From Carson to cricket: How Jim Carter became a pioneer for women’s sport

Downton Abbey’s Mr Carson belongs to a world of rigid hierarchies and fixed gender expectations, but while portraying the stoic butler over a dozen years, Jim Carter OBE has been helping loosen inherited assumptions around women and girls in sport.

What began as a drive to get women’s cricket going at his local sports club is now a broader role as vice-president of Women in Sport, and Carter is glad to offer a voice.

“My job; standing up, remembering lines, not bumping into the furniture, has given me a profile… and I think it’d be mad not to use that voice for things I believe in,” Carter said.

His own sporting background began with rugby at school before acting at university, which was all-consuming. Working patterns stopped team sport, but he likens the rugby values that he experienced to the sense of belonging he found in acting. 

“You join the acting tribe, with its own customs and habits and shorthand,” he said.

“And if you’re a member of that tribe, it doesn’t matter what age you are. And I think team sports are very valuable for giving people a tribe. I see it here at Hampstead Cricket Club, that people join and they find their gang.

“And it seems to be particularly strong with the women. A lot come to London having been at university, looking for where they can find a social life in this big city, and they find their tribe here in the cricket club. And I think that’s fantastic value. They also bring so much to the club in energy and joie de vivre and a willingness to commit.”

Carter remembers a “light-bulb moment” in 2004 that led to the formation of the women’s section.

“It was a conversation in the club bar with a couple of the female hockey players saying: ‘We’re looking for a summer sport, could we play cricket?’ And I thought: ‘Of course you can. Why not? Why has nobody ever thought about it? It’s the most obvious thing’.” 

He approached the club’s Australian male coach, who didn’t hesitate. 

“We hoovered up some kit and just started. And then nobody could say no, because initially, most of our women players were from the hockey club. It caught fire very quickly. I just couldn’t think of any reason at all, and I still can’t, why anybody wouldn’t encourage anybody to play sport.”

Starting the women’s team was vindicated when his daughter Bessie joined them aged 12.

“She’d done Sunday mornings with a mixed group and was often the only girl there, but because she was tall and confident and could bowl straight, she became part of the women’s team,” he said.

“And I saw the way they looked after and welcomed her into the group and it made her feel grown-up and made her feel great.”

A decade passed and Carter was chairman. The women’s section had become well established, but he still felt that more could be done. It was also 2015 – the club’s sesquicentenary. 

“I knew Clare Connor, the head of women’s cricket at the ECB at the time, and I asked her, ‘How can I do more?’ and she said, ‘Well, I can bring the England Women’s team down here and play a game against a mixed Hampstead side’.” 

So on Sunday 7 June 2015, the England Women’s team came to play a “Carson’s XI” – players from the men’s U21s and the women’s team.

“They brought the full team down, all in their kit, and the PR team, and they gave us a masterclass before the game. There was Sarah Taylor, Charlotte Edwards and a lot of the people who are still playing today, giving it their full attention,” he said.  

“They won the game off the last ball, and Nat Sciver as she was, Nat Sciver-Brunt hit a six onto the pavilion roof. And from that one event we recruited 35 girl cricketers. It was massive. Parents were coming up to me and saying, ‘My daughter was just interested in Barbie before now. Now, all she can talk about is cricket’ – it was inspirational. And that opened up girls’ cricket here.”

On top of raffles, fundraiser dinners, quizzes and celebrity charity matches across the years, Carter has also brought in professional female athletes from football, netball, hockey and cricket to form panels to speak to mostly women and girls at the club.

“One girl was shaking because she idolised Ann-Katrin Berger, the German goalkeeper, and she was meeting her hero. And you can’t underestimate the effect of that.”

Inspiration aside, in a recent report, Women in Sport highlighted the “opportunity gap” in England, noting that 58% of team-sport opportunities are mixed, while just 20% are girls-only. The research showed that this is not simply about a lack of sessions, but the quality of girls’ sporting experiences, as many find themselves in environments where they feel sidelined, intimidated by boys’ aggression or forced into sessions designed around male interests – factors that the charity says are directly contributing to the 1.3 million teenage girls dropping out of sport each year.

Grassroots clubs can create girls-only sessions or mixed sessions designed to counter gender stereotypes and challenge attitudes. If he could change one thing overnight, Carter would develop more female coaches.

“I see it down at the amateur level here, female coaches – we just don’t have enough of them. And I’ve noticed because our women cricketers used to coach our girls, but then they got so successful and were traveling so far, they didn’t have time.

“I would like to see a massive boost in female coaching, and that takes in female managers of football teams in the WSL too. I think that would have a huge effect, to come from above, to go to the clubs to say: ‘Here is this money to help your players to become coaches.’ We’ll encourage them. Then I could reach out to the Colts parents, to the mums, and say: Here’s your opportunity’.”

Even at Downton, the Crawley sisters challenged gender expectations, while the Tom Branson character helped shift an entrenched social order. But Carter questions how much has really changed.

“You see people watching the kids’ games and it’s mainly dads. And you think: ‘Well maybe Dad, if you said to your partner: I’ll stay at home and cook the lunch and put a wash in. You go and support’.”

But he is proud to see, for example, a very quiet and shy girl join the club years ago as a nine-year-old, discover cricket, rise through the teams, become first XI captain, and now, as an adult, a club coach.

Photograph by Jason Alden for The Observer