New Balls, Please

It has witnessed boom times and bust and, now, Price of Bath is the UK’s last remaining tennis-ball maker. Julie Harding meets the family putting the bounce into our balls

His service was bottled lightning,’ declares narrator Jeremy Garnet of his fearsome tennis opponent Tom Chase, the navy lieutenant in P. G. Wodehouse’s novel Love Among the Chickens. ‘Only once did i take the service with the full face of the racquet, and then i seemed to be stopping a bullet.’

The ‘bullet’ flying across this imaginary tennis court in early-20th-century England was probably made in Britain. Not long after the prolific comic author reworked his book, and when genteel Britain was still enjoying spiffing tennis games on summer afternoons, Price of Bath commenced tennis-ball production at its factory in Box, Wiltshire, a few miles from the honey-coloured Georgian city from which it partly takes its name. The remainder comes from the Price family itself, its members having churned out innumerable rubber products, including car and ship parts and bouncy balls, from this tiny factory for eight decades.

Louise Price is the third generation to steer what is now the sole surviving tennis-ball factory in the western world. A relative newcomer to ball production, she arrived five years ago to launch the company’s sales on Amazon when on maternity leave from a London teaching job. she never returned to the capital, instead persuading her husband, James Rainbow, to relocate to somerset.