As in many other sports practices, the British military had an enormous importance in spreading lawn-tennis. Two of the founders of the Wimbledon All England Club were military men, Captain Robert Fitzgerald Dalton, and Samuel Horace Clarke Maddock, a lieutenant in the Surrey Volunteer Rifle Corps. Major Henry Gem, inventor of lawn-tennis together with the Spanish Juan Bautista Augurio Perera, also belonged to the Fusiliers Corps and Major Walter Copton Winfield, the person who patented the game, was a member of the Cavalry Regiment of the Royal Guard of dragons.
The military were the ones who, helped by the force with which the British aristocracy embraced the new sport, introduced tennis both in the Commonwealth countries and in the United States. In addition to the effect of Wimbledon, which had labeled its tournament as 'World Championships', two other forces helped this expansion: the industry of manufacturers of balls and rackets, and the marketing offered by lawn-tennis.
The first Wimbledon was played with posts, nets and balls supplied by Isaac Jefferies and his company based in Woolwich's Lower Wood Street, South East London. Among other production lines, Jefferies and Co had been manufacturing Real Tennis rackets for years and was also a supplier of bows, cricket bats and croquet mallets.
His competitors included the firm of Thomas C. Ayres, established in 1810 on Aldersgate Street in central London, and the British and Oriental Racquet Manufactory of Charles Malings, also in Woolwich. In a more artisan way, the rackets made by Thomas Tate stood out, who had started building bows and ended up supplying his rackets to the brothers William and Ernest Renshaw, the great dominators of Wimbledon between 1881 and 1890.
But it was Jefferies and Co that first impacted the game and the market. And he did it because Major Wingfield commissioned them to build the rackets and materials for his Sphairistike box, (ability to play ball), the Greek name with which he had patented the game in 1874. The boiling point of tennis was such, companies in the sector flourished almost daily. But, even more important, an immense legal battle for patents was opened, with another great company entering the fray: the one that, in 1881, from Manchester where they manufactured umbrellas, was opened by the brothers Ralph and Albert Slazenger in London's Cannon Street.
With his first Wimbledon complicity: Jefferies took the lead in the business for three compelling reasons. The first was that the Royal Artillery Barracks, home to the popular Gunners, many of them tennis players, was a short distance from his factory; the second, by signing an agreement to market his products in the United States with Peck
The boxes of the lawn-tennis game that traveled the world, already manufactured by various companies, and also with a lot of open litigation in the courts for patents, had abandoned the name of Sphairistike, to be called 'The Royal Artillery Lawn Tennis Box', 'Army and Navy', 'Junior Army and Navy' or 'Royal Tennis'. As if that were not enough, Henry Malings, son of the founder of the British and Oriental Racquet Manufactory, married Louisa, the daughter of Isaac Jefferies. The Malings eventually moved to Chicago, and their factory was taken over years later by Slazenger, who joined Wimbledon in 1902 as a supplier of balls, and caused a sensation with their rackets, especially the Demon, marked with the image of a demon and the Star of David for the Jewishness of the Slazenger family.
Slazenger replaced F. H. Ayres as the tournament ball supplier. In 1906, after the death of Thomas Ayres, the company, with 600 employees and many plagiarism lawsuits in the courts, went into decline. After World War II, when Ayres made parachutes and other military items for the British Army, the company disappeared.
In 1907, after the acceptance of the presidency of the Wimbledon club by the Prince of Wales, years later King George V, the military presence at Wimbledon became more evident. Also in those years the term of Royal Box was established for the presidential box of the tournament, and the players had to bow on their way out to the center court in that direction.
Several military members of the club died in combat during World War I. Since 1926, when music was introduced to entertain the final days, military bands have made an appearance at Wimbledon every year, the first being that of the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall.
World War II also had a huge impact on Wimbledon. The entity ceased its tennis activity to become a health logistics center to support the Navy. Hitler suspected that the Slazenger brothers, who had ceased manufacturing sports equipment to turn to supplying weapons to the Navy, had settled in Wimbledon.
Over six years, some 1,000 bombs fell on Wimbledon, destroying 14,000 houses and killing 150 people. During the night of Friday, October 11, 1940, a Nazi air raid dropped five bombs weighing more than 200 kilos on the premises of the All England Club. The first shattered the roof of the clubhouse, the second fell on the center court deck, the third on Church Road, and the last two left two huge craters in the area of the attached golf course. Damage to Center Court affected 1,200 seats.
A plaque, with the names of the club members who lost their lives in both World Wars, is at the entrance to the AELTC social premises. After the war, and also to this day, members of the British Army take care of the security of the tournament.
In 1984, the first all-female military band, the Staff Band on the Women's Royal Army Corp, provided center court entertainment before both finals, something that was repeated in 1993, on the occasion of the commemoration of the centenary of the first edition of the women's test, when the Staff Band of the Adjutant General's Corp Ladies was recruited.
