Jane Bown took this picture of schoolgirls on a day out at the tennis at Wimbledon for the front page of the Observer on 29 June 1952. It was the hottest day of the year, 85 degrees, and 200 people had been taken to the hospital tent at the tournament, having fainted. The girls were queuing up for ice creams in a break between matches. “Wimbledon does not mean only tennis to these girls,” the caption noted. “It means also a chance to survey the adult world with the sensitive and critical eye of adolescence.”
Bown’s own eyes never lost those latter qualities. She took this photograph in the third of her 65 years with the paper; she had already an instinct for the intimate life of a crowd. Her camera would have been drawn to the contrast between the girl in the Hollywood shades and the more conventionally bespectacled girl at her side; she would have inveigled her way into the perfect position to capture that small visual drama without commotion. The idea of “teenagers” had not yet been invented, but the girl’s look offers a premonition of that cultural shift.
Wimbledon was not quite so alive to the forces of change. That year Frank Sedgman, the dazzling Australian, won three titles – singles, doubles and mixed doubles. His triumphs were put down to the fact that he trained in a gym in the closed season, a seriousness that was considered a little unsporting by the All England Club. Sedgman’s only reward for his efforts was a shopping voucher worth a few pounds. He turned professional later that year and was consequently unable to play again at the championships until after 1968, when Wimbledon finally changed its amateur-only rule.
