Save Our Queens

14 April 2012

The Queen's Club in danger? Impossible. This 118-year-old West London club - lawn tennis, real tennis, racquets and squash - is such a vital part of London life that even the buffoons of the Lawn Tennis Association would dare neither to let it die nor change its eccentric, loveable, cosmopolitan nature.

The point about Queen's is that, despite its name and its royal patronage, it is not an English toff 's club. Anyone can join. Over the years its members have come from all over the world and from every occupation. There have been Americans and Arabs, French and Russians, Australians and Norwegians. No one has ever counted or cared, but it is possible that foreigners outnumber the native-born English members.

There are lawyers, doctors, dentists, restaurateurs, Hollywood actors (Charlton Heston), singers (Tommy Steele, Shirley Abicair), entrepreneurs (Chris Wright), a concert violinist (Homi Kanga), billionaires (George Soros) - and paupers. All they have had in common has been a passionate interest in playing racquet sports.

When appointed US ambassador to Hungary, Philip Kaiser, a longtime member, did not take up his post until he could build a tennis court in the embassy garden. One member doing time for fraud (yes, the club has had a jailbird or two) was caught playing tennis instead of visiting a sick relative while out on compassionate parole. There was not a member who did not sympathise and understand.

And when Soros was cornered by the paparazzi at the courtside the weekend after he had dumped Sterling in 1992 and someone shouted at him "How does it feel to have cost this country billions of pounds?", most members were outraged that this intrusion might have ruined his game.

For the game is everything. This is not a social club. It is not a family club. Children are frowned upon. There are no creches or playrooms. There is a gymnasium - - but more to get fit for racquet sports than as an end in itself.

Unlike football clubs, members are not impressed by stars. John McEnroe swore at a woman member once and, to his amazement, was banned from the club for years.

The Queen's Club has always been a bit odd. Started by a couple of Victorian bucks on old market garden land as a venue for the annual Oxford-Cambridge match, it expanded into racquet sports. It once even had a winter ice-skating rink. It fell on hard times during the Second World War. A German bomber aiming for nearby St Paul's School, which had been taken over as Field Marshal Montgomery's headquarters, instead hit tennis courts four and five.

Typically, the brass plaque recording this disaster refers to it being due to 'enemy action', so as not to offend German members.

By 1953, the club was bust and was saved by the LTA in circumstances which remain foggy, to say the least.

The Stella Artois tournament, a major social event, played on what the professionals agree are the best grass courts in the world, stabilised the club's finances and the future looked rosy until the current crisis with the LTA.

Members are already apprehensive that the LTA is preparing Queen's for sale by making it more efficient and more commercial, thus destroying the traditional happy-go-lucky ethos of the club.

But members are not going to take this lying down. In the clubs oakpanelled rooms with their pictures of former sporting heroes, there is a rustle of conspiratorial whispers. Secret meetings are called and cancelled. Alliances form and re-form. Rumours rise and are then denied. The phrases most frequently used about the LTA are "remind them of the need to behave honourably" and "stress their moral obligation to us".

They want a fair deal from the LTA and will fight for it. And they are not without power.

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