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The logic of this argument was apparent
and in December 1902 the two Associations
announced their intention to
merge by the following 1st May. They
agreed initially on the unwieldy title of
“The United Table Tennis and Ping Pong
Association” but this was soon changed
and the new organisation became simply
“The Table Tennis Association”.
However, this rationalisation had come
too late; table tennis had fallen out of
fashion and the game in England died
as quickly as it had risen. The situation
was that by 1905 it was played in only
few isolated parts of the country and it
was many years before it regained anything
like its former standing.
There have been several suggested explanations
for its sudden demise: the
absence of a strong national organisation
to define a uniform system of play
and equipment standards; technical developments,
such as the use of rubbercovered
rackets, which widened the gap
in skill between the dedicated competition
player and those for whom the
game was merely a leisure pursuit.
The most likely reason was that table
tennis did not in those early years acquire
the status of a serious sport in the
minds of the public. It was an entertaining
pastime which became popular for
a while but it had its time and then just
died away.
However, not everyone had lost their
enthusiasm and in 1921, Percy Bromfield,
the champion from 1904, and
John Payne, the last secretary of the defunct
Table Tennis Association decided
to try to revive the game. Bromfield
said in a 1931 article that the initiative
came from a newspaper advertisement
placed by an otherwise unidentified Mr
Thompson, asking whether any former
players were still active, to which he and
Payne responded. He later gave a slightly
different account but whatever the
truth is, the fact is that the two of them
met and established a new Ping Pong
Association in November 1921, with
Bromfield as Chairman, Payne as Secretary/Treasurer
and a committee of five.
Their first major enterprise was the organisation
of a National Championships
and this was held at Selfridge’s Department
Store in Oxford Street in April
1922. The only events were men’s and
women’s singles and the men’s singles
final seems to have been a ferociously
competitive and slightly bad-tempered
affair.
The finalists were Austin Carris, a
wealthy Manchester businessman and
Andrew Donaldson, a schoolmaster
from Sunderland. Donaldson’s only
preparation for playing was to remove
his jacket, collar and tie. Carris complained
that the sound of Donaldson’s
leather boots on the wooden floor was
distracting him. In return, Donaldson
protested that he was being unsighted
by the reflection of light from the diamond
studs in Carris’s dress shirt. Donaldson
eventually won by four games to
one and to show this was no fluke he
reached the final again in 1924.
The game was beginning to attract the
interest of the popular press and early
in 1923 the Daily Mirror organised its
first national tournament. Over a period
of several months more than 30,000
entrants played in qualifying stages arranged
in their own areas and the finals
were staged in May at the Stadium Club
in High Holborn. The first prize in both
the men’s and the women’s events was
a Calthorpe car, with the losing men’s
London, the Home of Table Tennis
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