May Sutton was born on September 26, 1886, in Plymouth, Devon, England, later emigrating with her family to California.
May Godfray Sutton was born on September 26, 1886, in Plymouth, England, the youngest of seven children of William Bartlett Sutton, a British naval officer, and Adeline Balugue Sutton. When she was six years old, her family emigrated to the United States, settling in Pasadena, California, a move that would prove pivotal to the development of American tennis.
The Sutton family produced a remarkable tennis dynasty: May and three of her sisters — Ethel, Violet, and Florence — all became accomplished competitive players, with Florence Sutton also achieving national ranking. Growing up in the temperate climate of Southern California allowed May to play tennis virtually year-round on hard courts, a training advantage that helped shape her aggressive, powerful playing style, quite different from the more genteel game favored by contemporaries in the northeastern United States and in England.
This unusual upbringing — a British-born girl raised in the burgeoning tennis culture of early twentieth-century California — set the stage for Sutton to become one of the first great transatlantic stars of women's tennis, bridging British and American playing traditions and eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen.
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