Book Club: On race, cricket, and the history of the West Indies
An extract from Test Cricket: A History, by Tim Wigmore.
Test cricket is, of course, a ludicrous idea. Cricket itself is ridiculous enough, with positions called things like “fine leg” and “silly mid-on”, and hours-long matches that end without a winner, and equations for working out who would have won if only it hadn’t started to rain. But test cricket – which goes on for five days, has built-in meal breaks and can still end in a draw – is surely the most ridiculous sporting competition in the world.
It may not be a coincidence that the sort of people who read this newsletter seem, anecdotally, to be more likely to be cricket fans than fans of any other sport.
Anyway: because of the aforementioned, my one-time New Statesman colleague, the Telegraph sports writer Tim Wigmore, got in touch to ask if you lot might like to read an extract from his new book. Test Cricket: A History does what it says on the tin, telling the story of the sport since its creation nearly a century and a half ago.
I’m not going to explain test cricket in full, partly because it’s extremely complicated and took Tim an entire book, partly because I don’t actually understand it. But for the record it is seen as the most prestigious form of the sport, and began with an England vs Australia competition in 1877. Today, 10 other nations also have test status: South Africa, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Ireland, Afghanistan, and the West Indies, which isn’t actually a nation but a collection of 16 of them.
Because another running theme of this newsletter – one which does, it must be said, overlap with that of absurdity – is the legacies of the British Empire, Tim picked a section about the latter…
“In the evening Mr. Beckford and Mr. John Lewis etc, played at cricket,” Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican slaveholder, wrote on 11 June 1778. This diary entry is the first known reference to cricket in the Caribbean.
In Barbados, and elsewhere, cricket gained a hold through military garrisons: during the Napoleonic Wars, the game was played by British officers in the Caribbean. St Ann’s Garrison Cricket Club, in Barbados, was formed by 1807. After the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was passed by the UK Parliament, cricket was increasingly played by black people in the Caribbean. Slaves, and then indentured labourers, were required to bowl at the sons of British plantation owners; after slavery was abolished, cricket offered a route for black men to gain prestige.
When it came to taking on teams from beyond the Caribbean, the idea took hold that different territories were better together, largely because of the small size of individual islands. The West Indies Test team would eventually grow to represent a total of 16 island nations and territories. The most prominent are Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, the sole part of the West Indies that is not an island. A West Indies team first played in 1886 when an all-white squad toured Canada and the United States.
From its very earliest days, Caribbean cricket was inextricably linked to race. In Trinidad in the early 20th century, different clubs “represented the different social strata in the island within clearly defined boundaries”, the prominent Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote in Beyond a Boundary. Queen’s Park Club – “the boss of the island’s cricket relations with other islands and visiting international teams” – was for the white and wealthy. Maple – James’s club, to his later regret – was for the “brown-skinned middle class”, who “had founded themselves on the principle that they didn’t want any dark people in their club”. Stingo’s members were “totally black”, with “no social status”. The game flourished across these social divides: every village with 50 houses in Trinidad had its own recreation ground.
Trinidad were the first nation to select black players in the inter-colonial tournament, partly at the urging of Pelham Warner, an English Test cricketer who was born in Trinidad, the son of the Attorney General. When West Indies toured England in 1900, their squad included five black players; by their next tour, in 1906, the squad included seven, compared to eight white players. Tommie Burton, a leading black bowler, was sent home from the tour early for refusing to carry the luggage of his white teammates. Burton was subsequently banned for life from cricket in Barbados.
On the brink of Test status, the West Indies Cricket Board of Control was formed in 1926. This was essentially controlled by the same families who enjoyed the bulk of economic power in the Caribbean: the board was initially all-white, and ensured that the captain should be white too.
West Indies’ first Test line-up, who played at Lord’s in 1928, had white players from one to four in the batting order; all other players were black. It embodied how leading batters in the region tended to be white, and leading bowlers black. West Indies’ two most prominent players on the 1928 tour were George Challenor, a white Bajan, and Constantine. “It was symbolic, if not quite socially inevitable, that Constantine would be a bowler and Challenor a batsman,” wrote Michael Manley, who served as Jamaica prime minister, in his history of West Indies cricket.
The Jamaican George Headley shattered the racist trope that black people could not be leading batters. During the 1930s, Headley scored ten Test centuries; all his teammates mustered just five between them. The Bajan writer George Lamming’s 1953 novel, In the Castle of My Skin, describes how:
Jamaica cricket had captured the Barbadians’ imagination. Every boy who felt his worth as a batsman called himself George Headley.
At the end of his career, in 1948, Headley became the first black West Indian to captain the side. Yet Headley only filled in for one match in his native Jamaica. West Indies immediately reverted to having a white captain.
The captaincy was “the most obvious and apparent, some would say glaring, example of the black man being kept in his place”, wrote Learie Constantine, a leading West Indies player in the 1930s. He lamented that “White captains have shown a marked preference for white players” and “better coloured players have often been deliberately excluded”.
Subsequent analysis proved Constantine right. From their first Test, in 1928, until Worrell’s first Test as skipper in 1960, all batters not classed as white had an average of 42.15 when batting in the top seven. White top-seven batters averaged just 28.04.
As editor of The Nation in Trinidad during the 1950s, C.L.R. James campaigned for the Barbadian Frank Worrell to be appointed as the first full-time black captain. The selectors’ “whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain”, James later wrote in Beyond a Boundary. “The more brilliantly the black men played, the more it would emphasise to millions of English people: ‘Yes, they are fine players, but, funny, isn’t it, they cannot be responsible for themselves – they must always have a white man to lead them’.”
In 1960, Worrell was finally awarded the captaincy, aged 36. Unlike Headley, Worrell was not appointed merely for a solitary match.
Worrell was more than just a historic figure; he was a brilliant cricketer, too. Under his leadership, for the first time ever, West Indies were hailed as the best team in Test cricket.
When Worrell retired after the 3–1 win in England in 1963, he declared, “My aim was always to see West Indies moulded from a rabble of brilliant island individuals into a real team – and I’ve done it.”
Tim Wigmore is a sports correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, and the author of so many books on cricket I literally don’t feel confident giving a definitive count.
Test Cricket: A History is the first narrative history of the sport and has been praised by such luminaries as Andy Zaltsman, Jonathan Agnew and David Kynaston. It promises that, “from Bodyline to Bazball, the golden age to the rise of West Indies, and Shane Warne to Ian Botham, readers will come to appreciate Test cricket’s remarkable history like never before”. You can get your copy from Waterstones here.
Only a book about cricket would start by moaning that it's weird and rubbish.
Have you read Francis Edmond’s books on England’s tours? They’re very funny