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Marjorie Pollard's Cricket for Women and Girls

Roar Guru
28th November, 2011
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In the Occupy London protest site just outside St. Paul’s, a list of anti-capitalist books dominates with stern attention, demanding to be leafed through for the cognoscenti of revolt.

A quick donation secreted into a rather dirty bucket and the book is yours before one of the glaring volunteers.

The most curious book of all, though, must be Marjorie Pollard’s Cricket for Women and Girls (1934), which found itself in one of the shelves beside the protest meetings.

Pollard states from the start that her work seeks to accomplish an improbable task. ‘There is going to be no introduction to this book.’ Often, her terse lines hit you with a force as well struck as a sweetly timed cover drive. But despite the text’s assumptions, which are as dated in parts as the covering, Pollard herself did a good deal to popularise the sport amongst women. She had herself excelled at the game of hockey.

If one can pick a rough date as to when women’s cricket began, one can point the finger to the 1880s. (Some go back earlier – to 1745 with a match between the villages of Bramley and Hambledon in Surrey.)

In 1890, the English Cricket and Athletic Association organized two teams to tour England. It had one important objective: ‘proving the suitability of the National Game as a pastime for the fair sex in preference to Lawn Tennis and other less scientific games.’ The Women’s Cricket Association, formed in 1926, played its first representative match in 1929.

In 1932, Pollard noted the thrill of playing ‘cricket where W. G. Grace, Bradman, “Ranji,” and such deities had performed’, an experience ‘almost too exciting to be bearable.’ The first two day match in the history of the Women’s Cricket Association saw an England XI up against a Scottish XI, a situation that drove Pollard to effusive distraction. ‘I found myself thinking in the field: Did Hammond really stand there – did Gregory really stride up to this very wicket?’

Occasionally, the wording comes across as deliciously dated, rich with what now seems like an anachronistic turn. ‘Restricted is the word that was once used to tell the tale about our batting. I think it still holds good.’ Curiously, given that time’s endless misogynistic assumptions of women’s temperaments as being tempestuous, irrational and spontaneous, the converse is true of women’s cricket. ‘In most cases it lacks fire, it lacks energy, and it lacks courage.’

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This is a singularly odd statement, given that women’s cricket in the 19th century was far from lacking in terms of fire or courage, being occasions for rivalry and heavy betting.

A few suggestions come from Pollard’s pen. Start having fun. Stop pretending you are holding a match at Lord’s playing with the grim determination of male Test match cricketers. Imitation had to be avoided – to stop thinking that one was playing a game of three or more day’s duration. Solemnity had to be ditched in favour of virile fun, to hit the ball with the enthusiasm of ‘any village blacksmith’. The WCA did not want to be seen as a hot bed of alpha females aspiring to challenge men with the willow.

In that light, the gender assumptions should not come across as surprising. ‘Boys are encouraged to play with balls almost as soon as they can walk – perhaps the next generation of girls will be as lucky.’ Despite the obvious conservatism of the WCA (they could hardly be termed card carrying members of women’s liberation), some men felt deeply threatened.

Its formation struck one writer, whose views appeared in the first edition of Women’s Cricket in 1930 as ‘preposterous’. ‘I felt sorrow and dismay at the idea that another field of male activities was to be usurped by the fairer sex… cricket is degraded… let us have this one sport to ourselves… let us pray women never gain admittance to the pavilion at Lord’s.’

This was not to be. In 1934, women’s Test cricket was born with an English touring side making the trip to Australia. Pollard, now armed with the BBC’s microphone, kept watch over proceedings.

There have been books more expansive and comprehensive than Pollard’s somewhat idiosyncratic effort – we think, for instance, of Rachel Heyhoe Flint and Netta Rheinberg’s The Story of Women’s Cricket (1976).

There have been women cricketers less conservative than Pollard. But being of her time, this text still makes fabulous reading on the initial steps in the broadening of the game amongst a hitherto avoided class of players.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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