Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

41 ‘The cohorts of cricket are being swollen’ The sport’s emergence was sluggish in other cricket-playing nations. In South Africa, women first took up the game in the late 1880s, but teams did not last long. Although some clubs existed for white women from the 1920s, it was not until 1952 that a governing body was established. The game was only adopted by women in the West Indies in the 1960s, and women in Pakistan and Sri Lanka had to wait until the 1990s. However, some nations where the sport was relatively obscure or unpopular did embrace the game. In Ireland, the game was played by the daughters of aristocracy from the late 1880s, and from 1908 was embraced by middle- class schools in Cork. However, there is little evidence the game was played in large numbers and was not organised in any meaningful way until the late 1930s. The Northern Ireland Women’s Cricket Union was not founded until 1948. In Canada, the sport became increasingly popular in the 1950s, as it also did in the United States in the 1960s, but never reached the same level of participation experienced in England, Australia and New Zealand. The Netherlands stands as an anomaly as the only country in mainland Europe to embrace the game. Cricket was adopted by hockey players eager to play a summer sport, and in 1934 the Nederlandse Dames Cricket Bond was established, subsequently playing games against England and Australia in the late 1930s. By 1936 there were six teams in the country, four of which formed a league. 18 Dutch Women’s XI pose for a photo before playing Great Comp (Kent), at the home of WCA president Frances Heron-Maxwell, 25 June 1938. Great Comp had toured the Netherlands in 1936, and found the Dutch were far more relaxed about issues of dress, preferring to wear trousers. (WCA archive, Somerset Cricket Museum)