Harry Gem
Encyclopedia
Major Thomas Henry Gem known as Harry Gem, was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

, soldier
Soldier
A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary...

, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 and sportsman.

Alongside his friend Augurio Perera
Augurio Perera
Juan Bautista Augurio Perera was a Spanish-born, English-based merchant and sportsman, credited alongside his friend Major Harry Gem as the earliest inventor of the game of lawn tennis.-Life:...

, he is credited as the earliest inventor of the game of lawn tennis.

Biography

Gem was born in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

 and educated at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...

. From 1841 he practiced as a solicitor
Solicitor
Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

 in Birmingham, becoming a magistrate
Magistrate
A magistrate is an officer of the state; in modern usage the term usually refers to a judge or prosecutor. This was not always the case; in ancient Rome, a magistratus was one of the highest government officers and possessed both judicial and executive powers. Today, in common law systems, a...

's clerk in 1856.

Highly active in local life, Gem wrote journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 and drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

 for several local publications, rose to the rank of Major
Major
Major is a rank of commissioned officer, with corresponding ranks existing in almost every military in the world.When used unhyphenated, in conjunction with no other indicator of rank, the term refers to the rank just senior to that of an Army captain and just below the rank of lieutenant colonel. ...

 in the 1st Warwickshire Rifle Volunteer Corps and was active in numerous sports including cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

 and athletics
Athletics (track and field)
Athletics is an exclusive collection of sporting events that involve competitive running, jumping, throwing, and walking. The most common types of athletics competitions are track and field, road running, cross country running, and race walking...

. He is recorded as having won a bet by running the 21 miles from Birmingham to Warwick
Warwick
Warwick is the county town of Warwickshire, England. The town lies upon the River Avon, south of Coventry and just west of Leamington Spa and Whitnash with which it is conjoined. As of the 2001 United Kingdom census, it had a population of 23,350...

 in under three and a half hours.

Invention of tennis

Among Gem's sporting interests was the game of rackets
Racquets (sport)
Rackets or Racquets is an indoor racket sport played in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada...

, which he played at the Bath Street Racquets Club adjacent to the Racquet Court Inn in Bath Street, Birmjngham with his friend Augurio Perera
Augurio Perera
Juan Bautista Augurio Perera was a Spanish-born, English-based merchant and sportsman, credited alongside his friend Major Harry Gem as the earliest inventor of the game of lawn tennis.-Life:...

, a Spanish merchant based in Birmingham. Frustrated at the complex and expensive facilities required for rackets, however, the two developed a simpler game that could be played on Perera's croquet
Croquet
Croquet is a lawn game, played both as a recreational pastime and as a competitive sport. It involves hitting plastic or wooden balls with a mallet through hoops embedded into the grass playing court.-History:...

 lawn at 8 Ampton Road in Edgbaston
Edgbaston
Edgbaston is an area in the city of Birmingham in England. It is also a formal district, managed by its own district committee. The constituency includes the smaller Edgbaston ward and the wards of Bartley Green, Harborne and Quinton....

, incorporating elements of rackets alongside features of the Basque
Basque people
The Basques as an ethnic group, primarily inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country , a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France.The Basques are known in the...

 game of pelota.

This game is known to have been being played by 1865, though research has suggested that experimentation may have started as early as 1859. It thus clearly pre-dates the game of sphairistike, whose rules were published and for which equipment was sold by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield
Walter Clopton Wingfield
Major Walter Clopton Wingfield was a British army officer who was one of the pioneers of lawn tennis. Inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1997, an example of the original equipment for the sport and a bust of Wingfield himself can be seen at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis...

 from 1874.

Gem and Perera's game also bore a closer resemblance to modern tennis than Wingfield's in several significant respects, most notably in being played on a similarly sized and configured rectangular grass court, rather than the hourglass-shaped court with a 'waist' at the net that featured in Wingfield's sphairistike.

Originally referred to as Lawn rackets or Lawn pelota, Gem and Perera's game was being referred to as Lawn tennis by 1872.

Early tennis clubs

In 1872 both Gem and Perera moved to Leamington Spa
Leamington Spa
Royal Leamington Spa, commonly known as Leamington Spa or Leamington or Leam to locals, is a spa town in central Warwickshire, England. Formerly known as Leamington Priors, its expansion began following the popularisation of the medicinal qualities of its water by Dr Kerr in 1784, and by Dr Lambe...

 and formed a club with two doctors from a local hospital specifically to play this new game. The Leamington club thus became the world's first tennis club, playing on the lawns of the Manor House Hotel opposite Perera's new home in Avenue Road.

Gem had also been a member of the Edgbaston Archery Society from 1864 to 1869 and, although there is no direct evidence to demonstrate that he personally introduced lawn tennis to the society, the game was certainly a fixture in the society's calendar by 1875, with the society being renamed the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society
Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society
Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society, informally known as The Archery and based in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham, England, is the oldest lawn tennis club in the world....

in 1877.
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