Clodagh Finn: The Irish tennis ace you've probably never heard of

Irish Examiner

12-07-2025

As the women's final gets underway at Wimbledon today, let's give a celebratory shout-out to the only Irish woman ever to take the title: Lena Rice from Tipperary.
It's now fairly well-known that this woman with the powerful serve beat May Jacks in two sets to take the singles title in 1890 so, why then, is there so little about the record-breaking player who beat her earlier that year?
A few weeks before, in May, Louisa Martin defeated Lena Rice in the final of the Irish Championships at Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, a tournament on a par with Wimbledon at the time. On that occasion, Miss Martin, to use the deferential tone adopted in news reports, 'played up better' than Miss Rice to take the singles title.
It was no one-off. Louisa Martin was Djokovic-esque in her achievement; like him, she won 24 Major titles — though not all singles — in a brilliant career that earned her international recognition. Here is a summary of those dizzying stats: Between 1886 and 1903, she won 15 Major singles titles, five doubles and four mixed doubles championships, and she was a three-times finalist at Wimbledon (1898, 1900 and 1901).
Tennis historian and author of The Concise History of Tennis (2010) Karoly Mazak went so far as to rank her 'world number 1' for six of those playing years, but even in the pre-Open, pre-ranking days of the late 19th century her game was considered exceptional.
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Writing at the time, English tennis correspondent A Wallis Myers said of her: 'She has been unfailingly to the fore at the premier meetings, always a doughty warrior, armed at all points to meet any kind of attack. There is no better-known member of the Fitzwilliam Club, and among the roll of ladies who have given their best to promote the true interests of the game in Ireland, hers must inevitably go down to posterity.'
Stellar career
Her singular career, however, did not go down to posterity or, at least, not until recently. That Myers appraisal from Lawn Tennis was quoted in a revelatory piece on RTÉ Brainstorm last week in which Aoife Ryan-Christensen recalled the heyday of Irish tennis and the Irish Open, once an important stop on the tennis calendar.
There are other references, including a very impressive account of her stellar career by Mark Ryan on tennisforum.com, but it still feels as if we have not made enough of a woman who was exceptional in her field.
As Ryan puts it: 'Given the successes she consistently achieved at the highest level during the period 1885-1903, in particular in singles events, Louisa Martin can arguably be considered Ireland's greatest ever female lawn tennis player.'
If you trawl back through the archives, that little-known fact breaks through in several unexpected places.
It's a wonderful surprise, for instance, to discover a sketch of her in a 1896 summer edition of The Gentlewoman, 'the weekly illustrated paper for women' founded in London just six years before. She is shown wearing a long skirt, a cinched blouse and a straw hat as she steps forward to take a shot.
'Louisa Martin can arguably be considered Ireland's greatest ever female lawn tennis player.'
How women, often wearing brimmed hats and skirts that brushed the ground, played tennis at all is a wonder, but Louisa Martin must have faced extra challenges as one of the few women who had an overhead serve and a serve-and-volley game.
Rise to fame
Born Mary Louisa Martin to Edith Agatha Martin and the Reverend George Henry Martin on September 3, 1865, in Newton Gore, Leitrim, Louisa (as she was known) was a teenager when lawn tennis was enjoying something of a golden age in Ireland in the late 1880s.
It's not entirely clear when she began to play — perhaps while visiting her grandparents in Cheltenham — but by 1884 she was good enough to make it to the finals of the Cheltenham Championships. She lost to Edith Davies in three sets, but she was already making waves.
The Field Lawn Tennis Calendar said that while Davies carried off the title, 'she was very hardly pressed by Louisa Martin, who, if able to practice with good players, will be able to hold her own with the very best of the ladies'.
It wasn't long before she did just that. Two years later, she returned to win the championship and repeated the feat in 1887 and 1888.
By then, her name was enough to draw a crowd, or so the Belfast Newsletter suggested in its coverage of the Irish Championships in late May, 1887. It reported that the 'the audience was larger than on the previous day no doubt in anticipation of the match between Miss Louisa Martin and Miss Lottie Dod'.
Despite showing 'exceptionally brilliant form' in that season's practice matches, Martin lost to Dod because of 'nervousness', a trait singled out more than once to explain her few losses.
In the Irish Championships of 1892, though, Louisa Martin evened the score when she beat Lottie Dod, then considered unbeatable.
The sports journal Pastime ran this account: 'Scarcely anyone expected Miss Martin to win, but win she did. She started with great dash and decision, the court — somewhat slow and heavy from thundershowers — appearing to suit her admirably, and proving just as unsuitable to her opponent's style of play. The consequence was that Miss Dod had no time to get into her stroke, and the set was quickly won by Miss Martin by 6-2."
Her opponent won the second set and it looked like she might take the third too, but a thunderstorm stopped play; the short reprieve revived Louisa Martin who won the game, 'her play all round being of a very high order'.
We get a tiny peephole into her private life, courtesy of the Evening Herald, in late May 1896, which recounted that Louisa's niece, Madge Stanuell, was visiting the tennis champion at her country home at Grange Bective, Co Meath, when she fell from a horse but happily escaped serious injury.
Lena Rice from Tipperary is the only Irish woman ever to have won the title at Wimbledon.
Madge Stanuell's aunt on the other side of the family was Florence Stanuell. She was also a gifted tennis player who teamed up with Louisa to win a number of doubles championships. Not only were the aunts good at tennis, but they were also talented hockey players.
Louisa, known as 'Loo' to friends and family, was also something of a character, according to her great-nephew Peter Bamford. She farmed some of the land she inherited and, at times, blew the harvest money to bring Peter's mother Evelyn to London as her chaperone. 'This was all part of Aunt Loo's fun,' he writes, 'as she was about 55 and her 'chaperone' about 17. My mother had many tales of these excursions, which took place about 1920 and later. On one occasion Aunt Loo acted scared of the traffic in Oxford Street and made a 'holy show' of her chaperone, finally they took a taxi to cross the street.'
There's another newspaper snapshot that speaks of the connections between sportswomen of the time. Buried deep in the social columns of April 1938 — three years before she died — is a line telling us that Louisa was a guest at the wedding of Tyrone golfing pioneer Rhona Adair's daughter. When Rhona Cuthell married William Aylmer Clarke that year, Louisa Martin was among the congregation wearing 'a saxe blue felt hat with a tailored suit of navy blue'.
As one of the world's most famous tournaments draws to a close today, let us also pay tribute to this one-time finalist and greatly overlooked tennis great.
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