Shortly before I retired the owner of Thames & Hudson, who profoundly disliked America, but who had employed me to develop a programme of textbooks for US college courses, asked me whether I really enjoyed my travels to many obscure towns where we could sell our textbooks. I replied that I had never been to a place where there was not a person or something that was not interesting.
I recalled this brief conversation because, at the urging of Kourtney, the partner of our eldest son, I have been drafting my memoirs and I have reached the thirteen years of my life working for Thames & Hudson. One of the visits I recalled was to Rome, Georgia (I used to joke that I had been to Paris (Texas), Athens (Georgia), Cambridge (Maryland), Birmingham (Alabama), and London (Ontario) without once setting foot in Europe). I paid a call at Berry College, founded in 1902 on 93 acres outside the town as a Boys Industrial School by Martha Berry, daughter of a grocery wholesaler and cotton trader. Rome’s location on the Etowah River made it a trading hub in north Georgia and southern Tennessee in the days of river transport. Theodore Roosevelt once visited Martha’s wood cabin schoolhouse, and Woodrow Wilson’s wife was a native of Rome. So there are presidential links to the town’s history.
While I was in Rome, I took a stroll downtown and discovered, outside the town hall, a statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from a female wolf (a copy of the Capitoline Wolf, a famous statue in Rome, Italy). A plaque on the statue announces: “Romae Novae, aspicium propseritatis et gloriae lupam capitolinam signum Roma aeterna, consule Benito Mussolini misit anno MCMXXIX” (In New Rome, the auspice of prosperity and glory, the Capitoline Wolf, the symbol of eternal Rome, was sent by the consul Benito Mussolini in 1929). It seems that the citizens of Rome are still proud of their link to Il Duce.
Well, earlier this month (February 2026) I took a friend who was Macmillan’s publishers of many thousands of academic books, and who was about to mark his 91st birthday, to lunch in the Belgian Arms in Holyport, near Maidenhead. The pub is over 200 years old, and one of its upstairs rooms was once home to the local Methodist worshippers (incongruously, since Methodists are in principle tee-total). It was previously called The Eagle. During the First World War, some German prisoners were held in Holyport. For reasons unexplained, the Prussian arms were displayed on the front of the pub, and as the prisoners passed by, they saluted the arms. This so annoyed the locals that they renamed the pub (Belgium, of course, was where the main battlefields of the war were situated) the Belgian Arms.
Tim, however, had in mind another piece of local history: there are 23 real tennis courts in the UK, and one is in Holyport. So we tracked it won, (a short distance from the Belgian Arms). The game is ancient (Henry VIII played it at Hampton Court), but Holyport is a newcomer. The owner of Holyport House built the court in 1889. His successor was a cricket man, and the court was neglected, but was restored in the 1980s.
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| Holyport Real Tennis Club |
A Real Tennis court is a rare sight. There are only 41 courts worldwide. In addition to those in the UK there are ten in the USA, almost all in the East. The Racquet Club of Chicago, at Dearborn and West Schiller is the furthest west. Its closest neighbour is the Racquet Club of Philadelphia France and Australia each have four clubs.
Our visit prompted me to investigate the derivation of Holyport’s name. The town is named after no holy site or event; its derivation is the Old English horig (muddy) and port (market-town).
