The Kodak Company, with plants in both North America and the UK, was perfectly set up to promote the sport of baseball in the UK. Long a staple of its North American recreation clubs, the game took root in the recreation society of the company’s works in Wealdstone, Middlesex, in the late 1920s under the watchful eye of enthusiasts seconded from the company’s North American operations. It was to the women’s game that the Kodak baseball section was to make its most significant contribution, with its flagship women’s team, the Hawk-Eyes, leading the way in bringing the women’s game to public attention.

The 6 June 1930 edition of the Daily Mirror carried a photograph showing ‘Bernard Nedell, the American actor, coaching a girl for the baseball match at Stamford Bridge’ [1]. The few of the Daily Mirror’s readers familiar with the playing of baseball in England in the period would have recognised this as a reference to the annual tradition of the Anglo-American Baseball Association (AABA)—London-based American and Canadian baseball enthusiasts keen on widening interest and participation in the sport in the UK [2]—of opening its season with an exhibition game that included a match between women’s teams, something that was guaranteed to get press attention and a photograph in the next day’s paper.

A typical scene at an AABA-organised press call in this period. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

However, if these readers had looked more closely at the photograph of 6 June 1930, they might have noticed that there was something different about this scene. The female players in these games had, up until this date, been West End chorus girls especially recruited for the event and dressed in outsized men’s baseball uniforms supplied to them by the AABA [3]. The player receiving the benefit of Bernard Nedell’s guidance in the 9 June 1930 photo is something different, as is plain by the uniform she is wearing, which is clearly a bespoke uniform tailored for a woman. Visible on the front of the uniform are the letters ‘E’, ‘B’, and ‘T', and in front of them, just about visible here, but plainly visible in the photographs of more players from the same team published in the Daily Herald on 7 May 1932 and Reynold’s Newspaper on 22 May 1932 [4], is the letter ‘H’. For a select few people in the know, this would have been enough to tell them that this was no chorus girl; this was one of the pioneers of the women’s game in England, a player for the Kodak Hawk-Eye Baseball Team.

Just two years after the company’s founding, the Kodak company built its first factory outside the USA on farmland outside the hamlet of Wealdstone in what was then rural Middlesex [6]. The factory opened in 1891 and grew to such a size across the next few decades that Wealdstone became in effect a company town, with much of the social, cultural, and sporting life revolving around activities organised by the employees themselves under the banner of the Kodak Recreation Society. By 1928, the Society had its own baseball section, and within a year, this included women’s as well as men’s teams [7].

Back in the company’s original plant in Rochester, New York, baseball had been played since the earliest days of the company, with founder George Eastman turning out for the very first works team [8]. By the 1920s, the company’s two sites in Rochester—Kodak Park and Hawk-Eye—played host to ‘Noon-Hour’, ‘Twilight’, Interplant, and Indoor baseball leagues, and works teams played in the City Industrial League, all under the auspices of the Kodak Recreation Club [9]. Game reports were a frequent feature of the in-house employee magazine, The Kodak Magazine, and, although there was much less written about games between teams of female employees than male employees, it is clear that, as early as 1926, two of the departments also had their own women’s teams, as the following write-up of an indoor game between teams from the Camera Works and the Kodak Office published in the April 1926 edition of the magazine makes plain [10].

Public domain. https://archive.org/embed/kodak-employee-magazine

Kodak’s Canadian operation, Kodak Heights, Mount Dennis, Toronto, also had women’s softball teams by 1924 [11]. This was all against a backdrop of increasing women’s participation in baseball (or softball) across the USA and Canada [12]. In this light, it is natural that the Kodak Harrow site would follow suit. The extent to which this was directly inspired by the North American operations is evident in the timing. It is also, as we will see, evident in the names adopted by the teams, which followed closely the US Kodak model of naming teams after the company’s products—Hawk-Eye, Brownie, etc. Most particularly, it is there in the origins of the man who coached the teams.

Edward ‘Eddie’ Lynch was a 50-year-old (in 1931—the date of the quote above) foreman in the camera department at Kodak Harrow. An Ontario native of Irish extraction, he had worked at the Kodak Heights plant in Toronto before being seconded to Harrow. Although pinning down when exactly Lynch arrived at Harrow is difficult, the fact that his wife, Lucy, arrived in the UK to join him in September 1929 suggests that it was in that or the previous year; something that is supported by the fact that their two children, Evelyn and Earl, who did not move to the UK with them, turned 21 and 19, respectively, in 1928, old enough to be safely left behind [14]. It will be remembered that 1928 was also the year that the baseball section of the Kodak Recreation Society was formed, which would support the contention in the article quoted above that ‘When [Lynch] came from Canada to England he decided that what England lacked was baseball’.

It is worth taking a moment here to address the correct rendering of ‘Hawk-Eye’/’Hawkeye(s)’. In the press, the team’s name was usually rendered ‘Hawkeye(s)’, as can be seen from the quote above, but it is clear from the period Kodak literature and the use of the ‘HEBT’ initialisation by the baseball team, that ‘Hawk-Eye’ is the correct rendering, and, as such, is the rendering I will use here.

The HEBT appear to have made their public debut in an item in a newsreel by British Pathe titled “English girls baseball” (footage that also makes clear that the pitchers pitched under-arm, softball style) [15]. And, on 6 June 1930, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News reported the following.

As we have seen, this was also the day that the Daily Mirror published the photograph of Bernard Nedell of the AABA coaching a member of the Hawk-Eye team. Although not stated in the ISADN piece, it is likely that the ‘two teams’ were both from the Kodak works. However, it is also possible that one of the teams is the women’s baseball team of the British Celanese Acetate Company, who were to become rivals to the Kodak works teams across the next few years, as evidenced by the following article from the Mail and Chronicle, date 28 August 1931, which is worth quoting at length because of the snapshot it provides of the Kodak baseball section in this period.

The upcoming game against a team from Cardiff, the subject of the quote introducing Eddie Lynch above, was organised by Eddie Lynch and given the grandiose and entirely spurious title of the European Women’s Baseball Championship. Lynch advertised for a team to play against the Hawk-Eye team and received a reply from the St Dyfrigs Club of Cardiff. The match was played on 27 August 1931 and Hawk-Eye won 10–8 [17]. A discussion of the game of baseball as played in Wales in this period under the ‘Welsh’, AKA, ‘British’, or ‘English’ code (as opposed to the ‘American’ code) falls outside the scope of this work, but this event, however spurious the billing, does at least make plain that the Welsh code was attracting female players too in this period [18]. And this was attracting the attention of the press.

As in North America, the treatment of the growth of women’s baseball in the period British press was twofold, in that, on the one hand, it formed one element of the wider discussion of the growing participation of women in sports and, on the other, it provided news editors with an excuse to run pictures of attractive young women in the pages of their newspapers. Although I will focus on the former here, it is important to understand that the majority of mentions of women’s baseball in the British press in this period came simply in the form of photographs of players posing for the camera, often in ways that played to the stereotypical view of women that newspaper readers would expect to be served.

Typical press presentation of women’s baseball. Press photo, author’s own collection.

Thus, for example, the Daily Mirror ran a photograph on 2 May 1928 showing the catcher for one of the teams of chorus girls put together by the AABA powdering her nose through the guard of her mask. These photos were usually accompanied only by a brief caption identifying the subject as a female baseball player—no name provided (it is with a degree of irony that one of the rare instances of a newspaper article naming a female baseball player in this period is not about baseball at all; it is a review of a musical revue staged by the Kodak Recreation Society baseball section published in The Era on 20 April 1932. The name-checked players are Mary Dodd and Miss V. Ronald).

These photographs were not accompanied by game reports or team lists and did not come with any other context. It is telling that the reverse was true of the men’s game in this period—photographs were rare, but game reports were not. In fact, although results and key plays were occasionally reported, I know of only one instance in this period when a game between women’s baseball teams in the UK received a full play-by-play game report in the period British press. Due to its consequential historical significance, I will end this article by quoting that report at length.

All that said, the appearance in public of teams like Hawk-Eye did lead to women’s baseball joining the discussion of women in sport, which centred on issues of decorum and physicality.

The use of the word ‘strenuous’ in this article by ‘Daring Diana’ in Reynold’s Illustrated News of 8 August 1931 is of particular interest because of the resonance with the famous dismissal of the possibility of women playing baseball by entrepreneur Albert G Spalding in his 1911 book America’s National Game [19].

This remark is echoed in the caption of a photograph of a women’s baseball game in the USA published in the Daily Mirror on 29 July 1914: ‘Baseball seems a rather strenuous game for the gentler sex, but the American girls are just as keen as their brothers’ [20]. Against this backdrop, some promoters of the sport were keen to contrast its virtues with the vices of alternatives, such as this letter-writer to the Daily Express in 1921 [21].

Or the columnist ‘Elizabeth’, writing in the Lancashire Evening Post in 1933 [22].

It is telling, in this respect, that baseball was of particular appeal to women with jobs that kept them sitting or standing in a single location for long periods. We have already seen that the Kodak Hawk-Eye team was formed of ‘typists, factory girls, and clerks’; further up the country, and a few years later, it was a Leeds typist by the name of Wendy Dempster who was expressing a desire to see a women’s baseball league formed [23]. This was also the era when the hiking craze was at its peak [24]—and it is interesting in this respect to compare the uniform worn by the Hawk-Eye players and the ‘uniform’ of 1930s hikers of both sexes: an open-necked shirt and shorts. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that women in clerical work represented simply the largest pool of women available, as, by 1931, they made up 42% of all clerical workers [25].

On the side of decorum, there was the constant push and pull between practicality, respectability, and appealing to the male gaze in the way the teams were dressed, particularly at the hands of male coaches/promoters. The hip-hugging men’s uniforms worn by the chorus girls hired by the AABA were firmly on the side of appealing to male sports fans, while the looser-fitting jerseys and shorts of the Hawk-Eye team were just as firmly on the side of the practical.

Looking ahead a few years, when the National Baseball Association (NBA) made a concerted effort to launch professional leagues under the American code across the UK for both men and women [26], the Daily Mirror was at pains to point out that ‘the uniforms of the girls’ teams will be similar to those of the men’ [27], i.e., not revealing. It is somewhat depressing, then, to report that, when the NBA finally launched women’s teams in London, the players of one of the teams, the West Ham ‘Hammerettes’, were dressed like beauty pageant contestants, complete with figure-hugging outfits and sashes [28]. This is consistent with the treatment by the NBA of women’s baseball as a novelty, with games played immediately before matches in the men’s leagues, as ‘warm-up acts’. In this respect, they were following the playbook of the AABA.

A West Ham ‘Hammerette’, Reynold’s News, 17 July 1937. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

With all that can be said against the treatment of the women’s teams by the NBA, it also has to be acknowledged that the brief life of the NBA leagues (1935–1939) was the period when the women’s game had the highest profile before the modern era, with promotional announcements and reports of results and key plays (but not full game reports) being published in what was at the time, the highest circulation newspaper in Britain, the Daily Mirror. It was in the run-up to one of these games that the Daily Mirror described the Kodak team as ‘the pioneers of ladies’ baseball’. In terms of regional coverage, the newspapers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, bastions of the NBA leagues, although still tending towards the photograph-but-no-write-up approach to reporting the women’s game, did at least from time to time provide the names of some of the players of local teams such as the Leeds Pioneers, the Hull Pioneer White Caps, the Castleford Tigers, and Greenfield Amazons [29]. However, it is to the more obscure Echo, Mail, and Chronicle (West Ham) edition of 23 July 1937 that we must look for our one and only full play-by-play game write-up in the press in this period, written by the paper’s resident baseball correspondent ‘Homer’, for a game between the West Ham and Kodak teams. To set the scene for that game, it is worth catching up with Eddie Lynch, last seen coaching the Hawk-Eye team to victory in his self-declared European Women’s Baseball Championship in 1931.

Eddie Lynch remained employed at Kodak Harrow until at least 1941, by which time, he was 60 and his wife, Lucy, was 56 [30]. He remained involved with the Kodak baseball teams until at least 1936—at least, if he is, as I believe, the ‘T. Lynch’ referred to in this article on the men’s baseball team in the Bexhill-on-Sea Observer from August of that year [31].

Readers will recall Eddie Lynch’s penchant for colourful sweaters from the quote that introduced him at the start of this article. Lynch’s employment at Kodak Harrow until at least 1941 means that he would be a witness to the birth, rise, and fall of not just women’s but also men’s baseball under the American code in the UK, he and his wife Lucy returning from a trip home to Canada on 2 September 1939 [32]—one day before the declaration of war that put at end to even the amateur leagues in the capital that had outlasted the ‘professional’ leagues of the NBA by a couple of years [33].

The Kodak factory was considered a target for bombing by the Germans as the cameras it produced were a vital element of the intelligence war, and at least one bomb and one parachute mine hit the site in 1940; it also became the location for ‘Station Z’, the citadel built to serve as the headquarters of the Air Ministry in the event of a German invasion [34]. So, the ‘typists, factory girls, and clerks’ of the Kodak works would have a busy war. But let us end this article by rolling the clock back a few years, to happier times, when the female employees of the Kodak Company were the aces of women’s baseball [35]. Jamie Barras, December 2024.

Echo, Mail and Chronicle (West Ham), 27 July 1937. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

Hawk-Eye pitcher, Daily News (London), 7 May 1932. Note the overhand pitch. Image created by British Library Board. No known copyright holder.