red 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