Last week, we lost an Australian cricket captain. It’s a rare event in this country and perhaps not as surprising as you might think that it may have passed you by.
Mary Allitt (later Loy), OAM, died Tuesday week ago, aged eighty-eight.
Mary represented Australia in eleven Tests from 1951 to 1963 in an era when women’s cricket was still a long way from attaining the (even still, arguably scant) recognition that it enjoys today.
With a high score of seventy-six in her twenty innings, she was recognised as much for her contribution to the team’s character as she was her exploits on the field, captaining the side as she did for her final three Tests.
Her career overlapped with one of the most famous of Australia’s early female cricketers, Mary Dive, who is to this day commemorated by the Molly Dive Stand at North Sydney Oval.
In fact Allitt was Australia’s thirty-fifth women’s Test cricketer, her baggy green being awarded to her some fifty fours years late, by Steve Waugh, at a ceremony in 2005. Photographic records of the time 2005, that is – suggest Mary was delighted nonetheless.
At the end of her career, Mary married Tom Loy, a champion showjumper and the two ran a well known riding school in Deniliquin, in New South Wales’ Riverina.
Tom and the school were themselves a subject of an edition of Australia Story.
Mary’s claims to fame did not end there, being the niece of Joseph Lawson, who represented the seat of Murray in the New South Wales parliament for forty years up until the early 1970s.
Returning to cricket but not far removed from the politics of the day, Mary Allitt’s team of 1963 were the first women’s team to dine with the Member’s Committee in the fabled Long Room at Lord’s during their tour of that year.
Quentin Hull interviewed one of Mary’s teammates, Coralie Towers, on ABC radio at lunch of Day 2 of the Perth Test to talk about Mary, that lunch and many other things giving a fascinating insight into women’s cricket of that era.
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