Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

29 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges resistance failed to disappear entirely. 25 Female cricketers were intensely aware that aligning the popular National Fitness movement with women’s cricket would be a boon to the sport, and did so in the media, although they distanced themselves from any claims the sport would give rise to a race of super-humans. 26 Women’s sport also benefitted from advances in transportation and leisure time. Playing cricket relied heavily on the ability to travel to and from grounds that, due to the sparse nature of women’s clubs, could be a significant distance from one another. The men’s game had hugely benefitted from the railway boom of the mid-19th century, but as women’s matches lasted no more than an afternoon, travelling was usually restricted to within walking or cycling distance. Motor cars had unshackled the sport for wealthy women by allowing distant clubs to regularly play each other and build local networks. By 1939, there was two million privately owned vehicles in Britain with prices that were quite affordable for middle-class families. 27 Marjorie Pollard (1889-1982), the editor of the WCA’s monthly magazine, Women’s Cricket , praised the car as the underlying reason for greater participation and higher standards of play. By removing tiring train journeys, the game was also said to be more enjoyable. She even reviewed four of the latest models, including her own Wolseley Hornet 12, which is an indicator of the wealth of many WCA members. The abundant growth of personal transport was coupled with an upsurge in leisure time as the average working week fell by seven hours between 1919 and 1939, even leading some to believe the nation had a ‘problem’ with leisure that urgently needed restraining. 28 Meanwhile, ever greater numbers of employers provided paid holidays. Even before the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, which assured 11 million workers at least one week’s paid leave, forward-thinking companies had introduced similar benefits. 29 Many players used this to drive to the WCA’s annual ‘Cricket Week’ in Colwall, Herefordshire. The immediate post-war years also witnessed a growth in the number of single women who, often financially independent and with an abundance of time, played cricket as a form of self-expression and entertainment. The idea of a ‘lost generation’ of men following the First World War, and therefore lost marriages, has been disputed by historians; nevertheless, it is true that from the late-19th century a moral panic over so-called ‘surplus’ women existed. The imbalance between men and women was numerically significant before the War, but by 1921 there were 1.75 million more women than men, and this figure still stood at 842,000 a decade later. 30 This was not simply a detached figure for many women. England’s opening batsman, Myrtle Maclagan, and England’s first captain Betty Archdale both claimed to have stayed single because they never met the right man, and accused others of loveless marriages to avoid the stigma of being ‘a maiden aunt or governess’. Pollard claimed in the centre- left Reynolds’s News that cricket and team games were the ‘best cure for loneliness’, an opportunity to meet eleven new faces each week and make