ABSTRACT
This chapter looks historically at “Wimbledon”, the annual tennis championship staged by the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) in London, and in particular at the subtly mutating notions of the “Englishness” which the tournament has so often been claimed to represent. This “Englishness” has, inevitably, always been rooted in social class myths, skilfully adapted according to changing political circumstance. The chapter revisits much of the content of my previous article “Sacred Turf” (Wagg 2015) and takes account of recent work by the leading historian of English tennis, Robert J. Lake (Lake 2017a and 2017b). It attempts to identify and interpret the elements of “Englishness” that Wimbledon has, at different times, been held to represent.
