Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
1903, Myers doubted he had “yet seen her equal” in ladies’ tennis.[27] She could jerk her opponents around the court like puppets with her forehand. And, observers noted, she volleyed aggressively, with the self-confidence of a man. F.R. Burrow, who presided over Wimbledon as the tournament referee from 1918 to 1936, and who first started watching tennis in the 1880s, wrote in 1937 that so versatile was she, so talented at whatever sport she tried her hand at, that “it is a pity that flying had not then been invented; I feel sure Miss Lottie Dod would have been the first girl to make a solo flight around the world.”[28]
Of all the women in sports who followed in Dod’s footsteps, the Guinness Book of World Records could only find one athlete in the succeeding century-plus to compare her to: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the great American sportswoman, born forty years after Dod, who in the years surrounding World War II competed and won at the highest levels in track and field, golf, basketball, and baseball.
* * *
Somewhat itinerant in her later decades, Dod had always made a point of going to Wimbledon in June from wherever she happened to be staying at the time, to sit on Centre Court and watch the championships unfold. Until a few years earlier, she had been living with her older brother William in a flat that she owned at 5 Trebovir Road, in London’s Earl’s Court district. It was an area of grand stone houses, which by midcentury, in the austerity years following World War II, had been divided into smaller subunits. Like so much of the great city in those years, it had a faded quality to it, a sense of grandeur misplaced. William Dod, himself an Olympic gold medal−winning archer, and a World War I veteran—in his late forties, he volunteered to fight with the Sportsman’s Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and was sent off to the trenches for a year—had also never married. William and Lottie, the bachelor and spinster siblings, had, since before World War II, lived together more or less without a break. Occasionally family members would joke about why neither sibling had married or had children; in private, they may, some members of later Dod generations would subsequently speculate, have wondered whether or not the two Olympians were even interested in pursuing romance.[29]
In 1939, the two siblings moved into a property that William owned in the village of Westward Ho! in Devon. They stayed there throughout the war, and then, some years later, returned to London. But William, four years Lottie’s senior, died in October 1954, and a few years after that, Lottie, now well into her eighties, had moved out of the capital to live in genteel retirement on the south coast, to be near her last surviving brother, Anthony, and his wife, Evelyn. Tony had married her shortly before World War I; Evelyn came from the petite aristocracy, and her father was a vicar of a rectory near Newbury. As the couple aged, they lived quietly in Sway, Anthony studying his chess books, Evelyn playing the piano, both regularly attending church. In the evenings, they would read poetry together in their living room. Some days, when their grandchildren were around, they would dust off the large old magic lantern that Anthony had bought decades earlier, and put in the slides for the visual images to accompany nursery rhymes and comedic stories.[30]
Lottie had, until recently, remained active and relatively healthy.
In 1960, however, age had finally and fully caught up with her. She had, by that summer, outlived all her siblings. Philip had died in early childhood; Ann, her first tennis partner, had died of cancer back in the 1920s; William had been dead six years now; and, most recently, Anthony, with whom she had cycled around Europe in their youth, and climbed some of the continent’s highest peaks, to whom she had moved to Sway to be near, had died at the start of the year. Now, with the summer tennis season underway, Lottie Dod herself was too sick to travel. She was suffering from bronchopneumonia and severe anemia, and had also recently taken an awful fall in the nursing home, breaking her right femur and pelvis.[31]
To her caregivers at the home, she was likely just another little old lady burdened with ailments and with not too long to live. They probably felt sorry for her, saw how lonely and vulnerable she was, and shuddered inside, hoping that such a fate would not one day befall them. Looking at her, so helpless, so pained, struggling for every breath, they probably couldn’t imagine that she had ever been young, had ever been independent. How could they have known that she had once soared like a bird over mountains; that she had once, in riding the Cresta toboggan course in Switzerland, achieved higher speeds than had any other woman on earth at the time? How could they have known that she had once stared into the jaws of massive glacial crevasses, and that she had, for years, graced the tennis courts of Wimbledon like no woman before, and only a rare few after, had done? How could they have known that, in her prime, the old lady could have staked claim to being the greatest sportswoman the world had ever seen?
* * *
Lying in her bed in the home in Birchy Hill, far from the Midlands town of Lower Bebington in which she had been born on September 24, 1871, Dod listened to the plummy voices of the BBC radio commentators. In London that Monday, June 27, the temperature was hovering at sixty degrees Fahrenheit; it was a blustery, cloudy day, a fairly typical early-summer afternoon in England. It was the sort of weather that Dod as a player had once thrived in. Despite the clouds, the rains held off and the matches continued.
In all likelihood, as she half listened she drifted in and out of consciousness.
By the end of the afternoon, Neale Fraser would have advanced one round further in the journey that would take him to the title the following weekend. (Maria Bueno, not playing that Monday, was practicing for her quarterfinal match the next day against the Englishwoman Angela Mortimer.)
By the end of that afternoon, too, Dod, the last-but-one surviving champion from tennis’s Victorian cradle years, the youngest-ever winner of what would come to be known as the “big four” Grand Slam tennis tournaments, would have died. If she was indeed tuned into the radio commentators reporting from her beloved Wimbledon, she breathed her last listening to the coverage of Fraser’s match against Buchholz, before MacKay imploded against the Italian, before Truman wowed the home fans with her win. Lottie’s death came in time for the news to reach the later editions of some of the country’s evening papers, in time for afternoon editions across the Atlantic to pick the story up off of the newswires.
* * *
Around the world, a lot had been happening that June: earlier in the month, a group of five young Liverpudlians, boys who had grown up not too far from Dod’s childhood home, had performed in concert, using, for the first time, the band name the Beatles. Three of them, John, Paul, and George, would stay with the band, recruit Ringo, and conquer the world over the coming years; two would drop by the wayside. In Australia and the Soviet Union, major air crashes had claimed dozens of lives. Midmonth, Portuguese colonial forces had fired on a crowd of pro-independence protesters in the Mozambican town of Mueda, killing between five and six hundred people. The massacre catalyzed resistance to colonial rule, and in the months that followed a number of nationalist groupings crystallized in response. In contrast, a few days afterward, the Congo, long the blood-soaked crown jewel in the Belgian Empire, was finally granted independence after years of strife. As the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States heated up, recently launched weather satellites began beaming remarkably specific information on weather patterns back to earth. And in New York, an Alfred Hitchcock film titled Psycho had premiered in two movie theaters before huge, and terrified, crowds.
Charlotte Dod was long forgotten by that summer of 1960. She was a Victorian relic in the nuclear age. On the rare instances she was talked or written about, by sports commentators and historians, she was always referred to by her childhood nickname of “Lottie,” even though she repeatedly made it clear that she loathed the diminutive. Indeed, as far back as 1893, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, she had admonished a reporter for the Westminster Gazette, “Pray do not call me Lottie. My name is Charlotte and I hate to be called Lottie in public.”[32] In her time, however, under that detested moniker she had been hands down the most famous, most versatile, and most accomplished female athlete on earth. She was known through the British Isles, and—courtesy of the spreading reach of England’s newspapers and periodicals, and the wonders of telegraphy—the wider empire, as Lottie, “the Little Wonder,” the youngest person of either sex ever to win a singles trophy at a major tennis tournament. One hundred and fifty years after her birth, that record still stands;