Tennis History | The Queen's Club, Barons Court — Britain abolishes the amateur, 14 December 1967

For most of the twentieth century the four major championships were closed to professionals. A player who took money for playing was barred from entering, which produced the arrangement the sport lived with for decades: the best players in the world were routinely unable to enter the tournaments that decided who the best players in the world were. Everyone in tennis knew the amateurs were paid anyway. Expenses were generous, appearance money was arranged privately, and the practice was common enough to have acquired a name — shamateurism. What it did not have was a way out. The International Lawn Tennis Federation would not sanction tournaments open to both classes of player, and no single national association was willing to defy it alone. On 14 December 1967, at its annual general meeting at The Queen's Club in Barons Court, the Lawn Tennis Association did exactly that. It voted to abolish the distinction between amateur and professional players in British tournaments, with effect from April 1968. The Lawn Tennis Association's own published account of the meeting credits the case made on the floor to Derek Penman, its councillor for Kent, and records that the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club backed the change. The risk was not rhetorical. The federation had the power to expel Britain from international competition and had made clear it might use it. Britain went first with no guarantee that anyone would follow. Three months later the federation called an emergency meeting of its member nations in Paris, on 30 March 1968, and instead of expelling anybody it sanctioned a limited experiment: twelve open tournaments in the year. The first of them began at Bournemouth three weeks after that. The building is not incidental. The Lawn Tennis Association had owned The Queen's Club since 1953, so the association was meeting on its own premises — a club incorporated in 1886, whose first lawn tennis courts opened in 1887 and whose clubhouse opened in January 1888. The decision that ended amateur tennis in Britain was taken inside an institution amateur tennis had built. Two cautions against reading too much into it. First, this vote did not open the four major championships. It opened British tournaments; the majors followed at different speeds, for their own reasons, and one of them was not a major at all. Second, nothing here was a moral awakening. The vote made an existing practice honest, and moved the money from private envelopes onto a table where it could be contracted, taxed and argued over. STATUS NOTE, current as of September 2026. The Queen's Club is a private members' club and hosts an annual grass-court tournament. The Lawn Tennis Association sold the club to its members in 2006 and relocated its headquarters in 2007. COORDINATE. The pin sits on the clubhouse at Palliser Road, West Kensington, London W14. Two independent sources agree: the Office for National Statistics postcode centroid for W14 9EQ at 51.486848, -0.212243, and OpenStreetMap's building record for The Queen's Club House at 51.48736, -0.212461. The two lie about 130 m apart, which is the expected offset between a postcode centroid and a specific building rather than a disagreement about which place is meant. Precision radius 150 m. The pin is the club, not the room the meeting was held in, which this account has not identified. DISCLOSURE. The identification of The Queen's Club as the venue of the meeting of 14 December 1967 rests on the Lawn Tennis Association's own published histories, which is the association's account of itself. No contemporaneous newspaper report or set of minutes has been consulted for this entry, and the venue should be treated as well attested rather than documented here. COVER. "The Queen's Club" by Stephen McKay, photographed 14 April 2018, from Geograph Britain and Ireland, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The image shows the clubhouse from across a grass court — the Victorian building, its clock tower and its ironwork verandah, all of which stood in 1967. The courts, terraces and planting in the foreground are modern.