110ST TO WIMBLEDON TENNIS

A star from Stonyhurst
Time va, when our great Catholic public schools produced few stars in the world of sport. A reason sometimes given for this was inadequate coaching, inadequate playing facilities and insufficiently testinv fixture lists.
Things are better today. but the question is not one which retrospectively worries Herman David, elected in February chairman of the All-England Lawn Tennis Club. and due as such to be host from Monday onwards to the Wimbledon Championships. He is. by the way. a first cousin of Fr. Clifford Howell. S. I., with whom he was at Stonyhurst.
Stonyhurst tennis training for the young Herman David thirty years ago consisted of very amateur efforts on one or other of the two available courts in the college of the Eagle Towers — and this at the cost of reprimands for cutting the solemnities of all-holy cricket.
Despite this poor start. Oxford saw him in the University team pitted against Bunny Austin in the midtwenties, a fact ,which should give hope to the thousands today who play in schools and clubs in the hope of appearing one day at Wimbledon. Oldest inhabitant FROM 1933-1936 Great Britain was the ch.mpion lawn tennis nation. The fact that in the preceding year. David played for Great Britain in the Davis Cup is sufficient testimony to the standard of his play. But a more amusing record he holds is that of being Wimbledon's oldest inhabitant, having played in the Wimbledon Champlo eihips from 1928 to 1952. Discovering one day that he was the oldest inhabitant. he hastily retired to recall with some justifiable satisfaction that he reached the last 16 of Wimbledon in 1931, beating Jack Crawford.
Being in private — or rather In
business a City merchant who juggles with diamonds and thinks of diamonds in terms of tons rather than one engagement ring in a life-time. this combination of tennis prowess with administrative and assaying skill, has, not surprisingly, made him one of the great personalities of the national and international tennis world.
He has been a member of the English international team Selection Committee and the All England Committee since he ceased playing In first-class tennis, and from 1953 to 1958 he was the non-playing captain of the English Davis Cup team -a period during which England reached the finals of the European Zone.
The summit
THIS year, in his middle fifties. A Herman David has reached the summit of the tennis world in this country. and, apart from all the heavy business involved in running the championships, seeding players and making the thousand and one decisions that so complex a business Involves, he with his wife will be Lost and hostess to Wimbledon ten. ais, entertaining Royalty, the Church. the Cabinet and all the top-level V.I.P.s of the social and tennis world.
Though he confesses to considerable nervousness, his streamlined, still young. athletic face gives every assurance of being able to take it all in his stride. After all, a man who all his life has handled the most precious of *ones as we handle our change. i hardly likely to quail at being host this year. and perhaps for many more, to the greatest international championships of the mos' popular and elegant of modern games.
And in 'his paper at least a word, too, for Mrs. David, his non Catholic wife who. acco-ding to his own confession, sees to it that husband and children are kept on their Catholic toes. One hears so much against mixed marriages, but the ones one comes across seem invariably to be the grandest of successes.
M. B.