IN July 1934 Fred Perry beat Jack Crawford at Wimbledon to lift the men’s singles title. He would win again in 1935 and 1936, and no other British male player would win the title until a certain A Murray in 2013.

The women’s title went to Britain’s Dorothy Round, whose win over the American, Helen Jacobs, delighted the watching King and Queen. The month had arrived with a heatwave. On Saturday the 7th, the Glasgow Herald reported, “thousands of citizens” had left Glasgow “by car, ‘bus, cycle, and on foot for country and seaside in search of an elusive coolness. The Ayrshire and Fife coasts were well patronised, while many people sailed down the Clyde from the Broomielaw.”

The heat that Saturday, in fact, had been overbearing, with a temperature of 118 degrees in the sun being recorded at Springburn Park. Families cooled off (above) in the river Kelvin at Kirklee. Sand storms occurred on the beaches at St Andrews and Arbroath, to the alarm of bathers. Six hundred people needed treatment in the intense heat while watching the Test at Old Trafford.

The Herald’s photo-page, incidentally, carried a photo of the happy royal couple talking to the Wimbledon winners. Beneath it was one of German’s ageing President Paul von Hindenburg with his Chancellor, who, before the decade was out, would plunge the world into war. Hindenburg died less than a month later, and”Herr Hitler”, as the caption referred to him, took over.