Tennis History | The Gloucester Hotel, South Kensington — the women's game organised into one association days before Wimbledon, June 1973

On 21 June 1973, nearly sixty women tennis players crowded into a room at the Gloucester Hotel in South Kensington and voted themselves into a single association. Billie Jean King had convened the meeting; the players elected her its first president. Virginia Wade became vice-president, Lesley Hunt her assistant, Françoise Dürr and Ingrid Löfdahl-Bentzer joint secretaries, and Betty Stöve treasurer. Within a few weeks the new Women's Tennis Association counted sixty-four members. The building was almost new. The Gloucester had been put up in 1972–73 by the Rank Organisation on the site of a demolished block of Victorian houses at Nos. 4–18 Harrington Gardens — a 561-room hotel barely finished when the players walked in. It stands today as the Millennium Gloucester Hotel, at the same address. The point of the meeting was leverage, not sentiment. The women's game had spent three years divided between a rival circuit — the Virginia Slims tour, launched by the Original 9 in 1970 — and the events the national associations sanctioned. A truce in the spring of 1973 patched over the split, and the WTA was the body built to hold the whole draw together and bargain as a bloc. The men had done the same nine months earlier, forming the Association of Tennis Professionals in September 1972; the women were, deliberately, following the model rather than inventing it. The timing was not accidental. The founding fell in the same week the men's new association was showing what a players' bloc could do: over the suspension of the Yugoslav player Nikola Pilić, most of the leading men withdrew from the 1973 Championships and emptied the Wimbledon draw a few miles east. The women did not boycott. They organised, four days before play began on 25 June, and King then went out and won the Wimbledon singles. What the association was built to argue took decades to win. The US Open equalised its prize money that same year, 1973 — the first of the four majors to do so, at Billie Jean King's insistence. The Australian Open followed at the turn of the century; Roland-Garros and Wimbledon were the last, in 2006 and 2007. As of 2026 all four majors pay their women's and men's champions equally, but Wimbledon reached that point only in 2007 — thirty-four years after the room at the Gloucester Hotel. Coordinate. The pin is the hotel building at 4–18 Harrington Gardens, London SW7. Two independently maintained sources place it within about 26 metres of each other: the Office for National Statistics postcode centroid for SW7 4LH (retrieved via postcodes.io) at 51.493373, -0.183305, and the OpenStreetMap building record at 51.493578, -0.183498. The pin is their midpoint. Precision radius 100 m, covering the hotel's Harrington Gardens, Ashburn Place and Courtfield Road frontages. The building's construction date and address are from the Survey of London (British History Online), which records the Gloucester Hotel replacing the earlier houses "in 1972–3." Cover image. Betty Stöve — elected the WTA's first treasurer at this meeting — photographed the same year, 1973, holding a trophy at the Melkhuisje international championships in Hilversum, the Netherlands. Photograph by Rob Mieremet for Anefo; Nationaal Archief / Dutch National Archives, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL. No free-licensed photograph of the Gloucester Hotel meeting itself is known to exist; this image shows one of the founders in the founding year, not the meeting or the hotel.