Left-handers make up about ten per cent of the world's population but when it comes to tennis - or at least becoming champions of Wimbledon - the percentage is even lower. Only nine left-handed players, seven men and two women, have ever won a Wimbledon singles title and it is only in recent years through the repeat skills of such as Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe that the total of singles titles annexed reached 24.

Wimbledon had been going for 30 years before, in 1907, The Championships welcomed their first leftie as a winner. He was an Australian, Norman Brookes, who also became the first man from overseas to capture the trophy. Born in 1877, the year of Wimbledon's inaugural competition, Brookes became champion at 29.

He was the first of the great Australian tennis players, possessed of what was styled "a devilish, swerving serve" which earned him the nickname The Wizard. Brookes had already competed in the 1905 Wimbledon, losing in the Challenge Round to the five-time champion, Laurie Doherty, before returning two years later to defeat the same opponent by walkover after playing through the field to reach the Challenge Round.

Wimbledon did not see Brookes again until 1914, when once more he became the champion in the last event before the First World War. After serving as a captain in the British army, Brookes defended his title in the first post-war tournament and lost to a fellow Australian, Gerald Patterson. In 1924, aged 46, Brookes was still competing at Wimbledon, good enough to reach the fourth round.

Forty years passed before Wimbledon welcomed another left-hander into the winners' circle. He was Jaroslav Drobny, the Czech who fled his homeland's Communist regime and was competing on an Egyptian passport when he won Wimbledon at the 11th attempt.

Having played his first Wimbledon in 1938, the bespectacled Drobny had reached the semi-finals three times and been runner-up twice (1949 and 1952). Such failures had made Drobny, who represented Czechoslovakia at ice hockey in the 1948 Winter Olympics, highly popular with the British public, so his 1954 victory over Ken Rosewall in a four-set 58-game classic was hailed virtually as a home triumph for Britain.

Drobny, who was to become a British citizen five years later, was, like Brookes, a late blossomer. He was 32 when Wimbledon success came his way, having already lifted the French title in successive seasons, 1951-52.

Eight years on, in 1960, Wimbledon fell to another of the talented Australian brigade, Neale Fraser, whose swinging, kicking serve was so similar to Drobny's. Even Fraser, who went on to win the US title later the same year, conceded he was lucky to reach Wimbledon's final after saving five match points in a marathon quarter-final against the American, Earl Buchholz.

However, there was nothing lucky about his success in the final, where he beat his compatriot, the up-and-coming Rod Laver, in four sets. Fraser went on to succeed the legendary Harry Hopman as Australia's Davis Cup captain, a post he held for 23 years.

It was Laver who became the fourth of the left-handed champions by winning the next two Wimbledons, 1961 and 1962, before turning professional and then returning, after tennis went open in 1968, to win that year and in 1969. In two of those four years, '62 and '69, the Rockhampton Rocket won all four Grand Slams to set the mark as the game's best-ever male competitor.

In 1969 Laver shared the title honours with the first left-handed woman winner, Britain's Ann Jones, who became - and who remains - the only British left-handed singles champion, man or woman.

Mrs Jones, who first made her sporting name as Ann Haydon in table tennis as a five-time finalist in the world championships, was 30 and competing in her 14th Wimbledon when fortune finally smiled on her, though she won the title the hardest way conceivable, by defeating the sport's top two women, Margaret Court and Billie Jean King, in the semi-finals and final.

Suddenly, left-handers were now more in evidence as champions of Wimbledon. Jimmy Connors, aged 21 and competing in his third Wimbledon, dropped only six games in routing Ken Rosewall in the 1974 final. Then in 1982, playing for the 11th time, he won it again.

Connors' second title was sandwiched between the loud and laudable successes of John McEnroe in 1981, 1983 and 1984, and for three of those years in the early Eighties, 1982 to 1984, there was a left-handed woman champion, too.

Martina Navratilova, on her way to becoming the finest ever female tennis champion, had embarked in 1978 on a magnificent spell in which she fell in love with the Wimbledon tournament and won its singles crown eight times in ten years.

Then, just to show it was not all over after defeats by Steffi Graf in the 1988 and 1989 finals, she won a ninth Wimbledon in 1990.

For a while, after those heady years, the era of the left-hander was in decline. Then, after 11 years without a title for that ten per cent of the world's population, Goran Ivanisevic took the men's title in 2001 to prove that the lefties can still sometimes rule at Wimbledon.

Written by Ron Atkin