Blantyre Lawn Tennis Club – Between 1910 and 1915, this local sports club established tennis courts and a pavilion at 81 Stonefield Road. The club arrangements were done through Mrs Catherine Weir of 16 Victoria Street. The club bought the land from the Trustees of John Clark Forrest.
At that time the adjacent Bowling club were still renting land from the trustees, but they owned their own clubhouse at the time, the back of which faced on to the courts. Separate changing rooms were located near the manse and the adjacent land of Pilot Acre. The yearly annual rent in 1915 for the tennis courts was £5 and 10 shillings, perhaps reflecting what a community past-time this provided.
The popular tennis courts were between Pilot Acre and the Blantyre Bowling Club, on the east side of Stonefield Road and were still there in 1963, as this picture shows. No longer there today, the ground is now used as the car park for the Bowling Club, which was recently surfaced with tarmacadam in Winter 2016.
From “Blantyre Explained” by Paul Veverka (c) 2017
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As someone whose family have been running tennis in Drumchapel since 1906 I had a look at club records and the 2004 book 100 years of Tennis in the West of Scotland. There is no mention of Blantyre LTC in the Drumchapel records from 1908 to the present. Blantyre is not mentioned in the book either. Motherwell and Hallside are but long closed. Uddingston are much to the fore nowadays. They may not have played in competitive leagues.