Doubles delight for tennis ace
Angela Buxton Tennis player BORN AUGUST 16, 1934 – DIED AUGUST 15, 2020, AGED 85
ONE of England’s greatest women tennis stars,Angela Buxton won the women’s doubles at both Wimbledon and the French Open in 1956 but could not secure victory in the singles.
She formed a brilliant alliance with African American Althea Gibson.They formed a close bond because they had both suffered racial abuse, Buxton because of her Jewish background and Gibson because she was banned from playing white players early in her career in the United States because of the colour of her skin.
Liverpool-born Buxton won many titles as a teenager, partly because her motherViolet took her to South Africa during the Second WorldWar so she could play all year round.
They later lived opposite the Los Angeles Lawn Tennis Club in California, where she played the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Doris Day. Her career took off when Violet divorced and they returned to Britain in 1953.A year later Angela was selected to play against America in the BritishWightman Cup. She reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals in 1955.
During a tour of India in the same year she met Althea Gibson.
In the French Open they beat Americans Darlene Hard and Dorothy Knode. At Wimbledon, Buxton got to the final but her mother could not get a ticket. Sensing anti-Semitism, she threatened to pull her daughter out, and two tickets were found.
In the event, Buxton and Gibson took just two sets to defeat Australians Fay Muller and
Daphne Seeney. Marriage to Donald Silk produced two sons, who predeceased her, and a daughter, Rebecca Silk, whose husband Jonathan Djanogly, is the Tory MP for Huntingdon.
Althea Gibson died in 2003 after being helped out of poverty in old age by her former doubles partner.