The Table Tennis 53 - ITTF

Early references in THE TIMES - Part 1: Tournaments
by Alan Duke
Prompted by Steve Grant’s excellent series of articles
arising from his research into U.S. newspapers, I have
put together two articles based on my (much more
limited) searching of The Times (London) for the period
1884 to the late 1920s.
This first article gathers together all references to the
very earliest table tennis / ping-pong tournaments. The
very first mention I could locate was in the edition of 20
November 1901:
The following week 1 brought the added information that
the tournament was for “Ladies and Gentlemen”. This was
repeated on the 30 th , although strangely the event had
apparently been condensed to just December 11 th ! In
subsequent editions of the newspaper 2 , the entry was
just “Table Tennis Tournament, Dec. 11”. On Monday 9 th ,
this became “Next Wednesday, Table Tennis Tournament”,
until finally on the big day itself:
On the 12 th the above notification was repeated but as
“2 nd day”, and then “3 rd day” on the Friday.
All the information about tournaments is taken from the
Entertainments section, and, sadly, there did not
appear to be any subsequent results in the paper.
Notification followed soon after of an event held under
the Laws of the Ping-Pong Association. The following
announcement appeared on December 17 th 1901:
Details for this event were published on Christmas Eve ;
and Boxing Day (note also the Drury Lane entry -
more in Part 3):
Further information was given on 27 th December:
Details of the final day appeared on 28 th December:
Also over the same period, Crystal Palace ran Table
Tennis Tournaments as part of its “Grand Xmas
Programme”, with notices in the paper throughout the
holiday period 3 :
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