The Summer Field

172 Women played regardless. Two works teams met at Ivybridge one Thursday evening in July 1933: from Portal’s, a local paper mill; and Reckitt’s, a starch factory in nearby Plymouth. The South Devon Times called it a ‘novelty’; it may be significant that those working women, already with the economic freedom of a wage, had the cultural freedom to be outgoing with like- minded colleagues, at least at sport-friendly workplaces (Portal’s, for one, ran a men’s team too). Otherwise, gathering at least 22 women in a town or district was hard. That may explain the prewar cricket weeks at Colwall in Herefordshire, where women came together as strangers; captains were elected and teams arranged to be as even as possible. Those women, well- off enough to afford a week away from home, were a pioneering elite; hence matches between England and Australia, as watched in 1937 by F.I. Watson, a columnist for The Field . After watching his first day of women’s cricket at The Oval, he found the strokeplay ‘limited’, and the bowling ‘on the whole not very good’, ‘but the fielding was often really brilliant’. After judging that women looked ‘less elegant at cricket than they do in most other sports’, for the other two-thirds of his column he returned to his usual county round. Intriguingly, the letters page the next week carried a line from Watson, more (but not much more) enthusiastic about the women’s game. He closed with a conservative’s last stand: ‘Nothing that can be said against it, however, is likely to stem the tide of development.’ Why had he written the extra letter? Had someone made him?! Perhaps women were in some ways not so weak. * Women A Punch cartoon of 1961 making fun at women’s ignorance of cricket.