Tel: 0161 434 3781 | Email: enquiries@didsburyltc.org.uk
A Brief History of the Club
Our club was founded in 1924. At least that is
when we began playing tennis on our present site. Before that we’d
been a section of the Didsbury Cricket Club on Wilmslow Road. By
1924 the tennis members had decided to set up on their own, we
don’t know for what reason. The move cannot have been easy. When a
site in Parrswood Road had been purchased with the aid of
substantial loans, it is said that members dismantled their wooden
clubhouse, brought it down to where we are today, re-assembled the
building and had some six courts laid, two of grass and four of
shale. There is another story that the clubhouse was brought down
to its new site on a lorry pulled by an elephant hired for the
occasion from a travelling circus ! That may be just a nice story -
but who knows ?
Unfortunately we now have no records of the club
in the 20s and 30s. After WW2 the grass courts were unusable and by
the 1970s the four shale courts were in very poor condition. The
club still had debts from the original loans, money was scarce, and
by the end of the 70s there was a real danger of the club folding.
The club committee considered selling the land where the grass
courts had been but worried that there would then be no scope to
redevelop in the future. Little did we know, but history
was about to intervene....
The old
.................
......... and the new
Everything changed when the old clubhouse was
burned down on the night of the 18th of April, 1979. We have
no idea what caused the fire. It certainly left us in a mess and
with a decision to make about whether we had a future at all. An
extraordinary General Meeting of club members decided at last to
sell the spare land where the grass courts had been, lay new tarmac
courts and build a brick clubhouse. It took quite a while to sort
all this out, with a period of hiring a Portakabin to function as a
temporary clubhouse and playing our social tennis in a local park.
We re-opened fully in the summer of 1982. With everyone happy about
the redevelopment, it seemed that the fire had done us a good turn.
Someone even suggested that maybe a member had started the fire to
ensure the club’s future !
Since then the club has gone from strength to
strength. The tarmac courts have been replaced with Astroturf,
floodlights erected with the aid of a lottery grant and the
clubhouse fabric and furnishings improved bit by bit. Our courts
are reckoned to be among the best in our local league, and we look
forward to many more years on the site the early members took such
trouble to establish.
About Us:
Situated in East Didsbury, the Club offers year-round tennis to players of all levels and ages.
T: 0161-434-3781
E: enquiries@didsburyltc.org.uk
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A: 509 Parrswood Road, East Didsbury, Manchester M20 5GQ