South Africa:England’s cause • The game’s revenge
• The new order • Sharjah:global cricket • Argentina, Ireland,
USA:apostate nations • Market and nation in Indian cricket
• The supreme drama of Test cricket
Throughout the twenty-year isolation of South Africa from world cricket, the battle cry of apartheid’s apologists was ‘Keep politics out of sport!’ They appealed to a world transcending politics, a community of cricket, which was, in fact, the community of imperial white supremacy.
Of course, it was the English who brought cricket to South Africa. But, at first, they brought it mainly to black people. Fostered by missionary schools and military outposts, black South African cricket grew steadily in the second half of the nineteenth century. An educated, enfranchised, English-speaking black petty bourgeoisie emerged in the Cape, and it adopted cricket as part of the apparatus of civilization which, it hoped, would enable it to meet the white colonizers on their own terms. Cricket, with its level playing field, was a way of claiming a place in and protection under the British empire. For John Tengo Jabavu, a black politician, newspaper owner and chairman of two cricket clubs, the virtue of cricket was that it was ‘calculated to make the Europeans and natives have more mutual trust and confidence than all the coercive and repressive legislation in the world’.
With the discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886, British interests in South Africa changed. Capital from the City of London facilitated rapid industrial development, which reduced the black population to cheap labour. Cricket was supplanted among the black proletariat of the Transvaal by football and boxing. The mining companies, including Lord Harris’s Consolidated Goldfields, encouraged football in their company hostels as a cheap diversion for the workforce. At the same time, the British began to restrict the long-established black franchise in the Cape.
English cricketers began regular tours of South Africa in 1888. Standards were low, but the power of South African gold and the need to integrate the feisty Boers into the empire led the MCC, many of whose members had investments and family in South Africa, to establish close ties to the newly-founded all-white South African Cricket Association (SACA). In 1892, professional members of WW Read’s England squad played a match against Cape Malays (the amateurs refused to take part). It was to be the last time a touring England side faced a black South African side until December, 1993. During the match, the bowling of Krom Hendrick, a ‘Coloured’ man, impressed the English players, who were surprised when he was left out of the South African side that toured England in 1894, on the instructions of Cecil Rhodes, the Cape Colony Prime Minister who financed the tour.
As British designs on the whole of South Africa became clearer, tensions with the Afrikaners mounted. When Lord Hawke’s side visited South Africa in 1898–99, the captain refused to meet Kruger, the Afrikaner President of the Transvaal Republic, and announced that he had brought cricket to South Africa to ‘comfort the English’. During the ‘Boer War’, imperial propagandists like John Buchan alleged the Afrikaners had no ‘tradition of fair play’. Black Africans largely backed the British, hoping to secure the franchise, but they lost out profoundly under the political settlement which followed the war.
When Lord Harris took Plum Warner’s England side to South Africa in 1905–06, he declared that cricket would bring together ‘Briton and Boer’. In the interests of empire, cricket’s level playing field was extended to the Afrikaners, but at the cost of excluding non-whites. The imperial integration of white South Africa was one of the reasons for the formation of the ICC in 1909. But it was always a selective integration. Between 1909 and the beginning of the boycott in 1970, South Africa played England, Australia and New Zealand regularly, but never played India, Pakistan or West Indies.
Ironically, there was more interest in cricket among the black majority than among the Afrikaners, who remained alienated from the ‘English game’ (though not from rugby) until the 1960s. Squeezed out of world cricket, African, Indian, and Coloured people continued to play the game under their own auspices. Gradually, separate cricket authorities for ‘Bantu’, ‘Indian’, ‘Malay’ and ‘Coloured’ cricket emerged, and found niches within the evolving structure of what came to be known as apartheid.
The MCC colluded with South African racism from the beginning. Ranji was omitted from a South African tour, apparently at the request of white South Africans. His nephew, Duleepsinhji, was left out of the England team which faced the visiting South Africans in 1929, after pressure from South African politicians, whom, Learie Constantine observed, ‘could not face the risk of a century being scored against their team by a coloured man’.
An England side captained by FG Mann, and including Denis Compton, toured South Africa in 1948–49, when the new National Party government was passing the legislation which institutionalized apartheid – and ruled out the occasional inter-racial cricket that had previously been permitted. In those days and for decades to come, black South Africans supported the visiting side. When Neil Harvey scored a match-winning 151 not out for Australia at Durban in 1950, every stroke was cheered by the black spectators sitting in their reserved places, one of whom was the young lawyer Nelson Mandela.
The South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC) was formed in 1950 to unite the existing black federations. At first, SACBOC tournaments were run in accord with the dictates of apartheid: African, Indian and Coloured players were segregated not only from whites but from each other. However, black cricketers increasingly refused to compete along ‘ethnic’ lines. In 1956, a visit by a Kenyan Asian side led SACBOC to integrate ‘non-white’ cricket, inaugurating a golden age which produced, among others, the all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira.
Though SACBOC represented the numerical majority of cricketers, and was recognized by the South African regime as the black equivalent of SACA, it received no assistance from either the MCC or the ICC, despite their avowed mission to further the cause of cricket everywhere. SACBOC asked the MCC how it could take part in international cricket. The MCC said SACBOC would have to prove it could manage its own affairs, but offered no other guidance.
The South African Sports Association (SASA) was formed in 1958 with the aim of challenging apartheid in sport. It launched a successful campaign to stop a tour planned by Frank Worrell’s West Indians, who had agreed to play against non-white teams entirely within the racial framework of apartheid. Dennis Brutus, the SASA secretary, wrote regularly to the MCC and ICC, but rarely received the courtesy of a reply. After Sharpeville, SASA officials’ homes were raided and their correspondence seized. Brutus was ‘banned’ and later shot in the street. He survived, and in 1966 left South Africa for England.
The reality of repression rarely intruded upon the idyll enjoyed by the English cricketers and cricket writers who visited South Africa throughout this period. As Rowland Bowen observed, in South Africa ‘an ideal kind of pre-1914 amateur cricket’ still flourished. Only those few for whom the Golden Age was not the final word in cricket culture, like John Arlott, Jim Laker or Mike Brearley, saw anything amiss. Trevor Bailey recalled:
From the social angle the most enjoyable of all cricket tours were those to South Africa. The hospitality was of a scale unequalled anywhere else in the world, the country varied and fascinating, the climate beautiful and the cricket excellent ... their basic approach was very reminiscent of public school sides ... it all stemmed from a life-style which, though materially rewarding, is at the same time rather narrow and isolated.
The cosy interchange between English cricket and its South African ‘cousins’ came to an end in the late sixties with the D’Oliveira affair. The selectors always insisted that their decision to leave D’Oliveira out of the England party scheduled to tour South Africa in the winter of 1968–69 was dictated entirely by the demands of cricket. Few believed them, especially as the day before the selection meeting D’Oliveira had scored 158 not out against the Australians at the Oval.
The attitude of white South Africa towards an appearance by D’Oliveira on its cricket grounds had long been unmistakable. In January 1967, the South African Minster of the Interior had announced: ‘We will not allow mixed teams to play against our white teams here.’ A year later, Billy Griffith, the MCC Secretary, wrote to SACA asking for confirmation that no conditions would be imposed on the selection of the England tour party. He received no reply.
In March, 1968, the MCC Committee received a report from Alec Douglas-Home, who had recently visited South Africa and met President Vorster. Douglas-Home advised the MCC not to press for an answer to Griffith’s letter. The implication of his remarks was that the only way to save the tour would be to avoid selecting D’Oliveira. Meanwhile, Lord Cobham, a former MCC President and Treasurer, had also been talking with Vorster, who had told him point blank that D’Oliveira would not be welcome. Cobham passed on Vorster’s views to the current MCC President, AER Gilligan, and Treasurer, Gubby Allen, but they kept the information to themselves.
The tenth Viscount Cobham, CJ Lyttelton (Eton, Cambridge) was a member of one of England’s great cricketing dynasties. A former captain of Worcestershire and erstwhile Tory parliamentary candidate, he became Governor General of New Zealand and Lord Steward of Her Majesty’s household. His mother was South African and he had extensive banking interests there.
The selection meeting that chose to leave D’Oliveira out of the South African tour was the last ever held under the auspices of the MCC. Every single one of the ten men present had played cricket in South Africa. None had ever uttered any public criticism of the apartheid system. The Chairman of Selectors, Alec Bedser, later became a founder member of the right-wing Freedom Association, which received funds from the South African government. The MCC President that year, the former Sussex amateur Arthur Gilligan (Dulwich, Cambridge), had visited South Africa many times. He was the amateur England captain at the centre of the row between Lord Hawke and the professionals in 1925, and for several years a member of the British Union of Fascists. He wrote an article for the BUF Bulletin entitled ‘The Spirit of Fascism and Cricket Tours’. Gilligan argued that cricket tours (in which ‘it is essential to work solely on the lines of fascism’) strengthened ‘the crimson ties of friendship ... and the crimson bonds of kinship’.
The selectors’ decision was ratified by the MCC Committee as a whole before being released to the press. In South Africa, the Minister of the Interior interrupted a speech to the ultra-right Orange Free State Congress of the National Party to announce D’Oliveira’s omission, which he welcomed as a triumph for apartheid. In England, the MCC’s excuses for leaving out D’Oliveira came under scrutiny. One of the most bizarre was the assertion that a player of D’Oliveira’s style would not perform well in South African conditions. Doug Insole insisted that overseas D’Oliveira had to be regarded primarily as a batsman, not an all-rounder. But when the medium-pacer Tom Cartwright withdrew from the tour because of injury, the MCC, fearful of public outrage, replaced him with D’Oliveira. Vorster then banned the tour. ‘It’s not the MCC team,’ he said. ‘It’s the team of the anti-apartheid movement ... it is a team of political opponents of South Africa. It is a team of people who don’t care about sports relations at all.’
At that year’s annual general meeting, the MCC overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to end cricket contacts with South Africa pending ‘progress by South Africa towards non-racial cricket’. Leading the attack on the proposal was Dennis Silk, who insisted, ‘We do not stand as the social conscience of Great Britain.’ He also noted that South Africa was Britain’s third largest export customer. He was backed by Subba Row and LWT chairman Aidan Crawley (Harrow, Oxford), a former Labour MP who had turned Tory in 1957 and served briefly on Douglas-Home’s front bench. He was to become MCC President three years later.
This was the MCC’s final act as the official voice of English cricket. The next year it was replaced by the Cricket Council and the TCCB, which proceeded with arrangements for the South African tour of England scheduled for 1970. But any lingering fantasy that cricket could live in balmy indifference to the evils of apartheid was rudely dispelled by the campaign to ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’, which broke over English cricket like a thunderstorm in late 1969.
For the English cricket authorities, the threat of mass action against the South African tour was an assault on the national heritage and the game itself. They were deeply shocked by this intrusion into the game of what they regarded as the most offensive facet of modern life, the protest politics of the late sixties. ‘Suddenly we weren’t outside the US embassy or standing in Trafalgar Square,’ recalled Peter Hain, the campaign’s principal spokesperson. ‘We were at the gates of Lord’s.’
Cricket was especially vulnerable to direct action, which had already proved highly disruptive at rugby matches. The day-long play, the leisurely pace and wide-open spaces, the sheer delicacy of the game, made it an easy target for even small groups of protesters, no less the army that the Stop the Seventy Tour people were planning to mobilize. An entire five-day Test match could be wrecked just by digging a hole in the pitch. Some of the anti-apartheid protesters had more imaginative plots. One threatened to unleash a horde of grass-eating locusts on Lord’s the evening before the Test match.
The anti-authoritarian brio of the late-sixties youth rebellion was the polar opposite to the genteel nineteenth-century ethos of English cricket. For many in the cricket establishment, this was an apocalyptic clash, a battle to rescue the game from the forces of anarchy. The TCCB declared its intention ‘to uphold the rights of individuals in this country to take part in lawful pursuits’. In The Times, John Woodcock proclaimed ‘a moral obligation to see the thing through’ and blamed the whole affair on the ‘intractable attitude of the non-white authorities’. The county chairmen on the new TCCB vowed to defy Hain and the demonstrators. One county secretary told the Observer: ‘This was their opportunity to apply all their dislike and loathing of permissiveness, demonstrators and long hair. Staging matches with South Africa is their chance to make a stand against these things.’
Hain, a South African exile and Young Liberal, became a hate figure for the cricket establishment, but the man they took for cricket’s nemesis, was, in fact, a cricket fanatic. As a would-be leg-spinner at Pretoria Boys’ High School, he had followed the game with passion, and like other young (and not so young) fans had drawn up a personal World XI (Sobers was captain, Graeme Pollock the only South African). In the course of a search of his family’s home, local Special Branch agents came across young Hain’s World XI and for a moment mistook it for a terrorist hit list. The officers, all Afrikaners, did not recognize any of the ‘English’ sport’s great names.
The threat of mass action precipitated public debate on apartheid and sport on a scale never seen before. In response to that debate, the Labour Party, the Liberals, the trade unions, the churches, the Police Federation, most of the press and even some Tories came out against the tour. Black workers on London Transport threatened to stage a one-day strike to coincide with the Lord’s Test. The television technicians’ union called on members not to cover any matches involving the South Africans. John Arlott declined to commentate on them. The Archbishop of Wales urged his fellow Glamorgan County Cricket Club members to resign if the tour went ahead. And the Queen let it be known that, contrary to custom, she would not attend the Test at Lord’s. The tour had become too unpredictable for all concerned; even the establishment wanted it cancelled.
But the MCC was by no means isolated. It enjoyed strong support from some (but certainly not all) cricket fans, and it had friends in the Tory Party, who tried to whip up a ‘law and order’ frenzy against the protesters. Sir Peter Rawlinson, a future Attorney General, and Lord Hailsham helped draft legal memoranda for the Cricket Council. A ‘Save the Seventy Tour Committee’ was set up by the right-wing Monday Club. The South African government promised money to defray security costs. From May 1970, the new MCC President (and ex-officio chair of the ICC) was Sir Frank Cyril Hawker (City of London, Cambridge), erstwhile Essex amateur and currently Chairman of Standard Bank, which was associated with Standard Bank of South Africa. He was also Executive Director of the Bank of England, Sheriff of the County of London, a Free Forester and long-standing acquaintance of Vorster.
A siege mentality gripped Lord’s. The MCC invited its members to volunteer as stewards for the Test matches. And for the first time they were driven to employ a public-relations consultant: Subba Row was taken on to help Jack Bailey promote the cause of the South African tour. Together, Bailey and Subba Row, later bitter enemies in the mid-eighties battles between the MCC and the TCCB, leafleted the rugby crowd at Twickenham urging support for the cricket tour.
Looking back, the lengths to which the authorities were prepared to go to save the tour defy comprehension. They ordered 300 reels of barbed wire and decked out Lord’s like a concentration camp. Other grounds followed suit. By encircling cricket pitches with wire and security guards, the authorities made them look like what the protesters said they were: fortresses sheltering apartheid. Early in the season, several cricketers were injured when they got tangled in the wire while fielding in the deep.
Coupled with the threat of mass action at home was the threat of a wide-scale boycott of British sport by African and Asian nations. Had the tour gone ahead, Britain might have faced expulsion from the Commonwealth and Olympic Games. The joint Pakistan and India tour arranged, after much delicate negotiation, for the summer of 1971, would certainly have been cancelled. Kenya, Uganda and Zambia had already called off an MCC tour planned for January 1970. The authorities were prepared to sacrifice a great deal of cricket, not to mention money, to save a tour that they had already been forced to cut back, for security reasons, to a mere twelve matches at eight grounds. Britain might face expulsion from the Commonwealth and Olympic Games, but the cricket authorities seemed to believe this was a price worth paying for their ‘principles’. To them, the threat of a boycott, an example of international solidarity in action, was and remained ‘blackmail’.
The Cricket Council wanted the Labour government, to which it was deeply hostile, to take responsibility for cancelling the tour. Contrary to all the claims made by Pycroft, Harris, Hawke, Plum Warner, Gubby Allen, EW Swanton and so many others over the years, English cricket’s spokespersons now insisted that political and moral issues were outside their ken. Disgusted by the government’s failure to stand up for ‘law and order’, they demanded government intervention – in order to protect cricket’s autonomy! Years later, Jack Bailey revealed that during the controversy he met several times with Special Branch officers, one of whom had infiltrated the Stop the Seventy Tour committee.
The Labour government was as loath to act as the cricket authorities. It could not be seen to defend the South African tour, but it also did not want to be identified with the protesters, especially as the general election was planned for the first day of the Lord’s Test. Home Secretary James Callaghan was forced in the end to make a direct request to the Cricket Council on behalf of the government. In response, the authorities at last climbed down. The invitation to SACA was withdrawn ‘with regret’. The Daily Telegraph likened it to the fall of the Bastille.
The success of the Stop the Seventy Tour took both the authorities and the Anti-Apartheid Movement by surprise. Because Hain, along with Dennis Brutus (a key organizer in the campaign), was a cricket nut as well as a radical, he was able to see the critical role that sport played in South Africa. ‘We fused the back pages with the front pages,’ he later explained. ‘We brought radical politics into an intimate aspect of everyday life.’ In so doing, the campaign revealed to many, for the first time, the latent political power of sport.
The cancellation of the 1970 tour proved to be a more important turning point for English cricket than the foundation of the TCCB in 1968 or the John Player League in 1969. From now on, the elite had to accept that it was helpless against both mass opposition at home and the new balance of forces abroad. Under coercion, English cricket was compelled to live with the exclusion of South Africa. But it did so grudgingly. Over the next twenty years, its leading figures sought repeatedly to weaken or sabotage the boycott.
In the early seventies, the cricket Maecenas and one-time Warwickshire amateur Derrick Robins organized tours of English professionals to South Africa and Rhodesia. These tours were blessed both by the South African government, which gave them special dispensation to play against non-white sides, and by English cricket officialdom, which recognized as first-class the matches played by the English tourists against whites-only teams. Among the young, white English cricketers Robins took to South Africa in 1972–73 were Peter Willey, John Lever and Robin Jackman, all of whom were to return to South Africa in the future. The tour was managed by Jack Bannister, a long-serving Warwickshire professional turned journalist.
Bannister was also at this time, and for many years after, a paid official of the Professional Cricketers’ Association. On his instigation, the Transvaal Cricket Union offered £2,000 from the profits made by the Robins to the PCA. A majority of PCA members voted in favour of accepting the money, but Mike Edwards, the current chair and one of the body’s founders, resigned in protest and soon after left the first-class game. ‘I felt that to accept the money would prejudice the Association’s ability to represent all its members,’ Edwards recalled. ‘We had about twenty-five black members at that time.’
Under pressure, South African cricket twisted and turned. In the sixties, it had breathed defiance: under no conditions would blacks be allowed to play with or against whites. But the international boycott hit hard and concessions were made. SACA announced that, in keeping with the government’s new policy of promoting ‘multi-national’ (but definitely not inter-racial) sport, trials for the national side would be conducted between sides based on ethnic groups, thus ‘keeping the races apart until representation at the highest level’.
In the mid-seventies, a new group of businessmen and professionals took over the reins at SACA. These ‘liberals’, headed by Joe Pamensky and Ali Bacher, were more sensitive than their predecessors to the need to placate international sentiment. At the same time, the National Party made overtures to Brutus and Hain. The mounting desperation to recommence international tours led, in 1977, to the formation of the allegedly multi-racial South African Cricket Union to replace the all-white SACA. A faction within SACBOC, led by its President, Rashid Varacchia, was co-opted into the new body, which recognized the right of all clubs to play with or against anyone they liked, regardless of colour. Varacchia believed that under SACU cricketers would be able to play what he dubbed ‘normal’ sport, i.e. sport without interference by the apartheid laws or the government.
Shortly afterwards, the National Party sanctioned multi-racial sport from club level upwards (crucially, school sport was to remain segregated). At a match at the Wanderers between a white side and an Indian side, the Minister of Sport said that from now on ‘dirty, bloody politics’ would be left out of cricket. But only a few white players were prepared to sacrifice white privileges by playing for black clubs. And there were even fewer blacks in white clubs. The liquor laws meant that while it was legal, at last, to play together on the field, it was still illegal to drink together in the pavilion.
Despite Varacchia, and despite the many blandishments on offer from Pamensky and Bacher, most black cricketers refused to enter the SACU fold. At the final SACBOC meeting of 1977, the majority of players and officials declared their opposition to the actions of the SACBOC officials. In Johannesburg the following year, the South African Cricket Board (SACB) was founded. Its constitution committed it to non-racialism in sport and solidarity with the broader liberation movement. The new SACB secretary, Hassan Howa, a Cape Town ‘Coloured’ of mixed Indian, Turkish and Scottish descent, repudiated Varacchia’s championship of ‘normal sport’ with the slogan, ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’, which became the watchword of the anti-apartheid movement.
With SACBOC disbanded, the SACB undertook supervision of a host of black cricket competitions. For the next fourteen years, deprived of finance and harassed by the authorities, it sustained black cricket at the grass roots. In comparison, the impact of SACU’s much trumpeted ‘development programme’, with all the advantages of money, publicity and government co-operation, was minute. Playing on matting wickets spread over soccer or rugby pitches, the SACB cricketers were building a new sports culture as an integral part of the liberation movement.
In England, it was argued that SACU had gone as far as it could. The rest depended on the government. Richard Hutton, who had played for Transvaal after leaving Yorkshire in 1974, returned from South Africa to announce that ICC members would now have ‘to stand and be counted. Then we shall know who wants to play cricket and who wants to play politics.’ The SACB was accused of ‘looking on cricket as a political lever and not for the sake of cricket itself’.
Before SACU, South African cricket had been a full and fair reflection of the mundane ugliness of apartheid. Now, it became a mask for that ugliness. The formation of SACU and its ‘development programme’ for black cricketers was of a piece with the National Party’s efforts to convince the world that the South African establishment could put its own house in order. That was why Howa had declined to act as what he called a ‘black front’ for apartheid.
It was true, as Hutton and his colleagues kept saying, that the anti-apartheid movement had moved the goalposts. The Stop the Seventy Tour Campaign’s original demand had been for an end to apartheid within cricket. That was no longer seen as sufficient. As the liberation movement gathered strength, both within South Africa and abroad, there was not only a growing unwillingness to compromise with the apartheid system, but also a deepening insight into sport’s place within society. The level playing field could not be achieved in cricket as long as it did not exist in society as a whole. ‘What is normal about an all white school playing cricket against an all-black school?’ asked one SACB supporter:
This is the very multi-national trap which South African propaganda tries to sell to the outside world as normality. Non-racial cricketers, unlike those playing under SACU’s auspices, are not prepared to accept a compartmentalization of their lives which permits (literally) free association on the cricket held but rigid segregation elsewhere.
In 1979, over the opposition of Pakistan, West Indies and India, the ICC agreed a TCCB proposal (itself the result of SACU lobbying) to send a delegation to South Africa to report on progress towards multi-racial cricket. The delegation was headed by Charles Palmer, that year’s MCC and ICC Chairman, and included representatives from Australia, New Zealand and England, all of whom had records as friends of South Africa.
Not surprisingly, their report commended the progress SACU had made in meeting the ICC’s requirements. It proposed that a multi-racial ICC side be despatched to play against a representative South African side (by which they meant a SACU side); the proceeds would be used for the benefit of non-racial cricket (by which they meant the SACU ‘development programme’). Nowhere did the report mention that, like other opponents of apartheid, members of the SACB were denied freedom of speech and association. Nor did it mention that it was illegal in South Africa to support sanctions, and that anyone who advocated the sports boycott was liable to imprisonment. It said nothing of the black cricketers arrested for playing on a white ground in Cape Town in 1978, nor anything about the harassment of SACB by security police, who took down the names of players appearing in SACB matches or even at non-racial nets. The ICC rejected the Palmer delegation’s recommendations.
When the ICC met at Lord’s in August 1980, a TCCB proposal that there be ‘no recriminations’ against any Test country choosing to play against South Africa was rejected. Outside the meeting room, TCCB delegates urged SACU representatives to make a written submission to ICC members, who would consider it in 1981.
SACU officials lobbied heavily in preparation for the next year’s ICC summit. They assured delegates that the South African regime would soon exclude sporting bodies from the apartheid laws. But in the face of hostility from the black countries, neither England nor Australia was prepared to propose South Africa’s readmission. New Zealand had its own troubles. The country was in the midst of tearing itself apart over a South African rugby tour.
As a result of that tour, the West Indies cricket board cancelled a planned visit by the New Zealand Test side. The ICC condemned the West Indian move, deploring ‘sanctions on cricket as a result of actions by other autonomous sporting bodies’. But it made no move to readmit South Africa. At the same time, it voted to grant Test status to Sri Lanka.
John Woodcock complained that South African ‘hopes had been falsely raised’. Peter Kirsten, considered one of the more enlightened South African cricketers, told readers of The Cricketer that South Africa’s ‘cause’ had been set back by ‘the infiltration of the ICC by Sri Lanka (a very minor cricketing body). Now the four non-white member countries can vote against the three white member countries.’ He complained that he and his fellow cricketers were being frustrated in their ‘ardent wish merely to take part in the contest of country versus country to show where one’s identity lies’.
This was precisely the problem. The ‘identity’ of South Africa was not a settled thing. It was above all a political question and would remain so as long as the majority were disfranchised.
SACU’s failure to secure readmission to the ICC led to a change in South African strategy. In order to prove its credentials to the English cricket establishment, SACU had opposed Packer, but it had also learned from his example. Official cricket could be made to bow before the power of the market. The English ‘rebel tour’ of 1982, and the West Indian and Sri Lankan tours which followed it, were testimonies to that power. But as with the Packer affair, the authorities themselves had laid the basis for it in preceding years.
In February 1981, the Forbes Burnham government in Guyana had revoked Robin Jackman’s permit to enter the country because of his involvement with apartheid cricket (he had played for Western Province in 1971–72 and for Rhodesia, after UDI, in 1972–73,1976–77 and 1979–80). Alan Smith, the TCCB tour manager, withdrew the rest of the England squad from the Test ‘as it is no longer possible for the Test team to be chosen without restrictions being imposed’. The message from the English authorities, backed by the Tory government, was clear: English cricketers had every right to play in South Africa. The Burnham government’s stance was widely seen in the Caribbean as an attempt to cloak one of the region’s most repressive regimes in the robes of anti-imperialism. The rest of the tour proceeded in the islands without incident, but a warning note had been sounded.
When the English party to tour India was announced the following autumn, Indira Gandhi declared that Geoff Boycott and Geoff Cook, who had played in South Africa, would not be let into the country unless they publicly repudiated apartheid. George Mann, the TCCB chair, insisted: ‘We will not alter our principles of selecting our side on merit. South Africans found that out thirteen years ago. Guyana discovered it last winter and now India’s government know where we stand.’ Nevertheless, Boycott and Cook issued the required statements, and the Indian visas followed. The TCCB then sent a letter to all county players warning them against playing in South Africa. The next month, Jackman, Hendrick, Larkins, Willey, Woolmer, Miller and Old went there to take part in a double-wicket tournament. The TCCB said nothing.
The rebel tour had its genesis when a South African businessman, travelling on a British passport, approached Boycott in the West Indies in 1981. In the midst of the Jackman affair, Boycott divulged the plans to Gooch and others (including Gower, Botham, Emburey and Dilley). All were happy to sign a handwritten letter confirming their interest in the venture. During the following summer, press reports implied that John Edrich, an England selector, was recruiting for SACU. On the arrival of the England squad in India, Christopher Martin-Jenkins revealed that if the official tour had been cancelled ‘some of England’s players might have joined a tour to South Africa’. Over the next few weeks in India, the final plans for the tour were agreed. Five of the sixteen England tourists were involved.
The rebel tour of 1989 was hardly, then, the well-kept secret both the rebels and the cricket authorities later claimed. Lord’s’ first communication with the rebels was in March 1982, after their tour had begun, and was delivered to their South African hotel in a British embassy diplomatic bag. On behalf of the TCCB, DB Carr and FG Mann warned that the ‘strong reaction in England and other countries’ might endanger the visits of India and Pakistan planned for the following summer ‘thus seriously affecting the county finances and the possible future livelihood of fellow cricketers’. The TCCB advised the rebels that ‘if it is thought practicable’, they should ‘refrain’ from playing in ‘international calibre matches’.
Gooch and Boycott claimed that the tour, sponsored by South African Breweries, was neither ‘international’ nor ‘representative’ and was therefore not banned under the Gleneagles declaration. Yet the rebels played what were billed as ‘Test matches’ as the ‘SAB England XI’ against a SACU-selected ‘South Africa’ decked in Springbok emblems.
If the purpose of the tour was genuinely to promote non-racial cricket, as its apologists claimed, the English players could have confined their activities to assisting the development programme. Even John Woodcock, a defender of the tour, was forced to admit: ‘I wish I could say that the tourists found time to go to the townships and help them too. That they didn’t was only partly because time was so short.’ In fact, in the black communities the rebel tourists were seen as sanctions-busters. The whole enterprise profoundly alienated the black majority because it confirmed suspicions that SACU’s one and only priority was getting back into the Test arena. The development programme was purely cosmetic. The white cricket authorities remained devoted to white cricket.
India and Pakistan made it clear they would refuse to visit England unless Gooch’s rebels were banned from international cricket. The TCCB proposed a two-year ban; at the West Indies’ insistence, this was raised to three years, and approved by the ICC in July 1982. The TCCB explained that it had been forced to agree to the ban ‘to preserve international multiracial cricket’. George Mann, the TCCB chair, virtually apologized for it: ‘The players have broken no law, none of our rules. We are not trying to penalize them, merely taking the minimum steps needed to protect cricket.’
In the Commons, Thatcher struck a similar note. She said she did not approve of the tour but claimed: ‘We do not have the power to prevent any sportsmen or women from visiting South Africa or anywhere else. If we did we would no longer be a free country.’ This tallied with Gooch’s own view of his cause: ‘We had taken up the right of an Englishman to earn a living where and in whatever legal way he chooses, which is normally one very good reason for being English.’
Two higher loyalties were being invoked in defence of the rebels: the free market and the English nation. Only a few years before, however, in the Packer affair, these two had been portrayed as mutually exclusive. John Woodcock, who had denounced Greig as a national traitor for taking Packer’s shilling, now damned the TCCB for ‘bowing to political pressures to the consternation not only of the players concerned but also of the average cricket follower’. The ban, he said, made him ‘sick with despair’.
The South African government placed full-page advertisements in the English cricket press protesting about the ‘hypocrisy’ of the ban. Support for the rebels was organized by the newly-founded, South African-funded Freedom in Sport, whose chairman was Lord Chalfont, an MCC member and Lord’s Taverner, as well as a former director of IBM in South Africa and current Thatcher favourite. Chalfont told cricket fans: ‘The TCCB has given in, without even a protest, to a straightforward and impudent piece of political blackmail.’ If India, Pakistan or West Indies were not prepared to play an England team selected solely on merit, they should ‘stay away’. According to Chalfont, it was the TCCB’s patriotic duty to stand up for cricket against ‘bully boys’ and ‘intimidating pressure groups’.
Like Woodcock, Chalfont claimed to be speaking for ‘the average cricket follower’. He warned that English crowds would boycott Tests in which England was ‘not represented by the best available players’. Nothing of the kind happened. Throughout the South African saga, commentators and authorities alike seemed unaware – or unable to admit – that the sports boycott of South Africa enjoyed wide public support.1
The right-wing attacks on the TCCB for selling out to the Third World were expedient demagogy. It was easy for the likes of Chalfont and Denis Compton to call for actions that would have led to a black-white split in world cricket – there was no danger of the TCCB heeding their advice. The English cricket authorities worked hard to bring South Africa back into the fold and to ease the pain of isolation whenever they could. But they would do so only up to the point at which this activity jeopardized England’s own place in world cricket. The ICC tried to maintain the fiction that each country was free to select its own team without interference, but everyone knew that Test cricket was now in the hands of much greater powers. The TCCB had no choice but to bow to that reality, much as it disliked it. Cricket commentators and right-wing politicians were free to indulge their fantasies.
In July 1983, the MCC held a special meeting to debate a proposal to send an ‘England’ tour party to South Africa. The proposal emanated from Freedom in Sport, which had formed a committee of MCC members, fronted by Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, to secure the fifty signatures necessary to force Lord’s to call the meeting. Joe Pamensky announced that SACU would welcome an MCC party. One thousand members packed Westminster Central Hall for the club’s first discussion on South Africa since the D’Oliveira affair. Across Parliament Square, the Commons was debating the return of capital punishment.
John Carlisle, the Tory MP for Luton North, managed that evening both to cast his vote for the death penalty and to move the Freedom in Sport motion at the MCC meeting. A strong supporter of tobacco sponsorship of sport, this former commodities dealer had already declared his belief that ‘the system of apartheid in South Africa has worked in terms of government’. In his speech he denounced the ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘double standards’ of the TCCB and the ICC. The themes were then taken up by Denis Compton, Brian Johnston and the Tory MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, who had business interests in South Africa. Hunter too cast his vote for the rope that night.
The MCC Committee, represented by Colin Cowdrey and Hubert Doggart, opposed the motion, but accepted all the arguments about ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘double standards’. The sad reality, they explained, was that passing the motion would have only one effect: to jeopardize MCC’s remaining influence and with it, Lord’s future as a Test venue. The final vote, including postal ballots, was 4,344 for the motion and 6,604 against. Twenty-five per cent of MCC’s traditionally docile membership had defied the Committee.
The ICC meeting in June 1983 refused delegations from both SACU and the SACB, though TCCB people met informally with SACU representatives, as they did throughout the eighties. Every winter, some seventy English cricketers played and coached in South Africa. The Cricketers’ Association supported the right of cricketers to work and play where they liked – a principle which was abrogated in English county cricket by the TCCB’s hostility to a transfer system. South Africa was, in effect, subsidizing county cricket, providing the winter employment which the counties refused to provide.
But the intercourse between English and South African cricket was increasingly unacceptable to the rest of the cricket world. In response to the rebel tours, the West Indies Board pushed for a clear ICC statement banning cricketers who went to South Africa in the future from playing in Test matches. They also proposed an amnesty for those who had gone in the past. This would have benefited the England side more than anyone else, but the TCCB persistently opposed the West Indies Board. In 1986, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, both at that time merely associate members of the ICC, refused to receive English B teams which included cricketers who had played in South Africa. In Wisden Cricket Monthly David Frith accused the two countries of ‘creating a new form of apartheid’ which denied to ‘the teeming thousands’ of their lands ‘the understanding which is bred through international cricket’.
At the 1987 ICC meeting at Lord’s, West Indies and India proposed to ban from international cricket any player who thereafter engaged in ‘sporting contact’ with South Africa. The TCCB had been given a year’s notice of the motion and had consulted with Sports Minister Colin Moynihan. With Australian support, it succeeded in deferring the matter to a select committee to be chaired by Colin Cowdrey, the new MCC President and ex-officio ICC chairman. Cowdrey’s committee dithered and delayed and in the end came back with no suggestions to resolve the dispute.
During the summer of 1988 it was widely rumoured that moves were afoot to organize a new rebel tour. Thanks to Cowdrey and the TCCB, the ICC meeting at the Oval decided to postpone a decision on the West Indies/India motion yet again. The TCCB argued that British law and opposition by the Cricketers’ Association (whose protests it usually ignored) made imposing a ban difficult.
Two months later, the Rajiv Gandhi government objected to eight members of the England side chosen for the winter tour of India. All of them had played in South Africa and appeared on the United Nations ‘blacklist’. One of them, the putative captain Graham Gooch, disclosed that he had a contract to play in South Africa that winter but would forgo it for the sake of the England captaincy, which had just been offered him.
Long before the selectors met, the Indian Cricket Board had notified the TCCB that India’s immigration laws prohibited entry to sportspeople on the UN blacklist. Nevertheless, Alan Smith, announcing the squad, said he would be ‘surprised and disappointed’ if the Indians raised objections. Peter May, the Chairman of Selectors, insisted, ‘We don’t pick the team for political reasons.’ Earlier that summer he had removed Mike Gatting from the captaincy after it was revealed that Gatting had entertained a woman who was not his wife in a hotel bedroom. The selectors appeared quite prepared to take a moral stand, but not on South Africa. In the end the Indians maintained their objections to Gooch, Lamb, Barnett, Radford and Thomas and the tour was cancelled.
Jack Bailey, who had left the MCC the year before, was one of many within English cricket to accuse the Indian government of double standards. He lamented ‘the remarkable gift of inconsistency possessed by politicians in that part of the world’. But other ICC members had little sympathy for England. The TCCB had dragged its feet at the ICC, where the matter could have been resolved without government interference. In the end, it was the unilateral Indian action which broke through the stonewalling defence of the TCCB and led to the ICC agreement of January 1989.
On behalf of the TCCB, Subba Row and JJ Warr had been engaged in negotiations with other ICC members for months. It was widely known that the ban and amnesty, as proposed three years before by the West Indies, would soon be agreed. At the TCCB meeting on 19 January, four days before the ICC meeting, Pamensky and Bacher were allowed to address the assembled county officials. Bacher made it clear that SACU was contemplating a new rebel tour. The South Africans were applauded, but after they left, the TCCB gave its ICC delegates, Subba Row and Doug Insole, a mandate to ‘exercise the UK vote as appropriate’, which everyone knew meant a ban.
Pamensky and Bacher also met with Carlisle and Norris McWhirter, chair of the Freedom Association, which applied to the court to stop the ICC meeting on the grounds that the proposed ban was an illegal act of ‘blackmail’. This time the ICC was advised by its former adversary, Lord Alexander of Weedon. Justice Taylor ruled against the Freedom Association, describing its action as ‘an abuse of the process of the courts’.
At the ICC meeting, the TCCB suggested that another ‘fact-finding’ mission be despatched to South Africa. This time no other country was prepared to support the idea. The long-standing West Indies proposal was seconded by Sri Lanka. In the interests of the ‘unity and continuity of international cricket’, it was agreed that from April 1989, no one would be selected for international matches who was in ‘sporting contact’ with South Africa. There was to be a clean slate – freeing Gooch and scores of other English players from future taint, as long as they desisted from going to South Africa.
As that year’s MCC President, Lord Bramall had acted as chair of the ICC meeting and announced the historic decision to the press. ‘It isn’t in itself an action against South Africa,’ he insisted. Subba Row admitted, ‘These are the realities of international cricket. We have had to put a curb on our own players, something we had always resisted and we would still rather not do.’
The obvious reluctance with which the TCCB had submitted to the ICC majority made it vulnerable to the familiar charge of expediency. The authorities were accused of betraying England and all it stood for. ‘Foreign governments must be taught that whatever restrictions they place on their citizens, we still live in a free country,’ McWhirter railed. South African all-rounder Clive Rice lectured the TCCB on its national responsibilities: ‘England have backed down on those principles of freedom of choice which they hold dear.’ Here the English nation was harnessed to the free market, and both were placed at the service of the apartheid cause.
For David Frith, the betrayal of the nation was one and the same with the betrayal of cricket itself. ‘Cricket, the sacrificial lamb, has had its throat cut at the altar of political expediency ... England has caved in against the forces of blackmail. And on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Churchill’s death too ...’ Frith’s remedy to this national disgrace was a reassertion of the prerogatives of empire: ‘The “Children” have been feeding off the Mother Country ever since the game was born in these various far-flung lands. What sort of “Mother” is she? Might she not have got tough with her offspring, especially the noisier ones?’
Frith’s contempt for the autonomy of other lands was shared by EM Wellings, who used his Wisden Cricket Monthly column to declare ‘a Hundred Years War’ against the unbearable arrogance of the ‘coloured countries’. Accusing the TCCB of a ‘failure of leadership’, ‘continual retreat and surrender’ and ‘weakness’, not to mention the heinous crime of having ‘accepted dictation from West Indies’, he called on the English authorities to ‘retaliate’ by expelling West Indian cricketers from the county championship.
Curiously, the ICC decision was seen as freeing SACU to play the market. Now that everyone knew exactly the price of busting the boycott, negotiations could begin. Mike Gatting observed, ‘This will mean that there will be even more money knocking around to play in South Africa.’ Jack Bannister reported that eight senior England players would prefer to join a rebel tour to South Africa, if the money was right, instead of the official winter tour to the West Indies.
That spring, SACU staged an expensive ‘centenary’ bash to mark the one hundredth anniversary of South Africa’s entry into Test cricket. What was being celebrated here was the continuity of white South African cricket, making a nonsense of SACU’s claims to represent a radical break with the racist past. Cricket administrators, journalists and former Test cricketers from across the cricket world were invited to the extravaganza. SACU wined and dined them, showed them the development programme, a game reserve, lashings of first-class cricket and specially-staged ‘old-timers’ matches.
Though the TCCB declined the SACU invitation, the English cricket establishment was well represented. MCC sent two official representatives, George Mann (a former TCCB chair) and JJ Warr (who had been acting on behalf of the TCCB only months before).
They were joined by former England players Peter May, MJK Smith, Norman Gifford, Keith Fletcher, Dennis Amiss and, Denis Compton. BBC commentators Trevor Bailey, Tony Lewis, Fred Trueman, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Jack Bannister were also on hand. Bailey and Trueman had already appeared in a SACU promotional video. Martin-Jenkins acted as Master of Ceremonies at one of the SACU banquets. Bannister and Lewis had commentated for the South African Broadcasting Company, and Lewis had smoothed the way for Matthew Maynard and other Glamorgan players to spend winters in South Africa. Ali Bacher explained that Colin Cowdrey, ‘an old ally of South African cricket’ would have liked to attend the festivities but dared not for fear of compromising his chairmanship of the ICC.
The purpose of the whole affair was to encourage the foreign guests to tell the world that South Africa should be readmitted to the cricket community. David Frith was one of many only too happy to oblige. In a seven-page feature in Wisden Cricket Monthly he set out to make up for ‘the outside world’s crass refusal to listen, let alone give credit where it is abundantly due’. South Africa, he reminded his readers, was not the only country with ‘shanties and slums’. Anyway, in Alexandra township, ‘the shanties are being bulldozed away and replaced with blocks of flats’ (which was not what the England A cricketers found when they visited the township four years later). Frith believed that apartheid was already largely dismantled ‘apart from the universal suffrage claimed to be so simple and beneficial an achievement only by those who lack an understanding of South Africa’s complex history’. Frith enjoyed the SACU-organized visits to Sun City in the ‘independent homeland of Bophuthatswana’ and to a ‘Zulu compound’ where ‘villagers frenziedly danced themselves to exhaustion’.
At that year’s MCC annual meeting there was strong support for sending coaches, kit and an under-15 side to South Africa. Compton and Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, the former amateur captain of Hampshire, backed the proposal, but Lord Bramall and the Committee pointed out that if MCC was seen to defy the ICC it would be blamed for ‘wrecking international cricket’ and lose its last shreds of influence. John Stephenson, the MCC Secretary, later reflected:
Is there a conflict in the role of Secretary of MCC and ICC? Well, a lot of MCC members would like to see the MCC helping in South Africa ... But at the same time we administer the ICC, and when we had a meeting in January 1989 there was a unanimous vote against those who play in South Africa. It’s a bit of a tricky one, that.
In April, Ali Bacher was the special guest at the annual Wisden dinner, one of the premier events in the English cricket calendar. He boasted of ‘the revolution taking place in South African cricket’ and portrayed SACU as in the van of the ‘progressive forces ... who want to destroy apartheid’, which was certainly news to the ANC, the trade unions, and the civic associations. We have had a moratorium on international tours,’ he explained, in order ‘to concentrate on the development programme’. That moratorium had lasted all of two years. But SACU’s patience, it seemed, like its commitment to township cricket, was meagre. Because the programme was ‘costly’, Bacher explained, international tours were necessary to fund it (though the previous ones had been loss-makers). ‘We do not want to hurt world cricket with unofficial tours,’ Bacher insisted, ‘but it must be understood that we need outside contact.’
The warning could not have been clearer. News broke in mid summer that sixteen English players (including nine who appeared in that summer’s Ashes series, among them former captain Mike Gatting) would tour South Africa during the coming winter. The TCCB found it ‘particularly distasteful’ that SACU had run ‘a covert recruitment campaign ... even while their officials were enjoying consideration and hospitality from Board representatives’. True, SACU officials had been guests of the TCCB at the Edgbaston Test and the Benson & Hedges Cup Final. But their recruitment campaign was an open secret. Jack Bannister was spreading the word in the counties and dropping heavy hints in the press. Gatting told Micky Stewart about Bacher’s offer. Before turning it down, he wanted assurances about his Test future. Apparently, Stewart failed to offer them. Certainly, Lord’s did nothing to halt the tour.
The tour was announced on BBC TV by Jack Bannister, one of seven BBC commentators on duty that day who had attended the SACU centenary jamboree earlier in the year. As Cricketers’ Association Secretary, Bannister had worked closely with its treasurer, David Graveney, who was to be the tour manager. His uncle, Tom Graveney, was also on BBC duty that day. Like the other commentators, he welcomed the tour. Ray Illingworth summed up the mood: ‘we’ve been dictated to by these countries overseas for too long’. The bias was too much even for the Mail on Sunday, which reported: ‘Christopher Martin-Jenkins announced the news with the air of a head prefect announcing a half holiday. Brian Johnston, his headmaster, smugly observed that, “They are in no way rebels. They are merely following their profession.” “Absolutely,” gushed Martin-Jenkins.’
In this instance, the BBC crew were out of step with the press, which was mostly hostile to the tour. To the Mirror and the Sun, the Gatting men were ‘traitors’. Both papers opposed the sports boycott, but both were keen on ‘national loyalty’. Unlike the 1982 tour, this one was in direct conflict with an official English tour, and one to the West Indies at that. But the main reason for the absence of public sympathy for Gatting’s tourists was the deepening popular contempt for apartheid. Phillip DeFreitas and Roland Butcher, the only black cricketers in Gatting’s sixteen, withdrew from the tour after pressure from the black community in Britain. Among cricket fans, black and white, there was widespread recognition that, in Imran Khan’s words, ‘The central issue raised by the rebel tour is a moral one.’
Earlier in the summer, a delegation from the Mass Democratic Movement, the umbrella group organizing internal opposition to apartheid, visited England to warn cricketers that any rebel tour would be met by mass protests. Krish Mackerdhuj of the SACB (later President of United Cricket Board of South Africa), told the press: ‘Our message is simple. These tours will set back our efforts to develop non-racial sports. They will give comfort to the apartheid regime and its supporters. They will undermine the struggle to create a non-racial and democratic South Africa.’ According to Matthew Engel, the MDM delegation were ‘treated with the contempt to which black South Africans are no doubt accustomed’.
Announcing the tour, Gatting insisted, ‘I know very little about apartheid. I do believe there shouldn’t be any politics in sport.’ On his squad’s arrival at Johannesburg airport, police used dogs, whips and teargas to clear away demonstrators. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Gatting said of the protest, ‘there were a few people singing and dancing and that was it.’
That evening, black workers in the English players’ hotel marched through the lobby in opposition to the tour. Chefs, chambermaids, porters and other staff refused to serve Gatting’s men, who were forced to help themselves and dine in an enclave cordoned off from other customers.
The Alexandra Civic Association mobilized thousands of township youth in a demonstration calling for an end to the SACU development programme, now hopelessly compromised by the tour. Police used dogs and bullets to disperse the crowd. Rebel tourist Chris Cowdrey was contemptuous. ‘The demonstration was a mile and half from the ground. That wasn’t much use to anyone, was it?’
Marches and vigils greeted the English cricketers wherever they went, despite SACU’s decision to switch the first five matches to areas considered more ‘moderate’. Five thousand gathered behind a banner proclaiming: ‘Mike Gatting: we are the masses of Pietermaritzburg and we have arrived. We do not want you in our country.’ Gatting was handed a petition detailing the racist bias of South African sport. Among other facts, it noted that despite what Bacher called SACU’s ‘revolution’, whites, sixteen per cent of the population, had exclusive use of eighty-four per cent of the country’s cricket pitches.
Outside the cricket grounds, demonstrators, organized by the ANC sponsored National Sports Congress, chanted non-stop. A young black man showed Gatting buckshot wounds received on a demonstration outside a cricket ground. ‘It’s nothing to do with us,’ Gatting told the man. Then he confided to reporters, ‘He said he was shot on the way from a peaceful demonstration. That’s bollocks.’
Bacher dished out free tickets in a desperate attempt to get black people into the cricket grounds. Freedom in Sport hired vans to transport them from the townships. But at the Wanderers, half the spectators were said to be police. The Gatting tour cost SACU 14 million rand, five times what it spent annually on the development programme.
Bacher realized he had miscalculated even before de Klerk announced, in the middle of the tour, the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and Communist Party and the release of Mandela and other political prisoners. Bacher was facing direct opposition on his home ground, the like of which he had never expected. It was an expression of the confidence and power of the mass movement for democracy which had matured through bitter struggles during the seventies and eighties. If even the National Party had to bend to this force, how could SACU hope to resist it?
Prodded by the ANC, Bacher and SACU entered negotiations with the National Sports Council. Declaring the moment ‘a time for compromise’, Bacher curtailed the tour. The Mirror gloated: ‘Mike Gatting and his jackals of cricket are coming home early with their bats between their legs.’ Like the barbed wire at Lord’s twenty years before, the police cordon around Gatting’s team in South Africa made all too naked the coercive reality of apartheid which the SACU promoters were hoping to disguise. In the fiasco of the Gatting tour, all the myths propagated by the South Africa lobby in English cricket for twenty years were stripped bare. The tours had nothing to do with township development or the advance of non-racial cricket. SACU did not enjoy large scale black support, was not independent of the government, and had not gone as far as it could. In fact, it had not gone nearly far enough – any more than the government had. All the high-toned rhetoric about a cricketer’s right to work, about bridge-building, about keeping politics out of sport was shown to be nothing but an apology for apartheid.
Those who aided and abetted the cause of white South Africa during the years of isolation were by no means all out-and-out racists, unreconstructed Blimps, or cynical apparatchiks. The roots of English collusion with white South African cricket ran deeper, into the soil of empire, from which the real ‘hypocrisy’ in this long-running saga sprang.
Colin Cowdrey once said that cricket’s motto was ‘friends for life’. This apparently benign notion became, in the mouths of the English cricket establishment, a justification for white solidarity against black demands for equality. Jack Bailey explained their thinking: ‘Those who played and administered cricket’ [in South Africa] ‘had fought side by side with England during the war. Now they needed our help and support ... We were fighting for the world of cricket as we knew it.’
Cricket was identified with empire and both were identified with the free market. In their way stood ‘politics’, portrayed with astonishing disregard for history as an antonym for cricket. In Wisden, John Woodcock warned: ‘Administrators will always do well to remember that they hold the positions they do, not to act as politicians but as guardians of the game of cricket – in South Africa not least.’ Jack Bailey claimed that the ICC ban ‘made political considerations part of the process of qualification’ for ‘the first time’. That the ICC and English cricket had sanctioned the denial of black rights in South African cricket for generations did not seem to Bailey or Woodcock a ‘political’ consideration. It was simply the natural order of things.
Supporters of the boycott were always accused of being ‘anti-cricket’. David Frith ranted regularly against ‘their eager propensity for assaulting the game of cricket, which presents the most defenceless of targets’. ‘These dabblers in inverted racism’ and ‘masters of the hatred game’ were, to Frith and others, enemies of cricket because they wished to exclude white South Africa (and those who aided and abetted it) from the game. They could not accept that it was the exclusivity of apartheid that was inimical to cricket and that the exclusion of South Africa from world cricket was the only way to bring about a broader inclusion, in cricket and well beyond.
The new watchword for South Africa’s friends was ‘bridge-building’, a variant on Lord Harris’s imperial ideology. ‘Cricket is just one way to bridge the gap between the old-fashioned white ruling class and the still largely primitive black tribes,’ explained Martin-Jenkins. It was as if apartheid was based on a misunderstanding, a gap between cultures which cricket could breach.
For many in English cricket, there was something right and just about the world of white South Africa, a world where people knew their places, where white skin brought comforts and privileges which only considerable wealth could purchase in England’s dog-eat-dog world. Here was a hierarchical, leisured society like the long-vanished England embodied in cricket’s traditions. No wonder that for them the defence of white South Africa merged so easily with a defence of ‘England’. No wonder they were unable to understand that by playing in South Africa they were rejecting the multi-racial reality not only of South Africa but of contemporary Britain itself. White supremacy was identified with the stability and orderliness which England had forfeited some time after the Second World War. The fact that in reality South Africa was one of the world’s most unstable and disorderly societies did not stop some cricket writers from turning it into one of the many ‘lost paradises’ which resonate in the literature of the game.
Gooch, Boycott, Gatting and others openly admired the white lifestyle in South Africa. Gooch was impressed by the standard of cricket in white South African schools, which ‘makes the English schools system look a sorry mess’. Boycott, according to Gooch, was ‘in his element in South Africa, where he had plenty of friends, a great deal of contacts and – important to him – a true liking for the country’.
The English rebels and their supporters inevitably absorbed the logic of white privilege. They took refuge in the cultural exclusivism promoted by the ‘new racism’ in Britain and consonant with the ‘multi-national’ strategy adopted by apartheid itself in the seventies and eighties. ‘South Africa’s non-white races are anything but harmonious,’ Gooch informed English cricket fans. ‘The Indians, Africans and coloureds are invariably at odds with each other.’ He had no doubt that ‘to suddenly hand over control to the blacks would create a situation of pure farce’. Gatting, too, believed that ‘the Zulus are more moderate’, and that therefore the abolition of apartheid was ‘more complicated’ than people in England appreciated. Walter Hadlee, doyen of New Zealand cricket, insisted that ‘the matter of separate development is for the determination of those who reside in southern Africa. There is evidence that some ethnic groups prefer separate development.’
If the cultures of southern Africa were thus mutually exclusive, it followed that cricket, the embodiment of the (English and white) culture of empire and the market, must be foreign to Africans. Richard Hutton informed readers of The Cricketer that ‘among the African communities the natural inclination is still towards Association football’. Gooch picked up the theme, one of apartheid’s hoariest myths: ‘the blacks and the coloureds have no historical background in the game’. Accusing the SACB of practising a ‘reversal of apartheid’, he complained that ‘coloured cricketers who choose to play in the predominantly white leagues have been persecuted by their own kind in an unpleasant situation which reminds me of striking miners attacking their working colleagues’.
Gooch was only repeating what he had been told by SACU and its defenders in the English media. Like the scabbing miners, those who played for SACU did indeed face ostracism within their own communities – but they were handsomely rewarded by the establishment. The real sacrifices were being made by those (mainly black) South African cricketers who resisted SACU’s bribes. The career choices confronting these people were infinitely more difficult, more crucial to their standard of living and even physical survival, than ‘the difficult choices’ faced by Gooch and other English cricketers tempted by the rand.
Wisden, along with most of the cricket media, never acknowledged the existence of any non-SACU cricket. Until 1991, it refused to include the SACB in its international directory of cricket bodies, which listed the Argentine Cricket Association, the Israel Cricket Association, the Japan Cricket Association, the Scarborough Festival and the Sports Turf Researching Association. By blotting out the existence of SACB and the long tradition of independent black cricket it represented, the South Africa lobby was able to promote the township development programme as a benign missionary venture. Apartheid would be mitigated by white paternalism from above, not black struggle from below. Lurking behind the argument was the old imperial assumption that blacks were not capable of governing themselves. This was the subtext of the clamour against ‘Third World hypocrisy’. Martin-Jenkins argued that the boycott was illogical because ‘South Africa has no monopoly on racial prejudice. India, Pakistan and Guyana exercise some repression on ethnic and religious grounds.’ He might have added Britain, Australia and New Zealand to his list. All differed from South Africa in that none openly disfranchised the majority of the population on the basis of skin colour.
However, the charge that cricket and sport in general were being asked to bear the brunt of the global crusade against apartheid, while commerce proceeded largely unfettered, was true. The rebels and their champions laid claim to nothing more than the freedom that British capital enjoyed in the South African market. It seemed to them grotesquely unjust that cricket should be ‘singled out’. Gooch and Gatting, apparently oblivious to the student-initiated boycott of Barclays (which ultimately forced the bank out of South Africa) and the anti-apartheid pickets outside British supermarkets, protested that ‘no one complained’ about businessmen pursuing trade in South Africa.
The sports boycott was only part of the anti-apartheid movement’s general call for sanctions, a strategy of isolating apartheid on every front. The strategy was more effective in sport than in other areas for one simple reason: black nations have power in sport which they do not have in the market. The boycott was always more tenuous in rugby and golf, where black players were rare, and more stringent in athletics and cricket, which depended commercially on black participation. The West Indies, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka could hold international cricket ‘to ransom’ because, within international cricket, they enjoyed an equality denied them in other spheres.
The friends of South Africa in English cricket believed they were upholding both cricket and the market (and the white race) against arrogant ‘Third World politicians’. They could not understand that these politicians derived their power from cricket’s level playing field, which upended the market that had drawn English cricket to South Africa in the first place.
The game itself had taken revenge. It was not an accident that sport led the way in forging international opposition to apartheid. Because it was familiar to millions, sport offered a powerful public focus to the anti-apartheid movement. Many found this objectionable. Jack Bannister whined: ‘Sportsmen are again being asked to forgo huge sums of money to appease the consciences of others.’ He assumed, it seems, that they had no consciences of their own. Asif Iqbal, in contrast, was ‘proud of the fact that my sport should be serving as an instrument for a cause the morality of which is far above any banal platitude about politics and sport’.
The South Africa lobby’s claim that it spoke for the cricket public in England was predicated on the assumption that this public shared its conception of ‘what England stood for’. The rebels and their friends could not understand that their tolerance of apartheid in South Africa seemed to many a rejection of the multi-racial reality of Britain today, including British cricket crowds. One of the reasons the TCCB had to give way on the ICC was that it knew the public would not forgive it for getting England excluded from international cricket, no longer seen as whites-only cricket, for the sake of South Africa.
Throughout English cricket’s long collaboration with apartheid, nation, market and cricket were invoked as avatars of each other. Yet it was the fractures between them that dictated the real course of events. Apartheid was sustained by the international market which had created it. English professionals claimed the right to play cricket in South Africa as part of their right to work and, above all, move freely in search of work – precisely the right that was denied the black majority under the Group Areas Act. The irony was that apartheid was itself an abrogation of the market: it kept blacks off the level playing field.
To assert the right to play cricket in South Africa was to assert ancient English prerogatives. But here the rights of the ‘English nation’ as asserted by the South Africa lobby came increasingly into conflict with other peoples’ assertions of their own national rights, in the Caribbean, the Asian subcontinent, Britain and, of course, South Africa. What tilted the balance in favour of the latter was cricket itself, which gave new and non-imperial nations a leverage that they did not enjoy elsewhere. Cricket became a democratic counter-force to the amorality of the market. It became a vehicle for anti-racist solidarity, just as it had served for so many years as a vehicle for the solidarity of the white rulers.
The reconciliation process which unfolded in South Africa after the collapse of the Gatting tour was applauded everywhere, especially in the cricket world. It did not, however, proceed without dissent, hesitations, ironies and strange reversals. Its ultimate outcome remains in doubt, as does the outcome of the larger, national reconciliation process which it so uncannily mirrors.
The first, tense meeting between the SACB and SACU was held in Durban in September 1990. The negotiations, under the supervision of Steve Tshwete, the former Robben Island prisoner and ANC sports spokesperson, took eight months. Eventually, a ‘Declaration of Intent’ was agreed. All parties pledged themselves to rectify the gross racial imbalance in South African cricket. Priority would be given to development, not international tours.
On 29 June 1991, the United Cricket Board of South Africa was born, with ten members from SACU and ten from SACB on its Executive. The event was celebrated with a banquet in Johannesburg attended by Walter Sisulu and E. W. Swanton, Sam Ramsamy and Ali Bacher, Sunil Gavaskar, Gary Sobers, Richie Benaud and the Pollock brothers. A few days later the UCBSA delegation flew to London for the annual ICC meeting.
Tshwete and Bacher lobbied the High Commissions of all the ICC members. It was agreed that India would propose the UCBSA’s admission to international cricket. It would be too compromising for all concerned to have the TCCB propose it. West Indies and Pakistan abstained on the vote, but the rest supported the UCBSA application. Welcoming the decision, an emotional Ali Bacher at last acknowledged the role of the black SACB cricketers ‘who deserve even more credit than we for keeping the game alive with very poor facilities’.
Not everyone was pleased at the speed of unification. For Hassan Howa, the whole business smacked of ‘indecent haste’. He refused to visit the Newlands ground at Cape Town to his dying day in 1992. Nelson Mandela dismissed accusations that the ANC had given ground too quickly on the resumption of international cricket tours. ‘We have extremists who say that there can be no normal sport in a racial society,’ he pronounced, without intended irony, ‘but it seems to me that sport is sport and quite different from politics. If sportsmen here take steps to remove the colour bar, then we must take that into account.’ Only a year before, he had attacked Thatcher before the Wembley crowd with these words: ‘It is only those who support apartheid who say that the Pretoria government should be rewarded for the small steps it has taken.’
The debate over the pace of change will only intensify in the years to come. How long before we see black players in the Test side? Will development or international tours take priority? Will affirmative action really change the SACU ethos of paternalism? Can the entrenched resistance of the old white guard, still ruling the roost in cricket clubs across the land, be overcome? Will development be aimed at producing showpiece players for the national squad, or will it tend the grass roots? Will it, as Khaya Majola, now the UCBSA director of development, promises, ‘teach people that cricket is not just about survival, but joy’?
All these questions are echoed in the complex process under way today in South Africa. With the end of apartheid and the coming of democracy, will white and black in South Africa at long last share a level playing field? How will the legacy of apartheid be redressed? Are electoral democracy and legal equality enough? Or will more radical solutions have to be found?
The lesson of the years of isolation is that cricket cannot be an island. The tensions between the dictates of the market and the promise of democracy which will course through South African society in the years to come will also run through South African cricket.
English commentators have persisted in speaking of South Africa’s ‘return’ to international cricket, but in South Africa itself there is greater awareness that this is not a return, but a new departure. Too many in the English cricket world have celebrated the resumption of a ‘normal’ cricket that never existed. The South Africa admitted to Test status by the ICC is not the South Africa of old and is far from fully fledged, either on the cricket field, or in the wider world. It is a nation still in the making, threatened by reaction and division, but full of a promise that England can only envy.2
The ICC meeting which agreed to admit South Africa to the 1992 World Cup was held in Sharjah, twenty-five kilometres up the Persian Gulf coast from Dubai. This bright and arid desert city seems a long way from the misty village greens of England, but it is today one of the world’s major cricket venues, and a fitting meeting place for the new world cricket order.
The game was first brought to the United Arab Emirates by British oil companies, but it was migrant workers from the subcontinent who put Sharjah on the international cricket map. The oil sheikhs had imported a proletariat. As elsewhere, this proletariat sought self-expression through sport, notably cricket.
Big cricket in the Gulf began in 1980, when Miandad’s XI played Gavaskar’s XI to raise money for the newly-established Cricketers’ Benefit Fund. According to Asif Iqbal, who organizes the matches in Sharjah for the CBF: ‘We hoped to provide a much-needed service primarily for cricketers in the Third World and to do so in a more dignified manner than is done in England where he is virtually made to go around with a begging bowl.’ It was a return to the old days of Clarke’s XI, when professionals organized their own benefit matches. And like Clarke’s XI, the CBF series opened up a new market for cricket, a market hitherto ignored by the authorities.
Between 1983 and 1993, twelve one-day international series were staged in Sharjah, which acquired a pavilion, floodlights and luxury boxes. The CBF organizers pay substantial sums to the official boards to send top-class teams. Prize money is handsome ($30,000 for the winner and $20,000 for the runner-up in the 1990 Australasia Cup, which cost over $1 million to stage). The participating boards now nominate the series’ beneficiaries, who have included Gordon Greenidge, Wasim Raja, Salim Malik, Madan Lal, Allan Border and a host of lesser-known veterans. In 1993, in the Wills International Trophy (contested by Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe), the two beneficiaries, Sikander Bakht and Rameez Raja, received $35,000 each. The prize money is supplemented by donations and gifts from local supporters. In 1991, Javed Miandad received a new Mercedes and $150,000 from an expatriate Pakistani businessman.
Cricket at Sharjah is broadcast by the Hong Kong-based Star TV to hundreds of millions across Asia. Television, music and film stars from the subcontinent turn up at the matches to enhance their celebrity status. As the world’s first ‘neutral’ cricket capital, Sharjah was recruiting neutral umpires five years before the ICC began appointing them for Test matches.
Between 1983 and 1993, Pakistan played thirty-five one-day internationals in Sharjah. India played thirty, Sri Lanka twenty-one, the West Indies fourteen, Australia ten, New Zealand six and England three. Australia have visited the Gulf three times; England only once, in 1986–87. Clearly, Star TV and its vast market mean little to the TCCB. But England have been reluctant to play in Sharjah for other reasons as well.
Ever since the flop of the Triangular Test series of 1912, it has been the received wisdom in England that punters will not pay to watch two foreign teams play on neutral ground. But the success of the World Cup tournaments, of the Nehru and Hero Cups in India, of the World Series Championship in Australia, not to mention the Sharjah series, suggests otherwise. Along with much else, England will have to abandon its old bilateral approach to international cricket if it is to assume a place as an equal among equals, not a former master, in world cricket.3
In the years after World War II, British officials held commanding positions in numerous world sporting bodies, both amateur and professional (the Olympics, athletics, tennis, soccer, hockey, boxing and, of course, cricket). Back in 1968, no one thought it necessary to specify that the new TCCB was the ‘UK’ or ‘British’ or ‘English’ TCCB, unlike its foreign counterparts, which all incorporated their countries’ name. Similarly, Britain is the only country which does not print its name on its postage stamps. Back in 1968, the qualifying adjective ‘British’ or ‘English’ was also omitted from the names of the Football Association, the Rugby Football Union, the Lawn Tennis Association and the Amateur Athletics Federation. This nomenclature was a legacy of the origins of these sports in Britain, and an indication that British sporting bodies had yet to escape from old imperial presumptions. Like Britain’s place on the UN Security Council, its continuing clout in the administration of world sport, particularly cricket, was an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution and empire. But it was no longer commensurate with the country’s economic status nor with its performances on the sporting field.
Over the past decade, England has been gradually pushed aside within the ICC, which changed from a ‘Conference’ to a ‘Council’ in 1989. That year, it decided to elect its own chairman, rather than allow the MCC President to occupy the post ex-officio. Thus, Colin Cowdrey became the unlikely superintendent of England’s loss of administrative supremacy within cricket, its last imperial sinecure. The veto enjoyed by the ‘founder members’, England and Australia, was surrendered. In January 1993, the ICC voted to appoint David Richards of the Australian Cricket Board as international cricket’s first Chief Executive, replacing the MCC Secretary who had administered the ICC since its founding in 1909.
In July 1993 Clyde Walcott, the former West Indian batsman wicket-keeper, became the first non-English and non-MCC chair of the ICC. His only rival, the TCCB nominee, Raman Subba Row, was easily defeated. Walcott was backed by Ali Bacher, who seemed to have metamorphosed into one of those manoeuvring Third World cricket politicians his old supporters so despised.
Walcott and Richards share a belief that cricket, in Richards’s phrase, ‘must be expansive’. Richards sees Sharjah as a model for what he calls ‘off-shore cricket’. He wants the ICC to catch up with the new global media market. ‘With the way the world is shrinking, what is absolutely essential now is to have a global attitude and to have people thinking internationally at all levels.’ He sees satellite and cable TV bringing cricket to Europe, North America, South East Asia, even China and Japan, assuming the missionary role once played by imperial schoolmasters, civil servants, soldiers and vicars.
Recent years in Sharjah have shown that ‘off-shore cricket’ is not immune from international tensions. In the 1991–92 Wills Trophy final, the heart of the Indian batting order–Shastri, Azharuddin, Tendulkar – was wiped out by a hat-trick of LBWs from Pakistan’s Aqib Javed. The Sri Lankan umpires were accused of bias, as were the Muslim officials organizing the event. For over two years India boycotted Sharjah. The oil sheikhs talking about fair play and the traditions of cricket could not gloss over the realpolitik of the subcontinent. Sharjah became the site for a proxy war between India and Pakistan.
In 1994, the United Arab Emirates, which had been admitted as an associate member of the ICC only three years before, won the ICC Trophy in Kenya and thus qualified for the next World Cup. Other competitors complained that the UAE team was in reality a ‘Pakistan second eleven’. The global market that created cricket in Sharjah blurs national boundaries, but it does not necessarily reconcile nations. Indeed, by making the question of nationality so problematic, it intensifies disputes about who belongs to which nation, not least in England itself.
Richards’s vision of the global spread of cricket is likely to prove as wide of the mark as Bowen’s prophecy of terminal decline. The audience for cricket no longer inhabits a single, unifying economic market, as it did in the days of empire. And England is no longer the metropolis, the centre of gravity around which satellite countries revolve. The world may he shrinking, but it is also fragmenting.
The new democracy in the ICC is bound to be less stable than the old paternalism. The founder members’ veto has been replaced by an understanding that major decisions must pass by a two-thirds majority. The nine full members, with two votes each, will have to look for support from the nineteen associate members, with one vote each. Will a stable alliance emerge to take the place of the old Australia/England axis? As the world divides into giant trading blocs, the Test countries are being pulled into conflicting economic and political orbits: the West Indies towards North America; England towards the European Community; Australia and New Zealand into the eastern Pacific rim. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka form a massive economic bloc in themselves with aspirations to compete with the big three. South Africa and Zimbabwe have links with all the blocs. Increasingly, only cricket unites these cultures – cricket and capitalism. As new alliances are forged and broken, new interests will come into the game, and with them new priorities and values.
Sport, like the market and the rule of law, is portable because its rules are impersonal and universal. Like the market and the rule of law, sport brings changes wherever it goes. All three integrate people into an international system, putting an end to self-contained cultures. But the portability of cricket, compared with other sports, is limited. Everywhere, it has to struggle before taking root in new soil – and that soil always changes it. It is adopted and adapted.
Cricket followed the English, but not systematically, not everywhere. Only where England wielded state power – where the British military and civil service supervised imperial interests – did cricket thrive. Where the public-school elite did not govern, it failed. With its roots in the landed gentry, the game was well suited to the needs of a colonial caste which allowed middle-class people to acquire land and servants and re-create themselves as landed gentry. Playing cricket, for them, was an assertion of Englishness in a foreign land. At the same time, its inclusive premises allowed it to become a means of bonding local elites to British rule. As a rule, little effort was made to inculcate Christianity or British dietary habits in the governed populations, but cricket was promoted relentlessly.
The cultural baggage cricket carries weighs heavily on the game wherever it goes. As the visible token of English presence, it flourished only where Englishness was identified with a wider, imperial community. Elsewhere, it floundered.
In Argentina, Portugal and other independent countries under British commercial dominance, cricket was played from the early nineteenth century. Clubs and competitions were set up, some of which still exist, but the game did not spread to the locals beyond the small minority who attended English-style public schools. In 1948, the nationalist demagogue Eva Peron demanded that the English-run Buenos Aires Cricket Club give up its historic ground, built in 1864, for a welfare scheme. When the gentlemen of Buenos Aires CC refused, she incited a mob to burn their clubhouse to the ground.
The Irish rejection of cricket was explicitly political. In the seventeenth century Cromwell issued a ban on cricket in Ireland and his troops confiscated cricket bats – an indication that cricket of some sort was popular among the Irish peasantry and not regarded yet as especially ‘English’. In the nineteenth century it was played every where in the island, except, ironically, by the Scots Presbyterians in Ulster. An Irish cricket annual was published from 1865 (only a year after Wisden) until 1881, the year the land agitation began. In 1879 an Irish XI toured North America. Parnell was himself a keen cricketer, but under the impact of the national movement with which he was associated, Irish cricket crumbled.
This movement defined itself as anti-English and, increasingly, republican. As it became a mass movement in the late nineteenth century it embraced organized sport as a weapon. The Gaelic Athletic Association was founded in 1884 on the model of the Amateur Athletic Association in England, but soon rejected English sports and instead revised and codified traditional Irish games. It demanded that all participants in Gaelic sports boycott British games. While football survived, cricket was driven into a redoubt among the Ulster middle classes and the public schools in the south. It became a victim of the world’s first organized sports boycott.
Billy Power, one of the Birmingham Six, acquired a taste for Test cricket during his seventeen years in British prisons. ‘It kills a lot of time,’ he explained. He described a triangular cricket tournament he had seen in Albany prison: the three sides were Irish, Black and ‘English’. In an English gaol, playing cricket seems a perfectly good way to get back at the English. But in Ireland itself, not playing it is even better.
The greatest single national defection from cricket’s cause was the United States. The traditional American explanation for baseball’s triumph over cricket is tautologous. America embraced baseball because baseball was intrinsically American. Compared with cricket, it was faster, less time-consuming, more clear-cut, and thus in tune with an emergent national culture. Baseball simply grew, like corn and tobacco, out of the American landscape. What is missing from this argument is the element of struggle, the competition for cultural space which baseball entered in the late 1840s and from which it emerged, fifty years later, triumphant.
Although English immigrants and visitors had been playing cricket in America since the seventeenth century, it was not until 1850 that American-born youth in Philadelphia took it up. They were inspired by the English textile workers and potters in Germantown and nearby New Jersey, artisanal expatriates driven from England by poverty and political suppression, and carrying the same Chartist heritage which shaped William Clarke’s itinerant XI. To the young Philadelphians, sons of professionals and stockbrokers, cricket seemed more sophisticated than the rudimentary stick-and-ball games then played across North America. It was worthy of regular practice and play, and investment in facilities. Clubs were founded and the game soon spread to New York.
Within a few years cricket had grown sufficiently to warrant the first-ever English overseas tour, a commercial venture organized by George Parr, Clarke’s successor as captain of the All-England XI, and RA Fitzgerald, the future MCC Secretary. ‘Cricket in Philadelphia,’ Fred Lillywhite observed, ‘has every prospect of becoming a national game.’
Baseball borrowed the terms umpire and inning (reduced to the singular) from cricket, but little else, though batters were initially called strikers. It was an urban phenomenon, played by New York clerks and artisans, who formed baseball fraternities which quickly donned colourful uniforms. In 1845, the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club drafted the sport’s first set of rules. Foul lines were introduced, giving spectators a closer view of play. Each inning was limited to three outs, thus compressing it in time. Over the next decade, nine innings became the standard length of a game, which could now be completed in three hours.
In the mid-1850s, Henry Chadwick, an English expatriate, began writing about baseball for the Brooklyn Eagle and other papers. He gave it the box score and batting averages, both derived from cricket, and for over forty years pressed its claim to be the supreme American sport. In 1857, Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a sporting weekly, argued that just as the English had cricket, so Americans should have ‘a game that could be termed a “Native American Sport”’, by which the paper meant baseball.
When Walt Whitman, Chadwick’s fellow journalist at the Brooklyn Eagle, anointed himself the prophet of American democracy, he also took up the cause of baseball. ‘It’s our game, that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game.’ For Whitman (bizarrely echoing Thomas Hughes) baseball had ‘the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere – belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life’. Baseball promised to unify the American diversity, something which cricket could not offer.
It has to be remembered that the ‘special relationship’ and popular American Anglophilia is a creation of the Second World War. Except among a narrow eastern white Protestant elite, Anglophobia was the rule, especially among the Irish immigrants who formed such a large proportion of the nascent urban working class.
Baseball and cricket grew side by side in the 1850s. Clearly, baseball enjoyed advantages in a mobile, expanding society. You didn’t need to dig or mow a pitch. You didn’t need stumps. You just needed a bat, a ball and ‘bases’, for which almost anything would serve. Just prior to the Civil War, the Brooklyn Excelsiors, one of the first professional baseball sides, toured the country, and like Clarke’s XI introduced the joys of their game to new regions, including Philadelphia.
During the war, the British government was on the losing side, blockade-running for the Confederates whose slave-based cotton economy fed the mill industries of Lancashire. That could not have aided cricket’s cause. More importantly, the Civil War brought together young American males from all over the country. Because it was already systematized and widely reported, baseball as codified in New York was adopted in preference to other local variants.
The Civil War created, for the first time in US history, a strong central state with a large standing army. It also unleashed American capitalism, and in so doing created a new American market, in which commercial baseball flourished. Mark Twain called the game ‘the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!’
Baseball took to commercialism with much less fuss than cricket. The objections of the old co-operative fraternities, for whom amateurism meant not social exclusion, as it did in England, but independence from employers, were brushed aside by a booming market. In the 1870s, the leading clubs became joint-stock ventures. The first all professional club was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, sponsored by local businessmen and politicians and managed by the Englishman Harry Wright, a former cricketer. The National League was founded in 1876 by another former cricketer, Albert Spalding, who had become a professional baseball pitcher and later a team owner. Baseball had its first cartel.
In 1890 the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players rebelled against the owners’ ‘reserve clause’ (which denied them freedom of movement), denounced the National League as ‘stronger than the strongest trust’ and set up an alternative Players’ League. Harry Wright was one of the few scabs. Spalding warned of ‘anarchy’. He suborned the Players’ League’s financial backers and forced the professionals back under the National League umbrella, which, he promised, would restore ‘to all its purity our national game’.
As baseball became an American institution (William Howard Taft threw out the first ball of the season in 1910, thus linking the cult of the Presidency to the national pastime), it sought an exclusively American history. According to Spalding, saying that baseball had been invented in America was like saying ‘two plus two equals four’. Chadwick pointed out the game’s probable origin in English rounders, but this offended the baseball establishment. Spalding set up a special commission of seven men, including two US Senators, to investigate the game’s origins. After due deliberation, the commission declared that baseball had been created in the year 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, by Abner Doubleday, later a Civil War general. Accordingly, in 1939, the sport celebrated its official centennial and opened its Hall of Fame in rural Cooperstown. Baseball, like cricket, had become a pastoral. Its roots in urban America were disguised.
It was cricket’s associations, both national and social, more than its Laws of play, that left it vulnerable to the rise of baseball. After the Civil War, cricket, though still widely understood and played, became increasingly the pastime of a plutocratic Philadelphia elite. It became the property of men of property, men who wanted to differentiate themselves from the polyglot, multi-racial, multi-religious hordes busily creating a new type of ‘American’, not least on and around the baseball diamond.
Even as its appeal contracted, Philadelphia cricket, spurred by visits from England, reached a high plateau of excellence in the 1890s, producing several world-class cricketers, notably the fast bowler Bart King, who headed the English first-class averages in 1908, taking 87 wickets at 11.01. But English immigrants no longer proselytized for cricket. They wanted to become Americans, as did other immigrants, and baseball was (and remains) a way of doing that. Competitive US cricket lingered on until the 1920s when a new mass culture took shape under the impact of radio, movies and newspapers. Baseball boomed as never before. Cricket was swept away.
The characteristic illusion of US sport is its universality. Baseball has its World Series, American football its Super Bowl, and in basketball the NBA Champions are definitely the world champions. Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning home run in 1951 was ‘the shot heard round the world’. There is an unself-conscious assumption here that America is in itself a world, maybe even that it is the world. The size of the American market and America’s global military dominance have enabled the country to persist in this delusion, but it cannot last for ever. With the growth of the game in Latin America and the Far East, the majority of baseball players and fans are now non-English speaking. It may not be long before the US has to face the kind of historical humiliation which has been England’s lot on the cricket field for decades.
Meanwhile, immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia have reintroduced cricket to North America, which David Richards sees as a new market for the ex-imperial game. But cricket is unlikely to carve out a niche in American culture the way reggae has. It faces too much cultural competition, not least from baseball.
Wherever cricket prospered, there was a contest, as there was in England, for control of the game. In Australia the battle was between Anglophile officials and the more ‘Australian’ working-class players and spectators. In the West Indies, the white plantocracy and merchants gave way to a black petty bourgeoisie. Again and again the same questions were raised: who owns the nation? To whom does the cricket side rightly belong?
In India, cricket was initially organized along communal lines. There were Parsi, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh sides. This was in keeping with the method used by the British for ruling India, predicated on the ahistorical notion that Indian society was made up of mutually exclusive religious communities. Gandhi, who knew that unity was the key to independence, condemned cricket matches played between religious communities.
Under the government of the secular Nehru, independent India did away with the communal competitions. Interestingly, this Old Harrovian barrister, who had turned the ideology of fair play and the promises of empire against the British, only really showed an interest in cricket after independence, when he would occasionally appear in matches with parliamentary colleagues. India had inherited cricket, along with its army, civil service, capital city, and the Ambassador motor car, from its former masters. But it is a common English misconception that the popularity of cricket in modern India is some kind of fond tribute to the Raj. It is not. Indian cricket today is something new and different.
The Congress governments of the fifties, sixties, and seventies used the state to build up indigenous Indian capital (including a major industrial base). A wall of protection shielded the country’s economy from penetration by multi-nationals, just as its non-alignment kept it out of the Cold War. At the same time, Indian cricket acquired, for the first time, a mass base, putting down roots far beyond the old English speaking enclaves. Clubs were established in schools, colleges, factories and offices; a plethora of competitions grew up and, of course, a bureaucracy to supervise them.
Cricket in India unites the purchasing classes. As it did in Victorian England, it binds together middle and upper strata – only in India today it does so through a common consumer culture. Revealingly, cricket in India is sponsored by a much wider range of industries than in England. The Tatas, Mafatlal and other industrial and commercial giants are heavily involved, as are the civil service, where the Indian private and public sectors mesh, and the banks. International cricket matches are major social occasions. As Mihir Bose put it, cricket, like the film industry, ‘mixes glamour with money’. Cricket is fashionable, as it was in late-eighteenth-century England.
The long era of Congress rule produced a new middle class whose aspirations the protected economy could not meet. Many turned away from Congress, whose electoral hegemony was maintained only by the muddle of its opponents on left and right. The Congress itself then turned to the free-market miracle cure. Since the late eighties, and especially since the end of the Cold War (and with it ‘non-alignment’), ‘liberalization’ has become the new consensus.
Today, India, with the twelfth-largest GDP in the world, is trying to sell itself as the mega-market of the nineties. Indian companies now sponsor cricket to ‘emphasize their global ambitions’. Reliance, Hero, Honda are all aiming at the jean-buying generation. Sachin Tendulkar advertises the Sunny 50cc motorcycle produced by Bajaj. The Indian middle classes, which have largely abandoned hockey, love cricket, the world game, just as they seek a place in, and access to, the world market.
When college youth, the consumers of the future, were asked by the magazine India Today, ‘Who is your role model?’ Twenty-five per cent cited Rajiv Gandhi (a dead man). The most-often-cited living person was the Indian cricket captain, Mohammad Azharuddin (a Muslim), with fourteen per cent. The Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, was back in the pack with four per cent. Besides its own, vast internal audience, Indian cricket enjoys an audience throughout the Indian diaspora – in North America, Europe, South East Asia, South Africa and Australia. Liberalization has meant a new emphasis on the role of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) in the economy, and cricket, through satellite and cable broadcasts, is a means of linking up with them. Indian cricket is thus becoming not merely a fusion of English and Indian experience but a meeting place for India and the new global media market.
That has disturbed the Hindu nationalists of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s official opposition. They fear that Star TV may act as a conduit into India for alien cultures. Shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought Star in late 1993, he flew to India, where he met with the Prime Minister. The BJP denounced him as a pornographer and a threat to national integrity. Murdoch tried to assuage them by disavowing the Sun’s page-three photos.
Meanwhile, Hindu nationalist sentiments have been growing among the cricket consuming classes. Chetan Chauhan, the former Indian Test opener, has been a BJP Member of Parliament. Like its right-wing counterparts in Europe, the BJP seeks to exploit popular cynicism towards politicians and bureaucrats by promoting an exclusivist national identity. The BJP claims that successive governments have ‘pandered’ to the 100-million-strong Muslim minority. Like Norman Tebbit, the BJP is trying to rally an embattled majority, and invoking the twin phantom enemies of that majority: the establishment and the minorities. They have even applied their own version of the Tebbit test to Indian cricket.
For ten years a Muslim aristocrat, Mansur Ali Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi (Winchester, Oxford), captained the Indian Test side. During his captaincy, India did not play against Pakistan. Another Indian Muslim, Abbas Ali Baig (Oxford) was not so lucky. After making a century on his Test debut against England, he continued to play well in 1959–60 against Benaud’s Australians. But he failed in the 1961 series against Pakistan. His loyalty to the Indian cause was questioned by politicians and journalists. He was dropped for six years.
The same themes were sounded when India resumed playing Pakistan in 1978, after a gap of seventeen years. Hindu nationalist politicians suggested that Indian Muslims secretly supported Pakistan in cricket: proving that because they were loyal Muslims they had to be disloyal Indians. When Pakistan lost to Australia in Lahore in the 1987 World Cup, BJP activists distributed sweets in Gujerat, one of India’s communal flashpoints. The ploy led, as the BJP intended, to the taunting of Muslims in the streets and outbreaks of violence.
In 1991, a Pakistani visit to India was cancelled for the second successive year following threats of disruption by Hindu communalists. Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena, a semi-fascist party based in Maharashtra, declared that it was ‘anti-national’ to play against Pakistan. His supporters dug up the pitch at Bombay’s Wankhede stadium and threatened to burn it to the ground.
The imperial game has become a national game. In India, this has made it a barometer for the tensions of liberalization: the contrary pulls of market and nation.
Nationalism explains why some peoples take up cricket and why others put it down. In India, Australia and the West Indies, it was disseminated by the elite, and there taken up by the masses. In Ireland and North America, it was disseminated by the elite, but there rejected by the masses. What seems to determine the success or failure of cricket in each case is the relation of the elite to the masses, and how race and nation enter into the struggle between them. The fate of cricket in South Africa, the United States, Ireland, the West Indies, India or Australia was shaped by the interplay between the inclusive and exclusive identities associated with the game.
If you see nations, including England, as monoliths, you can never understand why or how cricket survived or perished. Test sides do not display durable national characteristics, no less racial characteristics. But on the cricket field, in the course of pitting themselves against the representatives of other nations, they do display the highly contested process of national self-definition. Test cricket is a struggle between nations in which nations are forged.
Surveying global cricket, John Arlott observed: ‘English cricket is a game apart. So is Australian, Indian, West Indian. Even Pakistani cricket is different from Indian.’ The reason for this national differentiation, Arlott believed, was that cricket was ‘the deepest game, the profoundest, requiring the deepest and profoundest thought’.
It is an old cliche that ‘temperament’ is the key to success at the highest level of sport. In contests in which high degrees of skill and physical prowess are often evenly matched, the subjective factors sway the result. Cricket’s complexity, its open-endedness in time and space, gives even more scope for ‘temperament’ than other sports. It is often said that Test cricket is played in the mind. The mind of a Test player, as much as anyone else’s, is informed by his sense of who he is in the wider world and what he has in common with the people he works or plays with. Because of that, the performances of Test cricketers are inflected by their understanding of what the people they ‘represent’ on the cricket field expect and believe.4 This is what makes Test cricket such supreme drama.
It is also why politics is bred into cricket. It is not an optional ingredient, offensive to some and intriguing to others. It is the yeast that makes the dough rise. As Asif Iqbal put it: ‘Sport is politicized the moment nation-states take the decision to enter the sporting arena under their national banners. England, Australia, India, Pakistan – these are nation-states, not sporting clubs.’