The Bathurst Cup

THE CUP

Newspaper lore tells how the perfect newspaper headline should have four elements; religion, snob appeal, mystery and sex; hence the archetypal headline, “Oh, my God! The Duchess is pregnant; whodunit?” My story has the first three elements, so it is nearly perfect. it involves Tennis’s own world cup, the biennial Bathurst Cup, coming to Lord’s in 2022. First, let me tell you a bit more about the tournament before describing the mystery of the trophy and its giver.

In 1921, the T&RA committee met to give approval for a new tournament, the Bathurst Cup, to take place first in London between 8 and 20 May 1922. As The Times reported on 21st November, the competition would take place in Paris one year and London the next, and would be open to teams of between two and four amateur players representing any country in the world. These teams would compete on a format modelled on the lawn tennis Davis Cup, namely four singles matches and one doubles match, the winner being the

Above: The Bathurst Cup was given by and named in honour of Lilias, Countess of Bathurst. Left: The Bathurst Cup.

team winning the most matches. Perhaps showing an awareness of a thousand years of Franco-Anglo relations, the organisers decided that in France, French rules would apply; so, for instance, each match in France would be three 8 game sets, whereas in the UK it would be five 6 game sets.

Inevitably, given the choice of venues, the first competitors were France and Great Britain. The tournament experienced some teething problems, some of which might sound familiar to organisers of international matches in the early twenty-first century. The two players making up the French team, M. Worth and M. Deves, were not greatly enamoured of the court at Queen’s or of the Tennis balls provided for the match, leading to calls by the press for much greater efforts to standardise the match balls. Whether for these or other reasons, the team of four players from Great Britain, Baerlein, Bruce, Pennell and Renshaw, proved too strong for the Frenchmen and were

easy winners, 5-0. Indeed, the Times correspondent was able to note of Mr Pennell, that his singles match against M. Deves was so much within his control that he was not required to resort to his usual range of on-court practices, including “playing the ball between his legs and behind his back” and, at moments of stress, “ejaculating the word ‘Scissors’”!

By the following year in Paris, the Americans had organised a team; as the Sunday Times correspondent later noted it was very “splendid” of them to turn up for a tournament that could never be played on their home soil, on the grounds that it would probably not be possible for representative teams to travel there “merely on the coarse question of money”. The first US team included their Olympic champion, Jay Gould, although it sounds from the commentary of the time that he had not put in much training for the event: “Mr Gould is decidedly portly these days […] he potters around the court”. However portly he might have seemed, Gould could still stoop for the ball, and was more than a match for the French. Indeed, the he also gave the British pair of Baerlein and Bruce a run for their money. It was only a remarkable win in the deciding rubber by Baerlein against Gould - 4/8 8/5 8/4 (French rules) - that gave the British their 3-2 victory. The USA would win in the following year and establish a pattern of US and GB victories that was unbroken until 1982 when Australia (who had started to compete in this tournament in the 1950’s) won the trophy for the first time.

Turning now to the trophy and its donor, the Bathurst Cup was given by and named in honour of Lilias, Countess of Bathurst and the wife of the 7th Earl. However, Lilias (nee Borthwick) was a powerful woman in her own right. In 1908 she inherited The Morning Post, a newspaper associated with the Tory Party from her father and was its proprietor until 1924. The paper was noted for its attentions to the activities of the powerful and wealthy, its interest in foreign affairs, and in literary and artistic events: it is said to have been the first daily paper in London to publish notices of plays and concerts on a regular basis. It achieved notoriety in 1920 when it published a series of articles on the now thoroughly discredited, anti-Semitic hoax, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Her reasons for donating the Bathurst Cup are, for the moment, obscured by the mists of time. Extensive research within the archives of the T&RA has revealed nothing. An article in The Field from 1921 states that this “generous gift” would “do a great deal to spread the knowledge of Tennis both here and abroad and to carry the revival of interest in the game that has been noticeable in the last few years.” Sadly no one has yet produced a definitive biography of the Countess. Investigations in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography indicate that the male members of her family were interested in hunting, flying and winter sports, but no Tennis players. A cursory review of the list of documents deposited in the archive of her papers at Leeds University does not This year is to be the 100th Men’s and the inaugural Ladies suggest the answer Bathurst Cup, it will be held at Lords. lies there. And the Morning Post was not a paper providing any coverage of Tennis. So her motives remain a mystery unless someone out there knows more! An interesting footnote emerging from the T&RA archives is that, like the more famous Jules Rimet Trophy awarded to winners of the soccer World Cup, the Bathurst Cup also went missing. In 1972, it vanished completely, only to reappear later in the same year, after the insurance money had been collected. (The insurers were reimbursed, of course.) It is now stored securely, and winning teams hold a replica trophy commissioned in 1987. By Roger Pilgrim, with thanks to David Best, Brian Rich, Sam Leigh, Jamie Bruce and Chris Davies.