Saluting Union Jack

GH remembers the inventor of cricket's World Cups

Almost everything about Sir Jack Hayward now seems designed to confuse if not offend present sensibilities. The British businessman was such a florid patriot he was known as ‘Union Jack’, kept his watch on UK time wherever he was in the world, would not drink French wine and banned foreign cars from his Sussex estate, while adding Colman’s Mustard to everything he ate. On relocating to the Bahamas, he arranged for the island to import double decker buses and red telephone boxes so he felt at home. His reactionary views in a celebrated 2003 interview with the Financial Times provoked a furore: ‘If I had my way, I'd form my own party far more right-wing than Margaret Thatcher. I'd bring back National Service, the Scaffold, the cat o' nine tails, the Empire—places like Sierra Leone and Nigeria were so much better off under British rule than they are now.’

For a man of stupendous wealth, however, Hayward lived frugally, favouring well-worn suits and keeping one pair of shoes for thirty years. He preferred to lavish money on quixotic projects like retrieving Brunel’s Great Britain, raising Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, restoring Kipling’s Rolls-Royce, sponsoring round-the-world yachtsman Chas Byth, and, above all, supporting Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he was described by Henry Winter as ‘one of the game’s greatest owner-benefactors,’ ploughing in £75 million and extracting not a penny. And if much of his life involved the celebration of a receding imperial zenith, in one idea he was far-sighted: he was first with the idea of a cricket World Cup. Even better, it was a World Cup for women.

Tonight, England and Australia play the final of the Women’s T20 World Cup at Lord’s. Hayward had wanted this for his own 1973 Women’s World Cup, but Marylebone would only permit practice there - something that had the Guardian lampoon MCC as standing for ‘Male Chauvinist Cricket’.

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Cricket’s oldest frenemies had to make do with playing off at Edgbaston, where at the end Hayward poured the champagne for winning captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint. It was the culmination of a long sponsorship partnership with women’s cricket, which turned into a lifelong friendship between two eminent Wulfrunians. And it started like this.

Non-poison chalice