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‘throughout the summer of 1953 West Indians looked forward…’
Nicole, West Indian Cricket, p.187.
Willy Richardson joining commentators like Arlott and Rex Alston
His commentary from a position on the Victoria Memorial was widely reported in the Caribbean: see, for example, Public Opinion, 30 May 1953, p.5, which refers to ‘W.A. Richardson of Trinidad’.
For the involvement of the English cricket commentators, see Kynaston 2009, p.298 and Booth 2008, p.278: Arlott was positioned at Piccadilly Circus. Howard Marshall, another voice of cricket even if no longer employed by the BBC, was also persuaded to return for the Coronation coverage (Booth 2008, p.278).
a popular calypso by another of their countrymen, Young Tiger
Here is the magnificent original, plus a ukulele cover version that I’ve grown to like while trying to finish these footnotes.
making it obvious they were sending out the big guns
Jeffrey Stollmeyer observed that England were ‘taking no chances this time’ after Gubby Allen’s ‘disastrous’ tour in 1947/48. He felt all the players announced in the first tranche were ‘disciplined in the hard school of Test cricket’ (as quoted in The Gleaner, 5 August 1953, p.10).
detachments from the Big Four colonies
King George’s Jubilee Trust Coronation Programme, p.15.
Minutes of the Board of Control’s meetings…
Woodville Marshall expressed the ‘frustration’ of all West Indian cricket historians that WICBC minutes have never been made widely available (in Beckles [ed.], Area of Conquest, p.31).
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‘insular prejudice had gnawed at the very core…’
Anderson, in an article in a souvenir brochure edited by W.A.S. Hardy for the 1950 tour (They Live For Cricket, p.29).
As if to prove the point, Stollmeyer thought Anderson himself was ‘prejudiced parochially and racially’; he records a ‘scene’ in Jamaica where, ‘a bit drunk’, Anderson accosted the Barbadian Goddard and accused him of having ‘no manners’ (India Tour Diary, p.5).
Welcoming Hutton’s men to Barbados, Budd Smith expressed gratitude that West Indies cricket was finally evolving from the ‘pit of human weakness’ – by which he meant the ‘narrowness’ of insularity and the bane of ‘individualism’ (Barbados Advocate, 29 January 1954, p.10).
The British Guiana Cricket Association nearly boycotted…
See Kumar, Cricket, Lovely Cricket, pp.56-58; Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.76.
‘George or no George we win the match’
The Gleaner, 30 June 1950, p.10.
The original plan for 1953/54 was a four-match series starting in Trinidad…
Cricket Sub-Committee Meeting 8 October 1952, chaired by Warner, minute 8 (MCC Archive, MCC/CRI/1/3): ‘A Report submitted by the Special Sub-Committee was considered and it was agreed that only 4 Test Matches of 6 days should be played on the tour. In Colonies where only one Colony match was proposed this should be of 5 days duration.’
Fearing that the team would have too little first-class cricket before the first Test, it was recommended that the Special Sub-Committee should reconsider their proposed itinerary with a view to allowing another Colony match to be played in Trinidad.
At least the MCC schedule included two-day games in Antigua and Grenada…
The Board of Control had pressed for three-day fixtures, but their request was rejected (MCC West Indies Tour Sub-Committee, 1 June 1953, minute 1).
…since the era of Lord Hawke
Hawke’s touring side of 1897 visited Antigua. The last visit to Grenada by an English side was that led by B.J.T. Bosanquet in 1902.
Frank Mason of St Vincent … was rated by Worrell and Weekes
See Weekes (with Beckles), Mastering the Craft, p.82. According to the Foundation which seeks to preserve his legacy, Mason clean bowled Worrell twice in the same match.
The Guyanese commentator Reds Pereira devoted a section of his memoirs to a list of players from the smaller islands who were passed over by the national selectors (Living My Dreams, pp.136-37); the Antiguan historian Tim Hector gave a lecture which listed some of the people who felt they could not support the national team (in Beckles [ed.], Spirit of Dominance, p.56).
A preparatory leg of the tour was introduced before Christmas in Bermuda
See Chapter 7 for further details.
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not traditionally considered part of the British West Indies
Noel White tells the story that the Bermudan Alma Hunt was invited to Trinidad for Test trials in 1933: ‘He did fairly well but when selection-time came, it was decided that Bermuda was not part of the West Indies’ (George Atlas Headley, p.58)
‘notorious psychological alienation’ from the eastern Caribbean
Lewis, Growth of Modern West Indies, p.18.
Stuart Hall adds the point that in the Southern Caribbean there was ‘a great deal of inter-island migration’ but Jamaica was ‘an exception in this regard’ (Familiar Stranger, pp.164-65).
The award of the extra Test sparked a predictable spat…
The fixture competition rumbled on in the next season when Australia were to be the visitors, and Jamaicans campaigned for two Tests again to mark the tercentenary of British settlement. Judging from a report in Public Opinion, Trinidadians appear to have responded with a mixture of outrage and sarcasm, suggesting that Jamaicans needed to be introduced ‘to some of the cruder economic facts’ of cricket: ‘Every West Indian outside Jamaica – (assuming Jamaicans still consider themselves West Indians for any other purpose than international cricket) – is expecting two Tests in Trinidad’ (12 June 1954, p.7).
Meanwhile, the Guyanese…
While Hutton’s men were in the West Indies, the journalist Jake Crocker noted with an almost perverse pride that while the Guyanese cricketer ‘has done more than any other Colony to bring the Caribbean into a cricket unit, no Colony has lost more often than his – or as cheerfully as his – in the past 60 years of cricket in the West Indies’.
Crocker was probably referring to the fact that it was generally accepted the Guyanese businessman Alty O’Dowd had provided crucial financial support for the tour to England in 1928 – see, for example, Beckles (ed.), A Spirit of Dominance, p.40.
The Australian journalist Ray Robinson (The Wildest Tests, p.39) believed that ‘to be teasingly called Mudlanders or Mudheads by islanders from Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica scarcely ruffles the pride of the Guyanese’ but he perhaps underestimated how these barbs could wound.
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Bustamante…Manley
In 1950, noting that Kingston was riven by factional tension reminiscent of ‘the Capulets and the Montagues’, Patrick Leigh Fermor noted:
What seems very surprising is that Mr Bustamante, the pistol-packing, hard-living and humorous ex-rabble-raising demagogue, whose every word and gesture have an engaging histrionic phoneyness, should be the leader of the more moderate party; while Mr Manley – darker, equally aristocratic in appearance, but whose reserve and poise and purity of speech remind one constantly that he is a Rhodes scholar and a K.C. – should be the leader of the extreme left PNP’ (Traveller’s Tree, pp.346-47).
This paradox was recognised by other commentators, although Stuart Hall preferred to characterise the PNP as a ‘social-democratic…reformist party, strongly influenced by Fabian traditions’ and the JLP as a ‘free-market, business-oriented and populist party of the Right’ (Familiar Stranger, p.41).
‘self-government meant brown man rule’
A canonical phrase, quoted in this form with some distaste by Richard Hart in Towards Decolonisation, p.253.
Donald Sangster…helped arrange the first Australian tour to the West Indies…
He had reportedly made the suggestion on a trip to Australia in 1951, hoping that such a visit could spur tourism and trade. Sangster ‘sought and obtained the co-operation’ of the Board of Control and sponsored a proposal in the Jamaican parliament indemnifying the Board for some of its costs (Gleaner, 5 August 1953, p.1).
Jamaica … had initially played a peripheral role…
In Muscular Learning, Clem Seecharan outlines the early cricket relations in the West Indies: the suggestion by the other major centres that Jamaica should combine with the smaller islands for domestic competition did not go down well.
Moore and Johnson have written an article on the internal development of cricket, which they believe was, by 1920, ‘arguably the national sport of Jamaica’ (‘Challenging the Civilising Mission’, p.365).
Despite noting massive crowds in Jamaica on the next MCC tour in 1959/60, Swanton still felt that ‘the game is not quite so deeply rooted here as in the south-eastern Caribbean’ (West Indies Revisited, p.172).
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Jamaica ‘should play their own cricket …’
Reported in The Gleaner (21 March 1953, p.10).
This letter was written specifically in protest about Jamaican attempts to undermine Trinidadian candidates for the Test team against India, but it is representative of the tensions between Jamaican and Trinidadian cricket which were a running theme after the war. When Stollmeyer stopped over in Jamaica en route to India in 1948/49, he tried to avoid social functions: ‘Whenever a Jamaican began to talk cricket, the bad feeling would grow on me that a team of Jamaicans and not West Indians should have been selected to tour India’ (India Tour Diary, p.5).
Stuart Hall remembered that the first Barbadian he met was Carl Jackman, who had come from Codrington College to teach Latin at Jamaica College: ‘We imitated his accent, pretended we couldn’t find Barbados on the map, said the place was so small that cricketers had to use the whole island as the cricket pitch, and insisted that Bajan rules required the batsman to hit the ball into the sea to score a four’ (Familiar Stranger, p.167).
Headley remembered being not ‘altogether a popular appointment’
He made this remark many years later in conversation with David Frith.
Constantine made the more general observation that Headley never received due recognition for his contribution to West Indies cricket ‘because success in world affairs by a black man was not easily accepted by the powers-that-be’ (Changing Face, p.122).
Many suspected that he was struggling more…
Walcott, Island Cricketers, p.32: ‘Practically everyone in West Indies believed the main reason behind Headley’s action was not a bad back but rather a distaste for playing under the captaincy of Stollmeyer and Goddard.’
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Stollmeyer occasionally acknowledged his ‘abundance of guts’…
Everything Under the Sun, p.130.
which Clyde Walcott thought was ‘always’ in play…
Walcott, Island Cricketers, p.67.
Goddard ‘on his own admission, has never read a cricket book’
Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.68.
‘we could easily have won the series if only our chaps had settled down…’
[I’m afraid I’ve mislaid this Gomez reference.]
‘through with Test cricket’
As reported by The Gleaner, 11 December 1952.
It was widely reported that the Board of Control had issued him…
Ivo Tennant, in his biography of Worrell, states boldly that, after Goddard had commented adversely on the itinerary, ‘the Board suspended him from Test cricket for three and a half years’ (p.41). I have seen other less specific references to a ban in the contemporary press, but have not been able to find an official statement by the Board regarding any such suspension.
Goddard told a journalist that he was back in contention…
Landsberg, Kangaroo Conquers, pp.132-33. According to this account, Goddard replaced the nominated Barbados selector Freddy Clairemonte at the meeting which decided the captain for the home series against India: the other selectors, Nethersole (Jamaica), Green (BG) and Marsden (Trinidad) ‘were somewhat taken aback to discover that one of the nominations for the captaincy was actually on the board which would make the choice’.
Stollmeyer appears to have insisted on leading a three-man panel…
Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.139-40.
In some reports of this initiative, the local selector is described as chairman, but Stollmeyer makes it sound as if he was in charge, and the point holds anyway that he wanted the captain to have more influence over selection from Test to Test.
PAGE 47
‘merely encouraged infighting and parochialism’
Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.140.
Trevor Bailey was not exaggerating when he opined…
Playing to Win, p.188.
PAGE 48
what Frank Tyson called the ‘apartheid’ …
In his autobiography, A Typhoon Called Tyson, p.193.
Michael Down (p.78) and Simon Wilde (p.280) both quote Tyson’s phrase in their discussions of pro-am issues in post-war cricket. Late in life, Wilfred Rhodes also described the pro/am system as ‘English apartheid’ (interview with David Frith, 18 March 1970, cited in Bodyline Autopsy).
Compare Constantine, Cricket in the Sun (1946), p.64: ‘It is not, of course, only in the West Indies that professionals have been looked upon as a race apart.’
what Gordon Lewis called the ‘multilayered pigmentocracy’…
Lewis, Growth of Modern West Indies, p.80.
the contestants of a Jamaican beauty pageant of 1955…
This became a notorious, and one senses not entirely typical, example of ‘pigmentocracy’ which has often been re-cited (for example by Natasha Barnes in Chapter 1 of Cultural Conundrums, drawing a specific link with cricket). However, the general point entirely holds: social status in the Anglophone Caribbean, with very few exceptions, was defined by propinquity to whiteness.
The British West Indians are by no means alone in making such intricate gradations – one is reminded of the fact Mrs Beeton divided servants into 25 categories (Birley, Sport and the English, p.263).
three-tier pyramid of the plantation, white-brown-black
As late as 1967, a Caribbean travelogue by the Anglo-Hungarian journalist George Mikes noted that ‘in any expensive hotel or restaurant, all the guests are white, the manager is brown and the the waiters and the dish-washer are black’ (Not by Sun Alone, pp.48-49).
Visiting Jamaica at about the time of the MCC tour, Mona Macmillan noted: ‘The old British snobbish division between educated and uneducated is enforced by the division of “brown” and “black”’ (Land of Look Behind, p.210).
Beyond a Boundary, p.56.
‘caste’ lines … his ‘social and moral crisis’ …
Beyond a Boundary, p.55.
But, with such provisos, club cricket in the capital cities…
The more one thinks about it the more objections there are to a ‘straightforward’ hierarchy in each island: for example, Pickwick owned what became the Test ground in Barbados, so I think they felt far less ‘junior’ to Wanderers than, say, Shamrock felt to Queen’s Park in Trinidad. Yet I hope this schema remains a useful way of ‘getting’ the way club cricket worked in principle.
PAGE 49
– Weekes called them ‘atrocities’ –
In the Foreword to Ganteaume’s My Story, p. iv.
Compare Constantine: ‘In the past many have not been asked who were good enough’ (Changing Face of Cricket, p.92).
George John, a ‘man of the people’…
Beyond a Boundary, Chapter 6.
‘The Big Ones here strangled my future, boy’
Errol John, Moon Over a Rainbow Shawl, as quoted by Beckles, in Development, vol. 1, p.106.
[The version of the play published in 1957 held by the London Library does not appear to contain this line but has a very similar scene (pp.60-63). I have made a small error in that, while the play won a writing competition and was published in 1957, it did not premiere at the Royal Court until 1958.]
the highest batting average in Test cricket: 112.
While I was writing the first drafts of this chapter, Prithvi Shaw had a higher average, after his first series for India, but a tour to Australia saw to that. While I was drafting these footnotes, Devon Conway scored 200 in his first Test innings for New Zealand. But the statement is correct again at the time this book went to press.
Gomez, who happened to be his boss at a sports-equipment company…
I may be reading slightly too much into a comment in My Story at p.8: Ganteaume says he worked as a salesman for Sports and Games, where Gomez was a partner; but he certainly tells several stories of Gomez treating him like a subordinate.
‘times had indeed changed, but not enough’
Beyond a Boundary, p.136.
‘three times’ as hard for a black cricketer from the BCL…
Sobers, My Autobiography, p.18.
One is reminded of James’s comment on the white clubs in Port of Spain, Queen’s Park and Shamrock: ‘I would have been more easily elected to the MCC than to either’ (Beyond a Boundary, p.56).
the respectable secondary schools which acted as nurseries…
See Keith Sandiford, Cricket Nurseries of Colonial Barbados: The Elite Schools, 1865-1966.
In the only year he was always available to Empire, Worrell captained their football team to the island championship and helped the cricket team to win the same honour (Empire 75th Anniversary Club Book, p.27).
According to Tony Cozier, Weekes helped the Garrison Sports Club, the Barbados Regiment team, to the BCA title in 1946/47, and was then invited to join Empire in 1947/48, where he remained a member for the rest of his life (Everton Weekes, pp.2-3).
Empire 75th Anniversary Club Book contains a good account of the history of the club, which according to legend had its origins in the great fast bowler Herman Griffith being blackballed by Spartan three times: ‘Cricket and cricket clubs in Barbados illustrated most graphically those barriers which in the Caribbean, and perhaps especially in Barbados, lasted until well into the twentieth century’ (p.15).
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‘a family that came as near to aristocracy as the colonies can produce’
Manley, History, p.63.
Tim Hector once described Nunes as ‘the Jamaican imitation of English aristocracy’ (Area of Conquest, p.116).
the tradition of a white Kingston Cricket Club player
Madeleine Kerr’s analysis of Jamaican society in 1952 captures some of the themes of Beyond a Boundary: ‘One of the salient points in a class society is that each stratum imitates the habits of the stratum above it, and each stratum in turn jealously preserves its customs from encroachment’ (p.94).
Nunes … and Constantine appear to have despised each other
For example, see Constantine’s acid comments in The Changing Face of Cricket, especially p.134, where he says he wrote to the Board of Control when invited to tour Australia in 1930/31: ‘if Mr Nunes is captain I am afraid that I shall not be able to make the tour’. Jack Grant captained the party, and Constantine made it. The feud between the two men seems to have carried on for years: in 1950 Constantine blamed Nunes for trying to ban him from the West Indies dressing room (Changing Face, p.138)
Dos Santos…was known as the ‘Great White Lord’
Ganteaume, My Story, p.17.
The respected local journalist ‘Strebor’ Roberts suggested…
Gleaner, 18 July 1953, p.8.
Roberts thought Worrell was the ‘obvious selection’ and it was time the Board of Control followed the English example and appointed a professional as captain. He thought that by inviting him to act as vice-captain ‘the Board has merely drawn a red herring across the trail’ since it was also obvious Worrell was already acting de facto in this role, frequently consulted by Stollmeyer in the field. Interestingly, Roberts thought Stollmeyer had not proved ‘the tactician he was made out to be and lacked the rallying and fighting spirit of John Goddard’ – as we shall see in Chapter 19, Goddard had his admirers among black journalists.
‘should remember that they owe something to West Indian cricket’
As quoted in The Gleaner, 23 September 1954, p.10.
The same report registers similar displeasure on the part of Jack Kidney, tour manager in 1950 and one of the Barbadian representatives on the Board of Control. Like Goddard, he ‘regretted’ the participation of Worrell and Ramadhin in the Commonwealth tour as they would not be able to take part in early preparations and also risked being stale – ‘but there was nothing to be done in as much as there was no contract between the two players and the board’.
Goddard’s comment was not received well in Jamaica. Strebor Roberts responded in his Sports Editors’ Diary that several players had looked short of match sharpness in the previous home series against India and it was reasonable for Worrell and Ramadhin to go on the Commonwealth tour. Surely with a trace of sarcasm, he observed that it was at least ‘refreshing to see Goddard has maintained a vital interest in the West Indies cricket’ (Gleaner, 26 September 1953, p.8). Ken Jones also defended Worrell and Ramadhin in the PNP weekly, Public Opinion (26 September 1954, p.7).
Worrell’s decision to leave Barbados for Jamaica is discussed further in Chapter 10. The Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles drily characterised it as a decision ‘to depart the white man’s country for the brown man’s country’ (Area of Conquest, p.53).
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Gideon Haigh calculated that Headley contributed more than Bradman…
In this short 2009 essay, ‘The Great Black Hope’.
C.L.R. James that his average was far higher on rain-affected wickets
In Beyond a Boundary, pp.140-41. There may be a degree of partisanship behind James’s methods of calculation but I believe Ray Robinson conducted a similar exercise (which I have been unable to find).
Noel White suggests one early influence on Headley’s sticky-wicket play was Ernest Tyldesley, whom Headley watched on Lionel Tennyson’s tour playing with ‘perfect control’ on a wet wicket at Melbourne Park (George Atlas Headley; see also Lawrence, Masterclass, p.11, p.15).
a ‘revolutionary’ figure … ‘the hopes of the black, English-speaking Caribbean man’
Manley, History, p.63.
As early as 1930, Nethersole was describing Headley as ‘the most distinguished person in Jamaica’: ‘I have learnt in a short time that there is nothing like cricket to make a man both earn and appreciate the respect of his fellow men’ (White, p.27; Lawrence, p.25).
Some in the Caribbean might have seen insular bias at work here: one of Constantine’s literary collaborators Denzil Bachelor, in a book they wrote together in 1966 called The Changing Face of Cricket, wrote: ‘if any man is the incarnation of revolutionary cricket, that man is Constantine’ (p.70) – Bachelor is obviously talking about revolution in cricket not politics but Trinidadians might argue for Constantine as the true pan-Caribbean hero. Although Constantine was always highly complimentary, he did observe in the same book that Headley had ‘a more than healthy respect for West Indian Cricket Authority’ (p.121).
yet Garvey was a cricket enthusiast…
See Tim Hector, in Beckles (ed.), Spirit of Dominance, p.49.
Headley … is said to have written ‘African’…
And this may not have been a grand gesture either: perhaps ‘African’ was simply the best available option on the customs form (as implied by White, p.35), although the story is sometimes told as if Headley was making a political statement: John Gemmell certainly reads it that way (p.142), even if in nearby sentences he also claims Cardus believed Constantine ‘spoke for his people’ and that Lucas CC dominated Jamaican cricket up to the First World War. But David Frith, in his memoir Paddington Boy, certainly remembered Headley telling the story that he filled in his immigration form ‘automatically and with pride’, and his apparent disgust that one of his teammates signed in as ‘European’.
Famously dubbed ‘Atlas’ for carrying the West Indies team…
C.B. Fry is often credited with this soubriquet.
Headley was the only player to be selected for all four home Tests in 1929/30, although he reportedly had to buy a newspaper to confirm he had been picked in Barbados (Lawrence, Masterclass, pp.18-19).
Lamming’s first novel … suggested that ‘the only knowledge’ of Jamaica…
Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin is set in the late 1930s: ‘In most cases the only knowledge most people might have had of Jamaica was that George Headley was born there’. This may be one of Lamming’s little jokes, as Headley was born in Panama.
Constantine described Headley as a ‘universal favourite’ (Cricket in the Sun, p.75) and remembered him, perhaps a touch inaccurately, as ‘the first Jamaican to come south to play representative cricket’ (Cricket and I, p.115).
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‘Closer Association of the British West Indian Colonies’
This conference, held late in 1947, established the principle that the territories would in due course aim to become an independent, federated Dominion.
‘finished with this shit’
Ganteaume, My Story, p.28.
Others will have muttered the same sort of thing…
Spencer Mawby notes that ‘in the 20 years before independence, British policymakers prioritised the notion of an orderly transition in a way that pointlessly delayed the implementation of constitutional reform, encouraged the development of authoritarian politics and neglected the economic conditions which stimulated local discontent’. He notes that the local political leaders ‘came to regard metropolitan policymaking as equivocating, negligent and obstructive’ (Ordering Independence, p.3).
…the PNP to purge Marxist elements … the Communist union leader Ferdinand Smith
Mawby provides more detail on these two ‘decisive events’ in Jamaican politics (Ordering Independence, p.74).
stretching as far back as the inaugural 1900 tour of England…
James tells a story about Learie’s father Lebrun Constantine, who could not afford his passage on the inaugural 1900 tour of England, as if it were a scene in a novel by Dickens or Thackeray: ‘A public subscription was organized on the spot, a fast launch was chartered and caught the boat before it reached the open sea. Constantine Snr. scrambled aboard to hit the first West Indies century made in England’. The truth was more prosaic: Learie Constantine acknowledged more than once that most of his father’s funding came from a local businessman, Michael P. Maillard (see for example Changing Face of Cricket, p.86).
But the point still generally holds. Stollmeyer remembered how Jamaicans ‘got together’ to ensure Les Hylton would not miss the 1939 tour to England, a precedent the Guyanese sought to invoke when they offered to pay for John Trim’s passage in 1950.
the ‘moving experience’ of being funded by his fellow islanders…
Richards, Hitting Across the Line, p.33.
For Headley, a figure of £1,183 0s 2d was reportedly raised…
Tony Cozier, Fifty Years of Test Cricket, p.32.
PAGE 53
‘by tropical standards decidedly a veteran’
Swanton, West Indian Adventure, p.29.
Weekes compares his batting style… should not ‘really’ have been considered…
Sir Everton Weekes, telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2018.
rumours circulated that the Sabina Park pitch might be dug up
Admittedly I am relying on two accounts by Englishmen prone to exaggerate Jamaican crowd behaviour: Bannister wrote of ‘undisguised’ threats to dig up the pitch or boycott the Test (Cricket Cauldron, p.26). According to Graveney: ‘Had Headley not been included, it was an open secret that the match would be either boycotted or there would be a riot. In view of what happened later, I am inclined to think that the rioters would have held sway’ (Cricket Through the Covers, p.112).
‘in answer to the public clamour’ for Headley’s return
All the quotations in this paragraph are from The Gleaner’s report on this meeting, 3 November 1953, p.8.
He had moved up the order…at Headley’s suggestion
According to Noel White, when Headley confided he was changing the batting order, ‘Nunes was furious’ and told the captain ‘your blood be upon your head’ (George Atlas Headley, p.119).
Rae scored 111.
PAGE 54
A ‘nucleus’ of players including these names was announced…
On behalf of the Board, Nethersole announced this ‘nucleus’ on 30 October while making clear that it ‘does not in any way prejudice the chances of other players for selection and in no way indicates that those named will play in the first Test’ (Gleaner, 31 October 1953, p.10): Stollmeyer, Worrell, Weekes, Walcott, Ramadhin, Valentine, Gomez, King, McWatt, Pairaudeau.