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‘I can hear them now…’
Walcott, Island Cricketers (1958), p.9.
‘symbolic moment in our lives…’
Walcott, Sixty Years in Cricket (1999), p.33.
‘VE Day’
Clive Lloyd, as cited by Stephen Thorpe, Sunday Times, 25 June 1995, section 2, p.25.
eight cases to England, duly impounded by Customs and Excise
According to the test-cricket-tours website (now apparently, and very sadly, defunct), customs officers at Southampton deprived the tourists of 96 bottles. Goddard said that the rum was regarded as a food in the Caribbean. The officials replied ‘We think it’s drink’.
‘And all the time, as “Goddard’s Gold Braid Rum” sank…’
Walcott, Island Cricketers, p.10.
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Imperial Cricket Conference
The ICC – renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965 and the International Cricket Council in 1989 – did not, as Simon Wilde points out, hold a meeting outside London until 1991 (England, p.236).
The voices of the players wafting across the balcony…
The tourists’ scorer, Bill Ferguson, remembered them ‘proclaiming from the rooftops, even the one on the Lord’s pavilion, the glories of Caribbean cricket’ (Mr Cricket, p.165).
dustbin lids, cheese graters and bone discs on wire
For the dustbin lids and cheese graters, see The Daily Gleaner, 30 June 1950, p.1; for the bone discs, Daily Express, 30 June 1950, p.1.
how many West Indian supporters were actually there
Sam King thought there were ‘hardly any’ West Indian supporters at Lord’s – ‘Certainly no more than 50, probably nearer 20’ (Lister, Fire in Babylon, p.64).
In his BBC commentary, Rex Alston referred to ‘one or two West Indian characters’ encroaching once the last English wicket fell, then ‘lots’ of them chasing Goddard ‘harem scarem’ from the field, then a ‘band of about a dozen’ singing and dancing in front of the balcony.
Scoring the game from the pavilion, Bill Ferguson remembered ‘a couple of dozen West Indians in the stand at the Nursery End’ singing calypsos loudly enough to be heard at the other end of the ground, but thought that the pitch invasion involved ‘hundreds’ of West Indian supporters (Mr Cricket, p.106).
In their history of Lord’s, Peebles and Rait-Kerr state: ‘Their numerous supporters rushed onto the ground and towards the Pavilion, where a line of policemen suddenly, and rather unnecessarily, appeared’ (p.66).
‘joyous – rather riotous’
This is the phrase used by Godfrey Evans in his 1951 autobiography, Behind the Stumps (p.242). He remembered watching the ‘incident’ at the end of the game from the England balcony:
The West Indies were delighted with their victory – their first ever victory at Lord’s. Their dusky supporters – and what a crowd of them there seemed to be! – showed their unbounded joy and appreciation by jumping the fence surrounding the playing area and singing and dancing some of the calypsos (specially written for the occasion) for which they are so famous.
Evans’ close friend Compton said he would never forget the ‘vigorous and witty comments’ from ‘the solid block of dark faces on the top part of the stands at the Nursery End’ (End of an Innings, pp.66-67).
While most English accounts of the celebrations are affectionate, there is sometimes more than a trace of condescension, as in Alec Bedser’s reference to ‘triumphant tribal dances’ (p.34).
In his essay ‘Calypso kings, dark destroyers’, Stephen Wagg touches upon some of the stereotypes used by English journalists, but also points out that the middle-brow press had some fun with another stereotype, ‘the MCC toff born to privilege’ (Cricket and National Identity, p.184).
Some West Indian accounts also deliberately fell back on these clichés to convey the sense of a citadel stormed: a feature, probably by Jimmy Cozier, syndicated in The Gleaner and Trinidad Guardian (30 June 1950) suggested Kitchener’s ‘African war dance’ would have ‘WG turning in his grave’. Michael Manley, who was present in 1950, may have had later pitch invasions in mind when he wrote up the game in his History of West Indies Cricket (p.93):
When Lord Kitchener led a happy, chanting, hip-swinging, black Caribbean celebration round and round the hallowed turf at Lord’s, the procession was more impressive for its enthusiasm than its size. The raised eyebrows in the Long Room were to become increasingly frozen at that altitude in the years to come.
See also Beckles, Development, vol. 1, p.106; Hall, Familiar Stranger, pp.214-15.
the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus
Jan Morris recollected that ‘in 1930s most Englishmen of all classes thought Piccadilly Circus was the centre of the world’ (Farewell the Trumpets, p.426) and it also provided a focal point for Caribbean migrants, who often met up there (see for example Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners). It would have been a natural terminus for Kitchener’s procession, whether or not he knew that the Nigerian musician Ambrose Campbell had ‘started a procession’ of African drummers and guitarists around Piccadilly Circus on VE Day (BBC radio, Black Music in Europe, Series 2, Programme 3, about 1 minute in).
the most famous song written about the game
David Rayvern Allen, in his survey of cricket music (1981, p.168), opines that Victory Test Match ‘found a place that brings but one answer when asking for a song on cricket’.
Their Lordships had both come to Britain on the Empire Windrush
I will sometimes use the term ‘Windrush generation’ to refer to Caribbean migrants to Britain. Yet, while the Windrush has become such an important symbol, it should be remembered first that 1948 was not ‘Year Zero’ for migration by West Indians and second that there has been a black presence in Britain since Roman times (some of the classic accounts are included in the Further Reading).
It should also be noted that the West Indian community in Britain, even when it was smaller before the war, turned out to support their team. Richard Bentley (2019, pp.30-31) notes some press coverage of ‘too enthusiastic’ West Indian supporters at the Lord’s Test in 1933. Also at Lord’s on that tour, against MCC, Constantine remembered hearing ‘Negro Spirituals’ (Cricket in the Sun, p.58); at The Oval in 1939, Lord Tennyson defended West Indian supporters cheering on their team: ‘show them how we enjoy cricket in the West Indies’ (White, p.85); in newsreel footage of the 1948 Lord’s Ashes Test against Australia, a few black people can be spotted in the crowd.
Whatever their precise contributions…
Kitchener improvised calypsos throughout the game, and it is usually assumed that Beginner at least drew on some of these lyrics when he recorded Victory Test Match (in 1950 they ‘shared’ a side each on a 10-inch record released by Parlophone).
But two of the calypso’s most famous lines echo Beginner’s earlier works. Compare ‘those pals of mine’ with ‘Learie Constantine | That old pal of mine’ (from 1928) and ‘the bowling was superfine’ with ‘Sealy and Headley was superfine’ (from 1935). On the other hand, the ‘superfine | Valentine’ rhyme also appears in Kitch’s Cricket Calypso, released later in 1950 to look back on the entire series.
the calypso celebrated a moment of uncomplicated joy
Victory Test Match has been described by Claire Westall (2009, p.228) as ‘defining and canonical’.
It is perhaps invidious to dissect a work that was created off the cuff and captured the moment so perfectly. But Beginner / Kitchener demonstrate the deceptive ability of calypso, ‘the poor man’s newspaper’, to make resonant points beneath the patina of clipped reportage and forced rhymes. The event is destined to ‘go down in history’ not just because of the presence of the British Establishment – ‘the King was there well attire’ – but the testimony of the humble West Indian emigrant: ‘at Lord’s where I saw it’ (Young Tiger does the same thing in his calypso on the Coronation: ‘She was there…’; ‘I was there…’). The song registers a sense of ‘plenty fun’ but also recognises consummate achievement (‘the bowling was superfine’), popular self-assertion (‘People jump and shout without fear’) and competitive aggression (‘Walcott licked them around’). Kevin Le Gendre, who provides a good analysis of the calypso in Don’t Stop the Carnival (pp.192-93), notes that ‘licks’ is ‘one of the most expressive verbs of action in the West Indian vernacular’.
Victory Test Match was immensely popular in England: Jack Bailey remembered it being a frequent request on Housewives’ Choice (Trevor Bailey, p.40) – and it may also be noted that Princess Margaret became a devoted fan of Lord Kitchener. Compton and Edrich both chose the song as one of their Desert Island Discs. It became well known across the Commonwealth: Nilianjana Roy confessed to not being ‘much of a cricketer’ as she was growing up in India, but she knew the lyrics to ‘Cricket, Lovely Cricket’.
For West Indians, the song became something akin to a national anthem: Leeka Champagnie remembered joining Jamaicans singing it at Fulham Town Hall (Thomson, Dead Yard, p.288). For the Jamaican musicologist Roy Black, ‘the Victory Calypso was crucial to West Indian post-colonial societies’ (Gleaner, 17 April 2018). The Indo-Guyanese Frank Birbalsingh was sure ‘there must have been very few Westindians at the time who didn’t know the whole calypso by heart’ (Indo-Westindian Cricket, p.17). The Trinidadian Gordon Rohlehr calls it a ‘timeless ballad’ (Beckles [ed.], Area of Conquest, p.66).
The song took care to namecheck…
‘When Bedser bowled Christiani…’ Apart from his brilliant fielding, Robert Christiani had an unremarkable game but he was remarkable as the team’s only representative from British Guiana.
‘pals’ across national and ethnic divides
For the Antiguan historian Tim Hector, Ram and Val were the first in a series of symbolic pairs, followed by Kanhai and Sobers, then Kallicharran and Lloyd. For Hector, Roberts and Holding acted as a pair in a similar way, Roberts representing the previously excluded smaller islands (Beckles [ed.], Area of Conquest, p.114).
Frank Birbalsingh (1996, 67) allowed himself a rare florid passage to put the exploits of Valentine and Ramadhin into the overall context of Caribbean history:
Two colonial innocents, one descended from African slaves and the other from Indian indentured labourers, dared to confront the imperial British lion in his den, and with nothing but sheer skill and natural courage to rely on, tamed the royal beast into docile submission.
A decade later Natasha Barnes (2006, p.27) noted that ‘the possibility of interracial unity was perfectly expressed in the black and brown partnership of Ric [sic] Valentine and Sonny Ramadhin’.
Tim Burton (Afro-Creole, p.176) had been a little more irreverent about the symbolism of Lord’s in 1950, implying that cricketers of Indian heritage were not thought of central importance: ‘Quashie (with a little occasional help from Sammie) takes on Massa at his own game’. Burton goes on to point out that the ‘Indian’ communities in Guyana and Trinidad tended to support India against West Indies, and to assert that there were no ‘Indians’ in the great West Indies teams of the 1980s (this is not quite true). Burton makes the same point about the Trinidad Carnival in the 1950s, which ‘came to embody proto-nationalist myth of “all of we is one” at a time when Afro-Indian relations were becoming worse’ (p.206).
The way in which cricket could either dampen or excite the tensions between ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ communities in the British West Indies will prove a recurring theme.
PAGE 22
happened to tally with the precise margin of victory
And also, in what Rae called ‘a remarkable coincidence of numbers’ (Kumar 2000, p.126), their first innings score.
‘It was as much their day as ours’
Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.92. The four 1939 tourists present in England eleven years later were Constantine, John Cameron, Bertie Clarke and Jeffrey’s brother Victor.
‘great names’
Walcott, Island Cricketers, p.11.
A Times editorial after the victory also named Challenor, Constantine and Headley as ‘the giants’ of West Indian cricket (30 June 1950, p.7).
Challenor…was perceived to be the link
James described him as ‘the great originator’, one of the Barbadian patricians who ‘made West Indies batting, and Worrell, Weekes and Walcott stand on their shoulders’ (Beyond a Boundary, p.135). Constantine described him as ‘one of the greatest’, a player ‘who helped build West Indies cricket to what it was many years later’ (Changing Face of Cricket, p.118). Compare Swanton, ‘Five Barbadian Heroes’, pp.36-37.
Attitudes to Challenor were not always as benevolent after the war – the stand named after him at the Kensington Oval was still essentially reserved for whites. In the same year as Beyond a Boundary, Worrell observed: ‘Today one still hears of the “scintillating” performances of the late George Challenor whose Test record I gather was an aggregate of 101 runs, highest score 46, average 16.8, but there is an ever-ready willingness to dismiss and discredit Everton Weekes’s contribution of 4,455 runs, average 58.6, and Clyde Walcott’s 3,796 runs, average 56.6’ (Eytle 1963, p.24).
But he had been well past his best…
Constantine suggested Challenor had ‘deteriorated’ by 1928 partly because of the use of leg-theory against him (Changing Face of Cricket, p.116).
against Middlesex, virtually on his own and virtually on one leg
He scored 85 and 103 and took seven for 57. See Harry Pearson’s biography, pp.101-11.
There is some fleeting Pathé footage of the man they called ‘the coloured catapult’ bowling and batting in the Test series that year.
Perhaps the best potted account of the 1928 tour, where Constantine’s dissatisfaction with white leadership became obvious, is provided by the Old Ebor website.
‘dead hand’ of prejudice
Constantine, Cricket in the Sun (1946), p.94.
‘manipulated’ out of the side
James, Cricket, p.237.
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He repeated the feat…at Lord’s
Headley scored 106 in the first innings (Stollmeyer the only other batsman to contribute more than 22) and 107 in the second (next top score 29). ‘Those figures,’ wrote Robertson-Glasgow, ‘record but cannot express the scene of Headley against England on those days; the cool and equal command, the acquiescence of genius in patience and sense’ (Crusoe on Cricket, p.176). West Indies still lost by eight wickets.
Headley remained the only batsman to be etched twice on the honours board in the same match for over 50 years – until Gooch’s famous exploits against India in 1990 (333 and 123). In 2004, against West Indies, Michael Vaughan (103 and 101*) became the only other player, to date, to register two centuries in a Test at Lord’s.
by Bacup in the Lancashire League
Bacup were scheduled to play Tordmoden on 26 June, the second day of the Test, but the game was abandoned without a ball being bowled.
‘the widespread and mildly disapproving generalisation…’
Arlott, The Echoing Green, p.157.
‘a bunch of calypsonians’
Weekes (with Beckles), Mastering The Craft, p.122.
‘the amount of rum we had brought with us’
Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p. 76-77.
Compare Worrell: ‘We arrived in England in 1950 and found we were regarded as little fodder for the cattle’ (quoted in Eytle’s 1963 biography, p.85).
the battering pace already associated with West Indian teams
Beyond a Boundary, p.148: ‘Critics of a sociological turn of mind had proved that we were a nation which naturally produced fast bowlers, when in 1950 Ram and Val, both under twenty-one, produced the greatest slow-bowling sensation since the South African team of 1907. We are moving too fast for any label to stick.’ Compare Figueroa, England v West Indies, p.2; Constantine/Bachelor, Changing Face of Cricket, p.136.
Certainly, Rex Alston, in his preview of the 1950 tour, assumed that the West Indies fast bowlers would be responsible for any ‘trouble’ England might encounter. At Lord’s, Alex Bannister noted that the ‘irony of England’s downfall is that it was not brought about by the much-vaunted speed battery, but by two 20 year old “unknown” spin bowlers’ (Daily Mail, 30 June 1953, p.7). Reflecting on the series in 2008, Trevor Bailey thought the success of Ram and Val was considered ‘very unusual as in the past it had been their pacemen who had caused the damage’.
Englishmen were conditioned by their memories of previous series: Pelham Warner would have been old enough to remember pioneer fast bowlers such as Woods and Cumberbatch; fresher in the memory were the young Constantine and Manny Martindale, who broke Bob Wyatt’s jaw in 1934/35. But in fact, as touched upon in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, after the war there had been a glitch in that ‘vaunted’ production line of pacemen, at least in the ‘Big Four’ colonies, so that the medium-pacers Frank Worrell and Gerry Gomez were often asked to take the new ball.
According to the typecast, West Indian team spirit would fall apart…
Weekes noted ‘in those days the English media had difficulty referring to the West Indian XI as a team’ (Mastering the Craft, p.122).
Congratulating the tourists on their series win, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow noted their grace under pressure, in contrast to previous West Indies teams who ‘have sometimes suffered from temperament’ (Country Life, 25 August 1950, p.592). The typecast is discussed further in Chapter 8.
‘We were a mixed race team…’
Mastering the Craft, p.131.
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succumbed ‘to the festive inducements’
Through a Maze of Colour, p.147. Gomez would hardly be alone if he tried to schedule his visit in line with the sporting calendar. Brian Stoddart (1998, p. 661) points out that when Robert Menzies was Australian Prime Minister in the 50s and 60s, ‘official meetings in London inevitably coincided with test matches’.
‘The victory has done more for the morale…’
As reported in The Gleaner, 1 July 1950, p.10, where Gomes is described as ‘rotund’ and ‘pipesmoking’.
[Kumar (p.126) provides a slightly different wording, taken from the Guyanese Argosy, so I have taken the liberty of melding the two together very slightly.]
a younger generation of budding politicians
One of the best accounts of the binding influence of the LSE, especially for students lodging at Nuffield House, can be found in Grist to the Mills by the Jamaican Gladstone Mills.
It should be remembered that even before the war London had, in Ben Pimlott’s phrase, ‘provided a pan-nationalist dating service’. And at the Pan-African Congress of 1945 held in Manchester, 33 of the 58 accredited delegates were West Indian.
‘the proof that a people were coming of age’
Manley, History, p.93.
Because of his friendship with Castro and his determination to be ‘non-aligned’, Manley was often demonised by Anglo-American conservatives as ‘lunatic left’ in his first term as Prime Minister of Jamaica between 1969-72 – he would of course prefer the term ‘democratic socialist’.
But his attitude to cricket arguably shows him kowtowing to the very conservative assumption that developing nations had to be ‘taught’ by the long-established ones. Spencer Mawby: ‘Metropolitan policymakers had a developmentalist view which portrayed the achievement of independence as analogous to a child’s attainment of maturity after a period of painful schooling. The colonial power took on a paternal role which necessitated disciplinary action in cases of insubordinate behaviour’ (Ordering Independence, p.22).
To use a phrase of the ‘post-colonial’ theorist Stuart Hall: ‘It is one of the cruellest of ironies that, in trying to position oneself as different from what one has made to be, one is condemned unconsciously to repeat elements of the old self one is trying to surpass’ (p.22).
power of radio
For John Figueroa, ‘short-wave radio really eradicated time and space’ in the Caribbean: by the 1950s Rediffusion boxes had reached the mountain villages of Jamaica (Abrahams 1957, p.155). The Trinidadian Willy Richardson (1961, p.158) noted that West Indian radio’s very first purpose was ‘to bring us the detailed accounts of Inter-Colonial cricket’.
The Jamaican writer Edmund Baugh remembered that his feeling for cricket was ‘deeply enhanced’ by his first boyhood experiences of hearing ‘that peerless poet among cricket commentators’, John Arlott: ‘My memory of the legendary 1950 England v West Indies series is inseparable from the rhythms of Arlott’s voice…’ (Lunchtime Medley, p.3; compare Bowling was Superfine, p.257). The Trinidadian David Treboulay felt ‘cricket commentators like John Arlott, Rex Alston, Johnny Moyes, and Jim Swanton left as deep an impression on West Indian men as studying Shakespeare at school’ (Kings of Spin, p.16). Cecil Gray’s poem ‘Sonny Ramadhin’ captures the reactions of radio listeners in 1950 – ‘Here in these islands we screamed joyous shouts | as every wicket fell’ – and indeed in 1951/52 in Australia when the bowler was less successful: ‘At four o’clock one morning, Christmas Day, | you had Doug Ring out. We’d won. The umpire | said no. Oceans away here, like you, we wept’ (anthologised in The Bowling was Superfine, p.83).
West Indians had been receiving uninterrupted ball-by-ball commentary
‘In 1939 when the West Indies cricket team toured England came an important innovation: unbroken ball-by-ball commentary on each Test match on the Empire Service wavelength to listeners in the West Indies…This was almost certainly the first ever unbroken commentary on a whole Test’ (Booth, Talking of Sport, pp.273-74).
It would take another 18 years for British listeners to receive unbroken commentary on a dedicated wavelength (the programme which would become Test Match Special).
PAGE 25
‘easily outweighed in importance’
Thomson, Ramblings from the Distant Past, p.35.
He is actually telling a specific anecdote about the third Test at Trent Bridge but the problem he would have had throughout the series was that close of play, Trinidad time, was 1.30pm and his lunch-hours were supposed to end at 1pm. Thomson implies that the close-of-play summaries of Arlott and Alston were often impossible to resist.
‘coming home high on victory…’
Tony Deyal, ‘King Cricket and other monarchs’, Gleaner, 9 December 2016: ‘Even though I was five years old at the time, I remember my father and my uncle coming home high on victory and the spirits of the cane they grew and reaped, boasting about their friend, Ramadhin, who had worked in the cane fields with them.’
‘radio commentary of the match has drawn…’
B. Bardswell, letter to Gleaner, 30 June 1950, p.10.
published a cartoon
Gleaner, 30 June 1950, p.10.
‘hear what was going on’ … ‘extremely proud’ … ‘Walcott making 168 at Lord’s…’
Lance Gibbs, interviewed by Martin Gough (BBC), 12 May 2004.
As discussed further in Chapter 3, the Guyanese had been incensed by the fact Christiani was their only representative on the tour. But Christiani himself noted that ‘the joy of the people was quite obvious’ at the four civic receptions he attended on his return. He came home with the gift of a cocker spaniel puppy – named Ramalf after the spin twins (Kumar, Cricket, Lovely Cricket, p.183).
‘We Won! We won it at Lord’s!’
Kumar, Cricket, Lovely Cricket, p.128:
…the legend goes that a murder trial was in progress while the Test match was taking place and that certain arrangements had been made to pass the score to ‘C.J.’ at certain times, which he would pass on to others in court. When news of the great victory came through it is alleged that C.J. could not prevent himself from exclaiming: “We won! We won it at Lord’s!” Everyone in the court cheered – none more loudly than the accused.
half the population of Barbados
Sixty Years, p. 42. Compare Island Cricketers, p.56: ‘All Barbados turned out, so it seemed, to welcome us back’.
‘cricketing ambassadors’ … ‘fostering and cementing…’
From a letter to the conservative Barbados Advocate, 4 October 1950. Such ponderous proconsular homilies were a common feature of ‘loyalist’ editorials in the early 1950s.
‘the natural joy and happiness…’
Weekes, interviewed by Kumar in 1999 (Cricket, Lovely Cricket, p.181).
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‘In those days, coloured people or black people…’
Walcott, interviewed in 2000 for the BBC World Service programme, Sporting Witness.
Similarly, Weekes believed that the West Indians ‘recently arrived and having a difficult time with jobs, housing and racism’ in Britain ‘were looking to us to lighten their burden … and restore pride daily stripped away from their lives’ (Mastering the Craft, p.122).
As it happened, the first British cabinet meeting to consider the imposition of immigration controls took place on 19 July 1950, five days before the second Test started.
‘We was proud of the cricket team…’ … ‘beating England bad-bad…’
Llewelyn Barrow, interview with Michael Myatt, quoted in Anthony Joseph, Kitch, p.104.
Chapter 1 of Colin Babb’s They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun is a good source for more examples of the Windrush generation taking pride in the cricket team. Another source is the autobiography of Gladstone Mills: ‘Throughout the summer of 1950, we basked in the triumph of the West Indian tour of Rae and Stollmeyer, the three “Ws” and the “two pals”, Ramadhin and Valentine. We especially enjoyed the euphoria of that victory at Lord’s, our first on English soil, and the ensuing calypso dance on those hallowed grounds’ (Grist to the Mills, p.107).
I’m sure this must have been the prevailing attitude and that historians and cultural commentators have been right to attach great importance to it. But two points on the other side of the ledger. First, not every West Indian migrant was swept up by the events of 1950: the Jamaican sculptor Ronald Moody once asked ‘Dare I admit I was never drawn to cricket?’ (quoted in Sandhu, London Calling, p.138). Second, even people who were obviously were, like Donald Hinds, recognised its symbolic power but worried that the attention devoted to it helped foster a superficial view of the Caribbean: ‘On the whole the space afforded West Indians in British journals is reserved mainly for cricketers and pieces of sensational reporting on West Indians in the community’ (Journey to an Illusion, p.161; compare p.207 and Lewis, ‘Race Relations’).
‘a real Arctic feeling, bad-bad-indifferent…’
A sentiment voiced by a character in Edric Connor’s 1959 BBC radio play My People and Your People (quoted in Bidnall, West Indian Generation, p.80).
Such memories are legion in Windrush oral histories: ‘It was dark, unfriendly, it was an odd feeling, not a friendly and inviting place’ (Grant, Homecoming, p.77).
‘London is the place for me’, Kitchener sang for a Pathé newsreel …
Kitchener appears about two minutes in.
‘magnificent’ and ‘comfortable’
The adjectives appear respectively in verses 5 and 3 of the recorded song (Melodisc 10-inch [1951, cat. no. 1163]) – as so often Kitch’s calypso has a little sting in the tale as it turns out the ‘me’ of the song resides at ‘Hampton Court’ – so the listener is asked to wonder whether the sentiments are those of a naive migrant or a privileged native.
‘my landlady’s too rude’
The first and third line of My Landlady, Melodisc 10-inch (1952, cat. no. 1208).
…at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square…
For further reading on this infamous incident, and quite complex matter of law, see Hill, Learie Constantine, p.102 and footnote 43.
‘sense of fair play’
Constantine, Colour Bar, p.138.
the humiliations of life as a ‘Negro-in-England’
Colour Bar, p.67. Constantine actually uses this expression adjectivally to refer to the delicate ‘manners’ he has had to learn, always at risk of being abused or snubbed by ‘most British people’.
PAGE 27
Bullying at the workplace…
In Journey to an Illusion, one of the greatest Windrush ‘oral histories’ first published in 1966, Donald Hinds testifies to many in the host population complaining of ‘too few jobs, too few houses and too many white women paying too little attention to the colour bar’ (p.50).
Hinds was a qualified teacher from Jamaica who became a bus conductor in Streatham. He accepted he had to ‘de-skill’, like an estimated 50% of West Indian men in London in the late 1950s, but found it harder to understand why he was often dehumanised. Hinds is particularly authoritative on what he called ‘the rigmarole of acceptance and rejection’ (p.5) and the complexities of his own reaction: ‘Deep down I knew I loved my persecutors. Our Caribbean background was shaped by English things. I did not know the extent to which I was conditioned’ (p.4).
Ian Thomson, who interviewed Hinds for his excellent book on Jamaica, The Dead Yard, provides an introduction here which may help persuade some of you to find a copy of Journey to an Illusion.
It would be trite to call them…
Although Henry Swanzy, the Anglo-Irish radio producer who sponsored so many West Indian writers on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices, once opined that Selvon has ‘done as much good for the Caribbean name, among certain circles, as even the Test cricketers’ (18 April 1954).
‘political unity and creative pride’
Lamming, Pleasures of Exile, p.225. Lamming was lamenting that the West Indies was in sore need of this, but in a passage which strongly implies that he and Selvon can provide some.
a brave new world
‘O brave no world, that has such people in’t’ (The Tempest). Lamming made Shakespeare’s play the foundation pillar of The Pleasures of Exile, first published in 1960. Much of this extended essay is preoccupied by the complex historical iniquities West Indian Calibans have suffered at the hands of European Prosperos, but the essential premise is that Caliban, and Prospero for that matter, might now be free to prepare for ‘a Season of Adventure’ (p.229). James was no doubt doffing his cap to Lamming at the beginning of Beyond a Boundary: ‘To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew’ (p.1).
Compare the recollection of the Jamaican poet John Figueroa (England v West Indies, p.144):
In 1950 we all thought that facism had been defeated. The West Indies seemed a microcosm of what might be a brave new world: an Indian, and a grandson of indentured labourers among the descendants of slave and slave owner and late-comers, among the Weekeses and the Goddards, the Valentines and the Stollmeyers, the Gomezes and the Christianis, the Testrails and the Worrells! And back at home there were Achong and Tang Choon and Asgarali, and Barrow and Abrahams.
‘Indian, Negro, Chinese, White, Portuguese mixed with Syrian’
Pleasures of Exile, p.37.
Lamming, like Figueroa, highlighted the crucial role cricket played in helping the English understand that ‘the West Indian, though provincial, is perhaps the most cosmopolitan man in the world’. The Australian Test team at Lord’s all ‘look like English people’, the Indian team all ‘look alike’ (Lamming’s italics), but in a West Indies XI ‘the mixtures are as weird and promising as the rainbow’.
a bridge into English culture for the Windrush generation
Selvon’s brilliantly done little story centres on the migrant Algernon, working in a Chiswick tyre factory, who sees a chance when the West Indies are doing well in England to ‘give the Nordics tone’. He is challenged to a game by one of his English workmates: ‘But what you think Algernon know about cricket in truth?’ He just about bluffs his way through until rain stops play.
There were many real-life examples of West Indian migrants being given roles in works or school teams rather above their level of ability.
Hunter Davies once encountered a Barbadian called Arley Sobers, who had immediately been picked for the Cardiff university team on the strength of his race and name: ‘That happened all the time…I did play a bit of cricket at Cardiff but not very well’ (A Walk Around the West Indies, p.12).
E.A. Markham recalled the ‘benign racism’ behind his being picked consistently for his school team despite the fact his performances were mediocre (Against the Grain, p.118).
A character in one of the novels of the Jamaican migrant, Ivor Osbourne, cuts himself off from the game because of the prejudice and snobbery he encounters:
All the English fellows were always asking me something or other about cricket whenever they spoke to me. In the end I really felt playing cricket was all I was good for. I hated this. It was almost a pleasure to confess that I didn’t know the latest score, didn’t in fact know that there was a game being played anywhere. Then I would stand back and watch their faces pale with astonishment.
(Prodigal, anthologised in Bowling was Superfine, p.224)
See also Emma John’s recent reassessment of Playing Away, the film made by Horace Ové from a Caryl Phillips screenplay.
less about making friendships than making statements
In No Win No Race, Derek A. Bardowell, the British-born son of Jamaican migrants, notes the twin impulses encouraged by cricket to self-assertion and assimilation: before independence every victory had been significant and a cause for a street party: ‘cricket had been the tool to undermine the rulers’. But when his own father came to England in 1960, ‘the West Indian team served another purpose: they incubated him and his peers from the hostile reception of English folks’ and helped him fit in (his father set up a cricket club in Balham). For Bardowell junior, the impulse to self-assertion should be stronger, and that was certainly true for many West Indians in the 1950s.
This is where what academics would call the ‘trope’ of Caliban and Prospero can have more of an edge – especially perhaps for the academics themselves: Stuart Hall felt ‘there was no missing the payback moment of triumph’ represented by the victory at Lord’s and the victory calypso, a decolonising moment in which the ‘children of empire’ confronted and engaged the ‘mother country’ on ‘the home territory of the colonizers themselves’ (Familiar Stranger, p.138). Paul Gilroy viewed West Indies Test victories in England as ‘symbolic reparations’ (quoted in Lister’s Fire in Babylon, p.253).
Burton, although sometimes sceptical about such narratives, notes how cricket was taken over from the colonial masters and turned with a vengeance against them, ‘as Caliban turns the language he learns from Prospero’ (Afro-Creole, p.173). See also the poem ‘Caliban Prospero Cricket’ by John Agard (collected by Brown and McDonald 2012, pp. 37-38).
‘no islander from the West Indies sees himself as West Indian…’
Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile (p.214):
No Barbadian, no Trinidadian, no St. Lucian, no islander from the West Indies sees himself as West Indian until he encounters another islander in foreign territory…The category West Indian, formerly understood as a geographic term, now assumes a cultural significance.
Compare Selvon, in his essay ‘Three into One Can’t Go’:
When I left Trinidad in 1950 and went to England, one of my first experiences was living in a hostel with people from Africa and India and all over the Caribbean. It is strange I had to cross the Atlantic and be thousands of miles away, in a different culture and environment, for it to come about that, for the first time in my life, I was living among Barbadians and Jamaicans and others from my part of the world.
Or Darcus Howe, C.L.R. James’s nephew, interviewed in 2012:
I was becoming a West Indian in England. Before I arrived here I had never met a Jamaican, a Kittitian or an Antiguan. In that process we broadened our vision and perspective.
It was part of the colonial syndrome that London remained the capital of the British West Indies, although Mighty Sparrow later found in New York another ‘metropole’ where the differences which separated West Indians at home seemed to be erased: ‘It don’t have no who is who | Brooklyn equalize you’ (Mas in Brooklyn [1969]).
See also Hall, Familiar Stranger, p.44.
Perhaps the 1950s, before the islands went their own ways after independence, was the high water mark of ‘West Indian’ unity. Sobers sometimes seemed to think of himself more as a Barbadian than a West Indian: ‘When I went to play in the leagues in England in the late 1950s (for about £500 a year) many seemed to think Barbados was part of Jamaica. So you stood up. It was good to go out there and make people realise we were all individual islands. Cricket was what united us, but we could promote our island by our character and behaviour’ (interviewed by Simon Wilde, Sunday Times, 7 March 2004) .
‘You can never get away from the fact …’
If You’re not White You’re Black, Melodisc 10-inch (1953, cat. no. 1260).
For more intellectual formulations of the same idea, we can turn to (i) the Trinidadian Kenneth Ramchand, who wrote of a special form of English colour blindness which ‘manifests itself in an insensitivity to racial discriminations and variant shades within the category “black”’. It registers two crude categories, black and white’ (in Tajfel and Dawson (eds.), Disappointed Guests, p.28); (ii) the historian Gordon Lewis, who suggested the migrant ‘feels less like a West Indian in English society and more like a black man in white society’ (‘Race Relations’, p.22); (iii) Walter Rodney’s polemical The Groundings with My Brothers, which at one point gets back to the simple formulation of Kitch: ‘I maintain it is the white world which has defined who are blacks – if you are not white you are black (p.24).
might one day unite the ‘whole coloured world’
Constantine, Colour Bar, p.178: he uses this expression when discussing the ‘extraordinary wave of anger’ caused by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. See also pp.105-06 on the attractions of Communism, and p.50: ‘there is something that all coloured nations share – a dislike of white Government’.
the more monochrome racial pride
By which I mean the ideological position that all ‘non-whites’ should consider themselves ‘Black’ in common cause against ‘white supremacy’, as opposed to the less antagonistic ‘rainbow’ position we have seen Lamming sometimes leaning towards in the 1950s and which was implicit in mottoes like ‘Out of Many, One People’ (Jamaica) and ‘all o’ we is one’ (Trinidad). Stuart Hall observes that ‘it was only later, when migration to Britain had increased, that “black” became politicized’ (Familiar Stranger, p.14).
This is a vast subject outside the scope of this book, but ‘black consciousness’ was arguably incubated in the Caribbean, in a line which begins with John Jacob Thomas, Edward Blyden and Henry Sylvester Williams, then the movements of Garveyism and négritude (in the Francophone Caribbean), then the links between figures such as Padmore and James with pan-Africanism, then the roles of Walter Rodney and Stokely Carmichael in ‘Black Power’.
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out ‘to prove something’
Lamming, The Emigrants, p.66.
‘London Bridge is falling down’
Mastering the Craft, p.118.
Jimmy Cozier remembers ‘London Bridge’ being one of the ‘singing games’ on the sugar estates his father-in-law managed in Barbados (Caribbean Newspaperman, p.21). Frances Edmonds records the song being sung at Queen’s Park in to celebrate a win over the English as late as 1985/86 (Another Bloody Tour, p.145).
‘Winning the series 3-1…’
Beckles, Development of West Indies Cricket, pp. xv-xvi.
Weekes recalled that in 1950 Constantine ‘did say to us that our victory signaled the “end of empire”, the moment he had long cherished’ (Mastering the Craft).
According to Stewart Hall, C.L.R. James ‘often remarked that the British said that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton and would be lost on the playing fields of Lord’s cricket ground’ (quoted in Featherstone et al, p.8).