The Wettest Wimbledon

[knocker]

A hot topic as it starts today. As far as I can ascertain 1922 seems to well up there but I'm sure WH has details at his fingertips.

And even if the rain does fall, it is unlikely that it will be as bad as the first championship, when it moved to the current ground at Church Road, Wimbledon in 1922. It all started to go wrong when George V opened the new Centre Court and the heavens opened up soon afterwards with buckets of rain.

“He gave three blows on a gong, the tarpaulins were removed, the first match started — and the rain came down,†wrote the Wimbledon historian Richard Milward. And it rained every single day of play and by the second week actually grew worse, with huge downpours. At that time, all the courts, apart from Centre Court, were unprotected and they turned into quagmires in the relentless rain. The backlog of games grew so long that the finals were not completed until July 12, a week late. That year still ranks as the most disrupted tournament in Wimbledon’s history.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/weather/article3455048.ece

[4wd]

How can this be, we now know summer rain events are a modern phenomena, a symptom of global wierding caused by AGW.

In the olden days summers were warm dry and sunny, while winters were almost always dominated by long periods of frost and frequent snow.

[I remember Atlantic 252]

heard somewhere that the mens final in 1922 was on the wednesday, the latest ever finish