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And what should they know of England who only England know?
Rudyard Kipling, The English Flag (1891), line 2.
What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963), p.[11] and p.243.
Kipling was exhorting his complacent ‘street-bred’ countrymen…
The English Flag, line 3.
Whereas Kipling derided, in another famous poem, ‘flannelled fools’…
The Islanders (1902): Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls | With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’.
One of the specific motivations for the poem was that Kipling felt the professionals being paid to play Test cricket against Australia should have been fighting for their country in South Africa.
His overall attitude to sports and games was rather more nuanced.
‘Perhaps after all we know most of England “who only England know.”’
This and all the preceding quotes in the paragraph are taken from a speech made for St George’s Day, 1961.
[Strictly speaking it was made on the evening before St George’s Day at a celebratory banquet – but it was so difficult to write an elegant clarifying sentence that I hope I am allowed to collapse the date into one.]
Kipling is actually slightly misquoted at the very beginning of the speech: ‘What do they know of England who only England know.’
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‘more sharply than they themselves’
James to Naipaul, in Cricket, p.117.
This was a common enough point, made in a paternalistic way by Harold Macmillan, in a radio broadcast after the war, who told his listeners that the migrant ‘with smiling face and dark skin’ would ‘certainly, I am afraid, know a great deal more about us than we know about him’ (quoted in Webster, Englishness and Empire, p.5).
It also became a classic ‘post-colonial’ intellectual position: for Stuart Hall the ‘interdependence’ of the metropole and the colony ‘is what defines their respective specificities; in everything they reverberate through each other’ (Familiar Stranger, p.11) – even if, when he first came to England in the 1950s, the ‘prolonged historical entanglements between the Caribbean and Britain’ tended to be ‘written out of the story’ (p.12). More provocatively, Hall suggested that ‘the English are racist not because they hate the Blacks, but because they don’t know who they are without the Blacks’ (quoted in Phillips [ed.], Windrush, p.93).
Naipaul himself made the same kind of point as James at the climax of his essay on the 1963 Lord’s Test, pondering Cowdrey coming out at the end: ‘And this is the ridiculous public-school heroism of cricket: a man with a bandaged arm saving his side, yet without having to face a ball. It is the peculiar style of cricket, and its improbable appreciation links these dissimilar people – English and West Indies.’
There is a trace more anxiety…
Compare Derek Walcott: ‘The pride of the colonial in the culture of his mother country was fiercer than the true children’s, because the colonial feared to lose her’ (What the Twilight Says, p.17)
The speech to which Beyond a Boundary seems to be responding was by Enoch Powell
It can be found on the website of the Churchill Society.
Powell’s original manuscript is also accessible on this website.
Of course it is impossible to prove that James was responding to Powell, and he had already written a substantial part of Beyond a Boundary by 1961. But it is interesting that he uses the same wording – ‘What do they know’ rather than ‘What should they know’.
‘twisted expression of national pride’ … ‘fellow members of our Commonwealth’
Swanton, letter to The Spectator, reproduced in Last Over, p.188.
[Swanton hyphenates ‘fellow-members’ but I thought this would be distracting.]
‘can reflect personality and individual idiosyncracy’
Swanton, in a July 1979 piece quoted by Fay/Kynaston, p.308-9.
‘to maintain an ethos which both influences and reflects the British character …’
Swanton, in The Cricketer, October 1966, p.2.
‘dynamic explosions of individual and creative personalities’
Beyond a Boundary, p.209.
I’ve been slightly naughty here in that James uses this phrase in his most pessimistic chapter, suggesting that such explosions took place in the Golden Age of cricket but were now ‘impossible’. However, he often uses very similar language to describe West Indian cricketers of his own era.
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‘To play it keenly, honourably, generously, self-sacrificingly…’
This famous letter was first published in The Times: for its quotation by Stollmeyer, see Everything Under the Sun, p.14.
‘I am sure that such figures as Lord Hawke and Lord Harris…
Fifty Years in Cricket, p.139.
not a ‘many-chinned blimp’ but ‘a universally respected man of awesome dignity’
Swanton, Last Over, pp.229-30.
[Swanton hyphenates ‘universally-respected’ but again I thought this would look odd to the modern reader.]
encroachment by pros and colonials
The historian Harold Perkin recognised the important role of sport in channelling violence: ‘Would the Franks, Visigoths or Huns have played football with the Romans – except with their heads?’ But he also recognised that the reason cricket took root in the empire whereas the rest of the world played soccer had a lot to do with the gentlemanly ethos, ‘a defence not only against social pollution by the untouchables of the home country but also against defeat by the highly skilled professionals who emerged from the working class’ (p.216).
‘the republic of cricket’
A phrase used by Harris in a letter to The Times of 1909, cited by Birley, in his Social History, as an example of the ‘specious nonsense’ Harris talked about the comradeship of amateur and professional. But, however paternalistic Harris’s attitudes, and however much he was helped by the fact W.G. Grace played as an amateur (on generous expenses), he and MCC – unlike some governing bodies – wanted amateurs to play on the same field as professionals.
Michael Down asserts that when the decision to abolish the gentleman/player distinction was made in November 1962, table tennis was the only other sport ‘without recognized amateurs’ (Is It Cricket?, p.91).
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Without Warner’s insistence … ‘absurd’
Warner, Cricket in Many Climes (1900), on arrangements for the first West Indian tour of England: ‘Without these black men it would have been quite absurd to attempt to play the first-class counties…’ (p.8). Warner was reworking an observation he had made in an 1897 essay (reproduced in Bowling was Superfine, p.344) where he had objected strongly to the policy in Barbados and Demerara (British Guiana) of barring black players from inter-colonial cricket.
‘According to the colonial version of the code…’
Beyond a Boundary, p.232.
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‘By “letting the side down” all you mean is…’
John Wain, Hurry On Down, p.166.
In the same diatribe, the hero states that his education ‘didn’t leave me with any illusions about the division of human beings into cricket teams called Classes’.
many of them … were driven by a strong will to win
Harris was a past master at invoking residency qualifications to stymie all other counties except Kent, hence the oft-quoted remark attributed to Lord Deerhurst, president of Worcestershire, in the Long Room: ‘May I congratulate you, my Lord, on having buggered up the career of another young cricketer’ (see, for example, Birley, Willow Wand, p.95).
Warner was criticised by Australians in 1903/04 for the ‘subterfuge’ of altering his XI against New South Wales after the start of the game (Wilde, England, p.76-77).
Allen reportedly instructed the Old Trafford groundsman ‘to take more’ grass off the pitch to ensure a dustbowl for Laker’s match in 1956 (Scovell, 19 for 90, p.26).
MCC ruled with the ‘consent of the governed’
Warner, in The Cricketer, 35.7, p.5.
a ‘cricketing Bolshevik’
In perhaps the most famous example, Warner actually wrote ‘cricketing Bolshevist’, during the Parkin controversy of 1924 (Birley is, as usual, a mordant source – see Willow Wand, pp.100-1).
In Beyond a Boundary (p.228), James repeats the story, often told in the Caribbean, that the Board of Control called Worrell ‘a cricket Bolshevik’.
… time to say a ‘final goodbye’
Beyond a Boundary, p.233 [I have dehyphenated ‘good-bye’].
one of the many ambivalent depictions of ‘Us’ against ‘Them’
Wain’s hero is not quite ‘Us’ – he recoils from the opportunity to marry into a stable working-class home – but he is driven by a near-hatred of ‘Them’, by turns principled and cynical. His novel is an early example of the many important works of the late 1950s and 1960s which have a more militant, and often ‘northern’, attitude. The great work of non-fiction to accompany these ‘angry young men’ novels (admittedly looking back more than forwards) was Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, in the same way that Beyond a Boundary can be read in parallel with the Caribbean novels published either side of the war.
‘rich in craft skills and camaraderie’
Chalke, Through the Remembered Gate, p.49.
‘not merely a cricketer from the West Indies’
‘Yorkshire cricketers’ were more than ‘cricketers from Yorkshire’
As quoted in Chapter 6.
‘relish’ … ‘MCC, once it had been well and truly beaten…’
Quoted in Featherstone et al, p.259.
‘descended from cane-cutters and slaves’ … ‘like a millionaire…’
Quoted by Trelford in Len Hutton Remembered, p.33: ‘He may be descended from cane-cutters and slaves, but this Richards bats like a millionaire, as if he owned six sugar plantations’.
Compare a comment on Boycott also quoted by Trelford: ‘In some ways Boycott is like Bradman – both come from small places and both are run-hungry’ (p.29).
‘They want to relax, and merely to watch …
Swanton, West Indian Adventure, pp.15-16.
‘You hear the latest from British Guiana?’ …
V.S. Naipaul, ‘Test’, originally written for Harper’s & Queen, anthologised in The Bowling was Superfine.
‘If I knew I that I was going to die today…’
G.H. Hardy, as quoted by C.P. Snow in his chapter on the mathematician in Variety Of Men (1967), p.46.
Hardy was in fact about to die – Snow visited him ‘four of five days before’ the end (p.45) when his friend was distracting himself in a nursing home by following an India v Australia series. The quotation was used as the epigraph to Brian Levison’s poem, Death of a Cricketer.
‘a ludicrously old-fashioned view’ … ‘sterner realities’
Swanton, West Indian Adventure, p.16, p.15.
‘colossal nerve’
The Nation, 26 February 1960, p.10. James is responding specifically here to local whites calling him a ‘racialist’.
Stuart Hall: ‘What kind of collective psyche could invest so much energy in maintaining racial dominance and at the same time categorically deny the efficacy of race’ (Familiar Stranger, pp.95-96).
‘malicious xenophobe’
Ross, Through the Caribbean, p.89.
When he collected some of his cricket writing in 1999, Ross saw fit to include this passage when he could easily have chosen another from his tour book given the reverence generally shown to James (Green Fading into Blue, p.31).
‘the black man being kept in his “place”’
Constantine, Cricket in the Sun.
‘the only sporting team of African descent’
The furore caused by this remark – made in Guyana and for which Richards later apologised – is discussed in an essay by Kevin Yelvington, collected in Malec 1995, pp.46-47.
‘To grin at cricketers on equality’s field day …’
Derek Walcott, ‘Montego Bay – Travelogue 11’, in Poems (1951).
‘Old hanging ground is still playing field – …’
Martin Carter, ‘After One Year’, in Jail Me Quickly (1964).
[I’m very annoyed with myself that I managed to misquote this line in the first impression of the printed book by forgetting a word: it should be ‘Old hanging ground is still green playing field’]
‘representative roles’
Beyond a Boundary, p.72: ‘The cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance.’
Stewart Brown is one of many commentators to note that in calypsos and poems there are many ‘praise-songs’ to great West Indian cricketing heroes ‘who are almost always presented as representing some aspect of cultural assertion beyond their mere achievements on the field of play’ (Bowling was Superfine, p.25).
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‘filled a huge gap’ in the ‘consciousness’ of people back home
Beyond a Boundary, p.225.
Ironically, a more conservative West Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul, was probably being more ambivalent about the influence of the game in another well-known passage, even as he says cricket was ‘more than a game’ in Trinidad: ‘In a society which demanded no skills and offered no rewards to merit, cricket was the only activity which permitted a man to grow to his fall stature and to be measured against international standards…The cricketer was our only hero-figure’ (Middle Passage, pp.35-36).
Another relatively conservative novelist, Mittelholzer, reminds us that education and the professions (of which I suppose novel-writing was one) may have been as important as sport: ‘Quite a number of black men have graduated out of their class and become members of the coloured middle-class through their professions as doctors or barristers-at-law. One or two have done it through cricket’ (With a Carib Eye, p.56).
‘I hate cricket and afternoon tea and all that bunkum’
Reported in Barbados Advocate, 18 February 1954, p.2.
Stuart Hall is perhaps another instructive case. Educated thirty years after James, in Jamaica not Trinidad, he still ‘instantly recognised the social world’ evoked in Beyond a Boundary. Hall’s choice was not between Maple and Shannon, but against any accommodation with the status quo. He writes of his father: ‘I resented his social quietism…that he tolerated the way he was patronized by the men he drank with at his cricket club – which, on these personal grounds, I refused to join’ (Familiar Stranger, p.27).
Eric Midwinter puts it from the perspective of the imperial ruler: ‘The Englishry, the religiosity and the sense of colonial mission that was incorporated into cricket’s diaspora made it, geopolitically speaking, very lop-sided. Where football, perhaps aided by its later development and conveyed beyond these shores by commercial, engineering and allied agencies, became a global sport, cricket, part of the message carried by the administrator, the teacher, the cleric and the soldier, limited itself to the Empire’ (Class Peace, p.121). All four of these figures were not well liked by nationalists.
…too intimate a part of ‘social and political life’
Beyond a Boundary, p.217.
‘double consciousness’ … ‘Cricket is the game we love …’
Orlando Patterson, ‘The Ritual of Cricket’, an essay first published in 1969 and anthologised in Liberation Cricket, where the quotation appears on p.144.
a ‘sociological miracle of the twentieth century’
I have managed to mislay the Seecharan reference but the impact of the great West Indies sides of the early 1980s made an impression far and wide.
Tanya Aldred was in her last summer of primary school in 1984 but watched much of the ‘Blackwash’ series on her grandmother’s ‘relic’ of a television:
That West Indies side of 1984 was unbeatable in a way that must be unimaginable to children who follow cricket today. They were the All Blacks and Real Madrid combined – with the same fear and excitement but more grace, perhaps more joy, and certainly fewer financial endorsements. It was both political and awesome. What I didn’t realise as a child, was that these men were all-time greats, at their all-time prime.
(‘1984: The Maroon-Blazered Galacticos’, p.77)
‘structural adjustment’ by a new master, the International Monetary Fund
Tim Hector, ‘West Indian Nationalism and C.L.R. James’, in Wagg (ed.), Cricket and National Identity, pp.172-73.
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‘Cricketers like the Constantines … , George Headley and Frank Worrell …’
Mike Brearley, ‘Sir Donald Bradman Oration’ (2013).
There are similar reflections on West Indian cricket in Brearley’s recent books On Cricket and The Spirit of Cricket (see especially Chapter 7).
‘Steeped within the tradition of Constantine, Headley and Worrell…’
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, ‘The Radical Tradition in the Culture of West Indies Cricket’ (1994), republished in a collection of lectures and essays he edited, An Area of Conquest.
‘the most significant single event’ … ‘emancipation’ of the professional cricketer
Michael Down, Is it Cricket?, p.85.
Down also believes Hutton to be ‘without doubt a pivotal figure in developing the social balance of post-war cricket’ (p.86).
the forces of English patriotism and respectability reduced other loyalties to mere gesture
As Stephen Wagg once observed of Yorkshire professionals: ‘They accepted class relations, but not the condescension that went with them’ (Sporting Heroes of the North, p.12).
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the Lancashire League did not pay as well as Kerry Packer
Midwinter puts it well when he observes that cricketers ‘had to await the boldness of a maverick capitalist, the one with the most riches, to find their legal rights assured and protected’ (Class Peace, p.126).
cricket is ‘as sweet and painful as life itself’
Weekes (with Beckles), Mastering the Craft, p.12.
‘He spoke with precision, and no rancour …’
Weekes (with Beckles), Mastering the Craft, p.75.
‘But I don’t want to know what I know now …’
Len Hutton, interviewed by Donald Trelford, as transcribed by Stephen Chalke (Remembered Gate, p.282).
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‘the essential humanity of the difference’
Arlott coined this phrase in a 1949 essay on ‘Australianism’.