The Wimbledon Club

The Wimbledon Club

1854 - 2004

A Sporting Scrapbook

Stephen Chalke

Directly across the road from the main gates of the All-England Club, the Wimbledon Club has cricket, hockey, lawn tennis and squash sections. The cricket club was formed in 1854, playing at first on Wimbledon Common. In 1877 one of its members, Spencer Gore, became the winner of the first All-England Lawn Tennis Championship. Gore’s verdict on the new game of lawn tennis? ‘Anyone who really plays well at cricket will never give attention to lawn tennis. The monotony of the game will choke him off.’

The rules of the Wimbledon Men’s Hockey Club formed the starting point of the meeting in 1886 that for the first time standardised the rules of hockey, while the Ladies – formed in 1889 – are the oldest surviving ladies’ hockey club in the world.

Five Test captains have represented Wimbledon Cricket Club at different times in its history – Ivo Bligh, Arthur and Harold Gilligan, Alan Melville and Freddie Brown – while on one occasion in the 1890s the England hockey team contained seven players from the Wimbledon Club.

In 2004 Stephen Chalke wrote the club's history. Full of anecdotes and social history and extensively illustrated with photographs and original drawings, it is a beautifully-produced 160-page landscape-shaped hardback.