Highly active in local life, Gem wrote journalism and drama for several local publications, rose to the rank of Major in the 1st Warwickshire Rifle Volunteer Corps and was active in numerous sports including cricket and athletics. He is recorded as having won a bet by running the 21 miles from Birmingham to Warwick in under three and a half hours.
Invention of tennis
This game is known to have been being played by 1865, though research by the Birmingham Civic Society has suggested that experimentation may have started as early as 1859. It thus clearly pre-dates the game of sphairistike, whose rules were published and for which equipment was sold by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield from 1873 and whose anniversary was celebrated as the centenary of the game of tennis in 1973.
Gem and Perera's game also bore a closer resemblance to modern tennis than Wingfield's in several significant respects, most notably in being played on a similarly sized and configured rectangular grass court, rather than the hourglass-shaped court with a 'waist' at the net that featured in Wingfield's sphairistike.
Early tennis clubs
In 1872 both Gem and Perera moved to Leamington Spa and formed a club with two doctors from a local hospital specifically to play this new game. The Leamington club thus became the world's first tennis club, playing on the lawns of the Manor House Hotel opposite Perera's new home in Avenue Road.
Gem had also been a member of the Edgbaston Archery Society from 1864 to 1869 and, although there is no direct evidence to demonstrate that he personally introduced lawn tennis to the society, the game was certainly a fixture in the society's calendar by 1875, with the society being renamed the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society in 1877.
