My friend Milton Gayle, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a much-loved tennis coach in south London.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, as a young teenager he had been unable to play the game in any formal sense, and the closest he got to a proper court was as a ballboy in a local “whites only” tennis club. But he was given a Fred Perry tennis racket by a visiting player and his passion for the game was ignited. When he came to London aged 15 in 1967, joining his parents, brothers and sisters, further racial and financial barriers confined him to playing tennis against a wall for the next 10 years.