Apart from being an extremely wet fortnight, 1958 was scarcely a vintage year for my Wimbledon baptism. Pancho Gonzales, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and Frank Sedgman had turned professional, giving a depleted look to a men’s field from which Australia’s Ashley Cooper emerged as champion at the expense of his compatriot Neale Fraser.

Yellowed cuttings confirm that I thought it was a below-par Wimbledon. “At the moment, Cooper is top of the class in the serve-and-volley school which could cause the death of lawn tennis as a spectacle,” I warned. “Crowds will dwindle if the service-dominated monotony of this year’s final is repeated too often.”