Page 520 - The Secret Museum

On day one of its opening, of course, it being England, and it being Wimbledon, it

rained. People didn’t mind too much as it gave them a chance to check out the new
grounds. It wasn’t until 3.30 in the afternoon that the King and Queen came into the
royal box and the King banged a gong three times to open Wimbledon. The new
Centre Court was revealed, in all its shadowless, smooth, green glory.

The first match began. The players were Colonel Kingscote and Mr Leslie
Godfree. Mr Godfree served the first serve ever on Centre Court, and Colonel
Kingscote whacked it straight into the net. Godfree pocketed the ball as a memento.
His opponent’s poor start didn’t matter as he went on to win the match. The first

match on the new Centre Court may have lacked the drama of some of the thousands
of matches that have since been played there, but everyone was happy they’d been
able to see a game at all, despite the drizzle. Due to the bad weather, only one more
match was possible that day. There were a few muddy footprints on the court by
sunset.

The Wimbledon museum store has plenty more treasures. There are two small
storage rooms. The first one, which contains the plans, also houses paintings,
postcards, greetings cards, tickets, passes, posters, sculptures and ceramics right

from the early days, and up until the 2012 Olympics. There are also lots of costumes,
from long white dresses and suits worn in the twenties to sexier little white dresses
and men’s kit from more recent times. They’re all hanging in white bags, as if they
were in a dry-cleaner’s.

Just next door to that room is the racket store. As you’d imagine, there are rows of
tennis rackets, arranged chronologically, from the old wooden style, used in the
1870s and for the next hundred years, to the modern graphite rackets. Above the
wooden rackets are lots of wooden presses, which the rackets were put away in.

Players kept their rackets for years back then – they’d never have imagined that, in
the future, players would swap rackets several times a match. It was interesting to
see the moment graphite rackets arrived in the seventies represented in the museum’s
collection. Some people used them right away, and others, like McEnroe, used
wooden ones until the 1980s. There are some of his in the row, mixed in with the
graphite.

Federer, Cash, Henman, Agassi – all of them have donated their rackets to the
collection. Opposite them all, on the floor, is the biggest racket in the world, made

for a shop promotion, and the biggest tennis ball. There was a sign on the shelf in the
racket store that I liked, as it seemed so typically English – it looks like a big green
table tennis bat, and it reads ‘End of Queue’. ‘There’s always a queue at
Wimbledon,’ said Honor.

Honor pointed out four rackets that were used for the friendly mixed doubles
match played on 17 May 2009, when Centre Court’s roof was first used. After years
of pondering over and then planning the roof, finally the Wimbledon organizers had
an ally against the haphazard English summer. Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf took on