When she was a young girl, Rachael Heyhoe was playing cricket in the middle of the road, with dustbins for wickets. Suddenly, the police rolled up and everyone scattered. “They hauled my brother and all his friends out from behind various hedges and wrote down their names,” she recalled. “Then I came out and said, ‘Do you want my name, please, because I was playing cricket as well?’ And the policeman said, ‘Oh, no, girls don’t play cricket,’ so he didn’t take my name down.”
From Lord’s to the Lords, Rachael Heyhoe Flint, as she became, was a sporting pioneer, taking on the establishment and hitting it for six. She was the leading batswoman — or “woman batsman” as she was sometimes called, much to her annoyance — of her time, and did more than anyone to promote the women’s game when it was struggling for funds and recognition, although her forthright manner and apparent appetite for publicity did not endear her to those in authority.
Although denying vehemently that she was a feminist, she was instrumental in getting the MCC to admit women: it was easier to gain admittance to the House of Lords, where she was appointed a Conservative peer in 2011. She was a hockey goalkeeper good enough to play for England, and she had careers in journalism, television and public relations. She was also an accomplished after-dinner speaker. “My husband says it is like being married to a whirlwind, but I love what I do,” she said in 2004.
She was born Rachael Heyhoe in Wolverhampton in 1939. Her parents had met at a PE college in Copenhagen where her father, Geoffrey, was a lecturer, and her mother, Roma, a student. Her father became director of PE for Staffordshire county council.
“I was an awful tomboy,” she recalled. “I scored 723 not out in back-garden cricket. Four runs to the house, six for the roof, 12 over the roof and into the street. I had to wait around three years to bat, as my brother said: ‘Oh, girls aren’t allowed to bat.’ Finally, aged ten, I got a bat and they couldn’t get me out.”
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She passed the 11-plus and attended Wolverhampton Girls’ High School. In the sixth form she scored her first century and in the same match took six wickets for seven runs. She was in the Staffordshire side at 16 and also represented the county at hockey, playing in goal and later becoming an England international. She went on to Dartford College of Physical Education, then taught PE in Wolverhampton.
In 1960 she was chosen for England’s cricket tour of South Africa and, when Australia visited England in 1963, at the Oval she became the first woman to hit a Test six. In 1966, despite having already got up some official noses, she was appointed captain.
She had swapped PE for journalism, getting a part-time job on the sports desk of the Wolverhampton Express and Star and becoming sports editor of the Wolverhampton Chronicle. She covered Wolverhampton Wanderers’ matches, despite women not being allowed in the press box. In 1967 she began a long stint with The Daily Telegraph, sometimes covering her own matches under a pseudonym. Without sponsorship the players had to pay their own way: “We were incredibly amateur amateurs. After the match we’d pack our stuff in the car and drive off back to the homestead, and then go back to work the next day.”
A tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1968-69 was announced 18 months earlier so that players could raise funds. On her return she became something of a celebrity, appearing on Desert Island Discs and panel games, and was in demand for after-dinner speaking, for which she won an award from the Guild of Professional Toastmasters. She also became ITV’s first woman sports reporter, covering hockey internationals.
“Finally, aged ten, I got a bat and they couldn’t get me out
In 1970 she received an offer to take an English team to Jamaica. The Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) vetoed the idea because of the cost, so she wrote a letter to Charles Hayward, the millionaire industrialist and fellow Wulfrunian. “By all accounts it was screwed up and thrown in the bin, because he wasn’t interested in sport,” she said. “Luckily, his secretary fished it out and gave it to [his son] Jack, because she knew he likes both women and cricket.” Jack, based in the Bahamas, agreed to fund the trip.
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In 1971 she married Derrick Flint, a former Warwickshire cricketer who ran an engineering and construction business, and added his name to hers. She had a son, Benjamin, who works in marketing and sponsorship, and three stepchildren.
Hayward sponsored a second tour of the Caribbean, and then came up with the idea of a women’s world cup: “In 1971, I was staying in Sussex with Jack and his wife,” she recalled. “After supper we started having a little slurp of brandy, and as the level went down the bottle, Jack suddenly said, ‘Why don’t we have a world cup of women’s cricket?’ — and he said he would pay for it.”
The inaugural tournament took place in England in 1973, two years before the men’s version, and Heyhoe Flint led her side to victory, scoring 64 runs in England’s 279 for 3 in the final at Edgbaston, where they beat Australia by 92 runs. In 1976 she made 179 at the Oval against Australia, batting for eight and a half hours over two days and saving her side from almost certain defeat. In the same year England women played their first game at Lord’s, also against Australia. Heyhoe Flint had long been campaigning for the chance to appear at “HQ” and some months earlier had told a newspaper, not entirely in jest, that she would take the MCC to the Equal Opportunities Commission if it did not relent. This did not go down well with the WCA which, unknown to Flint, had been negotiating with the MCC. In 1977 she was shocked to be stripped of the captaincy and then left out of the tour to India.
“I think one or two officials became a little disenchanted with the attention I was getting,” she said. The episode raised a storm, not helped by the WCA’s refusal to justify its decision. Heyhoe Flint had become almost synonymous with women’s cricket, and Jack Hayward resigned his patronage of the WCA in protest.
She was recalled in 1979 for the series against the West Indies, and at 43 took part in the 1982 World Cup. In 22 Tests she scored 1,594 runs at an average of 45.54, and in 23 one-day internationals she made 643 runs at 58.45. She later served briefly as England manager, but again fell foul of the authorities.
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Having won the battle to play at Lord’s, Heyhoe Flint was determined to get women accepted as members of the MCC. She first applied in 1990, under the name “R Flint” so that it would be looked at. When her true identity emerged the MCC was baffled — because no woman had previously applied.
A vote was lost, but Heyhoe Flint kept up the pressure, helped by the decision not to grant National Lottery money for the development of Lord’s, partly because the MCC was an all-male club. In 1998 there was a fresh vote, narrowly lost, but eight months later nearly 70 per cent of members came out in favour.
Heyhoe Flint became one of the first ten women admitted to the MCC, as an honorary life member, and she was the first woman to serve on the MCC committee: “Within a year £8.2 million was spent on refurbishing the wonderful old pavilion,” she remarked. “Typical. Get a woman involved and they want to change the curtains and the carpet.”
It was a characteristically dry observation. When she was asked if batswomen wear the equivalent of men’s “boxes”, she replied, “Oh yes, we call them ‘manhole covers’.”
She was a board member of the England and Wales Cricket Board and in 2010 was the first woman to be inducted into the Cricket Hall of Fame. When she was asked if she preferred to watch men or women playing, she was unequivocal: “The man any time — even when I was playing. There is no comparison.”
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She had supported Wolverhampton Wanderers as a schoolgirl, and when Jack Hayward became the owner of the club in 1990 she joined him as public relations executive. Typically tireless in promoting Wolves, she would take to the streets to sell the club to passers-by. She was made a director in 1997.
“I’m not a feminist,” she once said. “I hate feminists. I just wanted people to accept the sport for its qualities — not like monkeys learning to dance. If people didn’t want to watch or play against us, they didn’t need to. I wasn’t going to chain myself to the Grace Gates and go on a hunger strike to get recognition.”
Baroness Heyhoe Flint, OBE, cricketer and broadcaster, was born on June 11, 1939. She died after a short illness on January 18, 2017, aged 77