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Thelma Lister

British tennis player

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 26, 2024
Entity authorityQ115803192 ↗
Source-derived summary

Thelma Lister was a British former tennis player.

Lister was the niece of Sir John Jarvis, 1st Baronet. She won the singles title at the Irish Championships in 1937 and was runner-up the year after. Her career titles also included the North of England Championships. Amongst her Wimbledon appearances, which spanned four decades, she made the mixed doubles fourth round with Abe Segal in 1959. She was married to tennis player and South Africa Davis Cup captain Claude Lister.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Thelma Lister” is british tennis player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Thelma, Lister and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1937, 1959—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Thelma, Lister and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british tennis player” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 26, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q115803192. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937 and 1959.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Thelma Lister”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Thelma Lister primary sources, Thelma Lister archive and Thelma research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Thelma Lister”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Thelma Lister” 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.