Tennis History | Worple Road, 1877 — The Championships Began as a Fundraiser for a Broken Roller

The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club held its first Championships in July 1877 because its pony roller had broken and the club could not afford to mend it. That is not a joke at the club's expense. It is the whole scale of the thing. The ground on Worple Road was a suburban croquet lawn that had taken up lawn tennis two years earlier, and the tournament was a fundraiser. Twenty-two men entered at a guinea each. The prize was a silver challenge cup put up by The Field, valued at twenty-five guineas, plus twelve guineas in cash. The club cleared about ten pounds. What makes the meeting worth a pin is not the tournament but the committee. On 7 June 1877, Henry Jones, Julian Marshall and Charles Gilbert Heathcote sat down to write rules for an event that did not yet have any, and departed from the Marylebone Cricket Club's version of the game. They fixed a rectangular court of 78 by 27 feet, dropped the net to 3 feet 3 inches at the centre while leaving it 5 feet at the posts, and took the scoring by fifteens from real tennis. The singles court has those dimensions today. A subcommittee of a croquet club, meeting to raise money for garden machinery, set the shape of the court the sport still plays on. Spencer Gore beat William Marshall in the final on 19 July, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4, in forty-eight minutes. The final had been scheduled for the Monday and was pushed to the Thursday by rain, which tells you something durable about the venue. Two things this memory does not claim. It does not say this was the first lawn tennis tournament — it was not, and clubs elsewhere in England had run them earlier. And the event has never been called the Wimbledon Open. It is The Championships, Wimbledon; there is no "Open" in the name and never has been, whatever happened to the entry rules in 1968. The club left Worple Road after the 1921 meeting and moved to Church Road for 1922, having outgrown a ground it could not expand. The site is now the playing field of Wimbledon High School, and a plaque on a gate off Worple Road marks it. Coordinate. Pinned at the approximate centre of the former ground, on the north side of Worple Road between the road and the railway line — the arrangement the 1877 engraving itself describes, with the road on the left of the view and the London and South Western track on the right. Historic England's archive places the commemorative plaque at Wimbledon High School Playing Field, Worple Road. That is one positional source, not two: no independent survey of the courts' footprint was obtained, so this pin does not meet the two-source standard used elsewhere in this series and is stated here as an approximation. Precision radius about 180 m, which covers the whole of the old ground rather than any particular court. Cover image: contemporary wood engraving of the 1877 Championships at Worple Road, signed H.W.P., published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of 14 July 1877, page 405. Public domain by age, via Wikimedia Commons. Worth looking at closely: there are no stands. The spectators are standing on the gravel and grass in top hats and bustles, several matches are running at once under thatched umpire shelters, and the nets sag deeply between high posts — the 5-foot posts and 3-foot-3 centre the committee had specified five weeks earlier.