MARGARET HUGHES once complained: “I have been treated as a freak, rather like the fat lady at the circus.” Her crime was to invade the jealously held male preserve of cricket writing.
Her first book, All on a Summer’s Day (1953), had nonetheless, one of the best of champions, the legendary cricket correspondent of The Manchester Guardian, Neville Cardus. “This is,” he declared in his foreword, “the first book on first-class cricket not written by a man.”
All on a Summer’s Day was a partly autobiographical ramble through the cricket and cricketers she had watched since the 1930s when, as a teenager, she had seen Patsy Hendren batting at Lord’s and Harold Larwood bowling at Trent Bridge. Her writing was witty, trenchant and impatient of dull cricket. She once suggested that umpires, like boxing referees, should have the power to call players together and order them to “fight”.
Although some reviewers were mildly patronising, surprised that a woman could write so well about the game, John Arlott in Wisden called the book “the work of an enthusiast who has watched and enjoyed cricket with an eye for detail and for character, for adventure and the human reflection beyond the ropes. It will, I fancy, be read with the same pleasure as it was written.”
Hughes had met Cardus after the Second World War when she was in her twenties and already besotted with cricket, and he was approaching 60. Cardus’s marriage of 46 years did not preclude enduring friendships with other women, particularly younger ones, and Hughes remained close to him until his death, known as his “cricket wife” and helping him in myriad ways.
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When he faced the prospect, “too awful to contemplate”, of writer’s block, it was Hughes who eased him through. His “cure” was to write so many words to her each day “free of the responsibility even to write well, as long as I wrote something”. One of Cardus’s favourite snacks while watching cricket at Lord’s was sausages, but they had to be perfectly browned. Hughes obliged.
During the Australian summer of 1954-55 Hughes broke another barrier by becoming the first woman to cover a Test series for a daily newspaper. Probably helped by Cardus, who would be in Australia with her, she landed the job on the Sydney Daily Telegraph after persuading the proprietor, Frank Packer, to take her on. Packer’s son, Kerry, was to turn cricket upside down two decades later.
Hughes’s assignment turned out to be one of the most momentous Ashes series, in which England under Len Hutton lost the first Test by an innings but won the next three, thanks largely to the explosive fast bowling of Frank Tyson. It inspired Hughes’s second book, The Long Hop (1955), though this was as much a personal diary as a series of match reports.
Arlott wrote in Wisden that “the Australia of her book is not merely a setting for cricket but a place of interest, of fun and of new impressions”. He quoted a typical sample of her crisp, vivid prose: “Now the Englishmen suddenly came to life. Four runs later Harvey received a beast of a ball from Tyson which spat up at him and splashed off his bat to Cowdrey, 104 for 4.”
Born in North London and brought up in Kent, where her father ran a family business making springs, Hughes got her first taste of cricket from her three brothers in the back garden. At 17 she joined the London evening newspaper, the Star, in the advertising department.
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She was a Wren during the Second World War and after a spell in New York set the pattern of her subsequent life, working in the winter so that she could be free to watch cricket in the summer. Her first job was on the magazine Queen, where she quickly mastered the essentials of laying out pages and dealing with awkward writers.
She wrote no more books, but after Cardus’s death in 1975 she became his literary executor and edited several anthologies of his writings.
Always cheerful and positive, she rarely missed a day’s cricket at Lord’s, usually in the company of half a dozen of so friends for whom she would throw birthday parties in her flat not far from the ground. She remained a familiar figure in the Compton and Edrich Stands up to a couple of years ago when her health started to decline. She never married.
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Margaret Hughes, writer on cricket, was born on October 1, 1919. She died on January 30, 2005, aged 85.