Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

20 Grammar school University there. So at 12 or so, Enid joined the Nottingham Women’s CC. Enid’s route into cricket was unusual. Raf Nicholson points out (Nicholson, 2016) that Enid and Margaret Rutherford are the only two England cricketers of the period who came from working-class backgrounds. She adds: “Women’s cricket remained overwhelmingly middle class at the top levels until at least 1970.” The pitch, on Jesse Boot’s land, was shared week by week with Nottingham Casuals, the city’s other women’s club, and Nottingham would play there for 40 years or so. Enid would go for nets every Thursday night, paying something for the nets and something to help pay for the next international team coming over. Women’s cricket had to scrape and save for finance, so everyone was asked to chip in. She was playing for the club by 1956 and progress was rapid. She was playing for the Nottinghamshire county side by 1957 (perhaps earlier, as Rachael Heyhoe Flint suggests she was playing for them at 14, which would have been 1955, and Rachael might have played against her for Staffordshire) and for the Midlands in 1958; there were clubs, there were county sides, and there were ‘territorial’ sides, so this was the progression. A write up in Women’s Cricket says she took four for 24 against Grantham in her first match for the club (but that score doesn’t appear in the magazine so we don’t know whether it was 1956 or 1957 or even earlier). So far no 1956 scores have been discovered. There are only scraps of information from the early years. There is only one Nottingham club score in Women’s Cricket for 1956 – a defeat by Edgbaston on June 10. Neither the county nor the club put their averages into the autumn annual. Nottingham had historically been strong for women’s cricket, largely because of the works teams – Boots, Raleigh, the Mansfield Shoe Company, Bairnswear, and Players had at one time all put out teams, though the works teams were dying out by the 1950s. Enid says: For 40 years or so we played on part of the Jesse Boot land. Every week at nets we made a contribution to the hire of the net and a donation to pay for future international touring teams’ hospitality. Now it is all funded by the ICC. Enid also played hockey for the school as a forward but she admits that, fitter and stronger than the rest, she tended to roam all over the pitch so at some time was put at left back. She was house captain too, the school having a house system despite its small size. In 1957, too, she sat her O levels and stayed on at Brincliffe into the small sixth form. Brincliffe went comprehensive much later and then was merged into Manning School on Gregory Boulevard; Brincliffe ‘closed down by Maggie Thatcher’, says Enid, despite a local campaign to save it. Janice Layton remembers that after the school closed they went on attending Old Girls’ reunions, though Enid was sometimes away playing cricket, with the last one taking place in Mapperley about ten years ago. Enid was now playing plenty of cricket, fitting it in this year around her O levels, though many scores are now lost in the past. There are some scores