Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

14 Introduction ‘It gradually got that you were free’ the cowardly and the unruly: the supreme tool for training young men for their future roles in public life. It was also seen to be a civilising force, and was readily exported to the empire. It strengthened imperial bonds, supposedly humanised and elevated uncultured men, and helped build relationships based on mutual trust and respect. In short, it was a world occupied by men and built for men, and women simply had no place in it. 18 Yet as many women were padding up for the first time, the ‘Golden Age’ of men’s cricket came to an end in September 1914. A depleted last round of County Championship matches began on 31 August, by which time many grounds including Old Trafford, Trent Bridge and The Oval had been appropriated by the War Office for military use, and the tournament would not resurface until May 1919. The same was also true of the Minor County Championship, which did not resume until 1920, while the demands of enlistment and the requisition of grounds, vehicles and horses prevented nearly all recreational cricket until peacetime. Popular opinion in 1914 was certainly opposed to the continuation of spectator sports, and public officials castigated those that continued playing games as feckless or cowardly. ‘Men who can still go on with their cricket and football,’ Field Marshall Lord Roberts claimed on 29 August 1914, undermined ‘the very existence of the county’. In fact, only two major cricket competitions – the Bradford and Central Lancashire leagues – played every year of the war. 19 The contrast between men and women’s experiences of cricket during wartime were therefore vastly different. Although undeniably recreational, cricket was a constructive demonstration of civic virtue for women. For men, at least in the early stages of war, it was a symbol for unpatriotic, selfish hedonism. Two decades after the Great War, and these humble beginnings, the number of women and girls regularly playing cricket was probably higher than at any other point in the 20th century, barring the mid-1950s. The evolution of the sport was no anomaly. Women’s cricket was part of a wider narrative of social and cultural emancipation that began before the First World War. From an inaccessible game played solely by a few upper- class ladies, by the summer of 1938 there were probably over 10,000 women and girls regularly playing the game in England, and even more turning up to watch them play. The main reason for this unprecedented growth was the formation of the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) on 4 October 1926, the chief organising body for women’s cricket in Britain, which acted to coordinate, organise and develop the game. By 1928, the WCA had codified the rules of women’s cricket, and a year later had started actively promoting the game through public exhibition matches. By 1938, the WCA had 19 county associations formed and organised into five regional districts, which played regularly at first-class grounds. A tour of Australia and New Zealand between October 1934 and March 1935 saw the first international women’s cricket matches, and this was successfully repeated with an Australian tour of England in 1937. But it was not just the WCA that developed the game. The interwar years witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of women regularly