It is now known that the South African government, headed by Balthazar Johannes Vorster, was deeply concerned about the possibility of D’Oliveira being picked by England, or rather by the MCC, as a member of the 1968–69 touring party from the very first moment that he played for England in 1966. A security file was opened on him, and Vorster personally received regular reports on his form and performances, for example during Cowdrey’s tour of the West Indies in early 1968.
The reference to the MCC in the last paragraph is a very deliberate one. The selection process was twofold. First the England selectors picked the squad as a sub-committee of the MCC, but then the full MCC committee had the right to veto individual players, as had of course happened with Brian Close. (The system would change in 1969, with selection responsibility passing to the TCCB, but the change was only nominal, since the TCCB was in effect an MCC shadow organisation. Even then, for some years England would continue to be called ‘MCC’ when touring overseas.)
The reason this is important is that, since the South African (and Rhodesian, to give it its official title) Cricket Association (SACA) was largely under the control of the South African government, Vorster assumed the same to be the case of the MCC. Given that the Labour government of Harold Wilson had resisted UDI in Rhodesia, and was known to be deeply unsympathetic to apartheid, Vorster, despite having been named after one of the Three Wise Men, therefore seems to have been deeply suspicious of the MCC as a bunch of left-wing potential trouble-makers. Had this been known to the rank and file of MCC members they would doubtless have found it highly amusing. It has, however, an important bearing on what follows, and should be borne in mind.
As early as the beginning of 1967, Billy Griffith, the secretary of the MCC, had flown to South Africa in an attempt to get some guidance on whether a ‘coloured’ cricketer would be accepted as a member of an MCC touring party. These talks were inconclusive, though they did prompt a South African minister to say to the press that mixed-race teams were not allowed in South Africa, and that this was well known overseas; hardly a coded message. Vorster was embarrassed and got the minister to try to deny having made the statement, but the damage was done. Back in Britain, a motion was put forward in the House of Commons calling for the 1968–69 tour to be cancelled. This doubtless fuelled Vorster’s paranoia about a political nexus between the MCC and the UK government; in reality, the MCC was hugely displeased at politicians attempting to muscle in on what they (the MCC) saw as a purely sporting matter.
In January 1968 the MCC decided to force the issue, and wrote SACA a letter which, while couched in guarded and polite language, clearly sought an assurance that they could pick anyone they liked for the forthcoming tour, regardless of colour.
At about the same time, the South African government considered and arrived at a multi-pronged strategy to deal with the situation. Their ideal option was that D’Oliveira would not perform sufficiently well to justify selection for the tour. Failing this, plan A was to try to ensure that D’Oliveira would not be available for the tour, and so could not be selected. Plan B was to try to persuade the MCC (whom, remember, the South Africans saw as controlling selection) not to pick him, regardless of his performance.
Plan A was eventually attempted, but before moving on, it should be noted that there was something of a catch-22 quality about plan B. In order for it to work, the MCC would have to be made to realise that if D’Oliveira was selected then the tour would be cancelled by South Africa; only this knowledge could possibly deter them. Yet, if this fact was made known publicly, then the tour would almost certainly be cancelled anyway by the dreaded MCC–Wilson government cabal.
For the sake of clarity, let us abandon any attempt at a chronological narrative, and instead pursue each of these plans separately to their conclusions.
Plan A itself took two forms; let us call them A1 and A2.
A1 consisted effectively of a bribe. D’Oliveira would be approached and offered a very large amount of money to accept a coaching contract in South Africa that winter. This approach was duly made by a business executive called Tienie Oosthuizen, who worked for the wealthy South African businessman Anton Rupert’s Rembrandt Group. The offer was put to D’Oliveira in an office in Baker Street. As the summer worked its way towards its dramatic climax at the Oval, he was put under extreme pressure to accept it before the England selectors met. One telephone conversation was recorded by D’Oliveira and his agent. The transcript41 shows an increasingly desperate Oosthuizen offering to pay money immediately into a bank account if D’Oliveira will accept, and hinting darkly at possible unpleasant outcomes should he not.
D’Oliveira successfully evaded giving a firm answer. Oosthuizen persisted, saying he would call again at 8.30 the next morning. That evening, D’Oliveira was called by Cowdrey to the Oval. The planned call was cancelled and never took place. The first leg of plan A had failed.
If A1 had seemed remarkable, the second variant of plan A is almost so bizarre as to be totally unbelievable, yet it happened.
In June 1968 D’Oliveira reported to Lord’s for the second Test against Australia. He was in good spirits, having been England’s top scorer and only really successful batsman at Old Trafford. During the evening before the match, when the England side traditionally met for dinner to discuss tactics, D’Oliveira was buttonholed by Billy Griffith, who put to him the amazing suggestion that he should announce himself unavailable for England that winter, but ask to play instead for South Africa.
The sky had fallen in. D’Oliveira was staggered. Why did Griffith think that he had spent so many years qualifying for England? Did Griffith really imagine that he would want to represent the hated apartheid regime? Or that they would consider picking him even if he did? And why was Griffith, an official of the MCC, making an approach which can only possibly have been instigated by the South African government? From what is now known, this suspicion was indeed correct. It seems almost certain from a letter written to Vorster in May (before the Lord’s Test) that the plan originated with SACA.
It is sad indeed that Griffith, who had won the DFC flying gliders during the war, should have sunk to such unimaginable depths of shabbiness. Yet the fact that he did so is a mark of the desperate manoeuvres into which certain officials felt forced by plan B, the unfolding of which will be explored later.
As if to convince D’Oliveira that he had not imagined the whole thing, exactly the same proposal was put to him the next morning by The Daily Telegraph’s cricket correspondent, E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton. Swanton was deeply embedded within the cricket establishment. He was particularly friendly with Gubby Allen, the MCC treasurer; indeed, he was writing his biography at the time. Swanton would later admit that the idea was the brainchild of SACA.42 Again D’Oliveira angrily swept the suggestion aside.
A short while later Cowdrey came up to D’Oliveira in the nets looking very embarrassed and told him that he would not be playing in the match after all. So, the second limb of plan A was stillborn, but D’Oliveira was out of the side, and it looked as if plan B was working instead.
So, let us take a look at plan B, which had been unfolding in parallel.
Remember that the MCC had written a letter to SACA at the beginning of 1968 asking them for an assurance that they could pick whomsoever they liked for the winter tour. At first, SACA, in consultation with the South African government, dealt with this by ignoring it. MCC’s reaction was to dispatch a special plenipotentiary to discuss the matter in person, a former prime minister no less. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, immediate past president of the MCC, was travelling to South Africa anyway, and was asked if he might drop in on Vorster while he was there and see if he could feel things out. Douglas-Home agreed.
However, for reasons best known to himself, though he saw Vorster he never asked the one direct question to which the MCC back in London were desperate to have the answer. Yet when he reported back, he gave it as his opinion that if D’Oliveira was chosen he was likely to be accepted by South Africa, and that the MCC would be better advised not to try to force the issue for the time being, and just let matters take their natural course. It remains unclear on what basis he formulated this view, but it was one which was gratefully accepted by the MCC. While Douglas-Home’s motives remain obscure, it is clear that he muddied the waters dreadfully. By allowing the MCC to believe they could continue happily fudging the issue, and by misleading them as to Vorster’s true intentions, he delivered the worst of both worlds. They duly decided that, in the light of his advice, they would not press for any reply to their letter.
By this time, however, a response had actually been drafted. Taking advantage of the fact that the MCC’s own letter had been expressed in such diplomatically bland language, the response was equally anodyne. In fact, it was a response in name only, not giving any clear assurance one way or the other. Jack Cheetham, a former South African captain, was tasked with delivering the letter personally to Gubby Allen and Billy Griffith at Lord’s. A response was by now, however, the last thing they wanted, and when Cheetham proffered it, they persuaded him to return it to his pocket forthwith. Thus their official line became that no response to their letter was ever received. If it is true, then it is so only on the merest of technicalities. A response was prepared and delivered to them, but they chose not to accept it.
Their motives are not hard to guess. If they had formally accepted receipt of the letter it would have had to go before the MCC committee, who would recognise at once that it did not in fact answer their concerns, and press for clarification. In the light of Douglas-Home’s advice, that was the last thing that Griffith or Allen wanted. In effect, the two MCC officials deliberately suppressed the letter when their official duty clearly demanded that they should have relayed it to the committee.
Back in South Africa, SACA were surprised and happy that the issue had been successfully avoided, yet Arthur Coy of SACA warned Vorster that, according to Cheetham, the MCC were sufficiently ‘compromised’ with the Wilson government that they were likely to pick D’Oliveira whatever his form, purely for political reasons and with the intention of embarrassing South Africa. It was apparently on receipt of this advice that plan A was conceived, the result of which has already been described.
Vorster’s other response to Coy’s warning was to ask to meet with Lord Cobham, who had extensive family and business connections with South Africa and was currently in the country. He needed Cobham to carry back to the MCC as discreetly as possible the true state of affairs: that if D’Oliveira was selected the tour could not go ahead. Cobham, who met with Vorster in March, was subsequently said by Coy to have been deeply upset by this news, and to be desperate for the tour to go ahead. From the way subsequent events unfolded, it is clear that Cobham’s bombshell about Vorster’s true intentions was passed on to Allen, who then apparently brought both Griffith and MCC president Arthur Gilligan, brother of Harold Gilligan (both brothers were former England captains), in on the secret.
Yet again one must question the conduct of Allen and Griffith. As paid officials of the MCC, it was their clear duty to pass this explosive new information on to the committee, yet they failed to do so. They were in fact perpetrating both a cover-up and a serious deception of their own organisation.
This was the position when D’Oliveira was unexpectedly left out of the Lord’s Test, a Test match that was attended by various South African dignitaries, including Arthur Coy, who was a guest in Cobham’s box and had been sent with specific instructions from Vorster to have further private conversations with influential establishment figures. It is not known exactly to whom he spoke (though it would have been strange if the official representative of a Test nation’s cricket board was not granted audiences with key MCC officials), or what was said, but his mission was clear: to spread the word that D’Oliveira would not be allowed in.
There is no way of knowing what further private communications may have taken place between the Test matches at Lord’s and the Oval, but one final desperate throw of the dice took place after D’Oliveira had actually scored his hundred. Oosthuizen phoned the Oval and left a message with the Surrey secretary, Geoffrey Howard. It was, Oosthuizen said, a personal message from the South African Prime Minister for Billy Griffith. He was to tell the selectors that ‘if today’s centurion is picked, the tour will be off’.43
So much for plan B. The message had been conveyed, and so far as Vorster was concerned it was now up to the selectors to decide whether they wanted the tour to go ahead or not. He doubtless assumed that Allen & Co. would have apprised the selectors of the true situation just as they themselves had been informed of it separately by both Cobham and Coy. Before turning to the selectors, however, two further matters should be noted, of which D’Oliveira only became aware when he reported for duty at the Oval.
First his agent discovered that a certain highly placed official was spreading the rumour that he had been offered a bribe to make himself unavailable for the tour. The identity of the official has never been established, but there are two obvious candidates. This was to be the final ironic twist of plan A. What is significant is that certain key people within the English game were clearly aware of its existence, and knew enough about the details to be able to peddle this warped version of the facts. D’Oliveira was sufficiently concerned to speak privately to Cowdrey and assure him that it was untrue.
Second, he became aware that earlier in the summer letters had been sent to 30 touring party candidates asking them to confirm their availability for South Africa, but that he was not among them.44 It is obviously ludicrous that D’Oliveira, who had until recently been a regular member of the Test side, should not have been recognised as one of the 30 best players in the country, and seems to offer clear evidence that even well before the event, various important figures had already taken the decision that he would not feature as a member of the touring party, no matter what. If the letters had been sent by the selectors, rather than the MCC, then this would also be clear evidence that at least one of the selectors had been let in on the nasty secret that Allen, Griffith and Gilligan were nursing in their bosoms.
Which brings us neatly to the question of whether the selectors, or any of them, knew the true position and, if so, when.
The four selectors were Doug Insole (the chairman), Peter May, Alec Bedser and Don Kenyon. To these four would be added the captain, Cowdrey, who by tradition would have the final word; if the captain insisted on a particular player then it was felt right to give him the team he wanted, since it was on the success of that team that he would ultimately be judged. Cowdrey is therefore clearly a key figure, but let us look first at the others.
The chairman, Doug Insole, was close to Gubby Allen. We do not know who signed those 30 letters, but if Insole had done so it would seem likely that he would have known the truth. Even if they were signed by Allen, one would expect that Insole, as chairman of selectors, would have had some input into the list of recipients. We don’t know, but if this were the case it might help to explain D’Oliveira’s surprise exclusion at Lord’s.
There exists one other argument in favour of Insole and at least one other selector (May?) having been in on the secret for some time. Everyone who has ever known him describes Doug Insole as an honourable man. If, when Geoffrey Howard delivered Oosthuizen’s message, it had come as a bolt from the blue, then one might suppose that the honourable course for Insole to take would have been to excuse himself from the proceedings, leaving the other selectors to continue, insulated from the truth? The fact that he did not do so suggests either that no such message was received or, alternatively, that at least some of the selectors had known the truth for some time. The only person who could settle this question is of course Insole himself, but sadly he declined to be interviewed for this book.45
Peter May was married to Arthur Gilligan’s niece and was extremely well connected in the cosy, gentlemen’s club world that was the cricket establishment in the 1960s. There is no direct evidence that May knew about the intervention of the South African government, though it would have been easy for Gilligan to pass the word, while if either Allen or Griffith had told Insole, then there would have been no reason not also to confide in the tight-lipped May, who was after all a former England captain, and could surely be trusted. The evidence here is entirely circumstantial, but the supposition that May did indeed know, at least by the time of the Oval Test, is the most likely explanation for Cowdrey’s apparent change of heart, of which more in a moment.
With regard to both Bedser and Kenyon there must remain considerable doubt. Both were professional cricketers (Kenyon was still playing) and it is quite possible that Allen and Griffith did not consider them sufficiently ‘chaps like us’ to trust them with their terrible secret, though Bedser and May were former Surrey and England teammates, so anything is possible. Kenyon was D’Oliveira’s county captain (Graveney deputised whenever Kenyon was not available), a fact which has been frequently overlooked.
History has placed Colin Cowdrey in a horrible position, and his own convoluted attempts to extricate himself in his autobiography make things worse, rather than better. It is common ground that he had a long discussion with D’Oliveira after his century about the practical difficulties that might be encountered in taking him to South Africa; Cowdrey himself admits that he was impressed and persuaded by D’Oliveira’s responses. D’Oliveira has always maintained that Cowdrey went further, giving him to understand that he wanted him in the party (‘you’re on the boat, Basil’),46 and would argue for him at the selection meeting.
In the taxi on his way across London to the meeting he said to Jack Bailey, assistant secretary of the MCC, ‘it looks as though we shall have problems with South Africa … They can’t leave Basil out of the team. Not now.’47
The first part of the statement might be seen as evidence that Cowdrey was already in on the secret, but this is fanciful. It was reasonable to anticipate problems with South Africa in any event. The second part of the statement reads very strangely, however, and may actually be unexpected evidence of Cowdrey’s good faith, at least initially. Why would he say ‘they’ when he, as captain, would surely have the final say? Is this perhaps a sign that Cowdrey, a non-confrontational man who hated being the bearer of bad news and always wanted to be on good terms with everyone, a man who was known to suffer from periodic losses of self-confidence, simply lacked the strength of character to stand up to his fellow selectors? Evidence suggests that on various occasions he exhibited signs of indecision as a captain, and allowed himself to be swayed by the views of others, particularly when strongly expressed. Knowing all this, does it not seem reasonable that he would strive to be part of a consensus, rather than a member of the awkward squad sticking up for his own opinion?
Cowdrey left the Oval at the very least strongly inclined to include D’Oliveira; although he tries to cast doubt on this in his book, the evidence of both D’Oliveira and Bailey is compelling. He was probably the one key figure who could sway the final decision one way or the other if he chose to. A few hours later the meeting ended with D’Oliveira not having been picked. Thus, one can only conclude that somewhere along the way he changed his mind, or at least that he no longer felt strongly enough about it to influence the decision.
One possible explanation has already been proffered; that Cowdrey was too weak to stand up to his fellow selectors, despite having apparently promised D’Oliveira that he would do so. Ray Illingworth would say: ‘He never seemed able to make a decision about anything, he never had the courage of his convictions, and he had to be talked into things’.48 Illingworth also suggested that on various occasions Cowdrey promised people things which then never happened.49
There is, however, another possible explanation.
Geoffrey Howard says in his memoir At the Heart of English Cricket that he gave Oosthuizen’s message to Insole personally. If this is the case then Insole would have been in on the secret by the time the selection meeting took place. If Insole knew, it would have been natural for him to tell May, even if he had not in fact already done so, or even if May had not already heard the news from Gilligan. If May knew, what could have been more natural than for him to take Cowdrey aside as he arrived for the meeting and tell him too? May was Cowdrey’s closest friend. He had been best man at Cowdrey’s wedding, and was godfather to his oldest son, whom he would later elevate entirely undeservedly, but mercifully briefly, to the English captaincy.
If Cowdrey was suddenly let in on the secret before the meeting began, he must have been aghast, not just at the prospect of one of his beloved Five Tours not taking place, but at the impossible position in which he had (quite innocently) placed himself. Far from being the villain of the piece, Cowdrey may simply have been an honourable man pushed beyond the limits of his character and overwhelmed by events.
41 Given in full in Peter Oborne, Basil D’Oliveira, Little, Brown, London, 2004
42 Basil D’Oliveira op. cit.
43 From Howard’s memoirs, as told to Stephen Chalke. Howard is an independent and unimpeachable source, and anyway would have had no reason at all to invent such an extraordinary story. Stephen Chalke, At the Heart of English Cricket, Fairfield Books, Bath, 2001
44 Interestingly, neither was Barry Knight, for reasons which may become clear.
45 He did, however, say: ‘There seems to be an assumption that there is something sinister yet to be revealed. Well, there isn’t.’ Letter to the author 22 February 2011.