Angela Buxton
Determined tennis player who bonded with her doubles partner over the prejudice both had faced
ANGELA BUXTON, who has died on the eve of her 86th birthday, was a famously determined English tennis player who endured early experiences of anti-semitism and went on to partner the Africanamerican Althea Gibson to the Wimbledon and French Open doubles crowns.
She later became an influential tennis writer and coach and won acclaim for her loyal support of her former doubles partner, who fell on hard times in old age.
Angela Buxton was born in Liverpool on August 18 1934, one of two children of a wealthy Jewish couple, Violet and Harry Buxton, whose Russian families had both fled the pogroms at the turn of the century.
“Our surname had been something like Bakstansky,’’ she later explained, “but they anglicised it to Buxton.” Her father, who had been a jewellery trader in Leeds, developed an ingenious gambling system and went to the south of France with his brother to try it out. The pair played the tables and won so much money that they broke the bank, their vast windfall enabling Harry to buy a string of cinemas in the north-east in 1928.
When war broke out, Violet Buxton took Angela and her brother to South Africa to escape the bombing and encouraged them to play sports. Angela, a bright, determined child, showed early promise at tennis, and when the family returned to England in 1946 she was sent to a boarding school in Llandudno, Gloddaeth Hall, where the coach immediately 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. My coach said I was a potential Wimbledon champion.”
He insisted she enter the Hightown tournament near Liverpool, her first championship, and she won the Under-14, Under-15 and Under-18 titles. After taking her School Certificate early, at 14, she decided to concentrate on tennis and attended a school for talented girls in Hampstead. She had several lessons with a coach at the Cumberland Club, but when she asked him about joining, he told her not to bother because she was Jewish. Later she took great pride in regularly winning the Cumberland’s open tournament.
By now her parents had divorced, and in 1952 her mother took her to California to continue her education, lodging opposite the exclusive Los Angeles Tennis Club. Once again, as a Jew, she was banned from playing there so instead she commuted to the La Cienega public courts, where she was coached by “Big Bill” Tilden, a threetime Wimbledon singles champion and later a film actor. An outcast from polite society in LA, after serving a prison term for sexually abusing teenage boys, he none the less retained numerous celebrity pupils and Angela Buxton played tennis with Charlie Chaplin and Doris Day.
She returned to Britain in 1953, a rising star among a strong British contingent including Angela Mortimer, Pat Ward, Anne Shilcock and Shirley Bloomer, who were all in the world’s top 10.
After a humiliating 6-0 6-0 thrashing by the Wimbledon champion Doris Hart in the British Hard Court Championships, however, she decided to quit and chose the Maccabiah Games in Israel as her farewell tournament. Two gold medals restored her morale and she returned to competition reinvigorated, winning selection for the 1954 British Wightman Cup team against America.
She became the protégée of the maverick tennis writer and amateur coach CM “Jimmy” Jones, later the editor of Lawn Tennis magazine, who trialled his offbeat training system – which emphasised agility and footwork training – on her. Her ranking soared and she reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals in 1955. Jones insisted she could win the doubles with the right partner and when she met the raw but powerful African-american star Althea Gibson on a goodwill tour of India, the pair developed a close rapport.
Both women were outcasts. Althea Gibson, a talented all-rounder, the daughter of penniless sharecroppers from South Carolina, had developed her game playing stickball in Harlem and winning a string of national blacks-only tennis titles, but it took years before she was allowed to play the top white players.
When Jones asked her to partner Angela Buxton, she accepted enthusiastically. They won the 1956 French Open, beating the Americans, Darlene Hard and Dorothy Knode, in a three-set final, then looked unstoppable at Wimbledon.
Angela Buxton, with the English Indoor and London Grass Court singles crowns under her belt, reached both the Wimbledon singles and doubles finals, the first Briton to contest the singles final in 17 years. Her mother Violet, realising that Angela would be opening the dancing with Lew Hoad at the Wimbledon Ball on the eve of finals day, decided she too would like to go to the ball.
When Angela went to the office with her mother to order the tickets, however, the pair were told that they had sold out. The redoubtable Mrs Buxton, detecting anti-semitism, was furious and threatened to keep her daughter at home on the Saturday, finals day for both the women’s singles and doubles, effectively stymying the entire Championship.
The pair stormed out, before the ticket manager, realising how catastrophic Angela’s non-attendance would be, sprinted after them in a panic, apologising and saying that she had managed to find two tickets after all.
In the singles final, Angela Buxton was swept aside by the American Shirley Fry, who had put out Althea Gibson in the quarter-finals. The doubles was a different matter and, having already beaten Fry and Louise Brough in the semis, they outplayed the Australians Fay Muller and Daphne Seeney 6-1 8-6, in the final. One British newspaper reported the victory under the headline “Minorities Win”. “It was in very small type”, Angela Buxton recalled acidly, “lest anyone should see it”.
A wrist injury at a New Jersey tournament weeks later virtually ended her career at just 22. Although she won the singles at the Maccabiah Games again in 1957 and played left-handed in lower-level tournaments, she accepted the inevitable and retired from international tennis.
She became a tennis journalist and wrote several books on coaching technique, including Tackle Tennis This Way, Starting Tennis and Winning Tennis and Doubles Tactics. She also founded the Angela Buxton Tennis Centre in north London.
Angela Buxton was never hampered by false modesty, and her forthright manner alienated many members of the tennis establishment. Unlike the rest of Britain’s Wimbledon champions, she was never invited to join the All England Club, an omission she attributed to anti-semitism, although the club has had numerous Jewish members, the first admitted in 1952.
In 1959 Angela Buxton married Donald Silk, president of the British Zionist Federation and later a prominent City figure. The couple had two sons and a daughter, and during the Six-day War in 1967 she volunteered on a kibbutz in northern Israel with the three children, all aged under seven. The marriage did not last and Jimmy Jones, the greatest tennis influence of her life, became her longstanding companion.
In later life Angela Buxton divided her time between Altrincham, Cheshire, and the Palmaire Country Club in Florida, still taking a keen interest in tennis and mentoring promising young players.
She remained a close friend of Althea Gibson, who won the Wimbledon singles crown in 1957, the first African-american woman to play at Wimbledon and to win a major. When her friend rang her in 1995, destitute and suicidal, Angela Buxton organised a successful campaign among the tennis fraternity, raising over $1 million.
The money transformed Gibson’s final years, enabling her to cover her medical care and live comfortably until her death in 2003.
In 1981 Angela Buxton was admitted to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and in 2015 was inducted into the Black Tennis Hall of Fame. When a statue of Althea Gibson was unveiled at the US Open in 2019, Angela Buxton was honoured for her role in promoting her friend’s career and supporting her in her decline.
Angela Buxton is survived by her daughter, Rebecca Silk, wife of the Tory MP for Huntingdon, Jonathan Djanogly. Both her sons predeceased her.
Angela Buxton, born August 16 1934, died August 15 2020