Book Review: The Women in Whites by Raf Nicholson

With the ICC T20 Women’s World Cup about to begin and with hundreds of thousands of tickets sold at the major test cricket venues, there is no better time than now to remind ourselves about where women’s cricket in England has come from over the last century and more - and the extraordinary journey English women’s cricket has been on over recent years.

“The Women in Whites” (Pitch Publishing, £19.99) takes us on a journey from the 14^th Century until the present day. The author, Raf Nicholson has spent most of the last 20 years researching the history of women’s cricket, and this book is an authoritative and meticulous overview of how women’s cricket has developed, particularly since the creation of the Women’s Cricket Association in 1926.

Alongside a chronological narrative of tours and crises and arguments and victories and defeats, the reader is introduced to the characters who pioneered and progressed the women’s game through the decades. 

We meet Netta Rheinberg, the tour manager who ended up playing in a test match in 1949; Marjorie Pollard, who helped found the Women’s Cricket Association in 1926 and the first woman to commentate on a men’s test match; Frances Heron-Maxwell, the campaigner for women’s suffrage who turned the extensive grounds of her house into a cricket ground. And many more: Snowball, Bakewell, Heyhoe Flint, Brittin, Smithies, Connor, Edwards all take their places in the pantheon of the women’s game and this book gives the context and background to their careers and what made them so significant. 

What Nicholson does brilliantly is to paint a picture of these women and the times in which they lived and the radical nature of what they were doing, thus transporting the reader to the interwar years, the postwar years, the 1960s, etc, right up to the present day. 

The whole story is about a struggle for acceptance, a struggle to establish and maintain a sport against the odds, especially when confronted with overt and indirect misogyny. And most of all it’s a story about how radical people with radical ideas struggled to live by their ideals as the whole world around them changed. The really important ideals of the interwar years: amateurism, the length of skirts, a refusal to have any trophies, correct evening wear, become the very things that hold the game back in the second half of the 20^th century.

Nicholson’s source material – particularly the WCA archive which she liberated from a cow shed in Lancashire, and which now resides in the MCC library at Lord’s, has given her a substantial amount of authentic material with which to work. Finding such a source must be a historian’s dream. Turning these minutes of meetings and diary entries and memos and ledgers into a narrative as coherent and charming as this is what sets this book apart. 

And it was Nicholson’s work tracking down and interviewing former players over the past 15 years (many of whom have since died) and using those interviews to bring colour and insight and context to the archive which really helps the reader understand the story of women’s cricket from the point of view of the participants.

The book ends by bringing us right up to date. We live in a world of franchise deals, TV rights and global sporting politics, where cricketers are social media stars as well as athletes. As the book concludes, today’s players are indeed standing on the shoulders of giants. 

Order your copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-women-in-whites/raf-nicholson/9781836802921