The Bodleian Library at Oxford University has a manuscript with the earliest image of English people playing something that looks like cricket. It dates from 1344 CE.
One of the players is a woman. She actually looks rather more proficient, preparing to release the ball underarm, than the batsman who seems to have made up his mind to swipe it one-handed on the full with an early version of a reverse sweep.
Women have been part of the story of English cricket for nearly seven hundred years since. But for half of those years they were invisible. A historian, Dr. Rafaelle Nicholson, has uncovered their story in an excellent book Ladies and Lords: A History Of Women’s Cricket In Britain. She relates it to the entire social, economic and cultural history of women in Britain. One finds many echoes of the story of women’s cricket in Pakistan, and perhaps in every country. England’s women cricketers did not face the intense struggle experienced by the pioneering Khan sisters of Karachi, which I was privileged to hear from them at first hand.
But England’s women also had to battle against prejudice and neglect. Until very recently, they never got paid and met all their expenses, including overseas tours, without sponsorship or support. They were expected to be grateful to men, especially husbands and employers, for the chance to play at all. They endured mockery, even from experienced cricket journalists who should have known better.
Women disappeared from the records and images of English cricket for four centuries until in 1744 CE a local newspaper published an account of an all-women’s match between two rural villages. Other such games attracted crowds and sponsorship – and gave rich men another outlet for betting. But then Victorian men decided that women should not play sport but watch themselves play it. Medical “experts”, including Britain’s best-known doctor, W G Grace, told them, on no evidence, that cricket was dangerous for their delicate constitutions especially their ability to bear children. In this W G ignored the early cricket training he and his brothers received from their mother, Martha, and indeed the cricket played by his two daughters at school.
Eventually private girls’ schools gave some experience of cricket to pupils from wealthy families. Some enjoyed it so much that they formed their own clubs to continue playing matches in adult life, mostly on private grounds in country houses. One of the leading female players of late Victorian times was Lucy Ridsdale. Her future husband fell in love with her when she scored a fifty in one such match. He was Stanley Baldwin, who would become a Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s – and President of the MCC. A generation later, Betty Archdale, who would become the first England women’s captain, grew up with a very different political outlook. Her mother was a militant campaigner for votes for women: young Betty helped her to throw stones through the windows of government buildings and leading gentlemen’s clubs.
Public education expanded greatly in early twentieth-century Britain, for girls as well as boys, but very few girls in state schools got any chance to play it. Some enlightened factory owners provided cricket facilities for their women workers but generally English women’s cricket remained the preserve of wealthy English women with supportive husbands. It had no encouragement or even recognition from the MCC or the English counties, and not until 1926 did English women’s cricket acquire its own administration. The Women’s Cricket Association had a deeply conservative outlook on dress and deportment for women players – and for years it would oppose any form of payment to them, even support for travel expenses on the overseas tours which started in the 1930s.
The formidable Marjorie Pollard was a strong enforcer of its codes as a leading player and organizer over nearly thirty years, but in many ways she was a modern figure, especially in her recognition of the power of the media to promote cricket. She produced a regular magazine, Women