At Wimbledon 1932 Austin beat Frank Shields and Jiro Satoh before losing the final in straight sets to Ellsworth Vines.

[13] At Wimbledon 1938 Austin beat Henkel but won just four games in the final against Don Budge, who was at the peak of his form and went on to win the Grand Slam.

(Frank Wordsworth) Donisthorpe (patented in Great Britain in 1934) with a shaft that splits into three segments – allowing for aerodynamic movement.

He married actress Phyllis Konstam in 1931, after meeting her in 1929 on a transatlantic liner while travelling for the US Open, and together they were one of the celebrity couples of the age.

Austin played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, was a friend of Daphne du Maurier, Ronald Colman, and Harold Lloyd, and met both Queen Mary and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1933, concerned by increasing threats of a renewal of European, and indeed wider, war, Austin became involved in the Oxford Group, later Moral Re-Armament, speaking on public platforms and writing press articles.

[15] He and Fred Perry were the only players to raise their voice, in a letter to The Times, against the Nazi ban on Jews joining the German team for the Davis Cup.

In 1943, with the extension of US conscription to Allied resident citizens, he was drafted into the US Army Air Force, but a diagnosis of Gilbert's Syndrome (periodic malfunction of the liver) precluded him from combat service, and he was discharged in 1945.

[17] When he returned to Britain in 1961, a voting member of the Membership Committee of the All-England Club who had been removed from the Cambridge tennis team during Austin's captaincy used Austin's alleged proselytism for the Oxford Group as an excuse for denying him reinstatement in the All-England Club after a lapse of dues payment.