My grandfather, Geoffrey Thomas Jury, first picked up a racquet at St. Anne-On-Sea Lawn Tennis Club in Lytham St. Anne’s, an affluent seaside town a few miles south of England’s rowdy resort city of Blackpool. By the 1930s, Blackpool had become Britain's most popular vacation resort, hosting more than ten million visitors a year. It was in this setting my grandfather competed as a young man on the grass, once winning the Lancashire Country Men’s Doubles Championships.
Drawn into the second World War as a civil engineer and surveyor, Grandpa told tales of building tank bridges in the desert, and hair-raising accounts of being torpedoed on a troop ship. Despite the conflict, tennis remained a passion and practice; black and white wartime photographs show him on the court drilling his serve, accompanied by a robe-wearing ballboy.
Following the war, for much of his career, my grandfather was responsible for supervising the building of infrastructure and new home construction across the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland and latterly on the bucolic Isle of Wight, a small but perfectly formed resort island floating off of the south coast of England.