The Girl Grimmett

GH on the Alana King of her day

The spell Alana King cast this week over the Englishwomen put me in mind of the wonderful Peggy Antonio, whom I had the good fortune to interview in 1992, ten years before her death, which led indirectly to the donation of her remaining mementos to the Australian Sports Museum. Here’s the piece I wrote - one of my all-time favourite sports stories.

The voice on the other end of the phone is cautious, but immediately warm. ‘Peggy Antonio?’ it says. ‘Yes I am. Or I was. I’ve been Peggy Howard for almost fifty years.’ The lady leg-spinner of Australia’s first women’s cricket Test series in the 1930s? The ‘Girl Grimmett’ so brilliant that male critics debated the possibility of unisex Test matches? ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ comes the reply. ‘That was a very long time ago, and I’m afraid I don’t remember much.’ Most of the trophies, souvenirs and memorabilia, it’s explained, have long gone or been recycled. The mounted balls were unscrewed for the children to play with. The old Australian blazer made quite good dusters. But she’s happy enough to talk.

Peggy Antonio always deplored the fuss about her, but her story has an irreducible media appeal. She slots into every disenfranchised group you can conceive of: an impoverished teenage girl of the Great Depression raised by a lone mother, one of six in a family mingling Chilean, Spanish, German, French and English blood. Her job: making boxes in a shoe factory. Short, too: five feet in sprigs. And a legspinner. Such a good one, though, that at fifteen she was representing her state, at seventeen starring in the first women’s Tests between Australia and England. At twenty, having been able to make Australia’s first women’s cricket tour only through the intervention of a gentleman patron, she was a celebrity in England. Don Bradman’s ghost writer thought her ‘the best girl cricketer’ he had ever seen.

Faithful to the tradition of her craft, too, she saved her most baffling delivery until last: after that 1937 trip she never played for Australia again. But she is recalled, nonetheless. Last year, in an article marking a hundred years since a woman first slipped into its pages, Wisden invoked her above all as a women’s cricketer who could have crossed the gender gap. It recalled how Neville Cardus rhapsodised after seeing: ‘Suppose one day the greatest slow left-arm bowler in England is a woman, will any male selection committee at Lord’s send her an invitation?’

‘Wisden?’ says Peggy. ‘That’s a record isn’t it?’