Captain Bligh’s bounty

Midsummer — Wimbledon at full-throttled grunt, England’s cricketers in meaningful challenge with Australia at last, down by the river the bunting’s gay and the hanging-baskets plump and plenteous for Henley’s hearty annual heave-ho, and deep down in the cold southern seas this very morning we shall know who has drawn first blood as the rare and ancient rugby challenge resumes between marauding Brits and defiant New Zealand All Blacks. A couple of you were tickled by last week’s en passant here on the first Wimbledon of 1877 being suspended between semi and final to allow spectators to attend the Eton v. Harrow cricket at Lord’s. Had it not been, I daresay there would have been no final because the 27-year-old surveyor Spencer Gore, of Westside House, Wimbledon Common, was a cricket-mad Harrovian who was not going to miss his alma mater’s grand occasion at Lord’s for a game of puny tennis.