“We’ve steered clear of such extremes as koroing, as we feel that it results in taking away too much of the natural goodness that builds up over the years in the soil”
passing on the head groundsman’s duties to his son on retirement last year, while Graham’s uncle was putting in fifty years of service at The Hurlingham Club, his only interruption being a break for national service. “Maybe it explains why I entered the industry,” Graham muses. “Groundsmanship is clearly in the blood.”
Longevity of service seems a characteristic of the industry but, being immersed in lawn care since childhood and growing up around the club, has clearly been a recipe for success for Graham.
“I’ve learnt everything I know from my dad. His attention to detail is probably the biggest impact he’s had on the way I do things now,” he states. “Most importantly, he taught me that we have to do things a certain way here - we have a reputation to uphold.” Graham nearly took a markedly
different career path, however. He began an engineering apprenticeship at sixteen only to realise, after a year, that it wasn’t the route for him.
He then spent a year travelling Australia before returning to the UK and an invitation from his father to work at Queen’s. From then on, Graham knew groundsmanship was the avenue he wished to explore, so enrolled at Norwood Hall Agricultural College to study for an NCT qualification, which he gained in 1995. He has gone on to become an examiner and assessor for the IOG and City and Guilds - an aspect of his job he believes is vitally important for him to stay on top of his game. “It’s a good thing to know about the
exams, especially in this business, as many groundsmen overlook them or think they’re not worthwhile,” argues
Graham. “It keeps you on your toes and up to speed with the latest changes.” “Aside from that, it helps to get out of your comfort zone, otherwise it can become easy to simply stick with what you know and what you think is best. It’s important to always be pushing, especially in an industry where it’s vital to ensure new blood keeps coming in.” Whilst teaching is an adjunct to the main job in hand, this aspect of his work he greatly enjoys and the club hosts frequent day visits from students at Kew Gardens studying the Kew Diploma. “As part of their course they have to do a turf module, so they come to us seeking advice on how we do things, which I really enjoy. It also gives me the chance to see my old tutor at Norwood Hall, Len Stocks - a man with tremendous knowledge in training who has taught me a great deal over the years.”
The club hosts an array of world
ranked tournaments, including the Aegon Championships (formerly the Stella Artois Championships), the World Rackets Championships and leading real tennis events (Queen’s has two courts), including the British Open and now the Atco Super Series Squash Finals. Not all of these directly involve Graham - his key responsibility is to maintain the twenty-eight outdoor courts, of which the twelve grass ones are some of the finest anywhere, the spread of different playing surfaces available, including ten indoor tennis courts (six acrylic and four carpet), six acrylic all- weather, six clay and four new artificial grass courts. There’s even a short tennis area and a practice wall, where one of the turfcare team was brushing up on his strokes as we toured the club.
The team’s busiest time of year is the run-up to the Aegon Championships, staged straight after the French Open, and the ideal warm-up event on grass before Wimbledon.
Signs of the huge transformation that the club undergoes for the event were few and far between. Centre Court, which stages all the event’s competitive play, looked lush and ready for action once more - just a month after the event left town.
The week-long championships, two weeks before Wimbledon, has long proved popular with some of the giants of the game, with the likes of Nadal, Hewitt and Roddick winning the event in recent years but, strangely, says Graham, not Federer.
The Grade 1 listed pavilion overlooking the court offers a uniquely intimate involvement with the tournament, where club members and players can interact both before, during and after the game. “Players often share a drink and a chat in the pavilion, rather than just playing and going,” says Graham. “Our members love that, and it’s a special element of the event and one that is unknown anywhere except perhaps Monte Carlo and Rhode Island.”
Contrasting with the intimacy on the one side of Centre Court is the commercial reality of the game on the other, where temporary seating for some 7,000 spectators looms high above the grass, erected over the neighbouring acrylic court. In all, the club can handle up to 10,000 people a day, so it’s no mean feat to accommodate them comfortably amid the glare of the world’s media. “This is a big event for us, and there’s
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