Brittin’s genius recognised at last with first pavilion honour
Ask Charlotte Edwards to tell you her cricketing hero, and she will not hesitate: Janette Brittin. It is a fair call when you crunch the numbers: over a 19-year international career, between 1979 and 1998, Brittin amassed 1,935 Test runs – still a record today – and won a World Cup final (at Lord’s in 1993), while her average against Australia was a formidable 56.88.
The fact that Edwards is a household name, while few will have heard of Brittin, tells you all you need to know about the whitewashing of women from cricketing history.
It is an omission that Surrey, the county Brittin represented for 21 years, are hoping to correct with a radical step: a room in the members’ pavilion at the Oval has been renamed the Janette Brittin Room in recognition of her achievements. Incredibly, this is thought to be the first time that a space in a cricket pavilion in England has been named after a female player.
“Jan is a Surrey legend,” Surrey chairman Richard Thompson told The Daily Telegraph. “This is about making sure we don’t forget those legends.”
Brittin, who was awarded the MBE in 1999 for services to cricket, grew up in Chessington, Surrey, and was a naturally talented sportswoman from a young age, representing English schools at athletics; she eventually achieved the rare feat of becoming a triple international, adding indoor hockey and indoor cricket to her mantle. Across 27 Tests between 1979 and 1998 she scored five centuries and took nine wickets with her part-time off-spin.
Brittin died in September 2017 after a battle with cancer, but last night, ahead of Surrey’s Vitality Blast match against Kent, many of
her former team-mates, parents Kevin and Margaret, and partner of 25 years, Angie Bainbridge, gathered for the official opening of the new space and to remember a much-loved cricketer, daughter, partner and friend.
“She dealt hugely modestly with the adulation that we all had for her,” England team-mate Barbara Daniels said at the event. “She was hero-worshipped. She was the best player I have ever seen.”
Daniels recalled the time that Brittin, who after her retirement from cricket in 1998 served as a coach, spotted a young Sarah Taylor in the nets: Brittin turned to Daniels and said: “She’s going to be pretty good.” “As a youngster, I grew up with her as one of my idols,” Surrey director of women’s cricket Ebony Rainford-brent, who joined the club in 1995, told The
Telegraph. “I heard her name almost every single day. Every time I played a shot, my coach would say: ‘Do it like JB!’ There was no hope that I would ever be able to play like her. She was so classy.”
“In an amateur era, she was the ultimate professional,” Daniels added. At a time when there was no money in the women’s game, Brittin juggled cricket first with her studies at Chelsea PE College, and then with her work as a teacher and as a manager for British Airways. Nonetheless, she still managed to devote hours to training, and was
known for her incredible feats of athleticism in the field. “One of the reasons they changed from playing in skirts to trousers was JB’S diving stops!” another England teammate, Enid Bakewell MBE, recalled.
To commemorate the occasion Surrey have also issued a brochure entitled “Women of Surrey CCC”, which contains profiles of Brittin and other trailblazers from history including Myrtle Maclagan, Sylvia Swinburne and Molly Hide, as well as paying tribute to the modern day contribution made by the club’s female players and workforce. “We haven’t done enough for the women of Surrey,” concluded Thompson, “but it’s never too late to put things right.”