In 1946, Wimbledon Served as a Sign That War Was Really Over

Shakespeare tells of the Dauphin of France mockingly sending a case of tennis balls as a gift for English King Henry V in 1415, provoking a fracas on French soil. But how welcome such a shipment would have been more than five centuries later, after another conflict in Europe, as sporting subjects of King George VI tried to reestablish a tradition called Wimbledon.

Balls--certainly white then--were hard to find. In 1946, the Vatican of Tennis was a mess, a gaping hole left in the roof of Centre Court by Nazi bombers. Even though World War II had ended 10 months before, Britain, after a close call against Germany, was still severely limited by wartime rationing of practically everything.

“We were just glad to have made it,” says R.E.H. “Buzzer” Hadingham, who would become Wimbledon’s most progressive chairman in the 1980s.

Like so many, he had been away for years, fighting, neglecting his tennis and other aspects of life. “I wasn’t on the tournament committee then,” he says. “They’re all gone now, but they did a terrific job under terrible handicaps, determined that this part of English life should be restored quickly after a six-year lapse.”

Says Chris Gorringe: “I’m told that the most worrisome aspect of restarting the Championship in 1946 was the shortage of balls. Everything was short after World War II, of course, but balls were rather essential.”

Gorringe is secretary of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, where the world’s foremost tennis bash begins Monday on God’s own grass, as ever since 1877--with time out for two world wars.

Gorringe has his own problems, keeping well-cosseted pros and more than 300,000 customers in good fettle. But nothing similar to rescuing the tournament from a blackout of half a dozen years, patching a roof, replacing 1,200 seats that were bombed out of use for ‘46, finding enough food for player lunches and soap for showers. He doesn’t have to crank up a cobwebbed, neglected club that had been used as a civil defense center, army barracks and farm.

“They had used the parking lots to raise pigs and chickens and vegetable gardens. And the courts were untended until late ’45 because the groundsmen went off to fight,” says journalist Lawrie Pignon, who covered his first Wimbledon that year. “For a press headquarters, they fixed up a small room with four tables for lunch and four to write at.”

But Pancho Segura says: “It was Wimbledon, and we were excited to be here after all the years of dreaming about it.” Ecuadorean-born Segura, a Hall of Famer and now the pro emeritus at La Costa, had come to the United States to play tennis for the University of Miami and win three NCAA titles, from 1943-45. “Tennis went on in America despite the war and a lot of guys going into the service,” he says. “The U.S. Championships kept on at Forest Hills.

“All we knew of the war was newsreels. But when I came in here and saw that hole in the roof and the area of the damaged seats roped off, and the bomb damage all over London, it meant something.”

Pignon smiles and says, “The public spirit was marvelous that year. You couldn’t get decent clothes, but women rummaged around in attics to find summer hats and dresses they hadn’t worn in years. Men came in their military uniforms or what we called ‘demob’ suits, the drab suits they gave you when you were demobilized. Discharged. We were all so happy to be free of the war, to go to Wimbledon again.

“Club members gave up their shoe-ration coupons so the ballboys could have sneakers. A sports club couldn’t get building priorities, but Wimbledon bought some old army huts and used the wood to rebuild the outer fences. It brought out ingenuity and resourcefulness.”

Even for players. “We rode the subway to get here,” Segura says. No gas could be allotted for ferrying players back and forth from the hotels, so the poor souls had to actually travel to the ballpark on their own.

“The food wasn’t much,” Segura said. “A lot of cucumber sandwiches, but you know the English--stiff upper lip, old boy. They got it done. Well, we did have some steaks--horse meat.”

And there were enough balls. Hadingham, now retired as an executive at Slazenger, the supplier since 1902, says, “The Germans razed our ballmaking plant with firebombs early in the war. But we found another factory in Yorkshire, although going back into production was very slow right after the war.”

California was the world’s primary tennis vineyard then, and the pick of the ’46 crop, Jack Kramer and Pauline Betz, were supposed to win. She did, over another Californian, Louise Brough, losing no sets and only 20 games in six matches. Rounding out the all-California semifinals were Margaret Osborne and Dodo Bundy.

“The American women were the class. They played their circuit uninterrupted during the war. But it was a screwy tournament for the men,” Segura says. Seeded fourth, he lost in the third round to Californian Tom Brown, the year before a combat infantryman in Europe. “Kramer got hurt. You didn’t know how guys would play after the service, and never heard of some of them, like [Jaroslav] Drobny, the guy who beat Kramer. Or the big Frenchman, [Yvon] Petra, who won it all.”

Kramer, tall, blond crew-cut “Big Jake” with the serve-and-volley big game, had mothballed his Coast Guard uniform and memory-banked recent Pacific island invasions. He was fortified by American steaks, shipped frozen to him by a Chicago meatpacker, and the knowledge that he was the world’s best.

But he hadn’t played a major since losing the U.S. final of 1943 to a Los Angeles pal, Navy pilot Joe Hunt, both on leave. Kramer was seeded second behind Australian Dinny Pails, who had won his country’s title in 1946, the first of the three shelved majors to reactivate. Neither came close to the title.

Pails may have gone underground: He lost his way on the subway. Arriving 20 minutes late and flustered, he rushed onto Centre Court where Queen Mary had been kept waiting in the Royal Box. There he fell in the quarterfinals to the giant Petra, at 6 feet 5 the tallest of the Wimbledon champions and the last to triumph in long white trousers and white cap.

Petra also wore shoes, though he had learned to play barefoot in Vietnam (then French Indochina), where his parents were colonials. His prospects of ever winning a major seemed past. Seeded fifth, he was 30 and had a tough war in the French Army, wounded and, for a while, a German prisoner of war. But his huge serve boomed, and he closed with five-set victories over Berkeley’s Tom Brown and Aussie Geoff Brown, the first to flash a two-fisted forehand and shorts at that pinnacle.

But the epic was Kramer’s fourth-round jolting by the unseeded Czech Drobny, 2-6, 17-15, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3. A portly, clever left-hander, Drobny had appeared at Wimbledon as a teenager in 1939, thinking as the war stretched on and on, “I’d probably never get back. But I became a household name in Britain with that win,” says Drobny, 74, a defector in 1949, eventually a British citizen and a Londoner. “But people thought I’d never win Wimbledon.” He did in 1954.

Drobny doesn’t remember 1946 as difficult here. But, then, he had outlasted the war in occupied Czechoslovakia, avoiding relocation in Germany as a slave laborer because he had a job in a German-controlled Prague factory. “The food at Wimbledon seemed OK. I was young and it was free. Mostly sandwiches. Better than at home. Not much tennis during the war. We used the few balls until they fell apart. If a string broke, you hoped to find an old racket and took a string from it.”

Kramer had a blister on his racket hand, the right, and it opened during the Drobny match. “It was raw, awful looking,” says Pignon, fresh from slave labor himself in a coal mine as a German prisoner of war.

Present as a cub reporter for the Daily Sketch, Pignon “left the press box and sat with the photographers behind the umpire’s chair. I had a close look. Jack’s hand was covered with pus and blood. No medical attention allowed in that day, and no chairs to sit on. You were expected to keep going. He’d try to bandage it best he could when they changed ends--with the umpire glaring at him for taking the time.

“But Kramer won over everybody because he never uttered one word of complaint. He had only praise for Drobny, and he won the championship effortlessly in ’47.

“I had a good story, and showed it to my boss, the sports editor. He said ‘That’s too good for you, sonny,’ and ran it under his own byline.”

The theft didn’t bother Pignon long. “I vowed that if I ever got out of that prison camp, nothing would ever make me unhappy again,” he says.

That was the Spirit of ’46. Wimbledon was back, out of shape, maimed with a hole in its head, but damned if wouldn’t live happily ever after.