Margaret Hughes, who has died at the age of 85, was an unlikely blazer of an improbable trail. "This is the first book on first-class cricket not written by a man," began the foreword that Neville Cardus wrote for her All On A Summer's Day (1953): "Very few reporters in Fleet Street can write on the game with as much observation, sense of scene and character, and knowledge of the things that technically and tactically matter."
Encouraged by Cardus, the celebrated Manchester Guardian music and cricket correspondent, Hughes ventured, 18 months later, down another path no woman had been permitted to tread and reported an Ashes series for a daily newspaper. Only now, 51 years later, is Chloe Saltau of the Melbourne Age poised to become the second such correspondent.
The relationship between Hughes, who never wed, and Cardus, who never mastered the principles of fidelity, set tongues wagging. According to his biographer, Christopher Brookes, they met after the second world war and were "the closest of friends".
As a writer, he valued her counsel like no other. In a letter in September 1949, the fragile Mancunian confessed to her that he was facing "a prospect too awful to contemplate" - writer's block. Next week he wrote again, reassured: "I hit upon this idea of a daily task to produce so many words for you, free of the responsibility even to write well, so long as I wrote something."
Else Mayer-Linsman was known as his "music wife" Margaret his "cricket wife". Yet to focus on the Cardus connection is to diminish the courage, persistence and literary worth of Hughes, a sharp but unassuming North Londoner to whom Lord's was "the open sesame to a lifetime of happiness".
She was one of four children of Dorothy Maude and Arthur Hughes, who ran a family business manufacturing springs; she was brought up in Kent. Her devotion to cricket was fostered by three brothers and a back garden. At 17, she joined the ad department of the Star in Fleet Street, her chief motivation "to see the cricket scores before the general public".
She was a Wren for five years during the war, and went to New York after her father died in 1944. She resolved on her return to make cricket "the real centre of my life" and to earn enough during the winters to underwrite summers of intensive cricket-watching.
A chance reunion with a fellow Wren led to a job at Queen magazine. In no time, Margaret was laying out pages, chivvying writers and curbing their excesses.
All On A Summer's Day, part autobiography, part celebration of English cricket from 1946 to 1952, was well-received: "It will, I fancy, be read with the same pleasure as it was written," opined John Arlott. The frontispiece photo is striking: dark clusters of hair, noble nose and proud chin, eyes glinting mischievously.
Its closing chapter, Alice At Lord's, 1952 was exquisite: "'This is the stupidest place I have ever visited,' [Alice] said. 'I shall never come here again.' The tall man looked at her in silence and nodded. 'Yes, you will,' he said. 'You won't be able to stay away now that you have come.'"
Press box visits became a trial as colleagues bitched and spectators gawked. "I have been treated as a freak," she wrote, "rather like the fat lady at the circus."
Undaunted, she persuaded Frank Packer, the maverick proprietor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, to let her cover the 1954-55 Ashes tour. The Tests were historic: inspired by the torrid fast bowling of Frank "Typhoon" Tyson, Len Hutton's team cheered a ration-ravaged nation by winning the series 3-1, their first triumph down under for 22 years.
She wrote The Long Hop (1955), a tour diary with a difference, and not merely because it eschewed scorecards. "As we at all times criticise the Premier for his management of home affairs," she reasoned, "call Mr Butler a fool for his Budget, find fault with Beecham's conducting, or Gielgud's performance, can we not, sometimes, say that our cricketers are not quite so brilliant as usual?"
Margaret was bequeathed the copyrights when Cardus died in 1975, and edited several collections of his cricket writing: those who crossed swords with her found a guardian both zealous and jealous.
Living in retirement in Marylebone High Street, she remained a fixture at Lord's. A regular companion, Leslie Abelson, recalls her "always smiling, cup always full". Only in the final two years of her life did the ritual cease. She never recovered from a a heavy fall last summer. She leaves an important, if largely untapped, legacy.
Her brother, David, survives her.
· Margaret Patricia Hughes, sportswriter, born October 1 1919; died January 30 2005.
