Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

27 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges but failed to shift it away from an image of a burlesque performance, and were curtailed by commercial interests and widespread ridicule. Even so, some clubs for less affluent players were established before 1914. Brighouse Alexandra Women’s Cricket Club was formed in Yorkshire in 1898 and remained strong into the 1930s, consisting of women from the local mills. Cadbury’s, one of the biggest proponents of the game, had initiated cricket in their Bournville Girls’ Athletic Club from at least 1902, but possibly as early as 1889. These sides tended to play local middle- class boys’ or girls’ schools rather than other working-class teams. In Manchester, a league was established by eight teams in 1913, at least one of which contained factory girls from a corset manufacturing firm. 20 This was probably the first women’s cricket league in the country. However, these occurrences were rare prior to 1914 and it was not until after the Great War that working-class women’s access to sports greatly expanded. Generous bodies such as workplaces and charities were usually the only way poorer women could afford to play, and their diminished support in the mid-20th century was a key reason for the decline of women’s cricket after 1956. 21 The development of organised women’s sports, 1890s-1939 Cricket was not the only sport women from wealthy families began to penetrate in the late-Victorian era, to later find mass appeal in the 20th century. Despite vocal opposition, the late-Edwardian and interwar period was a time of great organisation and growth for women’s sports. Women worked hard to open opportunities for physical recreation previously the sole preserve of men, or alternatively created their own games. The The Original English Lady Cricketers, flanked by their two male managers, c. 1890. (WCA archive, Somerset Cricket Museum)