With the current success of the Matilda’s in soccer, Local Studies has chosen to take a look back at Women in Sport. This week we focus on Elise Jarman and her long contribution to local tennis.
Boarding school was the first time I played tennis. Herbert A. Edwards was our teacher and in class we used to do all the motions of tennis. They even made it part of the entertainment at the school concert at the end of the year, the Tennis Tableau. We all got up there in our tennis dresses, with our rackets and we’d do the serve and the forehand and the backhand to music. It was a scream really. I don’t know what the parents must have thought.
Image courtesy of Elise Jarman.
When I was a teenager, everybody was keen to have a game of tennis, but I never got around to joining a club in those days. Every now and then I’d organise a four for tennis and we would go and hire a court and play tennis.
City Beach didn’t really have a Tennis Club until about the mid-1950s. I suppose we had lived there for about 10 years by then. There was a group of people who lived at the southern end of the district, and they played tennis on a private court there. The interest among that group had attracted a few more people and they realised they couldn’t keep using this court, so they approached the Council to set aside some land and build a clubhouse.
In those days, they dropped a note into every house in the area, to let us know anything that was going to happen. Anyhow, I went along to a meeting of The City Beach Progress Association, held at the old tea rooms down at the south end of the beach. I am just wondering how I got there, because I didn’t drive at that time. I must have gone with somebody else, I suppose, unless Harry dropped me down or something. But we had little kids, and we couldn’t leave them, so one of us had to stay home and it was I who went to the meeting. Anyhow, it was decided that they would approach the Council, which all happened and eventually we got our tennis club going. Harry and I were inaugural members for that. Then, not very long after, they got a bowling club going. The Progress Association was always looking for something going on.
We built a little building, which just had two tiny rooms and a toilet at either end, which became public toilets, but we could lock up the two little rooms. One was kind of a storeroom, that was about the size of the rooms, and the other one was a tiny little kitchenette with an urn in it.
They opened the courts before they had the building finished and we were able to play. We would go down on a Saturday afternoon, and we would have a thermos of tea and a beach umbrella. They felled a big tree, so there was a big log and we used to sit on the log, with our cup of tea, under the beach umbrella.
Harry and I both served on the committee at the Tennis Club, but Harry became President and served for over 20 years as President. About 18 months before Harry died, somebody suggested to the committee that the present pavilion, which was built in 1975, during the time Harry was President, be called the “Harry Jarman Pavilion”.
During that time, we instituted a trophy for the annual trophy presentations for “Best Club Member”. The stipulation was that this trophy was for people who were not on the committee. They did not have specific jobs to do, but they were just people who were always there, always doing things, but were sort of quite outside any of the things that the committee handled.
It was called the “Jarman Trophy”. At first it used to be a tray or something like that, with engraving on it and so on, but these days, I give money or a gift voucher or something like that. That has been going for quite a number of years.
C Barron, J Beament, A Harse, J Way,
J Scheele, E Jarman, M Nelli
So, I’ve played tennis since I was at St Brigid’s in Lesmurdie, where I learned to play tennis. I am 96 years old now [as at 2023], so one could say I’ve played tennis at least 80 years, but almost 70 years at City Beach.
Image courtesy of Elise Jarman.
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