Jeanne Matthey

Jeanne Matthey was a French tennis player, born in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Swiss father and a French mother, who learned the game at the Racing Club de France after her family moved to Paris in 1900. She won the French Open women's singles championship four years in a row from 1909 to 1912 and lost the 1913 final to Marguerite Broquedis. In 1913 she beat the fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lenglen on the way to the Chantilly title. Wounds suffered as a Red Cross nurse in the First World War ended her playing career, and in the Second World War she worked for the resistance and was held in German concentration camps in 1945. She was later made a commander of the Legion of Honour.