Notes on the Evolution of Women’s and Girl’s Cricket in Wales
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 31
Author: Hignell, Andrew
Publisher: Museum of Welsh Cricket
Rating: 3 stars
The first monograph of what is to be a regular series from the Museum of Welsh Cricket is on a subject that I know little of and which has been largely ignored by cricket writers in the past. That women’s cricket is now receiving more serious attention is undoubtedly a good thing, and this is certainly an interesting story.
Hignell begins, not unnaturally, with a search for the first recorded women’s cricket match in Wales and, slightly to my surprise, that dates from as late as 1885. Earlier references do exist albeit they are not conclusive, but even these ‘possibles’ only go back as far as 1853.
From that earliest record there is a crossover with the subject matter of Giles Wilcock’s splendid book on The Original English Lady Cricketers who played one of their matches in Newport in 1890, and that seems to have been the catalyst for the start of some organisation of the women’s game in Wales.
The story moves forward right to the present day and introduces the one name that was familiar to me, Lynne Thomas, who scored a century in the first Women’s World Cup in 1973. Now well into her eighties hopefully a future monograph can be based around an interview with a lady whose record makes it clear that she was a very good cricketer indeed.
Covering as it does an era that is wholly within the age of photography there is some excellent imagery in this one and, in bringing matters up to the present day I am somewhat humbled, in view of some of the comments I have made in the past about franchise cricket in general and The Hundred in particular that, irrespective of my thoughts on that subject, it has certainly been good for women’’s cricket in Wales.
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