Angela Mortimer, who has died aged 93, was one of only four British players to have won Wimbledon since the second world war. The odds on this shy young woman emerging from the backwaters of Devon to succeed on the international sporting stage were as remote as the swathes of Dartmoor she used to roam as a child.
But, having survived trying to dig up an unexploded bomb she found on the moor as an eight-year-old, “Mort” as she became known in the tennis world, battled all manner of adversity until she was able to beat Christine Truman in the Wimbledon final of 1961.
