Fred Perry(1909–1995)

Frederick John Perry was born at 4 Brook Bank Road, Edgeley, on the south side of Stockport in industrial Cheshire on 18 May 1909, only son of Samuel Perry, a Stockport cotton-mill spinner and Co-operative Society organiser of small means, and Hannah Birch. The family was working-class Labour Lancashire of the Edwardian generation; the father became, after a long Co-operative-movement apprenticeship, the Labour MP for Kettering at the 1923 general election and a parliamentary whip in the 1929 MacDonald minority government. The family moved south to Ealing in west London on the father's parliamentary appointment in 1923, and the fourteen-year-old Fred was put through the Brentham Garden Suburb's Ealing County School. He took to ball sports immediately. The household had no money for tennis subscriptions, so he started on the cheaper indoor game first.

He won the World Table Tennis Championships at Budapest in January 1929 at nineteen, beating the Hungarian veteran Mihály Szabados in the men's-singles final. The British table-tennis governing body had supplied him with a thirty-pound annual subvention through the year of his championship preparation; the win returned the Co-operative-Society father's confidence in his son's working career. He switched to lawn tennis the same summer. He had been playing at the public courts at Brentham Park in Ealing through the table-tennis years on the working principle that the two games rewarded the same wrist-and-eye combination; the switch took him from the table to the grass-court game in a way that was, by every contemporary observer's account, anatomically rare.

The four Lawn Tennis Association coaches at the Queen's Club, west London, took him onto the development squad in 1930. He played his first Davis Cup tie for Great Britain at the 1931 European Zone semifinal in Paris (lost), the first round of the 1932 Wimbledon men's singles (won three rounds, lost the quarter-final), and the United States Championships at Forest Hills in September 1933 (took the men's singles title against Jack Crawford). The Wimbledon championship was the next year. He came onto the Centre Court on 6 July 1934 to play Jack Crawford in the men's singles final and beat him 6-3, 6-0, 7-5 in three sets, took the men's singles title at his fifth Wimbledon, and was the first British male player to win it since Bunny Austin's first round-of-sixteen exit at the 1931 Championships had ended the Edwardian-Edward-Hodson Bunny-Austin generation's chances. The Wimbledon title was won three years in succession: 1934, 1935, 1936. No other British male player took the men's singles title at Wimbledon until Andy Murray in 2013, seventy-seven years later.

He won eight Grand Slam singles titles in the eight years between 1933 and 1936: three Wimbledon (1934, 1935, 1936), three United States (1933, 1934, 1936), one Australian (1934), one French (1935). He led Great Britain to four consecutive Davis Cup victories between 1933 and 1936. He turned professional in November 1936 on a contract with the American promoter Ellsworth Vines, played the early American professional-circuit tour at a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars across the 1937 season, and was effectively barred from amateur-only Wimbledon for the remaining twenty years of his playing career (the professional-amateur distinction was not lifted at the four Grand Slams until 1968). He took American citizenship in 1939, served in the United States Army Air Force as a physical-training instructor through the war, and was demobbed in 1946 to a life as a tennis coach and equipment promoter in Florida.

The Fred Perry clothing brand was the second career and is the surviving cultural-product of his name. He met the Austrian-Jewish refugee tennis-coach Tibby Wegner at a Vienna 1948 exhibition and the two of them spent four years working on the design of a slim white cotton athletic shirt that would absorb the perspiration of the Centre-Court summer better than the existing British-and-American tennis-clothing market offered. The first hundred shirts came off the Manchester production line in spring 1952 under the new Perry-Wegner brand, with the laurel-wreath badge stitched at the chest (the Wegner-designed motif on Perry's amateur-era Wimbledon trophy presentation). The brand sold the polo shirt slowly through the 1950s, was taken up by the British mod-and-skinhead subcultures of the 1960s as an unofficial uniform, and is now a international fashion brand in its eighth decade of continuous production. He sold his stake to the Japanese Hit Union in 1995, six months before his death. He continued playing exhibition tennis on the senior-circuit at amateur charity events through his eighties, died of a fall in his Melbourne hotel room on 2 February 1995, eighty-five years old, on the eve of the Australian Open final he had come down from Florida to commentate on. The Perry name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *pyrige* (the pear-tree), an Old English place-name compressed into the surname through the medieval parish maps of the Midlands; he carried it from a Stockport mill-spinner's house into both Wimbledon's seventy-seven-year British men's singles drought and the laurel-wreath polo shirt that wears his name now.