Ronald Shayes
British tennis player
Ronald Alfred Shayes (12 September 1912 – 17 December 1940) was a British tennis player.
A native of London, Shayes got his first introduction to tennis at the Garden Lawn Tennis Club in West Wickham and was active on tour during the 1930s. He was an architect by profession.
Shayes reached the singles fourth round at Wimbledon three times and was a doubles semi-finalist twice. In his only appearance at the U.S. National Championships in 1938 he took Bobby Riggs to five sets in a third round loss.
From 1938 to 1939, Shayes played for Great Britain in the Davis Cup. His 1939 reverse singles win over Bernard Destremau, which was considered an upset, secured a tie against France.
Shayes ended 1939 as Great Britain's third ranked player.
In 1940, Shayes was killed in a flying accident in Southern Rhodesia, while training with the Royal Air Force.
“Ronald Shayes” enters the record as british tennis player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ronald, Shayes and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q115903570. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1940, 1938 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronald Shayes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.