Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

80 Workplace and Working-Class Women’s Cricket English Federation never extended beyond the boundaries of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and although the WCA had pursued an image of middle- class respectability, both organisations contained a significant proportion of working-class women and girls. Workplace cricket The expanding number of organised women’s sports in the interwar years was undoubtedly due to the enthusiasm and dedication of players and administrators, but broader economic changes also helped nurture their development. The greater availability of paid holidays, higher living standards, cheaper and more abundant consumer products, economic growth and an improved national transport infrastructure meant the nation had more free time to enjoy leisurely pursuits. A public house- building project saw an unprecedented rise in new homes which incorporated direct supplies of water, gas and electricity, as well as other labour-saving designs. For many middle-class families, these advances resulted in ever-greater opportunities to partake in sports and recreation. A dramatic decrease in the average family size, from over five children per family in the late-19th century to less than two by 1933, gave many mothers more personal freedom, and daughters more parental attention. 17 New employment opportunities gave working-class girls the option of playing sports previously restricted to the middle or upper-classes. A rapid expansion in modern, technologically-advanced light manufacturing, which used assembly-line production methods, meant businesses looked to women as a bountiful source of cheap labour. These ‘new’ industries enabled female staff the prospect of using welfare, recreational and educational facilities that were once reserved only for men. The wartime economy had propelled changes in women’s employment witnessed before the war, and with it their game-playing prospects. Like Dick, Kerr’s Ladies and other football teams associated with heavy industry, some cricket teams emerged because of women’s participation in wartime production. Biscuit factories such as Huntley and Palmer’s (Reading) and Peek Frean (Bermondsey), which had manufactured shells in the First World War, had women’s cricket teams in the immediate post- war years and the latter affiliated to the WCA in May 1932. The Reading- Slough area west of London was highly noted for its concentration of ‘new’ industries in the interwar years; the region boasted exceptionally low levels of unemployment and very high numbers of female employment. 18 Many of the factories based there provided cricket for women and girls, including clothing manufacturer Burberry’s, pharmaceutical producer Aspro and dried-food firm Horlicks. 19 Most of these teams were unaffiliated to any women’s cricket body, preferring to play in departmental competitions and against other local businesses. As the British economy progressively moved away from the industries that had once made it ‘the workshop of the world’ – coal, textiles and iron – the nation increasingly looked inwards, and with it altered the pattern of female employment. Lucrative domestic markets were a greater focus for