Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

19 Chapter Three Grammar school In 1952 Enid passed the eleven plus (still known to most as “the scholarship”). Nottingham at this time actually had one of the lowest rates of eleven plus passes – 10.1% - because it had few grammar school places, so to pass from a small village primary was quite an achievement. Enid went to Brincliffe Grammar School, which, although in Nottingham, catered largely for girls from the country areas. This was a small single sex school of about 180 pupils (though it ran to a sixth form which in Enid’s time was only six or so in each year), ten to 12 miles away from Newstead by the number 61 bus Enid had half a mile uphill to the bus stop, and another half a mile at the other end. Most days she ran it, though she was on one occasion bitten by a dog and spent half a day in the hospital. Brincliffe was next door to the private Nottingham Boys High School. As a small school it had only one laboratory, so though they studied biology there was no chemistry or physics (but they were offered needlework and cookery), and it was too small to run a cricket team or affiliate to the Women’s Cricket Association. Enid had played hockey at junior school and carried on, though the hockey pitch was another 20 minutes’ bus ride away. Janice Layton, a friend of Enid’s ever since the start of her grammar school days, tells how Enid originally made friends with one group who then told her they didn’t want her because she was ‘too rough’, presumably a reference to her working-class background rather than her hockey style. After that she was with Janice and her friends. Janice remembers Enid as being very good academically, particularly at maths. There was a time, though, when Miss Carter, the formidable headmistress, stormed into the sixth form room because they were making too much noise and found Enid knitting a jumper as a birthday present for her father. It was confiscated, leaving Enid in tears, and the next day she had to go and grovel to the head to get it back. Asked if anyone coached her, Enid says: Oh no, at senior school we weren’t allowed to play cricket - too ‘unladylike’. In fact, whistling was too ‘unladylike’ then . What they could do was cross the road to play rounders. Enid played back stop as she was not worried by catching a hard ball and also ‘ran round all over to back up the whole team’. She also played badminton to junior county standard. The PE teacher at Brincliffe, Valerie Oakes, knewAnneWoods at Nottingham Women’s Cricket Club, which had been playing since at least the 1930s; the club was already there when the women’s county club was formed in 1933. They played on a pitch originally donated by Boots and opposite the