Wimbledon champion who fought discrimination in tennis
Angela Buxton, who has died aged 85, was a British tennis champion best known for her extraordinary partnership with Althea Gibson, the first black American to win a grand slam title. As a Jewish woman, Buxton had experienced discrimination time and again, and so when they met on a tour of India in 1955, she was instinctively drawn to Gibson – the Harlem-raised daughter of South Carolina sharecroppers who was battling such overt racism, she’d almost given up the game. (As Billie Jean King said of US tennis in that period, “Everything was white. The balls, the clothes, the socks, the shoes, the people. Everything.”) The two outsiders first became friends, then tennis partners – and together, Buxton recalled, they “beat everybody”.
Angela Buxton was born in Liverpool in 1934, to a wealthy couple whose families had fled the pogroms in Russia. During the War, her mother took her to South Africa to escape the bombs, where she started to play tennis. She was quick and determined, and returning to England in 1946, she was sent to a boarding school where a coach spotted her talent. “I was head and shoulders above the rest,” she recalled. “During the War, they had no rackets, no balls and no nets in England. I was beating girls of 18.” She won a raft of youth titles, moved to Hampstead to enrol in a specialist school, and had lessons with the coach at the Cumberland Club. But as a Jew, she wasn’t able to become a member of the club, said The Guardian. (Later, she made a point of returning, twice, to win the club’s open title – “just to rub their noses in it... and they never gave me a cup of tea. Not even that!”) In 1952, she moved to Los
Angeles. As a Jew, she was barred from the private tennis club near her home, so she trained on public courts. She won a gold medal at the Maccabiah Games in Israel in 1953, and reached the Wimbledon quarter-final in 1955.
Fiercely competitive, Buxton made few friends on the circuit; but she found an ally in Gibson, a self-described “street fighter” who’d spent time in a shelter for abused children. Off the court, they went about everywhere together. In 1956, she and Gibson won the doubles at the French Open, where Gibson also won the singles title. They then won the doubles title at Wimbledon, where Buxton reached the singles final. A British newspaper reported their victory under the headline “Minorities win”. “It was in very small type,” Buxton noted, “lest anyone should see it.” Later that year however, she suffered a wrist injury, and in 1957, she was forced to retire. She was 22.
Although her successive applications to join the All England Club were rejected, she remained a fixture of the tennis world, attending tournaments and writing books. She and Gibson stayed in touch, but they had not spoken for some time when, in 1995, she got a call from her friend. Gibson had gone on to win four more grand slam singles titles; but she’d never been good with money, and having had a stroke, and racked up huge medical bills, she was destitute. Buxton, who had settled in Florida, sent her some cash, then started a campaign which raised $1m, so enabling Gibson to live the last eight years of her life in comfort. Buxton was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2014 and the Black Tennis Hall of Fame the following year.