Quite a few interesting details have come to light since our last report on July 9th 1929. On July 25th, the Hawkeye girls succeeded in putting it over the Camera girls despite the walk-over by the Camera in their last match. The game was quite tense at times, especially when the catcher caught the ball with her nose. The teams tied at the end of the official five innings, so they played an extra innings each side, in which the Camera took two runs and the Hawkeye three. Then the Hawkeye broke loose—and what a noise! I feel quite sure quite a few lungs needed repairing next morning.[i]

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 Hawkeye, leading the way in bringing the women’s game to public attention.

On August 9th the Japan met the Hawkeye in a semi-final to the Cup Match. Gee, that was some game. The Japan were soon leading by eight runs to six, so up went the shout, “Now then, what’s the matter with the Hawkeye?” So they put their backs into it and pulled off the game with fifteen runs to eight; and now the Camera meet the Hawkeye for the Cup. Look out for squalls.[ii]

On 6 June 1930, the Pathe Newsreel Company included in its Empire News Bulletin a report titled ‘English Girls Baseball’, which featured two teams of women playing baseball at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football Club.[iii] Anybody seeing the newsreel familiar with the playing of baseball in England in the period would have recognised this as depicting 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[iv]— of opening its season with an exhibition game that included a match between women’s teams, something that was guaranteed to garner the AABA some press attention and a photograph in the next day’s paper.[v]

However, anybody paying close attention to the teams in the 1930 Pathe newsreel would have noticed that there was something different about them this year. 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.[vi] They were there for comic relief. The teams in the 1930 Pathe newsreel were something different; that was obvious from the high standard of their play and their uniforms. The latter were bespoke, coordinated, and functional. The members of one team even had their team’s initials embroidered across the fronts of their jerseys: HEBT.

This was the Kodak Harrow Works Hawk-Eye Baseball Team making its public debut.

A NEW HAWK-EYE: the complete pocket camera. Simple, instantly understood, yet embraces every practical feature demanded by the expert. Kodak Print Ad, 1909.[vii]

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.[viii] 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.[ix]

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.[x] 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.[xi] 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.

The second game began to even the score up a little, largely owing to the girls getting over "stage fright," and the good pitching of Florence Blum and Nellie Barton. The score was Kodak Office 15, Camera Works 10, the latter with two on bases, and no outs. Catherine Funk held the spotlight with a hit through the beams, hitting the peak of the back wall. The ball bounded, was caught by a fielder, which made a triple play and saved the game for the Office.[xii]

Kodak’s Canadian operation, Kodak Heights, Mount Dennis, Toronto, also had women’s softball teams by 1924.[xiii] This was all against a backdrop of increasing women’s participation in baseball (or softball) across the USA and Canada.[xiv] 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, but also, as we will see, 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—and, most particularly, in the background of the man who coached the teams.

HE WON GIRLS' BASEBALL! DEMON TRAINER OF "HAWKEYES" Meet the man who has just won the European Women's Baseball Championship Mr. Eddie Lynch. With a Transatlantic twang in his voice, a white and blue sweater and a peaked jockey's cap. Mr. Lynch stood in the sports ground of the Kodak factory tonight and, by sheer lung power, goaded his team of girls to victory. Mr. Lynch is a baseball expert. When he came from Canada to England he decided that what England lacked was baseball. He was the man responsible for training the Kodak “Hawkeye” team of typists, factory girls, and clerks [...][xv]

Edward ‘Eddie’ Lynch, known to his British workmates as Ted ot Teddie 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, Lynch 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.[xvi]

It will be remembered also 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 rendering of ‘Hawk-Eye’/‘Hawkeye’. In the British press, the team’s name was usually rendered ‘Hawkeye(s)’, as can be seen from the quote above, while the Kodak company’s own publications used ‘Hawk-eye’ and ‘Hawkeye’ interchangeably—hence ‘HEBT’ being the initialisation used by the baseball team when it was formed. I will stick with ‘Hawkeye’ here for simplicity’s sake.)

As shown by the two quotes that opened this piece, the Harrow Works’ in-house staff magazine, the Kodak Works Bulletin, printed its first report of games between the women’s teams at the Harrow site in the summer of 1929. (Note that ‘Japan’ in the second quote was the name given to the department responsible for applying black lacquer to the back of photographic plates, a process known at the time as ‘japanning’ due to its resemblance to Japanese lacquer work.)

As we have seen, the Hawkeye, alongside the Brownie, one of the other three Kodak women’s baseball teams in existence at the time (all from the Camera Dept.), made its public debut at the 1930 AABA season-opening game at Stamford Bridge in June of that year (The Brownie won 6–0; a rare defeat for the Hawkeye). The appearance of the two teams had been arranged during a visit by the AABA’s organising secretary, Charlie Muirhead, to the Kodak baseball section in early May 1930.[xvii] However, it would be another year before the women’s teams would face opposition from outside the company. The first of those games would be against the women’s baseball team of the British Celanese Acetate Company based at New Eltham in Kent.

Tea over, we changed into baseball kit, and off we went to the diamond. One began to wonder if they’d come to watch a Bobby Jones golf tournament, so great was the audience who cheered loud and long at every point of the game, which was grand. The Celanese ladies put on a great show; for only a few weeks at the game they played splendidly and have great promise as ball players.[xviii]

The game, between the Kodak Brownie team and the Celanese team, which took place in June 1931 at New Eltham during the Celanese company’s annual sports day, had come about as the result of a request from a Mr Hornsby, Sports Secretary of the Celanese works, for the Kodak Recreation Society to send someone to New Eltham to teach the game of baseball to Celanese’s female workforce. Ted Lynch duly obliged. There would be further games the following month when the Kodak Japan team paid a visit to New Eltham. However, on that occasion, the Celanese team was coached by another of Kodak Harrow’s Canadian employees, Sid Jackson.[xix] This was because Ted Lynch was busy cooking up something else.

GIRLS AS BASEBALL ENTHUSIASTS. CLUB WITH EIGHT TEAMS AND 150 MEMBERS. The baseball section of the Kodak Recreation Society is now nearly three years old, and has about one hundred and fifty members. There are five teams in the men's league and three in the girls'. The members play under Canadian “soft ball” rules. The girls have christened one of the teams “Hawkeye,” and this team has won the Kodak League Cup for the past two years. They will shortly oppose a girls' team from Cardiff, and, if they win, propose to make a claim to the women's “soft ball” baseball championship of Europe. Mr. E. Lynch, of the Kodak works at Wealdstone, who hails from Toronto, coaches the women's teams. British Celanese is another business house with a women's baseball team, and, although beaten twice by Kodak, they hope to hold their own at the next meeting.[xx]

The game against a team from Cardiff, Ted Lynch gave the grandiose and entirely spurious title of the European Women’s Softball Championship. Lynch had advertised in the national press for a team to play against the Hawkeye, which, by 1931, had emerged as the most accomplished of the women’s teams at Kodak, having won the women’s league three years running. Lynch received a reply from the St Dyfrigs Club of Cardiff. The match was played on 27 August 1931, in front of a crowd of several hundred. The Hawkeye won 10–8. The team was captained by Peggy Stiles, and its star run-scorer was Eileen O’Connell.[xxi] A photograph of the victorious Hawkeye alongside Ted Lynch was included in the December 1931 issue of the Kodak Works Bulletin. (It is worth noting here that Eileen O’Connell would remain a fixture of the Kodak baseball section for at least seven years.)

I tell the story of women’s baseball in Wales in this period under the ‘Welsh’, aka, ‘British’, or ‘English’ code (as opposed to the ‘American’ code) elsewhere.[xxii] It is enough to say here that it had much in common with the story of the Hawkeye, being rooted in workers’ recreation, albeit alongside the nonconformist ethos of ‘Chapel sport’. It is also worth noting that under the Welsh code, the game had two innings, and every player had to be put out before the next team could come to the plate. Based on this, for the Hawkeye–St Dyfrids game to end ‘10–8’ strongly suggests that the game was played under American rules, not Welsh, as might be expected given that Hawkeye was the team that issued the challenge.

Nothing seems to have come from a suggestion by Ted Lynch that the Hawkeye would travel to Paris to ‘defend their title’ in 1932. However, representative Kodak teams would go on to ‘defend’ the ‘title’ against other factory teams from the London area: the Ford Sports women’s baseball team in 1935 and the Philco Radio women’s baseball team in 1937.[xxiii] It is unlikely that anyone outside of Ted Lynch viewed these games as actual championship games.

The Hawkeye was not around for those games, however, as the 1932 season was to be its last. Its star hitter and base runner, Eileen O’Connell, went on to become captain of the X-Ray team, the first women’s team from outside the Camera Department. Meanwhile, future representative Kodak women’s team captain, Phyllis ‘Phil’ Cloake, took over the running of the Brownie team and led it to four successive championships, beating Hawkeye’s 1929—1931 record. The game at Kodak was moving on.

However, to take a step back: as the quote above shows, the 1931 championship game, spurious or not, brought the women’s game in Britain some of its most expansive press coverage to date. It is worth looking at how the press represented the women’s game in its pages.

Sir, I note the Football Association do not want girl football clubs, and doctors are against the game, too. If our girls want a game with more go in it than tennis and a game where brains count more than they do in hockey, let them play baseball. They will find baseball a team game in which strength and brains have equal share.[xxiv]

As in North America, the growth of women’s baseball received two types of treatment in the British press: on the one hand, it formed one element of the wider discussion of the growing participation of women in sports, while 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 were of the latter type: 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. 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 received a full play-by-play game report. 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 Hawkeye did lead to women’s baseball joining the discussion of women in sport, which centred on issues of decorum and physicality.

I hear that baseball is to have a very definite place in women's sport next year. Plans are being made to form other clubs, and baseball matches may be included in various athletic meetings. It is a fine game for developing quickness of the feet and brain, and need not be any more strenuous than other games now played by women.[xxv]

The use of the word ‘strenuous’ in this 1931 item by ‘Daring Diana’ in Reynold’s Illustrated News 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.

But neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field. . . They may play Lawn Tennis, and win championships; they may play Basket Ball, and achieve laurels, they may play Golf, and receive trophies; but Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.[xxvi]

The Spalding 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’.[xxvii] Against this backdrop, some promoters of the sport were keen to contrast its virtues with the vices of alternatives, such as the writer of the letter to the Daily Express in 1921 that supplied the quote that opened this section, and the columnist ‘Elizabeth’, writing in the Lancashire Evening Post in 1933.

Young women have been known to make clever players of this game, which requires speed, agility, a quick eye and intelligence. As a game, it is certainly more adapted to women than, say, cricket, for great hitting strength is not so necessary.[xxviii]

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 Hawkeye 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 (Wendy Dempster would go on to captain the Leeds Pioneers baseball team).[xxix] This was also the era when the hiking craze was at its peak[xxx]—and it is interesting in this respect to compare the uniform worn by the Hawkeye 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.[xxxi]

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 Hawkeye 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[xxxii], the Daily Mirror was at pains to point out that ‘the uniforms of the girls’ teams will be similar to those of the men[xxxiii]’, 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.[xxxiv] 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.

In a game between Leeds Pioneers and Castleford, which Leeds won by 19 runs to 9, Miss Irene Lockwood, the Leeds "Babe Ruth," hit a "homer" […][xxxv]

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 (1934–1939) 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’.

Preceding the West Ham game to-morrow is one between West Ham girls and Kodak girls. These young ladies take their ball game seriously, and though the home side might have advantage of home surroundings and fans, they will have a stiff opposition in Kodak, who are the pioneers of ladies' baseball and have a remarkable record.[xxxvi]

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,[xxxvii] 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.

Greenfield Amazons meet Leeds Pioneers at Greenfield Stadium to-night (7 o’clock) in the first women’s baseball match to be played in Bradford. Teams:— Greenfield.—R. Suddards, M. McKinley, R. McKinley, S. Wharton, I. Johnson, L. Johnson, M. Carr, A. Tree, I. Roebuck, M. Langlois, E. Keighley, F. Brentnall. Leeds.—W. Dempster, L. Myers, W. Wilson, E. Winfield, I. Jones, M. Scott, A. Westcoat, E. Collier, M. Jones, E. Hillaby.[xxxviii]

However, it is to the more obscure West Ham and South Essex Mail and its 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. This was a game between the West Ham Hammerettes and Kodak Aces,[xxxix] and was written by a West-Ham-based writer on all matters baseball who went by the pen name ‘Homer’. The most knowledgeable of the writers on baseball in the London press of the period, it is likely that ‘Homer’ was himself a player or coach for one of the men’s baseball teams based in the West Ham area: the professional West Ham team, or any one of the amateur teams that played in the West Ham J.O.C. Baseball League.[xl] To set the scene for that game, it is worth catching up with Ted Lynch, last seen coaching the Hawkeye to victory in his self-declared European Women’s Baseball Championship in 1931.

Ted Lynch remained employed at Kodak Harrow until at least 1941, by which time, he was 60 and his wife, Lucy, was 56.[xli] He remained involved with the Kodak baseball teams until at least 1939,[xlii] and remained as colourful, as ever.

Kodak, incidentally, had two big advantages over their opponents […] The second was the brilliant red sweater worn by Mr T. Lynch, their American manager and coach. Mr Lynch’s sweater completely eclipsed that made famous by Mr P.G.H. Fender.[xliii]

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[xliv]—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.[xlv]

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.[xlvi] 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 they were the aces of women’s baseball.

Kodak players identifiable from the newspaper report: Phyllis ‘Phil’ Cloake (captain and pitcher), Nan Moon, Gemma Gregory, and Ida Johnson; meanwhile, ‘O’Connor’ is almost certainly Eileen O’Connell, veteran of the women’s game at Kodak, star of first the Hawkeye and then the X-Ray team, and still going strong.

KODAK'S WIN

Miss Millar Knocks A Home Run

Kodak's were the visitors at the West Ham diamond on Sunday for the second girls’ game of the season, and they defeated the Hammers by 7 to 5. Miss Rowley made first in the opening after the home team catcher Miss Millar and pitcher Miss Steele, had collided in an effort to take her easy pop-up along the first base line. With Miss O’Connor facing Miss Steele, Miss Rowley stole second and took third on a passed ball. Miss O'Connor singled and stole second and Miss Moon singled to drive in two runs. A smart put-out at first base retired the side with Miss Moon on third following a two-bagger by Miss Lambert. A grand home run by Miss Millar opening batter for the Hammerettes was followed by a single through the short stop by Miss Hayes.

Miss Hayes was put out at second when a hefty hit to the left field by Miss Steele was dropped. Miss Morris single[d] and Miss Steele came home on a single by Miss Glover. The run was followed by another by Miss Morris on a double bagger by Miss Leach. With a run in hand, the Hammerettes retired the Kodak team for a duck in their next visit, and failed to add to their own score in their second frame. Two further runs were added by Kodak in their third visit. A double steal was the main cause, Miss O'Connor crossing the plate when Miss Johnson bunted short of the pitcher. Miss Cloake drove in Miss Moon with a hefty drive over the pitcher's box. Still undismayed the Hammerettes added a further two to their score of three to take the lead at five to four at the end of the third. Miss Glover and Miss Leech crossing the plate.

Errors allowed Miss Gregory to take three bases on a one base hit and Miss Rowley's hard drive to the short stop scored the run. Miss Rowley advanced to third and Miss Moon took second after a single and a poor throw and error at second let in the two runs. Kodak's dismissed the Hammerettes in their last without further addition.

Pitching for the Hammerettes, Miss Steele had three strike-outs against nil from Miss Cloake.[xlvii]

Jamie Barras, December 2024, revised October 2025.

[i] ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 11, page 96, August 1929.

[ii] See Note 1 above.

[iii] The Pathe newsreel item can be viewed here: https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/241284/, accessed 29 March 2025. We can be sure this is the Stamford Bridge game from the timing—see Note 6 below—and because ‘Stamford Bridge’ can be seen on sign behind the posing HEBT team at 0:06–0.08.

[iv] The story of the Anglo-American Baseball Association, which grew out of the 1914-1918 Anglo-American Baseball League, falls outside the scope of this work, but more information can be found in the 12 December 2024 post on the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/FolkestoneBaseball, accessed 15 December 2024.

[v] For the photographs in the newspapers from the 1930 event see, for example, the photograph on page 11, Daily Mirror, 6 June 1930, with the caption ‘Bernard Nedell, the American actor, coaching a girl for the baseball match at Stamford Bridge’.

[vi] See for example, the photograph in the Daily Telegraph (Derby), 11 May 1929, featuring players recruited, according to the report, from the show ‘The Five O’ Clock Girl’.

[vii] Ellis Collection of Kodakiana (1886–1923), Duke University Libraries, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4930qj74, accessed 15 December 2024.

[viii] This description of the founding of Kodak Harrow and the Kodak Recreation Society are taken from https://headstonemanor.org/kodak-in-harrow-celebrating-130-years/ and https://www.kapitimuseum.org.nz/virtual_exhibit/vex11/BCB97B64-5B82-47FE-9C05-789816802750.htm, accessed 15 December 2024.

[ix] The section’s founding “three years earlier” is mentioned in ‘Girls As Baseball Enthusiasts’, Mail and Chronicle, 28 August 1931.  The women’s teams having been in existence for ‘two years’ is mentioned in ‘Baseball Boom?’, Reynold’s Illustrated News, 10 May 1931.

[x] Issues of Kodak Magazine, the in-house magazine for Kodak’s Rochester employees, are available to view at https://archive.org/embed/kodak-employee-magazine, accessed, 15 December 2024. This information is gleaned from: ‘George W Howells Retires’, Kodak Magazine, June 1926, page 23.

[xi] Information gleaned from various issues of the 1925 editions of the in-house Kodak Magazine, see note 7 above.

[xii] See Note 7 above, April 1926 edition, page 21. According to the June 1926 edition of the magazine, this was the first year that the Camera Works had fielded a women’s baseball team (page 25), suggesting that organised women’s baseball at least was relatively new at the site.

[xiii] https://kodakcanada.omeka.net/exhibits/show/kodak-canada--the-early-years/women-at-work--the-changing-oc, accessed 15 December 2024.

[xiv] See for example, https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2020/03/26/spotlight-universal-newsreel-highlights-female-baseball-players/, which includes a 1930 newsreel of a women’s baseball minor league game, accessed 17 December 2024.

[xv] ‘He Won Girls’ Baseball!’, Daily Herald, 27 August 1931.

[xvi] Biographical Information for Ted Lynch and family from ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com (Operations), accessed 16 December 2024. Ted Lynch, birth date and job at Kodak Harrow: 1939 England and Wales Register, Harrow, and UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960, SS Empress of Britain, 22 July 1939; Lucy Lynch arrival date, UK: UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960, SS Minnedosa arrival 8 September 1929, Liverpool; Lynch children’s names and Lynch’s job at Kodak Heights: 1921 Census of Canada, Toronto Ward 5.

[xvii] Result of the game: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 12, page 62, July 1930; Muirhead’s visit: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 12, page 35, June 1930.

[xviii] ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 13, page 76, August 1931.

[xix] See Note 18 above and ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 13, page 82, September 1931.

[xx] ‘Girls As Baseball Enthusiasts’, Mail and Chronicle, 28 August 1931.

[xxi] See Note 15 above and ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 13, page 122, October 1931.

[xxii] https://www.ishilearn.com/diamond-lives-health-friendship-and-baseball-part-iii, accessed 1 October 202. It is worth noting here that, In 1931, the Liverpool-based English Baseball Association (EBA), which played under the ‘Welsh’ aka ‘English’ code, also organised a ‘ladies’ section’; see ‘Baseball for Girls’, Liverpool Echo, 18 March 1931.

[xxiii] Paris game suggestion: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 13, page 195, November 1931. Defence against Ford Sports: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 17, page 110, October 1935. Against Philco Radio: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 19, page 7, May 1937.

[xxiv] ‘Baseball for Girls’, letter column, Daily Express, 10 December 1921. Alas, the anonymous correspondent blots their copybook with their postscript: ‘They would look just as pretty in baseball uniform as they do in footer rig’.

[xxv]  ‘Baseball Plans’, Reynold’s Illustrated News, 9 August 1931.

[xxvi] Quoted, for example, here: Donna L. Halper, Marvels or Menaces: How the Press Covered ‘The Lady Baseballists,’ 1865-1915, https://sabr.org/journal/article/marvels-or-menaces-how-the-press-covered-the-lady-baseballists-1865-1915/, accessed 16 December 2024.

[xxvii] The photo is on page 11, Daily Mirror, 29 July 1914.

[xxviii] ‘Elizabeth’, ‘Baseball Girls’, Lancashire Evening Post, 31 August 1933.

[xxix] ‘Women’s Interest’, Leeds Mercury, 11 May 1936. Wendy Dempster as captain of Leeds: ‘ “Ranger’s” Notes and Selections’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 06 July 1937.

[xxx] Holt, A. (1987). Hikers and ramblers: surviving a thirties’ fashion. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 4(1), 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523368708713614

[xxxi] S. Todd, ‘Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women's Entry to Employment in Inter-War England’, Twentieth Century British History 15, 2 (2004), page 122.

[xxxii] The story of the NBA falls outside the scope of this work. You can read about it in the following: Harvey Sahker, ‘The Blokes of Summer’, Free Lance Writing Associates, Inc., 2011; Josh Chetwynd and Brian A Belton, ‘British Baseball and the West Ham Club’ McFarland and Company, 2007; Daniel Bloyce, ‘John Moores and the ‘Professional’ Baseball Leagues in 1930s England’, Sport in History, 27:1 (2007), 64-87.

[xxxiii] ‘A Hit Among the Misses!’, Daily Mirror, 7 May 1935.

[xxxiv] This is most apparent in the photograph showing members of the team running towards the camera—problematic in itself—in the Daily Mirror, 17 July 1937, but can also be seen in the posed photograph of one of the players in the Reynold’s Newspaper, 18 July 1937.

[xxxv] Al Male, ‘Your Boy Won a ‘Ball Bat?’, Daily Mirror, 22 June 1937.

[xxxvi] Al Male, ‘Women’s Match’, Daily Mirror, 17 July 1937.

[xxxvii] See, for example, Note 29 above, final reference.

[xxxviii] ‘Women’s Baseball’, Bradford Observer, 21 August 1936.

[xxxix] Kodak Aces: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 19, page 55, July 1937.

[xl] ‘Baseball Fixtures: West Ham J.O.C.’, West Ham and South Essex Mail, 14 May 1937.

[xli] This information is contained in the listing for Edward and Lucy Lynch in the passenger list for the SS Modasa, which left the UK on 25 August 1941; UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960, accessed at ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com (Operations), on 17 December 2024.

[xlii] Lynch is in the photograph f the q1939 Kodak men’s hardball team: ‘Baseball’, Kodak Works Bulletin, Volume 20, page 153, September 1939.

[xliii] ‘Baseball at Bexhill’, Bexhill-on-Sea Observer, 8 August 1936.

[xliv] Listing for Edward and Lucy Lynch in the passenger list for the SS Duchess of Atholl, which arrived in the UK on 2 September 1939; UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960, accessed at ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.com (Operations), on 17 December 2024.

[xlv] See Note 30 above for the story of the NBA leagues.

[xlvi] https://headstonemanor.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-April-7-14-Modern-Harrow-Room-Part-1-4.pdf and https://www.subbrit.org.uk/sites/station-z-air-ministry-citadel/, accessed 17 December 2024.

[xlvii] ‘Homer’, ‘Round the Diamond: Kodak’s Win’, West Ham and South Essex Mail, 23 July 1937.