Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

48 Chapter Seven Enid from 1969 Enid returned from the tour of Australia and New Zealand a star in the small world of women’s cricket and was feted locally for a while. She was given a civic reception by the Nottingham City Council, and at this she was received by the Lord Mayor of Nottingham and the president of the men’s county cricket club. Locally she was given an engraved silver salver, and also the ball used in the Second Test against New Zealand, mounted and inscribed. Kirkby Council gave her a dressing-table set. It’s a fair bet that no male cricketer was ever given such a thing! Perhaps more usefully the Nottinghamshire and England batsman, Reg Simpson, then representing Gunn and Moore, allowed her to choose a new bat. Netta Rheinberg remarked in her Wisden piece that the achievement of the double on tour might have been managed before, as the figures from earlier tours were simply not there, but it seemed unlikely. Certainly no male cricketer had managed the feat in a major tour (though Maurice Tate had done it on an MCC tour of India and Ceylon in 1926-27). The Wisden piece is not very reliable on her early life, referring to the ‘boys’ at Brincliffe borrowing her kit, and referring to her club side as Notts Casuals rather than Nottingham (a bit like mixing up Forest and County). There was a tour report in the 1970 WCA Year Book as well, written by Val Hesmondhalgh, the tour manager, who had played in a couple of matches on tour. Her report said: It was disappointing to have drawn all three Test matches [in Australia] but these results made the team realise that half chances had to be taken if victory was to be achieved. She went on to say: The bowlers had a more difficult task on pitches which offered little assistance. They were accurate, but tended to rely on the batsmen to make mistakes. The exception to this was Enid Bakewell, whose intelligent left-arm spin bowling forced batsmen into errors and gained her a reputation so that on numerous occasions the batsmen were playing the bowler not the bowling! Her analysis of 53 wickets at an average of 11.8 [on the Australian leg] speaks for itself. Enid looked like the first name on the selectors’ list now, but life was more complicated than that, and for various reasons she would not play for England again until the 1973 World Cup. This was in part because there was not much international cricket played then. Rachael Heyhoe led a team to Jamaica in January 1970, and a rather more substantial tour, again captained by Rachael Heyhoe, went to Jamaica, Trinidad and Bermuda a