Tennis History | Montgomery Hall, Lawrence Gardens, Lahore — the Punjab championship started here in 1885, and the club that ran it now plays three kilometres away

The white classical hall standing in Bagh-e-Jinnah in Lahore is Montgomery Hall, joined by a covered corridor to Lawrence Hall and completed as a single composition in 1866 at a cost of about a hundred and eight thousand rupees. Lawrence Hall went up in 1861-62 and was named for Sir John Laird Mair Lawrence; Montgomery Hall was named for Sir Robert Montgomery. The gardens around them were Lawrence Gardens then and are Bagh-e-Jinnah now. The building has been the Quaid-e-Azam Library since 25 December 1984.

Between those two dates it was a club, and the club ran one of the oldest lawn tennis tournaments in the world.

The Punjab lawn tennis championships were first played in 1885, on grass, usually in December. That is two years before the Bengal championships at Calcutta and it makes the Punjab event older than a great many tournaments that are better remembered. Its home was this building and the ground around it.

Two things about that sentence need care, and both are the kind of thing that gets flattened in a modern tournament list.

The first is the name. In 1885 the institution occupying these halls was the Lahore and Mian Mir Institute, which had been established here in 1878. It did not become the Lahore Gymkhana until 23 March 1906 — twenty-one years after the championship started. A record that files the 1885 tournament under "Lahore Gymkhana Club" is applying a name the club did not yet have, which is a small thing until you notice how often it happens, and that it is the same move as filing a New Zealander under Australia because the team he played for was called Australasia.

The second is the ground. The club is not here any more. The Punjab government acquired this site, the foundation stone of a new clubhouse on The Upper Mall was laid on 5 March 1968, and the Lahore Gymkhana moved into a hundred-and-seventeen-acre leased property there on 16 January 1972. The halls became an academy for administrative training, and then, after renovation begun in 1981, the public library they are now.

So the name and the ground have come apart. OpenStreetMap maps fourteen tennis courts at the Lahore Gymkhana on The Upper Mall today. They lie about three kilometres south-east of this pin. Whatever is played on them, none of it is played where the Punjab championship began, and a visitor who goes looking for the tournament's first ground by following the club's name will arrive in the wrong place by a distance you would not walk in the Lahore heat.

What happened here in 1902 is the reason this ground is worth pinning at all. P. G. Pearson, the champion of Bengal, wrote the chapter on Indian lawn tennis for A. Wallis Myers's survey volume "Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad" (London, 1903), and recorded that in 1902 the two principal tournaments in the country — the championships of Bengal and of the Punjab — were played in the same week. Calcutta and Lahore are about sixteen hundred kilometres apart. Neither event was national, no competition in India carried the title of champion of India, and the two that came closest to mattering were not even avoiding each other on the calendar. Pearson draws the obvious inference and does not soften it: the constituency for the game was not large.

The passage carrying that is on printed page 320 of a volume whose only Internet Archive scan has bleached the left third of that leaf away, so it is reported here rather than quoted; the leaf is at https://archive.org/download/lawntennisathom00myergoog/page/n341_w1280.jpg. The editor's footnote identifying Pearson, on printed page 316, did come through clean and is quoted in the companion entry on the Delhi durbar.

Where the tournament went afterwards is its own argument about borders. Lahore was the capital of the Punjab province of British India when the championship began; since 1947 it has been in Pakistan. The championship did not stay with its ground. It moved to Amritsar, in East Punjab in India, in the early 1950s, and ran there until 1967. The ground and the event it was founded for ended up in different countries, and only one of them is still standing.

THE PIN IS THE BUILDING, NOT THE COURTS. This needs saying plainly. No source read for this entry locates the tennis courts of the 1880s to 1900s within these grounds. A club address geocodes to a hall or a gate, and the court a match was played on can be a couple of hundred metres from that and can have been relaid or built over several times since. The pin here is the hall complex; the radius is drawn to cover the halls and the lawns immediately around them, which is where courts of that period would have lain; and no claim is made about which patch of grass anything happened on.

COORDINATE. 31.554354, 74.331769, precision radius 400 metres. Two independent readings. OpenStreetMap way 316867818, tagged amenity=library as "Quaid-e-Azam Library" and carrying no wikidata tag, gives 31.554565, 74.331749. Four photographs of the building uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by four different contributors carry independent geotags averaging 31.554143, 74.331788. Those agree to within about 47 metres, and the pin is their midpoint.

A DISAGREEMENT WORTH NAMING. The English Wikipedia article on the Quaid-e-Azam Library gives coordinates of 31 degrees 33 minutes 46 seconds north, 74 degrees 20 minutes 30 seconds east — 31.562778, 74.341667 — which is about 1.3 kilometres north-east of the pin used here, and outside Bagh-e-Jinnah, where the same article's text places the library. Both readings are set out so a reader can check. This account follows the mapped polygon and the photographers, because they agree with each other and with the article's prose, and because a photograph taken in front of a building is a stronger placement of it than an infobox figure.

COVER. "Montgomery Hall, now Quaid e Azam Library, Lahore.jpg" by Wikimedia Commons contributor Muhammad Umair Mirza, 21 August 2022, CC BY-SA 4.0. A modern photograph, colour-processed, showing the hall from the south-east: Corinthian columns and a pedimented portico, a flag on the roof, a maintenance ladder against the wall, and an asphalt forecourt sweeping up to the steps. The forecourt is worth noticing — it is level, open ground of about the right extent, and it is now tarmac.

SECOND IMAGE. "Bagh e Jinnah Lahore 1.jpg" by Wikimedia Commons contributor Younisjunejo02, 30 May 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0. Despite the filename it shows the same building, seen across the gardens, with the library's name in Urdu on the facade. It is included for the foreground: several hundred square metres of flat mown grass under trees, which is what a ground for a December grass-court championship looks like when nobody is playing on it.

SOURCES. Primary: A. Wallis Myers (ed.), "Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad" (London, 1903), chapter X, by P. G. Pearson, read as page images from the Internet Archive copy lawntennisathom00myergoog. For the halls, the institute of 1878, the renaming of 23 March 1906, the 1968-72 move to The Upper Mall and the conversion to a library: the Pakistan Today feature "The Lahore Gymkhana" (archive.pakistantoday.com.pk, 12 March 2017) and the English Wikipedia articles on the Lahore Gymkhana Club and the Quaid-e-Azam Library, which agree with each other on the sequence and the dates. For the founding year, surface, usual month, the move to Amritsar and the 1967 close: the English Wikipedia article on the Punjab Lawn Tennis Championships. These are compilations rather than archives; no Punjab club minute book or contemporary Lahore newspaper was reachable for this entry, and a single column in either would settle both the exact 1885 dates and the location of the courts within the grounds.