Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

67 1973 to 1976 ‘A Day out for Uncle’s Favourite Girls’, which rather gives you the tone of the piece, suggesting an amusing novelty rather than a serious sport. Alan Gibson wrote about it for the Times. Gibson rather played the old buffer in this piece, huffing ‘I have never thought cricket a particularly suitable game for girls to play’ , though he does concede that they should not be stopped if they wish to play. He did not like some of the WCA’s publicity ‘about leg glances etc’ and was upset by ‘some of the antics at the fall of a wicket … like so many huge hairy footballers’ . He does make an important point about the underlying structure; in 1970 Rowland Bowen had estimated that one in a hundred women cricketers might play for England, while for the men’s game it was more like one in 100,000. The Lord’s pavilion, and especially the Long Room, was for men only. That created a near-farcical situation as England and Australia prepared for a Test at Lord’s in the 1970s. The players wondered how they would actually walk onto the field. It wasn’t until 1976 that Lord’s let us have a televised match there, and when we first went there I don’t think they were going to allow a woman in the scorebox Enid told the BBC in 2014: We didn’t know if we could use the changing rooms, and we certainly didn’t know if we could go through the Long Room. The Aussies didn’t know about the tradition of the Long Room, so they walked through - and we followed them. For the third one day match Enid came ‘home’ to Trent Bridge and in 40 overs Australia scored 119 for nine. Enid bowled three overs and took one for 14. England knocked the runs off for the loss of one wicket – Enid, out for 32. Then, late in 1976, a team was going to India for the World Cup, and a sensation was caused by the dropping of Rachael Heyhoe Flint as captain, and then her non-selection for the tour. Enid had declared herself unavailable, not much relishing the idea of India and still looking after young children.