Tennis History | Slazenger and Sons, 56 Cannon Street, London — the directory entered a rubber house, and the tennis trademark was registered in Washington

On 10 January 1888 the United States Patent Office registered trademark number 15,098 to R. Slazenger of London, England, for bats for tennis, racket, cricket and other games. The mark was the word Demon, drawn as a devil's head. Seven days later, on 17 January 1888, the same office registered number 15,113 to the same proprietor for certain woollen wearing apparel.

Two marks, one week, one man, filed through the same Washington attorney and witnessed by the same two hands. They sit in two different product categories of the Patent Office: Games and Toys for the first, Tailoring and Clothing for the second. That is the shape of the business this entry is about, and it is not the shape the modern brand suggests.

**What the London directory called them.**

The registration sheets give no street. Both carry the same note in the Library of Congress catalogue: business location listed on label, London, England. The Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, printing the week's registrations, does the same. It enters the proprietor as Ralph Slazenger, London, England, and stops there. A firm could be registered in Washington from a whole city.

The address had to come from somewhere else, and the place it comes from is a trade directory. The Post Office London Directory for 1889, on printed page 228, opens its entry for the street this way: Cannon st. (CITY) (E.C.), from St. Paul's churchyard to King William st. London bridge, Map N 9, O 9. The odd numbers run up the north side from 1. On the south side, between the turning for Queen Street and the turning for College Hill, the sequence reads 52, 54, then 56 Slazenger and Sons, indiarubber goods manufacturers, then 58 and 60 Morgan Charles and Company, wholesale and export stationers, and then College Hill.

Indiarubber goods manufacturers. Not sporting goods, not racket makers, not athletic outfitters. In the year after the Demon was registered in Washington, the directory that recorded every trade in London entered the firm under the material it worked in. Whether the firm chose that description or the directory assigned it is not established by anything read here, but it is the description the volume printed.

The same directory carries a second Slazenger and Sons entry, across the river. Under Holland Street, on the north side, among Hopton's Almshouses, a School Board school and the cocoa works of James Epps and Company, stands 22 Slazenger and Sons, indiarubber manufacturers. The directory does not say which of the two addresses was the counting house and which the works, and this entry does not guess. It is anchored at Cannon Street because that is where the encyclopaedia's account of the firm's founding puts the original shop, and because the City address is the one a customer would have written to.

**The mark itself.**

The label pasted to the 1888 sheet is a small printed slip, now heavily foxed, showing a frontal face drawn in line: two curved horns rising from the brow, a wing or ear flaring on each side of the head, a pointed chin. Across the forehead is lettered THE and across the lower face DEMON. Along the two horns, in much smaller type that is legible but only just at the size opened here, run the words TRADE and MARK. The Official Gazette, describing the same registration for the record, calls the mark simply the word Demon, which tells you what the office thought it was protecting.

The Gazette's description of the woollens mark is more forthcoming and more resigned. It calls it the representation of an old seal bearing a nondescript figure of an animal resembling a lion. On the sheet the seal is a circle with OSTERODE arched above the device and HEALTH CLOTHING below it, and a ring of small lettering around the rim that is not resolvable at the size opened here.

**The dates on the sheets, and what one of them means.**

Each sheet carries manuscript notes outside the printed frame. At the lower right of the bats sheet is a date reading June 4, 1883; at the lower right of the woollens sheet, June 1, 1885. At the lower left of each are two further dates, in what appears to be the same hand: October 30, 1887 and December 16 on the bats sheet, August 15, 1887 and December 23 on the woollens sheet.

The Gazette settles what the lower-right date is. Its entry for number 15,113 records the application and then states that the mark was used since June 1, 1885, which is the date written at the lower right of that sheet. The lower-right note is the claimed date of first use, and on the bats sheet it puts the Demon in commerce from June 1883, more than four years before it was registered in America.

The lower-left dates are not settled here and the entry does not pretend otherwise. The Gazette prints an application filing date for each registration, and the machine-read text of those two lines gives October 15, 1887 and August 11, 1887, neither of which matches the reading of the manuscript above. The Gazette's own page scans were not opened in this session, so the discrepancy may be in the machine reading, in the handwriting, or in the fact that the two notes record different events. No filing day is asserted. The corresponding used-since figure in the Gazette entry for 15,098 is not legible in the machine-read text either, so the sheet is the only source given here for June 4, 1883.

**Why an English firm was registering in Washington at all.**

This platform already carries three suppliers to the amateur game, and all three are American: a Boston shop on Washington Street, a New York outfitter on Nassau Street, and a Philadelphia works at Tulip and Palmer Streets. This entry is the first supply-side anchor in Britain to join them.

It reaches the same register from the other end. The three American firms were registering marks in the country where they sold. Slazenger was registering in a country where it did not manufacture, for goods made in England, which is what a trademark register is for: it is a claim staked in a market, not a record of where a workshop stood. The fee was worth paying because the American market for lawn tennis goods in the 1880s was worth having, and the register is therefore a better witness to a firm's export ambitions than to its premises.

It is also, for this entry, the only reason the firm is legible at all at a fixed date. Company records burn and are lost; a Patent Office sheet with a registration number, a date and a signature does not.

**The tennis connection, stated and not overstated.**

The encyclopaedia article on the firm records that Ralph and Albert Slazenger, brothers from Manchester, set up a shop in Cannon Street in 1881 selling rubber sporting goods; that a public company was incorporated in 1910 to acquire Slazenger and Sons, described in that transaction as manufacturers of sports equipment, india rubber, gutta percha and waterproof goods, leather merchants and dealers; and that the firm has supplied the balls for The Championships, Wimbledon since 1902. The 1910 description is worth setting beside the 1889 directory line, because it puts sports equipment first and india rubber second, and the directory twenty-one years earlier had only the rubber.

The same article calls the Wimbledon arrangement the longest-running sponsorship in sport. That superlative is not adopted here. It is a claim about every sponsorship that has ever existed, nothing read in this session tests it, and this platform's standing rule is that an unnarrowed superlative is not a finding. The 1902 date is given as the encyclopaedia gives it, and no contemporaneous source for it was consulted.

What can be said without any of that is narrower and firmer. Fourteen years before the date the encyclopaedia gives for the Wimbledon balls, the proprietor of this firm was registering a racket brand in Washington while his London street entry described him as a maker of rubber goods, and a tennis ball is a rubber good. The two facts are not in tension. They are the same business seen from its two ends.

**Status note.** Slazenger is a live trading brand and not only a historical firm. As of this entry's writing on 6 September 2026, the encyclopaedia article cited below records the brand as owned by the Frasers Group, which acquired it in 2004, and gives the head office as Shirebrook in Derbyshire rather than either London address above. Nothing in this entry depends on that, and none of it was checked against a company filing.

**Amateur-era note.**

The championships of this period were closed to anyone who had been paid to play, which is the footing every pre-1968 entry on this platform sits on. The bar fell on players. It did not fall on the people who sold them equipment, and the trademark register is where you can watch one of them earning money out of a game whose competitors were forbidden to. Nothing read here establishes the wording of the British amateur rule as against the American one, and neither wording is given.

**Gaps this entry declares.**

No photograph or engraving of 56 Cannon Street is offered, and none was found; the same is true of the three American premises already on this platform, each of which declares it. The Official Gazette entries for both registrations were found and read as machine text, but the page images carrying them were not opened, which is what leaves the filing dates open above. The 1889 directory's trades section, which would say how the firm was classified as against how its street entry described it, did not survive the machine reading and was not consulted in the scan. Nothing here establishes when Slazenger and Sons left Cannon Street, what stood at 22 Holland Street, or whether the Demon was sold in Britain under that name before it was registered in America.

**Coordinate.** 51.511937, -0.092422, precision radius 100 m. This is the south side of Cannon Street in the City of London, between Queen Street and College Hill. Three independent kinds of source agree and the entry uses all three. The first is the document itself: the 1889 directory places number 56 in that block, on that side, between those two named turnings, both of which still exist. The second is a commercial road-network geocoder, which puts the Cannon Street junction with Queen Street at 51.512144, -0.092700 and the junction with College Hill at 51.511988, -0.091963, bracketing about 54 m of frontage. The third is OpenStreetMap, whose premises carrying the modern numbers 52 to 54 and 60 both fall inside that bracket and on the south side, 12 m apart; the pin is set at their midpoint, 30 m from one junction and 32 m from the other.

The same geocoder's own address-level candidate for 56 Cannon Street sits 44 m away, effectively at the Queen Street corner. It was not adopted, because it is an interpolation along a street line and the other two readings are of different kinds: a printed block sequence and a surveyed building outline. The radius is set at 100 m, nearly double the documented frontage. It is tighter than the radius on any of the three American supply-side anchors here, and the reason is the kind of evidence rather than the quality of the geocoding: the source document does not merely name a street number, it fixes that number inside a block bounded by two turnings that are still on the map. What the pin does not claim is a building. Cannon Street was rebuilt after bomb damage and again after that; the numbering in this block has survived and the fabric has not.

**Cover.** The trademark registration sheet for number 15,098, R. Slazenger, bats for tennis, racket, cricket and other games, registered 10 January 1888, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division trademark series, call number TRADEMARKS no. 15098, 681 x 1024 px in the service copy opened here. It was opened and read in full. The printed frame gives the trademark heading, the proprietor, the goods, the number and the registration date; below the pasted label are the signatures of two witnesses and, under the word Proprietor, the name Ralph Slazenger written by James L. Norris as attorney. Outside the frame, in manuscript, are the category note reading Games and Toys, a red office number, a vertical docket down the left margin repeating the proprietor and the goods, and the four dates discussed above.

**Second image.** The trademark registration sheet for number 15,113, R. Slazenger, certain woollen wearing apparel, registered 17 January 1888, same series, call number TRADEMARKS no. 15113, 684 x 1024 px. It is included because it is the evidence for this entry's central point and not decoration: the same proprietor, the same attorney, the same witnesses, one week apart, in a different Patent Office category. Its office stamp at the head reads Tailoring and Clothing. Its label is a circular seal device with OSTERODE above and HEALTH CLOTHING below. This sheet has nothing to do with tennis, which is why it is here.

**Sourcing note.** There are no quotation marks anywhere above, and that is deliberate rather than accidental. This platform's condition for quoting is raw machine-read or primary text plus a second independent typesetting of the same copy, so that a compositor's slip cannot be mistaken for an author's words. Both of this entry's textual sources are raw text: the Official Gazette and the Post Office London Directory were read as page text from the Internet Archive, not through any summarising layer. Neither has a second setting. Each was set once, the Gazette by the Government Printing Office and the directory by its own publisher, and no other printing of either was found. The wording of the registration sheets was read from the page images directly, but a printed certificate and its Gazette entry cannot be shown here to be the work of two different printers. Everything above is therefore attributed paraphrase, including every phrase from the Gazette, the directory and the sheets, and including the encyclopaedia's account of the firm.

**Sources.** Trademark registration sheet 15,098: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020709050/ , image at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/trmk/1t10000/1t15000/1t15000/1t15098v.jpg . Trademark registration sheet 15,113: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020709065/ , image at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/trmk/1t10000/1t15000/1t15100/1t15113v.jpg . Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, volume 42 (1888), for both registration entries, the proprietor's address as the office recorded it, the official descriptions of the two marks and the used-since date for 15,113: https://archive.org/download/officialgazette42unit/officialgazette42unit_djvu.txt . Post Office London Directory for 1889, for the Cannon Street and Holland Street entries and the street heading, read as page text and verified on the page scans for printed page 228 and for the Holland Street page: https://archive.org/download/post-office-london-directory-for-1889/Post%20Office%20London%20Directory%20for%201889_djvu.txt . The firm's founding, the 1910 incorporation wording and the Wimbledon ball claim, from the encyclopaedia article on Slazenger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slazenger . Coordinate sources as described above: the directory block sequence, the Esri World Geocoder for the two Cannon Street junctions, and OpenStreetMap for the premises numbered 52 to 54 and 60.