Posted by Peter H on August 16, 2007 at 15:46:02 from 86.130.128.187 user Peter_H.
In Reply to: Re: Do Bohemians play tennis? posted by Prue Eckett on August 15, 2007 at 21:37:54:
Membership of a tennis club seemed to be a tad upper crust when so many were scraping the poverty barrel to its core
In my experience, this is completely inaccurate as far as it refers to the UK. My mother's family in Lancashire were all lower middle to middle class, and they all joined a tennis club in their late teens and early 20s. It was not so much to learn tennis as to meet people - that was one of the ways you mixed socially then. The courts were mostly municipal (ie owned by the local authority and rented out by the hour) although one or two private gardens had them. These gardens were large not because the owners were rich, but because many gardens were large then. Land values were not high, and there was not the demand for building land as there is now. If you look now for these gardens and tennis courts, you will find they are gone - all built on.
Tennis is not an upper class game. A Victorian middle-class house like Beckfoot would be expected to have a tennis court, just as many houses in my neighbourhood have netball apparatus fixed to the wall. There seems to be an overriding desire on TarBoard to show that the Blacketts/Turners were rich toffs served by downtrodden serfs. I have never read anything so ridiculous.