Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

57 Chapter Four ‘Too much emphasis on personal comfort’ Women’s increasingly visible presence on the local cricket field in the interwar years probably puzzled, irked and amused many onlookers in equal amounts. Nevertheless, the relationship between cricket and ‘the fair sex’ was one which generally reinforced social expectations that women’s place was in the domestic realm. Men’s clubs looked to wives, sisters and daughters to perform duties like preparing teas, washing plates, cutlery and clothes, or cleaning the pavilion. Such activities were seen as a natural extension of their conscientious work in the home. Sometimes they volunteered in administrative positions, such as scoring matches, fundraising or secretarial work, but it was very rare for women to be given any formal power. As a result, their contribution to the sport at grassroots level has usually gone unrecorded. In some cases, women were even banned from entering certain sections of the pavilion that were considered distinctive male social spaces, such as the Long Room. Even so, league and county cricket relied on paying spectators to survive, and women usually supplied a third of gate receipts. 1 ‘Ladies Committees’ were a common feature of many teams, but were limited to dealing with issues like teas, welfare and fundraising. Although these committees did not integrate into the recognised power structure of most clubs, they were essential to their survival. In the case of Spondon Cricket Club in Derbyshire, the ‘Ladies Committee’ worked tirelessly organising dances, novelty matches and whist drives between 1924 and 1945 to pay for purchasing the club’s Royal Hill Road ground. Their efforts were rewarded with life membership, but the unpaid labour of countless other women was usually an everyday expectation, rarely reaching the minute books. 2 This truth was reflected in contemporary interwar literature. Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match (1924), the archetypal story of village cricket in the interwar years, portrayed women as dutiful, caring and ignorant facilitators of the game and echoed the presumption that women would enable men’s leisure at the expense of their own. Liz Smith’s exasperation when asked to wash and iron dirty cricket clothes was likely shared by mothers up and down Britain: ‘and be back for your dinner ‘fore I’ve hardly swept out the bedroom. Cricket! Playing the fine gentleman in your white trousers and your white boots. Fat lot of games a woman gets, don’t she?’ Selincourt’s portrait was typical of the way women aided men’s cricket through their household duties without directly involving themselves in a club. When discussing the local village game, Mrs Cairie is simply met with a patronising response from her son, who laments ‘you will never understand about cricket, will you?’ After the match, the men go