Henry Austin

:"For the Major League Baseball player, see Henry Austin (baseball).":"For the architect, see Henry Austin (architect)."

Henry Wilfred "Bunny" Austin (26 August 1906 – 26 August 2000) was an English tennis player.

As of 2008 he was the last male tennis player from the United Kingdom to reach the final of Wimbledon, achieving that in 1932 and 1938. He was also a finalist at the 1937 French Open. Along with Fred Perry, he was a vital part of the British team that won the Davis Cup three times from 1933-35. He is also remembered as the first tennis player to wear shorts.

Austin was brought up in South Norwood, London. The nickname "Bunny" came from a comic strip, "Pip, Squeak & Wilfred". Encouraged by his father, who was determined that he become a sportsman, he joined Norhurst Tennis Club aged six.

Tennis career

While still an undergraduate at Cambridge University he reached the semi-finals of the men's doubles at Wimbledon in 1926. By the 1930s he was ranked in the world's top ten players. In his first Wimbledon men's singles final in 1932 he was beaten by Ellsworth Vines of the United States in three sets.

In 1932 he decided that the traditional tennis attire, cricket flannels, weighed him down too much. He bought a pair of shorts and used them at Forest Hills and subsequently at Wimbledon. But the tennis historian Bud Collins reports that Austin was not in fact the very first to wear shorts at Wimbledon.

In the years 1933-6, he and Fred Perry helped win the Davis Cup for Britain.

In his Wimbledon career Austin reached the quarter-finals or better ten times. In 1938 he played Don Budge in the final, but won only four games. The next year he was seeded first but lost in an early round. It was the last time he played at Wimbledon.

Personal

He married the actress Phyllis Konstam in 1931, and together they were one of the celebrity couples of the age. Austin played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, was a friend of Daphne du Maurier, and met both Queen Mary and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Austin and his wife worked for the cause of the Oxford Group. According to Austin's friend Peter Ustinov, Austin was "disgracefully ostracised by the All-England Club because he was a conscientious objector". In fact, he served in the American Army Air-Force as a private, 1943-45. A voting member of the Membership Committee of the All-England Club had been removed from the Cambridge tennis team during Austin's captaincy, and used the excuse of Austin's alleged proselytisation for the Oxford Group as an excuse for denying him reinstatement in the All-England Club after a lapse of dues payment. His membership of the club was restored in 1984, the year the obstructing member died.

Austin's autobiography, written with his wife, "A Mixed Double", was published in 1969.

After a serious fall in 1995 Austin moved to a nursing home at Coulsdon, Surrey. He died in 2000 on his 94th birthday. Just a few months earlier, he had joined other past Wimbledon champions and finalists on Wimbledon's Centre Court for a Millennium-year parade of champions.

Austin was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island in 1997.

Grand Slam record

French Championships
*Singles finalist: 1937
*Mixed Doubles finalist: 1931

Wimbledon Championships
*Singles finalist: 1932, 1938
*Mixed Doubles finalist: 1934

U.S. Championships
*Singles finalist: 1928, 1929

Grand Slam singles finals

Runner-ups (3)