The Vanderbilt: all tennis and no fur coat
The Princess of Wales with German tennis player Steffi Graf, (Shutterstock)
Charles Swallow, former owner of the London Vanderbilt tennis club from 1985 until 2003, passed away on Sunday 16th March. He was 86 and had given up his career as a history teacher at Harrow School to run the club. The Vanderbilt was seriously exclusive under the ownership of Swallow: a club limited to 500 members, frequented by the likes of Princess Diana, Steffi Graf, Richard Branson and the Saatchi brothers. The Vanderbilt was later sold to the developers of what is now the Westfield shopping mall in Shepherd’s Bush.
However, the Vanderbilt was certainly not glamorous in the early days before Charles took over from the previous owner.
The original site consisted of some huge rickety hangars on stilts, where parachutes had been made during the world wars.
In the early 1970s, I was wandering around the outside courts at Wimbledon in my school uniform when an elderly man in a full-length coat with an oversized fur collar and thick Hungarian accent approached me. “Would you like tickets for the final?” he asked. “Here’s my card. Come to my hotel and pick them up tomorrow evening. My name is Geza Gazdag.”
It all sounded too good to be true. Was this man with the strange name just into girls in school uniforms? So I rang his number the following evening and asked if my father could pick up the tickets… Sure enough, they were at reception.
For the next few years, my whole family were given tickets to the Wimbledon finals. My parents asked Geza Gazdag over for a meal one night as a gesture of appreciation. Geza was a Hungarian émigré from the 1956 uprising. He told them he owned a tennis club on top of New York Central Station and was looking to find a good location for one in Central London.
My father, a surveyor, found the site in Shepherds Bush and carried out the survey for him. Geza was ecstatic. He promised me a lifetime membership and my mother a fur coat.
Just before the club opened, he asked me and a few of my junior tennis friends if we would hand out flyers outside the Wimbledon gates at the tournament. Unfortunately, one of my friends was arrested for doing so.
“What’s your name?” the policeman demanded. “Ray Smith,” my friend replied. “Oh, yes? And who are you handing out these flyers for?” “Geza Gazdag.” One of the coppers answered with something along the lines of: “I think we have a bit of a comedian here,” before bundling him into the police van. To our relief, after a rap on the knuckles, he re-appeared a few hours later.
The club finally opened in 1975. It was pretty basic, and when I was on court I was always a bit nervous in case the structure was about to collapse.
A couple of years later, lifetime membership not forthcoming, I went down to the club and asked Geza if I could have a few hours a week of court time to do some coaching there. He gave me a thunderous stare, stuck his feet on the table and showed me some ragged peeling soles. “Your mother is a very attractive woman, but I curse the day I met her,” he spat. The club was clearly not doing so well.
A few years later, Geza Gazdag sold the club for a decent price to Charles Swallow.
In the mid ‘80’s I bumped into Geza at Flushing Meadows where he gave me and my friend centre court tickets for the whole fortnight. He was a very generous man, despite the fact that my mother never got her fur coat. She grumbled about that for years.
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