Nancy Green Tennis Cup

We have recently received a tennis cup, dating from 1938; our archivist Jo Coates tells the story of how it came into our hands.

In August, the school was contacted by Andrew Jamieson, who had been helping family members go through his mother-in-law’s possessions after she sadly passed away. Whilst sorting through her belongings, they came across a small trophy awarded to his mother in law, Nancy Clarke (née Green), in 1938 for winning the Junior Tennis Championship at South Hampstead.

Andrew also shared some interesting details about Nancy’s life. Nancy had served in the Women’s Auxiliary Airforce (WAAF) in the war, managing to keep up her hobby of tennis playing; she went on to become a finalist in the 1945 WAAF singles and played in the inter-services tournament at Wimbledon that year. A search through the archives found that Nancy had been a pupil at South Hampstead between 1937 and 1940. Her final school report, however, mentioned nothing of prowess at tennis – likely due to the fact that she attended the school during the chaos of the wartime evacuation to Berkhamsted.

Andrew wrote to us to say that Nancy’s family would like to return the cup to the school to be used for a new tennis award. We were delighted to receive the Nancy Green Tennis Cup, now proudly on display in the trophy cabinet, to ensure that her sporting legacy lives on at South Hampstead and look forward to presenting it at future sports award ceremonies.