Introduction
As a young woman, composer Ethel Smyth played cricket for a ladies’ team in Kent, the White Heather Club. The club’s leading light was the future Dame Meriel Talbot, who would soon play a key government role in the Commonwealth and the Great War. Though still in her early twenties, Meriel’s demeanour on and off the pitch showed she was destined for greatness.
DURING the summer of 1889 the cricket mania possessed all the young women of my acquaintance, the fountain-head of inspiration being the celebrated White Heather Club.* This club was the Zingaree* of women’s cricket and sported the prettiest colours I ever saw, a yellow, white, green and black ribbon with a faint line of pink in it.
In the light of her subsequent career, and also apart from any such considerations, I am proud to say that my particular friend was Meriel Talbot,* a cricketer compared to whom most of us were impostors. We all quite realised the fact, our feelings towards her being akin to those of schoolboys for W. G. Grace;* and however that great man may have treated neophytes and other inferiors, I can only say that Meriel met our incompetence with the gracious indulgence of a true artist. In one respect only, rapidity of movement, were some of us her superiors, but as she made most of the runs for her side she had every right to make them at her own pace — a curiously majestic one.
The White Heather Club was founded at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire in 1887, and was cricket’s first club for women, though women had been playing to a high standard for well over a century. Ethel tells us that the distinguished Lyttelton brothers Alfred and Edward — both first-class cricketers who played for Middlesex, and Alfred an England international — turned out to watch Meriel, Ethel, Nelly Benson (daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury) and the team.
I Zingari (from the Italian for ‘the gypsies,’ but pronounced ‘eye zin-gar-ee’) is an amateur cricket club founded on July 4th 1845. Its heyday was in the late Victorian era, playing seventeen first-class matches between 1849 and 1904, even facing the Australians in 1882 and 1884.
Dame Meriel Lucy Talbot DBE (1866-1956) was Secretary of The Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship from 1901-1916, a peace-making and co-operative role that took her all over the Empire. She subsequently became the first woman Inspector with the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, and was handed responsibility for recruiting and organising the Women’s Land Army in 1917. Later, she was a Government adviser on women’s employment, and chaired the BBC Central Appeals Advisory Committee. She was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1920, three years after the award was instituted; Ethel joined her on the honours list in 1922.
The English medical doctor W. G. Grace (1848-1915) is almost universally regarded as the greatest pioneer of the modern game. See A Many-Chorded Lyre for K. S. Ranjitsinhji’s poetical assessment of Grace’s significance.
Précis
Ethel Smyth became friends with Meriel Talbot in 1889 through joining the country’s first women’s cricket club, the White Heather Club. Ethel remembered Meriel as the team’s outstanding player, who made up for a certain lack of agility by the supreme skill with which she carried the whole side’s batting. (50 / 60 words)
Ethel Smyth became friends with Meriel Talbot in 1889 through joining the country’s first women’s cricket club, the White Heather Club. Ethel remembered Meriel as the team’s outstanding player, who made up for a certain lack of agility by the supreme skill with which she carried the whole side’s batting.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 45 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: about, although, because, if, otherwise, ought, until, whether.
Word Games
Sevens Based on this passage
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Variations: 1.expand your answer to exactly fourteen words. 2.expand your answer further, to exactly twenty-one words. 3.include one of the following words in your answer: if, but, despite, because, (al)though, unless.
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