Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

124 Chapter Eight ‘The idea a girl cannot play cricket has proved to be rubbish’ By the early 1930s, the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) was triumphantly, if a little disingenuously, claiming victory on behalf of the sport: women’s cricket was here to stay. ’Justification is no longer necessary’, the public voice of the game, Marjorie Pollard, wrote in a small, easily overlooked back page of the Evening News . ‘All seems now plain sailing and full-steam ahead.’ But was anybody listening to her bold declaration? Certainly, the number of girls adopting the sport was sharply rising. In Reading, one frustrated mother told a local reporter that while she was ‘doing the housework, looking after the family, making clothes and being an active member of the Labour Party’, her teenage daughters couldn’t be prised away from their bats and balls. A new generation of girls, untroubled by poverty and stifling ‘Victorian’ moral standards, was putting cricket before ‘everything else.’ 1 Nevertheless, the sport still failed to reach many outside girls’ secondaries or the novelty pages of provincial newspapers. The 1934/5 tour of Australia and New Zealand may have made a fairly big splash Down Under, but a year later barely a ripple of news made it back to Blighty. Some men, deeply impressed by the standard of play they’d witnessed, tried to generate wider interest. ‘I used to solace my manly pride with the reflection that a flying cricket ball was one of the things a woman could not face, but after seeing Miss Pollard crack towards cover point like Hendren, I have begun to wonder’, the Sunday Mercury cricket correspondent wrote. Women’s cricket, he concluded, was ‘worth going a considerable distance to watch.’ Meanwhile, another journalist proclaimed in Girl’s Own Paper that ‘the idea a girl cannot play cricket has proved to be rubbish’, the game had now outgrown prejudice and deserved recognition. Nonetheless, recognition was not readily forthcoming, and despite the efforts of Pollard and others, public interest in Britain gathered little momentum by 1936, the WCA’s tenth anniversary. 2 If the media could simply ignore sports like cricket, then the game had little impact on wider debates on women’s place in society. Physical recreation not only freed bodies, but also generated new employment opportunities, greater access to public spaces, and led to more liberalised clothing. Before 1914, sport was a key part of women’s social emancipation. Although Edwardian sportswomen were rarely vocal feminists, bodily liberation was an important area of feminist intervention and gender struggle. As historian Kathleen McCrone put it, sport was ‘the physical dimension of the struggle for emancipation’. Through physical recreation, especially