This is the second photo on this blog showing a family in the UK in their garden with rackets. Well, only one racket, but they seem to be having plenty of fun, anyway. This is a cabinet card, while the photo I uploaded a month ago was a smaller carte-de-visite (Tennis and tea in Hampshire, England). The rackets in that image were of an earlier design, closer in their proportions to those used in badminton, while the one above is similar in size and shape to tennis rackets used well into the twentieth century.
The photo came from Kettering, Northamptonshire, but the card has no information on it to help identify the original location or photographer.
Incidentally, the more common spelling in the UK seems to be racquet, and I initially used that spelling in this post, but later decided to use the standard American racket throughout the blog, for the sake of consistency.
Tokens of Companionship 
They look happy! It’ll probably have been taken in a back garden (yard). I’ve a photo from the late 1880s of some of the family who owned the house I lived in when I was a child (one of their descendants appeared on our doorstep one day asking to look at the house – he’d not seen it since he was a small child), and the photo is of them sitting in the back garden beneath or in front of an overgrown pergola – rather like this – though this seems to have a gate, maybe a garden gate to a different part of the garden. Well-to-do people (as these are, from their clothes) often had gardens that were split into different parts.
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Very interesting! I didn’t know that large gardens were sometimes divided into parts. That would allow members of the family to split up and have a bit of privacy. This family seems to enjoy each other’s company!
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