The leafy London suburb will soon resound with the familiar thwack, thwack, thwack as Wimbledon Fortnight gets underway on June 25. Helen McKay-Ferguson tracks down some bizarre facts to regale your friends with as you wait in the queue or sit out a spot of bad weather.

1) The name tennis is derived from the French ‘tenir’ meaning ‘to hold’. In days gone by opponents would have shouted ‘tenez’ at each other before serving as a way of saying, “See this ball I’m holding? I’m about to belt it at you”.

2) But if Major Walter Clopton Wingfield had got his way we’d all be calling it ‘sphairistike’, from the Greek meaning ‘the art of ball playing’. This was how the Major patented the game in 1874 when he drew up a modern set of rules. The term also crops up in the medieval mystery play ‘The Second Shepherd’ where, in a bizarre break from tradition, the shepherds arrive bearing a tennis ball for the baby Jesus.

3) The French also gives rise to the term ‘deuce’, a contraction of ‘a deux jeu’ meaning two points away from the end of the game. And apparently the term ‘love’ comes from ‘l’oeuf’, French for ‘the egg’ and a reference to the egg-shaped symbol for zero. The term ‘service’, meanwhile, dates back to sports mad monarch Henry VIII, who became so fat he couldn’t throw the ball up in the air and had to have a servant do it for him. 

 4) This year the male and female and singles champions will be awarded the same amount of prize money for the first time in Wimbledon’s history. A cool £700,000 is up for grabs, far exceeding the £10 shopping voucher awarded to ladies’ doubles winner Phyllis King back in 1936 – even if you do take inflation into account.

5) During the Second World War the Centre Court received a direct hit from a ‘stick’ of five bombs, resulting in the loss of 1,200 seats. But the Club still managed to do its bit for the war effort, allowing its famous courts to be used as a base by the emergency services and Home Guard. Not only that, but it also sheltered a mini farmyard of pigs, hens, geese and rabbits, helping the locals to supplement their rations.

6) These days the organisers are more intent on keeping animals off the courts. Electric fences are in place to stop pesky foxes venturing onto the grass and corroding it with their urine. And three days a week Hamish the hawk is brought in to fly over the courts, scaring away pigeons so they don’t upset matches. Having said that, in 2003 organisers allowed makers of videogame Virtua Tennis 2 to go ahead with a publicity stunt involving 20 pigeons. Spray-painted with the Virtua Tennis 2 logo, the specially trained birds flew onto the site during warm sessions and flapped their message in fans’ faces. Nice.

7) Even players who make it through the tough qualifying rounds won’t be allowed onto the courts unless they’re wearing the right kit. From 2006 players must be clad in traditional Wimbledon whites and women are banned from wearing low-cut tops that flash too much cleavage.

8) Female tennis players have also come under fire for grunting under the pressure. One of the loudest is Monica Seles, whose porcine outbursts can reach a whopping 93.2 decibels. But in recent years her crown has been snatched by Yugoslavian champion Maria Sharapova, whose loudest grunts register at an ear-splitting 101.2 decibels.

9) And TV commentators have come out with a few howlers of their own. Here are some classics:

“McEnroe has got to sit down and work out where he stands.” – Fred Perry.

“The Gullikson twins here. An interesting pair, both from Wisconsin.” – Dan Maskell

“She comes from a tennis-playing family. Her father’s a dentist.” – BBC 2

10) No visit to Wimbledon could be complete without a helping of strawberries and cream and every year spectators manage to polish off 27,000 kilos and 7,000 litres respectively – that’s roughly 270 wheelbarrows and 50 bathtubs!