Wimbledon's home began as a croquet club that grudgingly spared one lawn
The All England Club started life in 1868 amid a craze for croquet, not tennis. Lawn tennis got a single lawn in 1875, and the first champion, Spencer Gore, doubted the game would ever count among the great ones. Today that club of 375 full members runs the only grass-court Grand Slam.
On 23 July 1868 six gentlemen meeting at The Field magazine's offices set up the All England Croquet Club, with a ground off Worple Road in Wimbledon and a first croquet contest in 1870. Tennis, a new game devised by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield and first called Sphairistike, crept in during 1875. By July 1877 the club held a gentlemen's singles championship, served underarm, and added lawn tennis to its name. Croquet was dropped from the title in 1882 as tennis took over, then restored in 1899 purely for sentiment.
Growth came in steps. Ladies' singles and men's doubles arrived in 1884; ladies' doubles and mixed followed in 1913. Club colours had to change in 1909 because the originals nearly matched the Royal Marines, giving the dark green and purple still used. Crowds drawn by Suzanne Lenglen forced a move to Church Road in 1922, which is when the present Centre Court was built, oddly not in the middle of anything until later courts filled in around it.
History pressed in at intervals. A suffragette carrying paraffin and wood shavings was caught climbing a hedge near midnight on 27 February 1913. On 11 October 1940, five German bombs hit the grounds, while the club carried on with a skeleton staff, housing ambulance crews and Home Guard units. The Championships stopped for both world wars and, in 2020, for the pandemic.
Joining is deliberately slow: four full members must vouch for an applicant, two of whom have known them for at least three years. Membership brings the right to buy two tickets a day, and every champion is invited in. Grass is kept at 8 mm and has been pure perennial ryegrass since 2001. Centre Court now holds 15,000 beneath a folding roof finished in May 2009, and above its entrance runs Kipling's line about meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same. Around 450,000 people attend each year, and 90 per cent of the surplus goes to developing British tennis.
Source: All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club
