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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Early photograph of tennis champion Lottie Dod, possibly taken at Wimbledon in 1887. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Inc., is the source and owner of the photograph used in this production.
Charlotte Dod, aged eighty-eight, was lying in her bed, in the Birchy Hill Nursing Home[1] in the sleepy southern English village of Sway. It was a peaceful place, quiet, as good as any other spot to spend one’s final years. The village had a cluster of houses ranged along a few main streets, a handful of pubs, one church—St. Luke’s—tennis and archery clubs, and a community choir, all surrounded by the oaks and other trees of the New Forest, England’s last major acreage of densely wooded land. Carved out of the forest in places was pastureland, on which grazed herds of cattle, horses, and ponies. A few miles to the south were the genteel beach towns, retirement communities and tourist resorts dotting the windswept coast of the English Channel. Towns with names such as Lymington and Milford-on-Sea, Barton-on-Sea and Bournemouth. Their streets were lined with elegant mock-Tudor homes, the fronts cordoned off from prying eyes by tall hedgerows, as well as a fair number of thatched-roof cottages. There were, as well, many guesthouses in these parts, the front porches of which were decorated with hanging baskets of colorful flowers.
Birchy Hill, with its white-painted brick facade and gray-tiled roof, its brick chimneys and elegant curved window bays, had originally been built on a narrow country lane in the mid-1800s as home to three spinster sisters. Its grounds were spacious, the trim, sloping lawns surrounded by trees and thick tangles of blackberry bushes that on one side muffled the street sounds and noises of the village beyond, and on the other served as the outer edge of the New Forest. During World War II it had been requisitioned by the army. When the war ended, a male nurse who had served as a military ambulance driver, and his wife, bought the property, refurnished it with secondhand carpets, beds, and cupboards picked up on the cheap at estate sales, and opened up a retirement home that specialized in caring for elderly people with chronic physical or mental health conditions.[2] Within ten years, the original house had been expanded into a complex of buildings, and it had upward of thirty-five residents.
Universally known as “Lottie,” the elderly woman, who had had to move into Birchy Hill following a decline in her health over the previous years, was listening to a radio broadcast from the second Monday of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. She had been listening all of the previous week too, through days plagued by squalls of rain and endless delays. It was, for Dod, a sacred ritual. Almost certainly she had tuned in to every year of broadcasts since the BBC first began covering the event, by radio in 1927, by television ten years later, in grainy black and white, available for only a few hours each afternoon.
That day, there were four marquee men’s matches: on one side of the draw were two round-of-sixteen battles to settle, the first pitting the rising Australian star Roy Emerson against the Mexican Mario Llamas; the other showcasing the Chilean Luis Ayala against the Swede Jan-Erik Lundqvist. Both matches would be played on Court One. On the other side, a round ahead as the championship’s schedule had gotten knocked off-kilter by a higher than usual number of rain showers the previous week, two blockbuster quarterfinals to be played on Centre Court: the number one seed, Neale Fraser, against the American Earl Buchholz; and then the Italian Nicola Pietrangeli against the United States’ up-and-comer Barry MacKay. MacKay was a tall, big-hitting player from Dayton, Ohio, who had risen to number two in the rankings over the past months. There was also one women’s round-of-sixteen match still to play, the British star Christine Truman, who had won the French Open the previous year, against the Czech Věra Pužejová. It was scheduled as the third match on Court One, likely to be played in the very last hours of daylight; play at Wimbledon in late June could continue until about nine o’clock at night.
The tennis began promptly at two p.m.
On Centre Court, Fraser soon found himself in an almighty scrap against Buchholz, losing the first set 4–6, winning the second 6–3, losing the third 4–6, and then having to save five match points in the fourth before pulling back to even the score at 15–15. At that point, cramping so badly that he could hardly stand, and with an old ankle injury from a football game played five years earlier flaring up again, Buchholz had to call it a day.[3] Wimbledon had rarely seen a retirement midmatch at a more dramatic moment. Buoyed by this fierce contest, Fraser would, a few days later, hold the champion’s trophy aloft on Centre Court.
Much later, in the gathering dusk, the power player MacKay lost to the Italian in four sets when his serve, which had been unreturnable in the first week of the championships, abandoned him. Seemingly succumbing to stage fright, he hit one double fault after another. His opponent, by contrast, ran down everything, playing, the Associated Press reporter courtside noted approvingly, like a “jungle cat.”[4] When the final shot was hit and Pietrangeli had won, the Italian ran to the net to shake his defeated opponent’s hand. As he ran, he threw his racket high into the air in glee. The two men leaned in for the handshake, the heavy wooden racket arced downward through the air, and, in one of the tournament’s more bizarre accidents, crashed down on their heads, temporarily dazing both players.[5]
In the other two men’s matches, Emerson won in four sets, the last one being 9–7. And Ayala defeated his Swedish opponent in an uneven five-set match that waxed and waned in intensity over the course of several hours.
Meanwhile, in the one women’s contest of the day, to the delight of the home crowd Truman won in straight sets. Maria Bueno, the Brazilian sensation who had won Wimbledon in 1959 and who would go on to win the championships again the following weekend, wasn’t playing that Monday afternoon.
* * *
Year in, year out, since she had won her first ladies’ championship, back in Queen Victoria’s jubilee year of 1887, at the ludicrously young age of fifteen years and 285 days, Lottie Dod had made the journey out to the Wimbledon suburbs. First as a player, dubbed by the press “Little Wonder,” then as a fan.
She won in 1887 and again in 1888. She took a break from the tournament for the following two years, but when she returned, still a teenager, she was once more unbeatable. The championship was hers in 1891. In 1892. And once more in 1893. In these years, Lottie Dod, who would bicycle over to the courts from the nearby houses in which she stayed during the competition, quite simply made ladies’ tennis a one-woman show. “Though young in years, she is ripe in judgement,” wrote the commentator W. Methven Brownlee in 1889, in his sweeping overview of the state of tennis. The Little Wonder exhibited, he continued, “the temperament that is best described as ‘that sweet calm which is just between.’”[6]
Frequently, in the decades after she retired, Dod would bring her young nephews and nieces with her to sit in the front-row seats the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club allotted her, just behind the umpire’s chair.[7] When the weather heated up, she would take out her fan—black crenellated paper topping a metal skeleton, decorated with gold floral arrangements and slightly racy portraits of three fleshy women, a bearded man with two devil-like horns watching them from off to their left—and gently fan herself.[8]
The ladies’ championships had only begun in 1884, seven years after the first men’s competition. A mere three years before that inaugural men’s championship, one Major Walter Clopton Wingfield had filed a patent for the portable equipment used to play a game that had some relation in concept to the ancient indoor game of tennis played by Europe’s aristocracies since at least the thirteenth century. His patent referenced a design for a “new and improved portable court,” in the middle of which a “large oblong net is stretched,” with a series of triangular nets, fixed to pegs driven into the ground, arranged alongside the court as side netting to catch wayward balls. The lines of the courts were to be marked out “by paint, coloured cord, or tape.” Wingfield was exuberant about the possibilities of his new game. “By this simple apparatus a portable court is obtained,” he wrote in his patent application, “by means of which the old game of tennis, which has always been an indoor amusement, and which few can enjoy on account of the great expense of building a brick court, may be made an outdoor one, and played within the reach of all.”[9]
The word itself, “tennis,” was thought to have originated from the French verb tenir, “to hold,” a word cried out by the server before he threw the ball up into the air and batted it into play. Over the centuries, it vied with jeu de paume, or “game of the palm of the hand,” as the name of the game in the Parisian popular imagination. Wingfield called his modified game both lawn tennis and sphairistike—the latter being an ancient Greek word meaning something like “skill at playing ball.” Others translated it simply as “sphere and stick.”[10]
Initially, the military-man-cum-sports-inventor envisioned hourglass-shaped courts, narrowing at the net—which he saw as being about as high as a modern badminton net—and widening out toward the baseline. As for scoring, in a rule book he published in 1874 he advocated that each game be played to fifteen points, making the game a sort of set unto itself, much like it is in the sport of squash today; and averred that only the server could win a point. Lose a point while serving and the ball shifted to the opponent, for him to try his hand at scoring. The following year, however, with the tennis craze spreading like wildfire, the Marylebone Cricket Club, at the time the leading sports authority in England, took over its rulemaking. The MCC adopted the shorter, quicker, 15, 30, 40, game scoring method of the more venerable, ancient royal tennis. It allowed the person not serving to also win points; grouped games into longer first-to-six-game sets; and simplified the court structure into the rectangular shape that it has kept ever since. So, too, the wise men of Marylebone lowered the net height down from upward of five feet to its modern level of three and a half feet at the posts, slightly lower toward the middle of the court.
Those basic parameters of the game have survived down the ages. Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Venus and Serena Williams . . . all have played, and play, a game structurally almost identical to that codified by the MCC nearly one and a half centuries ago.
Maud Watson, the daughter of a vicar from the London borough of Harrow, won the first two ladies’ championships at Wimbledon, in 1884 and 1885. She took home as her prize a silver flower basket valued at twenty guineas.[11] Watson’s two-year reign was followed by Blanche Bingley’s victory in 1886. Both women were considerably older than Lottie Dod, and both had firmly established themselves as the players to beat on the growing ladies’ circuit, the tournaments of which were now dotted around the British Isles: in Dublin, Bath, Cheltenham, London, and elsewhere.
A year before Watson’s first Wimbledon win, the schoolgirl Dod had started entering doubles tournaments around England. Lottie had learned the game on courts that her parents, Joseph and Margaret, erected on the grounds of Edgeworth House—their sprawling estate, a few miles outside of Liverpool, bought with the profits from Joseph’s cotton brokerage business. In those early tournaments, Lottie partnered with her older sister, Ann, nearly nine years her senior.
Ann was good; but her kid sister, only eleven years old when they entered their first competitions, was in another league entirely. Newspapers reported on the child sensation in tones of amazement. “Miss L. Dod, who is only eleven years old, played from the back of the court with both skill and judgement,” wrote one reporter after watching Ann and Lottie reach the ladies’ doubles final in Manchester in 1883, an achievement that won them two pounds and ten shillings in prize money. Another journalist predicted that “Miss L. Dod should be heard of in the future, as though only eleven years old, she showed really good form, and not only served well but displayed tactics worthy of much older players.”[12]
When the younger Dod sister began playing, she was like a tornado, whisking up all her opponents, disorientating them, demoralizing them, leaving their tennis in tatters. Her one weakness was that she served underarm, as did most women at the time—though even that fact was partially mitigated by her hitting it fast and low over the net. She would hold two of the “Wimbledon balls,” made of rubber and covered with white melton cloth, which the Ayres company sold to the tournaments for twelve pence per dozen, in her open left palm as she leaned her back forward slightly from the waist and prepared to swing her right arm upward.[13] That relatively weak serve notwithstanding, the rest of her game was fierce, fast. She was a power player decades before power playing became the norm. In an age when tennis was too often played with the delicacy of croquet—“the rallies at that period were very tedious; indeed, it was possible to take a country walk after one began and get back in time to see the end of it,” a satirical writer for the Athenaeum reminisced in 1909[14]—Dod aimed to end rallies swiftly and brutally. The Little Wonder was one of the pioneers of the idea that backhands and forehands merited different grips; and her ability to shift how she held her cumbersome wooden racket paid huge dividends against her less dexterous opponents. Despite the inelegant, heavy structure of her racket, and the rigidity of the catgut strings, she hit her strokes with sheer ferocity.
The young girl ran down balls that most of her female contemporaries—who played while wearing ornate, skin-concealing outfits that wrapped their torsos tightly, and swaddled their bodies from the top of the neck down to just above the feet in layers of underclothes, bodices, dresses, blouses—could not, or would not, chase down. Dod, far younger than most of her opponents, could get away with wearing dresses that stopped a few inches above the ankles. As a result, in her first few years on the circuit she had a built-in advantage, her clothing not constricting her mobility quite as much as did the couture of her opponents. But none of that would have mattered a whit had she not also possessed vast wells of talent. The teenage sensation knew how to work the angles, when to hit a drop shot, when to rush the net for a devastating volley, when to pound a ball into the far corner of the court. She played not like a “garden party” player, the society hobbyists for whom she showed considerable contempt in her spoken and written comments on the game, but like an athlete. And she competed to win. “People have frequently asked me if I consider lawn tennis an athletic game,” she wrote in 1897, long after she had retired from the sport, in a gold-embossed, hefty tome, The Encyclopaedia of Sport, volume 1, edited by the aristocratic sports enthusiast the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire. “I presume my questioners have never witnessed a hard five-set match between two first-class men, played under a broiling sun. It is doubtful if any game is a severer test of endurance. For ladies, too, it is decidedly a very athletic exercise, always supposing that they go in for it heartily, and do not merely frivol at garden parties.”[15]
In her first outing at Wimbledon, in 1887, she faced a sparsely populated field. That year, there were only four other female competitors in the main draw, plus the 1886 champion, Blanche Bingley, waiting to meet the winner of these earlier rounds in the championship match. Crushing her other opponents, the fifteen-year-old Dod easily reached that last round. There, she routed Bingley 6–2, 6–0. Even the fact that Bingley served overarm, her legs and back straight, the low toss-up allowing only a gentle patting of the ball into play,[16] didn’t help her against her underarm-serving adversary. The second set lasted a grand total of ten minutes. A reporter on the scene, stunned by the quality of the play he had seen from Dod, her chestnut-brown wavy hair[17] bunched up under her cap as she swung away at the ball, found the new champion so dominating that “in the last set she did almost as she pleased.”[18]
Afterward, the two players, Bingley several inches the taller and wearing a dark dress with ornate crepe laced around the waist, shook hands decorously at the net. Bingley’s racket was awkwardly stuffed under her left arm; the champion Dod, with just the hint of a smile on her young face, let hers dangle loosely, casually, pointed down toward the court.[19]
Captivated by her youth and her sheer confidence, the sports journalists of the day, in densely printed, triple-columned publications such as Pastime, now took to calling Dod “the Little Wonder.”
In addition to publishing lengthy reports on football and tennis, those journals also carried pictorial adverts for rackets with quixotic names like the Smasher, the Never Slack Tennis Bat, the Tête-à-tête, and tennis accoutrements like Jefferies Patent Screw Lawn Tennis Poles and Murston’s Patent Star Racket Press. Soon they would be advertising rackets variously called the Dod and the Dod Lawn-Tennis Bat. These bats, raced into production after the Little Wonder’s win, were manufactured by Jefferies & Co., a concern based in the East End of London. Their manufacturers claimed that they employed a dense new stringing technique that allowed for the crisscrossed catgut strings to produce as many as 1,200 squares on the face of the racket head.[20]
* * *
For the next half decade, Blanche Bingley, who soon after her 1887 loss got married and resumed playing under the name Mrs. Hillyard, was not able to get a handle on her rival’s game. No one else could either. A leading tennis historian, writing decades later, could find only one explanation for Dod’s startling success—a most jarring explanation to the modern ear. “Miss Lottie Dod, who was lady champion thirty years ago, and almost as versatile as the present champion,” he wrote, “learnt her game, as she learnt other games, in the company of men.”[21] Whatever the reason for her success, that she was the best was beyond dispute. In his profile of nine leading players on the circuit, W. Methven Brownlee included eight men and one woman. The woman was, of course, Miss Lottie Dod.[22]
In the seven years that she would play on the embryonic women’s circuit—mainly matches around England and Ireland—she would win forty-one singles tournaments; seven of these garnered Dod championship trophies from the biggest events. She came second in eleven, and third in one. Most of her losses occurred before she turned fifteen.[23] Indeed, from 1887 onward, she lost only one tournament match to another woman. She also won twenty more tournaments in ladies and mixed doubles. It was an astonishing record, as near to perfection as any achieved in the long annals of lawn tennis.
Mrs. Hillyard eventually won more Wimbledons than did Dod—six to Dod’s five. But she only did so during the years Dod wasn’t playing: before the Little Wonder came on the scene; again in 1889, the first of two years, in the middle of her tennis-playing career, in which Dod decided not to compete; and several times after Dod’s sudden retirement from the game in the mid-1890s, at an age when many up-and-coming players still haven’t made their first real mark on the sport. Hillyard didn’t stop playing at Wimbledon until she was forty-nine years old, in 1913. Truly, if prizes were awarded for tennis longevity, she would have won them all. Yet when Lottie Dod was competing, there might as well have been a chasm separating the ladies’ number one player from the number two. Hillyard simply couldn’t keep up with the girl from Lower Bebington. In four of the five championship matches Dod played, Blanche Bingley Hillyard was her opponent; all four matches went to Dod, three of them in straight sets.
* * *
In those years, the Little Wonder traveled to the three-and-a-half-acre complex of courts on Worple Road. It was a low-key affair, its clubhouse a small, two-story brick villa, which players would enter through French doors. In the bathroom on the second floor, four washbasins set on marble slabs stood, where tournament participants could rinse the sweat off their faces after a closely fought match.[24]
Around the grass courts at Worple Road, noted A. Wallis Myers, the first great chronicler of the game, at times the spectators were jammed in so tightly that “not even a ferret could squeeze through the centre court crowd.” In the early days of the tournament, before the large stadiums were constructed, before women had been admitted to play, people would pay two shillings and sixpence simply to sit or stand wherever they could around the roped-off courts, some perched on chairs they had brought with them, others on piles of heated bricks they rented from hawkers on the grounds.[25] During the rains, they would unfurl huge umbrellas, under which they would shiver while the male players gamely continued. More recently, some semblance of order had been created by the building of the tiered seating, the boxes, the standing areas rising up around the courts. By the thousands, ticket holders, many of them dropped off by London and South Western Railway trains originating from Waterloo, which stopped at the Wimbledon station by the grounds, came to watch the games during the championship week.[26] Each year, it seemed, the sport grew more popular.
In 1922, after years of discussions, the championships finally moved to larger grounds on Church Road, a few miles from the original location, where the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and its famous tournament have remained ever since.
Dod was always welcomed back to tennis’s self-proclaimed cathedral. After all, she had won the prestigious tournament five times before retiring at the age of twenty-one and moving on to other triumphs. To play hockey for the English team. To become the British ladies’ golf champion. To train in Switzerland as one of Europe’s top ice-skaters, reaching a level never before achieved by a woman. To master the most dangerous of toboggan runs, including the Swiss town of St. Moritz’s notorious Cresta Run. To summit a number of Norway’s toughest mountains. And finally to win a silver medal for England in archery at the 1908 London Olympics.
Writing back in 1903, Myers doubted he had “yet seen her equal” in ladies’ tennis.[27] She could jerk her opponents around the court like puppets with her forehand. And, observers noted, she volleyed aggressively, with the self-confidence of a man. F.R. Burrow, who presided over Wimbledon as the tournament referee from 1918 to 1936, and who first started watching tennis in the 1880s, wrote in 1937 that so versatile was she, so talented at whatever sport she tried her hand at, that “it is a pity that flying had not then been invented; I feel sure Miss Lottie Dod would have been the first girl to make a solo flight around the world.”[28]
Of all the women in sports who followed in Dod’s footsteps, the Guinness Book of World Records could only find one athlete in the succeeding century-plus to compare her to: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the great American sportswoman, born forty years after Dod, who in the years surrounding World War II competed and won at the highest levels in track and field, golf, basketball, and baseball.
* * *
Somewhat itinerant in her later decades, Dod had always made a point of going to Wimbledon in June from wherever she happened to be staying at the time, to sit on Centre Court and watch the championships unfold. Until a few years earlier, she had been living with her older brother William in a flat that she owned at 5 Trebovir Road, in London’s Earl’s Court district. It was an area of grand stone houses, which by midcentury, in the austerity years following World War II, had been divided into smaller subunits. Like so much of the great city in those years, it had a faded quality to it, a sense of grandeur misplaced. William Dod, himself an Olympic gold medal−winning archer, and a World War I veteran—in his late forties, he volunteered to fight with the Sportsman’s Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and was sent off to the trenches for a year—had also never married. William and Lottie, the bachelor and spinster siblings, had, since before World War II, lived together more or less without a break. Occasionally family members would joke about why neither sibling had married or had children; in private, they may, some members of later Dod generations would subsequently speculate, have wondered whether or not the two Olympians were even interested in pursuing romance.[29]
In 1939, the two siblings moved into a property that William owned in the village of Westward Ho! in Devon. They stayed there throughout the war, and then, some years later, returned to London. But William, four years Lottie’s senior, died in October 1954, and a few years after that, Lottie, now well into her eighties, had moved out of the capital to live in genteel retirement on the south coast, to be near her last surviving brother, Anthony, and his wife, Evelyn. Tony had married her shortly before World War I; Evelyn came from the petite aristocracy, and her father was a vicar of a rectory near Newbury. As the couple aged, they lived quietly in Sway, Anthony studying his chess books, Evelyn playing the piano, both regularly attending church. In the evenings, they would read poetry together in their living room. Some days, when their grandchildren were around, they would dust off the large old magic lantern that Anthony had bought decades earlier, and put in the slides for the visual images to accompany nursery rhymes and comedic stories.[30]
Lottie had, until recently, remained active and relatively healthy.
In 1960, however, age had finally and fully caught up with her. She had, by that summer, outlived all her siblings. Philip had died in early childhood; Ann, her first tennis partner, had died of cancer back in the 1920s; William had been dead six years now; and, most recently, Anthony, with whom she had cycled around Europe in their youth, and climbed some of the continent’s highest peaks, to whom she had moved to Sway to be near, had died at the start of the year. Now, with the summer tennis season underway, Lottie Dod herself was too sick to travel. She was suffering from bronchopneumonia and severe anemia, and had also recently taken an awful fall in the nursing home, breaking her right femur and pelvis.[31]
To her caregivers at the home, she was likely just another little old lady burdened with ailments and with not too long to live. They probably felt sorry for her, saw how lonely and vulnerable she was, and shuddered inside, hoping that such a fate would not one day befall them. Looking at her, so helpless, so pained, struggling for every breath, they probably couldn’t imagine that she had ever been young, had ever been independent. How could they have known that she had once soared like a bird over mountains; that she had once, in riding the Cresta toboggan course in Switzerland, achieved higher speeds than had any other woman on earth at the time? How could they have known that she had once stared into the jaws of massive glacial crevasses, and that she had, for years, graced the tennis courts of Wimbledon like no woman before, and only a rare few after, had done? How could they have known that, in her prime, the old lady could have staked claim to being the greatest sportswoman the world had ever seen?
* * *
Lying in her bed in the home in Birchy Hill, far from the Midlands town of Lower Bebington in which she had been born on September 24, 1871, Dod listened to the plummy voices of the BBC radio commentators. In London that Monday, June 27, the temperature was hovering at sixty degrees Fahrenheit; it was a blustery, cloudy day, a fairly typical early-summer afternoon in England. It was the sort of weather that Dod as a player had once thrived in. Despite the clouds, the rains held off and the matches continued.
In all likelihood, as she half listened she drifted in and out of consciousness.
By the end of the afternoon, Neale Fraser would have advanced one round further in the journey that would take him to the title the following weekend. (Maria Bueno, not playing that Monday, was practicing for her quarterfinal match the next day against the Englishwoman Angela Mortimer.)
By the end of that afternoon, too, Dod, the last-but-one surviving champion from tennis’s Victorian cradle years, the youngest-ever winner of what would come to be known as the “big four” Grand Slam tennis tournaments, would have died. If she was indeed tuned into the radio commentators reporting from her beloved Wimbledon, she breathed her last listening to the coverage of Fraser’s match against Buchholz, before MacKay imploded against the Italian, before Truman wowed the home fans with her win. Lottie’s death came in time for the news to reach the later editions of some of the country’s evening papers, in time for afternoon editions across the Atlantic to pick the story up off of the newswires.
* * *
Around the world, a lot had been happening that June: earlier in the month, a group of five young Liverpudlians, boys who had grown up not too far from Dod’s childhood home, had performed in concert, using, for the first time, the band name the Beatles. Three of them, John, Paul, and George, would stay with the band, recruit Ringo, and conquer the world over the coming years; two would drop by the wayside. In Australia and the Soviet Union, major air crashes had claimed dozens of lives. Midmonth, Portuguese colonial forces had fired on a crowd of pro-independence protesters in the Mozambican town of Mueda, killing between five and six hundred people. The massacre catalyzed resistance to colonial rule, and in the months that followed a number of nationalist groupings crystallized in response. In contrast, a few days afterward, the Congo, long the blood-soaked crown jewel in the Belgian Empire, was finally granted independence after years of strife. As the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States heated up, recently launched weather satellites began beaming remarkably specific information on weather patterns back to earth. And in New York, an Alfred Hitchcock film titled Psycho had premiered in two movie theaters before huge, and terrified, crowds.
Charlotte Dod was long forgotten by that summer of 1960. She was a Victorian relic in the nuclear age. On the rare instances she was talked or written about, by sports commentators and historians, she was always referred to by her childhood nickname of “Lottie,” even though she repeatedly made it clear that she loathed the diminutive. Indeed, as far back as 1893, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, she had admonished a reporter for the Westminster Gazette, “Pray do not call me Lottie. My name is Charlotte and I hate to be called Lottie in public.”[32] In her time, however, under that detested moniker she had been hands down the most famous, most versatile, and most accomplished female athlete on earth. She was known through the British Isles, and—courtesy of the spreading reach of England’s newspapers and periodicals, and the wonders of telegraphy—the wider empire, as Lottie, “the Little Wonder,” the youngest person of either sex ever to win a singles trophy at a major tennis tournament. One hundred and fifty years after her birth, that record still stands; it is surely one of the most durable records in all of sports.
But the Little Wonder’s last hurrah, her Olympic silver in archery, had been more than half a century earlier. Still photos from that event show her standing ramrod straight, a slightly dour-looking middle-aged lady in a full-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse. She sported a quiver of arrows sticking out from a pouch on her right leg, her left arm was steadying the bow, her right arm pulling back on an arrow, about to let it fly. On her head was what looked to be a double-layered cap, one peak resting on the other. There was almost no cinema footage of her from her two-decade-long sporting career—just a few fleeting, silent seconds of her firing off arrows at bull’s-eyes at the 1908 Olympics, the crackly old reel kept in the British Film Institute archives—no extant radio interviews from her heyday. She had peaked just before the era in which sports stars were raised to immortality by visual and audio media. There weren’t films about her, she hadn’t made her fortune from the sorts of dizzyingly large sports winnings and sponsorship deals that later generations of champions would earn.
During World War I, Dod worked somewhat anonymously as a nurse on the home front, caring for wounded soldiers evacuated back to London from the continental killing fields, and in the process winning medals from the Red Cross for her services. After the war, she took up choral singing and piano playing, performing with a well-known London-based group called the Oriana Madrigal Society, and even at one point serenading the king and queen with Bach cantatas in a private chapel at Buckingham Palace.
For decades, she had been a slightly eccentric dowager, unmarried, seemingly—at least according to the late-life memories of her nephew G.E. Worssam—void of romantic feelings.[33] Worssam described her, without elaborating, as a “difficult” lady, and recalled that in their later years the various family members had grown apart. Younger relatives remembered her in old age as a serious, even morose person, someone slow to smile and oftentimes sharp-tongued.[34] When a male relative married an older woman, Lottie noted the fact somewhat contemptuously, mentioning that she had once been wooed by a younger man, a guards officer, but had turned him down because of his age.[35] Perhaps, in truth, she had never had the time or inclination for marriage, or for relationships with men, her obsession with sports taking precedence over all things domestic. Perhaps the anecdote that she told a reporter for the Evening Times-Republican, a newspaper published in Marshalltown, Iowa, during her tour of the United States in 1904, was in fact autobiographical. “Golf in Scotland is almost a disease. The passions and the perseverance that the Scot brings to golf are quite incredible.” She went on to explain, “I heard not long ago of an elderly bachelor in Edinburg [sic] who had played golf from his boyhood up. He was a lawyer, and every minute he could steal from the courts was devoted to the links. This man allowed neither religion nor society nor business to interfere with his daily golf. He had never courted a girl because, he said, golf hadn’t allowed him the time.”[36]
To an observer in the last years of her life, the elderly spinster Dod might have been a Miss Marple character, easy to underestimate or dismiss; a lioness and precedent breaker disguised as a prim-and-proper, churchgoing mouse.
On the same day that she died in Sway, that June 27, Harry Pollitt, the longtime general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, passed away of a brain hemorrhage while on a ship that was returning him from a speaking tour in Australia.
The next day, Pollitt’s death was widely reported, with long obituaries in many of the newspapers. The communist Daily Worker lauded him, somewhat hagiographically, as “a human, loveable man, with a great sense of humour and a seemingly endless store of stories having not only some important political point but also their highly amusing side.”[37] Dod’s passing, by contrast, was treated as an afterthought. In Scotland, a few hours after her death, the Aberdeen Evening Express published three peremptory paragraphs, informing readers, “Miss Lottie Dod, a Wimbledon champion of the 1880s, has died in a south coast nursing home.”[38] In England’s second city, the Birmingham Daily Post published Pollitt’s and Dod’s obituaries side by side on page four. Pollitt’s death merited fifteen paragraphs, spread across two columns, and a photo; Dod’s a mere five short paragraphs. So, too, the next morning the London Guardian, while mourning the death of “one of the most remarkable sportswomen of the nineteenth century,” only gave Dod four paragraphs and a photo. Running down the left two columns of that same page was a huge tribute to Pollitt, detailing the complex twists and turns of a life begun in slum housing in working-class Lancashire, one that included spells in prison and long years as an organizer and party apparatchik. “His life was devoted to what he regarded as a righteous war against the conditions of his childhood,” the obituary noted.[39] There was also a front-page news story on his death.
In America the next day, the New York Times deemed Dod’s death worthy of only three paragraphs, taken off the Reuters newswire, and reported out of the seaside town of Bournemouth. The tone was decidedly understated: “Lottie Dod, who had been a tennis champion and all-round athlete, died in a nursing home here last night. She was 88 years old.” Even the Minneapolis Star, which in bold print in its afternoon edition dramatically titled its tribute “Lottie Dod, Old British Athletic Queen, Dies,” could only squeeze out five short paragraphs, also taken off the Reuters newswire.[40]
* * *
At her death, the onetime sporting superstar’s estate was, according to the probate documents, valued at a precariously respectable middle-class 24,013 pounds, three shillings, and sixpence.[41]
She was likely buried in a simple ceremony. There were no news reports on her funeral, no indication of top-level representation—no government officials or senior figures within the world of sports came to commemorate the passing of this extraordinary sportswoman.
Over time, the younger generations of relatives would even forget where her body rested. Perhaps hers was one of the several dozen graves in the Sway cemetery on the edge of town that over the years were left untended and eventually became so weathered, so damaged by moss and algae, by rain and wind, that the carved words on the tombstones were no longer legible. Or maybe hers was one of the many graves so overgrown with grass and brambles and moss and weeds in the cemetery surrounding the little brick building that was St. Luke’s Church, just down the street from the Sway railway station, that it was impossible to see the names of those who lay beneath. Perhaps she had been buried slightly farther away, in one of the county-run cemeteries in Lymington or New Milton, each of which had many grave sites that over the decades would become entirely broken down, the stones cracked, the names of their dead long vanished.[42]
Wherever her final resting place, Lottie Dod would be left to navigate eternity alone. Nobody would be there over the years and decades to come to tend her grave or to mourn on the anniversary of her passing.
In her heyday, Dod had been more famous than all but a handful of women in Britain—and most of those who captured more attention from the turn-of-the-century newspapermen were ladies renowned for their titles, their places in high society, rather than for their achievements. Dod, by contrast, was fabled for what she did rather than the title she wore. In her glory years, she had been profiled in and photographed for the leading journals of the age. But even in her lifetime, those writers and photographers had abandoned her as her great accomplishments became but a distant memory from an impossibly long-gone era. She had spent the last decades of her life a silhouette. By the time she died, she had, for nearly half a century already, been shrouded in anonymity.
Lottie Dod’s letters and most of her photo albums—a different album for each sport—her hockey stick and alpenstock, one of her archery bows, and other meager possessions were parceled out to relatives. Her brother Tony’s oldest son kept many of these in the cellar of his large farmhouse in the village of Chieveley, in the county of Berkshire. And, as one generation gave way to another and to another after that, over the decades many of these records of her life vanished—disappeared in estate sales, perhaps thrown away as unwanted clutter. What was left of Dod’s eighty-eight years were shards, ghostly glimpses, in archives, in collectors’ albums, in newspaper morgues, of the larger-than-life achievements of the Little Wonder, that most out-of-the-ordinary Victorian lady.
In 1984, the essayist Kenneth Lash published an imaginary encounter with Woody Allen in which he embarrassed the film director by referencing people whom Allen had never heard of. “‘Lottie Dod,’ I said, ‘Lottie Dod.’ I touched him gently on the shoulder and walked away,” Lash wrote. “It was doubtful he knew who she was.”[43]
