There is nothing especially remarkable about this; as leisure time expanded and long-distance travel became both a more practical and less uncomfortable proposition, international sports federations (IFs) started popping up with regularity, to cater for the desire to develop common rules and mutually agreed schedules to encourage balanced competition between athletes from different nations.

But the foundation story of no other IF, as far as I am aware, takes in one of the most terrible accidents of the early 20th century - the sinking of the Titanic. Nor can there be many codas as heart-warming as the Olympic gold medal-winning performance that will take us back to Paris some 11 years after that inaugural meeting.

The story begins in 1911 when a Geneva-based American lawyer, Charles Duane Williams, in the words of the official Davis Cup website, “initiated the concept of National Associations coming together for tennis to be uniformly structured around the world”.

How he actually did this has not, so far as I can ascertain, been definitively nailed down. Author Heiner Gillmeister sets out two alternatives in his book, Tennis: A Cultural History. 

According to one version, Williams approached the secretary of the Swiss Lawn Tennis Federation, Charles Barde. Barde then passed on Williams’s proposal to French tennis official Henry Wallet who “happened to be on holiday on Lake Geneva”.

The other version has Williams writing to Wallet directly to propose introducing a world clay-court championship. This required an organising committee, and from this body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) evolved.

The correct sequence of events need not detain us here. Suffice to say that both Barde and Wallet were among the 21 men representing 12 countries who gathered in the French capital on March 1 1913 and unanimously passed a resolution formally constituting the ILTF.

Williams, tragically, was not there - nor was the United States. Minutes of the meeting kindly passed to me by the International Tennis Federation make clear that, though invited, the US had sent a letter regretting its inability to send a representative. Instead, it appointed Mr Sabelli, one of a four-strong British Isles contingent, to represent it informally “without power of voting”.

As for Williams, just under 11 months before the Paris gathering, on April 10 1912, the 51-year-old had boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg to sail back to America along with his son, Richard Norris Williams. He was lost at sea five days later when the great ship hit an iceberg south of Newfoundland.

His son, however, survived. An article by Régis Delanoë on the We Are Tennis website recounts how he finally told the story of how his father was hit by a falling funnel to the author of A Night to Remember, a best-selling 1955 book on the disaster, Walter Lord.

Having made it to a raft after prolonged immersion in the icy water, Williams junior was among survivors picked up around two hours later by another ship, the RMS Carpathia. By then, his feet were in such a state that he only narrowly escaped amputation. More about him later.

After achieving unanimity on the formal constitution of the new international body, the gentlemen closeted at 34 Rue de Provence, just up the road from the bustling Boulevard Haussmann on that long-ago March Saturday, seemingly had to work a bit harder to flesh out all the details.

On vote weighting, for example, the minutes relate that Australasia’s Gordon Inglis “wished it to be distinctly understood that should New Zealand wish to have separate representation later on Australia would retain its five votes”.     

After “further discussion”, countries invited to the conference were allotted votes as follows. British Isles six; Australasia, France, Germany and the US five each; Austria four; Belgium, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland three each; Canada, Denmark, Holland and Russia two each; Hungary, Italy, Norway and Spain one each.

Britain’s extra vote was said to have been accorded “as a recognition of the great services rendered by it in the development of the game all over the world during the past 30 years”. Ultimately, however, this turned out to be the source of further friction, with Warren Kimball, author of the book The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game, pinpointing it as one of two reasons why the US body did not join the ILTF until well into the 1920s.

The other reason related to a decision in Paris to recognise three tournaments as “World’s Championships” in their respective spheres.

The World’s Championships on grass courts were “offered to and accepted by” the Lawn Tennis Association delegates on behalf of the British Isles “in perpetuity”.

The World’s Championships on hard courts were to be organised “up to and including the year 1916” by the Union de Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA). The justification given for such a long initial run was to “give the club which organised the Championships on behalf of the USFSA an opportunity of recouping itself for the heavy expenses incurred in inaugurating them in 1912”.

These 1912 championships - presumably the event that Williams might, or might not, have suggested to Wallet - were held on the clay courts of the Stade Français Club in Saint-Cloud. This ended up being the venue on all but one occasion that the championships took place, prior to their abandonment from 1924. World War One prevented them being staged between 1915 and 1920.

Finally, the World’s Championships on wood - covered courts - were assigned to Sweden and then Denmark in 1914. The ILTF reserved the right to “adopt other surfaces than wood, but not hard surfaces in general use for outdoor competitions”.

Only six editions of these covered-court championships were ever held, all in Europe, with the Great War once again preventing the planned Danish event and the subsequent four editions from being staged.

The Davis Cup had started in 1900 as a challenge competition between Britain and the US. By 1905, it had expanded to include Belgium, Austria, France and Australasia.

The minutes of the Paris meeting state that it was resolved, again unanimously, to make this “the sole international team contest of the World”.

At this point, the German camp, in the shape of Dr Otto Nirrnheim, piped up. Nirrnheim, destined to be killed in action in northern France some two-and-a-half years later, alluded to something called the Meden Cup.

This, he said, was intended to be instituted in the memory of Carl August von der Meden, sometimes known as the father of lawn tennis in Germany, who had died in May 1911.

The idea, he explained, was for it to “take the place of the many matches which were now being played between the various European countries”. 

The intervention prompted a stern response from Australasia’s Inglis, however, who “made a strong protest against this competition” and asked for it to be prohibited on grounds it had been decided that the Davis Cup should be the sole international world’s championship for teams.

When it was pointed out that the Meden Cup was “restricted to European countries” and not, apparently, a matter which concerned the ILTF, Inglis “formally requested that his protest should be recorded in the minutes”.

One sometimes gets the impression that representatives at this inaugural meeting were less than keen on the ILTF becoming an especially strong body.

After discussing the question of appointing a President, for example, it was decided instead to appoint an advisory committee - “no member of which should reside further than two days’ post from Paris”. The minutes go on to note how it was “distinctly understood” that this committee was to have “no executive powers whatever”. 

Having survived the Titanic wreck, Richard Norris Williams was able to embark on an impressive tennis career, even though, in Delanoë’s words, “his weak legs were often very painful when the match was too long”.

His numerous titles included the men’s singles at the US National Championships in both 1914 and 1916. After war service, he was back in France, aged 33, in 1924 for the Olympic competitions, held on specially-built courts at Colombes.

There he teamed up with 38-year-old Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman to win the mixed doubles gold medal, having exited at the quarter-final stage in both men’s singles and doubles.

It may be that his narrow escape on the dreadful night he lost his father in the north Atlantic cost him more Olympic silverware. According to the Official Report, he was “unable to give his best in the singles owing to a foot injury” he picked up in a match he nonetheless won.

“He deserved to collect an Olympic crown,” the Official Report concludes. It would be churlish in the extreme to disagree.