Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

45 ‘The cohorts of cricket are being swollen’ Guardian . The omnipresent voice of women’s team sports, she wrote a weekly summer column in The Morning Post concerning WCA activity, and in 1939 penned a page in the monthly magazine Girl’s Own Paper , aimed at middle-class schoolgirls. 28 From 1935, Pollard spoke intermittently on national and regional BBC radio stations on the subject of women’s cricket, including live commentaries of international and domestic test matches. Efforts to publicise women’s cricket culminated in the production of a WCA film starting in May 1939. Directed and edited by Pollard, the film toured the country after 1945 due to the WCA’s wartime hibernation. 29 ***** The interwar years witnessed the emergence of a structured, coordinated and highly public international and domestic women’s cricket infrastructure, which consciously detached itself from the guarded play that had defined the Victorian and Edwardian period. In less than two decades the sport had grown out of the reclusive country houses and schools for the wealthy, into lauded and well-attended spectacles at first-class grounds. Renowned English actresses like Edna Best, Betty Chester, Jean Colin, Gladys Cooper, Mercia Gregori and Ivy Tresmand all professed to enjoy watching or playing the game. 30 With this great leap came serious appreciation and praise, but the noticeable evolution of the sport was not without opposition. Spurious claims and whispers about the game damaging girls’ physical development followed the sport wherever it travelled. The tireless, determined and shrewd commitment of players and administrators was the single greatest reason for the sport’s success in these years.