‘IF I DO that,’ says Andy Lloyd, covering his left eye with his left hand, ‘and look at your nose, I can’t see the right side of your face. Not even blurred – it’s just not there.’ It is shortly before Christmas 2014, and the former England Test batsman is sitting in a pub in Stratford-upon-Avon, four miles or so away from the stud farm in Warwickshire that he now runs. ‘I’ve lost 35 per cent of the vision in my right eye. And that’s why I was never as good a player afterwards. When you’re playing top sport any edge that you lose is the difference. I knew I wasn’t as sharp. I was missing balls that I used to be able to hit for four. I was 15 per cent inferior, which at the highest level of the game is a massive margin.’
Andy Lloyd was picked to open the batting for England against the visiting West Indians in the Test series of 1984. By the first months of that year the evolution of Clive Lloyd’s team from a brittle talent in the mid-70s to a supremely forged side was almost complete. Their batsmen, their bowlers, their fielders were the world’s best. A single Test match lost in four years. Before arriving in England they had beaten Australia in the Caribbean three–nil. They didn’t lose a second innings wicket in any of the five Tests.
‘I was ready for it,’ says Andy Lloyd. ‘I’m not a nervous type. Never been particularly afraid of anything. You get nervous when you’re not sure of yourself. I knew how I was going to play. Whether or not it would be good enough to get a lot of runs, I didn’t know.’
Lloyd was in good shape. He had never played Test cricket but did well enough in the three one-day internationals that came before the series and England needed some new opening batsmen. Geoffrey Boycott was still scoring runs for Yorkshire but was serving a three-year ban for playing with the English rebel side in South Africa. Graham Gooch couldn’t be picked for the same reason. The truth was that England had little idea who should be in their best side. The captain David Gower and the all-rounder Ian Botham were the only obvious choices. Usually, the Test and County Cricket Board kept 18 colour portrait photos on file to promote the picked team in magazines and brochures; this season they had more than 30 mug shots.
Lloyd’s county was Warwickshire. He had been born a Shropshire lad, spotted and sent to Edgbaston in 1976 when he was 19. That summer he threw countless half-volleys at Dennis Amiss, who was remodelling his batting after being hit on the head by Michael Holding at the beginning of the season. Amiss would now take a more open stance, and his first movement would be back and to the off side. The change worked. After a summer of hard work and throw-downs from young Lloyd, Amiss got back into the England side and made a double century against Holding and the West Indians in the final Test of 1976 at the Oval.
Eight years later it was Lloyd’s turn to play for England, and he had his own methods. He was a good player of fast bowling and had often taken on Marshall, Garner and Holding in county cricket. The previous season against Surrey, Lloyd had carried his bat for a century facing a ‘terrifying’ Sylvester Clarke on an underdone Oval wicket. Only Lloyd survived the innings as Clarke tore into Warwickshire with 7 for 53.
‘Facing fast bowling was not complicated,’ he says.
I knew exactly how I was going to play. The first thing is that you look to play back. But you’re always looking for the up ball, the full ball. The one that gets you out is the up ball, but it was also your run ball. You had to get your weight going forward for that one, flick it off your hip if it was straightish or if it was wide, twat it square. When you drove, you had to drive straight as a left hander because if you didn’t, there were four slips and a gully waiting. The ball was always coming across me. You didn’t hook against the West Indies – there was no point – because sooner or later due to the speed you’d be late on it and hit one up in the air. You might get 20 – well done. Great. What use it that? You’ve got to get 120. There were very few people who could take the attack to them; you had to wait until they bowled in your areas. They were clever, intelligent bowlers. Proper bowlers. They never just banged it in short, non-stop.
The first Test of the summer was to be played at Andy Lloyd’s home ground in Birmingham. Some English press men were optimistic.
‘In theory, the West Indies should be entering a vulnerable phase,’ John Woodcock had written in The Times. ‘Clive Lloyd will be 40 in August; Richards, now aged 32, is not quite the player he was; Holding, at 30, and Garner, at 31, are not as fit as they were, and in the middle of the order, there will be batsmen who have yet to make a real mark in Test cricket.’ Woodcock also mentioned the ‘monotony’ of watching West Indian speed, unrelieved by spin, for hour after hour and day after day. When the variety of the game was reduced, so was its charm, he thought. In captaining the side, Clive Lloyd had to do no more than keep his team’s heavy guns firing, often pitching as short as the umpire allowed. Leading the West Indies was a sinecure compared with leading a side against them.
The man leading the side against them, David Gower, won the toss and decided that England would bat. Andy Lloyd was ready to make his debut for his country. ‘This’ll be good for you, Lloydy,’ said the other opener, Graeme Fowler. ‘You’ll get involved straight away.’ And off they went to face the two best fast bowlers in the world, Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner.
Lloyd did better than Fowler, who was back in the dressing room within minutes, caught behind for nothing from a Garner ball. His successor, Derek Randall, didn’t last long either, also caught for a duck. England were five for two, but Lloyd was hanging around.
‘I’m sure I must have played and missed,’ he recalls, ‘but I’m sure too that I hadn’t given a chance. I was quite relaxed and had been in for the best part of half an hour. Felt fine. Fowler and Randall had come and gone and I was still there. At the end of what must have been the sixth over Gower came down and we chatted in the middle and he said something like, “Well done, mate. You’re looking good, keep going.”’
It would be the last mid-pitch conversation the two would have. Malcolm Marshall began the seventh over from the City End.
‘It was a short ball, but not very short,’ remembers Lloyd. ‘Malcolm, as we know, had a very quick arm action. I saw it all the way and I’m thinking, The ball is going to pass here – past my left shoulder. On my off side. I’m watching it, and it just straightened off the pitch after it bounced and it swung a little bit towards me. I was trying to get out of the way, but it followed me and it hit me here.’ He touches his right temple an inch from his eye. ‘I’d faced many quicker balls. It wasn’t especially sharp, it was just a bloody good ball. You get bouncers, very good bouncers and brilliant bouncers. This was a brilliant bouncer. Came back at me a bit and cleaned me up.’
‘Oh dear me,’ said Richie Benaud on the BBC television commentary. ‘Oh, I didn’t like the look of that at all.’ Lloyd fell straight to the ground and lay on his side. He put his hands to his head then didn’t move. Desmond Haynes at short leg went immediately to him and crouched down. Jeff Dujon, the wicket-keeper, ran quickly to Lloyd, as did Roger Harper from third slip.
Graeme Fowler was watching in the dressing room. ‘There was a locked door between us and the players’ area and another closed door between us and the pitch. The telly was on with the sound turned down. The ball didn’t get up as much as Andy thought it would and it walloped him on the temple guard of his helmet. I heard the crack through those two doors, and I was 80 yards away. “That’s hospital,” we said to each other straight away.’
In the middle, after a minute or two Andy Lloyd sat up. The physiotherapist Bernard Thomas had run out to treat him with the England twelfth man, Neil Foster.
‘There was no pain,’ says Lloyd.
I felt OK. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Bernard said, ‘Take your time and tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.’ I said two, then he did it again and I said four. They were the right answers both times. But then I looked beyond his fingers to the boundary, and there was an advertising hoarding by a company called Rediffusion. You could rent your TV off them. And I was looking at this board and I couldn’t really read it. Heavily blurred. Bernard said, ‘I think you should come off,’ and I looked at the advert again and I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ That’s when I knew something was wrong.
Within half an hour Lloyd was being examined, still in his whites, at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. ‘The bones around my eye socket were fractured. There was no real worry about brain damage; it was the working of the eye they were concerned about.’ He pauses for a moment and looks away towards the back wall of the pub. ‘I should have played it better. But even now, every time I go through in my mind how I could have played it, it still hits me.’
Lloyd’s Test career had lasted 17 balls and barely half an hour. He retired hurt on ten. He would never play for England again. He is the only England opening batsman never to have been dismissed in the history of Test cricket.
After nine nights in hospital Lloyd was allowed to go home to his flat in Moseley, but he had to be careful. He was unable to tie his own shoelaces for a month because the doctors told him he had to keep his head still. No sudden movements. But he wanted to play cricket. By the end of July Warwickshire had reached the final of the Benson and Hedges Cup and Lloyd wanted to bat in it.
‘I tried to do the Roy of the Rovers thing before the final by putting my pads on and having a net, but I was nowhere near. Couldn’t bat properly. I had to make a decision about whether or not to keep playing cricket. I could have picked up £60,000 or so as an insurance payout, but I’d have to stop playing professionally. Thing is, I knew I would be captain of Warwickshire one day, and I knew I had a benefit year coming within five seasons. So I decided to go on.’
Lloyd wouldn’t play again that year, but there was some tentative batting on an English Counties XI tour of Zimbabwe in the beginning of 1985. When the next county season came around he was back for Warwickshire. For his first game at Edgbaston, on the pitch where Malcolm Marshall had ended his Test career, he had to face Greg Thomas of Glamorgan, one of the country’s fastest bowlers. He did well.
I got 160 or something, so everyone thought I was OK. Most bowlers that season made a big mistake: they tried to bounce me thinking I’d be scared. But the balls I couldn’t play, the ones I really struggled with, were the full balls – half-volleys and yorkers. And the reason was this: I found it very difficult to judge distance and speed. The bouncer did two things – it went down and then up. That was OK, but the good-length ball just kept coming on the same path. That’s why fielding was a nightmare. I was in a lot of trouble from a ball hit flat and hard straight at me. As for batting, there was a guy at Lancashire called David Makinson. Left arm medium pace, absolutely nothing special. Couldn’t have played more than 30-odd first-class games and I doubt he got to a hundred wickets. Anyhow, he always pitched it up, and I couldn’t get a run against him, and he kept getting me out bowled or LBW. I think after that I knew I’d never play for England.
His damaged eyesight had recovered as much as it would. There would be no more improvement. Freed from the constant pressure felt by the elite cricketer – the expectation of playing for your country – Lloyd changed the way he batted.
I was a completely different player now. I started smashing it a bit because I knew I would never be in the top rank again. Psychologically it was interesting too because up to 1985, my whole career – ten years – had been all about me. Improving, improving, challenges, getting runs, focusing on nothing other than playing for England. That was my professional existence. After Malcolm hit me and I realised I had no chance of getting back with England, I changed my focus entirely – my reason for being a cricketer – and it became all about my team, Warwickshire.
I never felt that I was a victim of the West Indian fast bowling. It was fair dos. The fast bowler is not complete without a bouncer, and cricket wouldn’t be right without it. The West Indies overdid the short-pitched stuff – they stretched the limit of the regulations – but it was their way of winning, and they always played within the laws. Always. And I would have done exactly what they did if it had been up to me.
* * *
Andy Lloyd was still in hospital while the West Indies were making 606 in the Edgbaston Test. They didn’t have to bat again. They won the game by an innings and 180 runs. The second Test was at Lord’s, and it was England’s turn to declare in the hope of a win on the last day. Graeme Fowler had got a hundred in the first innings, and Allan Lamb did the same in the second. They set West Indies 342 in just under three sessions of cricket.
Gordon Greenidge opened the West Indies’ second innings. He had been batting at the top of the order for almost ten years and was as important to the team as any fast bowler. Again and again that morning he hit the run of small boards put up next to the boundary ropes on both the Grandstand and Mound Stand sides of the ground. Greenidge clipped decisively off his legs and cut so swiftly to the off that his bat circled with momentum above his head with each four. He made his 50 when the team had scored only 77.
Greenidge probably knew England and the English better than any of his teammates. His first encounters had come not as Gordon Greenidge but as an uncertain teenager called Cuthbert Lavine. Until 1965 Cuthbert had lived in Barbados with his grandmother, whom he adored, while his mother sent home as much of her wages from a London bakery as she could. When Cuthbert was 14, she sent for him, and he left the village of Black Bess in the north of the island. He was leaving behind his friends, as well as swimming in the sea, fishing after school, kite flying and berry picking. He moved to Berkshire into a gardenless terraced house with his mother and her new husband, whose name was Greenidge. In a grim street he experienced the drabness of 1960s Reading. It was, he said, like setting foot in hell.
‘I was going into something completely new, something I knew nothing about,’ he recalls. ‘It was a totally new dawn. Despite the joyful experience of being in the company of my mother again, it was very frightening, I have to say.’
If Reading itself was bad, school was worse. His thick and speedy Barbadian accent was ridiculed, but that was nothing compared to his astonishment at being racially abused. He remembers that ‘black bastard’ was the least of the taunts he suffered. His bewilderment was compounded by Caribbean pupils from different islands, who regarded him with almost the same suspicion and animosity as the white bullies who punched him in the face.
At 15 he was out of school and working. Unqualified and unskilled, he shifted sacks of seed and soil for a local agricultural merchant. He cared little for cricket and was better at rugby. He was a lonely, hesitant teenager, and his only dream was that he might one day become a preacher. Then an opportunity came along: in his last year at school he had been chosen for the Berkshire young cricket side, although Greenidge is convinced that the only reason he had been picked was that he was a West Indian. He hit the ball hard yet had no concentration, but he must have had some talent because the next season he was asked to play again and made a hundred against Wiltshire. His name was then mentioned to Hampshire, a first-class county. For the first time since he came to England, there was something to look forward to. Things had changed for the better. So had his name. Cuthbert Gordon Lavine was now Gordon Greenidge.
* * *
At Lord’s on the last day of the 1984 Test Greenidge batted on. After lunch he faced England’s fast bowlers not in a helmet but a cap. Bob Willis was driven; Derek Pringle was clubbed. Desmond Haynes had been run out, but Greenidge was joined by Larry Gomes with his unobtrusive, considered play. Meanwhile, a man was racing home across London to watch the rest of the match on his television. Harold Blackman was a bus driver from Harrow and, like Gordon Greenidge, a member of a powerful cricket team full of West Indians. Not quite Test standard, it’s true, but good enough to lick most sides that came their way.
‘Ah yes, the feller Gomes. We called him the carpet sweeper,’ chortles Harold in his chair at his family home in Barbados. He is retired and on his ‘long holiday’. He will be back in England next year, but not until winter is gone and the clocks go forward. ‘Yes, we call Gomes the carpet sweeper because he bat like an Englishman sweeping a room, prodding about, not attractive. Never hit the ball in the air. But the point is, he fold in nicely with the other West Indies players. We have a lot of attacking players. We have Gordon, we have Viv, we have Clive. So we liked somebody like Gomes to steady the ship. Sometimes we in trouble and Gomes comes out, prods here, prods there, make a hundred.’
Harold Blackman had been watching the Test match on his television that morning but had to run an errand from Harrow to Charing Cross station.
‘The game could only be a draw, only a draw. I had to do this delivery so I say, “No more cricket; I’ll do this job.” I set off and go to Charing Cross, finish the delivery a couple of hours later and then this feller at the station say, “Greenidge and Gomes are murdering England.” Well, first thing I run for the train to Harrow to get back to the house and see if we can win.’
Harold had arrived in England two years before Gordon Greenidge. He too was Barbadian and, like Greenidge, was an opening batsman.
I had been a bricklayer in 1963, 18 years old, helping to build the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown. Anyhow, London Transport came recruiting. They wanted people for the buses and trains. I put my name down and I got a letter one day – I’d been selected with a batch of 20 boys with a chance to go to England. We had to do exams first and they said if I was successful, I’d be going in three weeks’ time. So I had my injections and all that and we had to go to the polytechnic by Kensington Oval three nights a week. Now, we had dollars and cents in Barbados, and because I was going to be a bus conductor and collect the fares in London, I had to learn pounds, shillings, pence and farthings. This was a nightmare. But fortunately I was not too long out of school so it clicked quite quickly.
The final exam was on a Sunday morning in May 1963. Harold cycled to the test because he had to get to a game of cricket in the afternoon. ‘I was anxious not to miss that match. So I did the exam – pounds, shillings and pence – and then I had to write an essay about what to do if there was an accident on the bus. They told us the results immediately. And they said to me, “You’re passed to go to England and you’re off next week.” So I cycled to that cricket match knowing it would be my last in Barbados.’
Harold had never left the island before. He flew to Jamaica and then caught a cargo boat to England. ‘The bus company paid two weeks’ rent in advance and put you in a house where there were eight or ten other men living – 112 Hindes Road, Harrow. I’ll never forget it. Three to a room in bunk beds. It wasn’t easy. But one good thing, they were all Barbadians, and I knew two men there because we’d played cricket together at home.’
A few miles to the south, as Harold was settling in during that spring of 1963, the West Indies were at Lord’s, scrapping with England in one of the most exciting Test matches in years. Frank Worrell, Wes Hall, Colin Cowdrey with his arm in plaster, all four results possible. But Harold Blackman didn’t see the thrilling draw. What he wanted to do was play himself. It wasn’t difficult. Every bus garage in London had a side and a pitch. Harold’s was Harrow Weald. He made his debut – kit-less – within weeks. In his navy-blue conductor’s trousers he was told to bat at ten. For his next game his fortunes improved.
We played the hardest team in the division, Mortlake. They always won the Kingsbury League. This time the captain said, ‘Young Blackie, everybody now tells me you can bat. You can open.’ I said to him, ‘This is a big jump from number ten to number one, Captain!’ The opening bowler came from a long way off. Big run. I was on the front foot very early, and he bowled, and the ball still haven’t get to me yet. This is not like Barbados, I thought, so I decided then to play off the back foot, see it off the wicket. Next ball, overpitch. I hit it back past him for four: everybody like it and shout. And the bowler look at me and I say, ‘You can’t bowl fast.’ And he say, ‘Blackman?’ And I say, ‘Tudor??’ Well, turns out this feller and I used to play in the same league at home! I played for Lords, he played for Three Stars. Anyhow, I bat right through, get 68. They beat us by one wicket. But the news get around that a boy called Blackman was in the league!
Harold soon had a permanent spot in the Harrow Weald garage side and eventually became a valued regular in the London Transport XI, known as Central Road Services, a strong representative team chosen from all 48 London bus garages.
We had two white fellers in our garage team. That was about the same balance in all the garage sides. But when I first got to play for CRS, the captain had to be white. First time I see him bat, we lost. He was only captain because he was white! Oh yes, yes, yes. We still had that. He work for the buses but in the office. Once, I seen him try to make two runs to win a game. He couldn’t even do that. ‘We got to get a proper captain,’ we said. We took it in our stride though because we were in England.
Along the south coast, young Gordon Greenidge was also trying to work out English ways. By 1967 he had played for the Hampshire second XI and had done well enough to be offered a two-year contract. At the County Ground in Southampton he painted the benches, picked up litter and swept the pavilion. When his chores were done, he was allowed to practise playing cricket. He scored some runs but was desperately lonely. He had few friends and lived in a YMCA hostel. Greenidge would pass the hours away from cricket playing snooker or table football, wary of those travellers in the hostel who would pick on him because of his colour. As he needed to qualify for the county by residence, he had to live there not just for the cricket season but for the winter too.
‘That doomed me to the strange twilight world of the YMCA for some of the longest months of my life,’ he wrote. ‘I used to sit in my cramped and suffocating little room dreaming of the golden days of summer as the rain beat unceasingly against the windows.’
When his second season as a Hampshire cricketer started in 1968 he was hoping that life with the other junior players would be different to his dreary days in the YMCA. A few weeks into the season he and some other second XI staff were told to paint the creases for the start of a county game the following day. Instead, the other juniors decided to pin Greenidge down and paint him with whitewash. Only when they tried to whitewash his genitals was Greenidge able to break free. Made furious by his humiliation, he grabbed a spade and threatened to break it over their heads if they came any closer. ‘They must have sensed this was no idle threat and they backed off hastily,’ he recalled. ‘Never again did I become the butt of racial jokes or of misguided horseplay at Hampshire.’ He had stuck up for himself, but his sense of isolation from his teammates had never been more apparent.
‘Because of the treatment you had to cope with, you had to find a way of releasing all that built-up anger,’ he says now.
I felt that to go at my cricket forcefully, to attack, was a way of letting out that anger. I can’t take it out on another human being because it wouldn’t be right – although I felt like it at times – but I’m sure gonna take it out on five and a half ounces of leather cricket ball. I wasn’t always a touch player that applied a lot of finesse. Maybe the word to describe how I go after the ball on the field of play was ‘brutal’. Maybe it was a way of expressing myself and releasing that anger that had built up inside of me.
Greenidge’s experiences would not have surprised Harold Blackman, who by now worked the 140 bus route from Mill Hill Broadway to Heathrow Airport.
I can tell you it wasn’t easy. Things often happened. I would collect the money on the bus and I would have people who didn’t want to touch my black hands. One woman held the coins high in the air and dropped them to me – went all over the floor of the bus. Now, if that had happened later in my career I would have just let the coins roll, not a problem. But I was new. I didn’t want to lose my job so I was there on my hands and knees picking up this woman’s pennies. It was humiliating. Not very nice. That’s one incident. There were plenty more. They would call you a black bastard. Later on, when I was a driver, people would spit on you. It wasn’t fun, but we take it, we take it. You had to work it out for yourself. You could either get in trouble – I had friends who ended up in court for that – or you could walk away. My thing on the bus was not to talk to nobody. That way worked for me. But there are some things that were done to me that will stick in my mind until I die. When people ask me how can I stay on the buses for 48 years, I say, ‘Only God knows.’
And it made me angry – and I’ll tell you why. When I went to those evening-class lessons in Barbados before I got selected to be a conductor, they told us a lot of lies. They told us, ‘The English people are the nicest people in the world.’ First day I walked to the Harrow garage, we said, ‘Good morning,’ to everyone we passed – like we did in Barbados – and not one person answered. Why didn’t they tell us the truth?
We walked home at night in the early days, got followed by a group of Teddy boys with chains. Well, we made it to the Wealdstone police station and there were two policemen outside. We asked for help and you know what they said? They said, ‘I’ll tell you the best thing to do – why don’t you go back home where you belong?’ And you wonder why there were problems with the police in later years? They had the same hate in them as those Teddy boys.
* * *
At Lord’s in 1984 Bob Willis ran in from the Pavilion End to bowl. The ball was short, and Gordon Greenidge cut it square. It didn’t go for four, just a one to deep cover, but it was enough to bring the batsman a hundred.
‘Up goes the bat, up go the arms – a super hundred this,’ said the TV commentator Jim Laker. ‘He really has played exceptionally well. A hundred out of 149 for 1. He’s really set West Indies on their way.’
The West Indies supporters in the stands blew on creamy pink conch shells, rang hand bells and pumped portable radio sets up and down above their heads. Greenidge was their man, a batting hero of the best sort – dependable, experienced and exciting. But it had not always been this way.
‘Go home, Englishman! Who the hell are you?’ the fans had hooted. It was the beginning of 1973 and Greenidge was walking off the field at the famous Kensington Oval in Bridgetown having failed again for Barbados. The previous summer he had done well for Hampshire and had been given his county cap. This was much more than just a piece of cheap cloth; for Greenidge its award brought the sense of belonging and status, the legitimacy he had yearned for. It was recognition of his efforts. It made all those dreadful nights in the hostel worthwhile. With his Hampshire cap on his head, he felt less of an outsider. But now, months later, he was once again bewildered and confused. Barbados had asked him to play for the island. Perhaps this was a sign that he was being considered for the West Indies. Greenidge thought he was coming home, but he was in for a stunning let-down. What he calls a ‘hate campaign’ unnerved him so much that he seriously considered returning early to England.
It was very strange. I was encountering behaviour very similar to what I encountered when I first moved away. Up until this day I don’t think I am accepted as a Barbadian. I mean they still call me an Englishman, and that’s a fact. That made me very angry, as well as the reception that I received on coming back to the Caribbean. It was unexpected, so maybe I felt more anger towards the people behaving like that than what I felt towards the English guys who were calling me names when I first moved to England.
Greenidge worked out that the resentment was caused by the belief that he was taking the place of local cricketers in the Barbados team, the ‘home-grown’ players, that somehow his time in England had made him privileged and wealthy. Apart from his family on the island, few people welcomed him. Yet again he was an outsider. It didn’t help that he couldn’t make big scores on Caribbean wickets.
The skills he had learned in England – playing late, watching the ball off a deviating pitch against medium-pace swing – were no use to him here. The West Indies regional bowlers were faster, the wickets much quicker and the glare from the sun made Greenidge’s eyes water. To make matters worse, he wasn’t selected for the West Indies side to tour England in 1973 despite there being no obvious talent to accompany Roy Fredericks at the top of the batting order. Back in Hampshire that summer, Greenidge was quietly asked if he might be prepared to play for England. After all, he had lived in the country for long enough. He was flattered and gave it some serious thought. If he didn’t get picked for the West Indies in the next year or two, then yes, playing for England was very likely.
In the end the West Indies selectors made the decision for him. Greenidge was chosen for the tour of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the winter of 1974–5. He was one of many young players under the new captain, Clive Lloyd. In his first Test he made 90 and a hundred. A century on his debut for the West Indies – like George Headley, like Conrad Hunte and only five other men. It was a wonderful start to a very long international career, yet for all his successes Greenidge never seemed entirely soothed by a great innings. He was easily disturbed by his failures and had a tendency to sulk. Being dropped as an opening batsman in Australia the following season angered and humiliated him. Had his experiences as a young man taught him always to expect misfortune? Yet his determination to get even, to fight back, was equally strong. He was hugely competitive within the West Indies line-up. It’s likely that he felt his batting wasn’t recognised and applauded in the same way as that of the more gregarious members of the team such as Richards and Lloyd.
‘I have often wondered if my life would have been easier had I been bred and discovered on one of the Caribbean islands,’ he wrote in his 1980 autobiography. ‘I am the only member of the West Indies party who has come to the top via another route and there are still moments when I feel like an outsider in the West Indies dressing room.’ That feeling of separation was not helped by other remarks in the book. He made it clear that he did not think Clive Lloyd would go down in history as an inspirational leader. A marvellous and instinctive cricketer, for sure, but not a man whose shrewd captaincy changed the course of matches.
‘I think Gordon felt that he didn’t get what he really deserved in the side,’ says Tony Cozier.
He craved recognition. But the fact is he is right up there with the best West Indian opening batsmen there have ever been. Him and Conrad Hunte. And actually Greenidge was a fortunate batsman. He was fortunate to have Desmond Haynes as a partner. Roy Fredericks and Hunte had something like 13 different batting partners; Greenidge had Haynes and Fredericks. A big advantage. He had physical power matched by mental strength. He was a very serious man who I’ve no doubt didn’t entirely fit in to the West Indies dressing room, which was usually a place of fun and laughter. After all, they were West Indians. There was a lot of leg-pulling. But Gordon must have been strong because the one thing Caribbean cricket watchers can do immediately is detect any sort of psychological flaw, any weakness in a player. On the pitch Gordon didn’t have those flaws.
Certainly not on that day in 1984 at Lord’s. By the middle of the afternoon he was still there and had gone past 150. Less than a hundred to win now. Derek Pringle came back on to bowl. With beauty and power Greenidge put him over mid-wicket for four. Greenidge’s followers now honked with delight. ‘There’s the old Bajan sea shell,’ noted Jim Laker, before adding after a pause, ‘I’ve blown a few of those in my time.’ Off the next ball Greenidge nearly killed umpire Barry Meyer with a waist-high straight drive that would have ricocheted around the pavilion had it not been stopped by the dainty whitewashed fence guarding the front door.
‘It was unbelievable,’ recalls Graeme Fowler. ‘Allan Lamb was at cover; I was at backward point, and Greenidge was giving himself room and smacking it past us for four. The closer we got, the harder he would hit it one side or the other – he was playing games with us. We didn’t blame the bowlers though. It just got to a stage where it became inevitable. We couldn’t stop him.’
With a hook to long leg, Greenidge took Neil Foster for a six into the Edrich Stand. Now he had made two hundred. Only eight other men had done that at Lord’s since Test cricket began. His first reaction was to punch the base of his bat hard into the wicket as if planting a flag on a conquered peak. It had been a brilliant match-winning innings. Not long after, the defeated England fast bowler Ian Botham pottered up off four paces and bowled a fluttery off break which Larry Gomes, now on 88 and surely the finest carpet sweeper in the land, cut for four. Spectators fought for the ball at deep extra cover. Greenidge with a purloined stump in his hand, ran for the pavilion. It was half past five, and the West Indies had won by a mile.
It was one of the great West Indian innings of modern cricket, although Greenidge himself believes that his 134 (out of 211) at Old Trafford in 1976 was a more important score because it enabled his side to win a game they would otherwise have lost. Greenidge had showed himself to be supremely organised, a punisher who in the words of his captain batted ‘with the interests of West Indian cricket at heart’.
His opening partner, Desmond Haynes, had sat and watched most of Greenidge’s innings from the dressing-room balcony. They hadn’t shown it that day, but they were the most successful front two batsmen the West Indies would ever have. Sixteen times they put on more than a hundred together; four times they scored more than 200. For 13 years they stayed together.
‘My role was the supporting one,’ says Haynes. ‘I would never try to outdo Gordon. I wanted to make sure that our batting partnership was a long one. I don’t mean the number of runs we put on in an innings; I mean the number of Tests we played. If he made 89 and I got 11, then it was a hundred partnership and I would be picked in the next game. I was happy to play second fiddle. I always thought that Gordon was better than I was. He was a more complete player.’
England were now two–nil down in the five-match series. The loss at Lord’s was particularly embarrassing for the new England captain, David Gower. On the fourth evening his side had been in a very solid position, heading towards a good total. Then they came off the pitch in poor light when the braver thing to do might have been to stay on and make more runs to take the game away from the West Indies. Time had been lost.
Such a decision had been ‘psychologically weak and tactically timid’, wrote John Woodcock. The Times also questioned how hard Gower’s England had prepared to play the world’s best team. ‘There is one fairly gruesome story doing the rounds,’ revealed Woodcock. ‘It tells of how before the Lord’s Test West Indies practised hard from 10 o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon while England, due at three o’clock, arrived late and were soon gone. Clive Lloyd insisted that Garner, against his wishes, should have a proper bat, helmet and all, in case he should have to go in with 10 to win.’
Not since 1948 had an England captain declared his second innings and lost.
‘It was a mighty humbling day to be in the field against that,’ admits David Gower. ‘They won with nearly 12 overs of the last 20 left. To use a colloquial expression, all the wheels came off. The chairman of selectors, Peter May, was keen that we declared early. By the mathematics of the 1960s, that made sense; by the mathematics practised by the West Indies, it was a bit ambitious.’
‘It wasn’t the done thing to go on batting,’ says Graeme Fowler. ‘And that was the trouble. We were stuck in the 1960s, and the West Indies were playing twenty-first-century cricket in 1984.’
‘You see, your problem in England was flair,’ says Harold Blackman, who had made it back to Harrow to catch the last half-hour of the Test match on television.
Gordon was a flair man. A power man. A beater of the ball. Now you had no players with flair, well not many. Gower, he had a touch. ‘Lord’ Ted Dexter, he even batted like a West Indian. Colin Milburn. There was a feller we liked. We liked to see players hitting the ball. You also had a great player by the name of Ken Barrington, but we couldn’t stand him! He could prod around all day. A killer of the game! Peter May, he wasn’t bad, but the flair wasn’t there. The flair wasn’t there.
* * *
On the first morning of the third Test at Headingley Malcolm Marshall fractured his left thumb in two places. He had been fielding at gully and was hit trying to stop the ball. He left the ground and went to hospital, where his hand was set in plaster and the examining doctor told him he would not be able to play cricket for ten days. Marshall returned to the ground to watch England bat. The following day he saw his own team’s reply.
Larry Gomes again went well for the West Indies and on the third morning was nearing a hundred having got the side past England’s score of 270. The trouble was, he was running out of batting partners. When Joel Garner was out with Gomes on 96, it seemed that the innings would have to be closed. Only Marshall was left. But in the dressing room what had begun as a light-hearted tease – ‘Get your pads on Maco and go and help Larry’ – hurriedly became a serious plan. Garner was nearly back at the top of the pavilion steps when Marshall was seen trotting out wearing hastily fastened pads and throwing a batting glove back to his teammates. He was to admit on television that evening that he had still been ‘in his civvies’ when Garner was given out.
When he got to the middle he realised he couldn’t hold the bat in two hands because of his rigid plaster cast. ‘What shall I do?’ he asked Gomes. ‘Just try to block it, I guess,’ replied the batsman. With Marshall at the non-striker’s end, Gomes sprinted for two into the leg side and then, when the field came in to stop him getting the strike for the next over, he slogged Bob Willis back past his head for four to make his hundred.
That wasn’t the end of the innings. Marshall stayed with Gomes and faced eight balls of his own. He played and missed with a huge swipe that made him laugh, and then to the delight of the West Indies supporters on the terrace got up on his toes to glide a fast ball from Paul Allott wide of the slips. He’d hit a boundary with one hand, and before he was out his team had gone past 300.
Back in the dressing room Marshall realised that he was not in a huge amount of pain. He thought he might be able to bowl. England may have tolerated the light relief of him batting, but seeing him join the West Indies on the field to take the new ball was as serious as it was unexpected. England had scored only ten when he got his first wicket – Chris Broad caught at leg gully fending off a perfect short, fast and straight ball. After complaints were made that the England batsmen might be distracted by the flashing white plaster of Marshall’s cast – which had been signed by the West Indies team – his arm was wrapped in pink tape by Dennis Waight. He then took six more wickets, including a caught-and-bowled to dismiss Graeme Fowler, and destroyed England single-handedly.
Before three o’clock the following afternoon the West Indies had won the match by chasing a target of 128. They were now three up with two Tests to play and had once again defended the Wisden Trophy. English hands hadn’t raised it since 1969. ‘I had a certain feeling of helplessness,’ confesses David Gower. ‘It was now a question of the margin.’ He says he was trying to deal with his emotions both as a captain and as a player. ‘We’d been beaten badly, and whatever I said when I made an attempt to build or maintain an aura of confidence in the dressing room felt a bit hollow.’
By the time the series was complete, Gower had tried to gee up 20 different players. In four of the Tests he had had to inspire men who’d never played for England before. ‘These guys were having to make their debuts against one of the strongest sides they’d ever play in their lives,’ remembers Desmond Haynes. ‘C’mon! This was such juicy prey for our fast bowlers.’
At Old Trafford for the fourth Test the West Indies found yet another way of winning. Again they only had to bat once because Gordon Greenidge made another double century. In their second innings England had to score 221 just to make the West Indies bat again. They got nowhere near and were bowled out for 156 – not by Garner, Holding, Winston Davis or Eldine Baptise, but by Roger Harper the off-spinner, who took 6 for 57. John Woodcock remarked that the appearance of a slow bowler in a West Indies line-up was ‘as rare a sighting as an olive-backed pipit in Longparish in December’.
* * *
The West Indies had a squad of 17 players for the 1984 series in England. Harper was one of six who hadn’t played any county cricket. In the previous English season just Northamptonshire, Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire (who only took players born in the county) didn’t have a West Indian on their books. Those West Indians who played for the other 13 counties all played Test cricket in 1983. Several of the sides also had young British West Indian players – either born in England or who had moved to the country as children. At Middlesex, for instance, there was Wilf Slack, Roland Butcher, Norman Cowans and Neil Williams.
The importance of county cricket to the development of the West Indies team cannot be overstated. ‘Big time. It made a huge difference,’ says Alvin Kallicharran, who had 19 seasons playing for Warwickshire.
We became professional cricketers, and it became a way of life for us. For a young man to go to England and then to bat every day, to bowl every day – surprise, surprise you become a better player. Your capacity improves; you’re now a thinking person, thinking professionally. Because of England, I learned to keep my eyes on the ball, to play late, to remain focused in an innings and to concentrate for a long time. I learned discipline, I learned the etiquette of cricket. I felt I could combat any batting situation. So when we came to England as the West Indies later on, it was like batting in your backyard.
In 1968 the rules on overseas cricketers playing for counties had been reformed. Sides could employ a single foreign cricketer immediately and another after three seasons. Nowhere else in the world could a man play so many games of professional cricket in a season. The county championship programme of 1967 consisted of 238 fixtures, much more than the total of all first-class matches played that year in all other cricketing countries combined.
By the late 1960s Clive Lloyd had begun playing at Lancashire, Keith Boyce was at Essex, Garry Sobers was with Nottinghamshire and Lance Gibbs played at Warwickshire. Lloyd helped Lancashire to become the best one-day side of the time. In 1972 Warwickshire won the county title with four West Indians – Gibbs, Kallicharran, Deryck Murray and Rohan Kanhai – Murray and Kanhai could play because they qualified through owning property in England.
These players were developing the tradition begun by men such as Learie Constantine, the three Ws, Sonny Ramadhin, Collie Smith, Conrad Hunte and Basil Butcher. All these great West Indians had played English cricket in the Lancashire leagues, where they had gained a sense of responsibility. After all, they were carrying their teams. They were well paid so it was in their interests to develop not only their main skills but their subsidiary abilities too – fielding and batting if they were a bowler, catching and bowling if they were a batsman. To succeed they very quickly had to develop a sense of professionalism because the way they carried themselves in those little towns was noticed. Upright living was expected of them. These useful and important character traits would have been observed by and passed down to the players of later generations, building up to 1968, when the overseas player could flourish fully for the first time in county cricket. When Garry Sobers played at Derby that season, the county took more gate money than ever before in its history. These players were now sharing the experiences and challenges of those many voyagers who had left the Caribbean since the war to try to better themselves in England.
‘The league professional has a tremendous burden to shoulder,’ wrote Frank Worrell in Cricket Punch, ‘and it is a good thing for any cricketer who aspires to international fame to learn how to shoulder tremendous burdens. It sharpens him up, makes him realise that whereas cricket is a delightful game, it is also a difficult game if you are going to be at the top in the top class.’
‘They became stronger people,’ says Tony Cozier. ‘They went overseas, often for the first time, often alone. Their behaviour had consequences now. To put it another way, they did their own laundry for the first time. It made them into men.’ (Clive Lloyd was perhaps an exception on the laundry front. During his early seasons at Lancashire, the washing of his underwear was generously overseen by the wife of the county captain, Jack Bond.)
Migration to England made the West Indies Test side better. Domestic cricket in Australia and the Caribbean was only semi-professional, and there was not a great deal of it. You couldn’t earn much. So playing for a county meant good money and lots of cricket experience. ‘In the 1970s,’ says the cricket author Stephen Chalke, ‘there was nothing better than spending four months of a year when there was not much cricket going on anywhere else in the world, fine-tuning your skills within the rich variety of pitches and match conditions that English county cricket offered.’
Batting was done on uncovered pitches so there were always different surfaces created by wet or dry weather that helped the ball to spin, seam or swing. A young West Indian who had learned his cricket in Barbados or Trinidad had to tighten his technique considerably. The ball did very different things in England. Greenidge, Fredericks, Lloyd, Richards and Kallicharran all became more complete players because they batted in England a lot. In fact Richards and Greenidge served the bulk of their apprenticeships on English wickets. All would still have become great players, but their English experience taught them to adjust to different circumstances more quickly.
Bowling in England was always done best by the most intelligent cricketers. You had to think to bowl well on English pitches. Malcolm Marshall was a good example. During his great season of 1982, in all matches in England he bowled 1,008 overs and took 160 wickets. County cricket gave him the hours he needed to become brilliant. He could rehearse without fear. When he was perfecting his inswinger in 1985 it took him two months of net bowling and competitive matches to get the delivery to a standard with which he was happy. That meant at least 18 first-class and one-day matches. Had he been playing only for Barbados it could have taken him two seasons to build the confidence to use the inswinger in big cricket.
County cricket helped the West Indians more than it did any other foreign Test side. They were able to hone their skills and retain their competitive edge. Their sides of the 1950s and early 1960s had had some successes but lacked the consistency of professional cricket. Batting collapses were quite common, and the West Indies never stayed at the heights for long. Without the experience of English cricket, their great teams could not have advanced in the way that they did under Lloyd. County cricket made the Test side much harder to beat.
Perhaps the culmination of this shared experience was the team that excelled during Packer’s World Series Cricket. There is a connection. Here was a supreme travelling independent side, playing against all types of players on different types of pitches. At last they knew they could look after themselves.
* * *
At the fifth Test at the Oval in August 1984 the West Indies had the chance to make cricketing history. No team had won every Test of a five-match series in England before. Marshall was back and got five wickets in the first innings. Holding, reverting to his long run-up of ’76, did the same in the second. Lloyd saved the West Indies with an undefeated 60 when they batted first, and Haynes got a hundred when they went out for a second time. At one minute past midday on the last afternoon, Tuesday 14 August, the England swing bowler Richard Ellison nicked a catch to Joel Garner in the gully. The last of England’s 97 wickets to fall that summer had gone, and the West Indies had won every Test. Five–nil. Not a whitewash, a blackwash.
‘Everyone knows of our association with the British,’ says Viv Richards, ‘and everyone knows the standard that the British had set as far as cricket was concerned. So beating them felt like we had come a long way. They adore Test match cricket. I heard someone say, way back when, that England would rather lose a battleship than lose a game of Test match cricket.’ He laughs. ‘Now I don’t know how true that statement is, but hearing it like that, then you know how serious the English appreciate Test matches.’
Since the beginning of Test cricket such a complete result had only been recorded by four other teams. Australia had managed it twice, between the wars. England did it against India in 1959, and the West Indies beat India five–nil in 1961–62. By winning at the Oval, Clive Lloyd’s side had also equalled the all-time record of eight successive Test match wins. They hadn’t lost now for 23 matches. One defeat in 39 Tests.
‘We never expected to win five–nil,’ says Lloyd. ‘I must be honest and say that we didn’t expect to lose, but the margin of victory was a bonus. By now we were formidable. I think we were largely respected wherever we went, certainly by other cricketers, and people spoke about West Indian cricket with admiration.’
Up to a point.
While other players may have appreciated the West Indians’ craft, there was undisguised displeasure regarding their bowling by some in the English media. Writing in the Sunday Times, Robin Marlar stated that ‘as the umpires seemed neither to count nor to care how many balls pitch closer to the bowlers than the batsmen, we can expect the plague of short stuff to continue. The beautiful game will die of such brutality but you cannot get a West Indian to agree with that proposition.’ The only thing that gave Marlar any joy on the Saturday of the final Test was listening to one of Mozart’s horn concertos in his car as he drove to the Oval.
Ideas were also being formulated to blunt West Indies tactics. Two former England captains, Sir Leonard Hutton and Ted Dexter, had specific plans. Dexter wanted the pitch to be made longer so the ball took longer to reach the batsman. (Such a change would have killed off slow bowling at a stroke.) Hutton wanted a white line to be placed across the wicket halfway down. If the ball pitched on the bowler’s side of it, it would be an illegal delivery. The editor of The Cricketer magazine, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, endorsed Sir Leonard’s thoughts. He suggested trialling the line for a season of first-class cricket across the world so as to prepare teams for its use in Test matches. ‘It would be so much better to deal with the problem now rather than when someone has been killed,’ he wrote.
By now the view had formed that the West Indies were somehow tarnishing the spirit of cricket, that the way they played the game with four fast bowlers was underhand, unfair even. In the words of Marlar, ‘most people on whose support English cricket depends, believe monotonous fast bowling to be both brutalising the game and boring to watch’. To accompany the 1984 Test series in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, its editor John Woodcock printed a photograph of the England night watchman Pat Pocock, ‘ducking for his life’ to get under a bouncer from Malcolm Marshall. The picture was captioned, ‘The unacceptable face of Test cricket’.
‘Unacceptable?’ asks Graeme Fowler. ‘Was it hell. We never thought that. We just knew we were involved in a monstrous battle. We never thought this was against the spirit of the game. Our only thought was that if you can’t handle it, then don’t do it. Just get stuck in. The West Indies were found guilty of nothing more than being superb.’
Matthew Engel covered the 1984 tour for the Guardian.
As the possibility of the blackwash built, the series actually became more and more vivid. The extent of it enhanced the drama. And I don’t think monotony played any part in it. Monotony is trundling medium-pacers of the sort England quite often put out. The sense you had was that you were witnessing something extraordinary. Vivid, on the borderline of what we conceive as cricket, but never monotonous.
The West Indies were supposedly dull to watch, yet advance ticket sales for the third Test at Headingley (when England were already two–nil down) were a record £130,000. Gate receipts at Lord’s – £507,000 – were also a record. The boundary on the Grandstand side of the ground had to be shortened to 65 yards to accommodate extra spectators on the grass.
It was often repeated that summer that dreadfully slow over rates drained all the excitement from the game, yet when the unused playing time from 1984 is added up, it totals 15 two-hour sessions not including time lost to shorter weather delays. That would have been enough time to play another complete five-day Test. ‘If they’d have liked,’ says Clive Lloyd, ‘we could have won all our matches a lot quicker. I wonder what the people who counted the money in the tills would have thought of that.’ As for the depressing homogeneity of fast bowling, Woodcock suggested in The Times that there could be a scenario for the second Test where England might be better off picking four pace bowlers: Richard Ellison, Derek Pringle, Bob Willis and Neil Foster – as well as the fast-medium Ian Botham.
West Indian fast bowling was supposedly dangerous and unedifying. Wisden, in its review of the 1984 season, complained that umpires had allowed bowlers to resort ‘ever more frequently to the thuggery of the bouncer’. But others seemed to like it. At the end of May, when the West Indies had played Glamorgan, The Times had reported that after a delay for rain the weather and the play were more enjoyable. ‘There was a purple passage when Winston Davis [playing for Glamorgan] attempted several bouncers at [Richie] Richardson, a miniature war, as it were, between the Windward and Leeward islands. Those that Richardson could reach were hooked, pulled and driven for five fours.’ Black bowlers bouncing black batsmen seemed to be perfectly entertaining to some critics. Only in Test matches against England were bouncers apparently unpleasant.
In the series before the West Indies came to England they had hosted Australia. In one phase of the fifth Test in Jamaica the Australia fast bowler Rodney Hogg bowled 12 bouncers in a row (two complete overs) at the throats of West Indies’ openers Desmond Haynes and Gordon Greenidge. In the first innings Greenidge made 127 and Haynes scored 60. In the second innings both were not out, making the 55 runs the West Indies needed to win the game by ten wickets. Far from being intimidated by Hogg’s extraordinary bowling, they took it on and subdued it. It is interesting to wonder what the reaction would have been had Michael Holding bowled 12 bouncers in a row to a pair of England batsmen.
‘It’s so beautiful to see the hook shot played well,’ says Desmond Haynes. ‘I wanted people to bowl short at me. It was like a half-volley, a four ball. I always expected to get a short ball from a good bowler.’
‘The criticism has to be rooted in jealousy. Why else would people complain?’ reflects Joel Garner.
And the answer is very simple. You play to your strengths. It wasn’t intimidation. If you take short-pitched bowling away, how many fewer runs would Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharran, Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge have scored? They conquered the bouncer. Take away the short-pitched ball and you take away one of the joys of cricket. It’s such a nonsense because when we were on the end of it we never complained. The way I see it, we didn’t bowl excessive bouncers, we attacked people who had a weakness.
The reaction to West Indian fast bowling was troubled by inconsistency. It seemed to perturb journalists much more than it bothered the players and the spectators. Even those who called for its supposed unpleasantness to be tamed by legislation – such as The Cricketer – couldn’t decide whether fast bowling should be shunned or supported. Perhaps it depended on where the bowlers came from. In 1983, the season before the West Indies arrived, the magazine ran a nationwide competition: Find a Fast Bowler for England. Its quest was supported by Alf Gover and the England selector Alec Bedser. The winner, whom the two men chose from a group of 16 finalists, was a 19-year-old teenager from Paddington in west London called Junior Clifford. His parents were from Jamaica.
* * *
For the Oval Test in 1984, the last of the series, the press box was not in its usual place, but in a temporary building on the Harleyford Road side of the ground opposite the famous gasometers. To get to it, journalists had to make their way through the West Indian supporters. One reporter recalled that the atmosphere was different to anything he had experienced before. ‘The crowd was hostile,’ he said.
There was lots of dope, not mellow dope. There was no doubt they were in the majority. I guess this was getting to the peak of West Indian cricket watching in England. It was by no means dangerous, but I felt uncomfortable. But was it any more intimidating than moments I’d had with Yorkshire supporters on the Western Terrace at Headingley? Probably not. I think that more than ever most of these young people saw that West Indian cricket team as an expression of their frustrations. It was a solution. Given what had happened in inner-city England in recent years, was that surprising?
In 1981 there had been serious riots in Brixton, just a couple of miles from the Oval. Plenty of people in the blackwash cricket crowd would have experienced that trouble, and they would witness further riots in the same suburb the following year, which began after the police shot and paralysed a black woman in her home while searching for her son, who was suspected of an armed robbery.
Professor Paul Gilroy, who has written widely about black British culture, was in the 1984 Oval crowd.
For lots of young people there was a sort of Manichean purity to the confrontation that summer. The pulse of the 1976 cricket had been very strong and it radiated outwards for years. These victories, condensed into this sporting encounter, were symbolic reparations for their sufferings in England. There was, I think, one resonance for the Caribbean migrant and another distinct sensation for those who were born here, those people whom the government called rather memorably ‘the coloured school-leavers’. They had an extra dimension of bitterness.
‘In the 1980s,’ says the cricket writer Colin Babb, ‘the Test ground was a point of assembly. It was a place you went to meet people who were like you, to connect with them and to celebrate. Yes, there were local sports grounds, the odd bar where you could sit, perhaps an annual carnival in your city, but the cricket ground was the place. When I went to the Oval it was the only time in my life where I stood in an open public arena with lots of other people like me.’
* * *
By the start of the 1980s the relationship between the police and many of the people who lived in Brixton had deteriorated badly. At the beginning of 1981 a fire at a house party in New Cross, a few miles to the east, had killed 13 people. There was a widespread local view that there was orchestrated indifference to the tragedy (on the part of the newspapers and the police) because the victims were young and black and that the party had somehow been considered a sinister event. Six weeks later, at the beginning of March 1981, between 6,000 and 20,000 people (the reports vary) walked through London to protest against the authorities’ reaction to the fire.
Less than a month later a police initiative called Operation Swamp took place in Brixton. It was part of a campaign against burglary and robbery which the Metropolitan force was carrying out across London. In six days 120 plain-clothes officers stopped nearly a thousand people. Given that the suburb contained the country’s largest number of British West Indians, almost all the people stopped were black. In a part of London where suspicion of the police was already profound, the operation caused remarkable animosity. The name Swamp had apparently been taken from comments made by the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she was leader of the opposition in 1978. She predicted that by 2000 there would be four million immigrants from ‘Pakistan and the new commonwealth’ in Britain. ‘That is an awful lot, and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people of a different culture. The British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, then people are going to be rather hostile to those coming in.’
The head of the local CID described the 118 arrests made by his officers during Operation Swamp as a resounding success. Within days of its ending, tens of millions of pounds’ worth of damage had been caused to Brixton by rioters.
* * *
Steve Stephenson is sitting in an armchair in his house in Bedford. Around him is the evidence of his deep involvement in West Indian sport in Britain: photographs of him with players, posters advertising charity games, black-tie dinners, community matches for football and cricket. For 40 years he has been a confidant, fixer, supporter in loco parentis and adviser to Caribbean cricketers who come to England to play for a county or in the leagues. And his wife has been their chef. If it was egg and chips on the menu yet again in Bristol, Leicester or Swansea, Steve would rescue the West Indies by driving over with a car boot full of rice and peas and chicken patties, or ackee and saltfish with dumplings.
‘You remember that famous banner at the 1975 World Cup final?’ he asks. ‘You see it on the TV. The one with the kangaroo? That was painted by my younger brother Harvey. He was an A-level student at the time. He didn’t come to the game himself, but I was there. The banner got taken away from us and passed around the crowd.’ Harvey’s painted artwork had shown a marsupial bound with rope being pulled along by a black cricketer in whites and pads. It read, WEST INDIES – WORLD CHAMPION, WILL TIE THE KANGAROO DOWN.
Steve’s father was one of the first Jamaican immigrants to come to Luton in the early 1950s. He had cycled around Kingston selling tobacco from his bike, but in Bedfordshire he worked on the Vauxhall car assembly line. ‘Like a lot of people of his time, he saw England as the mother country where the streets were paved with gold,’ says Steve. ‘He wanted a better life.’
Steve arrived from Jamaica in 1971 when he was 17. He too worked in the car factory but by 1981 was studying for a university degree in social work. The riots that year in London, Manchester and Liverpool had spread to Luton. ‘I’d opened up a club with a friend of mine. The Starlight Club. We wanted to do something for the 200 or so young people, a lot of them alienated, many aspiring to be Rastafarian, most of them born here. ‘Social exclusion’ was the phrase they called it at the time.’
Luton was a tricky place in which to hang around at weekends in the early 1980s. There was regular trouble between supporters of Luton Town and visiting football clubs such as Chelsea and West Ham United.
‘Yeah, so the point was that this club was open all day on a Saturday. Keep the boys away from the nonsense. The police bought us a pool table. All the Asian boys would come and watch the Bruce Lee kung fu movies, the white boys come in hiding their cans of lager, the Caribbean boys come in hiding a bit of spliff, but they all mixed in the club together and they were off the street.’
Steve also set up a little library at the Starlight Club.
Lots of these kids had an identity problem, just like I had in Jamaica 20 years previously. I knew about Shakespeare, I knew about Pygmalion, we did exams through the Cambridge board, but we didn’t know the capital cities of the Caribbean islands. We knew nothing about slavery. It wasn’t until I came to England and read Malcolm X that I put all the pieces together. So I started teaching these kids a bit of black history. Some of them ended up in university and, I must say, some others ended up in Bedford Prison.
Then came the 1981 riots. ‘I was down there in the middle of it all trying to stop some kids destroying a snooker centre. “This is not the way it should be,” I kept saying. “We can’t wreck the town we live in.”’ The disturbances caused enormous bitterness between many people in Britain’s inner cities and the police. When it was all over in Luton, Steve wanted to do something to reduce the animosity. So he organised a cricket match.
I knew that we needed to bring the communities back together. The police had a good side, but we beat them in the park. Then they played us at their headquarters. We beat them there too. The mayor came to watch, and we all had a drink afterwards. These boys got a lot of pleasure from beating the police.
The heart of the problem was that for these kids they saw a lot of racism wherever they turned. Not necessarily from the police. You’d go to interviews with your qualifications and they’d offer you a job digging holes. If you spoke in patois, they automatically assumed that you were stupid. But at the time the backdrop to all this, the thing that we had, was West Indies cricket. I have to say that cricket was the mainstay, cricket gave us our pride. Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards. They lift us to another level. It was very important and it’s still important today. But there was more. Where we played cricket, the local black club we were in, the opening bowler would be a carpenter, the wicket-keeper was a car mechanic or a builder. I was the letter writer, the passport signer. And we would all help each other with our skills for our mutual benefit. It was so much more than a cricket team.
To watch the blackwash triumph of 1984 was special. ‘The cricket we went to see together used to lift our self-image. It was something we could look at and say, “Look what we have achieved.” We felt by winning at cricket we was having our own back. We weren’t getting the jobs, we weren’t getting up the ladder. I don’t think we analysed it at the time, we thought about it later on. The cricket brought us pride which we weren’t getting in other parts of our life.’
In 1996 Steve Stephenson was awarded an MBE for his years of service to the people of Luton. ‘I went to Buckingham Palace with my wife and my two children. All dressed up. We were inside the palace near the cloakroom and this very posh English lady who was also getting an award walked straight up and, without a pause, handed my daughter her coat. My daughter said, “But I’m not working here.” Racism? It’s alive and well. But, you know, I’m a social worker so I’m trained to show my humanity to all people whatever the situation.’