History
In 1875, the All England Croquet Club was suffering a decline in membership, and therefore in revenue, because of the popularity of a new sport called lawn tennis. Club members responded by converting one of the croquet lawns at its Wimbledon grounds into a tennis court.
Two years later, the organization - now renamed the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club - needed a new roller to maintain its lawns. A championship tennis tournament was proposed as an ideal way to raise the money, so the club placed an advertisement in The Times asking for entries and The Field magazine was persuaded to donate a 25-guinea trophy.
Twenty-two players entered that first Wimbledon tournament, which was won by Spencer Gore in straight sets over W. C. Marshall. Just as important to the club, 200 spectators paid a shilling apiece to watch the final, more than financing the needed roller.
The Wimbledon tournament was immediately accepted as Britain's national championship. The men's doubles event was added in 1879, ladies' singles in 1884, and the ladies' doubles and mixed doubles in 1913.
Although it was the national championship tournament, Wimbledon was never closed to foreign players. May Sutton of the United States became the first non-British champion when she won the ladies' singles title in 1905. Two years later, Norman Brookes of Australia won the men's singles.
With the emergence of great players from Europe, particularly France, in the 1920s, Wimbledon became the most important championship event in world tennis. Suzanne Lenglen of France won three titles between 1922 and 1925 and France's "Four Musketeers" - Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet, and Rene Lacoste - combined for six singles and five doubles championships between 1924 and 1929.
The All-England Club in 1922 had moved to a new site, boasting a stadium designed to seat 14,000 spectators. Ten years later, total attendance surpassed 200,000 for the first time, despite the worldwide depression.
World War II forced suspension of the tournament from 1940 through 1946, and a German bomb hit the famous Center Court in 1940, wiping out 1,200 seats. However, play at Wimbledon resumed in 1946 and the great tennis complex was completely restored by 1949.
During the 1950s, international participation grew even further, partly because of the increased availability of air travel. But the loss of many top male players to professional tennis troubled tournament organizers and in 1959 the club proposed opening Wimbledon events to professionals. The International Lawn Tennis Federation, however, was strongly opposed to professionalism and refused to sanction such tournaments.
The turning point came in 1967, when the BBC sponsored an open invitational tournament to celebrate its move into color television. A number of former Wimbledon champions who had become professionals took part in the tournament, and the event was so successful that the Lawn Tennis Association (of Great Britain) decided to open the championships in 1968, with the approval of the ILTF. That decision spurred similar moves by other major tournaments.