This year’s Wimbledon is the first since Scottish tennis star, Andy Murray, retired from professional tennis.
The sporting legend won the men’s singles title at SW19 twice, in 2013 and 2016, breaking a near 80-year string of bad luck to become the first British champion at the men’s event since Fred Perry back in 1936.
But it is not so well known that Murray also became the first Scottish-born men’s winner since Edinburgh’s own Harold Mahony in 1896, reports The Scottish Daily Express.
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Born in Charlotte Square, Mahony came from an Irish family based at Dromore Castle, in County Kerry.
His father, a barrister and landowner, had courts built at the Irish castle for his son to practice on and he became a formidable tennis player. At 6’3″, he was extraordinarily tall for the Victorian era and was equipped with a long reach and a “spiteful backhand”.
He reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1891 before travelling to America to develop his game (a little like today’s professionals with training camps in Florida) and then returning to sweep to victory five years later.
It was the high point of his career, despite a silver medal in the 1900 Olympics, but Mahony was popular with the fans of the day thanks to his “casual and irresponsible attitude” and his “generous heart”.
He was also an accomplished musician and a hit with “the ladies”, who was often in demand for one-to-one coaching sessions at country houses across the British Isles. According to a profile in the Independent, he may have been in an on-off relationship with the greatest female tennis player of her day.
Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Dod won the Wimbledon ladies’ singles title five times, the first when she was just 15 in 1887. Four years later, the 1891 census records Mahony staying as a guest at the Cheshire home of Dod and her widowed mother. She was also known to holiday in Scotland.
But tragedy struck on June 27, 1905, when the tall tennis champion was killed in a bicycle accident near the family home in Ireland. A newspaper report from the time states: “He was descending a steep hill near Caragh Lake, Co. Kerry, lost control of his machine, and was thrown heavily to the ground, sustaining fatal injuries.”
As the Independent noted: “His body was found, alongside his broken bike… And Lottie Dod? She never married.”
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