Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

33 Chapter Two ‘The cohorts of cricket are being swollen’ Less than three short years after the formation of the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA), the body was now ready to cast aside obscurity and play its first public exhibition match. The decision to stage such an event was not taken lightly, and the WCA committee was torn. Many believed their standard of play was not yet high enough to welcome paying spectators without reprisals and ridicule, but leading figures like media spokesperson Marjorie Pollard were convinced. History would remember it as an ‘epoch-making and epic day’, so she told fellow members, where players could finally show the sport had ‘come to stay’ and emphatically prove women could master it. In reality, the game was little to write about. ‘London and District’ faced ‘The Rest’ at Beckenham on 17 July 1929, and while some supporters praised the quality of the match, a disappointing amount of people came to watch. Symbolically, however, it was a marked a major shift in the sport. Players were ready to showcase their skill to audiences, not for monetary gain but to further the sport they loved. Pollard wrote, with uncharacteristic hyperbole, that it had now ‘proved’ women could play the game, and would ‘remove the incorrect attitude which some people take up when they talk about women’s cricket; the attitude which shows amused tolerance mingled with shocked pity.’ The sport undoubtedly continued to be a victim of this widespread chauvinism, yet over the next decade international, county and district games, open to the public and played at first-class county grounds, became widespread. 1 Two years later the WCA returned to Beckenham as the ‘South’ took on ‘The Rest’, but this time confronted a different reception. The press was now well represented in the crowd of onlookers, as too were influential men from the world of English cricket. Many tabloids pursued their usual belittling reports of ‘merry girls with milkmaid complexions’ skipping in the fields, skirts flying over heads, but some were converted. Former England captain Arthur Gilligan praised their ‘eye-opening’ display, former Derbyshire captain Albert Lawton called for women throughout the country to take to the cricket field, and popular magazines asked if women would ever play in test matches with men. ‘The cohorts of cricket are being swollen’, one newspaper put it a few months earlier, as they interviewed the new president of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Sir Julien Cahn, on this unforeseen phenomenon. Cahn, unlike many of his associates, was overwhelmingly in support. ‘Thirty years ago’, he put it, the sight of a female jockey ‘would have been impossible’, but were now surpassing men in the sport. Cricket had a similarly bright future, and was the ‘ideal’ sport for women. He willingly offered his private ground