To ‘fan the spirit of race hatred’: lawn tennis, propaganda and Germanophobia during the Great War

This study considers the various ways that tennis was implicated within First World War propaganda; more specifically, to consider tennis as both a lens to view and a context to understand and communicate perspectives about the war from a British perspective. In the midst of heightened nationalism, jingoism and Germanophobia, tennis featured in broader debates in both the mainstream and sporting press as a site of contested meanings of British national identity. This was seen through poetry and cartoons alongside public correspondence through letters to editors and various published discussions. These messages typically defended Britain’s amateur games culture, utilising constructions of ‘sportsmanship’ to distinguish British and German approaches, while denigrating Germany’s more functionalistic understanding of sport’s role in training. These messages were far from one-sided, as some British correspondents sought to defend German tennis players as somehow ‘above’ their barbarous brethren in ethics. Moreover, through tennis, Germans also communicated their objections to Britain’s apparently more ‘frivolous’ attitude toward sport and warfare. Thus, narratives were diverse and conflicting, and were indicative of ongoing confusions expressed publicly about the supposed role of amateur sport as a site of political expression.