From: The Racketeer 27, December 1997
The Prehistory of Mapperley Park Tennis Club
by Andy Lusis
A supplement to Chris Weir's history of the club, based on information unearthed while the author was researching his forthcoming book, Tennis in Robin Hood's County.
LEGEND has it that bowls and croquet were once played in the grounds of the Mapperley Hall Estate, on a spot now occupied by Mapperley Park Tennis Club. However, if bowls were played in the grounds, there is no evidence that the green was on that site. On the other hand the claims of croquet are much stronger. There was a Mapperley Hall Croquet Club - but did it use that site?
The area in question, at least from the 1870s, seems to have included trees and a pond. Did it also have a lawn of the quality needed for croquet? Jumping ahead several decades to 1903, when the northern part of the estate was released for building, the MPTC site was purposely not given over to housing. The most likely reason for this is that the land was not well suited to that purpose.
As late as 1910 the site, by then owned by tobacco manufacturer, John Dane Player, was officially unoccupied, but by 1914 there were four grass tennis courts and a pavilion. And the occupier of the ground? None other than Mapperley Hall Croquet Club. Could it be that the club had played croquet on another site, perhaps carrying on while the land around it was developed, but that some or all of its members were looking for a site on which to play lawn tennis, a sport whose popularity was growing rapidly at that time?
It seems likely that the Croquet Club, possibly while still playing its original game elsewhere, also became a tennis club, and continued on that basis until the 1922 season. Then a radical change took place. The ground was acquired by the brewer, James H. Shipstone, and split into three parts, which were let separately. Edward Hall and Ernest Bignall took one court each, while the pavilion and two courts were taken by Mapperley Park Tennis Club. Charles Sanderson and Arthur G. Dickins were the prime movers responsible the inauguration of the club, whose members - however many there were at that time - first took to the courts in the 1923 season.