Australia has a proud lineage of leg spin. You can start in recent times with Shane Warne and Stuart MacGill, back through the 1970s with Terry Jenner and Kerry O’Keeffe, the 1950s with Richie Benaud and Doug Ring, the 1930s with Bill O’Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett, and the start of the 1920s with Arthur Mailey and Warwick Armstrong. A name that is part of that lineage, but one that too many cricket lovers don’t yet know, is Peggy Antonio.
Peggy was an unlikely Australian cricketer in several ways, like being tiny of stature and Chilean by ancestry. But succeeding as a woman in the 1930s was perhaps the most unlikely of all. For the most part, women’s cricket was regarded with derision at the time by the men who ran the game. But some did see the light, and contrary to what you might think, there was plenty of it being played. A number of workplaces and social clubs had women’s teams, which is how Peggy was recruited while working at a Collingwood shoe factory at 13 years old. Yeah, it was a tough era.
Peggy’s dad was a Chilean dock worker named Francis Antonio, who had come to Melbourne and married Bell Myra Lubke. He died when Peggy was one. This calls to mind a young father, but Francis was 55 when he died, which raises some interesting questions that we absolutely can’t substantiate. We can’t find a birth certificate for Bell, but they married in 1892 and had Peggy in 1917. So, Bell must have been in her 40s, possibly 50s, when Peggy was born. Peggy’s four brothers and sisters were between 24 and 15 years older. A surprise late conception is entirely possible, but it was also common at the time for teenage pregnancies to be kept under wraps and the resulting babies to be passed off as belonging to the grandparents.
Growing up without siblings near her age, Peggy got into street cricket with the local boys, and by the time she hit the Raymond factory team, she was a quick study. A club cricketer named Eddie Conlon spotted her potential and offered to coach her. She started as a natural off-break bowler, but he decided to move her on to learning leggies.
By the time Peggy was 15, Collingwood councillor Laurie Marshall came out denouncing women’s cricket as a ‘burlesque and leg show’, so the Collingwood Ladies Cricket Club challenged councillors to a match. Peggy knocked over Marshall on her way to 6 for 33. The band at the ground played him to the middle with ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’ and accompanied him back after scoring five runs with ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. The councillors lost.
For Peggy, 1934 would be a watershed year. In February, she made her Victorian state debut against the big names of New South Wales – Mollie Dive, Margaret Peden, the Shevill sisters – and cleaned them up with 3 for 25 followed by 5 for 16. In December, history was made. For the first time, an England women’s national team would play Australia in a Test series. Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne would host at the main venues of the day: the Exhibition Ground, the SCG, and the MCG.
First, Peggy took on the tourists for Victoria in front of 5,000 people and lived up to her billing as ‘the outstanding googly bowler in the Victorian association’. Having tuned up with 6 for 5 in club cricket, she top-scored against England with 43, in between taking matching bags of 5 for 24. England had to cling on for a draw.
“A tiny slip of a Victorian girl was chiefly responsible for an early fall of wickets and when the English women began a stand the crowd wanted the tiny slip of a girl to take charge”, wrote The Sun. “Then there was a shout, ‘Bring Grimmett back’, and everybody understood. Peggy Antonio, a spin bowler, is making a name for herself as ‘Grimmett of the Girls’. Soon she was just ‘Peggy’ to the crowd.”
Grimmett was the foremost leggie of the day, hence the tiresome ‘Girl Grimmett’ stuff catching on in the papers. It was still better than being described as ‘a short, sturdy Italian girl’. But however shallow the coverage, Peggy was drawing attention. Of course she was picked for Australia in Brisbane.
England at that stage were a far stronger side, with more experienced players. But while they knocked over Australia for 47 to all but decide the match before it began, and while Peggy was the fourth player to be given the ball, she soon had England’s star opener Betty Snowball caught by one of the many Shevills. Peggy was the first Australian woman to take a Test wicket, and that at the age of 17.
She nabbed another in the brief second innings, and two more in the second Test, as England once more dominated. But after a round of state games that she bossed for three Victorian wins, the third Test was on home soil at the MCG. Right where she had dominated England for Victoria, she started the match with 6 for 49. The home team’s batting still faltered, and they ended up having to hang on for a draw, but Peggy had followed up Australia’s first ever wicket with Australia’s first five-wicket haul.
Going back to state and local cricket, Peggy’s dominance grew. Eddie kept coaching, adding the wrong ’un and putting equal faith in her batting. She had the dedication, training two nights a week plus five hours on weekends, 90 minutes batting for each 30 bowling, out in the heat no matter how harsh the summer. In December 1935, she set a new high score in Victorian club cricket with 134, then beat it in January with 142, both not out. In that club season alone she made 638 runs in 10 hits and took 60 wickets at an average of 6.1.
The press got more and more effusive. Eddie would have been chuffed by a Daily Express writer: “Whoever taught her to bat knows something. The way she used her feet and cracked the ball to the off nearly took my breath. She would make plenty of runs in English county cricket.” The Sporting Globe newspaper put down some very ordinary verse:
Peggy did glances and Peggy made drives,
Peggy hit boundaries, Peggy ran fives
They bowled fast and slow,
But get her out? No!
Peggy Antoni-oh,
Oh, oh;
Peggy Antonio.
They were even talking about her in Broken Hill. “She has captured the popular imagination – Peggy Antonio, who at the youthful age of 18 ranks as the foremost all-round woman cricketer in Australia has won this place by courage, patience and confidence in learning to execute every phase of batting, and bowling,” ran the piece in the Barrier Miner. “A remarkable feature of her bowling is the amount of spin she gets on the ball, considering her small hands, and short fingers, and also the fact that she is a woman.”
Classic 1930s backhander to end with, but let’s imagine they were shooting for generosity. Soon enough, with England having toured Australia, the next order of events was a reciprocal trip planned for 1937. Peggy was a certainty for selection, but for a long while it seemed that she wouldn’t be able to go. Players had to pay their own way, it required a long sea voyage, and she was no chance of producing what was then a sizeable sum of £75.
Her community in the tough working-class suburb of Port Melbourne rallied, holding fundraisers by way of dances and raffles, and the effort came to the attention of a benefactor. A director of the Victorian Stevedoring Company, James McLeod, had employed her father, and so had been interested to follow Peggy’s career via the press. In memory of Francis, he offered to pay her costs. The team set sail in late March, led by Margaret Peden. They were state rivals, but Peggy adored her captain, describing her as like a psychologist on the cricket field.
England’s captain, meanwhile, waited with consternation. If the ‘Girl Grimmett’ nickname was dull, ‘The Smiling Assassin’ had more zip, and Betty Archdale’s description underlined where it had sprung from. “It will be grand to meet Peggy again off the field, but I am not so anxious to meet her on. Small, dark, bright-eyed, red-cheeked and with a large grin, Peggy is an excellent all-round cricketer. Her bowling causes the most trouble to opponents, and I do not think we have any bowler as good in England.”
It was Peggy’s 20th birthday when Australia played their first tour game, and she made 53 against Kent. Having first played for Australia batting at 10, she was now opening or coming in at first drop. By this point she was now recognised as the side’s best batter as well as best bowler. Against Yorkshire she reached 98 while nine wickets down, and her batting partner got run out coming back for a second, so Peggy was stranded on 99. She erased that disappointment in the next game, with 103 against Lancashire.
The first Test was at Wantage Road in Northampton, and while she first failed with the bat, Peggy got Australia a solid lead with 6 for 51, almost the same figures as her previous Test at the ’G. With only 199 to defend in the fourth innings, Peggy took 3 for 40, including the final wicket. In their first outing in England, Australia had a first Test win. They held the series 1–1, Peggy topping the bowling with 19 wickets at an absurd average of 11.15. When she got home, Port Melbourne hosted a welcome ball in her honour.
That home summer she captained her club, then her state. But by December 1939, as a new season was getting going, she suddenly pulled the pin. Her explanation was blunt: “I took my equipment to the match on Saturday, but somehow I felt more fed up than usual and decided to call it a day there and then. I have had too much cricket and will be better away from it for a while.” She never came back, done with the game by the age of 22.
To be fair, that still meant she had been playing club cricket for nine years. And the decision would soon have been out of her hands, as cricket stopped for World War II, with players joining up and grounds around the country used for military camps. Peggy married in 1943 and had four kids, who by the end of her life had added 12 grandkids and four great-grandkids. She lived a long and quiet 84 years, rarely letting on that she had been a star in her day. In line with that modesty, she asked not to have a funeral.
Two more things. We said she never came back, but that’s not entirely true. She played one more time, in 1949. Her beloved former national captain put together a testimonial match, and Peggy couldn’t refuse Margaret. In her early 30s, after a couple of those kids and a decade out of the game, she suited up in South Melbourne, top-scored with 47, then took 2 for 52. The headline, all those years later, remained true: “Peggy Antonio plays good cricket.”
In 2025, when Alana King took five-for in that year’s solitary Ashes Test, a 91-year wait came to an end. Finally, Peggy had another woman for company on the honours board at the MCG.
