En-Tout-Cas is the oldest and best known of all artificial tennis
court surfaces having been manufactured since 1909 and is known
the world over.
Founder Claude Brown laid his Red Championship crushed brick shale courts, inspired by the courts he saw laid in South Africa that were made from anthills. These courts became known around the world as En -Tout-Cas, a phrase Claude saw, in Paris, advertising a parasol made for sun and rain, immediately declaring: “Just like my tennis courts.”
The earliest synthetic tennis court surfaces were slow to drain and dry. Claude hit upon the idea of making courts from ground-up stone and brick.
A classic setting for one of our modern courts
This more porous mixture allowed for easy draining. En-Tout-Cas grew and thrived through the twenties and thirties, even having an office in Harrods. An En-Tout-Cas tennis court was as essential an adjunct to an English country house as a Rolls-Royce car.
En-Tout-Cas went on to develop other surfaces, such as gragreen, a subtle blend of 6mm granite chippings, bitumen, and grey-green coloured granite grit, and the ubiquitous porous tarmac tennis court. During the second world war, En -Tout-Cas turned its ploughshares into swords, building and rebuilding airfields for the RAF.
As En-Tout-Cas enters its second century, the ownership of the business has in a sense come full circle through the involvement of two families of tennis court builders. It was Claude’s son Ronald who succeeded him before handing on the baton to his own son Colin. Today, En-Tout-Cas Tennis Courts is owned and run by Rory Shepherd. Rory is a second-generation tennis court builder who learned his trade with En-Tout-Cas in the early seventies. Rory’s father Robert ‘Bob’ Shepherd began work for En-Tout-Cas after the end of the Second World War. Bob answered an advert for a tennis court constructor, persuaded his brother Fred to teach him to drive – in a couple of hours – and then drove to Leicester where he duly secured the position after an interview.
After the end of the second world war, the combination of enormous amounts of rubble and brickwork and the large open spaces left by bomb damage in the centre of British towns and cities made for an ideal scenario for the speedy development of shale tennis courts and sports amenities. This had the twin benefits of providing sports and leisure facilities for the population and improving the appearance of the country’s battered urban landscape.En-Tout-Cas’ standing was such that after bitter and crippling winter of 1947, Claude Brown led the civil engineering industry’s delegation to 10 Downing Street to organise the national response to the disaster.
Through the 1950s, En-Tout-Cas went from strength to strength, building tennis court s in every corner of the land.- and building the running track at Iffley Road Oxford , where Roger Bannister became the first man in history to break the four-minute mile.
In the sixties, En-Tout-Cas received the Queen’s Award for the work it did on a massive programme of land reclamation around Stoke-on-Trent. En-Tout-Cas was sold to Crest Homes and Bob Shepherd was promoted from Inspector to General Manager of the whole UK. En-Tout-Cas moved into products like Tennisquick, a porous concrete tennis court, Pladek an acrylic painted porous bitumen macadam tennis court and Savanna, a sand filled polypropylene synthetic grass court surface.
In 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Virginia Wade won Wimbledon and, that year, presented Bob with a Wimbledon centenary plate. Three years earlier, Rory had disappointed his parents when he left Oundle School, and instead of becoming a research scientist, joined En-Tout-Cas. He had already spent his school summer holidays building tennis courts in France for the company. He went on to complete the company’s apprenticeship scheme before taking a National Diploma in construction. He was also part of the team that built the running track and tennis courts for the African Games in Accra, Ghana in 1977.
 In 1979 Rory left to start Anglia & Midland Sports and Bob retired. As Anglia and Midland prospered and then thrived, En-Tout-Cas went downhill. Crest Nicholson
sold the company, leading to a sad decade in a proud firm’s otherwise outstanding history.
Rory Shepherd bought En-Tout-Cas in 2010, to continue a family relationship that has now spanned more than 64 years and restore the old En-Tout-Cas ethos that “quality comes first” to this iconic British brand, in time for its second century.
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