Sepia Saturday 524: 13 June 2020

I have a feeling that in the old world - the pre-Covid world - it would have been round about Wimbledon tennis time now. But this isn't the real world, this is the Sepia world and therefore we can still have tennis if we want it. Or we can have sports, or women in long dresses or pavilions or whatever you would like. The Sepia world is rather like that, you can make the rules up as you go along. So says Alan Burnett from Sepia Saturday.

Here are some photos of my mother, her mother (I think, she was an identical twin so it's always difficult to be sure), her cousins and assorted friends. I think they are playing on tennis courts somewhere around Hamilton, Newcastle, Australia.  If you recognise the scenery, please enlighten me as there are quite a few tennis courts around Hamilton.  Not all the photos were taken on the same day.  My mother Barbara is a bit smaller in this first photo and in a different outfit.

Isn't it great how the horizon is a bit tilted in this photo?  I suspect cousin Joy may have been taking the photo.  Barbara appears to be wearing a velvet  smock of some kind which must have been very hot on the day.  The photo is not particularly clear but let's take a close up.

Here are some photos from another occasion.  My mother's writing on the back of the photos says that Silvia and Dolly are playing with Shirley and I suspect, Joy, the photographer.

It's a cracker of a photo isn't it?  Let's have another close up.

Here are some more of them playing silly buggers.  

And it looks like they are under the benevolent supervision of my grandmother Kit again - or is it Belle? Her twin sister.

Here's another one of Shirley taken when she was a bit younger I think.  

My mother Barbara was born in 1935 so my guess is that these photos were taken around 1941/1942.  

If girls were playing tennis, what were boys doing?  Having a canoe race, me thinks.

For more Sepia Saturday fun, check out other contributions here.

PS And being a librarian I can't help but review to a recent book review in The Guardian called A People's History of Tennis by David Berry.  Do you find tennis romantic or erotic???  Do you think it is an elitist game or a radical game?  Interesting reading - you will have to register to read the article but it's free to do so.