ENFIELD
HACKNEY
HARINGEY
ISLINGTON
Questions, questions, questions… Has Novak Djokovic ever lost in front of Queen Camilla? When was the seven-time champion’s first win on Centre Court? Who became the first Lucky Loser to reach the fourth round of the ladies’ singles? Could June 30 2025 be the hottest first day of Wimbledon on record?
During The Championships, the All England Club Historian Robert McNicol wears many hats: answering scattergun media enquiries, showing visitors the Wimbledon Library collection, furnishing the Club Chair Deborah Jevans and Committee with interesting historical nuggets for speeches and up-to-date information on Royal Box guests. He is also one of the team that looks after the Members’ stand on Centre Court and one of those responsible for ensuring the names are spelt correctly on the honours boards and trophies.
During the Championships, Robert is on red alert to live media outlets. When the BBC wanted to know if Djokovic had ever lost in front of Queen Camilla, one of his colleagues was able to confirm “he hadn’t!”.
Ditto, wimbledon.com’s query about the Serbian’s first win on Centre Court? This was nailed down to his sixth win on the grass of London SW19, in 2007, against the Italian Potito Starace.
“I also try to be proactive and pre-empt enquiries,” McNicol said. “After Grigor Dimitrov’s retirement against Jannik Sinner, I immediately did some research on significant historic retirements.”
The day after the dust settles on 2025 action, the story of another edition of Wimbledon is ready to be committed to the record books. And Robert is the man who dots the i’s and crosses the t’s on the official version of Championships history.
As the recent slogan states, Wimbledon is “Always like never before”. There’s always another intriguing chapter to add to the evolving history of the original Grand Slam.
This year he will note a new fastest serve – “Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard at 153mph, but he lost the point!”. And all sorts of standout trivia – “We’ve had two matches with four tie-breaks, only the eighth and ninth in Wimbledon history.”
Results are seen in a historical context. Robert confirms that Iga Swiatek’s emphatic win over Amanda Anisimova was mirrored in a match 114 years ago. “We had the first 6-0, 6-0 singles final since Dorothea Lambert Chambers beat Dora Boothby in 1911.”
Like panning for gold, it’s a painstaking business. “I’ll spend the next few weeks updating all the facts and stats resulting from this year’s play in the Wimbledon Compendium,” he continues. “I go through each category and check whether any records have been broken. I’ll also go through all the newspapers from the Fortnight to catch up on any interesting events, and trawl through the results on wimbledon.com to check if any records have been broken that I missed at the time.”
The next Compendium – a touchstone for encyclopedic knowledge of on- and off-court miscellany – will not be published until just before next year’s Championships, but Robert ticks off the updates while they are still fresh in the mind. “I’ve always enjoyed tracking the progress of Lucky Losers in the hope that this stat would need to be updated.”
This year brought joy on that front. “Solana Sierra of Argentina became the first Lucky Loser to reach the fourth round of the ladies’ singles,” he confirms.
The Wimbledon Library is a key feature of Robert’s domain. Here, shelves are lined with row upon row of leatherbound volumes of yellowing newspaper cuttings. Until a few years ago, the business of preserving the day-by-day live reports was still a scissors and glue operation, but the Club now subscribes to a digital cuttings service.
“The fact that so much information is available online makes it much easier for me to update the Compendium than for Alan Little when he launched it in 1991.”
Robert took over as Wimbledon Librarian from Alan, who founded the library in 1977. Two years ago, he began his current role as Club Historian. It’s a dream job for a tennis fan whose mother once told him “You won’t get anywhere in life watching tennis all the time”.
History is etched in the names you see around The Grounds – the Tea Lawn, the Rosewater Pavilion, the Doherty Gates (a tribute to brothers who were dominant at the turn of the 20th century), the Wingfield Cafe (named after Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a central figure in the history of lawn tennis) – and Robert has ensured this continues.
“The Cavendish is a new restaurant on the Grounds this year (formerly called the Parkside Kitchen) and is named after Henry Jones, who was known as ‘Cavendish’, one of the founding Members of the All England Croquet Club and the man responsible for introducing lawn tennis to the Club in 1875,” he says. “Cavendish was also the man who proposed the first Championships in 1877 and the first ladies’ championship in 1884. And he was the first Championships Referee.
“We’ve renamed the restaurant in his honour to mark 150 years of tennis at the Club. There’s been a running joke within the Museum team for years that every time we need to choose a name for something, I always suggest ‘Cavendish’. And now it has finally happened!”
source: Wimbledon
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