If he wins today, ‘Cross Channel Fery’ will be able to buy his own yacht, writes GUY ADAMS

Like all good posh boys, Arthur Fery knew how to behave when Her Majesty the Queen tapped him on the shoulder the last time he prepared to walk on to Centre Court.

During the accidental encounter just outside the Royal Box on Wednesday, the newly minted hero of British tennis didn’t just offer a suitably firm handshake: he also bowed his head and remembered to call her ‘Ma’am’.

Two hours and 14 minutes later, the 23-year-old former public schoolboy had sealed a place in the semi-final. 

Whereupon he was presented to Queen Camilla for a more formal chat. ‘She congratulated me’, Fery later recalled. ‘I told her how much of an honour it was for me to play in front of her. 

She told me, ‘Congratulations, keep going’. And I told her that it’s my birthday on Sunday and it would be great to play the Wimbledon final on my birthday.’

To do that, the man they are suddenly calling King Arthur will have to conjure up victory in what is, on paper, the most lopsided Anglo-German showdown since Dunkirk.

His semi-final opponent on Friday afternoon is Alexander Zverev, the ruthlessly efficient 6ft 6in World No3, who last month won his maiden Grand Slam on the clay of Roland Garros.

Fery is at least nine inches shorter and 111 places behind Zverev in the rankings. He serves at just 120mph to his opponent’s 131mph. 

And prior to this golden Wimbledon fortnight, the young Brit’s career prize money of £650,000 is a mere 1.3 per cent of the £49million that his rival has amassed.

Yet while Fery has dropped six sets en route to the final four (compared to Zverev’s two) and the bookies put his chances of success at just 16 per cent, there has been something about the swashbuckling manner of his victories thus far that makes it impossible to truly count him out.

During a crucial moment of the first round, the local boy who grew up within walking distance of the All England Club was forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to block out an epic temper tantrum from opponent Damir Dzumhur.

In round two, he came from a set down to edge out big-serving Finn Otto Virtanen, with Princess Catherine watching the action on an outside court. 

And epic third and fourth round battles saw him take down first Belgium’s Zizou Bergs then Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov via gripping ten point tie-breaks at the end of the fifth set.

Five times during those early rounds he had to contend with acute on-court nosebleeds, a condition exacerbated by stress which saw him visit a doctor this week to have blood vessels in his nostrils cauterised.

He’s also had to deal with a hostile PR campaign by scurrilous members of the French Press, who are attempting to claim him as one of their own. 

‘Arthur Fery, le Frenchy so British’ read a sardonic headline in L’Equipe on Thursday.

The accompanying article pointed out to readers that Fery, whose mother and father are both French, once represented that country as a 12-year-old junior and as a child spent holidays at the family’s second home near La Rochelle or with relatives in Nice.

Some have even christened him ‘Cross Channel Fery’. 

Yet while Fery is indeed bilingual and communicates with his parents in their mother tongue, the cut-glass English accent with which he has delivered a series of gracious and charming on-court victory speeches reflects the fact that he actually spent almost his entire childhood on the leafy streets of south-west London.

Born in Sevres, a Paris suburb a 20-minute drive from Roland Garros, he’s the eldest of three children of Olivia and Loic Fery, who moved to the UK in the early 2000s.

 Brother Maxime is a student at Imperial College London and is working a summer job at Wimbledon as a ‘runner’ carrying rackets to players.

Sister Albane, who spent her student days as a cross-country athlete at a university in the US, works for fashion brand Christian Dior. 

The family fortune is, meanwhile, considerable.

Loic, a financial trader, founded a hedge fund named Chenavari in 2007, which now has almost £5billion under management. 

Reportedly worth around £275million, he spent a portion of the spoils buying French Ligue 1 football club Lorient in 2009, at the age of just 35, though he sold it in January to American Bill Foley, who also owns AFC Bournemouth.

Olivia, under her maiden name Gravereaux, competed as a tennis player for both France and Hong Kong, where she lived during the 1990s. 

She peaked at world No225 and picked up a wild card to the French Open in 1991 before retiring after winning 33 of her 58 singles matches.

The couple divorced in 2022. 

Loic is now in a relationship with a 35-year old former Bolivian tennis star named Diana Kyllmann, who has been accompanying him to Fery’s matches. 

Olivia, who plays at the All England Club and has been viewing her son’s games from a members’ enclosure, still lives at the £6million, seven-bedroom family pile south of Wimbledon Park where Arthur grew up.

Arthur, whose social media feeds contain footage of a series of exotic family holidays, has described his background as ‘obviously privileged’ but added: ‘My parents have worked hard and had great jobs but I don’t really want to rest on that, I want to build my own name and that’s where the motivation comes from.’

Be that as it may, his childhood home is a stone’s throw from the Westside Club, one of London’s smarter tennis establishments, where Arthur was introduced to the sport by his mother at the age of five. 

He showed immediate promise. At seven he was among 113 ‘rising stars’ who played in the Lawn Tennis Association’s ‘national talent ID finals’.

At ten, he won the LTA’s winter national tour finals, an achievement indicating that he was one of the best players for his age in the UK. 

British coach Alison Taylor, who worked with Fery at the time and has been in his box this week, recalls him being ‘incredibly athletic’, recently telling Daily Mail Sport: ‘He had the best footwork, without even working on it.’ 

At 13, he won a sports scholarship to the £11,940-per-term King’s College School in Wimbledon. 

Unlike many tennis prodigies, who tend to be home-schooled to allow them to complete gruelling training schedules, Fery sensibly chose to remain in full-time education until GCSEs. 

Despite then joining the junior tour in 2018, which required him to begin online learning, he achieved three As at A-level. 

As a junior, his peak world ranking was 12. He competed at all four Grand Slams, catching the eye of the late Mike Dickson, the Daily Mail’s legendary tennis correspondent, at the 2021 Australian Open.

In what was his first newspaper interview, the then 18-year-old revealed that, rather than turning pro, he intended to accept a tennis scholarship to California’s Stanford University.

The decision to go to America, a path previously taken by Britain’s Cameron Norrie, was endorsed by Dickson, one of Fleet Street’s greatest analysts of the game, who observed that ‘taking a scholarship to play on the highly competitive American college circuit is a road increasingly travelled by aspiring professionals, with few players now breaking through before their twenties’.

That take proved to be almost entirely correct: in only his second year at Stanford, where he studied Science, Technology and Society, Fery became the No1 ranked player in college tennis.

He decided to leave Stanford after completing three of his four years (he’s free to finish his degree at a later date) having run Russian superstar Daniil Medvedev close during a gripping first-round match at Wimbledon in the summer of 2023.

Since the back end of 2025, he has won 47 of his last 60 matches to climb around 400 places on the rankings ladder, while a run to the second round of the Australian Open put Fery on the brink of the top 100.

As that journey suggests, his success at Wimbledon has been less of a surprise to those who follow the sport closely than it has to casual fans.

On the domestic front, Fery is reported to have dated former schoolmate Honor Millard, a foodie influencer known online as The Honorable Chef.

However, she was last pictured alongside Fery two years ago and it’s unclear whether they remain in a relationship. 

Two months ago, he bought his first home, believed to be a flat in Fulham.

Should Fery win on Friday, he’ll be able to afford an upgrade. 

He’s already banked £900,000 for reaching the semi-final and will double that should he beat Zverev, while ranking points for this run will propel him into the top 40, meaning he can enjoy seedings in lucrative ATP tournaments over the coming months.

Or to put things another way, ‘Cross Channel Fery’ may soon be able to afford his own yacht.