In December 2023, England became the first team to play a hundred women’s Test matches. Raf Nicholson’s piece on their journey originally appeared in the 2024 edition of the Wisden Almanack.
It all started with a holiday. In 1931, Elsie Bennett, who had recently been present at the birth of the Australian Women’s Cricket Council, travelled to England to see Vera Cox, a friend she knew through hockey. Cox was also secretary of the English Women’s Cricket Association, and the pair got thinking: if women can organise international hockey tours, why not cricket?
Three and a bit years later, in December 1934, an England team turned up at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground, which had hosted two men’s Tests before the Gabba became the city’s main venue. Lawyer-cum-captain Betty Archdale lost the toss, and her off-spinner Myrtle Maclagan bowled the first ball in a women’s Test. She finished with 7-10 – “a lucky day for me”, she wrote in her diary. Australia were all out for 47, and England went on to win by nine wickets.
In December 2023, they finally played their 100th Test, in Navi Mumbai, becoming the first women’s team to the milestone, even if they lost badly to India. Over half their matches have been against Australia, and nearly a quarter against New Zealand, dating back to February 1935. That game, at Christchurch, was organised via cablegram in a hurry (the New Zealanders had not formed a national association until March 1934). And it was over in a flurry: England won by an innings and 337 runs. Seven of their Tests have been against South Africa, the first four on a maiden tour in 1960-61, just months after the Sharpeville Massacre. The itinerary was stage-managed to the hilt, and black spectators were barred.
England have played West Indies only three times, all at home in 1979, when a team led by Sue Goatman won 2-0. They have never taken on Pakistan or Sri Lanka, nor the other two teams to have played a women’s Test – Ireland and the Netherlands. But they have now played 15 against India. The first, at Collingham near Wetherby in 1986, almost led to a full-blown diplomatic incident, after India slow-handclapped the English umpires off the field, and the WCA chair entered the tourists’ dressing-room, uninvited, to berate them for “unsporting” behaviour.
Though contests against Australia were not officially Ashes Tests until 1998, they have always best captured the public imagination. That first tour, nearly 90 years ago, featuring Tests at Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, attracted 34,000 spectators. Australia’s visit to England in 1951, meanwhile, involved Tests at Scarborough, Worcester and The Oval, where 15,000 turned up – a UK record until it was broken at Trent Bridge last June.
The Oval match, where England took the final wicket with just 15 minutes to spare, was also the first partially televised women’s Test, featuring Brian Johnston on commentary. Decades later, the public would once again wake up to the existence of women’s cricket, when Clare Connor’s side joined Michael Vaughan’s for the Trafalgar Square open-topped bus celebrations in 2005, having broken an even greater drought than their male counterparts by winning a Test series against Australia for the first time in 42 years. Their decisive six-wicket
victory at Worcester, where Katherine Brunt took nine wickets and made a half-century from No. 10, remains among their greatest.
That drought was partly down to a surfeit of draws, with 64 of England’s matches ending in stalemate. The main reason was financial: until 1972, women’s Tests lasted only three days. Despite England’s run of 19 draws out of 21 between July 1954 and February 1969, the WCA held out as long as they could against adding a fourth. In the interim, with Australia pushing hard for its introduction, England captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint retaliated by blaming the lack of positive results on unsporting declarations by the old enemy, and “appallingly slow batting”.
It took until January 1985 for the International Women’s Cricket Council to agree that all Tests should be four-day affairs. But how about five, to match the men? Last summer’s game at Trent Bridge was only the second such instance, following an experiment at North Sydney in February 1992, when England lost by an innings and 85 (and the third day was washed out anyway). The run of draws also contributed to Heyhoe Flint’s unbeaten 22-match career, between 1960-61 and 1979, the longest in men’s or women’s Test cricket. Talent played a role too: her mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour 179 – out of 260 while she was at the crease – to secure a draw against Australia at The Oval in 1976 is surely one of the greatest innings.
But the achievements of Jan Brittin surpass even Heyhoe Flint: in 27 Tests between 1979 and 1998, a player labelled by the media as “the girl with a touch of Gooch” amassed 1,935 runs at almost 50, a world record which may never be beaten. Brittin was still England’s best batter in her final series before retirement, aged 39: the last two of her five centuries – 146 at Guildford and 167 at Harrogate, both during the 1998 Ashes – were made with a splint protecting a finger broken during an ODI at Hove.
Test cricket’s leading wicket-taker is also English: Mary Duggan, who in 17 matches claimed 77 at 13. Off the pitch, she was the dignified and distinguished vice-principal of the Dartford PT College, where Heyhoe Flint and many other England players trained. On it, she was prolific with the bat, and lethal with her left-arm spin, despite having begun as a medium-pacer. In the first of her seven Tests as captain, against New Zealand at Christchurch in 1957-58, she took 6-55 from 40 overs, then scored a century. According to the tour diary of opening batter Cecilia Robinson, the team celebrated with a rare treat of “champagne and liqueurs”. Duggan would earn them another round of champagne 14 weeks later, with figures of 7-6 against Australia at St Kilda in Melbourne, a record in women’s Tests until 1995-96. Duggan then top-scored in England’s reply. The trouble was, she made only 12, as they responded to Australia’s total of 38 by being dismissed for 35. England clung on for a draw.
The amateur status of the women’s game meant players were always juggling cricket with other commitments – perhaps none more than England’s greatest Test all-rounder, Enid Bakewell, who missed out on an international debut, at home to New Zealand in 1966, because she was pregnant. Come the 1968-69 tour of Australia and New Zealand, she faced a difficult decision: could she really leave her young daughter behind for four months? She decided she could, and England were the beneficiaries: Bakewell finished the tour, which involved 14 state and provincial matches, as well as six Tests, with 1,031 runs at nearly 40, and 118 wickets at under ten for her left-arm spin. That included three hundreds – one on Test debut, at Adelaide, and two against New Zealand – and six fifties, plus 12 hauls of five or more, three of them eight-fors. Against Otago, she collected 13-41, six stumped by Sheila Plant. This astounding performance earned Bakewell a feature “Champion woman cricketer” – in the 1970 edition of Wisden. She finished her Test career, aged 38, with a batting average of almost 60, a bowling average of 16, and three children. But sleepless nights and nappies had been no barrier. In her final Test, at Edgbaston against West Indies in 1979, she had become the first English player, male or female, to score a century – carrying her bat for good measure – and take ten wickets in the same Test.
Women’s Tests have rarely been profitable for England. Lengthy gaps between series were the norm early on, as the WCA struggled to raise the funds to host teams. In 1934-35 and 1960-61, England sent teams abroad who were selected not on merit, but on the basis of who could afford the boat fare. Players regularly had to give up jobs to go on tour, while off-spinner Anne Sanders was denied paid leave to travel in 1968-69, despite working for the Central Council of Physical Recreation (now the Sport and Recreation Alliance).
Initially, the strict amateur ideals of the WCA meant offers of commercial support were turned down. But, by the Swinging Sixties, times had changed: the team enjoyed free bats from Lillywhites and, on the 1968-69 tour, official walking-out uniforms from Marks & Spencer. Occasional largesse from the men was also welcomed. MCC contributed £250 to the 1948-49 Australia tour fund. And in 1996 the TCCB contributed £50,000 to a visit by New Zealand. But the women were not directly paid to play Test cricket until the introduction of central contracts in 2014, and only last summer did they receive the same as the men for each appearance.
The irony is that the financial support which accompanied the takeover of women’s cricket by the ICC in 2005 has led to a decline in a format which, even after the advent of women’s ODIs in 1973 and T20Is in 2004, continues to be viewed by players as the game’s pinnacle. England played 14 Tests in the 1980s, 14 in the 1990s, and 16 in the 2000s, but only seven in the 2010s, of which six were against Australia. The volume of international cricket has increased dramatically since Maclagan’s first ball, but growth has come as a result of a focus on T20, felt by the ICC to be a more commercially attractive, less costly vehicle with which to develop the women’s game.
The ECB have fought hard for the survival of women’s Test cricket, with Connor leading the charge. But while the three-format women’s Ashes has, since 2013, helped cement the place of an England–Australia Test in the global calendar, the idea of a multi-Test series now seems an anachronism. The last occurred in August 2006, between England and India. It took 89 years for England to reach the 100-Test milestone. Whether they make it to 200 is another question.
Raf Nicholson is a women’s cricket writer, author of Ladies and Lords: A History of Women’s Cricket in Britain, and editor of CRICKETher.com.
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