The Summer Field

171 on first innings by two runs, 103 to 101; only, the gentlemen bowled 42 wides, and ‘they had to bat left handed with broomsticks and field and bowl with left hands only’. Men were left-handers in an equivalent game at Renishaw in August 1912, except they batted with pick-shafts on an 18-yard pitch. At Oswestry the school eleven played a ladies’ eleven in June 1896 ‘under the usual conditions’, so the Montgomery County Times reported. ‘The display of the gentler sex was very creditable and with a little more practice under their able coach they will in all probability turn the tables on their victors.’ Was this sincere, or empty flattery? As early as August 1882, a widely-quoted article in the Pall Mall Gazette , about the boom in tennis, spotted that by advancing in one sport women could advance in others, and more generally. Men claimed to worry that women might make a sport less energetic, and feebler, whether the ‘weaker sex’ played among themselves or with men. In fairness there was no denying that for safety’s sake women ought to play only among themselves. Some men still disapproved. In April 1933 the Derby Evening Telegraph ran a photograph of a local ‘girl cricketer’ bowling. It prompted a letter printed the next day from ‘Reformer’: ‘… the expression on the girl’s face belied youth. The violent exercise … had completely distorted her features.’ Several letters from women the day after defended women’s sport, if only because it was more healthy than ‘necking in the cinema’. Even if the newspaper invented ‘Reformer’, to spark real readers, that anonymous view was evidently credible. Women Undated group of ladies with BLCC badges – possibly Bawtry Ladies Cricket Club, of South Yorkshire.