Wimbledon Ball Boys Training and Tennis Balls Being Made (1961)

Various shots of lawn maintenance at Wimbledon Tennis Courts, London; men pushing lawn mowers; a man riding a roller; a man in a jazzy jumper uses a white line marking machine. At the factory of Slazenger Ltd in Barnsley, Yorkshire, we see various shots of the processes involved in making tennis balls. Rubber pellets are heated to make half of the basic shape (they come out looking a bit like cervical caps), then a moistened chemical pill is put into each half which makes the ball extra bouncy. The sealed halves are checked individually for weight (good shots of a bored woman at work), and then have the twopiece outer coverings glued on by hand; each piece looks like an inner sole or pantyliner. The finished balls are checked for size and squeezed in a special contraption to test compressibility. Various shots of boys at William Baker Technical School in Hertford as they practise their ballboy skills; they roll and bounce the balls to each other on a grass tennis court; then try out their skills i