Hinstock Lawn Tennis Club - Then and Now - compiled by Sean Pontin
If you could rewind about seventy years to when membership cost 7s 6d, a Slazenger racquet a guinea and a ball boy received a penny for his afternoon’s services, then you would probably arrive at the birth of the original Hinstock Lawn Tennis Club. It certainly was lawn tennis back then too, with some forty members playing on four, yes four!, grass courts. The courts themselves could be found in the heart of the village on the Falcon Field. This land was then owned by the village squire and today is home to the Roman Way housing development. The club was certainly a focal point of village life back then and boasted an open fronted wooden clubhouse, out-house with a stove for making tea and even it’s own toilet, something that the new club is yet to achieve!
Village stalwart, Mrs Edna Lewis remembers how important tennis was to village life back then, with many a young player playing most nights of the week. That is except Sunday, when it most certainly was not the done thing to play at the club. Mrs Lewis recalls one male member who so loved his tennis he would cycle to Audlem to work every day and still manage to find the time (and energy) to play in the evenings! In some ways village life doesn’t seem to have changed a great deal, Mrs Lewis laughs when she remembers how they lost one of their courts for a time. Apparently the squire, bowing to pressure from the local Women’s Institute, agreed for one court to be converted into a bowling green. By all accounts the tennis and bowling contingent never quite saw eye to eye after that and their partnership was not the most friendly (to be polite)! The bowlers soon gave up their claim and the tennis club soon had it’s fourth court back in business. Mrs Lewis caused something of a stir when she first played in shorts in 1935.
Even seventy years ago the players regularly travelled to neighbouring clubs to compete. Of course most villages had their own clubs back then and an evening’s entertainment could be had at Edgmond, Hodnet, Wollerton, Norton, Gnosall, Woore, Cheswardine or Wistanswick. How many of those clubs survive today? By the end of the 1930s war was consuming the nation and Hinstock Tennis Club took a well earned rest. That being said, the clubhouse didn’t attract any cobwebs as it was commandeered by the local Home Guard and transported lock,stock and barrel to Goldstone where it was used as a look out post and shelter!
In 1946/47 tennis (and the clubhouse) returned to Hinstock where once again many fine times were to be had on the village courts. Tennis continued in the village for a further eighteen years or so, but by the early 1960s interest was waning and times seemed to have moved on. Firing it’s last ball in anger, the club went into retirement in 1963/64 and the courts soon reverted to agricultural use. Seventy years on, Mrs Lewis still says that the time spent with friends at the tennis club were the best days of her life, lets hope that the new generation of players will think the same.