player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameAlfred Ernest
LastnameCrawley
GenderMale
CountryEngland
Date of birth1869-07-11
Place of birthLondon, England
Date of death1924-10-21
Place of deathKensington, London, England

About

Alfred E. Crawley was the brother of fellow lawn tennis player Walter C. Crawley. Arthur had a brilliant career at Cambridge University and, after going down, initially worked as a schoolmaster. However, he had a wide variety of interest and later gave up teaching to focus on journalism and writing books on various subjects, including ball sports.
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From the Islip Rural Deanery Magazine, July 1898:

By Samuel Crawley

It will be interesting to the parishioners to know that the eldest son of the Rector, Mr Alfred E. Crawley, M.A., Senior Classical and Composition Master at Lancing College, was admitted to holy orders on Trinity Sunday by the Lord Bishop of Chichester. Mr Crawley had a most brilliant career at Cambridge. In 1887 he gained the open Senior Classical Scholarship at Emmanuel College, and at the Previous Examination he obtained a First Class in Classics, First Class in Additionals and Second Class in Mathematics.

In 1888 Mr Crawley gained a Classical Exhibition of £50 a year from the Goldsmiths’ Company; he became also Foundation Scholar (£60 a year) and Latin Prize Essayist. In 1889 his Scholarship was advanced to £80, and he graduated as B.A. in the First Class of the Classical Tripos. In 1890 he was again placed in the First Class of the Classical Tripos at the Further Examination.

In 1891 Mr Crawley became Senior Classical Master at Saint John’s School, Leatherhead. In 1892 he gained the Sudbury-Hardyman Prize, value £30, open to B.A.’s of Emmanuel College for the best dissertation on an original subject. His subject was “Clavus Annalis.” In 1897 he became Senior Classical Master of Lancing College, in addition to his classical work.
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From The Times, 25 October 1924:

Obituary – Mr Alfred E. Crawley – An Expert in Ball Games

Mr Alfred Ernest Crawley, who died in Kensington on October 21, was a famous player and teacher of ball games, especially lawn tennis, and was also known as an anthropologist. The son of the Reverend Samuel Crawley, rector of Oddington, near Oxford, who was an early exponent of lawn tennis, he was a brother of Mr Walter C. Crawley, the Olympic champion.

Alfred E. Crawley was born in 1869 and was sent to Sedbergh School, Cumbria. Thenee he went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with a scholarship, and obtained firsts in the Classical Tripos, Part 1., 1889, and Part II., 1890. For seven years he was a master at Saint John’s School, Leatherhead, for three years at Lancing, and for four years at Bradfield. In September, 1906, he was appointed headmaster of Derby School, but resigned in December, 1908, and devoted himself to journalism and books.

He was at one period a frequent contributor to The Times. Lawn tennis was the game in which he was most successful, but he was also fond of golf, figure-skating, fives, and revolver shooting. He was often prominent in lawn tennis tournaments and achieved the distinction of beating the late William Renshaw. In 1919 he published a treatise on lawn tennis, and in 1922 a book of “Lawn Tennis Do’s and Don’ts”. More important was his “Book of the Ball”, which appeared in 1913, and has become a classic.

He had long been convinced of the practical value of comparing one game with another, and of getting hold of the principles which govern the behaviour of the ball generally, not merely in this game or that. Many diagrams and illustrations add to the value of the book, in which the fundamental scientific principles are lucidly explained. On the title-page he put the famous lines from Omar Khayyam: “The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes; And He that tossed you down into the Field, He knows about it all, He knows, HE knows!”

More than ten years before he had translated Omar Khayyam’s poem into Greek elegiacs. In anthropology Crawley was recognised as an able student and researcher. He published “The Mystic Rose: A Study of Primitive Marriage” (1902); “The Tree of Life-: A Study of Religion” (1905) and “The Idea of the Soul” (1909). He also contributed papers to Hastings’s Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, and was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological and the Sociological Societies.

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