What do you think?
Rate this book
All on a Summer's Day
Margaret Hughes recounts her life as a cricket fanatic and one of the sport's earliest woman writers.
Even a decade ago women in the cricketing media were a rare thing. The reason can only have been prejudice, as just a few short years on we now have a number of excellent commentators and several fine writers from the ranks of what in Margaret Hughes’s days was, rather patronisingly, referred to as the fairer sex.
So who was Margaret Hughes? The answer is that she was a remarkable woman who, back in 1953, published All On A Summer’s Day, a fine book which was essentially an appreciation of English cricket over the previous quarter of a century, but one into which she cleverly wove her own story as well so it is, in some ways, an autobiography.
1953 was the year of our present Queen’s coronation, and in a hard fought series of Ashes Tests England won back the famous urn for the first time since Douglas Jardine’s team did so in Australia in 1932/33. For the Lord’s Test of that summer Margaret became the first woman to cover a Test match for an English newspaper. It is not entirely clear why her tenure was limited to the one match but comments in Margaret’s second book, The Long Hop, suggest that her employers expected some sort of ‘feminine’ angle to her reports that they did not get.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Margaret Hughes was born in 1919. Her parents had three sons as well as Margaret and although she describes her family as very ordinary that, for once, does seem to have been something of a misdescription by her. Her father had a successful manufacturing business so much so that he could afford to be a racehorse owner, and in time the family had a substantial home in Kent.
As well as the sport of kings Arthur Hughes was also a keen cricketer and golfer, and Margaret’s mother, Dorothy, was also keen on sport and was a season ticket holder at Highbury where she would attend almost all of Arsenal’s first team games. When her mother didn’t use the ticket, usually for reserve games, Margaret was allowed to do so and then, in the summer of 1930 she first visited Lord’s.
It must have been difficult for a young girl not yet in her teens to see a great deal at Highbury if there was any sort of a crowd. Even as an adult Margaret was only around 5’2” in height, and it is testament to her love of sport that she persisted. Cricket was her passion though and her first hero the Middlesex batsman Patsy Hendren, whose spell she fell under when she first saw him. The following year Margaret spent a week in Nottingham with an Uncle, and there she saw the man who was to become her second great cricketing idol, Harold Larwood, for the first time. In All On A Summer’s Day she wrote:-
Hendren had captured my heart with his happy smile and twinkling feet and filled it with love of the game. Harold Larwood turned the key to keep cricket safely locked inside. On that day it was as if some Greek God had journeyed from Olympus to fill the cricket field with graceful movement. I can see him still, the sun glinting on his fair hair, his slight figure measuring out his lengthy run. Then the smoothness of his perfect action, like a modern machine, technically faultless.
Leaving school at 16 in 1935 Margaret embarked on what should have been a year at secretarial college. She did not much enjoy what she was doing, but quickly realised that if she worked hard at her studies during the winter months, and reached the requisite level of competence by the end of the following April, she would be able to spend the cricket season watching the game and, having duly acquired her certificates as she planned, that is exactly what she did.
The following winter the world of work beckoned and, not with any great enthusiasm, Margaret applied for a job with The Star in Fleet Street, figuring that by working for a newspaper she would at least have access to the cricket scores sooner than she would elsewhere. Interviewed by, serendipitously, another Hendren admirer, a job in the otherwise all male advertising department was hers.
After six years of wartime service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), including a period in New York, Margaret was demobbed at the end of April 1946. With a couple of months leave due there was no need for her to immediately look for gainful employment and, naturally, she spent the summer watching cricket, and making the decision for the future that her plan would always be to earn sufficient money in the winter to enable her to watch cricket all summer.
That she was successful in achieving that ambition was, in large part, thanks to her long years of military service. The cricket season having ended, that autumn she walked into the offices of The Queen, a society magazine that has changed its masthead a few times but, as Harper’s Bazaar, is still being published. In September 1946 the editor’s secretary was a former WRNS officer, and a job offer quickly followed.
In one of t...
Even a decade ago women in the cricketing media were a rare thing. The reason can only have been prejudice, as just a few short years on we now have a number of excellent commentators and several fine writers from the ranks of what in Margaret Hughes’s days was, rather patronisingly, referred to as the fairer sex.
So who was Margaret Hughes? The answer is that she was a remarkable woman who, back in 1953, published All On A Summer’s Day, a fine book which was essentially an appreciation of English cricket over the previous quarter of a century, but one into which she cleverly wove her own story as well so it is, in some ways, an autobiography.
1953 was the year of our present Queen’s coronation, and in a hard fought series of Ashes Tests England won back the famous urn for the first time since Douglas Jardine’s team did so in Australia in 1932/33. For the Lord’s Test of that summer Margaret became the first woman to cover a Test match for an English newspaper. It is not entirely clear why her tenure was limited to the one match but comments in Margaret’s second book, The Long Hop, suggest that her employers expected some sort of ‘feminine’ angle to her reports that they did not get.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Margaret Hughes was born in 1919. Her parents had three sons as well as Margaret and although she describes her family as very ordinary that, for once, does seem to have been something of a misdescription by her. Her father had a successful manufacturing business so much so that he could afford to be a racehorse owner, and in time the family had a substantial home in Kent.
As well as the sport of kings Arthur Hughes was also a keen cricketer and golfer, and Margaret’s mother, Dorothy, was also keen on sport and was a season ticket holder at Highbury where she would attend almost all of Arsenal’s first team games. When her mother didn’t use the ticket, usually for reserve games, Margaret was allowed to do so and then, in the summer of 1930 she first visited Lord’s.
It must have been difficult for a young girl not yet in her teens to see a great deal at Highbury if there was any sort of a crowd. Even as an adult Margaret was only around 5’2” in height, and it is testament to her love of sport that she persisted. Cricket was her passion though and her first hero the Middlesex batsman Patsy Hendren, whose spell she fell under when she first saw him. The following year Margaret spent a week in Nottingham with an Uncle, and there she saw the man who was to become her second great cricketing idol, Harold Larwood, for the first time. In All On A Summer’s Day she wrote:-
Hendren had captured my heart with his happy smile and twinkling feet and filled it with love of the game. Harold Larwood turned the key to keep cricket safely locked inside. On that day it was as if some Greek God had journeyed from Olympus to fill the cricket field with graceful movement. I can see him still, the sun glinting on his fair hair, his slight figure measuring out his lengthy run. Then the smoothness of his perfect action, like a modern machine, technically faultless.
Leaving school at 16 in 1935 Margaret embarked on what should have been a year at secretarial college. She did not much enjoy what she was doing, but quickly realised that if she worked hard at her studies during the winter months, and reached the requisite level of competence by the end of the following April, she would be able to spend the cricket season watching the game and, having duly acquired her certificates as she planned, that is exactly what she did.
The following winter the world of work beckoned and, not with any great enthusiasm, Margaret applied for a job with The Star in Fleet Street, figuring that by working for a newspaper she would at least have access to the cricket scores sooner than she would elsewhere. Interviewed by, serendipitously, another Hendren admirer, a job in the otherwise all male advertising department was hers.
After six years of wartime service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), including a period in New York, Margaret was demobbed at the end of April 1946. With a couple of months leave due there was no need for her to immediately look for gainful employment and, naturally, she spent the summer watching cricket, and making the decision for the future that her plan would always be to earn sufficient money in the winter to enable her to watch cricket all summer.
That she was successful in achieving that ambition was, in large part, thanks to her long years of military service. The cricket season having ended, that autumn she walked into the offices of The Queen, a society magazine that has changed its masthead a few times but, as Harper’s Bazaar, is still being published. In September 1946 the editor’s secretary was a former WRNS officer, and a job offer quickly followed.
In one of t...
191 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1953
3 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.