Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

114 be taught the benefits of reasoned debate, compromise and majority-rule. The two organising bodies, alongside educational institutions, increasingly recognised and marketed the sport as an actualisation of democracy and the expression of moral worth, both on and off the field. There was nothing new in this. Cricket’s ability to endow schoolboys with certain qualities needed for participatory citizenship had long been accepted by 1918. From the 1840s public boys’ schools identified cricket as a method of grooming future public servants and leaders: a watchword for gentlemanly manhood, Christian purity and respectability, epitomised in the maxim ‘it’s not cricket’. Advocates of the sport emphasised its civilising effect that was deemed essential to Britain’s imperial project, and it was embraced by the armed services too. This firm belief endured in the 1920s and 1930s as high-ranking cricket officials likened the men’s game – with no sense of irony, despite the palpable class divisions – to ‘a true democracy’, and scolded ‘Bolshevik’ elements that sought to destroy its spirit of ‘fair play’ and egalitarianism. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was described in 1931, rather ironically given its unconcealed elitism, as ‘the Parliament of Cricket, holding its position by general consent.’ 11 The Cricketer published numerous articles on the benefits of the sport, including its capacity to foster unselfish, honourable, courageous, loyal behaviour, all in the spirit of friendship and goodwill. One commentator even wrote that it helped children learn mathematics by solidifying abstract concepts. 12 Team games, it was argued, had added ‘character-building’ elements which individual sports lacked. One journalist noted in 1922: ‘It is in character-building that cricket and football leave lawn tennis toiling painfully behind. The definition of good citizenship, I believe, is a man who puts more into the world than he takes out. In other words, a purely unselfish man. No games inculcate unselfishness to the extent that cricket and football do. Your cricketers and your footballers must play for the teams, not for themselves. They are part of a community, and must behave as good citizens.’ 13 Yet regardless of the author’s characterisation, ‘good citizenship’ was not the sole preserve of men in 1922. As women achieved greater recognition for their influence outside the home, it was no coincidence their participation in the national game also grew. Marjorie Pollard regularly repeated her conviction that the social aspect of cricket made the game morally superior to individual sports. ‘I place social intercourse first among the benefits of cricket,’ she wrote in Reynolds News , ‘with many other games, such as golf, you meet the same people over and over again; but a team game introduces you to at least eleven fresh faces every time.’ Cricket was a ‘gracious game… entirely free from snobbery’. 14 Women had demonstrated their commitment to the nation through cricket in the First World War, as nurses and volunteers played the game with convalescing soldiers, and it continued to act as a vehicle for showcasing More than a Game: Citizenship and Cricket