It was July 23, 1868 when John H. Walsh, editor of “The Field” magazine, Captain RF Dalton, John Hinde Hale, the Reverend A. Law, SH Clarke Maddock and Walter Jones Whitmore, with other friends founded the All England Croquet Club. https://www.supertennis.tv/News/Eventi-internazionali/190714-Storia-All-England-Club
They are all keen croquet players, a popular pastime in Victorian England. They found the lawns suitable for a permanent home in the winter of 1869 in Worple Road and rented them for 7 years at £120 a year, plus a percentage of membership fees and daily admissions. Practically everyone has seen a game of croquet, however surreal it may be: Alice in Wonderland plays it at the invitation of the Queen of Hearts. Gradually, lawn tennis supplanted croquet even in the name of the club, which in 1877 became the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (then it disappeared completely between 1882 and 1899). In 1877 the first lawn tennis tournament in the club’s history was played. The Field magazine offers the winner a silver cup worth 25 guineas. The writer Henry Jones, who writes for the magazine under the pseudonym Cavendish and has already formalized the rules of whist, is one of the three experts who rewrote the rules and history of tennis for that first edition of Wimbledon. Tennis as we know it today began on Saturday 7 July 1877. To watch the revolution, interrupted from 12 to 16 July for the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow colleges, you pay a pound and a shilling.
Vince Spencer Gore, who will stop playing after losing the final of the tournament the following year against Frank Hadow, considered as the inventor of the lob, who is still the only tennis player ever to have not lost even a set at Wimbledon. Gore will take up cricket. Tennis, he will say, is too boring, it will never be so popular. Hadow also doesn’t think much of tennis, and he won’t return to defend his title. In 1879 the Reverend John Hartley, the only priest in the tournament’s roll of honour, triumphed against Thomas Vere St. Lege Goold, the first high-level Irish tennis player and the only Wimbledon finalist convicted of murder.
