Almanac Book Review: ‘Forgotten Pioneers – The Story of the Original Lady Cricketers’ by Giles Wilcock

 

Giles Wilcock, Forgotten Pioneers: The Story of the Original English Lady Cricketers, Pitch Publishing, Chichester, 2024, 320 pp, hardback, $48.85.

 

There is a long history of women playing cricket. The first recorded game occurred between two elevens of maids on Gosden Common near Guildford, England in August 1745. In subsequent years games were organised on an ad hoc basis in villages and cities across Britain. During the latter decades of the Victorian era, upper class girls played cricket (and hockey and lawn tennis) at school. In 1926, the Women’s Cricket Association was formed. In the 1930s tours and competitions were organised against Australian women. This was the initial step in the spread of women’s cricket across the globe. Until the last decade or so, women’s cricket was an amateur pursuit where the women themselves worked out how to finance the costs of playing. Giles Wilcock tell us that it ‘was not until 2014 that full-time professional contracts were introduced in England for women cricketers’ (p. 269).

 

Wilcock’s point of departure in Forgotten Pioneers: The Story of the Original English Lady Cricketers is to provide details on an earlier occasion when a troupe of females played cricket professionally. In late 1889 entrepreneur Edward Michel and solicitor Walter Henry Bosanquet (his cousin Bernard James Tindall Bosanquet invented the googly) decided to form a company which would present cricket games between two ladies’ teams. Cricket would be played in the afternoon. At night athletic displays and activities associated with theatre and music hall would be put on at local venues. This was a venture which combined sport and theatre/music hall.

 

Wilcock bases most of his information on an extensive trawling of contemporary local and national newspapers. With the exception of a report with one former player, in 1956, when she was 88, and a court case where one player sued a manager for unpaid wages, he has no primary source material – accounts by those involved in this venture of what happened on and off the field. He laments

 

‘None of these people left us their views. We only have what the newspapers reported: facts carefully chosen, filtered and interpreted by (male) journalists’ (p. 17).

 

Advertisements were placed in newspapers to attract prospective players to join the proposed tour. Advertisements were also placed to obtain cricket and other equipment, and to obtain interest from grounds and locations to stage games. Once the venture was up and running agents placed advertisements in local papers and spread flyers to promote games and to attend to logistic problems associated with travel and accommodation.

 

Over 200 girls/women applied with approximately 30 being offered two year contracts. The age range of the players was 15 to 26, two of whom were married. The players came from working class or lower middle class backgrounds. The organisers of the tour championed the players as ‘Refined Lady Athletes, not Burlesque Masqueraders’ (p. 34) in an attempt to emphasise the respectability of the entertainment they were providing. Consistent with the twin objectives of the venture, the girls/women either had a cricket, sporting (gymnastics) or theatre/music hall background. During the 1890 season, for example, ten players scored most of the runs and took most of the wickets.

 

The players were offered 10 shillings a week during a three month training period and 30 shillings a week during a seven month season. There was also a small bonus for whichever team won a game. Players could earn up to £50 in 1890; which was not an insubstantial wage during this period. For 1891, the weekly playing rate was as high as 35 shillings, though, as we will see, such payments were rarely honoured which resulted in the winding up of Original English Lady Cricketers. The players were provided with dresses and caps and had their travel expenses paid. The troupe was described as the Original English Lady Cricketers with games being played between ‘The Reds’ and ‘The Blues’.

 

Wilcock provides an account of the logistic and other problems associated with the progress of tours over three seasons. While he points to problems with tracking down games he has records on over 150 games – 85 in 1890, 58 in 1891 and 12 in 1892 by The All-England Lady Cricketers, a short term replacement to the winding up of the Original English Lady Cricketers at the end of 1891.

 

The tour was successful in 1890. It drew large or respectably sized crowds and made money. In 1891 a number of the leading players decided not to continue playing. The tour was in trouble from early on. It didn’t draw crowds, players were not being paid, promises were made and new managers were brought in to steady the ship; all to no avail. Wilcock speculates that there was malfeasance with someone, he can’t work out who, keeping gate receipts leaving players unpaid. The tour collapsed. In 1892 some of the players formed The All-England troupe in trying to keep the venture going; it played a dozen games before it too collapsed.

 

Sporting pioneers are often cast as role models. In demonstrating their skills on the sporting field, they demonstrate to others of the same ‘social’ category that this is something that they can also do. They are a source of inspiration and an example to be emulated. Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s tradition of excluding African Americans from playing in the Major Leagues in 1947 comes to mind. These women playing cricket professionally in 1890s Victorian England did not perform a similar function for women of that era. There was not a sudden surge in women, especially working class women, taking up cricket. While upper class women played cricket at school, they had no interest in mixing with the lower classes. It was only after World War One that upper class women established an amateur competition.

 

The Original English Lady Cricketers seem to be an oddity; one of those wonderful oddities that history more often than not likes to serve up to us. With the recent surge of women playing professionally in so many sports, these Nineteenth century professional women cricketers seem to be more important now, than when they actually played. Wilcock seeks to make senses of this. He sees them as a splendid example of female agency; a beacon of light shining brightly on possibility.

 

‘Almost all the women were from poorer backgrounds. At a time when women had little freedom, fewer rights and were almost universally treated badly, being part of the OELC offered an opportunity to break the restrictions of late-Victorian society and achieve fame and fortune…it was the women who drove the story. It was the women who achieved something approaching fame. And it was the women who travelled and did things of which few of their contemporaries could have dreamed. For this group to travel the country, being paid to play sport…was unprecedented…in the misogynistic climate of Victorian England, the very existence of the OELC and the fame of its players was extraordinary…no other professional women’s teams emerged in England until the 21^st century’ (pp. 270-272).

 

Originally Published in Sporting Traditions, May 2026.

 

 

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