Together with Fred Perry, Pat Hughes, Harold Lee and doubles expert Raymond Tuckey, Bunny Austin played in the British team which not only won the Davis Cup in 1933 for the first time since 1912 but then retained it for the next three years, before losing to the United States in 1937.
An elegant stroke-maker, Austin also finished runner-up twice in the men's singles at Wimbledon, first to Ellsworth Vines in 1932 and then against Don Budge when the American was on the way to the first Grand Slam in 1938. No other British player has reached the final since then.
In 1931 and 1938, Austin was ranked No 2 in the world. In 1933, when he was fourth seed but beaten in the quarter-finals, he was the first man to compete in shorts, rather than white flannels, on the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
Yet despite the acclaim Austin enjoyed at the time, this slim, gracious and articulate figure was later to find himself banished from most British tennis circles.
Henry Wilfred Austin was born at Norwood, south London, on August 26 1906 and educated at Repton. He quickly demonstrated his tennis talent and became an outstanding junior player.
He won the 16-and-under national boys' title at 15 and the 18-and-under title three times between 1923 and 1925. At the age of 18 he was elected a member of the All England Club. While at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he read History, he gained his Blue, and played in the University match from 1926 to 1928.
Austin relied on perfect timing. His opponents often spoke with feeling and frustration at the way he had used their speed of shot to create his own pace and invariably outwit them.
As Dan Maskell recalled, Austin's success "was built upon control and accuracy. In practice it was a joy to play against him for his beautiful rhythm seemed to brush off on you so that you felt that you were hitting the ball particularly well yourself. What Bunny, who played mainly from the baseline, lacked was variety and a big serve."
This was especially evident in his first Wimbledon final in 1932 when it was the speed of the Ellsworth Vines serve and forehand which dominated the match as Austin was beaten 6-4, 6-2, 6-0.
Austin had first reached the last 16 at Wimbledon in 1926 and repeated the performance in 1928 and 1930. But thereafter Perry steadily replaced him as the leading British player. He never fully emerged from the Perry shadow, though in fact he never played Perry in the Wimbledon Championships.
Among his many successes on court, Austin reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 1929 and 1936 and won the British hard court championships at Bournemouth in 1929, 1937 and 1938.
At the French Championships in Paris in 1937, he reached the final before losing in straight sets to Henner Henkel. In the fourth round at Wimbledon in 1928 he played one of his finest matches to lead the defending champion, Henri Cochet, by two sets to love, before lack of stamina - the other principal drawback in such an artistic game - enabled the Frenchman to escape.
Yet it will be for his contributions to the last British teams to win the Davis Cup that Austin will most be remembered, especially as he often lifted his game to beat opponents who tended to defeat him in tournaments.
A prime example was his Davis Cup straight-sets defeat of Vines in 1933, when the memory was fresh of the drubbing he had been given by the American in the Wimbledon final a year earlier.
Austin made his Davis Cup debut in 1929. He won his opening rubber, against Poland in Warsaw, for the loss of only three games in three sets and also featured in victories over South Africa and Hungary before losing both his singles matches in Britain's 3-2 defeat by Germany in Berlin.
The thrilling 1933 campaign, which was to lead to glory in Paris, began with Austin winning the one rubber he played in the 4-1 defeat of Spain. With Perry and Austin unbeaten and at the peak of their form, Britain also beat Finland 5-0, Italy 4-1 and Czechoslovakia 5-0 before the 3-2 victory against Australia, when Austin lost his second singles to Jack Crawford but the team still earned its place in the Challenge Round against France, winners the previous six years.
On a stiflingly hot opening day, 12,000 Parisians created an electrifying atmosphere. Everyone sensed that the first rubber could be crucial. "From the first," recalled Maskell, "Bunny played beautifully, gliding the ball to a perfect length and frustrating the attempts of a nervous André Merlin to bring him to the net. He would read drop shots and get there early enough to hit either a winning drop in reply or drive into an empty court.
"The only hint of danger came when Merlin, trailing 1-4 in the second set repeatedly produced some Cochet-like volleying coups to level the score at 4-4. Here Bunny remained calm. The Frenchman's recovery proved to be a dying kick. Looking lost and tired, the young man crumpled to defeat 6-3, 6-4, 6-0 to give us exactly the psychological edge for which we had been hoping."
Although Austin lost his second singles to Cochet over five sets to make the match score 2-2, Perry's defeat of Merlin in four sets gave Britain the trophy. On the train journey from Dover to Victoria crowds lined every platform and many of the fields along the track to cheer the British team.
A year later, when Britain successfully defended the trophy, Austin once again gave them an important winning start, outplaying Frank Shields only a couple of weeks after the American had outlasted him in five sets at Wimbledon.
In the 1935 final, Austin also included Budge among his impressive list of Davis Cup victims as Britain trounced the Americans 5-0, while he beat Crawford (though losing later to Adrian Quist) when Britain became champions for a fourth consecutive year in 1936, thanks to a final-rubber victory by Perry against Crawford.
The next year, by which time Perry had turned professional, there was even greater weight on Austin's shoulders when the Americans were once again the challengers in the final. It started well enough, with Austin beating Frank Parker in straight sets but that was the limit of British success. They lost the match 4-1. The Davis Cup run was over.
By now, Austin, a stockbroker by profession, was beginning to wind down his tennis career but in 1939, at the age of 32, and when Budge had joined the growing ranks of the professionals, he was still top seed at Wimbledon, only to lose in the quarter finals to the American Elwood Cooke.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Austin left for America to work with Moral Rearmament. He and his wife, the actress Phyllis Konstam whom he married in 1931, lectured extensively on MRA around the United States.
Despite ill-founded rumours, however, Austin was not a conscientious objector, nor did he ignore the war effort. Indeed from 1943 to 1945 he served with the US Army Air Corps.
Yet when he applied for re-admission as a Wimbledon member on his return to live in London in 1962, the application was rejected on the grounds that he had not paid his subscription for some years.
Although no one at The All England Club ever commented on the issue, Austin was convinced that it was his ties with Moral Rearmament which led to his being blackballed.
It was not until 1984 that Austin was re-elected to the All England Club. His last visit there was for the Millennium parade of former champions on the middle Saturday of this year's championship. Confined to a wheelchair after a fall some years earlier, Austin was given a tumultuous reception by the crowd and later told friends: "I think it was the happiest day of my life."
Despite his lengthy dispute with the Club, Austin maintained a close interest in tennis affairs, particularly in the decline of the game in Britain. He wrote letters to the press criticising what he called the "welfare state" in tennis.
"No coaching schemes or constant competition can produce results without the individual willingness to train and sacrifice for a sport one loves" was his favourite theme.
Phyllis Austin died in 1976. They had a son and a daughter.
Published August 28 2000 - The Daily Telegraph - Obituary
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