ABSTRACT

John Betjeman’s poem, The Subaltern’s Sweetheart, celebrates the beauty of the female tennis player as she covers the court with ‘the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy!’ The poem hymns an ideal of the English summer with tennis as central to it and the idyll of green grass, white clothes and pretty girls, accompanied by the rhythmic, regular “thwok” of the ball hit back and forth. This ideal has persisted into the twenty-first century, enshrined above all at Wimbledon: utterly English, serenely middle-class and sweetly carefree. It is so innocent – and so remote from contemporary tennis.