Geo G. Bussey Patent Rackets

First Published January, 2025

George Gibson Bussey was a young Englishman who moved to London from Yorkshire in 1851 at the age of 22 to make his way in the world. He had apprenticed as a saddle maker in his teens back in his home village of Ripon and used those skills to find employment in London where he also learned gunsmithing. By 1855, he was listed in London business directories as a gun case maker working out of his own shop at 173 High Holborn and in 1859 Bussey established his first factory in Dunn’s Passage to manufacture his patented cartridge carriers.

Geo G. Bussey & Co was initially registered as a company in 1864 and moved to it’s permanent location in Peckham a few years later. While the new company’s primary products were firearms and ammunition, he also continued to utilize his leatherworking expertise to create ancillary products, such as holsters, while building a reputation as a quality manufacturer who stamped their products with Bussey’s distinctive logo of an arrow passing through his initials GGB.

As the residents of London and the rest of England began experiencing both more leisure time due to mechanization and a rising standard of living, participation in sporting activities grew exponentially. Bussey capitalized on this trend by expanding his product line to include sports, such as cricket, lawn tennis and croquet to meet the growing demand for leisure time activities. They rapidly became one of the leading cricket bat companies in England and their high quality “Demon Driver” cricket bats made of willow were sought after by players throughout the British Empire.

Geo G. Bussey was definitely an early maker of lawn tennis rackets and equipment. This is evidenced by the existence of a correspondence that George Bussey personally sent to the Babolat & Monnier Company of Lyon, France in 1875 inquiring about their new natural gut tennis strings, which Bussey later used in both his lawn tennis and badminton rackets. In 1880, the company offered a “Royal Tennis Set” for sale, which included rackets, balls, poles and a net in a wooden box. Their early involvement in lawn tennis is also further supported by the first of several English lawn tennis patents that Bussey applied for over the years, which was filed on January 3, 1880 and was related to “Accessories and Appliances for Lawn Tennis”.

Tennis became an important component of their sporting equipment line that continued to grow as their reputation for quality rackets spread to players in England and many other countries. When George Bussey died unexpectedly in 1889 at the age of 61, his son William stepped up run the company. At that point in time, the company was the largest sporting goods manufacturer in England operating out of their “manufactory” in Peckham (a district in South London) with their lumber mills 90 miles to the north in Elmswell supplying the wood for their rackets and other sports equipment.

Geo G. Bussey was essentially a manufacturer / wholesaler of athletic goods. Their circa 1900 advertising often included the line “Agents all over the world”, which referred to the retailers they supplied in British Commonwealth countries, such as India, Australia and Canada, as well as the United Kingdom. They did open two company owned stores, one in London and one in Paris in the early 1900’s, but that was the extent of their retail involvement.

The tennis market was still growing and quite competitive when William took over with competitors, such as F.H. Ayres and Slazenger, making similar lawn tennis rackets in London. Geo G. Bussey was well known for making high quality rackets and they had boosted their racket production capacity with the invention of their own stringing machine in 1888, but they needed to differentiate their product from their competitors. As it turned out, Bussey did an excellent job of this by making patent rackets that were unique to their brand.

Some of these were “shaped handle rackets” such as fishtails and fantails that were also made by some of their competitors, but exclusive patent rackets like both of their wavy wedge models, rackets with their Tensive Grip and the Ventilated Holdfast (shared patent with Lunn) gave their product line uniquity, as well as the Bussey quality.

The following six Geo G. Bussey rackets from my collection demonstrate the most popular Bussey patents quite well. I actually wrote an article about Henry Lunn and his patented Ventilated Holdfast racket ten years ago in Issue 32 of the TCA Journal. Geo G. Bussey was the only other company with whom Lunn shared the patent to produce this very interesting model that has a ten inch gripping area with twelve equally spaced deep grooves running down the perfectly round handle.

According to a mention of the Ventilated Holdfast in the June,1885 first edition of “The Lawn-Tennis Magazine” the “racket has a fluted handle which is calculated to prevent the heating and consequent blistering of the hand”. I am not certain about that claim and prefer the following ad copy from the 1894 Geo G. Bussey Catalog which states “the construction of the handle is such that it provides a secure grip without exertion to the hand, a pleasant grasp and plenty of ventilation”.

Lunn & Co. of Horncastle introduced their model of the Ventilated Holdfast in their 1885 catalog with Geo G. Bussey offering custom-built Ventilated Holdfast models in an “Illustrated Sports” ad in April of the same year. The Bussey model with a leather collar pictured here is a near mint circa 1890 racket that has the Lunn patent info and model name stamped into the convex wedge with “Geo G. Bussey Co.” stamped in gold on the throat.

Without a doubt, the most well-known and sought after Bussey racket by collectors is their balltail model. Remarkably, Bussey was the only maker to offer a balltail model, although it appears to never have been patented.

The balltail pictured here is a “Tournament 3” model, which means it only has a single main string, while the “Tournament 2” model has double strung mains. Both were available in different weights up to a heavy 15 oz model. It is uncertain when the balltail was first offered, but it is featured in their 1927 catalog.

Perhaps the most unique racket that Geo G. Bussey produced over the years is the pictured “Demon Driver 1” that was first introduced in 1910. It was the only racket they made using high grade willow instead of the standard ash for the frame. Their catalog calls the Demon Driver 1 “Absolutely the best racket made”. Each racket has a serial number stamped into the side of the handle to specifically identify it in case it develops a flaw that needs to be addressed. This model is also stamped “Bussey’s Tensive Grip” directly above the lower part of the handle that contains 16 inlaid cork strips measuring five inches in length to enhance a players control of the racket. Additionally, the inside of the head has been attractively chamfered and it has vellum wrapped shoulders for extra strength.

There are two characteristics of the wedge that are quite rare. Bussey produced two unique “wavy wedge” designs and this one is the lesser used convex wavy wedge that is raised in the center and “W” shaped. The construction of the solid wedge itself is amazing. It is hard to see in the photos, but the wedge was hand built using small strips of ash constructed in a herring bone pattern that, like the vellum shoulders, gave the racket extra strength and allowed it to be strung at the “Highest Tension”, which is stamped into the side of the mahogany handle.

They were obviously quite proud of this model, because this one-of-a-kind design is atypically well marked with “Bussey” stamped into the wedge, the company logo stamped into the throat and “Geo G. Bussey & Co London” stamped into the handle. The second Geo G. Bussey wavy wedge is the more widely used concave version shown here on the “Wimbledon Hexagon 4” model that has double-strung mains. Unlike the Demon Driver this wedge design dips in the middle. This model was offered with and without the Tensive Grip in the 1927 catalog.

The final two rackets, “The Tournament 2” fishtail and “The Fantail 2”, are more common designs, but they still provided additional alternatives in the Bussey racket line from the traditionally shaped combed wood handle. Both models were first introduced in the late 1890’s and were produced well into the 1900’s. The Tournament 2 model was made of high-quality wood with a very pronounced fishtail and French polishing that has stood the test of time quite well.

Their fantail racket (or swallowtail as many English collectors call it) has a different take on the shape of the handle. While virtually every fantail has rounded handles, this Geo G. Bussey model has an octagonal shape with eight flat sides, which I haven’t seen employed by any other racket maker.

Geo G. Bussey & Co. suffered a devastating setback in 1898 when their manufactory and the attached lumber yard burnt to the ground. As a result, they lost a large portion of their sporting goods market share to their competitors in the years that it took to build a new 87,000 square foot state of the art plant.

An ad in the September 6, 1906 “Cricket: A Weekly Record” announces that their “new Peckham factory, the largest and best equipped of its kind, is now completed”. It goes on to acknowledge that in prior years “supply has been inadequate to meet the demand” because “during the rebuilding output was necessarily restricted”.

William Bussey led the company into the early 1930’s, as they continued to manufacture and ship their athletic goods to many points around the globe, but they were never able to completely recover from the effects of the fire. As the years went by, rising costs and increased competition made the company less profitable to the point that in 1932 the Board of Directors voted to discontinue operations and liquidate all the company’s assets.

The history of the company’s final years gets a little murky from 1932 forward, but apparently at some point a new owner assumed control and continued to operate it under the Geo G. Bussey name in the years leading up to WWII, during which time the building served as a bomb shelter for the residents of Peckham. I was surprised to discover a document from the 1947 British Industries Fair that lists Geo G. Bussey as “Manufacturers of High Quality Tennis, Badminton and Squash Rackets”. However, it was listed under a London address outside of Peckham, which definitely points to new ownership. That is the only piece of information that I could discover about the post-war history of Geo G. Bussey & Co.

The red brick five story ”Bussey Building”, as it is called today, sits adjoining the Peckham Rye Rail Station, still standing after fighting off several attempts to demolish it over the years. It has served the Peckham community as a cultural and business center with tenants that include art galleries, a brewery, a concert venue and a roof top bar with a great view of London where most customers are totally unaware of the buildings prominent place in sporting goods history from over 100 years before.

Good Collecting.

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