Table Tennis is probably the easiest progression to imagine from the ancestral family of Real Tennis, dating back to the 16th century and Major Wingfield's Victorian social outdoor game of Lawn Tennis invented in 1874. Being invented in England, with its inherently inclement weather, there was always going to be a need for some form of indoor game based on Lawn Tennis to amuse and fill the time during those wet Sunday afternoons at the Country House or Vicarage social gatherings. It did not take too much imagination to gather items at hand to develop a new miniature indoor game. . The dining room table could be used as the court, some books from the library balanced across the middle of the table for a net and some children’s bats or battledores ( small vellum covered drum bats used in the game of Battledore and Shuttlecock ). For balls, again any children’s small play balls would do or even improvised shaped and rounded corks. Thus a crude miniature indoor game of Lawn Tennis was born. . It is believed that the game probably developed from the early 1880s informally until commercially produced sets and equipment was made by John Jacques in the 1890s with the name of Ping Pong or Gossima meaning lightness. At first rather lively small rubber balls were used and then the game settled upon the much improved celluloid balls as used today which were introduced around 1900. . The name Ping Pong is an onomatopoeic description of the ping sound of the ball bouncing on the table and the pong sound of the ball against the hollow vellum drum Battledores. As a progression, some early manufacturers produced miniature strung rackets being exact copies of the much larger lawn tennis rackets but these proved to be unsatisfactory in controlling the smaller ball. Eventually more compatible solid wooden bladed paddles were produced and then various coverings were applied to give an improved control and dampening effect. . The game, post 1900, quickly developed and with a rush to have a standard set of rules as clubs and tournaments came into being, the Table Tennis Association was formed on the 12th December 1901 quickly followed by the rival Ping Pong association only 4 days later. The game became a very popular sport in the 1920s and developed internationally into today’s worldwide success as an Olympic Event and World Championship. As an example China now has an astonishing 300 million people playing occasionally of which 10 million play competitively. . The following pictures of items in the collection, with descriptions, give a pictorial historical insight into some of the equipment used from the early years to the present day.

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