Hampshire v Surrey for 500 Guineas — The First Women's County Cricket Match, 1811

Women had played cricket in southern England for at least sixty years. The Reading Mercury of 1745 recorded a match between Bramley and Hambledon women. Sussex villages staged annual women's matches on commons. By 1811, however, no county-level women's match had ever been formally arranged. The Napoleonic War, ironically, may have helped: with the men's professional ranks decimated, gentleman patrons looking for cricket entertainment turned to women's elevens.

The match was advertised in the London papers a fortnight beforehand. The Hampshire side trained on a private ground at Alton; the Surrey side practised at Newington itself. Both elevens were mostly drawn from the rural south, and contemporary accounts note that they bowled and batted in white dresses with coloured ribbons.

Women's cricket in the late eighteenth century had been an established curiosity. Single-wicket and full-side games had been played in Sussex villages and on Surrey commons since at least 1745, and the Hambledon-era diaries of John Nyren mention several women bowlers of high quality. The 1811 match at Newington Green, however, was the first staged on a properly contested county basis. The promoters were two unnamed noblemen who put up the prize money — 500 guineas a side, a sum equivalent to about £40,000 in modern values. The match was played over three days, 3-5 October 1811, on the field at Balls Pond, then a London suburb on the edge of Islington. Hampshire fielded a side captained by Anna Newland of Alton; Surrey were led by a Mrs Crocker. The cricket was reported by the Sporting Magazine as 'spirited and even', with several catches rated 'as good as men's cricket can show'. Hampshire won by fifteen notches — that is, fifteen runs in the underarm scoring of the day. The reporting press treated the match as a novelty: there were ribald jokes in some London papers and a respectful, almost surprised tone in others. The 500 guineas were paid out and the players returned home; no second county match of comparable status followed for almost a century.

“The match was played with great spirit and the catches were as good as men's cricket can show.”

No further county-level women's matches of comparable status followed in the next several decades. Women's village cricket continued in Sussex and Hampshire but the gentlemen patrons returned their attention to the men's game once the Napoleonic War ended in 1815. Organised women's cricket would not be revived at county level until the founding of the White Heather Club in 1887 and the formation of the Women's Cricket Association in 1926.