White Heather Club and Women's Cricket Through the 1910s

The White Heather Club had been formed in 1887 by Lucy Wedgwood, the Countess of Bessborough, Lady Idina Brassey and others — a determinedly upper-class enterprise.

By the 1910s the club had been playing for over twenty years, mostly fixtures in Yorkshire country house circuits.

The White Heather Club was founded by aristocratic women in Yorkshire in 1887 — the first organised women's cricket club of the modern era. Through the 1910s it continued to play exhibition matches against male teams, country house sides and other women's clubs, mostly in Yorkshire and the south of England. The First World War, like everything else, disrupted its activities; by 1915 the club had effectively suspended fixtures as members took up nursing or war work. It resumed after the war but never recovered its pre-war prominence. Its real importance is as the institutional thread between the Victorian women's cricket experiments and the formation of the Women's Cricket Association in 1926. The 1910s were a quiet, modest decade for women's cricket — there were no Tests, no national tournaments, just dispersed club fixtures — but the activity continued and the foundations were preserved.

“The lady cricketers of the White Heather Club have given the country house circuit some of its most amusing afternoons.”

The Women's Cricket Association was founded in 1926; the White Heather Club's tradition flowed into it. The first women's Test was played in 1934.