Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

47 Chapter Three It’s not Cricket? Public Hostility and Apathy ‘Cricket is a man’s game’, the Daily Mail’s cricket correspondent Aidan Crawley wrote on 25 June 1931. ‘Please leave cricket alone’, he lamented, ‘it is meant to be played hard by hard men who will take knocks and receive them’. By contrast, women’s feeble attempts were ‘a travesty of the game’, a ‘forlorn imitation’ of a sport unsuitable for them. Crawley may have been a conservative demagogue, but he was no mere provincial columnist. Educated at Harrow then Oxford, he had made a name for himself as an elegant and reliable batsman, and by the time of writing he was forging a successful amateur career at Kent. Crawley was a respected member of the cricketing establishment, and his comments reflected the thoughts of many in the Lord’s Long Room. The article sparked a lively public debate, which played out in the paper over the succeeding weeks. Some readers rejoiced in his candidness, praising the paper’s ‘courage to publish what 90% of the people think about women cricketers’, while others, such as former Gloucestershire captain Walter Troup, challenged him to watch a game before he damned them all. For Troup, women were far tougher than many men gave them credit for, forcefully asserting that he’d ‘seen girls knocked out and continue to play when many a man would have retired to the pavilion.’ Women cricketers reacted defiantly too, with an eclectic range of arguments that on the one hand emphasised the amateur, jovial nature of their games, and on the other impressed how committed and adept they were at it. One headstrong young schoolgirl tenaciously wrote that ‘nothing any man says can make me leave cricket alone.’ 1 Crawley stood firm. The future Member of Parliament and president of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) responded with characteristic disdain. ‘What a pity they are not playing some other game than cricket… the more I see of women’s cricket the more convinced I become that it can never be real cricket. Women as a whole are physically incapable of playing the game as it was meant to be played.’ Their shots were ugly and ungainly, the bowling wild and slow, and they lacked the strength, stamina and ‘general physique’ the sport needed. 2 Crawley’s criticisms were by no means extreme, but typical of many male cricketers, journalists and supporters in the interwar years. For most of the period, the Victorian and Edwardian assumption that cricket was a quintessential expression of masculinity continued unabated. The game was believed to cultivate the distinctive male characteristics of competitiveness, strength, courage and independence. Like its cultural and administrative home of Lord’s, it was a separate space exclusively for men. With haughty misogyny, the game was often spoken of in terms of honour, chivalry and gentlemanly conduct.