A writer, John Henry Walsh, a clergyman, the Reverend Arthur Law, a lieutenant in the Surrey Fusiliers Volunteer Corps, Samuel Horace Clarke Maddock, a fan of croquet, a sport for which he established its first regulations, Walter Jones Whitmore, a notable cricket player, lover of rules and outdoor games, John Hinde Hale and a soldier, Captain Robert Fitzgerald Dalton, are at the origin of what is now the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC), an entity popularly known in the five continents as Wimbledon.
On July 23, 1868, at the height of outdoor sport in Victorian Britain, these six people met in the office of Herbert Cox, editor of The Field magazine, located at 346 Strand in London. . There they formalized a new society: the All England Croquet Club. Walter Jones Whitmore and Samuel Horace Clarke Maddock were appointed secretary and treasurer respectively, agreeing to meet again two weeks later. The word tennis took seven years to be incorporated into the entity’s nomenclature.
John Henry Walsh was the inducer of that meeting. Walsh, a writer who signed with the pseudonym Stonehenge and who, years later, was director of the weekly The Field, had studied at the Royal College of Surgeons, and practiced that profession for years in an ophthalmology center. Walsh loved sports and the countryside, and had built a reputation as an expert on firearms, dogs, and horses. He was always attentive to news.
Since its creation in 1853, The Field was the reference magazine in Great Britain. It reflected the novelties of cricket, football, rugby, croquet and all the games in which a ball was involved that could bounce in the gardens after the invention of the rubber vulcanization process discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1839. The rectors of the weekly knew of its influence and not only published news and opinions, but also got involved in the advances and trends that they considered appropriate for themselves.
At the second meeting of the members of the All England Croquet Club, Walsh commissioned Henry Jones, surgeon, writer by the synonym of Cavendish, great friend, and expert on card games, to find land for a croquet lawn for the new society.
While waiting for a venue, the All England Croquet Club organized its first tournament at the Crystal Palace cricket ground, and months later a second at Eastbourne. Henry Jones continued to search, but his offers were turned down by Crystal Palace, the Toxophilite Society annexed to the Prince Club, and Holland Park in Kensington, which asked him for a rent of £500 a year for six acres of land.
On September 24, 1869, Jones finally found a four-acre piece of land bordering the railroad tracks off Worple Road, at Nursery Lane, still known as Nursery Road. £425 was spent to treat the land, plant new grass, make the field suitable and set up a small social hall. An agreement was also reached with the London and South Western Railways to lay out a path from Wimbledon station to the grounds. The aristocrat George Devereux de Vere Capell, seventh Earl of Essex was appointed president of the entity, and a fee of one pound per year for membership was established, or a lifetime of ten pounds.
In June 1870, the club hosted its first croquet tournament at Wimbledon. Of course, with a significant sign on the door of the headquarters that read: “Gentlemen are requested not to play in shirt sleeves in the presence of ladies.” Walter Peel, the undisputed best player in the discipline, won the tournament and immortalized the term ‘peeling’, which is still valid today, and which consists of scoring by making an opponent’s ball pass through the goal after being hit by one’s own ball. .
One of the great figures of literature, and a member of the England Croquet Club, Lewis Carroll, immortalized the game in his Alice in Wonderland, with his famous and fanciful account of the game of croquet played in the Queen’s gardens, which was staged years later by Walt Disney. In 1872, Carroll, a well-known mathematician, published a treatise with new theories on the rules of croquet. Lewis Carroll, at the request of the club, also carried out an in-depth study on the tennis scoring system and the way of organizing the competition draws.
Croquet monopolized the sporting life of the entity, both for the tranquility of being a game that did not require effort, and because it equaled its competitors, whether they were men, women or children, since the key was in the precision of hitting the ball with the mallet. . But something began to move unstoppably. The players of Real Tennis, an English version derived from the French Jeu de Paume, which was terribly popular in Great Britain, were not oblivious to the possibility of leaving the indoor courts to enter the gardens of the most elegant mansions and play thanks to the jackpot of the ball.
The older Henri Gem and the Spanish Juan Bautista Augurio Pereira had already been playing the new racquet sport since 1862 on different croquet fields. Gem always defined Pereira as the inventor of lawn-tennis. In 1872 they both moved to Leamington Spa, and very close to their homes, on the grounds of the Manor House Hotel, on Park Avenue, they popularized the game and founded the Leamington Lawn Tennis Club, the first tennis club in history.
Two years later, in 1874, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield understood that lawn-tennis could be good business, and he contributed to that trend by launching the Sphairistike game on the market, after securing his patent: a box with rackets, a net , poles, track marking instructions and rules of the game.
In 1875, with the indisputable rise of the new sport that was supplanting croquet, tennis was introduced as a sport at the All England Croquet Club. Reginald Gray, a Bermuda student at Burlington House School in London, who was a good croquet player, was one of the pioneers practicing lawn-tennis at Wimbledon.
The Board of Directors approved a membership fee of two guineas for both sports and to allocate £25 to convert a croquet lawn into one for the game of lawn-tennis and badminton. In 1876 tennis was gaining ground and, with five courts, it occupied almost half of the entity. On April 14, 1877, at the suggestion of John Hinde Hale, the club changed its name to The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club.
All that was missing was the creation of a tournament to endorse the importance of the entity. On June 2, 1877, John Henry Walsh proposed its start-up in order to obtain sufficient income to repair the horse-drawn gig with which the grass tracks were adapted. On June 9, The Field published the news of the creation of the Lawn Tennis Championship, a competition that would be held from Monday, July 9, and opened the registration process, for a payment of 1 pound, until July 7.
To enhance the competition, Henry Jones convinced John Henry Walsh to give The Field its deserved dose of limelight and commission the 25 Guinea Cup. It was the prize for the champion, and it consisted of a silver cup adorned with two rackets and three balls with the following inscription engraved on its front part:
The All England Lawn Tennis
Challenge Cup
Presented by the Propietors of The Field
For Competition by Amateurs
Wimbledon
July, 1877.
Today just over five per cent of Wimbledon members still play croquet.
