Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

12 Introduction ‘It gradually got that you were free’ This level of growth in women’s cricket was not dissimilar to the sport’s development nationally in these years. While it was expected women would meekly return to the home when peace arrived, they remained a very cheap source of labour – often paid half that of men for similar jobs – and therefore employers were reluctant to see them go. Although most women’s work teams disbanded after the war, some continued to play even when peace was declared. 12 If women were tasked with the manufacture of products used to end life, they were entrusted with the role of saving them too, and cricket was played in more traditional areas of female employment. Numerous voluntary agencies were established before or during the First World War to provide nursing care for servicemen, the largest being the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) with 23,000 nurses and 18,000 orderlies serving by 1918. As volunteers had to pay for both their training and equipment, most VADs were middle- and upper-class women that occupied a blurred space between the private function of familial carers, and public work outside of the home. Just as the WAAC had used cricket as a way of rehabilitating convalescing soldiers, so too did some nurses. 13 This was the case at Harefield Hospital, which at its height catered for over 1,000 wounded Australian soldiers. In November 1916, the hospital formed its Sports Union and arranged matches between patients and English and Australian nurses, as well as local women. These games were a joyful novelty which involving men having to bat, bowl and field left-handed, and gave patients an opportunity to return to some level of normality after the horrors of the trenches. Some female nurses may even have played the game with injured soldiers in the Second Boer War (1899- 1902), but this number would have been very small. ‘Open-air treatment’ was believed to speed recovery and strengthen bodies. The debilitating and dull process of recovery, coupled with the spontaneous and playful nature of these games would have removed any social stigma associated with women and cricket, and may have presented some women with their first chance to play the game. 14 But the relationship between women’s cricket and public service went beyond employment or nursing. In December 1914, Belfast’s Holywood Ladies’ Cricket Club organised a concert to raise money for the Royal Irish Rifles. Songs, dances and comedy sketches by the cricketers proved to be a hit with the locals; the money raised being used to buy cigarettes for local soldiers on the Western Front. 15 Cricket was seen as a way of healing the individual and community wounds the war was inflicting, and it was common for women to stage cricket matches to raise money for local hospitals or war charities. Alternatively, the limited number of clubs and educational institutions that played cricket by 1914 arranged games with convalescing soldiers in nearby hospitals. St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith twice played ‘a West-London hospital’ in 1918, and Roedean School held similar games with injured servicemen. Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge, also played recovering men. 16 Sometimes these separate approaches – playing