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Chapter 2

Battle of the Sexes

The young Wimbledon champion posing with her racket. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Inc., is the source and owner of the photograph used in this production.

The summer of her second Wimbledon win, in 1888, Lottie Dod, now aged sixteen, invited three of the best male tennis players of her age to a series of sporting duels. This was a full eighty-five years before sports’ most famous battle of the sexes, when, in 1973, an aging Bobby Riggs challenged Billie Jean King to a tennis match and had his head very publicly handed to him on a plate in a bling-filled, one-hundred-thousand-dollar, winner-take-all, globally televised match in the Houston Astrodome. The sporting world of the 1880s, the fans, the reporters, none had ever seen anything quite like what Dod was proposing. In the Victorian imagination, such a matchup was almost inconceivable, a pairing that was fundamentally against the natural order—but the Little Wonder, flush with her string of victories, supremely confident as to her abilities, believed that she could triumph.

Harry Grove, a Londoner nine years Dod’s senior, had won the Scottish championships in 1887 and reached the finals again the next year. As for the Renshaw brothers, the twins William and Ernest, they had utterly dominated Wimbledon since the start of the decade. William had won the tournament six times in a row, from 1881, six months after the twins celebrated their twentieth birthdays, to 1886, and would win one more championship in 1889. In his first win, William had demolished the reigning champion, Reverend J.T. Hartley, 6–0, 6–1, 6–1, in a match that lasted only thirty-seven minutes. It would establish a speed record for a Wimbledon men’s final that has never since been beaten.[1] Ernest had lost to his brother in several of the Wimbledon finals, though would partially redeem himself by winning the tournament in 1888. And the pair had combined into a formidable team that had won five Wimbledon men’s doubles titles. Their matches routinely drew huge crowds and ecstatic commentary from sports reporters.

“The match was of a most obstinate character, both brothers playing the hard volleys known as the Renshaw smashes to perfection,” reported a Morning Post writer of the 1883 Wimbledon final, watched by an estimated two thousand people, which William eventually won in five sets. “Considerable excitement prevailed, as both were in excellent condition and playing in fine form, hard volleying and rapid service being the order of the day.” Three years later, the Derby Mercury waxed rhapsodic about the “immense concourse of spectators” who came to watch William Renshaw play.[2]

All three men knew that their female opponent, Dod, was a skilled player; indeed, Ernest Renshaw had partnered with her over the previous year to win several major mixed doubles events. They had a good, friendly rapport. And Grove had also, at times, played mixed doubles with the teenager. In Exmouth that summer, after Ernest and Lottie won a tournament together, a friend’s camera had caught them sitting on a bench, casually talking. Ernest was wearing white trousers, spats, a white shirt, a checkered jacket, and a matching cravat. His face was dominated by a delicate mustache and intense, soulful eyes. Lottie was smiling; a rarity in her photos from the period, she looked relaxed, happy.[3]

The men Dod challenged probably figured that the unorthodox contests could only bolster their already high profiles in the rapidly growing sports culture of the era. And so they eagerly accepted her throw down.

Despite Miss Dod’s already remarkable résumé, the three gentlemen were confident that they could dispatch her with a minimum of fuss. After all, Lottie had two strikes against her: she was, quite obviously, a girl; and, following on from that, she would have to wear long skirts and all the other clothing that made it so difficult for women athletes to move fast. Ernest Renshaw knew, from firsthand experience, that this was a hindrance, since he had once, on a dare, dressed up in women’s clothing to play a friendly few games against Blanche Bingley.[4] In fact, so bullish were they that, in an age in which many matches were played with handicaps, much like golf is today, they offered the girl what they assumed would be a sporting chance, something to keep the attendees a bit on edge before they put the girl in the awkward cricket cap back in her rightful, subservient place.

Each game would, Grove and the Renshaws stated in accepting the dare, begin with Dod ahead 30–0. (William had boasted that against any other woman he would even offer 40–0 head starts, essentially meaning he’d have to win at least the first three points of every game in order to thread a path to victory.[5]) They also offered her “bisques,” a sort of second chance then in vogue in handicapped tennis matches, in which the weaker player could request two or three point replays each set, allowing them to scrub a few poorly played points at vital interludes in a game.

Since in tennis the scoring was 15, 30, 40, game, the Wimbledon ladies’ champion would need only two points to win each game; her opponent, by contrast, would need four. Dod accepted the conditions. Dressed in an ankle-length white dress, the sleeves down to her wrists, the body of the dress up to the middle of her neck, with a corset underneath, her legs covered in thick black stockings, her feet clad in the sort of clunky black leather shoes worn by washerwomen, her head protected from the sun by a delicate white cricket cap, she set to work. The Little Wonder employed her powerful forehand to the full, chasing down balls in the far corners of the court, charging the net whenever possible to end the rally with one of her signature devastating volleys. For tennis cognoscenti, her game was something to marvel at. The tennis chronicler A. Wallis Myer called her simply “the incomparable Miss Dod.”[6]

In the first match, played in northern England on the Monday following the end of a draining weeklong tournament, the girl took on Ernest Renshaw. Local papers had heavily publicized the event, which was billed as a charity exhibition with ticket proceeds going to the regional dispensary, and with additional mixed doubles matches featuring the two stars thrown in as a bonus. Dod won the first set at a dash, crushing her mixed doubles partner 6–2. But then, according to the reports from the grounds, she flagged. Perhaps the week of tennis had caught up with her; perhaps Renshaw, realizing he had a real match on his hands, simply raised his game one vital notch. He perceived, a commentator acerbically reported, “that he had no ordinary lady opponent, and from that moment every stroke was keenly contested, both players doing their utmost to gain the victory.”[7] Whatever the reason, he won, but only just. The final score was 2–6, 7–5, 7–5. Newspapers noted the “brilliancy” of Dod’s play, the astounding hand-eye coordination she showed at the net. She ran her opponent around the court so hard that it almost seemed, they wrote, as if Renshaw’s opponent were a man.

Later that summer, in between regular matches at a tournament in Scarborough, the exhibitions resumed.

First, the teenager wiped the floor with Grove, beating him 1–6, 6–0, 6–3. Then she took on the six-time Wimbledon champion—a man who for years had been the fiercest player on the lawn tennis circuit, a hero who traveled throughout the British Isles from one tournament to the next, routinely humbling his opponents. By the end of that match, Dod had proven her point. In demolishing William Renshaw 6–2, 6–4, she had shown that women, those delicate, fragile flowers of the Victorian imagination, were more than capable of holding their own in the most physical of domains.[8] The newspapers gushed about her “remarkable feats” in taking down the best male players of her era.

* * *

As the dreary rains of a sodden English July and August continued, the news focus shifted. The English public became engrossed in reading about the onset of a series of grizzly East End murders that would soon come to be known as the Jack the Ripper killings. Temporarily, sports, the Irish question, the growing movement for women’s suffrage, and pretty much everything else took a backseat. Purple prose poured forth on the slashing horrors that were unfolding on the darkened, narrow streets of the old districts coming off of the river Thames in the eastern precincts of London.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Each day from August 31, when the first of a series of victims’ bodies was discovered, new and ghastly revelations surfaced. The women, most of them prostitutes, had had their throats slashed, their abdomens and genitals cut. Some of them had had their internal organs removed. As the police started to put the pieces of the puzzle together, they found murders dating all the way back to April that appeared to fit the pattern of a serial killer.

The papers provided the unknown murderer daily coverage, guessing as to his motives, his identity, his status in society. The Illustrated Police News carried lurid stories with headlines such as “Ready for the Whitechapel Fiend, Women Secretly Armed.”[9] And a guessing game began: who was the crazed killer stalking the women of the East End, what were his motivations, where would he strike next? In September, news organizations started receiving letters from the perpetrator, signed “Jack the Ripper.” It was a moniker that would come to be a byword, down the centuries, for depravity. In mid-October, one of his missives, titled “From Hell,” arrived along with half a kidney, thought to be from one of his victims.[10]

Once the killer had named himself, the country, and much of the rest of the world, became utterly obsessed. In Scotland, the Courier and Argus reported that one of the canine entrants in a rabbit-coursing match had been named after the killer, and that, when he lost, the crowd “cheered lustily,” with one of the spectators announcing, “He cannot rip rabbits anyhow.”[11] In Yorkshire, the York Herald reported “further murders threatened by ‘Jack the Ripper,’” and in the next column over detailed how an East End woman who lived in the vicinity of the killings had been so “excited and effected” by them that she had hung herself in her own home.[12] Throughout the East End, the police flooded neighborhoods, hoping to flush out the murderer in his lair. They rounded up scores of known criminals, looking for a break in the case. They chased one lead after another, provided to them by informants. When the Ripper’s victims were buried, huge crowds lined the streets, following the hearses to the cemeteries and uttering what a Bristol Mercury and Daily Post reporter termed “loud and frequent” threats against the unknown killer. Across the Atlantic, the Cincinnati Enquirer, reporting on the murderer’s penchant for removing body parts from his victims, came up with what may well have been the most lurid subhead of all: “Theory That the Murderer Is Gloating over a Bubbling Cauldron of Hell-Broth Made of Gory Ingredients.”[13]

Soon, newspapers were reporting copycat assaults as far afield as Paris.[14] In Bradford, a woman named Maria Coroner was fined twenty pounds for “breach of the peace” after she sent out a series of threatening letters that she signed “Jack the Ripper.”[15]

* * *

Amid the horrors and the fear, sport must have been a most welcome diversion. In addition to increasingly breathless reports of dastardly crimes and bloody killings—most of them having nothing to do with the Ripper—the newspapers managed to keep up a steady flow of sports coverage. Next to the story about Maria Coroner, for example, was a long report on a shooting competition. There were still plentiful column inches in the major newspapers devoted to football, cricket, billiards, bowling—even if the front pages were otherwise occupied with murder and mayhem.

Lottie Dod kept her focus; she continued to win. The tournament season in England and Ireland ran until mid-October. And in one event after the next, Dod now pulverized her opponents. She beat them in regular matches, and she beat them, again and again and again, in handicapped events, in which her opponents started off with a two-point advantage. She beat them in singles, in ladies’ doubles, in mixed doubles. On the rare instances when an opponent kept close to her, eventually Dod would always pull off a break. When a set went the duration, her opponents would, almost without fail, blink first. That summer, she won several sets 11–9, 10–8, and 9–7. The only opponent to win one of these extended sets against her was Blanche Hillyard, who managed to squeeze out a 10–8 first set against Dod in Bath that May before collapsing 6–3, 6–0 over the following two sets.[16] Adding insult to injury, Lottie then partnered with her sister, Ann, to win the ladies’ doubles, easily beating Hillyard and her partner in the first round of that tournament. Afterward, the two sisters and their friend Mrs. Bagnall-Wild posed for photographs on the wooden chairs courtside, the sisters sitting straight, wearing feathered hats, and holding parasols by their sides. They looked regal, unapproachable.

The past couple of years, the writer W. Methven Brownlee wrote as the season wound down, had been “simply a triumphal procession” for the teenager. She and Maud Watson had together built ladies’ tennis into a mass spectator sport. “To these two players, the ladies of the lawn tennis world owe everything,” Brownlee gushed. But in reality, by late 1888 it really was only a one-woman show. “It was not now a question of getting a set against her,” the commentator wrote of Dod. “It was the satisfaction of getting a game.”[17]

* * *

The next year, however, there was a shocking absence.

The Little Wonder didn’t play Wimbledon in 1889, nor did she play in 1890 either. The public reason given was that, in the first instance, she was yachting, and in the second, she simply didn’t feel like playing. In private, however, the story may well have been less happy: The spring of 1889, Lottie’s older sister, Ann, had fallen in love with an older man, a senior employee of the Whitbread brewing company, while on a trip through the Scottish isles, and had asked her widowed mother for her blessing to get married. Instead, Margaret, who had minutely controlled her children’s lives from the time Joseph died in 1879, refused to even contemplate such a union. Fearing she would be forever trapped at Edgeworth, gradually growing into an old maid, on September 2, 1889, Ann eloped to Chertsey, where she and Ernest Worssam married.[18]

Nearly a century later, her children and Tony’s children told Jeffrey Pearson, a Cheshire-based author working on a short book about Dod at the time, that they believed in the wake of this scandal—first the spring and summer romance, then the elopement—Margaret had simply refused to allow Lottie to travel down to London to compete.[19]

Possibly adding salt to the wound was the patronizing way in which male reporters of the day greeted the proud young lady’s every success. Repeatedly, they wrote of Lottie as a tomboy, as somebody who wasn’t quite as womanly as she should be—or, if they acknowledged that she was womanly, they said it almost as a forced afterthought. They felt that they had a right to comment on everything from her weight to her muscle tone to the complexion of her skin. “Miss Lottie Dod, the well-known lady tennis player, and joint champion of England with Mr. J.C. Kay in the mixed doubles, lives near Liverpool,” one anonymous commentator wrote in a tennis guide published in 1891. “She is twenty years of age and weighs one hundred and sixty pounds; is healthy, ruddy, and as strong as a man.” To smooth out the backhanded compliments, the author then felt compelled to add, “But with all her training [she] has not lost a particle of her womanliness.”[20]

It could not have felt good to know that, no matter how extraordinary her athletic achievements, the journalists who dogged her every sporting move would always find some way to explain her successes in terms of the men she was surrounded by. Thirteen years after she had been labeled “ruddy, and as strong as a man,” an article in the Montgomery Advertiser, published in the US state of Alabama after she wrapped up an American golf tour, would couch her myriad triumphs this way: “The champion woman golf player of Great Britain is Miss Charlotte Dod, a slender and very athletic young lady who has been practicing outdoor games and sports of all kinds since her childhood. She had two or three athletic brothers to coach her in her games, which was a great advantage.”[21] Not to be outdone, the Dispatch in Moline, Illinois, informed its readers, “The young lady had advantage over most girls in that she had big brothers devoted to outdoor games. These gentlemen kindly coached their sister in her athletic training. It is a wonderful help when the athletic girl has such brothers.”[22]

None of the articles mentioned Ann, the sibling who had actually been most responsible for her emergence as a sporting superstar. Ann, who had taken her on train trips around England to compete in tennis tournaments, who had been her doubles partner during her first years on the circuit. And Lottie herself, who surely knew all too well the debt she owed the older woman, felt at times compelled in public to pander to this demeaning narrative. In 1899, she went so far as to argue that her brother Tony had been her primary playmate as a child, and that “perhaps it is because I have mostly played with men that I have learned to play such a strong game . . . the average man’s stroke is undoubtedly much more powerful and swift than that of even the most expert women players.”[23] After all, in an era in which women couldn’t vote and had almost no independent property rights, few of the reading public would have been willing to accept that women could, or should, compete on an equal basis with men in any arena of public life. Many would, quite probably, have agreed with the Pastime essayist who, three years before Dod had won her first Wimbledon title, penned a piece essentially arguing that while most women couldn’t play a good game of tennis, they could—and should—flirt with male commentators and officials well enough to convince them to overlook their sporting flaws. They should be judged as adornments rather than on their sporting merits. “Lawn tennis, unlike most popular sports, places the critic in an exceedingly delicate position, inasmuch as he has to deal not only with the successes and failings of men, but also with the merits and mistakes of those of the fair sex who adorn the game by participating in it,” he wrote. “He must, indeed, be a hard-hearted scribe who could resist the soft supplication ‘not to mention that miss’ or to record ‘all those faults,’ and we cannot be surprised that our reporters—faithfully as they usually portray events—occasionally plead ‘extenuating circumstances’ when the stern editor wishes to know why so few remarks have been made on the play.” The author, carried away by his own fantasy, went on to write of how male umpires might get distracted by the “natty little shoes” of female servers, forgiving their foot faults when faced with the “pretty pouts” of female competitors. “Truly, man shows his weakness when he is in possession of the umpire’s chair in a ladies’ match!”[24]

In her heart of hearts, however, while she occasionally pandered to public prejudice, Dod never seemed truly able to accept the inferiority of women in tennis or in anything else. She might not have defended her Wimbledon title in 1889, but she was still entering and winning other tournaments, mostly in northern England, within a relatively easy train ride of Edgeworth. In Liverpool, she trounced Hillyard in the championship match, and also won the ladies’ doubles. In Northumberland, she won in singles and in mixed doubles. Then, as a follow-up, she challenged yet another leading male player, H.G. Pease, to yet another battle of the sexes, this time a one-set exhibition match.

Dod’s handicap against Pease was only a one-point head start in each game. It didn’t matter; she ran away with the set 6–2. Most likely, she would have won even had they played on equal terms. Time and again, she ripped unreturnable crosscourt forehands. “When this movement came off, as it did nine cases out of ten, Pease could do little more than smile, though whether sarcastically at his own inability to return, or at the skill of his fair opponent, one cannot say,” wrote one of the journalists present courtside. “What was most striking, however, was the ease with which Miss Dod played. Without making much show of activity, she seemed always to be just where the ball was returned to.”[25]

* * *

Two years after her second Wimbledon win, and coming off an extended absence from the game, Dod was asked by the editors of The Badminton Library, a series of books devoted to covering the era’s most popular sports, to compile her thoughts about women in tennis. She eagerly accepted the assignment.

The resulting essay, seven pages in length, was a window into Dod’s true thinking on the topic, brilliantly attacking the idea that women couldn’t excel in sports. Not yet nineteen, she wrote with style and emotional force. “For some years after its introduction the game was evidently thought beyond them [ladies] both as regards body and mind. There were piteous moans about the weight of the balls, and pathetic appeals not to spoil it as croquet had been spoiled, by making it too scientific. It was represented, not it may be hoped by ladies, but on their behalf, that no lady could understand tennis scoring.”[26]

The teenage sensation, who had now played four matches against top male players and won three of them, was scathing about these critics. Of the editor of the Field, a journal with an outsize influence over how the sport was viewed, she wrote that “he was invested with the prerogative of an irresponsible despot”; and that, moreover, his narrow ideas about women in tennis had been “conclusively disproved” by the quality of the matches then being played by lady competitors.

“To thee a woman’s services are due,” she announced, as a stand-alone line at the start of her essay, quoting act four of Shakespeare’s play King Lear. She had made her point: Dod wanted to be judged on her own terms. Not as a freak show adjunct to the male contestants at Wimbledon and the other events on the tennis circuit, but as an athlete who would rise or fall based on her own skills and her own ability to compete.

* * *

In 1891, after more than two years of on-again, off-again presence at the major tournaments, the young Bebingtonian returned full-time to the circuit. She promptly took up where she had left off in late 1888, swatting away all her challengers. That year, she won every match she played. She did the same in 1892. The same again in 1893.

She was, by now, far and away the most famous female athlete in England, probably in the world. The well-known London society photographers W. & D. Downey invited her to their studios on Ebury Street, in one of the most tony neighborhoods of central London, to pose for a series of portraits. She showed up in a simple, crenellated white dress, the material from her shoulders up to the top of her neck a doily pattern, held tight with a metal clasp high up on her throat. She wore her signature cricket cap, under which was bunched her wavy brown hair, now somewhat longer than it had been when she first won Wimbledon as a slightly awkward fifteen-year-old. As the photographer took one image after the next, she looked off to the left, her lips, dimpled at the corners, showing just the trace of a quizzical smile.[27]

In early July 1893, Dod played her fifth Wimbledon title match. Yet again, she faced her archrival, Mrs. Hillyard. This time around, on a rainy, windy Sunday afternoon, Hillyard managed to pull out all the stops. She drove balls deep into the court, ran her opponent from side to side. For the first time in a final, Dod seemed to have lost her way. Battling the wind, she struggled to get the ball into court. The defending champion lost the first set 6–8.

Digging deeper than she had ever had to do before, however, Dod put in a bravura performance in the second, pummeling Hillyard and racing to a 6–1 victory. Perhaps the winds had died down, leaving just a steady drizzle; those were the conditions, commentators observed, in which Dod particularly thrived. “The English climate generally enabled her to take a speedy and complete revenge,” Wallis Myers wrote, referring to those rare occasions in which an opponent opened up an early lead against Dod. And once in her element, Myers noted, she quickly picked up steam and became “the beau ideal of what a lady-champion should be,” an unstoppable force of nature “absolutely without a weak point.”[28] Hillyard, however, refused to give up, and in the final set, the two women dueled fiercely, each staying on serve for the first six games. At one point, Dod fell heavily, and it wasn’t clear if she would be able to go on. She stopped, took a few minutes, regrouped, and then put in some of the most punishing tennis the sports journalists and audience members gathered around the court had ever seen. The quality of the play at Worple Road, reporters noted with astonishment, seemed to get better and better as each game passed. Hillyard kept probing, firing off shots deep into Dod’s backhand corner. Dod, wrote the Pastime writer on the spot, responded with “marvelous backhand returns.” In his opinion, “No other lady player is strong enough on the backhand side to return such well-placed drives with such unfailing accuracy.” Dod won the final set 6–4.

It was to be her last competitive tennis match. Ten years after she had debuted as a little girl in a small tournament in northern England, the now twenty-one-year-old slipped away, disappearing Garbo-like from the world she had so completely dominated. Not that she didn’t like the trappings of victory—her stash of prizes showcased in her Edgeworth bedroom was proof of the fierce pride she felt in her accomplishments; but she had never wanted to be what she derisively termed a “pot hunter,” someone who only stayed with a sport that she had conquered in order to collect even more trophies. Simply coasting, staying atop a game in which she had no true competitors, held little appeal for the Little Wonder. In fact, she said somewhat haughtily, she found the idea of sticking with one game her whole life “appalling.”[29]