LAWN TENNIS is a genteel sport. This, we are enticed to believe each midsummer, as the neat spectacle of Wimbledon Championships glides by.
We welcome bronzed, swarthy men and women genuflecting and plunging in equipoise; exemplars of polite, non-contact sport etiquette. For the glamorous elect occupying the stands, hollering and swearing is replaced with clapping, strawberries and cream.
Although the game’s combined display of grace and brute force is addictive to behold, tennis has not been paramount to Irish sporting culture. This is likely because of its reputation, since the 19th century, as an imported sport, the preserve of the upper-middle-classes and aristocracy, and synonymous with double-barrelled names and walled-off estates. In the 1880s, the founding rhetoric of the GAA denounced tennis as elitist and “alien”, not earthy and primordial like football or hurling. Oddly, this coincided with the heyday in Irish tennis.
Another factor unfavourable to the game’s popularity is our under-performance at Wimbledon in the last century. We have not produced a victor in this pinnacle of grand-slams since Harold Mahony in 1896. In 1894 Joshua Pim won the men’s final for the second year running and in 1890 the petticoat-wearing Lena Rice claimed the women’s title, Willoughby Hamilton the men’s. In the same year Pim and Frank Stoker won the men’s doubles. However, their predecessor, the blond-haired Irish tennis player Vere Thomas St Leger Goold, became more infamous than famous – though there’s no hint in his debonair pose in the photo (above right) of the macabre events which were to follow.
Tom Higgins's article on Vere St Leger in the Dictionary of Irish Biographycan evoke both pride and terror, depending on the time of year it is read. Born in 1853 into the peerage in Waterford, St Leger was a leisurely public servant who displayed an early talent for the game. He competed in his home county and in Limerick, and won the first Irish Open staged in 1879 at Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club. He had a flamboyant style with a sleek backhand and knife-edged volley, which got him through to the 1879 Wimbledon finals. There, he played admirably but lost in three sets against a lusty Yorkshire opponent, the Rev Thorneycroft Hartley.
Following this, his career became chequered. In his mid-20s only, he was feted in Fitzwilliam upon return, and continued as an active player and committee member in that historic club. However, he retired prematurely from the game in 1883 and moved to London where he fell, like many a former sportsman, into dissolute alcoholism. In 1891 he married Marie Violet, a young French couturier already twice widowed – incidentally, the deaths of the unfortunate woman’s husbands are not known to have raised any eyebrows.
Following unsuccessful business ventures, the couple emigrated to Canada, and from there to Las Vegas, running hotly out of funds. In Monte Carlo, among a rolling-stone tribe of casino gamblers they encountered a wealthy young Danish woman, Emma Liven. She became embroiled in their material difficulties, lending them large quantities of money and jewellery.
From here, St Leger’s story enters the darker annals of criminal history. In August 1907 after a fracas with their debtor, the couple left Monte Carlo and reached Marseilles on an early morning train, carrying two large trunks. These were deposited in the cloakroom, to be forwarded to London under the couple’s instruction. A porter, disturbed by the stench of decay coming from the luggage, called the gendarmes. Once opened, the trunks were found to contain the dismembered corpse of Emma Liven.
This was to become sensationalised by the press as “The Trunk Murder”, and after a short trial in which St Leger pleaded guilty and Marie feigned innocence, the couple were sentenced to life imprisonment. The one-time tennis star died in miserable obscurity on the penal settlement of Devils Island, French Guiana in 1909 within a year of arriving there, aged 56.
As tennis’s great annual event in Wimbledon commences, seasonal reminders of Vere St Leger lead me to reconsider just how genteel and restrained is tennis after all. Walking past my local Donnybrook Lawn Tennis Club sends a shiver down my spine as I recall a time when, as a young gamine in ponytail and whites, I was thrashed in the shins by an older competitor in even brighter whites; or when I witnessed my mother being beaten (in tennis register this time) by that little girl’s mother, alongside the sneers of other little girls. Poetic justice; family lore recalls how my grandfather at 18, also a keen tennis player of Waterford stock, hurled his tennis racquet at his opponent in lieu of a handshake when he was beaten squarely.
Despite the gilded aura of Wimbledon, tennis is not immune to the sort of violent outbursts that are commonplace in most tactile sports. Woody Allen made a film, Match Point (2005), which explores the link between tennis and blood lust, using Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Myers as the fictive conduit. Having murdered his mistress the young player, who never made it to Wimbledon, comments on the luck of his acquittal, “there are moments in a match when a ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward, or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose”.
Vere St Leger’s ball did not land in the right place in the 1879 Wimbledon Championships. Had it done so, perhaps the “wild Irishman”, as the Rev. Hartley presciently nicknamed him, would not have carried out the killing that has sullied the name of Irish tennis.