I went for a walk this morning along the River Leam (pron: LEM) and one of the many River Avons to within sight of Warwick Castle.

Though the area is quite built up, development has avoided the riverbank for fear of flooding, so for much of the way you can pretend to be deep in the country.

There was constant birdsong. I had to look up this SBB. It’s a juvenile European Robin.

I saw occasional butterflies, too. This is a Small Tortoiseshell in spite of the fact that it is quite large by UK standards. I love the stripy antennae.

On the way back, I took a different route, and did some urban sections. I went past a huge training center for guide dogs (US: seeing eye dogs) and a pedestrian tunnel under the railway that had murals depicting great moments and characters from Leamington history. There were the elephants that used to wallow in the Leam…

… the inventor of cricket statistics…

… the great engineer…

… the overnight visit from Princess Victoria (before she was not amused) which was enough to get the town a “Royal” in the name…

… and the world’s first tennis club.

Modern tennis was invented by Henry Gem and Augurio Pereira in Edgbaston near Birmingham some time around 1860. It was based on earlier games such as real (or royal) tennis, rackets, and the Basque game of pelota. In a letter Gem credited the Spaniard Pereira with coming up with most of the rules. In 1872 both men moved to Royal Lemington Spa and set up a tennis club there.

Real tennis is still played in pretty much the form that Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots would have know it, in a huge indoor court with sloping roofs half way up the walls on three sides. There are not many of these around. Lawn tennis has a huge advantage that you could play it anywhere there was patch of grass. The first games in Edgbaston were played on a croquet lawn.

The real breakthrough for tennis came in the spring of 1874, when Walter Clopton Wingfield began selling a boxed set containing everything you needed to play tennis: rackets, balls, a net, poles, field markers, and a set of rules. There was even a mallet to drive in the pegs holding up the net. From that tennis became a national and international craze. The first game of lawn tennis in America was played later that year.

Wingfield’s rules were not quite the same as modern tennis. He recommended using an hourglass shaped court so that the net could be shorter. The modern form of tennis came from the rules published by the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1875.

That same year the All England Croquet Club agreed to set one of their croquet lawn aside for tennis. In 1877 they became the The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, and they organized a tennis championship. By 1882 they became the All England Lawn Tennis Club, but in 1899, perhaps afraid that tennis might not last they became the The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. They don’t play much croquet any more, but they still hold a tennis championship every year at Wimbledon.