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‘a nice country’ … ‘people here like to see’ … ‘I’m very tired…’
All these details and quotations are taken from a report on MCC’s arrival at Piarco airport in the Trinidad Guardian, 5 March, p.14. The MCC players, busying themselves with immigration formalities, were said to ready ‘for a rest after a bumpy flight from BG’.
Bannister had written an opinion piece for the Daily Mail…
All the quotations in this paragraph are from Bannister’s article ‘Is it Cricket?’ (Daily Mail, 2 March 1954, p.4). The piece was reprinted in the Trinidad Guardian, 26 March 1954, p.6.
It has to be said Bannister’s conservative attitudes become obvious in this article. He talks of ‘the tragedy of adult suffrage’ in BG and stresses the importance of a permanent army garrison there to a continued settler presence, which he seems to assume is a pre-requisite for stability, not a cause of discontent.
the nationalist leader Eric Gairy had tried to organise a general strike…
The Trinidad Guardian hoped that the Windwards Islands trial match at the end of February ‘will tend to ease the absence of the usual Carnival festivities due to the ban on public processions and masking’ (25 February 1954, p.12). It had previously reported a police baton-charge of a march of Gairyites (8 January 1954, p.2). See Mawby, p.66 for the earlier General Strike in the spring of 1951.
He noted that Palmer had tried, without success…
Cricket Cauldron, p.121-22.
This request was made ‘half-jokingly’ but Cyril Merry, the Trinidadian secretary of the Board of Control, did make ‘enquiries on the possibility of curtailing the game’. As tickets had already been sold for the last day, ‘nothing could be done about it’.
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the ‘homely atmosphere’ … ‘cakes baked by the wives of the committee-men’
Bannister, Cauldron, p.121.
evidence of ‘shocking manners’ … ‘Please don’t bring any more English sides…’
These quotations are from a letter from Swanton to Cobham, quoted in Rayvern-Allen, Jim, p.194. [I have taken the liberty of compressing the phrase ‘In short, the manners in the West Indies were shocking’ down to ‘shocking manners’].
It was Crawford White who heard the complaint of an elderly lady recorded in Swanton’s letter.
‘making amends for an awful lot in spite of the fact…’
Cowdrey, in a letter to Swanton quoted by Fay/Kynaston, who describe it as a ‘model of its kind’ (p.112).
‘stigmatised’ … ‘there is no better-informed crowd…’
Swanton, Adventure, p.198.
– which Swanton’s team did not find time to visit in 1955/56 –
It was predictable that the Governor of Trinidad thought Swanton and his ‘chaps’ had done something ‘very valuable’ and that Wisden reported ‘they proved immensely popular’ with none of the ‘rancour and ugly incidents’ which marred Hutton’s tour. Figures such as Worrell and Walcott, and the Trinidadian journalist Brunell Jones, also thought Swanton’s mission had ‘succeeded tremendously’. But it was noted, even if Swanton explained he would have visited other territories had the timetable and budget allowed, that the itinerary did not include BG and Jamaica, the two colonies where anti-British feeling had run highest in 1953/54.
‘complete with a bar and other conveniences’
Trinidad Guardian, 12 January 1954, p.12.
Other improvements included a new 1,000-seater schoolboys’ stand near the northern sightscreen and a new lady members’ stand.
Thrice in the 19th century Port-of-Spain had nearly been destroyed by fire…
The three city-wide conflagrations took place in 1808, 1859 and 1895. See Bonham Richardson’s monograph, Igniting the Caribbean’s Past, especially p.54 which recounts the tale that the cricketers assisted casualties in 1895.
In the 1950s accidental fires still seem to have been common in Trinidad…
Admittedly I was on the look-out for them and it is one of the functions of a local press to report them, but there were many fires in the months leading up to MCC’s visit. The Port of Spain Gazette recorded the following incidents:
1 January
Headline (p.2): ‘Belmont Laundry Destroyed in Early Morning Fire’
18 January
Two fires reported on p.2: one from a stove, one from an electrical short circuit
26 January
The fire brigade was called out – but did not go into action – after electrical wires ignited as a tree was being felled; another stove fire was also reported that day (p.2)
3 February
Front-page headline: ‘Fire destroys night club in St James’; a house fire in San Fernando and the first bush fire of the year were also reported that day
7 February
Another electrical wire blaze (reported on p.2)
8 February
An explosion at the Pointe-a-Pierre oil refinery was front-page news
10 February
Page two headilne: “Fire bug” sets fire to school in Caroni – although the incident proved not to be serious
13 February
Two blazes within 10 hours: one caused by a faulty heater, the other by a faulty transformer (reported on front page)
16 February
Front page news: Boy dies, sister burnt in fire from exploding gas-lamp in Poona Settlement (she died later in hospital)
23 February
House in Rio Claro burned to the ground, cause unknown (reported on p.2)
2 March
Fire destroys police officer’s home in San Juan – local fire-brigade unit was already at Morant dealing with another fire (reported on p.2)
‘the well-known jealousy and individualism of Trinidadians’
Williams, History, p.81.
Compare Naipaul, Middle Passage, p.72: ‘Nationalism was impossible in Trinidad. In the colonial society every man had to be for himself.’
One story doing the rounds was that ‘loafers’ …
Bannister, Cauldron, p.105-06.
In his biography of Peter May, Rodrigo asserts, without any documentary support, that the fire in Trinidad was started ‘allegedly by a fire-bug whose passions had been roused by events’ in the BG Test (p.73).
‘sheer wickedness’ of vandals
As reported in the Port of Spain Gazette.
arson – especially the torching of cane fields – had long been associated…
Bonham Richardson points out that virtually every slave uprising in the Caribbean involved ‘the use or planned use of fire’:
During slavery, planters had owned everything – people, land, buildings, and implements – a legality that usually could be enforced for tangible, fixed objects yet was nearly impossible for fire. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Caribbean resistance and rebellion, imagined and real during slavery and thereafter, were nearly always associated with images of burning fields or buildings (p.21).
There is a lyric in this tradition by John Holt’s son in Police in Helicopter: ‘But if you continue to burn up the Herbs | we gonna burn down the cane fields’.
in 1903 rioters protesting about fixed water rates burnt down the ‘Red House’
See Richardson, pp.174-82.
The Water Riots were described in retrospect by Colonial Office as ‘the most serious…in the West Indies since the Jamaica rebellion of 1865’. The building was reduced to a gutted shell. Police opened fire on the protestors, killing 16 and injuring 42.
That this is incident still had great resonance is perhaps indicated by the fact that in The Beacon the piece in its fourth issue immediately following Bertie Gomez’s famous call to arms – ‘Black Man!’ – was an article on ‘The Water Riots of 1903’ by Henry C. Alexis (volume 1, issue 4, pp.3-7).
the Egyptians had set alight various British institutions…
The riots were sparked off by a confrontation between British soldiers and Egyptian auxiliary police in the city of Ismailia which left over 50 Egyptians dead. 26 people were killed in the disturbances in the capital the next day. The destruction of Shepheard’s Hotel in downtown Cairo was especially symbolic: see Elsheshtawy, ‘Urban Transformations’.
For the attack on Esmond Warner’s bookshop, see Howat, Plum Warner, p.202.
In Windrush: A Ship Through Time, Paul Arnott gives a thorough account: some suggested the maintenance carried out by a team of Egyptian fitters and labourers was an ‘opportunity for mischief’, but it is now generally accepted the explosion was accidental.
‘some people …’ that the Queen’s Park fire ‘started…’
Wardle, Happy Go Johnny, p.137. Wardle says he was not among these people, but the local newspapers front-paged both incidents in a way which made it hard not to see a link.
a ‘less explosive’ atmosphere in Trinidad
Swanton, Adventure, p.141.
‘as the island gives the example of many races living together in amity…’
Swanton, West Indies Revisited, p.72. Compare Last Over, p.137.
From his two tours to Trinidad, Wally Hammond remembered the crowds there as ‘extraordinarily cosmopolitan and picturesque’ (p.115). Ken Farnes was another to note the ‘exuberance’ of Trinidad, which he felt had more races ‘represented and mixed’ than anywhere in the world (Tours and Tests, p.79).
what Albert Gomes called Trinidad’s ‘crazyquilt’ of races
Maze of Colour, p.153.
Compare James Morris’s description of Port of Spain as ‘a gaudy and multitudinous mosaic’ of ‘endless tumbling variety’ (Cities, p.292).
Perhaps Leigh Fermor was being too pat when he came up with this sentence in Trinidad: ‘In the English-speaking Negro world of the Americas, Harlem is Rome, St Louis might be Athens of Alexandria, and Port of Spain is Byzantium: Jazz; Blues: Calypso’. But he warmed to the ‘exuberance and brio’ of Trinidadians and was probably right in suggesting that the island’s comparatively short period of slavery meant they were less psychologically damaged than Barbadians or Jamaicans. In their song and their dress – on other islands ‘Negroes were either dressed like tramps or town councillors’ – he noted less of that ‘certain self-consciousness, the wariness of a man in a false position’ (Traveller’s Tree, pp.172-74).
as in the serious disturbances in the oil fields of Fyzabad…in 1937.
For loyalists, these disturbances were seditious riots; for nationalists a Labour Revolution.
Maya Doyle’s blog for the National Trust of Trinidad & Tobago provides an introduction.
‘expatriate snobbery’ …
Gomes, Maze of Colour, p.108
As so often in his wonderfully sprawling memoir, it is not easy to know where to place this observation in time and place, but it falls in between anecdotes of 1946 and 1956 (admittedly about visits to England) and just before a complaint about ‘the mollifying influences of the high teas, the dinners and cocktail parties, the state occasions’ (p.119) to which members of the Trinidad Executive Council were exposed (before its reform in 1950).
‘diabolical astuteness…’ … their own ‘magic’
Mendes, Autobiography, p.34-35.
the ‘enduring fascination’ the game holds
Sam Mendes, in his introduction to an edition of Brearley’s Art of Captaincy.
‘exercise a restraining influence…’ … ‘public relations officer’ of empire
Mendes, Autobiography, p.35
‘still very Crown Colony’
Mendes, Autobiography, p.132
He seems to date this observation to 1946, when he campaigned for the United Front in the general election and was warned by the Colonial Secretary ‘more than once’ that he might lose his job as a civil servant if he continued to support an anti-ministerial party.
But the actor Edric Connor, visiting his home island in 1954, thought Trinidad was ‘thriving’: ‘The place had changed considerably. It was vibrant. We had received a form of self-government’ (Horizons, p.98).
Dos Santos is reputed to have started making plans … at four o’clock in the morning…
As reported by Horace Harragin, in his brochure celebrating the centenary of the Oval.
He brought in the British construction firm Ash & Watson
Ash & Watson’s effort was described as a ‘feat of arms’ by Joe Kelshall, the former Trinidad cricketer (Port of Spain Gazette, 9 March 1954, p.1). They seem to have specialised in emergency jobs: in 1958, they erected a 500-foot antenna tower in 12 days for Radio Demerara.
‘the Queen’s Park authorities acted with a swiftness and sureness…’
Trinidad Guardian, 9 March 1954, p.16.
Ganteaume … called dos Santos ‘the Dictator’
My Story, p.17
If the Carnival embodied a spirit of ‘al o’ we is one’…
The 1948 MCC tourists had enjoyed the world-famous carnival in company with Stollmeyer and Gomez, and it was often put forward as a shining example of Trinidad’s multiculturalism. But some commentators came to believe that Williams and the PNP – who adopted the slogan ‘al o’ we is one’ as their own – ‘hijacked’ the carnival in later years to suit their own ‘Afro-centric’ agenda (see an article by Raymond Ramcharitar in New West Indian Guide 85).
He held what was described as a ‘stag party’ for them at his own residence
venues where many local cricketers still struggled to gain admittance
Constantine liked to tell the story that even when he returned to Trinidad as a celebrity in the 1950s, and offered work as an oil-industry rep, his hosts preferred not to invite him to their clubs.
I don’t know whether we should read too much into an all-day Sunday ‘picnic’ recorded in the society column of the Trinidad Guardian at a private home in Monos, where Moss, May, Statham, Suttle, Laker and Graveney were invited and the only ‘local boys’ named are Stollmeyer, Atkinson, Pairaudeau and Gomez – the white members of the Test team.
‘endured with fixed smiles an endless teasing…’
This story was told by Howat (Len Hutton, pp.132-33), who was living in Trinidad at the time, and later wrote an evocative account of the crowd at the Oval, emphasising its ‘delight’ more than its hostility.
But when Constantine (p.70) described the Oval crowd as ‘all of them loyal right from the toes up, the very backbone and inspiration of all West Indies cricket’, he meant loyal to the team not to the British.
And the atmosphere could be lively in any case: during the colony game against Australia the next winter, Pat Landsberg noted ‘a fight at the north end of the ground’ which ‘distracted the crowd’ (Kangaroo Conquers, p.59).
‘a very welcome change indeed’ … ‘pleasant and good-tempered …’
J.S. Barker, Trinidad Guardian, 11 March 1954, p.1.
Trueman’s ‘vigorous encouragement’
J.S. Barker, Trinidad Guardian, 11 March 1954, p.1.
‘tended to target the bodies’
Bailey, in a 2011 interview with Ijaz Chaudhry.
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what a local journalist sarcastically called ‘the Jamaica pattern’
Trinidad Guardian, 26 February 1954.
Moss vaguely remembers giggling in the slips…
Interview with the author, 31 March 2015.
‘sad but unmistakable impression that he saw himself as the victorious gladiator’
Bannister, Cauldron, p.126.
Charles Bray praised Trueman for bowling ‘17 Lindwall-like overs’ and maintaining his pace all day but was disappointed by his behaviour towads Ferguson: ‘The least palatable feature of this incident was that Trueman did not go forward to speak to his prostrate victim. While others picked Ferguson up, Trueman stalked back to his mark’ (News Chronicle 15 March 1954, p.7).
Trueman compounded his breaches of etiquette by running off…
This convention had in fact been a matter of discussion for the MCC Committee a few years earlier (25 April 1949, minute 10): ‘It was decided to suggest to County Cricket Clubs that the old custom by which the fielding side allowed the batsmen to enter the pavilion first on the conclusion of an innings, etc., was a courtesy which might well be maintained, especially in view of the fact that departure from it was liable to lead to misunderstanding during overseas tours.’
a ‘minor match’ where ‘there was nothing at stake’
Trueman, As It Was, p.161.
‘white English bastard’
As It Was, p.161.
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Stollmeyer once joked that Ferguson was ‘no Valentino’ …
Everything Under the Sun, p.69.
Figueroa (1991, p.13) calls Ferguson ‘double ugly’. Gordon Ross asserted that Ferguson was ‘boastful of his extravagant claim that he is the ugliest cricketer…’ (Testing Years, p.46).
‘frightfully unsportsmanlike conduct’
Trinidad Guardian, quoted in Cauldron, p.126.
‘The days when the British…’
Evening News, as reported by Bannister in Cauldron, p.126. [Bannister actually quotes ‘The day when…’ but I have silently changed to ‘days’ to make the sentence agree.]
Swanton was aghast … ‘agonising watching’
Adventure, p.138.
instructing Compton, ‘with a straight face’
Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run, p.191:
Before the next over commenced, I summoned Denis to the middle and gave my instructions with a straight face: ‘You stay there Denis, and I’ll play the shots.’ While my words were very gradually sinking in, I had retreated to the safety of my crease, slogged about 20 and returned to the pavilion, content that with Denis in command we would be home and dry.
Hayter: ‘A remarkable feature was that Bailey was scoring faster than Compton, and for once he obtained most of his runs in front of the wicket, mostly with pulls and drives (Times, 16 March 1954, p.3).
Compton tells the story himself in End of an Innings (p.56).
on the rest day he had beaten Swanton … on the golf course
Although in Trevor Bailey’s Cricket Book, published in 1959, he owned up to a – theoretically impossible – handicap of 44 (p.58).
a ‘splendid stimulant’ for the Test
White, News Chronicle, 16 March 1954, p.8.
Bannister, in his fourth day report, had also predicted a win would be a ‘wonderful tonic’ before the Test (Sunday Guardian, 14 March, p.1).
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which May remembered was ‘as fast as we cared for’
As quoted by Bannister, Trinidad Guardian, 7 March 1954, p.1.
This report notes that the underlay of grey marl made batting ‘decidedly unpleasant’. Swanton also noted that ‘MCC in Grenada discovered … that the jute mat does not automatically mean a batsman’s paradise’ (Adventure, p.135). Bray noted the ball ‘flying high and dangerously’ (Port of Spain Gazette, 7 March 1954, p.1) and, when it was MCC’s turn to bowl, that Trueman ‘got plenty of lift and pace off the matting’ (9 March, p.1). Trueman and Moss ‘had a shock’ when the openers hooked off their eyebrows, although one of them, Barrow, overbalanced and fell on his stumps trying to avoid a Trueman bouncer.
not ‘madly keen’ to face the new ball
Wardle, Happy Go Johnny, p.136.
‘Trust you warn batsmen immense difficulties Trinidad wicket.’
This telegram from Griffith dates from 1955/56 when Swanton’s goodwill tour arrived at Port of Spain (6 April 1956 [MCC Archive, SEC/3/60]).
By then the matting wicket had been replaced by turf but, perhaps understandably, Griffith never lost an opportunity, in his self-deprecating manner, to remind people of his achievement on the jute. When Dexter and Parks scored runs in the last Test in 1959/60, he sent another telegram: ‘Well played, you can always trust Sussex at Trinidad’ (31 March 1960).
By common consent the only bowler to prove really difficult on the surface in recent years had been the Indian wrist-spinner, Subhash Gupte. In 1948, Griffith’s captain Allen had referred to ‘the infernal mat’ and its monotony inspired an array of similar adjectives from journalists: ‘wicked’, ‘sinful’, ‘comatose’.
In a practice game held at the Oval before MCC’s arrival…
As reported by the Port of Spain Gazette, 23 February 1954.
He was talking a good game before the Test…
Comments reported in Trinidad Guardian, 4 March 1954, p.1.
Barker … thought the Test surface played ‘even easier’ …
The Test wicket was reportedly described by one of the England players (perhaps Hutton or Compton, the only survivors from The Oval in 1938) as ‘one of Bosser Martin’s offsprings’.