Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

22 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges teams. Colwall, the ‘Birthplace of Women’s Cricket’, was enshrined into the history of the sport too as Cricket Week began, an annual festival that continues to this day. After one year, the Association had made steady progress and affiliated 28 schools, 6 colleges, 10 clubs, 2 workplace teams and over 300 individual playing members. 7 The WCA was not, however, the first organisation of women to play cricket regularly in England. The game first materialised in a structured and meaningful way in the late 1880s, when multiple country-house teams, formed by daughters of the aristocracy, established socially-exclusive ‘wandering’ sides with no fixed home ground. The most enduring of these was the White Heather Club, formed in 1887 in Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, which mimicked elitist men’s teams such as I Zingari. Garbed in a uniform of tailored shirts, ties, ankle-length skirts, petticoats and sailor hats, the women were ostensibly the wives and daughters of landed gentry, and their cricket was more pageantry than sport. The team contained notable members like Lucy Risdale, the future wife of Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and she even held some committee meetings at 10 Downing Street during the 1926 General Strike. Although the club maintained close ties with the WCA before disbanding in 1951, the lofty, amorous world they inhabited was wholly separate from the working, frugal one of most Association members after the war. 8 The White Heather Cricket Club, c. 1900. The club eventually disbanded in 1951. (WCA archive, Somerset Cricket Museum)