The Summer Field

170 some of the last amateurs of the game – for granted. * Women always had a place in the game; on men’s terms. When Torquay club ran a ladies’ day in July 1857, ‘attendance was very large’, the Torquay Directory reported, ‘at least 200 of the beauty, fashion &c of the county being present’. This was Victorian convention. A day for ladies simply allowed them to show their faces, make their fathers proud and maybe attract an unmarried man. Otherwise, women were not welcome. According to the Yorkshire yearbook of 1904, a mere 18 ladies were county members: five married and 13 single. They were listed with youths; neither group was entitled to attend or vote at meetings. Clubs would take women’s money but would not give them a say in those days, nor would Parliament. By 1928, Yorkshire had about 700 lady members, though they could not attend or vote. By 1939, the county still had around 700 ladies, and any subscriber of one guinea or more could attend and vote. That was progress, though hardly equality; women, like juniors, only had to pay half a guinea. In politics, women faced a dilemma: ought they to demand entry into men’s worlds, to do the same as men; or were they best to campaign on women’s issues, such as childbirth? Likewise in cricket: did women want to be the same as men, in the pavilion and on the field; or did they want their own matches? Victorian men happily played women, while handicapped themselves. It was men’s way of reinforcing the physical differences in the two sexes. Or, men simply could not take such a match seriously. On Tuesday, August 7, 1894, the men of the Somerset village of Compton played the women. The diarist W.P. Hayter recorded that the ladies won Women Girls at Convent of Notre Dame, Birkdale, Southport, 1910s: batting and keeping wicket without pads.