Wimbledon `99: When Wimbledon was Worpledon

Ronald Atkin turns back the clock to the first tournament in 1877

THERE WAS a temporary three-plank stand offering seats to 30 people; the total attendance for the final was 200; and the weather, as ever, was grim. This was 1877, the year of the first Wimbledon Championships.

The tournament was held at the site of the All England Club's first rented premises, four acres of meadowland between Worple Road and the line of the London and South Western Railway in what was then the outer-London suburb of Wimbledon. The champion, from an entry of 22 men - no women permitted in those days, old chap - was W Spencer Gore, an Old Harrovian aged 27.

In common with the other 21 hopefuls competing for a silver challenge cup valued at 25 guineas, Gore was not a devotee of the new sport of lawn tennis. A keen follower of cricket, Gore was also a player of real tennis and rackets. The day of the tennis specialist was still far away.

In fact in 1877 tennis was very much an afterthought at the All England Club, which had been founded nine years earlier to promote the game of croquet. But as the new game of tennis began to overtake the more sedate croquet in the minds of a growing middle-class population discovering an interest in exercise, if only of a casual nature, the AEC decided to incorporate tennis lawns into the club facilities.

There were, of course, strict regulations in the matter of attire. A notice on the clubhouse door advised, "Gentlemen are kindly requested not to play in shirtsleeves when ladies are present". The greater physical exertions of tennis also required more than the post-croquet rinsing of hands and the enterprising Dr Henry Jones, a committee member and general practitioner, built at his own expense a bathroom for the use of which he charged a fee.

The weekly sporting magazine The Field, in whose Strand offices the All England Croquet Club had been founded in July 1868, became one of the sporting world's earliest sponsors when it announced, "The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon, propose to hold a lawn tennis meeting, open to all amateurs, on Monday, July 9, and following days. Entrance fee pounds 1 1s 0d", and put up the 25-guineas trophy. A footnote indicated that rackets and "shoes without heels" should be provided by the players themselves, though balls would be supplied by the club gardener.

Dr Jones, who was appointed referee, did much more than introduce bathroom facilities to Worple Road when he was instrumental in drawing up the rules for the first Wimbledon. As the game had spread in popularity following its introduction in Britain by the cavalry major, Walter Clopton Wingfield, a set of rules for tennis had been devised by the Marylebone Cricket Club, the controlling body not only of cricket but also real tennis. Now Dr Jones and his committee revised those rules into the form in which the sport is played to this day - a court measuring 78 feet by 27 feet, sets won by the first to get to six games, and point scoring based on a clock face, 15, 30 ,40. The height of the net was set at five feet at the sides and three feet three inches in the centre, though this was later slightly amended. Players changed ends only at the conclusion of each set.

Though the scene of the first Wimbledon would have been more or less recognisable to present-day followers of tennis, the equipment and style of play were, perforce, rudimentary in a new sport. The rackets resembled snowshoes in shape and weight, the balls had hand-sewn flannel outer casings and the serving was round-arm rather than overhead.

Though the tournament's opening, Monday, 9 July, had been set, the event was the victim of weird scheduling. After the semi-finals on Thursday, 12 July, the competition was suspended to leave the London sporting scene free for the top occasion, the Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's, over the next two days, with Wimbledon's first final due to be played the following Monday, 16 July.

Nobody bothered to record the crowd numbers for the historic first day's play, when one of the entrants, a certain C F Buller, failed to turn up, reducing the number of matches from 11 to 10. The 11 survivors were whittled down to six the following day and then to three. Since the concept of using byes only in the first round was still some years away, William Marshall received a free passage into the final while Gore beat C G Heathcote, an All England Club committee man, 6-2 6-5 6-2.

After the weekend's excitements of the cricket at Lord's the day of Wimbledon's final, for the first time but certainly not the last, turned out wet and was postponed - not until the next day but, in accordance with those more leisurely times, until the following Thursday.

The paid attendance of 200 for the final (at a shilling a head) again had to put up with damp and dreary weather as Gore claimed his niche in sporting history by outclassing Marshall, a Cambridge tennis blue, 6-1 6-2 6-4. The one-sided match, delayed an hour by the weather, lasted only 48 minutes as Gore used his rackets skills to devastating effect.

Instead of playing the gentle baseline game then accepted as the norm, the main idea being merely to keep the ball in play as long as possible, Gore took full advantage of the dip in the centre of the net by volleying as frequently as possible. The wretched Marshall was given such a run- around that one spectator observed that the loser was "ready to drop".

The following year Gore, as defending champion, sat out the tournament until the final, where he played a fellow Old Harrovian, Frank Hadow, who was a coffee planter in Ceylon. Hadow, who won the 1878 title without dropping a set, defeated Gore 7-5 6-1 9-7, driving the defending champion to distraction with an innovative stroke, the lob, which wrecked Gore's volleying game.

Perhaps it was that defeat which persuaded Gore, some years later, to comment sourly: "That anyone who has really played well at cricket, tennis, or even rackets, will ever seriously give his attention to lawn tennis is extremely doubtful, for in all probability the monotony of the game as compared with the others would choke him off before he had time to excel at it."

History has proved that Gore's volleying was much better than his judgement.