Qualla: Wimbledon Championships

Wimbledon Championships: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bonoahx, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 19 July 1877, in front of about two hundred spectators who had each paid a shilling, an Old Harrovian rackets player named Spencer Gore defeated William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in 48 minutes. The prize was a silver challenge cup worth twenty-five guineas, donated by the sports magazine The Field, and twelve guineas in cash. The match was the final of the inaugural Wimbledon Championship, held by the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club to raise money for a broken-down pony roller. It was the world's first lawn tennis tournament. A hundred and forty-eight years later, the Championships remain the oldest, the most prestigious, and the only Grand Slam still played on its founding surface.

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Image: Bonoahx | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wimbledon Championships: Croquet, a Pony Roller, and a New Game

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Me3154a, CC BY-SA 4.0. The All England Croquet Club was founded on 23 July 1868 on Nursery Road off Worple Road in Wimbledon. Eight years later, in 1876, lawn tennis - then a new outdoor game devised by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield with the unwieldy original name Sphairistike - was added to the club'...

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Image: Me3154a | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wimbledon Championships: Forty-Eight Hours of Suffragette Plans

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Wimbledon's history holds one almost-disaster that the records preserve carefully. On the night of 27 February 1913, in the middle of the suffragette bombing and arson campaign, a groundsman spotted a woman climbing over a hedge into the All England Club at around midnight. She w...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Wimbledon Championships: Strawberries, Whites, and Royalty

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mvkulkarni23, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wimbledon traditions are precise. Players wear white - a rule formally enforced in 1963, although the convention is older. In 2023, after years of complaint from female players, the rule was modified to permit non-white undershorts for women during their menstrual cycles, 'provid...

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Image: Mvkulkarni23 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wimbledon Championships: Famine, and Then Murray

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benjamí Villoslada i Gil from Mediterranean Sea > Majorca Island > Sineu, CC BY-SA 2.0. British tennis at Wimbledon went through one of the great competitive droughts of any major sport. Fred Perry won the men's singles in 1936. No British man won again until Andy Murray in 2013 - a 77-year wait. Virginia Wade won the women's singles in 1977 and remains, as of 2025,...

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Image: Benjamí Villoslada i Gil from Mediterranean Sea > Majorca Island > Sineu | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wimbledon Championships: Henman Hill, Hawk-Eye, and the End of the Line Judges

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:12121343A, CC BY 4.0. Outside the show courts, on a grassy slope below a giant television screen at the northern end of the grounds, sits the area officially called Aorangi Terrace. The press call it Henman Hill, after Tim Henman, and have intermittently tried Murray Mound, but Henman Hill remains the...

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Image: User:12121343A | CC BY 4.0