Late in the afternoon of May 9, 1915, a German heavy artillery shell came crashing through the roof of a British officer’s dugout near Neuve Chapelle, France, killing three of its four occupants.
The trio were just a handful of more than 11,000 British casualties from the Battle of Aubers Ridge, that began earlier that day.
Videos by VICE
Yet the death of the highest ranked victim – a 31-year-old captain from New Zealand who was in charge of a Royal Marines armoured car detachment – would be felt more keenly, and reverberate further, than many others on the early World War I battlefield.
Anthony Wilding, the best tennis player in the world, was dead.
During his time on tennis’s top tier between 1906 and 1914, the Christchurch-born former lawyer won 11 Grand Slam titles in both singles and doubles. Six of those were singles; four straight Wimbledon titles between 1910 and 1913, and two Australian Open victories in 1906 and 1909.
Since his appearance in the 1914 Wimbledon final, which he’d lose to Australian Norman Brookes 4-6, 4-6, 5-7, only one other Kiwi – Chris Lewis in 1983 – has made it to a Wimbledon final. Lewis got thrashed by American bad boy John McEnroe.
Kiwi Anthony Wilding playing in the 1910 Wimbledon singles final, which he would win. Photo credit: WikiMedia Commons.
He’d win the Davis Cup with a combined Australasian team four years (1907, 1908, 1909 and 1914), while picking up a bronze medal in indoor singles at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.
To this day, Wilding – who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island in 1978 – still holds the record for most tournament titles won in a single season – 23 in 1906 – as well as most career clay court titles, with 75 in all. With Australian legend Rod Laver, he shares the record for most career outdoor titles won with 114.
The New Zealander’s fluid, athletic tennis was only punctuated, by most accounts, by an incredibly powerful forehand.
Yet the legend of Wilding goes beyond his style, ability and incredible on court records. The Kiwi was a true renaissance man of the first order; a Jay Gatsby before F Scott Fitzgerald had ever dreamed up the green light at the end of the pier.
Weaved amongst his stellar tennis career, Wilding – who never drank or smoked – studied law at Cambridge, toured around Europe solo on a motorbike, joined up for war on the recommendation of his ‘mate’ Winston Churchill – and was dating an American Hollywood starlet, Maxine Elliott, when he died.
“Some say he was the James Dean of his day, but he was also the [Roger] Federer of his day,” Anna Wilding, Anthony’s great niece, told the New Zealand Herald in 2014 when some early photos of the tennis star had been unearthed in London.
“When I look at Federer and his classic style, I often think of Anthony Wilding. They played a gentler game back then, but these photos show a lot of technique, which he was well known for.”
Often before tournaments, according to the New Zealand Herald, Wilding would turn up with only one pair of clothes – and would have to borrow friends whites to get onto the court.
Captain Anthony Wilding in an armoured car, before he headed to battle in France in WWI. Source: Myers (1916) ‘Captain Anthony Wilding’ via WikiMedia Commons.
His dashing manner was all the range in pre-War England too. His Wimbledon singles victory over American national champion Maurice McLoughlin in 1913 caused so many women to faint that the had to be “laid out on the court beside the roller until they could be removed,” Melbourne’s Argus newspaper reported.
In a time when rugby was still establishing itself in the New Zealand sporting consciousness, and the Antipodean nation still considered itself more truly English than truly Polynesian in nature, Wilding was a beloved Kiwi public figure.
In many respects, New Zealand’s own identity – and differences from Mother England – were forged in World War One in the trenches of Gallipoli, the Somme and Ypres.
Yet before it, to represent New Zealand well was to represent the British Empire first. Wilding’s character and approach to life seemed to sum that up completely.
His success on the grass of Wimbledon, and gentlemanly nature as he travelled the world, made him New Zealand’s ambassador to it; a noble bloke from a noble people.
“More brilliant players, greater artists and more subtle tacticians have appeared on the centre court, but no finer athlete, no man better equipped physically for the fray, no man inspired with such a consuming desire to do his best,” English biographer Arthur Wallis Myers would later write of Wilding.
Wilding was born to wealthy English parents in Christchurch in 1883 and played first-class cricket for Canterbury, and rugby for Cambridge, before committing himself fully to tennis.
Though he’d win the New Zealand national title in 1907, talent as rare as Wilding’s could never stay in the Land of the White Cloud for good. Europe would be his home for the majority of years before the Great War broke out.
Wilding’s original grave near Nueve Chapelle in France. Photo credit: Myers (1916) ‘Captain Anthony Wilding’ via WikiMedia Commons.
Back in New Zealand, where Christchurch’s main tennis park has been named after him, he has been remained through multiple books and reflective articles that attempt to re-introduce the Wilding mythology to another generation of Kiwis. Perhaps this is another attempt to do that. If not, his is a story that could be told time and time again, anyway.
The night before his death in Neuve Chapelle, Wilding spent the evening in the trenches with Lt. R. S. Barnes, a old lawn tennis buddy from the Rivera circuit days. According to Myers’ 1915 biography titled ‘Captain Anthony Wilding,’ the Kiwi and his English mate reminisced about their time back on the court.
Myers wrote that just before Wilding wrapped himself in a coat to sleep, Barnes said: “well, old man, you were in rotten form when you met Brookes [referring to his Wimbledon final loss the previous year].”
“One can’t always be at one’s best,” Wilding replied, as he left. It was the last reference he ever made to the sport that will forever define him, and a New Zealand that never knew war.
