Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

89 Workplace and Working-Class Women’s Cricket encouraging company sport and leisure as a way of championing ‘a spirit of cooperation’ between employer and employees, and declared that ‘class consciousness within the factory can be superseded by the sentiment of a common life and purpose.’ The company’s monthly publication, The Bournville Works Magazine , even adopted socialist rhetoric when claiming sport for girls could ‘emancipate the down-trodden’, and recommended games as an effective method of soothing frustration at ‘life and circumstance’. 46 Public officials and campaigning bodies supported this philosophy. E.L. Collis, a medical officer for the Home Office in the First World War, argued an ‘insufficiency of wholesome recreation was leading to industrial unrest… and to public disorder’, and recommended sport ‘for the health and happiness of the workers, and to keep them off the streets.’ The influential right-wing New Health Society praised Cadbury’s and others for ‘conditions [where] workers would have no reason for discontent, but instead become healthy, happy and disciplined citizens’. 47 The cross-class camaraderie managers hoped to foster was part of a wider effort to ensure workers remained loyal to the company and the status quo, rather than take up with reformist or revolutionary socialism. But ‘the cultivation of a spirit of unity’, as the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) staff magazine put it, also had implicit business advantages. 48 Industrial unrest and strike days cut output, jeopardised contracts and dissected profits. Governments recognised the importance of team sport as a unifier too. Civil Service sport experienced a dramatic expansion, especially for female employees, following staff support for the Trades Union Congress in 1926. The Rowntree labour manager in York complained of employees playing for working-men’s clubs rather than factory teams, as they were thought to undermine their loyalty to the company. 49 The culture of these businesses does appear to have resulted in some level of industrial harmony, and women’s cricket-playing factories were able to boast of excellent workplace relations. Cadbury’s, Rowntree’s, and Huntley and Palmer’s had very few strike days and little industrial action in 1926, and Peek Frean claimed to have lost only two days to strikes between 1857 and 1957. 50 Women’s cricket was therefore part of a broader development in industrial relations and management strategies which attempted to productively shape workers’ leisure time for mutual benefit. The political importance of sport took on greater significance in the interwar years. Rather than weaken class consciousness, physical recreation and leisure helped to forge a working-class collective identity, uniting them around a team or event. Competitions such as the Workers’ Games and Soviet Games started in the early 1920s as a left-wing alternative to the established Olympics. Other sporting organisations with a political agenda included the British Workers’ Sports Federation, which was established in 1923 and, following a successful infiltration by Marxists in 1928, was declared a vehicle for the ‘unrelenting struggle against existing capitalist domination of sport and the introduction of a socialist content into sport and physical recreation.’ Taking aim at workplace recreation, the Sports Federation argued cooperation with managers damaged class militancy