Bunny Austin
Henry Wilfred "Bunny" Austin was an accomplished British tennis player born on August 26, 1906, in London. He was influenced by a sporting family, with his father serving as his first coach and his sister being a national tennis champion. Bunny achieved significant success in his early years, winning the British school boys' tennis championship multiple times and captaining the Cambridge varsity team. Notably, he reached the Wimbledon finals in 1932 and consistently advanced in the tournament throughout the 1930s.
While he excelled in doubles, particularly with fellow British player Fred Perry, Bunny's singles career was marked by challenges against more powerful opponents. He is also credited with changing tennis fashion by opting to wear shorts instead of traditional long trousers, improving his performance in hot conditions. Beyond tennis, Bunny was involved in social causes, advocating against discrimination in sports and supporting the Moral Re-Armament movement. After his retirement from professional play, he continued to engage in various philanthropic activities, maintaining a public presence until his later years, when he participated in tennis commemorations even while residing in a nursing home.
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Subject Terms
Bunny Austin
Tennis Player
- Born: August 26, 1906
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: August 26, 2000
- Place of death: Coulsdon, Surrey, England
Sport: Tennis
Early Life
Henry Wilfred “Bunny” Austin was born in London, on August 26, 1906. His father Wilfred was a talented athlete in many sports and was Bunny’s first coach. His older sister Joan won national championships in tennis and served as Bunny’s mixed-doubles partner. He received the nickname “Bunny” from a cartoon rabbit in the paper named Wilfred. Bunny pursued a number of sports during his years at Repton School and achieved some eminent results as a cricketer. By the time he left for Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, he had determined to make tennis his primary sport.
The Road to Excellence
Bunny won the British school boys’ tennis championship in four different years, 1921 and 1923 to 1925. He captained the Cambridge varsity tennis team and won a couple of national tournaments in 1927. He even qualified for the English Davis Cup team in his first year at Cambridge, but he turned down the invitation on the advice of his father, who felt that Bunny’s studies deserved attention. While Bunny was at Cambridge, he worked enough academically to receive a degree in history.
For much of his life, Bunny weighed the claims of tennis against those of his profession and other responsibilities. He met his wife Phyllis on an ocean cruise and became greatly involved with her role as an actress. She came from a Jewish family and appeared in early films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The couple had two children and received plenty of attention in the social columns of newspapers at the time.
In 1929, Bunny met Fred Perry, the fellow British tennis player with whose career his own was to be linked. Perry had a more powerful game than Bunny and became the most successful English player of the twentieth century. Bunny continued to have mixed results over the next few years, with losses brought about by injury and a lack of stamina. He had beautiful strokes but never an overpowering game, resulting in many prolonged matches.
The Emerging Champion
Also in 1929, Bunny advanced to the semifinals of Wimbledon, the first of ten consecutive Wimbledon tournaments in which he advanced to the quarterfinals or beyond. In 1930, he was ranked ninth in the world, and two years later, he succeeded in reaching the finals at Wimbledon. That year, his competition was Ellsworth Vines, a power player from the United States; Bunny was overwhelmingly defeated, winning only six games. He admitted that he could not keep up with Vines’s power and was thinking of giving more serious attention to his career as a stockbroker.
The next year was perhaps the most successful in Bunny’s tennis career. He did not get back to the finals at Wimbledon, but he and Perry teamed up to take the Davis Cup away from the French, who had held it for six years. The French team included many champions from the 1920’s, but, even playing in Paris, it could not overcome the British team’s youth. The British controlled the Davis Cup for four years, with Bunny and Perry managing to fend off challenges from the Americans. Bunny was distinctly more successful in Davis Cup events than he was in the major singles championships. His game was more suited to singles than to doubles, so even in the Davis Cup, the doubles responsibilities were left to others.
One of the turning-points in his career was also a fashion statement. Before Bunny’s time, men’s tennis players wore long trousers on the court. This was perceived as the attire of a gentleman in a traditional game. Bunny decided that the perspiration that the trousers retained in long matches contributed to his problems with stamina, and he started to play in shorts. While he had been concerned about the reaction from the traditionalists, no negative consequences materialized, and shorts have been the attire of choice ever since.
Continuing the Story
Bunny enjoyed the international travel and attention that came with his Davis Cup victories, but he recognized how much of that success was because of Perry, who won Wimbledon three years in a row. During that time, Bunny was unable to return to the finals. Then, when Perry turned professional after the 1936 season, even the Davis Cup triumphs came to an end. At that time only amateurs were allowed to play in the Davis Cup and the main international tournaments, so Perry was lost to the British team. Bunny continued to play in various events and returned to the Wimbledon finals in 1938. He lost, however, to the American Don Budge, even more decisively than against Vines six years before. The following year, he was eliminated in the third round. His career as an international tennis player was over.
Bunny, however, had been active in various causes during his playing days, and those were enough to keep him busy. He and Perry had made a public protest over the German refusal to allow Jewish players on its Davis Cup team. He also became one of the spokesmen for the movement known as “Moral Re-Armament” that looked to a return to religion as an alternative to the increasing militarism of the 1930’s. Bunny spent a fair amount of time working in London on theater designed to reinforce some of the claims that Moral Re-Armament was making.
In 1943, Bunny traveled to the United States on behalf of Moral Re-Armament and did not return to England until 1961. When he was drafted into the American military, the heart ailment he had since his Cambridge days kept him from active service. On returning home, he found that his move to the United States had affected his celebrity, but he lived long enough to regain popular affection. In 2000, despite residing in a nursing home, he took part in a parade of former champions at Wimbledon in a wheelchair. He died shortly thereafter.
Summary
During his entire career, Bunny Austin was an outstanding example of a gentleman tennis player. He was able to play at the top of his game in certain settings and that enabled him, even after his tennis career was over, to retain the public eye for other causes.
Bibliography
Austin, Henry Wilfred, and Phyllis Konstam. A Mixed Double. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.
Mason, Tony. “Henry Wilfred Austin.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Potter, E. C., Jr. Kings of the Court. New Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1963.