Perry

At a quarter to six on the evening of Friday the sixth of July 1934, on the Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon, Frederick John Perry, twenty-five years old, the Stockport-born former World Table Tennis Champion who had taken up lawn tennis only five years earlier at the relatively late age of twenty, defeated the Australian Jack Crawford in the Men's Singles Final 6–3, 6–0, 7–5 to become the first British male singles champion at the Wimbledon Championships since Arthur Gore in 1909, a twenty-five-year span that had become the longest such gap in the history of the tournament. Perry won the Wimbledon Singles title again in 1935 against Gottfried von Cramm (6–2, 6–4, 6–4) and a third time in 1936 against von Cramm again (6–1, 6–1, 6–0), the three-in-a-row Wimbledon-singles record that has been matched in the seventy-four years since only by Björn Borg (1976–80, five) and Roger Federer (2003–07, five), and exceeded by no British player. He took eight Major singles championships in total: three Wimbledon titles, three US Open titles, an Australian Open and a French Open, making him at his 1936 retirement the only player in the history of men's tennis to have won all four of the modern Grand Slams (the Career Grand Slam, eventually matched by Don Budge in 1938 and confirmed as the central single benchmark of men's tennis the next year). His Wimbledon win of 1934 ended the longest male-singles drought in the tournament's history and was the central single moment of British inter-war sport.

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