Tennis History | Worple Road, Wimbledon — the croquet club that wrote the rules, July 1877

The All England Croquet Club leased about four acres of meadow between Worple Road and the London and South Western Railway line in 1868. Lawn tennis arrived on the ground in 1875, and in the spring of 1877 the club added the game to its name. That July it ran a tournament. There was one event: gentlemen's singles. Twenty-two men entered at a guinea each. The prize was twelve guineas and a silver challenge cup valued at twenty-five guineas, given by the sporting weekly The Field. Play began on 9 July. The final was set for Monday 16 July at four o'clock, rain pushed it to Thursday 19 July at half past three, and roughly two hundred people paid a shilling to stand and watch Spencer Gore beat William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4. The club cleared about ten pounds on the week. What makes this particular tournament worth a pin is not that it was the first lawn tennis competition. It was not; the game had been played competitively in England for several years already, and a claim that broad collapses on contact. It matters because of what the club did before anyone played a point. The rules then in circulation were the Marylebone Cricket Club's code of 1875, and the All England committee declined to use them. It laid out a rectangular court seventy-eight feet by twenty-seven, set the net at three feet three inches at the centre, and scored the game the way real tennis is scored — fifteen, thirty, forty. None of those three decisions has ever been reversed. A croquet club in south-west London settled the shape of the court and the arithmetic of the game for everyone who has played since. The engraving reproduced here was published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News on 14 July 1877, during the tournament, and it repays a close look. There are no stands. Spectators in top hats and bonnets stand on the grass at the edge of play, separated from it by netting. One umpire sits in a wooden box on a raised chair. The balls are kept in low troughs beside the court, which the caption calls mangers. Several courts run side by side across open ground; the clubhouse is a small shape in the distance on the left. Worple Road runs along that side of the field and the railway along the other, which is what fixes the site. The club stayed until the tournament outgrew the lease. It bought ground on Church Road in 1920, played its last Championships at Worple Road in 1921, and opened at the new site in 1922. The old ground is now the playing field of Wimbledon High School, with a plaque on the gate recording what the field used to be. A note on naming, because it is got wrong constantly. The event is The Championships, Wimbledon. It has never been called the Wimbledon Open, and in 1877 it was not open in any sense — entry ran through a private club, and there was no women's event until 1884. A note on a story often attached to 1877: that the tournament was got up to pay for a broken pony roller. It appears in a great many retellings. This account has not been able to trace it to a contemporaneous document, and offers it as tradition rather than record. COORDINATE. The pin sits on the former ground on the north side of Worple Road. The site is identified from Historic England's photographic record of the commemorative plaque at Wimbledon High School Playing Field, Worple Road, Wimbledon, Merton (reference PLA01/03/0743), and its extent is bracketed by OpenStreetMap's line of Worple Road to the south and the railway to the north — the two boundaries the 1877 engraving itself shows. No surveyed coordinate for the courts has been found, and this falls short of the two-independent-source standard used elsewhere in this series: the plaque record identifies the site but carries no coordinate. Precision radius 250 m, which covers the whole leased ground rather than any single court. COVER. "Wimbledon Championship 1877", wood engraving signed H.W.P., published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 14 July 1877, page 405. Public domain by age, via Wikimedia Commons.