Tennis on the Dart, for over sixty years

The original Tennis Association

Started in the early 1970s, when there was a sports pavilion on Coronation Park on the site of the present RNLI hut, managed and maintained by South Hams District Council.

For many years the association, which was unincorporated, was allowed the use of 3 courts for 2 evenings a week plus Sunday mornings. Eventually, owing to the difficulty of finding volunteers for the officer posts, and more players preferring to play during the day, the formal club folded.

Local resident Yvonne Cottam kept the junior association going informally, including running Prudential Easter tennis courses, until 1987 when she moved to Warwickshire.

The pavilion was used jointly by tennis and football players, with changing rooms, a toilet and kitchen facilities. When the football players moved to new facilities at the top of the town, lack of maintenance by the Council let the building fall into disrepair. Declared unsafe, it was demolished, and SHDC offered the land to the RNLI for their hut. For the last 25 years, tennis players have been without any facilities.

The Jubilee Lawn Tennis Association

The Jubilee Tennis Club was set up in 2002 as a bank account with four signatories, to handle contributions from the Thursday and Saturday morning groups towards the bulk purchase of tennis balls.

In 2009 John Bretherton and others developed a constitution for the Jubilee (Coronation Park, Dartmouth) Lawn Tennis Association, an unincorporated association. It was formed partly to enable use of the Naval College courts while the Coronation Park courts were re-laid — the only way to meet the College's security arrangements. It faded away once tennis restarted on the Park.

The small funds left from the original association were transferred to the Jubilee Club. Later, Leo Whittington, Jon Preston and Sally Clarke became trustees of the bank account, buying tennis balls for the larger Saturday, Monday and Wednesday groups.

The LTA smart access gate

In 2021, following concern from the town council that people were using the courts free of charge or for purposes other than tennis, Alistair Forbes and others agreed with the LTA that a smart access gate could be the solution.

Annual ticket holders were given free access, with bookings available 14 days in advance, and the weekly group sessions were set up as recurring bookings.

In September 2023 the Council Office cancelled those recurring bookings. After a considerable campaign by 97 tennis players, the Council's Assets Committee agreed to reinstate them in the name of the Dartmouth Tennis Association, incorporated that November.