Pioneer deserves place alongside Lord’s greats
There was a time when Rachael Heyhoe – or Rachael Heyhoe Flint as she became – was women’s cricket, and women’s cricket was Rachael Heyhoe Flint.
Some people (almost all of them men) mocked and snorted. The very idea of a female playing cricket, let alone playing it at an international level, evoked memories of the bigotry of Dr Johnson about women priests: like a dog walking on its hind legs, it wasn’t remarkable that it did it well, it was remarkable that they did it at all.
Yet Heyhoe Flint, who died four years ago having collected, among many honours, a peerage for her services to sport, philanthropy and business, saw off prejudice and an often crusty and uncomprehending establishment not just to triumph by her own efforts, but to make women’s cricket a sport that had to be taken seriously.
One of Heyhoe Flint’s successors as leader of the women’s game, Clare Connor, the next president of MCC, has suggested that this great pioneer be commemorated at Lord’s. I could not agree more. One does not have to be rampantly woke or a crusading feminist to appreciate that Heyhoe Flint was a true force for good, not just in cricket, but in society. It does men no harm that women play cricket, and, indeed, cricket lovers should rejoice that women, long before the era of Heyhoe Flint, were doing so much to support and spread love of the game.
It is a tribute to the strength of male bigotry that it took so long to register serious women’s cricket in the public consciousness (which was not the least of Heyhoe Flint’s great achievements). Cricket was routinely played in the great girls’ day and public schools founded in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It was not merely the preserve of a few rosy-cheeked tomboys in the pages of Angela Brazil. Heyhoe Flint was instrumental in helping women see that they had a place in cricket far beyond preparing teas and washing grass stains off the whites of their menfolk.
This has to be good for the game and for society, just as was the decision over 20 years ago that the game’s supposedly most exclusive club, MCC, should admit women members and start to field competitive women’s teams. MCC risked making a fool of itself by resisting that tide. Women had been able to become members of county clubs more or less forever, and there is scant evidence of men being harmed as a result.
However, I was sorry to see that a minority of my fellow MCC members are said to be planning a “revolt” if Connor is taken at her word, and an attempt is made to commemorate Heyhoe Flint at Lord’s. She was unquestionably a cricketer of distinction and a woman of huge distinction. She was without doubt a hugely inspiring figure and, unlike some of the game’s great figures before and since, seemed to spend much of life asking what she could do for cricket rather than what cricket could do for her.
She should without doubt be commemorated at what calls itself the home of cricket, beyond the painting of her that hangs in the pavilion. Whether a statue or gates or a building can be discussed. But she deserves it. After all, there are plenty of other things we MCC members – men and women – should be revolting about and which would bring infinitely more credit on our great club, such as the committee’s apparent determination to act as a cashcrazed despotism, which requires a serious and urgent uprising.
One does not have to be woke or feminist to see that Heyhoe Flint was a true force for good in cricket and society