Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
the Little Wonder’s last hurrah, her Olympic silver in archery, had been more than half a century earlier. Still photos from that event show her standing ramrod straight, a slightly dour-looking middle-aged lady in a full-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse. She sported a quiver of arrows sticking out from a pouch on her right leg, her left arm was steadying the bow, her right arm pulling back on an arrow, about to let it fly. On her head was what looked to be a double-layered cap, one peak resting on the other. There was almost no cinema footage of her from her two-decade-long sporting career—just a few fleeting, silent seconds of her firing off arrows at bull’s-eyes at the 1908 Olympics, the crackly old reel kept in the British Film Institute archives—no extant radio interviews from her heyday. She had peaked just before the era in which sports stars were raised to immortality by visual and audio media. There weren’t films about her, she hadn’t made her fortune from the sorts of dizzyingly large sports winnings and sponsorship deals that later generations of champions would earn.
During World War I, Dod worked somewhat anonymously as a nurse on the home front, caring for wounded soldiers evacuated back to London from the continental killing fields, and in the process winning medals from the Red Cross for her services. After the war, she took up choral singing and piano playing, performing with a well-known London-based group called the Oriana Madrigal Society, and even at one point serenading the king and queen with Bach cantatas in a private chapel at Buckingham Palace.
For decades, she had been a slightly eccentric dowager, unmarried, seemingly—at least according to the late-life memories of her nephew G.E. Worssam—void of romantic feelings.[33] Worssam described her, without elaborating, as a “difficult” lady, and recalled that in their later years the various family members had grown apart. Younger relatives remembered her in old age as a serious, even morose person, someone slow to smile and oftentimes sharp-tongued.[34] When a male relative married an older woman, Lottie noted the fact somewhat contemptuously, mentioning that she had once been wooed by a younger man, a guards officer, but had turned him down because of his age.[35] Perhaps, in truth, she had never had the time or inclination for marriage, or for relationships with men, her obsession with sports taking precedence over all things domestic. Perhaps the anecdote that she told a reporter for the Evening Times-Republican, a newspaper published in Marshalltown, Iowa, during her tour of the United States in 1904, was in fact autobiographical. “Golf in Scotland is almost a disease. The passions and the perseverance that the Scot brings to golf are quite incredible.” She went on to explain, “I heard not long ago of an elderly bachelor in Edinburg [sic] who had played golf from his boyhood up. He was a lawyer, and every minute he could steal from the courts was devoted to the links. This man allowed neither religion nor society nor business to interfere with his daily golf. He had never courted a girl because, he said, golf hadn’t allowed him the time.”[36]
To an observer in the last years of her life, the elderly spinster Dod might have been a Miss Marple character, easy to underestimate or dismiss; a lioness and precedent breaker disguised as a prim-and-proper, churchgoing mouse.
On the same day that she died in Sway, that June 27, Harry Pollitt, the longtime general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, passed away of a brain hemorrhage while on a ship that was returning him from a speaking tour in Australia.
The next day, Pollitt’s death was widely reported, with long obituaries in many of the newspapers. The communist Daily Worker lauded him, somewhat hagiographically, as “a human, loveable man, with a great sense of humour and a seemingly endless store of stories having not only some important political point but also their highly amusing side.”[37] Dod’s passing, by contrast, was treated as an afterthought. In Scotland, a few hours after her death, the Aberdeen Evening Express published three peremptory paragraphs, informing readers, “Miss Lottie Dod, a Wimbledon champion of the 1880s, has died in a south coast nursing home.”[38] In England’s second city, the Birmingham Daily Post published Pollitt’s and Dod’s obituaries side by side on page four. Pollitt’s death merited fifteen paragraphs, spread across two columns, and a photo; Dod’s a mere five short paragraphs. So, too, the next morning the London Guardian, while mourning the death of “one of the most remarkable sportswomen of the nineteenth century,” only gave Dod four paragraphs and a photo. Running down the left two columns of that same page was a huge tribute to Pollitt, detailing the complex twists and turns of a life begun in slum housing in working-class Lancashire, one that included spells in prison and long years as an organizer and party apparatchik. “His life was devoted to what he regarded as a righteous war against the conditions of his childhood,” the obituary noted.[39] There was also a front-page news story on his death.
In America the next day, the New York Times deemed Dod’s death worthy of only three paragraphs, taken off the Reuters newswire, and reported out of the seaside town of Bournemouth. The tone was decidedly understated: “Lottie Dod, who had been a tennis champion and all-round athlete, died in a nursing home here last night. She was 88 years old.” Even the Minneapolis Star, which in bold print in its afternoon edition dramatically titled its tribute “Lottie Dod, Old British Athletic Queen, Dies,” could only squeeze out five short paragraphs, also taken off the Reuters newswire.[40]
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At her death, the onetime sporting superstar’s estate was, according to the probate documents, valued at a precariously respectable middle-class 24,013 pounds, three shillings, and sixpence.[41]
She was likely buried in a simple ceremony. There were no news reports on her funeral, no indication of top-level representation—no government officials or senior figures within the world of sports came to commemorate the passing of this extraordinary sportswoman.
Over time, the younger generations of relatives would even forget where her body rested. Perhaps hers was one of the several dozen graves in the Sway cemetery on the edge of town that over the years were left untended and eventually became so weathered, so damaged by moss and algae, by rain and wind, that the carved words on the tombstones were no longer legible. Or maybe hers was one of the many graves so overgrown with grass and brambles and moss and weeds in the cemetery surrounding the little brick building that was St. Luke’s Church, just down the street from the Sway railway station, that it was impossible to see the names of those who lay beneath. Perhaps she had been buried slightly farther away, in one of the county-run cemeteries in Lymington or New Milton, each of which had many grave sites that over the decades would become entirely broken down, the stones cracked, the names of their dead long vanished.[42]
Wherever her final resting place, Lottie Dod would be left to navigate eternity alone. Nobody would be there over the years and decades to come to tend her grave or to mourn on the anniversary of her passing.
In her heyday, Dod had been more famous than all but a handful of women in Britain—and most of those who captured more attention from the turn-of-the-century newspapermen were ladies renowned for their titles, their places in high society, rather than for their achievements. Dod, by contrast, was fabled for what she did rather than the title she wore. In her glory years, she had been profiled in and photographed for the leading journals of the age. But even in her lifetime, those writers and photographers had abandoned her as her great accomplishments became but a distant memory from an impossibly long-gone era. She had spent the last decades of her life a silhouette. By the time she died, she had, for nearly half a century already, been shrouded in anonymity.
Lottie Dod’s letters and most of her photo albums—a different album for each sport—her hockey stick and alpenstock, one of her archery bows, and other meager possessions were parceled out to relatives. Her brother Tony’s oldest son kept many of these in the cellar of his large farmhouse in the village of Chieveley, in the county of Berkshire. And, as one generation gave way to another and to another after that, over the decades many of these records of her life vanished—disappeared in estate sales, perhaps thrown away as unwanted clutter. What was left of Dod’s eighty-eight years were shards, ghostly glimpses, in archives, in collectors’ albums, in newspaper morgues, of the larger-than-life achievements of the Little Wonder, that most out-of-the-ordinary Victorian lady.
In 1984, the essayist Kenneth Lash published an imaginary encounter with Woody Allen in which he embarrassed the film director by referencing people whom