13 CALYPSO, CREOLE, CRICKET, CONFLICT
Big business is bossed mostly by Americans, Englishmen, Syrians and Chinese with a sprinkling of Indians. The real Jamaicans are only in the island these days, to use a Jamaican phrase, “fi mek up numbers.”
— R. Donaldson, “A Jamaican In London”, Checkers magazine, 1948.
After the match I took my guitar and called a few West Indians, and I went round the cricket field singing and dancing. So while we’re dancing up come a policeman and arrested me.
— Lord Kitchener, on the aftermath of West Indies victory over England in the 1950 Test series.
During the infancy of the BBC, there was an emphasis on real-time events, from football matches to coronations and above all concerts. BBC Radio transmitted hours of live music and its cathode ray cousin followed suit, which meant opportunities for popular African-American artists of the day during the pre and postwar years. In October 1947, Adelaide Hall,1 a major figure from the Harlem Renaissance who settled in Britain in the 1930s, caused a sensation when she was filmed at the Radiolympia Theatre, but prior to that she had appeared with Nigerian bandleader Fela Sowande2 in Harlem in Mayfair, a show from the club she opened in London, the Old Florida. As film and television historian Stephen Bourne states in his important Black in the British Frame, early British television also shone a light on, “a small, but important group of Africans and Caribbeans.”3
Among them were the dancers and musicians already noted – Leslie Thompson; Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson; West African Rhythm Brothers; Cyril Blake & His Calypso Band and Ray Ellington. These were some of the artists who appeared on cultural programmes that reflected the “colonial talent” that was to be seen in London, which, until the early 1950s, was the only place in the country where TV programmes could be viewed.
Particularly important in the Black presence on early TV was the Trinidadian actor-singer-director and all-round cultural activist, Edric Connor, who became a key figure in postwar British broadcasting after he arrived in 1944. Connor recorded West Indian folk music and shared his extensive knowledge of the subject on radio shows like Traveller’s Tales and Music Makers. In the subsequent decades he made significant contributions to film and theatre. He had the voice and physique for audio-visual platforms, and recognizing an obvious talent in its midst, the BBC afforded Connor many opportunities to present Caribbean culture; the body of work that he put together in the immediate postwar years is really quite incredible. Connor was a great adept of Trinidadian calypso and Jamaican mento, and he championed these genres to a wider audience.
Serenade in Sepia was one of the most popular television programmes Connor made, running between 1945 and 1947, and featuring another vocalist, Evelyn Dove. It was a showcase for classic Caribbean folk music, with the two singers performing a varied songbook. Thankfully, footage of some of his appearances on the show have survived, and it is quite thrilling to watch him bring gravitas to a piece such as “Water Boy”, because his powerful voice is complemented by a commanding stage presence.
Connor shared a television studio with other trailblazing artists in 1946. Singing calypso songs, he appeared on shows that featured the Jamaican dance troupe Les Ballets Negres and the Nigerian musicians of the West African Rhythm Brothers led by Ambrose Campbell. While these broadcasts reflect the inroads made by black music into the mainstream media in postwar Britain – for nothing was more prestigious than a BBC transmission – the wider sociocultural and political framework around these artists remained ambiguous. To say that the progress of Edric Connor at the BBC pointed to a genuine engagement by editors and programme makers with West Indian culture is moot. The exotic was still well to the fore.4
Hugely charismatic in Serenade in Sepia,5 Connor comes across as the archetypal “son of the soil”. He sports a bandanna and is surrounded by open-shirted acolytes who gaze at him as if he were a village prophet. Most alarmingly, the studio set, possibly Pathé or Pinewood, is stuffed with fake palm trees intended to denote a “small island”. Vocally, Connor is magnificent. Visually, he is cast against the tropical canvas of the western imagination. The same image would also be recognizable in the form of Harry Belafonte, the American whose worldwide success would make him “the king of calypso”.
A dynamic performer, regardless of any prevailing reductive expectations, Connor was proactive on many fronts. He went on to form a talent agency with his wife Pearl that was instrumental in providing opportunities for other people of colour in the performing arts and literature. However, the work he did himself, which covered a wide range of activities that would justify the catch-all term “star of stage, screen and recording studio”, was no less worthy of note, particularly as it gave him the platform to represent West Indian culture on his own terms. The two albums Connor made in the mid 1950s are hugely important insofar as they reflect the richness of West Indian folk music and the depth of its historical roots. Songs from Jamaica and Songs from Trinidad are timeless collections that underline how the descendants of slaves lived and fashioned their own morality tales and parables, which often chime with the Black experience in America. There are a number of the “work songs” that accompanied everyday labour, such as “Day Dah Light” – the banana loaders song – as well as picaresque ballads like “Sammy Dead Oh”, which tells of a plantation owner who has been “obeah’d” by some of his treacherous neighbours. Also fascinating are chants borne of the imagination of Blacks, who, still clinging to the belief systems of Nigeria, make overt reference to deities such as Shango and Ogun (“Ogoun Belele”). Furthermore, many of the songs highlight the development of Creole, whereby Standard English is reshaped in new ways to acquire a distinct rhythmic identity and inflection. The Empire says, “Tears fall from my eyes”, the colonies say, “Wata come a me eye”. The Empire says, “Some are crying”, the colonies say, “Some a bawl”. The Empire says, “He’s a hard man to kill”, the colonies say, “He’s a hard man fi dead”. This language, uncompromising in its punchy, straight-down-the-line transparency, is given a sharp focus on these recordings because Connor’s sterling baritone voice is accompanied by a group of backing singers, The Caribbeans, and pianist Earl Inkman, rather than a full band. With no drums or string instruments in the arrangements, the beauty of the vocal phrasing, which is often as percussive as it is melodic, comes into its own. Interestingly, the lyrics of these songs, scores and their “translations” were also made available in a book that was published by Oxford University Press.6
Connor’s ubiquity on BBC music programmes of the early 1950s evidently caught the eye of producers as far away as Hollywood, which led to one of his most high-profile, though brief, film appearances.
His performance in John Huston’s 1956 film version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with a script by Ray Bradbury, starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and featuring a scene-stealing cameo by Orson Welles (and a great white rubber whale made by Dunlop tyres) cemented Connor’s journey from the calypso tents of Port of Spain to regular appearances on British radio and early TV.
Connor was cast in the role of the harpooner, Daggoo. He has precious little screen time and only a few lines of dialogue, but he makes a lasting impact with his performance of a Jamaican traditional song “Hill An’ Gully Rider”, which is heard during the first whale hunt. The tune is overdubbed with remarkable clarity, to give the impression that the sailors are lifting their voices to the sky as they lean back and forth to make their long, wooden oars slice the onrushing surf. The camera focuses on Connor for barely a frame as his solo voice is heard rising majestically above those of his shipmates whom he leads in song.
The emotional power of “Hill An’ Gully Rider” stems from its structure. It uses the basic call-and-response model that underpins field hollers, work songs, Negro spirituals, blues ballads and Caribbean folk music. Call and response transmutes into a melodic context, the most universal of human activities, the dance of conversation, whereby one statement is made as an invitation to another. So when Connor sings “Took my horse an’ comin’ down”, the chorus has to sing “Hill An Gully” because this upholds an implied narrative logic – in the same way that the call of “Oh, happy day” gains emotional plenitude as the response to “When Jesus washed… (my sins away)”. Call and response is about statement, but it also celebrates the art of listening.
Secondly, call and response offers rhythmic variety. The attack of Connor’s solo lines in “Hill An’ Gully Rider” contrasts with the crew’s exclamations to create a distinct shift in momentum. Connor sings in relatively medium-fast tempo and they come back with markedly slower, more languid notes that have the effect of anchoring and shoring up his delivery, so as to make the entire phrase more conclusive. The single voice and the chorus are united in their emotional make-up but each curls around the beat in a different way.
Thirdly, call and response offers tonal variety and textural contrast. Connor’s timbre is bold and piercing, but the crew-members, singing in unison, create a broader wave of noise, as if the song’s energy is expanding as more people join in. It’s not so much that the crew-members sing. They chant. They drop into a lower register, fuller, darker, a more bass-heavy presence.
Connor had a specific cultural agenda in bringing “Hill An’ Gully Rider” to director John Huston. As his Connor’s wife Pearl later explained:
Hill an’ Gully Rider is about the undulating land in Jamaica, but it was the undulating sea of Moby Dick, the ocean where they were looking for a whale, where Edric introduced the song. And it is a lyrical, lilting song, a beautiful thing that John Huston loved straight away. And Edric was always trying to do that, introduce Caribbean music into the films he worked on, and letting people know about our songs.7
Lasting approximately 90 seconds this performance is a seminal moment in the history of black music in Britain, precisely because it reached beyond Britain. It involved, as his wife commented, a superlative act of cultural intelligence, for packed cinemas around the world heard West Indian music in a classic American story.
The song was also a reminder of the musical role that Blacks had played on transatlantic merchant ships throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as outlined in Chapter 2, when their fiddling, singing and drumming entertained crews during their long months at sea. In Melville’s original text, the character of the “Negro cabin boy”, Pip, is a tambourine player, a detail that Huston faithfully brought to his adaptation. Connor’s singing brought a spotlight to the black maritime musician whom history often casts into shadow.
Striking as Connor’s performance in the “Hill ‘n’ Gully Rider” sequence is, one has to wonder how much greater an impact he could have made had he been given a speaking part. He did have more substantial roles in films such as Fire Down Below (1957) and Virgin Island (1958), dramas set in the Caribbean that cast him alongside American stars Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum (who also recorded a calypso album, Calypso Is Like So), Jack Lemmon and Sidney Poitier. But while Connor made headway as a film actor he knew that British television had a pivotal role to play for the burgeoning black community at the time, as the issue of the “colour bar” became ever more pressing.
Although the BBC was initially responsive to Connor’s ideas on how best to present West Indian culture, there was increasing tension between him and the Corporation when his vision became more politically adventurous and sought to reach beyond the realm of “light entertainment”, to the extent that the relationship deteriorated in the post-war period. Amanda Bidnall chronicles events in The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture In London 1945-1965: “He was an immediate success at the Corporation, but when the afterglow of military victory had subsided and concerns about racial strife replaced the celebration of empire in the late 50s, the BBC increasingly rebuffed Connor’s efforts to create and broadcast meaningful work.”8
Presentation for Black music and Black performers in pre and postwar Britain was a thorny issue. While the stereotypes of tropical people surrounded by exotic landscapes and casual clothing was the norm, there was great formality, if not exaggerated eloquence, in the way many spoke. Listen to interviews of the Jamaican double bassist, Coleridge Goode, who appeared in the 1947 television programme Jazz is Where You Find It and you hear a man with a professorial tone of voice, his diction in no way suggesting a West Indian background. It’s tempting to declare he is out-Britishing the British, but maybe it’s fairer to say that he was de-West Indianised by the influence of a colonial education and mindset. Black artists of his era all seem to sound like statesman in waiting.9
Goode, in his excellent autobiography, Bass Lines, evokes the horror his classical-music-loving father would have experienced had he known that his son had forsaken his engineering studies in Britain to play jazz. The deep attachment of the Caribbean middle class to European concert music and the cultural appurtenances that came with it – gentlemanly manners, sartorial elegance, perfect elocution – reminds us that islands like Jamaica were much more than just ruled by the mother country. They were fully immersed in its baptismal waters.
An even more striking example of the phenomenon can be found in a short film West Indies Calling, produced by Paul Rotha in 1943 and based on the radio series, Calling The West Indies, a wartime broadcast in which Caribbean serviceman and women sent messages to the islands. Edric Connor was an early contributor. Lasting just under 14 minutes, the film, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Information, carries a heavy whiff of propaganda and “jolly good show” bonhomie about West Indians who have made “common cause with us.”10 Somewhat inevitably, the strains of calypso ring out, all sliding horns and skipping drums courtesy of Al Jennings’ orchestra, and the credits inform us that the “speakers” are two West Indian servicemen, Carlton Fairweather and Ulric Cross, as well as the great Trinidadian cricketing legend, Learie Constantine and the Jamaican broadcaster, Una Marson. As for the larger cast, it is simply “West Indians in Britain.” Marson introduces her co-speakers who then praise the colonial war effort. Blacks are shown in munitions factories and in the armed services toiling to help defeat “Hitler and his gang”. They are happy on assembly lines with white colleagues. Racial harmony is implied. Then another calypso, this time with a very plummy, English-sounding vocal rings out. It gives way to a quite appalling commercial dance number. It is as if Black music is being “whitewashed” by a diligent BBC censor. What emerges from the film is how absolutely Oxbridge the West Indian speakers sound, though all of them were born on the islands. There is no trace of a Jamaican, Bajan or Trinidadian accent. Presumably, they were not encouraged to stray into the vernacular. The whole thing appears an elaborate construct, like the palm trees and bandannas that formed Edric Connor’s backdrop in Serenade in Sepia.
Whether they were performing “authentic” West Indian music or recounting the wartime West Indian experience, Connor and Marson evidently had to observe strict conventions, namely that folk themes had to evoke a degree of primitivism, while serious political content required an ultra formal tone. Una Marson’s own poetry shows something of this split in consciousness. There are poems whose models are Victorian, but also poems, such as “Kinky Hair Blues” that use Jamaican patois. How far colonial imprinting reached into the psyche of West Indians is graphically illustrated by an anecdote about another highly influential radio programme, in its earliest days produced by Marson, Caribbean Voices, which ran from 1943 to 1958. When poems or stories by Caribbean writers were read by Caribbean readers with regional accents, some listeners in the West Indies objected.
Caribbean Voices helped to launch a cornucopia of literary talent, notably Sam Selvon, Kamau Brathwaite and V.S Naipaul. But what made Caribbean Voices very different from the other BBC programmes was its exceptional commitment to the West Indian voice. Much of this was to the credit of the programme’s second, visionary, producer Henry Swanzy, leftish in politics and utterly committed to the development of Caribbean writing and writers on their own terms. On the surface, Swanzy’s much repeated preference for writing that had “West Indian colour” sounds similar to the tropical exotica of programmes like Serenade in Sepia, but in reality what he meant was writing that was truthful in language and range of reference to the places and societies of its setting. His commitment was to West Indian writing for West Indians, for the West Indian listener, even if it offended the ears of the Anglicised West Indian middle class. Swanzy, was, for instance, one of the earliest promoters of the patois poetry of Louise Bennett – as well as the gritty stories of Sam Selvon about the seamier side of urban life in Port of Spain.11 Bennett’s work began in the 1940s and had an important influence on coming generations of poets, writers and thinkers who realized that the creole subversion of English was an asset, not a liability. Perhaps more immediately, Bennett was influential because recordings of her verse were issued on the Melodisc label, and these works greatly inspired Edric Connor.
Caribbean Voices thus played a priceless part in revealing what was not an obvious truth for the British establishment, namely that West Indians could and did write, and that their stories, worldview and philosophy had a cultural resonance greater than that of a wartime message from a serviceman or woman to their families listening intently on the island.12 Swanzy’s programme also showed, too, what was constraining in other areas of BBC broadcasting, where an interest in the West Indies as a cultural region establishing roots in the UK gave way to a limiting preoccupation with race and mixed marriages. The visionary nature of the Swanzy period is shown by the fact that it took many years for the higher education institutions in the Caribbean to catch up with what it had done. It was not until the 1970s that the University of the West Indies began teaching Caribbean literature and scholars such as the brilliant Barbadian Edward, later Kamau Brathwaite, fought for the acceptance of “nation language” in which the specifics of “black talk” would gain greater currency. 12
But Britain’s Black population was not solely dependent on official channels like the BBC for its self-image. One of the most important postwar developments was the emergence of Black journalism and magazines where Black people could read about Blacks as written by Blacks.
Launched in 1948 and costing 1 shilling and six pence, Checkers, published by Edward Scobie, was a groundbreaking publication; it was billed as Britain’s “Premier Negro magazine” and it covered the arts, politics and social issues. Editorial standards were high and the design, graced with earnest portraits, was tasteful. Furthermore, Checkers was an international title. It was available on subscription in “Great Britain, Northern Ireland & Colonies.” The Arts coverage was particularly strong. In the inaugural edition were features on Nigerian sculptor Benedict C. Enwonwu, African-American actress Hilda Simms and Guyanese jazz saxophonist Wally Stewart. There were also thought-provoking opinion pieces that give the magazine a transatlantic flavour: “The Status of the Negro in the United States” and “A Jamaican in London”. The latter article, written by one R. Donaldson, who sadly does not have a biography on the masthead, is an intensely moving account of the hardships experienced by West Indian immigrants. It ends with an unapologetically sharp denunciation of racial prejudice and a reminder that the subsequent disenchantment of the Negro is heightened by the social injustice prevalent in the West Indies. The article also shows standard English and Black talk bumping heads, as the author finds that there are certain things that cannot be expressed in “proper” language. Cultural authenticity and political polemic elide in the use of creolised English to indict Jamaica’s pernicious racial hierarchy. “Big business is bossed mostly by Americans, Englishmen, Syrians and Chinese with a sprinkling of Indians. The real Jamaicans, are only in the island these days, to use a Jamaican phrase, ‘fi mek up numbers’.”
For a Jamaican journalist in 1948, this use of creole in a piece of formal English prose was daring. It looks forward to the writing of a pioneer such as Sam Selvon who not only accurately transcribed the Trini-talk of his characters – phrases like “Ma, you had me in one set of confusion this morning”13 – as West Indian novelists had been doing since the early twentieth century, but in The Lonely Londoners (1956) narrating the whole novel in a creole-inflected Trinidadian English.
Running to just 24 pages, Checkers may have been relatively slender, and it only ran for five issues, but even a cursory trawl through its content reveals a magazine that made an earnest and effective attempt to give a voice to the Black British community and chronicle the social and cultural changes that resulted from mass migration, not least in asserting the legitimacy of other varieties of English.14
Calypsos, as in future years reggae was to do, demonstrate that West Indian vernaculars have a breadth of vocabulary that can be used with metaphorical and allegorical depth. Calypsonians used words that the English would not know, as well as using known words in ways they had not thought of. Race relations was a theme that exercised the minds of both Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner in the 1950s, and the contrasts in the form and content of the language used on the former’s “If You’re Not White You’re Black” and the latter’s “Mix Up Matrimony” is fascinating.
Kitchener makes a number of excellent points about the phenomenon of the mixed-race woman who rejects her blackness, from attempts at hair straightening to a denial of African roots, but he also goes to the heart of the culture wars: language. When Kitch sings “You speak with exaggeration/To make the greatest impression”, he is denouncing superficiality and recognizing the political need for straight-talking, which is the essence of calypso.
Beginner’s treatise on love across the colour line has a different linguistic character. The title itself breaks with Standard English. “Mix Up Matrimony” is a union of a creolised term and a very formal English word. Beginner uses the recognizable, for metropolitan English listeners, formulation of mixed marriage in the first verse of the song, but he switches to mix-up matrimony in the second, and this signals an important duality, as he bounces freely between registers. “Mix up” exists because creole culture moulds vocabulary in a specific way, giving rise to compound nouns or adjectives that often have a sharp rhythmic impetus. “Mix up” swims in the same stream of invention as cook up, jump up, mash up and nice up, where the two-syllable punch of the word is a crucial part of its communicative power. Creolised English is characterized by such new conjunctions.
The history of the use of patois by calypsonians in the colonial period (when British governors could censor or ban) is a complex one. But what is striking is the linguistic freedom exercised by artists from an early stage in the development of the music. Beginner stands in the lineage of other calypsonians who reflected social realities through the language of the people. For example, Sam Manning, who lived in London two decades prior to Beginner, infused his lyrics with a deep Trinidadian-ness. In his 1925 song, “Brown Boy”, he says of a ruffian who has slapped him about, “He black mah eye.” The Standard English rendering of “He gave me a black eye” rhythmically would not flow.
“Mix Up Matrimony” is an upbeat song in which Beginner foretells a multi-cultural utopia that is not just confined to Britain – “Racial segregation universally fading gradually”– a cautious optimism that marked the thinking of some with regard to the issue of miscegenation at the dawn of the 1950s. This was broaching a hot topic at a time when the event of a son or daughter announcing the existence of a black partner could be explosive. Details in the song point to Beginner’s Trinidadian cultural identity, as well as his worldview. In the first verse he sings “Chiney” instead of Chinese, but so rooted is the word Chiney in the Trinidadian vernacular it would have been unthinkable to replace it by Chinese, just as it would have been for Beginner to sing “two races” instead of “two race” as he does in the second verse. In this case the Standard English plural would have derailed the metric carriage and reduced the overall musicality of the stanza. But the real value of “Mix Up Matrimony” lies in its conjunctions of vocabulary. Matrimony is as proper as mix up is improper.
Some calypsos are more creolised than others, such as the frankly raucous turns of phrase in Mighty Terror’s “Women Police”, his suggestive love letter to the girls in blue – “I do anything to get arrest”, “I hugging up mah police” “I could run straight and bite up one”. Beyond the rich colour of the vocabulary, the audacity of the lyric – proposing to make overtures to a British policewoman – reflects his imagination as a writer. This is rooted in the essence of Trinidadian “picong”, which places a premium on repartee and the exercise of invention when expressing the commonplace.
Many of the calypsos Melodisc and Lyragon put out in the 1950s have a similar linguistic and intellectual punch, and many broached subjects in their immediate environment – public transport, the authorities, race relations – as well as the iconic social events of the decade – the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth, immortalized in Young Tiger’s “I Was There (at the Coronation)” – upholding the sine que non of calypso as commentary on the here and now. The rise of the Black British calypso at roughly the same time as the West Indian novelists and poets found outlets for their work in London was not coincidental. It was an intriguing anticipation of the later but similar development of British reggae in the 1970s, by groups such as Steel Pulse, Aswad and Misty in Roots.
The meeting point between Kitchener, Beginner, Tiger et al and some of the writers is revealed in the many acrobatic turns of phrase in Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners,14 the definitive account of the postwar immigrant experience: “It’s not we that the people don’t like… is the colour black.” This is the great line that Kitch never wrote, but an utterance that could feasibly feature in one of his verses. This writer-singer kinship is also present in Selvon’s choice of character names. Sir Galahad, the constant thorn in the flesh of the narrating protagonist, Moses Aloetta, has a mythical resonance. It is the stuff of legend, and as such chimes closely with the calypsonian who named himself Ivanhoe.
It is because of the parallel developments of the West Indian novel, the West Indian calypso and the West Indian radio broadcast, as exemplified by Caribbean Voices, that the late 1940s and early 50s is such a crucial stage in the history of Black culture in Britain. So much of the spirit, the personality of a Kitch or Beginner is in Selvon’s writing (and even in V.S. Naipaul’s earlier work) and so much of Selvon’s intellect is in their singing. One was long form, the other short. One had a typewriter, the other a guitar.
Lyrically, calypso was, from its earliest incarnations, confrontational. Its use of coded language to outwit those in power upped its richness. But it was also about the chronicling of events and the depiction of daily realities in all areas of human existence, particularly those that drew focus to the individual, the way that he or she shaped his or her own destiny and the way that was in turn shaped by those with power. Which is why love and politics are essential themes in the calypso canon.
A subject that also captured the imagination was cricket, because it was an activity that had multiple strands of meaning. It was much more than sport. It was much more than spectacle. The cricket match in the West Indies, in a pre and postwar context, was a deeply political drama in which ruler and ruled, colonist and colonized, were drawn together on a stage with obvious gladiatorial connotations of hurling a leather ball towards the body of adversary who defends himself with a wooden bat, whose sleekly carved shape is weapon-like.
Cricket was also a site of racial struggle. Initially it was the preserve of the elite in the West Indies. The first sides to represent the region in international matches in the 1880s were dominated by white players; it would have been unseemly to allow the underclass to take part in an activity synonymous with refinement, and it was not until the 1920s that Blacks started to make the national team. As C.L.R. James recalls in his seminal study of cricket and its social ramifications, Beyond A Boundary,15 clubs in Trinidad such as Queen’s Park and Shamrock were exclusively European. Other clubs were for “brown” Trinidadians, others for Blacks. The first West Indians, in the eyes of the British ruling class, were not black. They were white.
The idea died hard. For example, when the Ministry of Information was explaining to the British public who West Indians were in the 1943 short film West Indies Calling, the narrator declared that “they are of a dozen different races,” and then stated that they were “descendants of the British and French and Spanish adventurers who opened up the New World” before evoking “the African slaves who were brought across to work on the sugar plantations, Chinese shopkeepers, Hindus and Moslems from India.” The camera zoomed in on white West Indian servicemen before showing any black person.
Race aside, in a context of colonial fragmentation, the West Indies cricket team was a powerful federalizing agent in Caribbean life. It was where the islands came together, each contributing their best players to create a regional superpower.
Prodigiously gifted players such as the legendary 3 Ws – Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell – and the spinners – Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine – signalled the coming of age of West Indian cricket in the 1950s. The success of the West Indies team established the men from the islands as a force to be reckoned with. Cricket became a source of West Indian pride. The pitch was thus a theatre where colonial subjects could defeat the former masters.
The visual drama of the game – the tricksy nature of the spin bowler; the athleticism of the fielder; the physical threat of the fast bowler; the Herculean sweep of a master batsman – were all grist to a calypsonian’s mill. Unfolding slowly – between every ball the players and spectators have to wait as the bowler walks back to his mark – cricket offers scope for unbroken observation and attention to detail – which is precisely what defines the best calypsonians.
Recorded in London in 1950, Lord Beginner’s “Victory Test Match” (also known as “Cricket Lovely Cricket”) is one of the best examples of the genre. It hails the triumph of the West Indies over England in the 2nd match of the Test series, when players such as Clyde Walcott produced match-winning performances in the presence of King George VI at Lords, cricket’s HQ. Beginner’s use of word-play is impressive and his reference to the West Indian team’s sense of ease has a sharp irony, given the fact that the right to belong in Britain, to enjoy the rights and privileges of citizenship, had been challenged by the Labour Ministry’s mealy mouthed declaration that no “encouragement” would be given to further waves of migration.
West Indies was feeling homely
Their audience had them happy.
Of course, the reason why the tourists felt at home was because there were so many West Indians in the crowd. Whether they felt at home is another story.
By way of witty couplets that bring together key moments in the match, with the ensuing emotion experienced by the crowd, Beginner assumes the role of commentator as well as storyteller, and shows his keen eye and irrepressible linguistic prowess. True to form, he mixes registers, moving seamlessly from the creolised line “They gave the crowd plenty fun” to the formal phrasing of “The king was there well attired.”
Later, there comes an even more impressive conjunction of formal and creolised expression, as Beginner starts to praise the W.I. players:
But Gomez broke him down
While Walcott lick them around.
To lick is one of the most expressive verbs of action in the West Indian vernacular, and although it firstly denotes “to beat or physically assault”, the deeper implication is that a designated foe is being resoundingly defeated or that a task is being completed with efficiency and satisfaction. Which is why lick is often turned into the phrasal verb as in He lick down the door or He lick down the man. So Beginner’s formulation Walcott lick them around brings into play the emphatically vivid image of the enemy, the England cricket team, being laid low in a comprehensive way, something which the British might express as Walcott smashed them all over the park. But that does not have the same flavour as Walcott lick them around. That is what would be heard in a rum shack in Port of Spain or a shebeen in Notting Hill or Moss Side, not a BBC commentary box.
Beginner goes on to evoke the galvanizing, unifying power of cricket among the Caribbean islands, and joyously revels in victory following the dismissal of the English batsman, Cyril Washbrook.
When Washbrook’s century had ended
West Indies voices all blended
With his closing verse, Beginner paints a masterful tableau that has great sociopolitical depth. Beyond the symbolic victory over Empire, the Test series provided an opportunity for members of the West Indian community located up and down the country to assemble. Although the contest reached its conclusion at Lords in London, one of the other matches took place at Old Trafford in Manchester, which gave Blacks from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and beyond, the opportunity to experience this sporting and political event as a collective entity. So the line, “West Indies voices all blended”, refers both to the union of different islands in the West Indian team and the various Caribbean communities found in Britain. That single line, so incisive in its simplicity, marks out “Victory Test Match” as one of the seminal theme tunes to a national manifestation of Blacks living in postwar Britain. Cricket, rather than London, is the place for me.
West Indian voices also blended in song when euphoric fans scrambled onto the outfield of Lords to demonstrate the joy they could not contain. They began to sing. It turned into a carnival road march. Exultation could have turned to expulsion. Alarmed by the sight of mostly young black men taking part in a pitch invasion, the very sight of which invoked the deepest paranoia of the wild or “savage” behaviour that defined a colonial vision of Africa and the West Indies, the police readied for action. However, a senior official from the MCC – Marylebone Cricket Club – in a wise moment given that police interventions on the cricket field in the Caribbean had provoked riots, advised the police not to intervene. The friends of the tourists were allowed to sing their songs. They could have their moment in the sun.
For the crowd it was about the right to free assembly and movement in public spaces. As Beginner sang: “Hats went in the air/People shout and jump without fear.”
Lord Kitchener was also present at the game and he reported:
After the match I took my guitar and called a few West Indians, and I went round the cricket field singing and dancing. That was a song I made up. So while we’re dancing up come a policeman and arrested me.
And while he was taking me out of the field, the English people boo him, they said ‘Leave him alone, let him enjoy himself! They won the match, let him enjoy himself.’ And he had to let me loose because he was embarrassed. So I took the crowd with me singing and dancing, from Lord’s, into Piccadilly in the heart of London…”16
A black musician with a guitar leading others in an improvised celebration. Sounds familiar? Just five years prior to the Test Match, the Nigerian bandleader Ambrose Campbell had led his ensemble through the streets of Piccadilly on VE Day. Victories in a world war and a sporting event may not be comparable, but jubilation when one is far from home is an essential human need. Those in power, possibly mesmerized by the sound of calypso, were able to recognize as much.
1. Stephen Bourne Black In The British Frame (Cassell, 1998), p. 81.
2. Fela Sowande was an excellent jazz organist-pianist as well as a composer and played duets with the legendary Fats Waller in London in the 1930s.
3. Stephen Bourne Black in the British Frame, p. 81.
4. Footage of Serenade in Sepia is widely available on the internet.
5. For Connor’s view, see Horizons: The Life and Times of Edric Connor (Ian Randle Publishers, 2007).
6. Songs from Trinidad (Oxford University Press, 1959) came with sheet music and a long informative preface by Connor.
7. Tropic Magazine, March 1960, p. 12.
8. Amanda Bidnall, The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 (Liverpool University Press, 2017).
9. See Anne Spry Rush’s perceptive account of the West Indian middle class, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonisation (Oxford University Press, 2011).
10. West Indies Calling can be found in the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcLkGHpw7nY Pathe News.
11. See Glyne A. Griffiths, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 (Palgrave MacMillan 2016).
12. See Kamau Brathwaite, The History of the Voice (New Beacon Books, 1984).
13. Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Longman, 1956) p. 82.
14. The Lonely Londoners, p. 89.
15. C.L.R. James, Beyond A Boundary (Hutchinson, 1963). It is worth noting that James’s masterwork, The Black Jacobins (1938), was an essential text for politically-conscious artists such as Robeson (who in 1936 took the lead part in the stage play that James wrote on Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution.
16. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, 2007) p. 516. See also Anthony Joseph’s recent Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (Peepal Tree, 2018).