Roehampton Club

Roehampton was founded by the Miller brothers as an officers’ polo club and opened in April 1902, with three polo grounds, a racecourse and stabling on about a hundred acres near Richmond Park. Its Roehampton Trophy, first played for in 1902, is now the oldest polo trophy contested in England, and a Roehampton team won the polo tournament of the 1908 Olympic Games at Hurlingham. Golf followed in 1904.

Tennis came in 1912, when the club extended its lease for courts. Its tennis committee first met on 11 April that year, Tom Fleming, an Irish champion of 1890 and 1891, became the first professional, and by July there were seven grass and six hard courts. By 1922 there were twelve of each, and by the end of the 1920s thirty-seven. The club staged the Surrey Hard Court Championships from 1914 to 1939, and in July 1919 the first Roehampton Grass Courts tournament, won in the men’s singles by Josiah Ritchie, the 1908 Olympic champion, at the age of forty. As the Rothmans Grass Court Invitation it ran until 1967.

Today the club keeps ten grass courts in two blocks among a wide range of surfaces, opening them on 1 May, the earliest date locally, and closing them in mid-September. Its members include the Grand Slam doubles champions Joe Salisbury and Henry Patten. Roehampton is a private club, not to be confused with the nearby sports ground in Roehampton where Wimbledon qualifying is played.