Norah Gordon Cleather would have caused a stir entering any room in any era. She was a glamorous London socialite who mixed easily with the world’s best tennis players and the cream of Europe’s interwar royalty but, like many fairytales, hers would take a sad and unexpected twist.
Her long-forgotten name has surfaced since Sally Bolton was named as the first woman to be chief executive of the All England Club, succeeding Richard Lewis, a handover taking place in the unique circumstances of a lockdown when the championships would normally be gearing up for a start on 29 June. But Cleather can lay claim to a version of that role in similarly challenging times, 81 years ago (as Bolton is discovering while reading Cleather’s autobiography, Wimbledon Story).
Besotted by the game and Wimbledon since her first visit as a schoolgirl in 1917, Norah joined the small backroom staff at Wimbledon in 1922, the year the tournament moved from Worple Road to Church Road to accommodate the extraordinary interest generated by Suzanne Lenglen, who became a life-long friend.
As the sport gathered international acclaim, she worked alongside the tournament director, Major Dudley Larcombe, and took over from him as “acting secretary” on the eve of the second world war when he retired due to ill health. It was a journey that seemed to fulfil all of Norah’s young dreams.
Bombs fell and Wimbledon closed. The car park was converted into a small farm and the London Welsh and London Irish regiments moved in. As Cleather recalled in her autobiography: “It was when I first heard the metallic tramp of heavy feet marching outside the All England Club … that I realised that Wimbledon had gone to war.”
Her great-niece Sarah Cleather – whose acting name is Sarah Tullamore – says: “Norah ran Wimbledon during the war almost single-handedly as the men were drafted off. She ended up living there as well, alongside the troops, as her flat in Earl’s Court was bombed out. She fully expected to continue after the war and why not?”
Tullamore is aggrieved by the way her great-aunt was subsequently treated and is working on a television drama she hopes will show what a quiet pioneer Cleather was.
When tennis resumed in June 1945, the ballboys were soldiers in full battledress; the players, too, were battle-hardened in the most literal sense and thrilled to step on to No 1 Court, while bomb repairs continued on Centre Court. It was not classified as an official championship but, like the Battle of the Brits starting at the National Tennis Centre this week, it was all they had.
She wrote, with some prescience: “I have always thought that in an age when the greatest players in the world are all professionals, such rules are dangerously out of date. I have already mentioned the ever-growing feeling that now exists among nearly all enthusiasts of the game that a new and far more flexible conception of the players’ status is long overdue.”
It would remain so until 1968, when Rod Laver and Billie Jean King won the first Open era championships. In 1945, the game was not ready for change of any kind.
“As things picked up again,” Tullamore says, “[she was] informed that a male manager would be coming to work with her to run things. She must have been disappointed, but she did accept this. However, when she found out the man in question would be paid more than her for the same job, she, quite naturally, objected and asked for the same salary – especially as she had been doing the job for 25 years and had just organised the first post-war tournament on her own.
“Sadly – and this is a sign of the times she lived in – the powers that be at Wimbledon rather brutally refused to budge. So Norah, with a heavy heart, decided to leave – which was a real pioneering thing to do at the time.
“She died in 1967, a couple of years before I was born, so sadly I never met her. But I have always been fascinated by her life and what she achieved at the time, which is why I really would like people to know about her.
“I get the feeling the press really liked her, from the cuttings I have read. She was hard-working yet glamorous and had worked her way up. But, ever the lady, she never gave the real reason as to her departure, either to the press or in her book, preferring instead to say that ‘it was time for a change’.”
Cleather was heartbroken in more ways than one. When she left to work in New York as a secretary for one of the Catholic university sororities, her departure coincided with the end of a romance with the love of her life, an American called John Kelly. He is said to have been in tears when he attended her funeral in 1967.
“She wanted a fresh start all round,” Tullamore says. “However, as her job in New York was much less glamorous than the world in which she had moved at Wimbledon and also, as she was far away, I think people just forgot about her.”