Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

84 Enid in South Africa But she still seems to have raised enough money for the trip. In 1983 Enid was already sure she had played for England for the last time. She does not remember talking about South Africa with her dad; he was 85 by then and dependent on her, though he drove (not always well) until he was 90. She was close to her dad in some ways, not in others (he was 42 when she was born, so there was a gap). He still did all the cleaning and cooking after mum died. Mum and dad had lived separate lives in some ways: he was always out at meetings of one sort and another At one time both of them were governors at Newstead school but that was complicated when Enid worked there and her mother left then though the school decided they couldn’t do without her father. Neither here nor anywhere else does anyone officially name any of the players involved! Indeed in February the Cricketer said: A team of unknown British women calling themselves the Unicorns and managed by Pam Groves set off from London just before Christmas to tour South Africa. The names of the tour party and their fixtures were kept secret. As by the time this was published the tour was over it was a rather delayed news item. There was a history to this. There had been earlier Unicorns tours, though there are no available scorecards and so apparently no names. But they had toured in 1974-75, 1975-76, and 1978-79. In the first two they played in the Simon Cup and in the others in the South Africa and Rhodesia WCA week. The 1979 Protea Annual contains summarised scores of the 1978-79 tour, including games which it describes as ‘Test matches’. Later Protea annuals took no notice at all of women’s cricket, Unicorns’ tours or anything else, and any account of the women’s game in South Africa will have to wait for the publication of a later volume of Cricket and Conquest (by Andre Odendaal et al ) with volume one published in 2016. The only official tour of South Africa had been in 1960-61 (just before Enid’s time, though a young Rachael Heyhoe was on the tour), with the South African and Rhodesian Women’s Cricket Association having only been formed in 1952. The tour had been agreed at the first meeting of the International Women’s Cricket Council in 1958. There had been no official matches since then, and to this day the Test matches on this tour are the only ones South Africa have ever played. Enid says ‘ in my opinion Rachael had started to raise money for women’s cricket (despite official disapproval) because she realised that only those who could afford it could play.’ But then women’s cricket everywhere passed completely under the radar at this time. Graham Gooch’s ‘rebel’ team in 1981-82 had produced outrage, but nobody noticed the women. There was the difference that they were not having their mouths stuffed with Krugerrands, but like the men, they played only against all-white teams. They played Western Province in Cape Town. Western Province scored 175 for five declared, with Enid bowling 12 overs and taking no wicket for 38. The Unicorns scored 124 for six of which Enid made one.