Chapter 1: Change in the Air
A Few Sentences before beginning………
Very few women walked the streets and sat on the balconies of their home in late 2018 without the excited murmurs of ‘World Cup’ being passed from their lips. The centennial anniversary of the Women’s Cricket World Cup (WCWC) was set to be a great tournament, as the qualified teams of 48 nations waited with abated breaths regarding their sporting futures. The next 2 months of heavy cricket proved them correct. Blinders, thrillers and adrenaline rushing matches all laid the pathway for a brilliant final on December 24, 2018, attended by Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom herself in person as the world held its breath for the final match of the 2018 Women’s Cricket World Cup, Britain. The opposing teams? Great Britain and the defending champions France. Nothing could be more fractious than these two historical teams clashing against one another. A match that went down to the last bowl as British Captain Heather Knight smashed a six of Sophie Pecaud’s last bowl to secure Britain a total of 348/9, crossing the needed score of 346, thus winning Britain the Women’s World Cup. It was a tense affair that turned out to be a thrilling match, waiting until the last bowl to decide the victor. British women celebrated their victory for days afterwards as French women groaned away as they lost their chance to defend their title as Champions. Cricket and Women’s Sport has become synonymous in the past century, but this was not always the case. In fact, the sport of cricket has a powerful male fanbase as well for their men’s team, but a century prior, men ruled the game instead of women. This is the story of how a game of cricket because the women’s best friend throughout the world.
Chapter 1: Change in the Air
In 1744, the entirety of the British cricketing community attended a meeting at Artillery Ground in London Cricket Club to standardize the rules of cricket. This included things like ‘what in the world constituted a no-ball?’, the length of a cricket pitch, the amount of bowls in an over (4 at the time) and the general size of a cricket ground. Unlike most other sports of the time, women were also invited to the meeting, for the game had attracted more than a few players into the game from the fairer sex as well. The rules of Cricket continued to evolve over time, like most sports. The idea of a Leg-Before-Wicket (LBW) was introduced alongside the middle-stump in 1774 and by 1788, the game was so popular that the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) took over all the laws of cricket as its sole custodian so that no more regional variations existed to streamline cricket in a more general manner to increase its popularity even further. The game of cricket, though it had existed for over a century by 1700, well and truly flourished for the first time in the 18th century.
The MCC Logo
Women were just as instrumental to the growth of the game as men at the time. Though women’s games of cricket happened all throughout England and Wales even before 1744, they happened under regional rules, and under haphazard circumstances. The first officially recorded match for female cricket took place in 1745, between the ladies of Bramley and Hambledon on a field near Guildford. All maids belonging to local nobles of Bramley and Hambledon respectively, the Bramley maids wore blue ribbons and the Hambledon maids wore red ribbons on their heads and played a game of cricket, being cheered on by their employers. The Hambledon girls won that match, having scored 127 runs in 35 overs, with Bramley being unable to chase that score, being all-out at 119 runs. The spectators noted and later told the Reading Mercury at the time that women bowled, batted, ran and fielded during the game as well as most male cricketers. [1] Women’s cricket became even more popular after the event, and female cricketers from Sussex impressed local army lads enough that the Honorable Artillery Company of London allowed 11 Sussex ladies to play against them in the HAC cricket ground in 1747, and stunning the sporting community in England at the time, these Sussex ladies defeated the HAC in a near dominant play. The presence of the Duchess of Richmond among the crowd attending the game, clearly backing the Sussex ladies, increased the popularity and visibility of the game among women. Using noble patronage, the game had become ‘encouraged to be played by every lady of enough means as a diversion from day-to-day meandering’ as reported by the Whitehall Evening Post in 1748 [2].
A women's cricket match being played in 1779 AD
Women’s cricket gained enough notoriety that sums of over 1000 pounds were often gambled upon by even commoners during women’s matches and nobles often betted amounts worth 10,000 pounds during female cricket matches. The stakes were very high and as with all games that involved off-field gambling, brutal gang-fighting between supporters of different teams became common-place. It would not be until the Victorian Era and the Industrial Age that cricket became the ‘gentleman’s and ladies game’. Before the industrial age, it was as much a brutal sport as cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing.
The height of women’s cricket before the late 1800s started from ~1750 and lasted until the start of the French Revolution, which also heralded the beginning of the the Industrial Age. Village cricket between female teams was so common that most villages were holding matches almost 3 or 4 days of the week. Female matches often took place on the basis of ‘Married v Single’ or ‘Married v Maiden’ or ‘Upper-class v Lower-class’ and were followed by boisterous social gatherings and events. Winning teams won great prizes, with an account from Rogate in 1765 mentioning that on average, a single female player of winning team went back home with ‘3 bottles of wine, 2 high-quality hats, woven in silk, a barrale of ale, a regale of tea and as much plum-cake as the hand could carry.’ [3]. With whole days being required to play the game, the evenings were followed up by balls where these female athletes showed off their dancing prowess as well. Just as how men showed off their strength as a measure of masculinity, it was considered to be the height of femininity in Britain at the time to be able to play a good game of cricket during the day and follow it up with a rousing dance in the evening ball. These matches became legendary. It attracted crowds of around 3000 spectators on average, which was unheard off for the time, and patronage from the local nobility also ensured that the game grew among the female psyche. By the 1770s, ‘Miss Wicket’, the showcase of a young and fair maiden playing cricket was considered to be the height of female fashion in England and Wales.
The popularity of cricket among the ladies also introduced the game to many men. The female players of cricket often brought with them their sons to their matches. With a son’s love for their mothers breaking through, most sons cheered on for their mothers during these matches without evening understanding the basic rules of cricket. These instances of course made these sons interested in the sport, and slowly spread itself among young men as a popular pastime as well. The most popular female cricketer in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1770s and 1780s would become Elizabeth Hamilton, the Duchess of Hamilton. Born to Peter Burrell of Beckenham – a barrister by trade – Elizabeth started to play cricket at age 16 and by age 21 had become the greatest female player in England and Wales. Her graceful play was enough to attract the attention of the Duke of Hamilton, who married her in the same year.
Elizabeth Hamilton, the Duchess of Hamilton c. 1795
The embodiment of the 'Miss Wicket' stereotype of the 1770s and 1780s.
The onset of French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution dealt heavy blows to women’s cricket however. Women were needed to work around the machines, and these women would be too tired to play cricket during their off-days, dealing a blow to the available amount of females playing the game actively. Regency and Victorian attitudes about morality also dealt another heavy blow to the popularity of the game for women. The British people came to believe by the 1820s that it was frivolous and morally suspect for any member of the working class to involve themselves in any kind of sport. This was perhaps the final nail in the coffin temporarily for women’s cricket for decades, as after 1838, official records of matches held between women became dormant. Even the upper-class women, who had sponsored the game so much in the 1700s had their attention driven elsewhere as cricket became contradictory with the Victorian ideals of ‘helpless and fragile femininity’. Depictions of women’s cricket by jealous men did not help matters either. In 1811, Thomas Rowlandson, the famous political artist known for his political caricatures created a cartoon of a women’s cricket game with the women being extremely voluptuous and being half-dressed, making the entire scene look like a brothel rather than a serious game of cricket. Such cartoons became common place under the regency and did a great deal of harm to the popularity of women’s cricket in Britain as it was clear to the women that their attraction to the game was not being taken seriously by the patriarchal society of the time. It was clear that cricket was going to remain a male-dominated game during the height of the Victorian Era.
For the next two and a half decades, cricket was dominated by upper-class and middle-upper class men. Women were very nearly absent from the game, despite its popularity among the common people of England and Wales. In particular, the Victorians believed that cricket was ‘a perfect system of ethics and morals which embodied all that was noble about the Anglo-Saxon character’ [4]. Despite this belief, cricket was painfully absent among the fairer sex due to stringent moral beliefs in Victorian society. This all came crashing down however, when a small and innocuous meeting between two females involved in the game. On the 29th of March, 1864, in a small house near the City of London, Martha Grace and Christiana Willes met with one another in what seemed to be a normal socialite meeting.
Martha Grace
These two names were very big names within the cricketing community, despite their sex, which was derided by men for playing ‘childish cricket’ at the time. Christiana Willes was born on the 20th of February, 1786 and was the daughter of a small landowning family near Tonford in Canterbury. She managed to marry well, marrying into the wealthy Hodges family in 1810 and having three sons and one daughter with her husband, Lieutenant Richard Thomas Hodges. The couple lived a happy married life until Richard Hodges died unexpectedly of stroke in late 1841, living poor Christiana Willes to be widowed. During her youth, Christiana Willes helped her brother, John Willes, a prolific first-class cricketer of the early 1800s, to practice his batting by bowling roundarm bowling to him. She apparently found underarm bowling to be extremely difficult in her favorite hooped skirt, and instead bowled roundarm bowling, which was banned by the MCC in 1788 to her brother. After a few months of playing with her brother, John Willes remarked that ‘her style of bowling leaves men to shame with her expertise’. [5]. Though her brother would get the credit of popularizing roundarm bowling after it was de-criminalized within the lawbook of Cricket by the MCC in 1837, her brother would always credit her with the development. For this reason, she was well-known within the cricketing community and was highly respected for it.
Martha Grace on the other hand was the mother of the indomitable Edward Mills Grace, an English first-class cricketer who was mildly popular in the 1860s who played for Gloucestershire County Cricket Club. Nicknamed ‘the Coroner’ by his teammates, EM Grace rose to fame when he scored 192 not out in August 1862 against Kent. Cricketing journalists throughout Britain gushed over the talent he showed during the match, and EM Grace’s popularity rose when he played well during a three match tour to the United States against Philadelphia in 1863 amidst a charity tour to raise morale during the American Civil War. When asked by cricketers and journalists regarding his talent, EM Grace credited his mother, who apparently played village level women’s cricket in her youth to have taught him all that he knew about the game. Martha Grace knew every small detail about the game and could drown any gentleman who knew cricket with facts about the game they never knew about. She was also invited to play the game during net sessions more than a few times, but always rejected these offers, fearing that her son’s opponents on the pitch would discern her son’s weakness’s through her playing style.
Edward Mills Grace
Martha Grace had never been interested in reviving women’s cricket in England and Wales before her 16-year-old daughter, Rosemary Grace complained to her in early 1864 that despite her interest in the game, she was not being allowed to play by her twin brother, the future great batsman William Gilbert Grace and his friends. Upon closer inspection, Martha collected a small group of 9 girls – most of whom were friends with young Rosemary – who wanted to play the game but weren’t allowed due to social stigma of the past 27 years. Martha decided that if young men and boys weren’t going to allow children to play the game, then she would take matters into her own hands, and wrote to several older female players of the game of a bygone era, trying to seek their aid to re-establishing the sport. Most of them were old and unwilling to help, other than Christiana Willes. [6]. Together they set up a meeting for March, 1864. The meeting was also attended by EM Grace, who was supportive of his younger sister’s initiative to play the game, and as such, accompanied his mother to this meeting.
After much discussion and negotiations, both women came to the conclusion that they could establish a cricket club for women using their excess wealth. Both were from very wealthy families and had more than enough wealth to establish a club. The main problem, both women recognized would be gaining MCC recognition for the establishment, otherwise no cricket club would dare play against theirs and all the practice their young ladies willing to play the game would be local boys who could play in their free time. Thankfully, EM Grace took up the hurdle of negotiating with the MCC. He travelled to Lord’s Cricket Ground and spoke directly with the MCC President, William Ward, the 1st Earl of Dudley. William Ward was especially hesitant about the idea, but the persuasion of his significant other forced his hand. Ward, at the time, was courting his future wife, Georgina Elisabeth, the daughter of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, 7th Baronet, and she knew Rosemary Grace and Martha Grace on a personal basis [7]. She spoke in favor of the plan, and was unwilling to even glance at Ward unless he aided her friends. Unwilling to let his courtship go down the drain, and because of the financial wealth of the Grace’s and the Willes’s and the Hodge’s which would cover the expenses of such a club, ward gave MCC’s permission for such a club to be established.
Georgina Elisabeth
With permission from the MCC, it was only a matter of expenses, and on the 6th of July, 1864, the British All-Female XI Club (BAFC as it came to be known) was established with its headquarters at Filton, on the outskirts of Bristol, near Grace Manor, with its sole purpose being to facilitate the re-growth of the cricketing game among the female population of Britain and Ireland. Little did its founders know, its establishment would send shockwaves into the sporting history.
- Excerpt from ‘For the Love of Cricket; The Rise of the Ladies Game’
Footnotes:-
[1] – A True anecdote of the match.
[2] – Another true anecdote.
[3] – Real fact from OTL.
[4] – True quote.
[5] – real quote.
[6] – the PoD. She was willing to help IOTL as well, but her son changed her letter at the last second. This doesn’t happen ITTL. The plot to create a all-female cricket club for England went nowhere as a result IOTL.
[7] – True Fact.
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