Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

11 Introduction ‘It gradually got that you were free’ Other factories provided fields, equipment and facilities for netball, gymnastics, tennis, and swimming. Like the WAAC, wartime cricket was not solely restricted to the middle- and upper classes. Welfare Officers were hired to supervise the needs of employees, from complaints and healthcare, to organising dances, picnics and sports tournaments. Usually educated middle-class women, Welfare Officers introduced munitionettes to games more common in fee-paying schools and colleges: they offered many working-class women and girls their first experience of team games during the First World War. Sport quickly became an integral part of factory culture. 9 Although football was more popular with women employed in wartime industries, cricket was also played by many factories. In Braintree, the Crittall Manufacturing Company ceased manufacturing metal windows and began production on 18-pound shells, aided by an influx of female munitions operatives. As part of their recreational programmes, they organised cricket and hockey games for their new workforce, but these soon ended after the war. The Templeborough National Projectile Factory in Rotherham employed 5,700 employees – the majority being women and girls – and organised football, cricket and hockey tournaments against other local factories and shop departments. The factory management was fully aware of the ‘real or imaginary sacrifice of early Victorian ideals’ women’s team sports represented, but claimed social conservatism was worth abandoning. The factory paper, aptly named The Bombshell , asked employees ‘to apply the rules of football and cricket outside the playing fields to the game of life’, believing sport was morally improving for workers. 10 The unique restrictions of cricket in terms of time, space and specialist equipment failed to beset football so acutely, so teams were willing to travel long distances to play. Between 1917 and 1920 women’s cricket sides were formed by transportation and engineering firms in London, Derby, Chesterfield, Clays Cross, Burton-on-Trent and elsewhere in the Midlands. Cadbury’s, one of the few companies that promoted cricket for their female employees before the war, doubled their number of teams at Bournville between 1914 and 1919. However, many of these sides dissolved following the end of hostilities as returning soldiers replaced women in industrial employment. 11 Working-class women’s cricket ultimately rested on employers’ goodwill and women’s ability to retain their jobs, and therefore the future of the sport was fundamentally fragile from the outset. Nevertheless, sides did continue after wartime production ceased. Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit factory in Reading manufactured 60,000 shells during the war, and employed 5,000 mostly female staff. Male-only sports grounds were opened to women for the first time, with tennis and croquet offered between 1913 and 1918, and a women’s cricket team officially formed in June 1919. In 1926 an interdepartmental women’s cricket competition was established which included both office and factory workers, and by 1929 21 interdepartmental teams competed, far outstripping the 12 male teams.