William Cecil Marshall (29 April 1849 – 24 January 1921) was a British architect and amateur tennis player, who was runner-up in the very first Wimbledon tournament to Spencer Gore in 1877.

[2] Marshall attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge,[2][6] where he played lawn tennis for the university against Oxford in 1870, 1871 and 1872.

[1] Marshall first worked for the Cheltenham architect, John Middleton (1873), and subsequently for Basil Champneys and Thomas Graham Jackson.

[1][22] The family lived in Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, until Marshall's retirement in 1908, when they moved to Tweenways (now Leigh Heights), a house he had built near Hindhead in Surrey in the 1880s.

[20] Marshall was an amateur artist and naturalist; in addition to tennis, he was a keen ice skater, and wrote a book on the topic.

[1][2] He was a friend and correspondent of Charles Darwin;[24][25] his circle also included Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

[26] Frances Partridge describes the family during her childhood as standing for "love of Nature ... for Wordsworthian poetry and its pantheistic outlook; for eugenics, agnosticism, and the march of science; for class distinctions courteously observed.