The “Premier” Tennis Racket of 1886

First Published June, 2025

I have been asked many times over the years “What is the rarest racket in your collection?” It is always difficult to choose the rarest, but I can say with certainty that the 139 year old racket pictured here is the most unique racket that I have ever owned.

This Premier model racket that was patented by Hillman, Herbert and Cooper of Coventry, England in 1885 was not only unusual for employing bicycle steel tubing for the frame, but also for possessing a capability that allowed the tension of the gut strings to be adjusted on the court during play.

William Hillman, who was a prolific inventor throughout his long life, designed this one of a kind racket. He started out in his remarkable career by learning mechanical engineering at John Penn & Sons in Greenwich, England in the mid 1860’s. Hillman took that training and his mechanical aptitude to the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, which was also just beginning to produce bicycles. He soon became an avid cyclist and actually won some races at Crystal Palace in London in the early 1870’s.

On his own time, Hillman had invented a new roller skate and teamed up with an acquaintance, William Herbert, to help market his new product. The association proved beneficial to both men and in 1875 they founded the Hillman & Herbert Company with Herbert supplying the capital and Hillman providing the product designs. They initially manufactured sewing machines, but quickly moved into bicycle production at their newly established Premier Works in Coventry, leaving the sewing machine business behind.

The pedal bicycle had been invented in France in 1864 and by the time they entered the market in the mid 1870’s the bicycling rage was sweeping across Europe. The big front wheel “Penny-Farthing” bike became very popular around 1875 and the now renamed Hillman & Herbert Cycle Company was soon producing bicycles, tricycles and quadracycles that featured the high spoked wheels that measured 46 inches in diameter.

In 1880, with their bicycle business experiencing tremendous growth, George Cooper joined the company as a named partner by providing additional capital and expertise to expand their cycle production at the Premier Works, which eventually grew to cover three acres of ground.

William Hillman’s inventive ingenuity led to Hillman, Herbert and Cooper offering around 200 different cycle models in 1886, which required building a second of an eventual four factories in Coventry. However, Hillman’s attention, which had gone from roller skates to sewing machines to bicycles, now turned towards the lawn tennis racket and on April 14, 1885, he filed and received an English patent for his new adjustable tubular steel tennis racket, which was patented in the U.S. on August 3, 1886.

The following excerpts that describe the racket very well are from a testimonial taken from the “St. Stephens Review” that appeared in the attached 1886 Hillman, Herbert and Cooper ad.

Hillman, Herbert, Cooper and Company, having touched perfection in their cycles, now have turned their attention to Lawn Tennis Racquets.

I have just seen a tubular racquet which will knock all the old style wooden racquets into oblivion.

It is made solely of tubular steel and gut, the nuisance of warped or broken racquets is therefore entirely done away with for the steel can neither bend or break.

It possesses an immense advantage over ordinary wooden racquets that the gut, by simply turning a button at the end of the handle, may be slackened or tightened to the exact tension when in use.

We believe that this invention will revolutionize the racquet trade.

The testimonial finishes by informing the reader that, “It will be out very shortly my friends.” The actual date of the testimonial is March 20, 1886, so it is safe to assume that the racket entered the marketplace sometime in the spring of 1886.

The racket, which weighs 13.5 ounces and is 26.25 inches in length, has no exterior string holes in its head. Consequently, the racket had to be strung exclusively through the interior holes, which would make restringing it a time-consuming stringer’s nightmare.

As you can see, in the attached patent sketch taken from Sigfried Kuebler’s “Book of Tennis Rackets”, the strings are gathered at the throat and looped around a leather cord that runs the length of the handle. The cord is attached to a “button” (which is missing on my racket) at the end of the handle that could be turned to tighten or loosen the strings as needed.

My initial observation of this racket was that Hillman, in all probability, did not play tennis. The handle measures a small one inch in diameter and is painted steel, which is slick and would make maintaining a grip very difficult. There are five inch long shallow indentions on opposite sides of the handle’s gripping area, but with a little perspiration added, they would be totally ineffective. This is not a racket that you would want your opponent or partner playing with, because you would be in constant danger of being “knocked into oblivion” by a 13.5 ounce flying steel tennis racket.

The Premier racket failed to “revolutionize the racquet trade” as their ad had boasted and, as a result, it was not in production for long, perhaps just one season. The stringing challenges and simple unplayability of the racket made this one of Hillman’s very few failures. Based on years of research for several articles that I have published on early metal rackets, I have found that the Premier is the earliest known metal lawn tennis racket.

The second oldest metal tennis racket, which was first made one year later in 1887 by the Metallic Racquet Company of Aberdeen, Scotland, also had a steel frame with gut strings. Even though Jeanne Cherry, Kuebler and the Wimbledon Museum report that the Metallic Racquet Company produced this racket in 1887, it was close enough to Hillman’s 1886 date that I felt compelled to research it further.

I was able to locate copies of the annual Scottish Post Office Directory that support the 1887 initial production date. They show that the Metallic Racquet Company was listed at 77 Waterloo Quay, Aberdeen beginning in 1887 and was also listed at the same address in 1888 and 1889 before disappearing from the directories. The Metallic racket also was strung only with interior holes and had the same slick metal handle as the Hillman design. As a consequence, it suffered the same fate as the Premier racket.

The Premier is also the first known adjustable tension lawn tennis racket. During my patent search, I did find a couple of earlier adjustable racket patents that had been filed, however I have never seen any evidence that they were actually produced. The second oldest adjustable racket made that I have been able to discover is a circa 1918 Courtland model racket that was made by Hobbies of Dereham, England. The 14.5 ounce Courtland had a steel head, wire strings, a wood handle and a spring loaded device at the bottom of the head that could be used to adjust the tension of the wire strings. The rarity of this racket suggests that it also had a very limited distribution.

The failure of the Premier adjustable metal racket was just a bump in the road for Hillman, Herbert and Cooper. They went through a name change to the Premier Cycle Company in 1891 and by 1896 they were the largest bicycle maker in the world turning out Premier bicycles at plants in Coventry and Nuremberg, Germany.

At the turn of the 20th century, Hillman was a very wealthy man and although he was no longer associated with the Premier Cycle Company, he continued to design cutting edge products. In 1902, he patented a chain drive motorcycle with many innovative features that was first manufactured in 1908 under the Premier name that he had made so famous over the years.

His design interest then shifted to automobiles and in 1910 he founded the Hillman Motor Car Company, which had a very successful run. Among his last designs was a race car that in 1921 set a world record by covering 79 miles in one hour. The Hillman Motor Car Company continued to operate into the 1970’s under several owners, including Chrysler and Peugeot.

In the same year that the Hillman motor car set the world record, William Hillman passed away at his Keresley Hall estate in Coventry at the age of 72 surrounded by his wife and family. During his career he had been successful at every major endeavor that he attempted from roller skates to automobiles with the lone exception being the lawn tennis racket. However, he was somewhat vindicated many decades later when metal racket frames and string tension adjusters became mainstream racket features.

Good Collecting.

Note: You can view the Metallic and the Hobbies Courtland rackets on the Wimbledon.com website in the “Explore the Collection” section.

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