Charlotte Cooper Sterry, Tennis Champion

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today we are going to talk about Charlotte Cooper, also
called Charlotte Sterry or sometimes Charlotte Cooper Sterry, who also
went by the nickname Chatty. She was a tennis player
whose marriage in nineteen oh one meant that news reports
about her career variously called her Miss Cooper or Missus
Sterry or Missus Sterry previously Miss Cooper, or sometimes even

(00:40):
Missus Alfred Sterry. Some of the records she set during
her lifetime playing tennis were unbroken for almost a century.
One of them actually still stands. We've also never really
covered the history of tennis on the show before, so
we're going to kick it off with just a little
bit of that, with some of the focus specifically on Wimbledon,

(01:04):
since a lot of her athletic record was as a
Wimbledon champion. Wimbledon is still considered one of the most
prestigious tennis championships in the world, and that reputation was
already established when she started competing there.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
When we say, Charlotte Cooper was a tennis champion. We,
of course mean lawn tennis, played with rackets and a
ball on a rectangular court with a net across the middle,
usually outdoors, although in spite of the name, lawn tennis
mostly not on grass anymore. But there is also court tennis,
also called real tennis or royal tennis, which is typically

(01:39):
played on an indoor court that looks fairly rectangular but
is really asymmetric. On top of being asymmetric, these enclosed
courts also are not standardized, and they have various nooks
and galleries and other openings around the sides, with a
visibly sagging net across the middle. Both of these tennis
games can be played as singles or doubles, and both

(02:02):
use a similarly confusing scoring system, but otherwise they are
very different sports, with different rules, different types of balls,
and different rackets.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Lawn tennis and court tennis share a lot of history,
though various games involving balls and paddles or rackets stretched
back to the ancient world, but the clearest precursor to
both of these types of tennis developed in medieval France.
This was called jude pump or game of the hand
or hand game. At first, this was played using a

(02:34):
rope rather than a net, and a stuffed bag rather
than a ball, and then people just use their hand
rather than a racket.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Judepum was played indoors, and as it was introduced from
France to Britain, it was just called pum, which people
spelled all kinds of different ways, gradually getting closer to
the way palm is spelled today, as in the palm
of the hand. In the fourteenth century, as the game
was becoming more popular on both sides of the Channel,
people started to shift from using their hand to using

(03:05):
some kind of paddle. At first, this was not a
strung racket. It was a long handled, wooden paddle that
looked almost like a small ore in. The word tennis
was used to describe this game by the start of
the fifteenth century, probably pronounced to nie, I don't know baby.
That would make sense since this game was played indoors,

(03:28):
it was most popular among the kind of people who
had room to do that, meaning royalty and the wealthy court.
Tennis is one of several sports to become known as
the sport of.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Kings, and the number of royal deaths are somehow associated
with it. This is not an exhaustive list, but on
June fifth, thirteen sixteen, King Louis the tenth of France
died at the age of twenty six after playing a
very strenuous game of tennis and then drinking a bunch
of chilled wine. That's what happened. His exact cause of

(04:02):
death is not really clear though. King James the First
of Scotland also liked to play tennis, and he had
been playing a lot of it at Blackfriar's Monastery in
Perth in February of fourteen thirty seven, when some assassins came.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
To kill him.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
The king used the iron tongs from the fireplace to
lift up a floorboard, planning to escape from the assassins
through the sewers, but then he found his way blocked
with stones, and that was something that he had ordered
three days before because he kept losing his tennis.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Balls down a drain hole. And then Queen Anne Boleyn,
wife of Henry the eighth, was also at a tennis
match in fifteen thirty six when a messenger arrived to
tell her to present herself before the Privy Council. After
that she was beheaded. There's also the tennis court oath

(04:56):
or the semon de ju du poems. On June twentieth,
seventeen eighty nine, at the start of the French Revolution,
the King had summoned the Estates General to deal with
a serious economic crisis, and the Third Estate or the Commoners,
had realized that any of their proposed reforms could be
blocked by the combined First and Second Estates or the

(05:16):
clergy and nobility. After the Third Estate tried to establish
itself as the National Assembly and was joined by some
members of the other Estates, the King had them locked
out of their regular meeting room at the Palace of Versailles.
Fearing that the King was going to try to dissolve
their assembly or otherwise attack them, they gathered in the

(05:36):
tennis court, where they swore quote never to separate and
to meet wherever circumstances require until the Kingdom's constitution is
established and grounded on solid foundations.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
I had always imagined this meeting as happening outside, but
it did not. It was inside. Lawn tennis or field
tennis diverged for this indoor style of court tennis in
the nineteenth century, and usually the person who's credited with
establishing the game of modern lawn tennis is British Army

(06:10):
major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who was born in Wales. He
came up with a collection of portable equipment that could
be set up and played on the same types of
fields where people were already playing croquet. We ran our
episode on the history of croquet as a Saturday Classic
in April of this year. People in this part of

(06:31):
Europe had already been playing outdoor games with balls and
nets and paddles or rackets, but Wingfield's rule set and
this equipment kit really helped popularize it.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Wingfield's game had some differences from modern lawn tennis, though
One was the name. He called it, sharisticky, from Greek
words meaning something like ballgame. Wingfield's rules described a field
shaped like an hourglass, with the central net at a
point that was narrower than the ends of the court.
This hour glass shape may have just been to make

(07:04):
the court different enough from existing rectangular game courts that
he could apply for a patent, and he was granted
a patent in eighteen seventy four. That same year, lawn
tennis was introduced into the US, Although there's some debate
about exactly who should get the credit.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Spheristikei also had a different scoring system. Today, lawn tennis
and court tennis follow the same basic scoring in which
one point is fifteen, and two points is thirty and
three points is forty.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
And there's other.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Stuff beyond that, which can all be looked up on
the internet for anybody who wants the details or the
speculation about why this is how it's scored. Uh, there's
various conjecture about why that is that we don't really know. Sporistiky,
on the other hand, was scored like badminton, which was
developed around the same time and named for the Duke

(07:58):
of Beaufort's badminton house in Glass. To share and badminton,
a point is a point and the winner is the
first player to reach a certain number of points. The
exact number has varied over the years, and the particulars
of badminton scoring are also available on the internet. Although
the names fistiki did not stick around, lawn tennis started

(08:19):
to overshadow court tennis, and the term real tennis was
coined in the early twentieth century to make sure people
understood that they were talking about the royal one, not
the one being played out on the croquet pitch. As
the popularity of real tennis declined, some of the spaces
that had housed those indoor courts were repurposed into things

(08:40):
like museums or theaters. Today, there are about forty real
tennis courts still in use in Australia, England, France and
the United States. The history of the Wimbledon Championships, often
just called Wimbledon, started not long after Walter Clopton Wingfield
got that patent. In eighteen six seventy seven, the All

(09:01):
England Croquet Club changed its name to the All England
Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club after setting aside some of
its croquet space for tennis. The club held its first
championship in eighteen seventy seven. As well, it had men's
singles only, with twenty two players, and the competition, the
first Wimbledon Championship, adopted the earlier scoring system from court

(09:25):
tennis rather than Wingfield's more badminton like system, and by
eighteen eighty the club's official rules were pretty similar to today's.
Wimbledon's first men's doubles championship took place in eighteen eighty three,
and the first women's singles event followed a year later.
The first woman to win Wimbledon was Maud Wilson. The

(09:46):
first permanent spectator stands were built at Wimbledon in the
mid eighteen eighties, largely due to the popularity of twins
Ernest and William Renshaw, who won a total of thirteen
titles between eighteen eighty one and eighteen eighty nine. This
surge and interest in tennis during their time as players
was nicknamed the Renshaw Rush, and even though lawn tennis

(10:08):
is often called the sport of kings, its connection to
royalty did continue. In the early twentieth century, the Prince
and Princess of Wales, the future King George the Fifth
and Queen Mary visited Wimbledon, and in nineteen oh seven
the Prince became Wimbledon's patron. Members of the royal family
have continued to serve as Wimbledon's patron since then. Today

(10:30):
that is Catherine, Princess of Wales. Various royals have also
served as president of the All England Lawn Tennis and
Croquet Club, including Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who served
for more than five decades. Ending in twenty twenty one.
Of course, lawn tennis was becoming popular in other parts
of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

(10:52):
centuries as well. The United States National Lawn Tennis Association
was established and held its first championship in eighteen eighty one,
the first National French championships were held in eighteen ninety one,
and the Lawn Tennis Association of Australasia held its first
tournament for men in nineteen oh five. Today, winning the

(11:12):
Australian Open, the French Open, the Wimbledon Open, and the
US Open is known as a Grand Slam. Wimbledon is
the only Grand Slam championship still played on grass. Charlotte
Cooper's Wimbledon debut took place less than a decade after
its first women's championship, and we will have more on
that after a sponsor break. Charlotte Reinegal Cooper was born

(11:45):
in ealing London on September twenty second, eighteen seventy. Her
parents were Henry Cooper and Teresa Georgiana Miller Cooper, and
she was the youngest of their six surviving children. Teresa
had been born in Chile and that's where she met
Henry while he was working as a merchant seaman. They
got married in Chile, and Charlotte's three oldest siblings were

(12:08):
born there as well. Henry Cooper died when Charlotte, also
known as Chatty, was just five. We don't really have
much detail about any of this, but the family doesn't
seem to have struggled financially. After his death. Chatty and
her siblings pursued various sports, with Chatty being particularly fond
of both hockey and tennis. In a nineteen oh three

(12:30):
book on tennis, player and commentator Arthur Wallace Myers described
how Charlotte's years of playing with her siblings lay the
foundation for her later success.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
Constant practice with members of her own family, especially with
her elder sister, brought her to perfection at a very
early date. But it was as a volleyer then quite
a rarity among ladies that miss Cooper sprang into fame
and made such an impression on the public, ally ing,
if you like me, don't really know much about tennis,

(13:05):
that is, hitting the ball back to an opponent before
it has bounced.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Charlotte noted the importance of playing with her family members
as well although when more of a focus on her brothers.
She contributed a chapter on ladies tennis to this same book,
and in it she wrote, quote, Personally, I attribute my
success mainly to indulging in outdoor pursuits from my very
early childhood and joining with my brothers in whatever games

(13:31):
they played. Later on, when I started tennis, I found
what great advantage all this had been to me. She
also stressed the need to learn to do each tennis
stroke correctly, because unlearning bad form could be very difficult. Quote.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
I believe the best way to learn strokes is to
trespass on the good nature of one of the first
class men players and get him to point out how
they ought to be taken. Once this knowledge has been acquired,
should be followed by practicing each stroke separately. A great
mistake I think many lady players make is by always

(14:08):
playing in practice only to win and not to improve
their weak points. A good half hour's knock up with
the latter object in view is of far more value
than many sets played with the sole idea of bettering
your opponent.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
By the age of thirteen, Chatty was playing and being
coached at the Ealing Lawn Tennis and Archery Club. Her
coaches there included C. H. Martin, who would be a
runner up in the men's doubles at Wimbledon in eighteen
ninety four, and Harold Mahoney, who had been born in
Scotland to Irish parents and would go on to win
the men's singles championship at Wimbledon in eighteen ninety six.

(14:46):
Charlotte Cooper won her first title at Ealing when she
was fourteen. In a book on tennis that was published
in nineteen ten, she said, quote winning my first championship
of the Ealing Lawn Tennis Club at the age of
fourteen was a very important moment in my life. How
well I remember, bedecked by my proud mother and my
best clothes, running off to the club on the Saturday

(15:08):
afternoon to play in the final without a vestige of nerve,
would that I had none now and winning that was
the first really important match of my life. Cooper became
known for a playing style that was more aggressive than
what was typically expected of women players, something that she
did while playing in skirts that came almost to the ground.

(15:30):
She also served overhead at a time when most women
served underhand. To quote her entry in the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography quote her game was all attack, but
that same biography also described her as having quote smiling,
good temper, and great sportsmanship. This included her friendly rivalry

(15:50):
with Blanche Bingley later Blanche Hilliard, who was about seven
years older than she was and had competed in the
first ever women's championship at wimb Both of them played
and trained at the Ealing Club, including against each other,
and in the words of Missus Lambert Chambers in the
nineteen ten Lawn Tennis for Ladies, quote, it was soon

(16:13):
regarded as a certainty that where Missus Hilliard and Missus
Sterry entered the lists, one or the other, and not
one more than the other, was destined to emerge victorious.
In her nineteen oh three chapter on Ladies Tennis, Charlotte
said of her friend and rival, quote, Missus Hilliard is
a splendid example of the true fighter. Her persistency and

(16:35):
pluck on the court are wonderful, as for her staying power.
She seems to be able to last forever. She certainly
heads the list of the most victorious in ladies singles
and is one of the most sporting of them. Certainly,
no keener player ever stepped on a tennis court. It
does not matter if her adversary happens to be a
third class player to whom she could owe forty and

(16:58):
give thirty. She is always is just as nice to
her as if she were her equal. Just the same again,
in handicap matches, whoever her opponent or partner may happen
to be, she is just as keen as if it
were a championship single. Many a valuable lesson can be
learned by playing against or watching missus Hilliard.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
I also found another thing that was by Blanche Hilliard
that was like similarly crazy, talking about how great she was.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people really
only played tennis in Britain during the warmer months, and
Cooper stayed fit in the off season by running and
playing other sports, including hockey. But she wrote that she

(17:40):
didn't think it was a problem to take a break
from tennis during the winter.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
My idea is that one plays just as well in
the summer without winter practice. It is rather a good
thing to have a few really good hard practices on
a hard court at easter time, so as to start
with renewed energy and with a you to thoroughly enjoying
the game and doing one's best at it, instead of
making a labor of it, which it must become if

(18:07):
one never puts away one's racket. There are various winter
games to keep one's eye in practice, such as golf, badminton,
and may I be bold enough to mention it ping pong,
a game which certainly requires quickness of the eye. Cooper
made her debut at Wimbledon in eighteen ninety three at
the age of twenty two. That year, Lottie Dodd won

(18:30):
the championship and Blanche Bingley Hilliard, listed as Missus g W. Hilliard,
was the runner up. Lottie Dodd had won the women's
singles championship at Wimbledon five times, starting when she was
only fifteen, and she retired from competitive play after her
eighteen ninety three win. That same year, Charlotte Cooper won

(18:51):
the Ilkley Open at the Ilkley Lawn Tennis Club in
West Yorkshire. Cooper won her first Wimbledon title in eighteen
ninety five, and then There are a couple of different
versions of how her family reacted. She was staying with
her brother, although in some accounts it was her uncle, regardless,
he didn't live far away, and she was riding to

(19:12):
Wimbledon every day with her tennis racket strapped to the
bicycle frame. When she got back after her win, her
brother asked her where she'd been, and she said at
the championship and she had just won it, and her brother,
who was pruning the roses when she got there, just
carried on with pruning the roses. In the version word

(19:33):
this was her uncle. He similarly didn't really react other
than saying that he was going to go make some tea.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
A lot of the articles online about Charlotte Cooper Sterry
today are sort of one page profiles of tennis players
or Olympic athletes, and many of them say that she
became deaf at the age of twenty six. This would
have been about a year after her first Wimbledon win.
There's really not much detail about this, aside from a
couple of sources that say it was because of an

(20:02):
infection near the end of her life. In nineteen sixty five,
Harry Weaver interviewed her for The London Observer in the
lead up to that year's Wimbledon Championships. That article describes
her as deaf from the age of twenty six, which
might be the source for this detail. In a book
about Wimbledon that was published after her death, her nephew

(20:23):
Tony Cooper is also quoted as saying he thought he
was right in saying she had never heard the ball
bounce because of her deafness.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
It doesn't seem like she really wrote or spoke about
this during her competitive tennis career. She did, I was
not able to find anything about it, but that's not
particularly surprising given attitudes about disability in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and since people used the word
deaf to describe a range of hearing loss. We also

(20:54):
don't really know what that meant for her, or whether
she thought it affected her playing at all or led
her to play any differently.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
It is possible, though, that this highlights something about her
skill as a player. In more recent years, various players
have talked about the role that sound and hearing can
play in the sport of tennis, like the sound that
the ball makes when struck with the racket can offer
clues about how hard it was hit, how well it
was hit, and how much spin is on the ball.

(21:23):
For most people, auditory reaction time is faster than visual
reaction time, so these sounds can give a player a
tiny edge overseeing what the ball is doing. Some players
have argued that if their opponents make too many grunts
or other noises, or if there are background sounds like
crowds or airplanes, it can affect their game. There have

(21:44):
even been some studies in which players have been asked
to wear noise canceling headphones, with the loss of those
audio cues seeming to negatively affect their performance. Without more
detail or information directly from her own experience, can really
only speculate about how Charlotte Cooper's deafness may have affected
her tennis game and other parts of her life, as

(22:07):
well as what, if anything she or others may have
done to make things more accessible. But if this description
of her as deaf did mean that she had lost
all of her hearing and the year that happened, that's
all correct, that would make her one of the first
known deaf athletes to be competing at this level. It
would also make her the first known deaf Olympic champion.

(22:31):
We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
After her eighteen ninety five win at Wimbledon. Charlotte Cooper
won again in eighteen ninety six. Then she was runner
up to Blanche Hilliard in eighteen ninety seven, and then
one again in eighteen ninety eight. In eighteen ninety nine
and nineteen hundred, Hilliard won with Cooper as runner up.
They just had a few years swapping back and forth
with which of them was the Wimbledon champion. Between eighteen

(23:06):
ninety four and eighteen ninety eight. Cooper also won five
mixed doubles championships at Wimbledon, with Harold Mahoney and another
with Hugh Lawrence Doherty in nineteen hundred, although at this
point mixed doubles was not formally considered part of the
Wimbledon championships. That didn't happen till nineteen thirteen. Doherty's brother Reginald,

(23:27):
who was also known as Reggie or RF, was also
a tennis player, and he and Charlotte won several mixed
doubles titles in England and Ireland. The nineteen hundred Olympic
Games have made a lot of appearances on the show
at this point, and Charlotte Cooper was there. She was
one of twenty two women to compete in the nineteen
hundred Games and won the women's singles in tennis. Another

(23:50):
person we just mentioned, Helen de Bortales, had been part
of the winning team in the one to two ton
sailing event a couple of months before, so this made
Cooper the first woman to win an Olympic event as
an individual competitor rather than part of a team.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
She and R. F. Doherty also won in mixed doubles.
The tradition of awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals to
the first, second, and third place winners did not begin
until the next Olympic Games in Saint Louis in nineteen
oh four.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
On January twelfth, nineteen oh one, Charlotte Cooper married Alfred Sterry,
who was a solicitor. That year, she was the first
place winner in women's singles at Wimbledon, listed as Missus A. Sterry,
and the runner up was Blanche Hilliard listed as Missus G. W.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
Hilliard.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Sterry won the Wimbledon championship that year without losing a
single set. It doesn't seem like there was a perception
that Charlotte Cooper Sterry would give up tennis after getting
married Arthur Wallace. Meyer's nineteen oh three book Lawn Tennis
at Home and Abroad, says of her marriage, quote, as
Miss Cooper, her career on the courts was nothing less

(24:58):
than marvelous in its concent distancy and brilliant in its achievement,
And as missus Sterry, there is every reason to believe
it will continue for many years to attract and retain attention.
She did take a couple of breaks from competitive play, though.
In nineteen oh two, Charlotte was the runner up in
women's singles at Wimbledon. The winner was Muriel Robb and

(25:21):
this was at the time a record for the longest final,
with fifty three games played. Then Charlotte and Alfred had
a son, Rex, in nineteen oh three. Charlotte was runner
up at Wimbledon again in nineteen oh four, this time
against seven time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Catherine Douglas later Dorothea

(25:44):
Lambert Chambers. In nineteen oh five, Charlotte gave birth to
a daughter, Gwendolyn, also known as Gwen. In nineteen oh seven,
Charlotte Cooper Sterry had what is regarded as one of
her biggest wins, Wimbledon had become an Internet national event
by about nineteen hundred, and the first player from outside
the UK to win a singles title at Wimbledon was

(26:06):
American May Sutton in nineteen oh five. Sutton had been
born in England but moved to California as a child
and had learned to play and started competing in the US.
Sutton had become the youngest women's tennis champion in US
history in nineteen oh four, and would go on to
be the first woman inducted into the International Tennis.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Hall of Fame. In nineteen oh six, she was runner
up at Wimbledon against Dorothea Lambert Chambers, and when she
returned in nineteen oh seven, she lost only one game
during her time in the UK, which was to Charlotte
Cooper Sterry, although to be clear, that was not at
Wimbledon but at Liverpool.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Sterry later wrote of this quote, I had heard a
great deal about Miss May Sutton, who made her first
appearance in England in nineteen oh five, beating everybody without
the loss of a set. I had also heard she
was a giant of strength, and that the harder one hit,
the more she liked it. The first time I met
her was at Liverpool in nineteen oh seven. I did

(27:06):
not play the previous season. I was determined to introduce
unfamiliar tactics, giving her short balls in order to entice
her up to the net. The result was that many
of her terrific drives went out, and I think this
was primarily the reason why I was the first lady
in England to take a set from her. I recollect
her telling me after the match was over that my

(27:27):
game was very different to any other she had ever played,
and that she was not anxious to meet me again,
remarks I took as a great compliment. In nineteen oh eight,
Charlotte Cooper Sterry made her Wimbledon comeback, seven years after
her previous win, once again winning the women's singles without
losing a single set. She was also part of the

(27:48):
winning pairs in both women's doubles and mixed doubles, although
neither was officially part of the Wimbledon championship yet. Sterry's
age at this point was thirty seven years, two hundred
and eighty two days, making her the oldest woman to
be a Wimbledon champion. That is a record that still
stands today. Wimbledon Open to both professionals and amateurs in

(28:10):
nineteen sixty seven, with the first open tournament happening the
following year. So sometimes Serena Williams is cited as the
oldest woman to win Wimbledon in the open era. Sterry's
nineteen oh eight wins also made her one of only
a handful of people to win Wimbledon after giving birth.
Although nineteen oh eight was her last Wimbledon win, Sterry

(28:31):
continued to compete there until nineteen nineteen, at the age
of forty eight. This was her eighteenth time competing at Wimbledon,
and she won her opening match that year. After this,
she did continue to play tennis, but she retired from competing.
The International Committee of Sports for the Deaf was established
in nineteen twenty four, which was also the year of

(28:52):
the first International Silent Games, also known as the Deaf Olympics.
Those were held in Paris. We don't really know whether
Charlotte Cooper Sterry was involved in this in any way,
but she would not have been a competitor there Apart
from her retirement in competitive play in that first year,
only men's tennis events were held at the Silent Games. Today,

(29:14):
the Deaf Olympics are sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee.
Charlotte's daughter Gwen also became a tennis player as well,
and made her first appearance at Wimbledon in nineteen twenty five,
and really their whole family was active in this sport
in one way or another. Charlotte's husband Alfred, served as
president of the International Lawn Tennis Federation, and her son

(29:38):
Rex served as vice chair of the All England Lawn
Tennis Club. Sterry had a personal goal of becoming the
oldest living Wimbledon champion, which for a time she was.
In nineteen sixty one, a celebratory lunch was held in
advance of the Wimbledon Championships, and she was the oldest
guest there at the age of ninety.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
Charlotte Coque Sterry died on October tenth, nineteen sixty six,
at the age of ninety six. By that point she
had lost much of her sight. Princess Marina, Duchess of
Kent was president of the All England Tennis and Croquet
Club at the time and set what Charlotte's son Rex
described as a very genuine letter and telegram in condolence

(30:21):
during her tennis career, Charlotte Cooper Sterry made it to
the Wimbledon finals eight times in a row between eighteen
ninety five and nineteen oh two, a record that remained
until Martina Nevertalova made it to her ninth consecutive Wimbledon
finals in nineteen ninety In total, Sterry won the women's
singles at Wimbledon five times, as well as championships in

(30:41):
Ireland and Scotland and various other championships and Challenge Cups
all around the UK. She also was part of the
winning pair in mixed doubles at Wimbledon six times, five
of them consecutively, before mixed doubles was recognized as an
official championship there. She made it to the finals of
the first recognized women's doubles championship in nineteen thirteen. A

(31:04):
century later, in twenty thirteen, she was posthumously inducted into
the International Tennis Hall of Fame. I kind of love her.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
I wish we had more detail about, like her personal
life beyond tennis, because pretty much everything I found about
her was about tennis, and athletes do have other things
in their lives besides.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
The sport that they're right. No, I also have a
little listener mail fantastic. This is going back to.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Our various conversations we've had about Google street View. This
is from I think Leah, I did not ask about
name pronunciation. This is titled street View Bikes. My friends
and I did the first imagery back in two thousand
and nine, and the email says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,

(32:02):
I've been listening for many years and finally am writing
because you asked about interesting StreetView images. You probably know
that there is a StreetView bike, but you might not
know the story behind the first images taken on a
hilly bike trail in Monterey, California. The StreetView team had
modified a tricycle petticab to carry the camera and computers

(32:22):
another hardware, but they were having trouble making it work.
The hardware was so heavy that it kept warping the
bike wheels and they couldn't go up hills. Several of
US bike geek slash Google software engineers who worked in
the same office as the StreetView team helped out by
rebuilding the wheels and adding pedals with clips to allow
more effective writing. Our test run is the first public

(32:45):
imagery from the StreetView bike. We can probably see us
because we tried to say out of view, but that
trike was so heavy we had to switch off periodically.
I'm including a picture that I suspect were scrubbed out
of so you can just see our helmets. I'm including
his pet tax pictures of my black Golden Retriever mix Vanta,
named after the paint. He's ninety pounds of fuzzy, goofy

(33:09):
cuddy and friendly. Let's open dog pictures. Oh my goodness,
what a happy dog face like That dog is therapy.
You don't even have to meet them.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
And yeah, there is.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
This picture is just sort of, you know, a view
of the ocean with.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
A strange little visual artifact kind of in the middle
of it, which definitely looks like it could be two
people's bike helmets digitally with the rest of them digitally
scrubbed from the image. Thank you so much for this
email and these pictures and this story. I love it.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I did not know that Google street View is going
to become the source of amazing emails and discussion that
it has when we mentioned it, not even in like
a particularly serious way.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, so the briefest of mentions.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, so if you would like to send us a
note about this or any other podcast, we're at history
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and we're on social media
at miss in History. You can subscribe to the show
on iHeartRadio app and wherever else you like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(34:29):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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