Suddenly it wasn’t buns but bans in discussion
‘Anyone who would swallow that would believe the moon was a currant bun!’ exclaimed the Guardian in its leader of 29 August 1968.
The reason for the paper’s indignation was simple. The day before the MCC had announced the sixteen players who would represent England in the forthcoming tour to South Africa, and Basil D’Oliveira wasn’t among the names. Yet five days earlier he had scored a match-winning 158 for England against Australia at the Oval. The Guardian, like just about every paper and person in England, suspected they knew why D’Oliveira had been left out of the squad – because the colour of his skin would be unacceptable to his hosts in South Africa. Not true! cried the MCC, a denial that drew forth the line in the Guardian leader.
It was a frivolous quip from the Guardian, but within days the mood darkened as cricket became headline news around the world. Suddenly it wasn’t buns but bans being discussed as cricket finally confronted South Africa over the evil of their apartheid policy.
The trail that led to those momentous events began in Signal Hill, Cape Town, where Basil Lewis D’Oliveira was born in 1931. Under the apartheid regime he was classified as a ‘Cape Coloured’: permitted to play cricket, as long as it wasn’t with whites, the only people who could play first-class cricket in South Africa. So in his desperation to play at the highest level, D’Oliveira wrote to the only man he thought might be able to help him – the BBC commentator John Arlott. ‘Dear Mr Arlott,’ began D’Oliveira. ‘I daresay this is only a minor detail compared, I presume, to your other escapades, but I am sure that you would try your best and use your powerful assistance to help me…’
D’Oliveira had made the right choice. Arlott had connections in English cricket, and he also had an abiding dislike of apartheid. In 1960 he organised for D’Oliveira and his wife to come to England and play for the Middleton Club in the Central Lancashire league. Such was D’Oliveira’s talent with bat and ball that in 1964 he was given a first-class contract with Worcestershire, thus becoming the first non-white South African in English county cricket. Two years later he made his bow for England in the Test-match arena, scoring 27 against the West Indies. In his second Test he scored a brace of half-centuries and in his fifth Test – against India – he made his maiden Test century.
Come the 1968 Ashes series D’Oliveira’s form was a bit shaky. He was dropped after the Old Trafford Test but recalled for the final match of the rubber, where he scored (from the England selectors’ point of view) the most unwanted century in Test-match history. ‘Oh Christ, you’ve put the cat among the pigeons now,’ chortled umpire Charlie Elliott, as D’Oliveira acknowledged the Oval applause on reaching three figures.
The cat was still running amok when the selectors met four days after that match to pick the tour party for South Africa. The minutiae of that meeting have never been fully revealed by those present, though chairman of selectors Doug Insole always claimed the squad was selected purely on cricketing merit. ‘Let’s forget about South Africa,’ he is reported to have said at the start of the meeting. ‘Let’s pick a team to go to Australia. And that’s what we did.’
D’Oliveira listened to the squad being read out on BBC radio, his Worcestershire teammates around him. When his name wasn’t mentioned D’Oliveira ‘fell apart. He put his head in his hands and wept.’ John Arlott shared his friend’s pain, writing in the Guardian that cricket’s administrators must ‘recognise that politics can no longer be shut out of the game’. He added that anger wasn’t his overriding emotion at the decision but ‘sadness, and that in the selection MCC have stirred forces – for both good and evil – whose powers they do not truly comprehend’.
The South Africans were jubilant, though the smirk was wiped off their faces a few days later when the News of the World announced that D’Oliveira would be reporting for them on the series from South Africa. Still, at least the cricketers would be all white, they thought. And then in September Tom Cartwright pulled out of the tour with a shoulder injury. He was a bowler but the selectors decided to replace him with a batsman – D’Oliveira.
The news was made public on 16 September, and the following day Prime Minister Vorster informed the MCC: ‘We are not prepared to receive a team thrust upon us by people whose interests are not in the game, but to gain certain political objectives which they do not even attempt to hide. The MCC team is not the team of the MCC, but of the anti-apartheid movement.’
Suddenly it wasn’t buns but bans in discussion
Britain reacted with fury to what the Daily Mail called Vorster’s ‘crude and boorish’ speech, one designed purely to placate the right wing of South Africa. On 24 September the MCC called off the tour, but what couldn’t be curtailed was opposition to South Africa in sport.
The events of the late summer were the spark for a firestorm of protest against South African sporting teams, not just in Britain but across the world. Though Australia toured the Republic in 1969/70, the MCC cancelled South Africa’s tour to England in 1970, leaving what Wisden described as a ‘bitter, emotional – sometimes hysterical – aura over English cricket’. In the same year the International Olympic Committee expelled South Africa and the ICC voted to suspend official matches with South Africa. Apartheid had turned to isolation, and South Africa would remain ostracised for twenty long years.