“Women’s Right to Cues” – apart from anything, I just love the pun. That’s worth a statue on its own.
One day in 1978, Sheila Capstick arrived at the Wakefield City Working Men’s Club in West Yorkshire for her regular game of snooker – only to find that the committee had voted to ban women from the tables.
Unwilling to tamely give up her sport, Capstick wrote letters to the national press, lobbied the committee, and gathered two thousand signatures on a petition. None of this had any effect (other then the committee calling the police to disperse the petitioners), so she and her supporters began picketing the club.
The Women’s Right to Cues campaign quickly grew from its original demand that women should be able to play snooker at Wakefield into a campaign for general sexual equality for club members. Most of the thousands of working men’s clubs which then existed were affiliated to a national body called the Club & Institute Union, and Sheila’s organisation insisted that every CIU club should offer full membership to women, with the same rights and access as male members. Women, like men, should be able to vote and stand for election, use their CIU cards to visit affiliated clubs other than their own, as men could, and there should be no more “men only” bars in any club.
ERICCA – Equal Rights in Clubs Campaign for Action – spent a generation campaigning, supported by feminist and left-wing groups and trades unions. Year after fruitless year they protested at the CIU’s annual conference. It wasn’t until 2007 that the all-male delegates finally voted to give women full membership – 145 years after the CIU’s foundation, and more than 50 years after its conference had first debated sexual equality. By then, Wakefield’s own snooker ban had long been lifted.
Sheila’s husband, Ken, was a miner, and during the great strike of 1984-5 she set up a women’s support group and was active in Women Against Pit Closures. After her death on 11th March 2018, aged 75, Ken described his wife as a “reluctant superstar” whose long struggle made her one of the unsung pioneers of women’s sport, and had changed attitudes about women’s “right to a social life, to partake in sports and their right to enjoy time outside their home as much as men did.”
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Sources:
www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/obituaries/sheila-capstick-equal-rights-campaigner-1-9071133
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/node/48420
www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/1303217.club-women-win-equal-rights/