Joy Liebert

  General Notes:

Obiturary Joy Lawrence

Cricketer who toured Australia with success in 1934 as part of the first Women's Association Test Team.

Joy Lawrence, who has died aged 85, was the youngest member of the first international Women's Cricket Association Test tour Team, which went to Australia and New Zealand in 1934-35.

The team paid their own passage to Australia, sailing out on the S.S.Cathy, via Ceylon to Perth. "We travelled by sea, train and charabanc," Joy Lawrence later remembered. "Our fares round the world amounted to L94 10s each, but we were given hospitality in Australia and New Zealand."

To start the tour they played local and State teams, winning most matches with ease. Then in December 1934 they played their first test match against Australia at Brisbane, winning by a resounding nine wickets. The Second Test in Sydney was won by eight wickets. The third and final test match in Melbourne ended in a draw.

In New Zealand, the English team romped through to handsome wins in both preliminary matches, and the Test match held in Christchurch, where they made 503 for 5 declared, a performance unsurpassed byany women's Test team since. The New Zealanders were all out for 70.

Although not one of the star performers, the 20-year old Joy Liebert, as she then was, proved a good all-rounder and played in all four tests. During the Second Test in Sydney, her keen fielding resulted in the run out of the Australian captain, Margaret Peden.

Joy Liebert kept a diary of the tour. In Woollongong, she noted:"Priceless ground, all whiskery in the outfield, with a concrete pitch and matting down on it, quite good fun. We made 111 declared by tea-time - they made 44 for 7. It's difficult to score on that ground. I made 15 not out. Enjoyed it quite. The fielding was heartbreaking."

In Brisbane, before the first Test, she enjoyed a swim in "clear warm, gently breaking sea - heavenly after a hectic night on the train."

Her one regret was not being able to meet any of the big names of Australian men's cricket of the time, such as Don Bradman. Nevertheless, she remembered having great fun: "Our tour was the highlightin our lives - far more fun than the modern game. All games have been ruined by the high salaries involved. They used to be a relaxation and a way of enjoying the fresh air and companionship - not any more I'm afraid."

Joy Liebert was born on May 16 1914 in Lytham St Anne's, one of four daughters of the owner of a Lancashire cotton mill. Joy and her sisters had an unconventional childhood for the time. They wore trousers and were encouraged to participate in mountain walking and other energetic pursuits.

She was sent to St Leonard's School in St Andrews, where she showed talent at cricket. Later, she played for Lancashire and the North of England.

Back in England after the Australian tour, she studed at the Chelsea College of Art and in 1940 married Ivor Lawrence, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and a widower, whom she first met on the return voyage from Australia. Of their four children, the first two were born under anaesthsia and the third died, after she contracted eclampsia, a few hours after its birth. As a result, Joy Lawrence becamean early supporter of the natural childbirth movement.

After her marriage, Joy took up painting and for many years produced illustrations for the magazine of the English Women's Hockey Club. She became a member of the Purbeck group of artists in 1960.

A lifelong naturalist, in her later years she worked to protect wildlife and the countryside around her home at Swanage, Dorset. She campaigned successfully to secure a preservation order on a holm oak in her road, and later accosted builders whom she suspected of tampering with its roots.

Her husband died in 1990; she is survived by a son and two daughters.

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Read by Peter Lawrence at Joy's Funeral.

Joy was trained as a painter, and this interest remained with her for all her life. She was very accomplished, she made perfect character portraits of animals articularly dogs that are every bit asindividual is the finest human portrait. Later she became as much interested in landscapes and still life, particularly with watercolours, and there are many fine examples of her work. Our plan is to haveet , later on, a party to celebrate her life and we will be showing many of the paintings at this party and giving a lot of them away.

Joy is best known to part in the first-ever English women's cricket team to visit Australia in 1934. In 1984 the Australian team came here and made history by being the first women to be admitted to Long Room at Lords. I accompanied Joy on this trip and as usual had no tie ( also de rigueur in the Long Room). After some argument the doorman admitted both of us; he felt that when tradition had been so disastrously abandoned that even women could enter the Long Room, nothing else mattered.

This funeral is somewhat unconventional and perhaps I can say something about that. Joy became very concerned about her funeral during one of her bouts of serious illness, about a year ago. She did not want to be cremated because she had read about pollution of the atmosphere, and as she had fought so hard to protect trees she did not one part of any tree to be buried with her. She and Anthea found a way to avoid both and to place her in nature, where she knows we all belong.

Indeed, both are parents were a bit unconventional, for example they sent their three children to an experimental coeducational boarding school at a time when the education of boys and girls together was considered a suspect practice.

I think they were unconventional for different reasons. My father's freethinking came from the diversity of his travels around the world and from his varied and sometimes horrible experiences in the war. He developed a deep and charitable tolerance of people are different type, of different ideas. Joy did not have
these experiences, and I think it was more her strong intelligence that sourced her individuality and made sure that both the irrational and the rational her home in her. I even think at heart, she was more unconventional than my father that it was not so conspicuous -- for he made the decisions. Whatever the causes they made a strong team, battling for first principles in the world always in thrall to fashion.

I'm proud to have inherited some of their lack of convention. Anthea has asked me to read something, and have chosen a passage from Jane Austen that explains in part what I have against convention:it is from Persuasion and describes why Anne Elliott decided against accepting the hand of Mr Elliott, who most sought to be perfect man for her:

"Mr Elliott was rational, discreet, polished but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. She prized the frank, the open hearted, the character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more dependent on the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than those whose presence in mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped."
BIRT: RIN MH:IF280
DEAT: RIN MH:IF281

Joy married Ivor Lawrence in 1940. (Ivor Lawrence was born in 1901 and died in Jun 1990 in Swanage.)

  Marriage Notes:

MARR: RIN MH:FF7