This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Where might British tennis have been for the past 20 years if a thief on a bus in Barcelona in the late 1970s hadn’t lifted Judy Erskine’s purse from her handbag? For a struggling young professional who had no money, no coach, no proper training facility at home and slept in a tent during tournaments, it was the final straw. She returned to Scotland, went to university, got married and in due time had two boys to whom she transferred her love of tennis.

Between them, her sons would win 86 tour titles, ten of them grand slams, two Olympic gold medals and Britain’s first Davis Cup crown for 79 years. Both topped the world rankings in their disciplines: doubles for her elder son, who won seven majors, and singles for the younger, who was knighted in 2017 at the age of 29 and might have won more than three singles slams if he hadn’t played in the era of the three greatest players in history.

It is easy to forget how mediocre British tennis was before the Murrays, especially in the men’s singles game where the name of Fred Perry and his eight major titles hung like an albatross across the shoulders of any home player who won a couple of rounds at Wimbledon. How excited we got in the mid-90s when Jeremy Bates almost reached the quarter-finals in a zip-up cardie! When in 2013 Andy Murray became the first Brit to win the men’s singles title in SW19 since Perry’s last in 1936, he called his management company 77 to recognise the years of drought.

There had been the odd flash of hope, such as when John Lloyd reached the 1977 Australian Open final or when Greg Rusedski did the same in New York 20 years later. Tim Henman reached six Grand Slam semi-finals, but more often making the second week of a slam was the peak of British male ambition. In men’s doubles, too, there were two US Open titles for Roger Taylor in the early 1970s, the first British success since the 1930s, and then a long wait for Jamie Murray. Even the women had gone off the boil since Virginia Wade and Sue Barker.

The Murrays did it all despite the handicap of being Scottish. I mean no disrespect to the sporting prowess of that noble nation, but the weather and the lack of indoor courts did not help to breed tennis champions. When Andy reached the third round on his Wimbledon debut as the world no. 312 in 2005, he was the first Scottish man to get that far since Donald MacPhail in 1938. It would take until 2022 before Murray failed to win at least two rounds at his home slam.

Scottish tennis success, like golf in the Sahara, was such a rarity that it became a joke in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The week before the appearance of the Dead Parrot sketch, when Judy Murray was barely ten, an episode was based around alien blancmanges from the planet Skyron turning people into Scotsmen to give them a better chance of winning Wimbledon. “Och, Angus, ye ken full well that Scots folk dinna know how to play the tennis to save their lives,” says the wife of the man who is sent out to represent the human race on Centre Court.

This was a little unfair on Scottish women. Frances MacLennan from Glasgow and Joyce Williams from Dundee had both reached the fourth round in 1965 and Winnie Shaw, another Glaswegian, would get to the quarter-finals of Wimbledon and the semi-finals of the Australian Open in 1970 and 1971, but you would have fancied your money on a blancmange with a racket against most of the Scottish men.

Harold Mahony, who won the Wimbledon singles title in 1896 despite reportedly having a rotten forehand, was the last Scottish-born champion before Murray, but he grew up playing tennis at the family seat of Dromore Castle in County Kerry. Between him and Murray you had only MacPhail and Ian Collins, who reached the fourth round in 1931 with a serve described as looking like “a monkey mounting a pole”.

Otherwise the annals of Scottish tennis give us Lestocq Erskine, winner of the first Wimbledon doubles title in 1879; Herbert Lawford, the 1887 singles champion (although schooled in Edinburgh, he was born and raised in Bayswater); and a pair of brothers who were great-great-uncles to our King.

Herbert and Patrick Bowes-Lyon, the fourth and fifth sons of the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, had a fine Wimbledon in 1887 with Herbert reaching the quarter-finals in the singles and Patrick winning the doubles alongside yet another Herbert, Wilberforce, great-grandson of the abolitionist. Their niece Elizabeth married a man who played in the first round of the men’s doubles at Wimbledon, ten years before he was crowned George VI.

Whilst the Bowes-Lyons, formidable on the grass at Glamis Castle, were the Murrays of their day, the records really don’t compare. Jamie Murray has won more than 100 Grand Slam doubles matches, whilst Andy will retire after the Olympics with 200 singles Grand Slam wins, placing him between Pete Sampras and Stefan Edberg on the all-time list and a few places ahead of John McEnroe and Boris Becker. That’s fine company to keep: especially for a Scot. We shall miss them.