I became a detective in women’s cricket and found treasure in an old Lancashire cowshed

Betty Archdale earned a distinctly unflattering nickname for her style of captaincy on the first England’s women’s tour to Australia in 1934-35. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

In the spring of 2011, I went to the MCC library at Lord’s – the world’s largest collection of printed material on cricket. I was near the start of a PhD on the history of women’s cricket and I wanted source material: this, surely, would be where I would find it?

Nope. When the MCC’s Neil Robinson took me to the section of the shelves on women’s cricket, I found that it consisted of three books, one of which was the autobiography of Rachael Heyhoe Flint, published in 1978. As for the MCC archives? The store cupboard was bare.