Local resident, Malcolm Mecklenburgh has bought another famous Milford on Sea resident of the past to our attention; Lottie Dod, five-time Wimbledon Champion and Olympic Silver Medallist. The Guinness Book of Records named her as the most versatile female athlete of all time.
This tantalising knowledge ignited a frivolous wish to find out more, in addition to the information that Malcolm had provided from his own research.
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| Lottie Dod- Aged 20 |
Lottie went on the become an English multi-sport athlete, competing and becoming a champion in tennis, golf and archery.
She also participated in many other sports, including field hockey, billiards, skiing, ice skating, mountain climbing, and cycling.
Tennis
Best known as a tennis player, she was the five-time Wimbledon Ladies' Singles Champion.
She remains the youngest Wimbledon Ladies' Singles Champion.
Billie Jean King was later to described Lottie as "One of the world's great unsung sporting heroes.'
In 1983, Lottie was inducted to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
To read more, please click here.
Field Hockey
In 1899, see was made captain of the Cheshire County team. In the same year, Lottie first played in the England Women's Field Hockey Team, which she had helped to found. The team won 3-1 versus Ireland.
In the 1900 rematch she scored both goals in a 2–1 victory. After which, she suffered from sciatica attacks which kept her from sporting events for a many months.
Golf
Lottie Dods golf career included representing England, and in 1904 she won the British Ladies Amateur Championship at Troon in Ayrshire.
Few golf clubs allowed women to play around the time Lottie first played golf at age fifteen.
In 1894 she helped establish a ladies' golf club at Moreton.
She then entered the National Championships, and became a regular competitor in this, and other golf tournaments, for the next few years.
In 1898 and 1900 she reached the semi-finals of the National Championships, but was defeated narrowly both times.
In 1900, she also played in an unofficial country match against Ireland, which the English won 37–18.
Having won the British Ladies Amateur Championship in 1904, Lottie was the first, and to date only, woman to win British tennis and golf championships.
To read more about her golf exploits, please click here.
Archery
In archery, Lottie won her first tournament by 1906, and competed in the Grand National Archery Meeting of 1906, 1907 and 1908.
In 1908 she won a Silver Medal at the 1908 London Olympics at the White City Stadium.
In 1910, Lottie came second in the Grand National Archery Meeting. Had she have won, this would have made archery the third sport in which she became a national champion.
It is said that one of her family ancestors commanded the English longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt, which makes an interesting connection to her skill in this sport.
To read more about her golf & archery exploits, please click here.
Winter Sports
In the winter, she was an ice athlete and trained in Switzerland. Lottie spent time skiing and ice skating, and she became the first woman to complete the toboggan course on St. Moritz's world famous Cresta Run at 70mph.
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| Lottie Dod Taking the Skating Test at St. Moritz |
She also participated in curling, mountain climbing, and long-distance bike rides across Europe.
To read more about her winter sports, please click here.
Part of her career were recorded by Team GB. To read, please click here.
Lottie was a true pioneer. She succeeded in many sports during the Victorian era when women were still considered fragile and delicate, and her achievements helped to smash this unfounded myth.
WW1 War Years
The Milford on Sea Historical Record Society were able to confirm from the Imperial War Museums' Lives of the First World War website, that during World War 1 she had been a member of the British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD).
The Voluntary Aid Detachment was a voluntary unit of civilians providing nursing care for military personnel.
After the war ended Lottie had provided more than 1,000 hours of service during the conflict, and she received a British Red Cross Gold Service Medal for her service at a military hospital in Speen.
Music
Lottie was also an accomplished contralto singer who performed with the London Oriana Madrigal Society, a piano and banjo player.
She also worked with youth clubs in Great Britain, including the Girl Guides, whom she taught piano and singing.
Later Years
Lottie never married, and in her later life, Lottie was known to have lived at Kivernells in Milford on Sea for a number of years.
Frank Cowper, author, journalist, yacht broker, and the unsung pioneer of yachting, also had a connection to Kivernells from when it was converted to Kivernells School in 1879.
In 1916 Kivernells returned to a private house owned by Horace Mann until his death in 1937.
In 1939 Kivernells was then run as a rest & convalescent home, until 1963 when the house was converted into eight flats.
Finally, in 1988 the house which had been known as Kivernells was demolished to become the site for Kivernell Place, Woodland Way, Milford on Sea.
(Kivernells is not to be confused with Kivernells House Residential & Retirement Home that was demolished around 2001. Until around the 1980's Kivernells House Residential & Retirement Home had been known as Ellaland, which at one time had been Ellaland School.)
Final Years
Lottie continued to attend the Wimbledon Championships until her late eighties.
One of her brothers, Willy Dod, an Olympic Archery Champion, was living in Earls Court when he died in 1954. He & Lottie became the first brother and sister to win medals in the same Olympic Games.
She eventually settled at the Birchy Hill Nursing Home in Sway, Hampshire.
Another brother, Tony, who had represented Lancashire at chess, also lived in Sway, at Arnewood Corner.
In 1960 she passed away peacefully in bed at the age of 88, fittingly, listening to the Wimbledon tennis commentaries on the radio. Tony died in the same year that Lottie passed away.
One Remaining Mystery
Malcolm has discovered that there is one remaining mystery to solve.
To date, no one has been able to trace a memorial stone.
It is known that her funeral service was held in Sway, and Sasha Abramsky searched Sway Churchyard without success. Possibly, but unlikely, her remains may have returned to the place of her birth, Bevington, but there is no record there. It is thought that Lottie is not in All Saints' Churchyard, as she does not appear in the Milford on Sea Burial Register.
It is true that Milford on Sea only has a small connection with Lottie Dod, but it is a connection never the less!
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Two books on her life are known to have been published:
Little Wonder
The Extraordinary Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar.
Written by Sasha Abramsky
Little Wonder tells the epic, and until now largely unchronicled, story of Lottie Dod, the first great heroine in women's sports. Dod was a champion tennis player, golfer, hockey player, tobogganist, skater, mountaineer, and archer.
She was also a first-rate musician, performing numerous choral concerts in London in the 1920s and 1930s, including in a private performance before the King and Queen.
In the late 19th century, Dod was almost certainly the second most famous woman in the British Isles, bested only by the fame of Queen Victoria. She was fawned over by the press, and loved by a huge fan base - which composed poems and songs in her honor, followed her from one tournament to the next, voraciously read every profile published on her and every report on her sporting triumphs.
Yet, within a decade or two of her retirement from sports, Dod was largely a forgotten figure. She lived, unmarried and childless, until 1960, and for the last half of her life she was shrouded in obscurity. In this new book, Sasha Abramsky brings Lottie's remarkable achievements back into the public eye in a fascinating story of resilience and determination.
To find out more, please click here.
Lottie Dod: Champion of Champions – The Story of an Athlete
Witten by Jeffrey Pearson and published in 1989.
To find out more, please click here.
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