly, and recently the second serve has generally been killed. Nevertheless, there always remains the possibility of something practical developing from that first terrific slosh, and it is still felt that George Murgatroyd is a man to be reckoned with. He has the Law of Averages on his side. In the ten years that have passed since he first took up the game he has never yet got that first serve over the net. It may—nay, must—happen soon, and who knows but that it will happen during our annual tournament? Certainly, therefore, we must include George Murgatroyd in our list of Possibles.
We come next to
J. ARTHUR BINNS.
In Arthur Binns we find a player of a very different order. “Grandpop,” as he is called—affectionately and at a safe distance—by Wambledon’s younger set, is a man of maturer years. Nobody, in fact, knows exactly how old he is. George Murgatroyd’s statement that when Julius Cæsar landed in England the first thing he saw was Grandpop Binns dancing about on the foreshore, painted bright blue and dressed in a natty wolf-skin, is, of course, pure persiflage, just one of those bits of clean, wholesome fun at which we all laugh so heartily. Personally, I should put Arthur Binns in the early seventies.
His years tell both for and against him. They have of necessity diminished the boyish sprightliness of his nonage, but on the other hand they have given him a wonderful steadiness and poise. He is not a remorseless machine like Archibald Twirling (with whom I shall deal presently), but nothing upsets him. He serves underhand, and has only once been known to volley—in June of the year 1910. His principal asset is his extraordinary knowledge of the ground. And in Wambledon tournaments to have a familiarity with the terrain is half the battle.
The tennis-court at Wambledon adjoins the Sea-View Hotel, and in his capacity of proprietor of that establishment it falls to Grandpop Binns to look after it and prepare it for the annual Championships. No one, therefore, knows better than he the exact position of the many bumps and hollows which punctuate the smoothness of its surface. Try as we may to prevent them, the village children will play rowdy games all over the court, and it is consequently full of heel-marks. These are thinly filled with loose sand, and a ball which strikes one of them sometimes stops dead and tries to bury itself, sometimes trickles off at a sharp angle. A man who knows the topography of the arena as well as does Arthur Binns must have more than a sporting chance of victory. Local opinion, it is true, is to some extent prejudiced against Grandpop, because he plays in his Sunday trousers and a stiff shirt, and rarely removes the top-hat which is his inseparable companion in his walks abroad: but looks are not everything in tennis, or who could compete with George Murgatroyd?
Let us, then, not dismiss Arthur Binns hastily. He is a distinct possibility. Indeed, I, personally, would rank him a shade higher than the third player on my list, his friendly rival,
ARCHIBALD TWIRLING.
Archibald Twirling is a man of method. I have called him a remorseless machine, and that is what he is. In this restless age it is rarely that we find a man who takes one definite line and sticks to it. Archibald Twirling is one of the exceptions. A builder by profession, he builds nothing but bungalows, and each Twirling bungalow is precisely the same as every other Twirling bungalow, even down to the horseshoe nailed over the front door. He rises at the same hour every day, retires to rest at the same hour every night. He eats one lightly-boiled egg every morning for breakfast, and winds the clock up every evening at precisely ten. And so with his tennis. Right from the beginning, Archibald Twirling made up his mind how he proposed to play tennis, and he has never deviated from his chosen course. Whether his opponent be a George Murgatroyd or a Grandpop Binns, his method never varies.
It is Archibald’s custom to stand at the back of the court and lob. If his adversary smashes, Archibald lobs. If he tries placing, Archibald still lobs. The longer the game goes on, the higher he lobs, until his antagonist, losing patience or, it may be, forgetting during the long wait for the ball to descend that he is engaged in a game of tennis, omits to return the stroke. Then Archibald shifts his chewing-gum from left to right, or vice versa, calls out the score in a rather melancholy voice, and goes on lobbing.
But Achilles had his heel, and so has Archibald Twirling. For a while, Archibald’s progress was one of unalloyed triumph. All Wambledon’s best and bravest fell before him. And then one day some shrewd student of the game discovered that he was physically and mentally unable to deal with a back-hand stroke, and now his rivals play sedulously on that fatal weakness.
It is an interesting and a pitiful sight to see Archibald Twirling when a crisis arrives which can only be met by a judicious application of the back-hand. There was a time when he would dive at the ball and try to lob it in the constrained attitude which had been forced upon him. But after lobbing perhaps a hundred balls into the sea, directly at right-angles to the spot where they should have gone, a frozen calm, a sort of dull resignation, seemed to descend on the unhappy man. He has now decided to treat such crises as Acts of God. There is something of the defeatist Russian philosophy in his attitude, a kind of crushed refusal to battle with Fate. To-day, when a ball comes at his back-hand, Archibald just stands and looks at it sadly, in his eye something of that mild reproach which a hat-check boy bestows on a client who tips him with an aspirin tablet.
This vital flaw in his game of necessity diminishes his chances for the Championship, and if it were not for the peculiarly maddening nature of his methods one might rule him out of the race. Persistent lobbing, however, has worn down many a fine player, and we must accord Archibald Twirling at least an outside chance.
We now come to the last name on the list, and it is the name of a dangerous man. There is, indeed, a strong school of thought in the village whose members refuse to hear of anybody but
JOHN JASPER JONES
as the next Wambledon champion. I happen to know that down at the Fisherman and Mackerel odds are being offered on his success which would stun the public.
This Jones has practically everything. As regards service, he is undoubtedly the superior of any of the other entrants. True, he lacks George Murgatroyd’s cavalier-like dash and fire, but on the other hand he has frequently been known to get his first serve over the net and on several occasions to place the ball in the right section of his opponent’s territory. He does not slash at the ball like George, preferring to throw it a few inches in front of him and then give a sort of stabbing lunge at it. No one who has not played at Wambledon can understand the moral effect of a first serve that gets over the net. One might almost say that it is etiquette not to return it. And, while Jones does not intentionally put any spin on the ball, the irregularities of the ground frequently co-operate with him so happily that he becomes unplayable.
In addition to this, he is, if given plenty of time, a master of the back-hand. I speak a little loosely, perhaps. To be perfectly accurate, John Jasper Jones has never brought off a back-hand shot in his life, and never expects to. But Nature having made him ambidextrous, he has found a way of meeting the situation. Where Archibald Twirling merely stands and sighs, John Jasper Jones acts. If the ball comes to his left, he rapidly shifts the racket to the other hand, and before his startled adversary can brace himself to cope with this new development the sphere is on its way back over the net. I have seen strong men positively paralyzed by the manœuvre.
The only flaw in Jones’s game is that he serves nothing but foot-faults. This might at first sight seem to reduce his chances of the handsome pewter cup to nil; but the resourceful man has found a way of overcoming this difficulty, too. Only a week ago he became engaged to the elderly sister of Bernard Thistleby, our sexton, who is to act as umpire in the tournament: and few of the cognoscenti doubt that, when it comes to the acid test, blood will prove thicker than water. Let me, therefore, come boldly out and state that, after weighing all the pros and cons, my money is on
JOHN JASPER JONES
for the big event.
There is just one other small point to be considered. Old Colonel Warburton will be a spectator, as usual, and something must undoubtedly depend on whether his vocal cords are in shape again or not. At the moment of writing, he is suffering from Clergyman’s Sore Throat, induced by a lengthy argument with the driver of a lorry who backed into the left mudguard of his car last Tuesday, and, when last seen, was virtually speechless. If he is still in this condition when the tournament opens, his influence on the fortunes of the contestants will, of course, be neutralized. If, on the other hand, he is in good voice, one cannot say what will happen. It is the Colonel’s practice, when watching tennis, to throw his head back from time to time and emit sudden, sharp, hunting noises by way of encouraging the players. You never know when these will occur, and the effect of the suspense on a highly-strung performer is frequently to put him right off his stroke. George Murgatroyd is peculiarly susceptible to them, and has been known in the hour of defeat to draw comparisons between the Colonel and the laughing hyena of the Indian jungle. They also affect John Jasper Jones and Archibald Twirling. Should the Colonel have recovered his full voltage by the great day, I would be inclined to transfer my support to Grandpop Binns, whom nothing can disturb. It was Grandpop Binns who, on the famous occasion in 1923 when the soap-boxes which form the foundation of the Grand Stand collapsed, injuring dozens of Wambledon’s smartest residents, merely looked over his shoulder with a lack-lustre eye and, observing “Forty-fifteen,” proceeded to serve one right over the net into a hole left by Farmer Wilberforce’s cow when that animal was pastured on the court. One cannot afford to ignore nerve like that, for it is nerve that wins championships.
To sum up, let me conclude with those splendid words which are the bed-rock of that love of sport which makes us Englishmen what we are—May the best man win. That the contests will be conducted in the true spirit of British sportsmanship goes without saying. Tea will be provided on the ground and will be followed by a short address from the Vicar in aid of the Church Organ Fund. Should it rain, the Championship will be postponed until next August and a Shove-Ha’penny Tournament in the saloon bar of the Fisherman and Mackerel substituted. As this scarcely comes within the scope of my present article, I will not deal with the prospects for this event, merely contenting myself with recommending as a Safety Bet William Anstruther Simpson, the son and heir of Simpson’s Bon Ton Drapery Stores, who, I am told, shoves a very fine ha’penny.
NOTE.—I find, on re-reading the Editor’s letter, that it was the Wimbledon, not the Wambledon, Lawn Tennis Championships with which he wished me to deal; and, strictly speaking, I suppose, I ought to write this article all over again. I am informed, however, that by the time these lines are in print this other meeting will have been concluded; so I will leave things as they stand, merely mentioning that the date of the Wambledon Tournament is August the First and that any of my readers who care to be present will be assured of a warm welcome and hearty English fare. The station bus meets all trains at Gluebury Mortimer, unless it happens to slip the driver’s mind, in which case there is a five-miles walk through delightful scenery. Come one, come all.
Printer’s errors corrected above:
Magazine, p. 123a, omitted comma after ‘breezes’.
Magazine, p. 126a, had ‘out list of Possibles’.