Fred Perry(1909–1995)

Frederick John Perry was born at Stockport in industrial Cheshire on 18 May 1909, only son of a cotton-mill spinner and Co-operative organiser who became Labour MP for Kettering in 1923. The family moved to Ealing in west London on the father's election, and the young Fred, with no money for tennis subscriptions, started on the cheaper indoor game first.

He won the World Table Tennis Championships at Budapest in January 1929 at nineteen, then switched to lawn tennis the same summer, on the principle that the two games rewarded the same wrist-and-eye combination, a crossover contemporaries thought anatomically rare.

The Lawn Tennis Association took him onto its development squad in 1930. He won the United States Championships at Forest Hills in 1933, and on 6 July 1934 came onto the Centre Court and beat Jack Crawford in straight sets to take the Wimbledon men's singles title, the first British man to win it in a generation. He won it three years in succession: 1934, 1935 and 1936. No other British man took the title until Andy Murray in 2013, seventy-seven years later.

He won eight Grand Slam singles titles between 1933 and 1936, three Wimbledon, three United States, one Australian and one French, and led Great Britain to four consecutive Davis Cup victories. He turned professional in 1936 and toured the American professional circuit, took American citizenship in 1939, and served in the United States Army Air Force through the war.

The Fred Perry clothing brand was the second career and is the surviving cultural product of his name. With the Austrian coach Tibby Wegner he designed a slim white cotton tennis shirt with the laurel-wreath badge at the chest; the first shirts came off a Manchester line in 1952, were taken up by the British mod and skinhead subcultures of the 1960s, and the brand is now in its eighth decade of continuous production. He played exhibition tennis and commentated into his eighties, and died at Melbourne on 2 February 1995, eighty-five years old, having come down to commentate on the Australian Open. The Perry name, the Old English locative of the pear-tree, he carried from a Stockport mill-spinner's house into both Wimbledon's seventy-seven-year British men's drought and the polo shirt that wears his name now.