History of the Wimbledon Championships From 1877
Wimbledon history from the 1877 fundraiser at Worple Road to the Open era, the challenge round, the wartime closures and the modern ground at Church Road.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Wimbledon Explained20 min read
- First Championships
- 1877
- Ladies' singles added
- 1884
- Moved to Church Road
- 1922
- First Open Championships
- 1968
A pony roller had broken. The club that owned it — a croquet club, occupying a few acres behind the houses of Worple Road in what was then suburban Wimbledon — wanted the money to mend it, and in the spring of 1877 its committee agreed to stage a tournament in the new game of lawn tennis to raise the funds. That is the story the club has always told about its own beginning. The roller was probably a convenient justification rather than the whole cause; croquet was in decline, lawn tennis was the fashionable novelty, and the members had already given a lawn over to it two years earlier. Either way, the meeting they organised has been played every summer since, apart from the two stretches when the country was at war.
Almost nothing about that first tournament would be recognisable now except the scoring. There was one event and it was for men. There were no seeds, no draw sheet worth the name, no press box, and no trophy the winner could keep. What the 1877 committee did leave behind, and what makes the date matter beyond a club anniversary, is the rectangular court and the code of rules that the rest of the world adopted more or less unchanged. The Championships did not merely happen to be first. They set the shape of the game.
The 1877 meeting and the ground at Worple Road
The All England Croquet Club was founded in 1868 and took a lease on four acres off Worple Road, close enough to Wimbledon station that spectators could walk from the platform. Lawn tennis reached the ground in 1875, when one lawn was given over to it along with badminton. Two years later the committee added the game to the club's name — it became the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club — and advertised a championship meeting in the sporting weekly The Field, which also put up the trophy.
Twenty-two men entered at a guinea apiece. The event began on 9 July 1877 on the club's grass, with spectators paying a shilling to stand at the side. The final was held over: rain interfered, and the club had no wish to compete for attention with the Eton and Harrow match at Lord's, which in the social calendar of the 1870s was the larger fixture by a distance. When it was eventually played, Spencer Gore beat William Marshall in straight sets in front of a crowd usually reckoned at a couple of hundred.
Gore is one of the better jokes in the sport's history. He was a rackets player, not a lawn tennis man, and he won by walking to the net and volleying, which at the time nobody had thought to counter. He was unimpressed by his own achievement and said as much, doubting that lawn tennis would hold anyone's interest for long. He came back the following year, met the lob for the first time, and lost.
The ground itself was hemmed in from the start. The principal court sat in the middle of the others, which is where the name Centre Court comes from — it was a literal description before it was a proper noun. As crowds grew through the 1880s and 1890s the club bolted on temporary stands, then permanent ones, then more temporary ones on top of those, and by the years before the First World War the site was visibly at its limit.
The rules three men wrote in a fortnight
The genuinely consequential act of 1877 was not the tournament but the rulebook written for it. A subcommittee of three — Henry Jones, Julian Marshall and C. G. Heathcote — was asked to produce a code, and the version they arrived at settled several questions that had been open since Major Walter Wingfield patented his boxed set of a game in 1874.
Wingfield's court was an hourglass, narrower at the net than at the baselines. The 1877 code discarded that for a rectangle 78 feet long and 27 feet wide for singles, which is the court still in use. The net was strung far higher than it is now — five feet at the posts, sloping to a little over three feet at the centre — and it was lowered in stages over the following years as it became clear that a high net rewarded the wrong things. Service was from behind the baseline, with a second attempt allowed after a fault.
For scoring, the committee took the system of the older indoor game, real tennis: fifteen, thirty, forty, game, and sets won by six games. Nobody has ever produced a wholly convincing explanation of why the numbers run that way, and the clock-face theory is a guess dressed as an account. The system survived because it was already familiar to the men writing the rules, and it has proved remarkably resistant to reform since. The mechanics of it, including deuce, advantage and the tie-break layers added on top a century later, are set out in our guide to how Wimbledon scoring works.
What made the 1877 code stick was that it was published, it was used at the only tournament anyone had heard of, and it worked. The Marylebone Cricket Club had issued its own lawn tennis rules two years earlier; within a few seasons the Wimbledon version had displaced them in practice, and the All England Club retained a controlling hand in the laws of the game for decades afterwards. A tournament staged to pay for garden machinery ended up writing the constitution of a sport.
The challenge round, and why the champions stopped using it
From 1878 the Championships used a format borrowed from rowing and archery: the holder did not play through the draw at all. Everyone else contested an All Comers' Singles, and the winner of that then faced the reigning champion in a single match — the challenge round — for the title. If the champion chose not to defend, the All Comers' winner took the championship outright.
- Entries closeEvery player except the reigning champion enters the All Comers' Singles.
- All Comers' roundsThe field plays through a knockout to produce a single finalist.
- The champion waitsThe holder plays no competitive tennis at the meeting until this point.
- Challenge roundThe All Comers' winner meets the holder in one match for the title.
- Holder stands downIf the champion does not defend, the All Comers' winner is declared champion.
The structure used for the singles from 1878 to 1921. It describes the sequence, not the number of entries in any particular year.
The arithmetic of that arrangement produced some extraordinary records. William Renshaw won seven gentlemen's singles titles in the 1880s, six of them in consecutive years, and in most of those seasons his entire tournament was a single afternoon's work. Dorothea Lambert Chambers won seven ladies' titles between 1903 and 1914 under the same system. Comparing those totals with modern ones is not comparing like with like, and any history that sets them side by side without saying so is misleading you.
The obvious objection is that a champion could hold the title for years while playing a fraction of the tennis of the people trying to take it from him. The defence was that the champion had earned the right not to be worn down by a fortnight of matches before the one that mattered. By the end of the First World War the argument had gone out of it, and when the club moved to Church Road for 1922 the challenge round went with the old ground. Every champion since has had to play through the draw from the first round, which is why the modern draw and the seeding system that shapes it carry so much more weight — a point picked up in our guide to how Wimbledon seeding works.
What the challenge round did to the record books
One practical consequence is worth spelling out, because it recurs in every argument about the greatest champions. A pre-1922 title and a post-1922 title are different objects. The first was won in one match against one opponent who had already played six or seven; the second requires seven wins in thirteen days. Any list that ranks them together is measuring two different things and calling them by the same name.
1884: the ladies' singles arrives, and the doubles follows
The Championships were a single event for seven years. In 1884 the club added a ladies' singles championship and, in the same summer, took over the gentlemen's doubles from the Oxford University tournament, trophy included.
Maud Watson won that first ladies' title, beating her sister Lilian in the final, and defended it the following year. She played in a full-length white dress with a corset beneath it, which was simply what a woman wore to play sport in the 1880s and which had a great deal to do with how the early women's game looked. White was convention long before it was regulation; the codified version, with its list of permitted trims and its rules on what may be worn underneath, came a great deal later.
| Event | First held as a championship |
|---|---|
| Gentlemen's singles | 1877 |
| Gentlemen's doubles | 1884 |
| Ladies' singles | 1884 |
| Ladies' doubles | 1913 |
| Mixed doubles | 1913 |
The two remaining events had a longer gestation. Ladies' doubles and mixed doubles were played at Wimbledon from 1899 without championship status, effectively as side attractions, and were promoted to full championships only in 1913. That is why the five main honours boards do not all begin in the same decade, and why the doubles draws have a distinct history of their own..
Two players from this period deserve naming. Lottie Dod won the ladies' singles in 1887 at fifteen and remains the youngest champion in the event's history. Suzanne Lenglen, arriving in 1919, beat the forty-year-old Lambert Chambers in a final that went 10-8, 4-6, 9-7 and drew a crowd the Worple Road ground could not properly hold. Lenglen played in a calf-length dress with bare forearms, and the fuss that caused says more about 1919 than it does about tennis.
Why the club left Worple Road for Church Road
That 1919 final is usually cited as the moment the old ground was finally seen to be inadequate, and the crowds turned away outside were the argument that carried the members. The club bought land on Church Road, about a mile to the north, and financed the build by issuing debentures — a mechanism it has used ever since, and one that still governs a distinct category of ticket sold to bondholders rather than to the general public.
Stanley Peach designed the new stadium. His Centre Court was a twelve-sided bowl with seating and standing room for several thousand more people than Worple Road could hold, and it opened for the 1922 Championships with King George V present. The weather then did what English weather does: 1922 was a badly rain-affected meeting that had to be extended past its scheduled end, an inauspicious start for a ground built partly to accommodate more people in the wet.
The name Centre Court came with them, which is an oddity worth pausing on. At Worple Road the court had genuinely been in the centre of the ground. At Church Road it was not central at all until No.1 Court was built alongside it in 1924, and even then only approximately. The label had stopped describing anything and become a name.
Worple Road did not disappear. The old ground passed into other hands and its playing surface survives as a school sports field, which means the site of the first forty-five years of championship tennis sits a short walk from the modern one and is not marked in any way a passer-by would notice. The move also set the pattern the club has followed ever since: buy the adjacent land when it becomes available, build in stages, and never quite finish.
Two wars, and the bomb that took out 1,200 seats
The Championships have failed to take place in only ten years since 1877. Four of them fall between 1915 and 1918 and six between 1940 and 1945.
| Years not played | Circumstances |
|---|---|
| 1915–1918 | First World War; the Worple Road ground given over to war use |
| 1940–1945 | Second World War; Church Road requisitioned, Centre Court bomb-damaged |
The second closure left physical marks. The Church Road grounds were requisitioned for civil defence and military purposes: a decontamination unit, fire service and Home Guard use, troops billeted on the site, and the car parks turned over to livestock — pigs, hens and rabbits among them, kept as part of the wider wartime effort to produce food on any available ground.
In October 1940 the site was hit during a raid. Five 500lb bombs fell on the grounds and one struck the Centre Court roof, destroying a section of seating usually given as around 1,200 places. The court survived; the seating did not. When the Championships resumed in 1946 the stadium was still short of its capacity, and the repairs were not fully made good for several years afterwards. There is a straight line from that raid to the shape of the modern stadium, because every subsequent rebuild of Centre Court has been layered onto a structure that had already been patched once under rationing.
Play returned in 1946 to a country still on ration books, with a reduced ground and a much-changed field of players. The resumption is a reminder of something the Championships have leaned on repeatedly: the meeting is annual and continuous in a way very few sporting events are, and the two gaps are the exceptions that show how unusual that continuity has been.
Amateurs, shamateurism and the players who were not allowed in
For the first ninety-one years, Wimbledon was closed to professionals. Entrants had to be amateurs, meaning they took no prize money — only expenses, which is where the whole edifice started to wobble.
Tournaments competed for the best amateurs by paying generous expenses, and everybody knew it. The word for the practice was shamateurism, and it was an open secret for decades: players received money that was not called money, kept their amateur status, and the governing bodies looked at the ceiling. Meanwhile a genuine professional circuit existed, run as a touring troupe playing on canvas courts in arenas, and the best players in the world signed for it because it paid them honestly.
The consequence was absurd. Rod Laver won the calendar Grand Slam in 1962, turned professional, and was then barred from Wimbledon and the other majors for the next five years while at or near his peak. Fred Perry, three times champion in the 1930s, had made the same choice a generation earlier and became a non-person in the amateur game as a result. Through the 1950s and 1960s the champion of Wimbledon was the best amateur available, which is a materially different claim from being the best player in the world.
The break came quickly once it came. In August 1967 the All England Club staged a professional invitation tournament on its own courts, sponsored and televised by the BBC, which let British audiences see for themselves what they had been missing. In December 1967 the Lawn Tennis Association voted to make its tournaments open to professionals from the following year, knowingly risking suspension by the international federation. The federation met in Paris the following March and, rather than expel the British, agreed to permit open tournaments. The first anywhere was the British Hard Court Championships at Bournemouth in April 1968.
What the Open era actually changed at SW19
Wimbledon 1968 was the first open Championships, and Laver, five years excluded, won the gentlemen's singles. Billie Jean King won the ladies'. Prize money was paid for the first time, and the two figures were not the same.
That gap became the organising grievance of the women's game for the next four decades. King was central to the response: the breakaway that produced a separate women's circuit at the start of the 1970s, and the founding meeting of the Women's Tennis Association, held in London in the week before Wimbledon in 1973. The tour that came out of it gave women's tennis its own rankings, its own prize money negotiations and, eventually, the leverage that produced parity at the Championships.
1973 also produced the strangest field in modern Wimbledon history. The newly formed men's association withdrew en masse in support of a suspended player, and the great majority of the leading men did not appear. Jan Kodeš won a championship that most of the best players in the world had boycotted, which is a footnote unfairly attached to a very good player.
Two structural changes followed the money. Entry became a function of computer rankings rather than committee invitation, which is the system that still fills the main draw today. And in 1971 the tie-break arrived, initially at eight games all before moving to six all later in the decade — the first serious attempt to put a ceiling on the length of a set, and the beginning of an argument that has run through the Championships ever since.
The rivalries that gave each decade its shape
Wimbledon's history is unusually legible as a sequence of pairings, partly because grass rewards a narrow range of styles and the same names therefore keep meeting each other.
| Period | The defining players |
|---|---|
| 1880s | William and Ernest Renshaw |
| 1900s | Reggie and Laurie Doherty |
| 1920s | Suzanne Lenglen, Bill Tilden |
| 1930s | Fred Perry, Helen Wills Moody |
| 1970s | Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe |
| 1980s | Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert |
| 1990s | Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf |
| 2000s | Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Venus and Serena Williams |
| 2010s | Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray |
Three matches carry disproportionate weight. The 1980 gentlemen's final between Björn Borg and John McEnroe turned on a fourth-set tie-break that reached 18-16 before Borg won in five; McEnroe took the title the following year and ended Borg's run of five in a row. The 2008 final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal finished in near-darkness on a court that had no roof, and is routinely nominated as the best match ever played. The 2019 final between Federer and Novak Djokovic went to the new final-set tie-break at twelve games all, having got there after Federer held championship points and did not convert them.
The Williams sisters supplied something the tournament had not seen before: four Wimbledon singles finals contested by two members of the same family, in 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2009. Between them they dominated the ladies' event for the best part of two decades, and their meetings on Centre Court were a genuinely awkward spectacle for a crowd that had no idea which way to lean.
For British readers there is a longer thread. Fred Perry won three consecutive gentlemen's titles from 1934, and then no British man won again until Andy Murray in 2013, a wait of seventy-seven years that became a national running commentary. Murray won again in 2016. Virginia Wade had taken the ladies' title in 1977, the centenary year, with the Queen present in the Royal Box. Home champions have been rare enough at Church Road that each one is remembered individually rather than as part of a run.
How the grounds grew: courts, roofs and a museum
The Church Road site has been rebuilt around its two show courts more or less continuously. The original No.1 Court, added in 1924, was physically attached to Centre Court and had a reputation as the best atmosphere on the grounds; it was demolished in the late 1990s and replaced by a larger, freestanding No.1 Court that opened in 1997 on a different part of the site.
- 1977Museum opened
- 1997New No.1 Court opened
- 2009Centre Court roof completed
- 2019No.1 Court roof completed
Completion years for the principal building projects at Church Road, as recorded by the club.
The Centre Court roof is the single biggest change to how the tournament is experienced. Built in stages between 2006 and 2009, it made the show court weatherproof for the first time and, in doing so, created the possibility of tennis continuing well into the evening — which is precisely what made an explicit finishing time necessary, as set out in our guide to the Wimbledon 11pm curfew. No.1 Court received its own roof a decade later, and the engineering and operating rules behind both are covered in the Centre Court roof explained.
Two other pieces of the modern site have their own histories. The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum opened in 1977, the centenary year, and now holds the original trophies year-round — the reason champions do not take them home is covered in our guide to the Wimbledon trophies. And the grass bank above the courts, formally Aorangi Terrace and universally known by the name of a player who never won there, occupies land the club took over from a New Zealand sports and social club, which is where the Aorangi name comes from.
The outside courts have produced their own history. The 2010 first-round match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut on Court 18 lasted eleven hours and five minutes across three days and ended 70-68 in the final set, a result that did more than any committee paper to make a final-set tie-break inevitable.
Radio, television and the reach of a fortnight in July
The BBC first broadcast from the Championships by radio in 1927 and first televised them in 1937, which made Wimbledon one of the earliest sporting events anywhere to be shown live on television — to an audience of a few thousand sets in and around London.
The more significant date is 1967. When BBC2 began Britain's first regular colour transmissions, Wimbledon was chosen as one of the launch events, and coverage of the Championships from the start of July that year was among the first colour programming the country saw. The choice was not sentimental. Grass, white clothing and a green-and-purple identity were unusually well suited to demonstrating what colour television could do, and the tournament's visual character has been bound up with broadcast presentation ever since.
The club's approach to that presentation has been consistent to the point of stubbornness. There is no advertising on the courts. The scoreboard style, the dark green paint and the restrained graphics are all controlled centrally, and the club has increasingly produced its own pictures and distributed them rather than handing the event over to a broadcaster. How that self-presentation differs from the other three majors, which sell courtside signage without hesitation, is one of the sharpest differences between Wimbledon and the other three majors.
Technology on court followed later and more cautiously. Electronic ball-tracking for player challenges arrived in 2007, and the shift from human line judges towards automated calling came much later and was resisted for longer at Wimbledon than elsewhere.
Prize money, Middle Sunday and the slower business of equality
Equal prize money for the men's and women's singles champions arrived at Wimbledon in 2007, the last of the four majors to make the change. Venus Williams, who won the ladies' singles that year, had argued the case publicly and in print beforehand, and the decision applied across the events rather than only to the two singles winners.
Other conventions have gone the same way, more quietly. Women players were listed on the scoreboards with the honorifics Miss and Mrs long after the practice had disappeared from most of public life; the club dropped it from 2019. Middle Sunday, kept as a rest day for most of the tournament's modern history and broken only when rain had forced the schedule open, became a normal day of play from 2022, turning the Championships into a fourteen-day event.
The wheelchair events were added in stages rather than all at once: doubles first, then singles, then the quad division, each arriving after the discipline had established itself internationally. They now occupy a share of the second week alongside the junior and invitation events.
None of this is finished. The club holds land to its north on the former Wimbledon Park golf course and has pursued a long-running scheme to build show courts there and bring qualifying onto the main site from its present home at Roehampton. That scheme has been through planning processes and legal challenge and its status has changed more than once, so anyone reading about it should check where it currently stands rather than rely on any summary, including this one. What is not in doubt is the pattern, which has held since the roller broke: a club that outgrows its ground, buys the next field along, and builds.
For the rest of the section, including how to get to the Championships and what to expect once you are through the gate, start at the England sport hub or the tennis section.