The history of En-Tout-Cas

The business prospered and by the outbreal of the first World War the new En Tout Cas red clay tennis courts were being installed in their hundreds for the wealthy and for leading clubs.

After the war, the company thrived. By the mid-1920’s the company had agents throughout Europe, Scandinavia and North America. The En Tout Cas London office was located in Fortnum and Masons. An En-Tout-Cas tennis court was as essential an adjunct to an English country house as a Rolls-Royce car. Claude brown was appointed Tennis Court Maker to King George V. By the mid-1930s, just 25 years after the company was founded, there were ten en-Tout-Cas courts at Wimbledon and En-Tout-Cas courts were being used for the Davis Cup and the French Open. North American clients included Edsel Ford, H F Du Pont, S R Guggenheim, J Pierrepoint Morgan and two members of the Vanderbilt family.

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 contributed to the war effort by building and repairing 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 to his own son Colin. Today, En-Tout-Cas Tennis Courts is owned and run by Rory Shepherd. Rory 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 the crippling winter of 1947, Claude Brown led the civil engineering industry’s delegation to 10 Downing Street to organise the national response to the crisis.

In 1948, the Olympic Games were staged in London, at very short notice. The main venue was Wembley Stadium, which had no athletics track. With just eight weeks to the go to the opening ceremony, En Tout Cas was asked to provide a world-class running track. The company came up with a completely new cinder formulation and completed the track with two days to spare.
Through the 1950s, En-Tout-Cas went from strength to strength, building tennis courts 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. The company installed cinder tracks all over the world until the introduction faster plastic tracks at the 1968 Olympics rendered the tracks obsolete.

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 developed new products such as 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 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.

Two years after that, Rory left to start Anglia & Midland Sports and Bob retired. As Anglia and Midland prospered, 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.