A MICROPHONE ON a stand has been set up on the outfield of the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown. It is 26 April 1985 and the West Indies are about to begin the third Test against New Zealand in Barbados. Clive Lloyd is there but not in his cricket whites; he is wearing a short-sleeved lightweight grey safari suit. He stands waiting with his hands joined in front of him.
Vivian Richards is at the microphone, self-consciously gripping a presentation tray on which are three cut-glass drinks decanters.
‘On behalf of the members and the management of the West Indies cricket team,’ says Richards, ‘let me say thank you very much, Clive, for the strength, power and, most of all, the winning habit. Also I hope that you will accept this little token which we have gathered here.’ He briefly raises the decanters. ‘Thank you very much, Clive. Well done to a champion.’
Clive Lloyd walks up to his teammate and they shake hands. They pose with the decanters for photographers. Lloyd smiles beside the man who is the new captain of the West Indies. He has retired. Richards is now in charge.
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Clive Lloyd had played his last Test match in Australia four months earlier. Another series had been safely won. He had led the team in 74 Tests and lost just 12 of them. There had been 36 victories. No West Indian had played as much Test cricket. Nineteen years had passed since he sat, fearful, in the West Indies dressing room in Bombay, wondering if he had the wit to bat against the Indian spinner Bhagwat Chandrasekhar.
The Trinidad and Tobago Review summarised Lloyd’s achievement:
He has moulded the most successful team in the history of the game. He and his men have expanded the horizons of cricket; they have played before hostile crowds with dignity and Clive Lloyd has been at the helm keeping his cool, loving and being loved by his players. He has shown us what courage and self-belief added to self-discipline and talent can achieve. He has warded off eye problems, back problems, knee problems. He has had to fight for his form; has had his battles with administration; successfully led his men in and out of the Packer affair, always coming out stronger, dignified and victorious. Devotion and decency are the qualities that come readily to mind. His place will not be easy to fill. He has shown us how and has taken us to the mountaintop. We salute him.
The recognition Lloyd received from the WICBC at the time was a little more restrained. ‘The board have long memories,’ recalled Lloyd years after his retirement. ‘I believe that they never quite got over Packer. I think in some way they felt shamed by what happened then, by what the players did.’ His conclusion was that some of the board were jealous of the money the players had begun to earn and envious of Lloyd’s standing within the team. ‘They saw me as the big cheese and themselves as underlings, and of course they wanted that position to be the other way around. I got rid of a lot of headaches for them. They didn’t even have to think about appointing another captain for the best part of a decade.’
The undercurrent of ill will between the board and the players was perhaps inevitable. The relationship reflected the tension that existed throughout the twentieth century in the Caribbean between employers and workers. Only after the Second World War had any meaningful recourse to trades unions for employees really existed. Even in the 1970s, as the Packer affair unfolded, members of the WICBC would have been unused to their authority being questioned. And although in the years before Lloyd’s retirement the board was largely made up of former players, there was, in Barbados and Trinidad particularly, a close historical association between Caribbean cricket administrators and the white elite of the sugar industry.
As Lloyd carried his three decanters from the outfield of the Kensington Oval on that Friday in April 1985 there could be no doubt that his captaincy had helped make the West Indies into a great team – not only his tactical skills, but qualities of leadership that included the gifts of humanity and perception. He was a leader of men in the fullest sense, and the man he identified with most in the tradition of West Indian cricket leadership was Frank Worrell. In the family tree of captaincy, Lloyd was separated from Worrell by two predecessors, Rohan Kanhai and Garry Sobers.
To understand Frank Worrell’s captaincy, and the leadership of those who followed him, is to understand something of West Indian history. In 1959 – 126 years after the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British empire – Worrell was the first black man to be appointed full-time captain of the West Indies. Up until that time the post was seen to be safe only in the hands of a white man, although there had been two brief interruptions to this orthodoxy: Learie Constantine stood in for the injured Jackie Grant in Jamaica against England in 1935 and George Headley led the side in 1948 against England in the Barbados Test. White leadership was an inevitable legacy of colonialism, empire – and slavery.
The social, political and economic consequences of slavery saturated the Caribbean territories for 300 years. These slave islands fuelled the expansion of European empires – Spanish, Dutch, French and British. The key crop was sugar. To colonialists the English-speaking Caribbean islands existed as little more than centres of wealth production; the connection between Britain’s growth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the production of sugar cannot be overestimated. The wealth created by slavery fired the Industrial Revolution and brought luxury to British cities. The historian Eric Williams, who would go on to be the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, wrote in Capitalism and Slavery ‘It was the slave and sugar trades which made Bristol the second city of England for the first three quarters of the eighteenth century. “There is not,” wrote a local annalist, “a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave.”’
In 1939 Winston Churchill spoke in London at a banquet given for West Indian sugar planters. ‘The West Indies’, he said, ‘gave us the strength, the support, but especially the capital, the wealth, at a time when no other European nation possessed such a reserve, which enabled us to come through the great struggle of the Napoleonic Wars, the keen competition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and enabled us … to lay the foundation of that commercial and financial leadership which … enabled us to make our great position in the world.’
That capital, and that great position in the world, had a human cost because sugar was difficult to make (as every good Marxist knows, the capital came ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’). Sugar cane needed money up front to pay for its planting and seasoning, and it needed labour. The money came from a network of wealthy commission agents in seventeenth-century London; the labour came from captured African slaves.
Since the 1440s European powers had been sending their ships down the west coast of Africa to collect slaves. By the time of the Industrial Revolution the pattern was set: British boats packed with cloth from Lancashire, iron goods from Birmingham and brass from Bristol would set off for the coast of ‘Guinea’. Once there, they would trade for humans. ‘The whites did not go into the interior to procure slaves; this they left to the Africans themselves,’ wrote the American historian Benjamin Quarles. ‘Spurred on by the desire for European goods, one tribe raided another, seized whatever captives it could and marched them with leather thongs around their necks to coastal trading centres.’
These outposts, on the coast of what is now Ghana, were the ‘door of no return’ for millions of people. The British also had slave forts in Benin, the Gambia and Sierra Leone. From these buildings the biggest forced migration in history began. It was a huge industry. Over 400 years, 11 million Africans were taken. Three million slaves were packed into British boats heading for North America and the West Indies. In the last decade of the eighteenth century a slave ship heading for Africa left a British port every second day. The great beneficiaries were the aristocracy, the Church and the royal family. ‘But it is scarcely an exaggeration,’ writes William St Clair in his book The Grand Slave Emporium, ‘to say that every person in the Europeanised world who put sugar in their tea or coffee, spread jam on their bread, who ate sweets, cakes, or ice-cream, who smoked or chewed tobacco, took snuff, drank rum or corn brandy, or wore coloured cotton clothes, also benefited from, and participated in, a globalised economy of tropical plantations worked by slaves brought from Africa.’
Once at work, cutting and preparing the sugar cane, the slaves’ lives were truly wretched. Nearly a million were sent to Jamaica alone to sustain the sugar plantations. By the 1780s there were more than 600 sugar estates on the island, where the planters and overseers commonly inflicted obscene, bestial punishments on their slaves for the most trivial offences. One such overseer was a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who for years kept a detailed diary of his relationships with the people he owned. One entry records how one of his slaves, after being caught eating a piece of cane, was ‘well flogged, then rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. Also whipped Hector for losing his hoe, made new negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.’ At times slave mortality was so high that for every three who arrived, two would die.
The making of Caribbean sugar was a vast exercise in tyranny and repression. According to the British historian Peter Fryer, ‘to establish, maintain, and justify their rule over, and their exploitation of, 370 million black people, Britain’s rulers needed an ideology which told them … that their imperial rule was in the best interests of their colonial subjects. This imperialist ideology was racism.’ Long after slavery ceased in the Caribbean, this view remained undiluted in Britain. In 1865 the Spectator published an article whose author reflected, ‘The negroes are made on purpose to serve the whites, just as the black ants are made on purpose to serve the red.’
Clive Lloyd’s ancestors were slaves. Vivian Richards’s ancestors were slaves. Frank Worrell’s ancestors were slaves.
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Towards the end of 2014 Vivian Richards leans back on his chair and looks towards the sea. He is considering his people’s past. The water of Dickenson Bay is turquoise and the sand is white. There are palm trees. This is Antigua – his island, his rock. Slowly he massages his shaved head with his hand as he considers what took place here. When he answers he looks to the horizon.
I have always been conscious of slavery. I think when you recognise where it is that you have come from it is easier to work out the route you would like to take. I think about the persecution we have faced as a people. When you understand your history, you can plot your own journey. And these people who carried out these things. Are they superior? I don’t think so. Am I angry about it? Nah. Not today. Being angry about it won’t get you anywhere – it’s like trying to spin a top in the mud. What I do know for sure is that we have come on a serious journey.
The elaborate social system fostered by slavery and the sugar industry remained long after the 1833 Act of Parliament abolished the slave trade. Cricket was a central part of that society. In the early 1800s the game was already established in the West Indies; island newspapers carried the announcement of fixtures alongside information on the sales of slaves and the latest changes in the price of sugar. Cricket was played first by whites of course, often by military men garrisoned there to thwart black uprisings on land and French invasion by sea. As one Barbadian newspaper put it in 1838, ‘the manly sport of cricket’ was intended for ‘the gratification of the soldiers as well as the sake of their health’.
Within 30 years or so elite clubs had been founded – the Wanderers and Pickwick clubs in Barbados for instance – where private games were played and watched by the plantation owners and growing numbers of white middle-class administrators, lawyers, merchants and accountants, whose influence was now superseding that of the old families as the price of sugar fell. All these men shared a common goal – the preservation of a colonial, hierarchical, capitalist society – and so West Indies cricket was born into the tradition of white authority – British authority. Cricket was a social tool to help sustain the empire.
And the black ancestors of Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards and Frank Worrell? Where did they all fit into this arrangement? The answer is first on the fringes, and then more centrally.
Cricket, like most aspects of colonial Caribbean life, needed ancillary labour. Land needed to be maintained, pitches needed to be prepared, and balls struck from the middle needed to be retrieved from neighbouring cane fields. This was a black man’s work, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century such menial tasks were the initial black connections to West Indian cricket. They are articulated by the cricket historian and author Professor Clem Seecharan: ‘The ball would disappear constantly in the thick undergrowth; it was the recurring task of the slave to retrieve it. To return the ball from beyond the boundary, accurately to the wicket, was a self-imposed challenge. The hurling of the ball a long way, from canepiece to playing area, was an act of freedom: it represented a fleeting presence in the central scene.’
In the Caribbean heat batting was more pleasant than bowling. White players who wanted to improve would practise against those blacks who showed an interest in, and aptitude for, bowling. Some of these bowlers became proficient all-round cricketers and began to play the game informally among themselves in the spare time that they had. And for a black slave or a freed man to master bowling to the extent that he could implicitly threaten the authority of his master by hurling the cricket ball fast and accurately became an act loaded with symbolism – what Seecharan describes as ‘an embryonic countervailing power: a potentially subversive action’. Not only that, but for a young black man to become good at bowling gave him an added use. Cricket was not yet an instrument of black liberation, but it certainly became an instrument of mobility. Not though for poor Quanko Samba.
In The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens lampoons the role of Samba, the servant-bowler, when a character tells Pickwick of a game of cricket he once played in the West Indies:
‘It must be rather a warm pursuit in such a climate,’ observed Mr Pickwick.
‘Warm! Red hot – scorching – glowing. Played a match once – single wicket – friend the Colonel – Sir Thomas Blazo – who should get the greatest number of runs. Won the toss – first innings – seven o’clock a.m. – six natives to look out – went in; kept in – heat intense – natives all fainted – taken away – fresh half-dozen ordered – fainted also – Blazo bowling – supported by two natives – couldn’t bowl me out – fainted too – cleared away the Colonel – wouldn’t give in – a faithful attendant – Quanko Samba – last man left – sun so hot, bat in blisters, ball scorched brown – 570 runs – rather exhausted – Quanko mustered up last remaining strength – bowled me out – had a bath, and went out to dinner.’
‘And what became of what’s-his-name, sir?’ enquired an old gentleman.
‘Blazo?’
‘No – the other gentleman.’
‘Quanko Samba?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Poor Quanko – never recovered it – bowled on, on my account – bowled off, on his own – died, sir.’
The unquestioning Quanko Samba, the meek servant who willingly bowled himself to death for his white master, has no basis in real life. A much better example of the development of the black bowler is found in Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture, edited by Hilary Beckles and Brian Stoddart. It contains the true story of Fitz Hinds, who went to England on the 1900 West Indies tour with Charles Ollivierre.
Hinds was in his late teens at the end of the nineteenth century and was a lower-class black – a painter. He had been attached to the elite Pickwick club in Barbados, where he was a groundsman and was allowed to bowl at, but not play with, the white members. He bowled well. Yet he wanted to play rather than just service others, so he left Pickwick and tried to join the Spartan club, which was a cricket team for the new black middle class. By this time black players had grown in confidence and had begun to form their own sides. This was a necessity, for whatever their talent they were not allowed to play for the all-white clubs of Wanderers or Pickwick.
However, there were those at Spartan, even though it was a black club, who opposed Hinds’s membership on the grounds that he was a lowly painter. Barbados was still a society of suffocating social rigidity based on the hierarchies of the sugar industry and the carefully catalogued gradations of skin colour. Eventually Hinds was allowed to join, but at the cost of personal exclusion. Some at Spartan refused to play with him, while some at Pickwick – in whose service he had been – refused to play against him. One member of Pickwick declined to get on the boat to England in 1900 because Hinds had been chosen in the touring West Indies side. Nonetheless, he prevailed and led Spartan to some big victories as a bowler and as a batsman.
‘His was a stirring achievement’, wrote the sports academic Professor Brian Stoddart, ‘under intense pressure which arose from the social layering of Barbadian cricket, itself produced by the island’s sugar culture, which allocated all members of the community a rank in its elaborately-defined production hierarchy.’
No one has explained the stratification of colour and class within Caribbean club cricket better than C. L. R. James. His decision as a young man in the 1920s to choose one local Trinidadian team over another was a matter of excruciating mental torment and one that he later confessed had cost him much. Within James’s area of Trinidad there was the Queen’s Park club – private, elite, wealthy and for whites only. There was the Shamrock club for the old Catholic families and the police side Constabulary – all black but captained by a white inspector. Maple was the team of the brown-skinned middle class (‘they didn’t want dark-skinned people in their club’); then there was Shannon for the black lower middle class and Stingo for the black working class.
James’s circumstances and education gave him a choice: Maple or Shannon. The noble decision would have been to join the latter, the club of Learie Constantine. Their style was renowned across Trinidad. ‘The Shannon Club played with a spirit and relentlessness,’ wrote James in Beyond a Boundary. ‘It was not mere skill. They played as if they knew that their club represented the great mass of black people in the island. The crowd did not look at Stingo in the same way. Stingo did not have status enough. Stingo did not show that pride and impersonal ambition which distinguished Shannon. As clearly as if it was written across the sky, their play said: Here on the cricket field if nowhere else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men on the island.’
James knew well what it would mean to play for Shannon, but he succumbed to another impulse. ‘In a West Indian colony,’ he wrote, ‘the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.’ James chose brown-skinned Maple. At a stroke he isolated himself from a portion of the people he respected and with whom he had grown up. ‘Faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years. But no one could see that then, least of all me.’
Frank Worrell would have been sharply aware of these tensions and how tightly club cricket was bound into local society; mistrust and ill feeling between those with differing tones of blackness were not exclusive to Trinidad. Worrell himself was from the black lower middle class. His upbringing, personality and position in Barbadian society all prepared him for the job that he would one day take.
Worrell was a tactful but forthright man, diplomatic but resolute. His qualities of leadership had matured from a youthful insistence that his voice be heard. By the time he was a teenager, he was suffering from what he would later describe as a ‘persecution complex’. He would write that his school days were made dismal because ‘child psychology was not a subject demanded of applicants to teachers’ posts. Indeed, the majority of masters did not have the experience of raising families of their own. There was no allowance for the original point of view.’
Worrell’s single-mindedness at Combermere School marked him out as difficult. But he was a gifted cricketer. He played for the island in a first-class game when he was seventeen, and six years later had batted in a Test match. Later that year, 1948, he travelled to England to play as the professional for Radcliffe in the Central Lancashire League. Everton Weekes would follow at Bacup the next season, and within three years Clyde Walcott would play at Enfield. By the time the three Barbadians had become established professionals in Lancashire they had already proved themselves as Test players for the West Indies, being part of the side that won a series in England for the first time in 1950.
If Walcott beat the bowlers into submission and Weekes dominated them with his powerful driving along the ground, Worrell – in the words of Learie Constantine – simply waved them away. ‘Worrell was poetry. He was the artist. All three Ws were geniuses but Worrell had the most style and elegance. He had all the strokes and the time and capacity to use them without offence to the eye, without ever being hurried. He was never seen playing across the line. That is why he never hooked. Players and pressmen agreed that even when he ducked beneath a bouncer, he did so with a lack of panic and great dignity.’
Worrell’s Test career from 1948 to 1963 coincided with increasingly strident calls for political independence in the West Indies. After the Second World War some sort of separation from Britain had become inevitable, and plans were being drawn up to create a united federation of territories. And yet the West Indies side Worrell played for was still captained by a white man. ‘The whole point’, wrote C. L. R. James, ‘was to continue to send, to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain. The more brilliantly the black man played, the more it would emphasise to millions of English people: Yes, they are fine players, but funny, isn’t it, they cannot be responsible for themselves – they must always have a white man to lead them.’
The West Indies cricket authorities at this time had a problem: it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the inclusion of white players in a side at the expense of Afro-or Indo-Caribbean players who were evidently more skilled. The new politics of the region compounded the peculiarity. Articulate, charismatic, intelligent black political voices and personalities were emerging across the Caribbean, yet the West Indies cricket team was captained by a white man – John Goddard – who would finish his days with a Test batting average of 30 and never make a hundred.
There is an illuminating statistical analysis of games played by the West Indies against England, researched by Professor Maurice St Pierre and published in his contribution to Liberation Cricket. It shows that from 1928 – when the West Indies first played a Test match – until England’s Caribbean tour of 1959–60 white members of the side (there were never fewer than six in the squad on every tour to England in these years) managed 25 half-centuries, no centuries and no double centuries. During the same period non-white West Indian batsmen scored 56 half-centuries, 29 hundreds and 7 double hundreds. Only twice did white players take at least 4 wickets in an innings in these Tests; non-whites managed it 44 times. Faced with these figures, Professor St Pierre can only conclude that ‘since whites were not usually picked as bowlers and they did not perform as batsmen, then they must have been picked for some other reason’.
Learie Constantine believed he knew the answer. ‘Cricket is the most obvious and apparent, some would say glaring, example of the black man being kept in his place,’ he wrote. Sir Leonard Hutton didn’t agree. He was England’s first professional captain – the job had always been done by an amateur player before him – and led the side to the West Indies on the 1953–54 tour. He observed, ‘the gradual exclusion of white folk is a bad thing for the future of West Indies cricket’. Hilary Beckles has this to say: ‘The politics of the ancient plantation system, then, had determined the ideological foundations on which West Indian cricket rest.’
There is another part to this story that is sometimes overlooked. The question was not simply one of colour, but of competence – and this was vital to the aspirations of the ordinary Caribbean cricket watcher. What was plain was that a number of white captains of the West Indies side were not selected on the basis of their ability. Rolph Grant was one. He was an average player by university standards yet on the 1939 tour to England he captained a Test side that contained George Headley and Learie Constantine. Grant’s selection made no sporting sense.
Socially, the years in which Rolph played were terrifically volatile throughout the West Indies. There were prolonged, serious and violent strikes and riots in several territories. Many people died. When it was over, one of the conclusions of the colonial rulers was that the British needed people of greater competence to run the islands. It was within this context that people situated the question of the black captain. It was a nonsense to have Headley and Constantine in a team which was captained by Rolph Grant – or his brother Jackie, who headed the side before him.
For many years black cricket watchers – particularly on the smaller islands (whose players weren’t represented) – refused to support the West Indies cricket team. The Antiguan politician and newspaper editor Tim Hector reflected that many ‘men [in Antigua] who were a library of knowledge about cricket and loved the game above all else, did not back the West Indies … keeping the West Indian captaincy as a fine white preserve, and excluding the small-islanders, made these very fine people into anti-nationalists … They relished the performance of Headley, the three Ws, Ram and Val, of G. N. Francis, Learie Constantine and Martindale, but they were against the side on which these men played – and for good reason.’
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By the end of the 1950s Frank Worrell was the most obvious and the most popular candidate to become the captain of the West Indies cricket team. Not only because of his talent and knowledge of the game, but because of his temperament. There was nothing histrionic about him; by West Indian standards he was reserved. Worrell was circumspect, a man who rarely acted impulsively.
He came at the right time, but he also brought a particular set of skills that were rare across the region. Lower-middle-class Barbadians came out of a specific social context, conditioned by their education, their adherence to Christianity and a sense of responsibility to family and neighbour. Those ingredients were more strongly evident in Barbados than in many other territories of the Caribbean. Part of the reason lay in the island’s ‘Englishness’. Since its colonisation in 1627 Barbados had been held only by Britain; it never changed hands. Notwithstanding the perversions of slavery, whites there had felt a certain paternalistic duty towards the blacks, and certain levels of black society had been entrusted with the administration of colonial life. Barbados was still a very closed society when it came to race, colour, class and hierarchy (Worrell pretty much left for good in his 20s because he could bear its petty constraints no longer), but the modicum of responsibility given to the black lower middle class gave them a sense of their own self-worth. There was a persona in black West Indian society that was yearning to lead – and Frank Worrell was its epitome.
Worrell was eventually appointed captain in 1959 in advance of the 1960–61 tour to Australia. He had been offered the post before but it had not been convenient for him to accept: the board had proposed pitiful sums of money to tour in the past, and he didn’t want to interrupt his studies at Manchester University. The trip was a great success. West Indies lost the series two–one, but the cricket was close, exciting and played with spirit by both sides. At Brisbane the first game ended in a tie, which had never happened in Test cricket before. More importantly, Worrell led the team – which included his white predecessor Gerry Alexander – with dignity, authority and distinction.
In British Guiana the young Ronald Austin heard the series unfold on his wireless.
Listening to it late at night, Sobers and Kanhai dominating the Australian bowling – yes, we lost eventually – but there was a sense of elation and good feeling that we were the equal of the Australians. It’s difficult to describe to you the intensity of those evenings. There was the time that Kanhai hit Richie Benaud for a series of boundaries, and the radio commentator Alan McGilvray said something like, ‘If this is cricket, what have I been looking at for the last 20 years of my life?’ The overwhelming sense was that the West Indian nation was contributing fully to something that was vital and worthwhile.
In five games of cricket halfway around the world Worrell had proved publicly that a black man could be an exceptional leader. The fact was as simple as it was significant. C. L. R. James had played a very visible role in the public campaign to see Worrell appointed. He now knew that the ‘constant, vigilant, bold and shameless manipulation of players to exclude black captains that has so demoralised West Indian teams and exasperated the people was over’. What is more, he wrote, ‘the intimate connection between cricket and the West Indian social and political life was established so that all except the wilfully perverse could see’.
James made plain his views in many articles and opinion pieces. When England were in the West Indies on their 1959–60 tour he had written in the Nation, ‘I want to say clearly beforehand that the idea of [Gerry] Alexander captaining a side on which Frank Worrell is playing is to me quite revolting. I shall mobilise everything I can so that Frank should captain the team to Australia.’
The distinguished British cricket journalist Alan Ross was appalled by James’s boldness. He responded in his account of that tour, Through the Caribbean, ‘Who but a malicious xenophobe could write, during a Test match, “that the idea of Alexander captaining a side on which Frank Worrell is playing is to me quite revolting”? Revolting is the parlance of the irresponsible agitator. Worrell’s great gifts as a player, his intelligence and charm, and no doubt his capacity for leadership, cannot benefit from such advocacy.’
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It is no exaggeration to say that from 1960 to 1965 Worrell was one of the most important public figures in the Caribbean region. One of the tragedies of West Indian cricket is that he would be dead within six years of the Australia tour, killed by leukaemia at 42. But in the last years of his life he helped to make the West Indies into the best side in the world. The success of his cricket team also overlapped with the short-lived political federation of the West Indies. Its aim was a single economic union of ten territories within the Caribbean loyal to the British monarch.
For many decades the British had being trying to pull together what C. L. R. James called ‘these specks of dust’. The idea of federation had been discussed since the nineteenth century. When the British knew they were going to leave the Caribbean after the Second World War, their solution was a federal arrangement in which the limited resources of these islands could be pooled. The trouble of course was that the people of the West Indies weren’t neighbours; these were islands and territories scattered over a thousand miles of sea. Jamaica wasn’t even involved in the first regional cricket competitions because it was too far to the north-west; for years British Guiana had hardly any contact with the other territories. The sensation of separateness, the notion of being content with existence as an island, was well known to West Indians in the same way that many people in Britain today don’t quite feel European.
The federation soon came up against the fundamental reality of Caribbean insularity. Outside the West Indies cricket team and perhaps the University of the West Indies, there was no particular commitment to, or even an understanding of, regional unity. Travelling between the territories was difficult. Only a small minority of people migrated from one island to another. A continual connection from one generation to the next – which needed to exist to help build a broader sense of national identity – just wasn’t there.
‘This thing – the federation – was imposed from Whitehall,’ says Clem Seecharan. ‘It didn’t have enough local or indigenous commitment or resolve to sustain it. So insularity came to the fore immediately. Each petty leader was still the king of their little land. Very quickly there were irreconcilable positions and within a matter of years it was falling apart at the seams.’
The federation was created in 1958. In 1961 Jamaicans voted in a referendum to go their own way. That pretty much caused the whole thing to collapse. The federation officially ended the next year. Frank Worrell was the captain of the West Indies cricket team for almost the whole life of the federation. It failed, but his team didn’t, and a strong feeling developed in the Caribbean that Worrell’s side was the surrogate nation and he was its leader. People could feel committed to this successful cricket side, dedicated to it without having to face the reality of dividing the spoils of Caribbean resources and trying to build a common market. There was an emotional neatness to supporting the West Indian cricket team that could never be replicated or realised in the political federation.
‘Worrell was a very smart man,’ reflects Seecharan.
He understood in his own quiet way that whatever people felt about federation, he represented something that got to the core of what limited unity we had. A lot of people say that they didn’t feel anything like a West Indian until they came to live in Britain. If they were Trinidadian, they came to London and they had never met a Jamaican before. So when they watched Worrell, Hunte, Sobers, Butcher, Hall and Griffith play cricket at Lord’s in 1963, for the first time in their lives they felt genuinely West Indian. This was no theoretical or aspirational idea. They could say, ‘This is what I am and these guys are speaking for me.’ They could see it in front of them.
Yet Worrell was not only a symbol of some wider unity, he was also a fine tactical captain and an astute judge of a man on and off the field. It was Worrell who first realised in the nets in Australia that Garry Sobers’s seam and swing bowling could be as potent in a Test match as his off spin. Worrell understood his brilliant all-rounder, and he protected him.
Basil Butcher, who was on the 1963 tour of England, recalls the players’ irritation when Worrell exempted Sobers from the 10 p.m. curfew. ‘We rebelled and went to Frank to complain,’ he remembers. ‘We said, “Skipper, this is not right. Why is it that Garry can stay out as long as he likes and we have to go to bed at ten?” Worrell’s response was this: “OK, Basil. You or the other guys give me five wickets, take two brilliant catches at short leg and score a century and I’ll let you go out as long as you want to.” That was the end of the meeting.’
Worrell had noticed Sobers had dreadful trouble going to sleep early; he just couldn’t do it. As his captain he came up with a solution. In return, Sobers gave Worrell his best cricket.
Joe Solomon was the middle-order batsman from British Guiana who played in all but one of the Test sides led by Worrell. He recalls that his captain would sit down in the dressing room to talk before the game and always allowed the players to express their views. He never came and said, ‘You will do this or that.’
‘Even if he had, that would have worked with me because I’m a quiet person,’ says Solomon,
but it wouldn’t have worked with a lot of the team because they were such individualists. But above all you felt you could not let Frank down. That was because we always felt that he represented something to us. He represented what cricket meant in our heads. It didn’t mean money. It was all those values which went with playing this game at the highest level. Being the best that you can and understanding the people who came to watch you. Many of them were menial workers, cane cutters who had paid a few pennies to come and watch. They were very important. And, without giving you a lecture, Frank would always make sure you understood this. He always made it clear that we must know that the people looked up to us.
* * *
By 1964 Garry Sobers had succeeded Frank Worrell as captain of the West Indies. He was Clive Lloyd’s first Test captain. At the time of Lloyd’s debut in 1966 Sobers was the greatest cricketer on earth. He could bowl all the varieties of left-arm spin. He could take the new ball and bowl fast. At slip or at short leg he seemed to catch any chance, however hard. Above all, he could bat. He could hit a ball on the rise and hammer it past mid-on or mid-off, what they called in the West Indies the ‘not a man move’ shot. By 1958, when he was still 21, Sobers held the world record for the highest score in a Test match, 365 not out. In 1968, playing county cricket for Nottinghamshire, he scored 36 runs in one over, hitting each ball for 6. Time and again it seemed he won Test matches for the West Indies almost by himself.
C. L. R. James believed Sobers to be the fine fruit of a great tradition, the most typical West Indies cricketer that it was possible to imagine. All geniuses, wrote James, ‘are merely people who carry to an extreme definitive the characteristics of the unit of civilisation to which they belong’. On the 1957 tour of England Frank Worrell had predicted to a journalist that Sobers would become the greatest player the game would know. Within three seasons Worrell was happy to let Sobers take over if he had to leave the field of play in a Test match.
‘He knows everything?’ C. L. R. James once asked Worrell.
‘Everything,’ Worrell replied.
Sobers’s leadership and his individual greatness coincided with a period of extended post-colonial optimism in the Caribbean. Barbados and Guyana both became independent in 1966, by which time Sobers’s cricket team was the best in the world, having beaten Australia, England and India. ‘There is embodied in him the whole history of the British West Indies,’ said James.
What James meant was that Sobers was a different man to Worrell. He was not from the aspirational middle class but from the poorest of urban black neighbourhoods in Barbados. The street where he was born in the Bay Land district of Bridgetown didn’t even have a name in 1936. Sobers’s father was in the Canadian merchant navy and was rarely at home. When Sobers was five, his father’s boat, the Lady Hawkins, was torpedoed and sunk by the Germans off the coast of North Carolina. Shamont Sobers was drowned. His widow, Thelma, brought up their six children alone.
Some of Sobers’s earliest memories were of playing street cricket. The bat was hacked from a branch or a piece of waste wood, the ball shaped from a lump of tar dug up from the road. Sometimes the boys used a sour orange or a small rock wrapped in cloth. Sobers grew up in poverty but there was a richness in his cricket. Aged 15, in short trousers, he bowled against West Indian Test players in a Barbados trial match. He was picked for the island XI, but first he had to be bought a pair of cricket flannels. Aged 17 he had played in a Test match. By 19 he had opened the batting for the West Indies against Australia, and two miles from where he’d been born hit Keith Miller for six fours in the fast bowler’s opening two overs at the Kensington Oval.
‘Sobers was a brilliant player whose skills and charm took him well beyond his poor beginnings,’ wrote Brian Stoddart in Liberation Cricket, ‘but he remained essentially a people’s man. He was far less concerned with the wider social issues than Worrell and that led to some awkward moments.’
This was particularly true once Garry Sobers became captain. It was a moment as important to the development of West Indian cricket as Worrell’s appointment had been. Sobers was the first ‘unambiguously native West Indian’ to attain that exalted position, wrote James. Sobers was what James would have called a plebeian West Indian. He had not been to a public school nor to a British university, as had all of his predecessors. His elevation from wretched poverty to the most esteemed job in the whole of the Caribbean was the triumph of the ordinary man. ‘The West Indian people are very conscious of the role of their cricket in their search for a national identity,’ believed James. ‘They will look at Sobers’s appointment as a stage in their national development.’
The author and journalist Lloyd Best saw Sobers differently. ‘Competence and performance are all that count,’ he wrote in the Jamaica Gleaner. ‘He leads his colleagues by technical example and nothing else. The moment the bails are lifted, the association is done. They have clocked out.’ Best also noted that even though Sobers possessed every skill the game needed and was capable of developing more, ‘his class and his education are liabilities, not assets’. The paradox of Sobers’s condition was that he thought like an ordinary West Indian instead of – as Worrell did – thinking on behalf of ordinary West Indians. ‘He will play for anybody so long as the price is right,’ concluded Best.
Sobers made two damaging miscalculations when he was captain of the West Indies, one sporting and one political. In the 1967–68 series against England Sobers declared the West Indian second innings in Trinidad and lost the game. He had been irritated by England’s unremittingly dull play and time-wasting throughout the series. Despite his brilliance in the final Test in Guyana, the rubber was lost and the people were angry. If he hadn’t considered it before, Sobers now knew that West Indian heroes could be thrown to the earth by the people as easily as they could be borne aloft.
In 1970 Sobers accepted £600 for two days’ work. The fee was to play cricket in a tournament in Rhodesia, a country like South Africa where the white minority ruled. ‘I asked for a couple of days to think it over,’ recorded Sobers in his autobiography, ‘but after delving into the matter I thought that, as a professional cricketer, there was little or nothing to stop me earning my living in what was a fun competition. I was well aware of the politics.’ The decision caused Sobers an enormous amount of trouble. He was publicly criticised by Caribbean and African leaders. As Hilary Beckles pointed out, Sobers ‘was not attuned to the historical and ideological nature of his location within West Indies cricket’. Sobers was the best all-rounder cricket had ever seen, the most brilliant of all cricketers. Was that not enough? Yet he did not grasp that the position of captain of the West Indies cricket team was, at its core, a political one.
Clive Lloyd was in the side that lost to England in ’68 and was captained by Sobers in the Rest of the World XI at the time of the Rhodesia controversy. He observed Sobers’s behaviour at close hand on both occasions and saw the consequences. Lloyd knew he could not afford to make the same sort of errors and hope to remain in charge of the West Indies.
During ten seasons of captaincy, Lloyd realised that the demands of West Indian leadership were unique in world cricket. He had understood Worrell’s legacy and the importance of Sobers’s individual example. He had worked out that his leadership didn’t end on the pitch or in the pavilion; it extended to the hotel check-in desk and beyond. Lloyd thought carefully about which players would share rooms on tour. He often put a bowler with a batsman – ‘Come on. I took your wickets today; you get me some runs tomorrow’ – or a player from Jamaica with a teammate from Trinidad.
Lloyd was rooting out inter-island rivalry. The limitations of insularity – bickering between the West Indian territories – had bedevilled its cricket since the selection of the first Test XI in 1928. ‘When I was first picked to play in 1963,’ recalls Deryck Murray, ‘I clearly remember being warned of all the animosity that I would encounter because people would feel that somebody from their island should be playing instead of me. I was from Trinidad. One of the places that was held up as the worst place to play was Jamaica because they would only support Jamaicans. As it turned out, I never found that to be the case.’
The journalist Tony Becca remembers arranging to go to dinner one evening with the former Barbadian fast bowler Wes Hall. ‘He was the chairman of selectors then,’ says Becca. ‘I said to him, “Looking forward to tonight. What time shall we meet?” We were in Antigua staying in the same hotel. He said, “I’ll see you in my room at eight.” I said, “We’re going to have dinner in your room?” and he replied, “Yes, we are. I’m not going down to the restaurant to face all those people.” The locals, like the Jamaicans, the Trinidadians and the Bajans, always wanted to push their own man.’
What Wes Hall was trying to avoid in the dining room that evening, says Paul Gilroy, was an encounter with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the narcissism of minor differences, the idea that it is precisely the small differences between people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. ‘The Caribbean was a region which harboured complicated stereotypes,’ he explains, ‘and they governed the personality, habits and inclinations of the inhabitants of the other places that were very nearby. And they were held with an increased fervour however tiny or insignificant they appeared to be to outsiders. As far as West Indian cricket was concerned, I expect that all of these things were being negotiated on some level in the form of dressing-room banter.’
‘Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there is harmony in the West Indies,’ laughs the DJ and broadcaster Trevor Nelson. ‘The sensitivities and clichés are everywhere. I’m a St Lucian. We are 150,000 very special people. Don’t ever call me a Jamaican! There are loads of stereotypes: Jamaicans are noisy and rude, Trinidad loves to party, Barbadians speak like farmers and kiss arse to the English.’
The clear historical differences within the Caribbean were cultural and racial, but other factors, such as geography and the climate, also played into the region’s feelings of separateness. Antigua is just a hundred miles square and has little rainfall. Jamaica is 1,200 miles from Barbados. Guyana is on the South American mainland and much of its vast interior can still be reached only by boat. The prime minister of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, was once supposed to have boasted that his country had islands in the mouth of its Essequibo River that were the same size as other Caribbean nations.
‘Apart from a heritage in slavery and an acquired British governance,’ wrote Brian Stoddart in Liberation Cricket, ‘these states varied considerably in economic and cultural composition which, along with the weather, produced distinctive cricket traditions.’ Even local termites affected the way cricket was played, said Stoddart. The example he gave was of a burrowing insect called the mole cricket. These grubs were two inches long with shovels for front legs. They ruined turf wickets in Trinidad, so heavy coconut mats were laid on the ground to thwart their digging. In the early years of the game’s development on the island the mats caused local batsmen to be better at playing square of the wicket rather than driving because the ball didn’t come onto the bat at pace.
By the time Clive Lloyd became captain of the West Indies, dressing-room cliques – in which 300 years of assumptions and misunderstandings had built up like sediment – were hampering team spirit. Shrewdly, Lloyd was able to strip out the damaging differences but retain those which brought competition and a desire to succeed to the team. ‘I understood the West Indian psyche,’ he says. ‘Each West Indian comes from a particular set of circumstances – our upbringing and the way we approached life. I had to treat all these players properly, with subtlety to get the best out of them.’
Above all, Lloyd knew that history had to be appreciated in a way that burdened no other captain of a Test team. He was aware of the significance of being the black captain of a side drawn from a collection of newly independent nations that had precious little to fuse them together other than the wins that he and his cricket team provided. He understood the ego of the athlete and the aspirations of the supporter. Intellectually, he had worked out how they were connected and how he personally had to satisfy both. To a region that had been created from the human catastrophe of slavery and stunted by the humiliations of colonial servitude, Lloyd helped to bring a decade-long joy that it had not known for three centuries. This is what cricket in the West Indies meant. This was liberation. This was respect. Lloyd had the courage to carry the hopes of five million people and brought a solidarity to the team that went beyond even the bonds created by Worrell.
Learie Constantine had called lack of spirit ‘the chief weakness of the West Indies team’. It had been a problem since they began playing Test cricket. When Constantine wrote, ‘we have not been able to get together in the sort of spirit which says, “Look here, we are going out today against these fellows and it is war to the knife!”’ he feared that this flaw might never be eradicated. In Lloyd he had his answer. Aside from all this, Clive Lloyd was a middle-order batsman of scorching brilliance who made more than 7,500 Test runs, won matches single-handedly and could make any bowler in the world despair.
Those who say Lloyd was a limited captain – who did not much more than glance at his watch from slip and change the bowling – understand little of cricket, less of leadership and nothing of the West Indies.