The day Wimbledon stood on the front line of a human rights struggle

The All England Club is such an establishment bastion that you wouldn’t believe middle-class Wimbledon women once tried to burn it down.

The Championships are synonymous with many things: queues, long summer nights of enthralling combat and pundits who insist on referring to the players by their first names (“Roger”, “Andy”, “Novak” and “Serena”.)

Arson, on the front line of Britain’s human rights struggle, features less often in SW19’s mythology.

In February 1913, an unknown female scaled the hedge on Centre Court at the All England’s former Worple Road site carrying a black leather bag and women’s dress basket containing paraffin, bundles of wood shavings and a towel. Also found at the scene was a piece of cardboard inscribed with: “No peace until women get the vote.”

It was 10pm and the club was empty but the groundsman Joseph Parsons spotted the intruder and challenged her. Running away, she fell, was apprehended, and handed over to the police. Newspaper reports claimed she had carried firelighters and a gallon of petrol.

At the local station the suffragette said only: “I object to being charged. I object to being detained here.”

The Western Mail carried a picture from her court appearance of a smartly dressed woman who had refused to give her name, age or address, but was thought by reporters to be about 35. She was sentenced to two months in jail.

The “Silent Suffragette”, as she was labelled, was an agent of a sustained campaign of letter bombing, arson, explosions and physical harassment in pursuit of the right for women to vote, with the genteel Wimbledon district one of its most active cells. Before the failed plot to reduce the All England Club to ash, Wimbledon suffragettes had carved “Votes for Women” into the greens of Wimbledon Common Golf Club and vandalised another course at Raynes Park.

They paid a high price for the conspiracy against Wimbledon’s Arcadia. A month after the arson attempt, at a Sunday gathering on the Common, suffragettes were “brutally assaulted” by men.

Some rushed the speakers’ platform and shouted “Kill them, kill them”, when beaten women were on the ground. Police hurried them to the house of a local sympathiser.

In the same year Emily Davison stepped in front of the King’s horse in the Derby and later died from her injuries. The Women’s Social and Political Union tried to burn down Crystal Palace’s grandstand before the 1913 FA Cup final (Wembley wasn’t opened until 1923.) Across the country there were numerous attacks on sport.

In the 112 years since the Silent Suffragette was rumbled before she could strike a match, the All England Club has dealt with climate, pro-Palestinian and assorted other political protests, without ever losing its Truman Show vibe. Wimbledon is one of the places where Britain seeks an escape from daily fears; where everything feels ordered and pretty and safe.

The first Ladies’ Championship was staged in 1884 – long before women had to break their backs in fields and munitions factories during the First World War to render the ban on their voting rights untenable. Limited suffrage was extended to women over 30 with property in 1918 before equality was finally “granted” 10 years later.

An enduring mystery from the time of the Silent Suffragette is how the All England Club came to adopt, in 1909, the same colours as the women’s movement: “purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope”.

Seven years ago an SW19 resident wrote to the club asking them to acknowledge that they had “consciously copied” the colours of the suffragette movement. From beyond the grave, the suffragettes might smile at their colours becoming a commercial goldmine.

We’re less likely to see a plaque to the anonymous arsonist of 1913 than we are shorts and singlets in the Royal Box. Nobody commemorates the person who tried to burn their house down, however valid the cause. But it remains striking that the commercial juggernaut of Wimbledon tennis was once on the front line of a struggle so fundamental to human rights that you can hardly believe it took until 1928 for justice to be served.

In 2007, the Women’s Tennis Association won its fight for equal prize money. This year’s winners of the men’s and women’s singles will each receive £3 million.

The disputes we hear nowadays tend to be about roof closures, scheduling, and the mounting cost of a jug of Pimm’s. Even line call rancour is on the way out, as digital technology replaces those smartly dressed human crouchers.

Nothing will ever beat the fight for women’s suffrage, but media skirmishes are not uncommon. The Guardian sports writer Frank Keating was once called before the panjandrums for a breach of Centre Court press box etiquette.

The great scribe was told he was to be suspended from the Championships “for a year”. No fan of Wimbledon, or its ways, Keating replied in that gentle voice of his: “Couldn’t you make it life?”

Photograph by Getty Images