Chapter 8 Footnotes

PAGE 133

the title of ‘undisputed cricket champions of the world’

The Daily Gleaner (hereafter The Gleaner), leader article, 28 December 1953, p.8.

The newspaper had previously explained its rationale for this title, asserting that England could become ‘undisputed world champions’ only if they avenged their defeats to West Indies at home in 1950 and on tour in 1947/48 (12 December 1953, p.10).


This has been a great year for Jamaica…

The Gleaner, leader article, 28 December 1953, p.8.


– its offices would be besieged in the ‘Black Power’ riots of 1968 –

These disturbances are better known as the Rodney riots, because they were incited by the government banning Dr Walter Rodney, who held a post at The University of West Indies in Jamaica, from the country. Because we have not yet encountered Rodney – we shall in Chapter 13 – I have referred to them thus. There is some brief contemporary footage here; for an academic accounts, see Gonsalves 1979, Payne 1983, Lewis 1994 and this piece by Michael West.

Michael Manley joked, just after MCC left the island, that the sports page was the only ‘impartial’ page in The Gleaner (Public Opinion, 11 April 1954, p.4).


the ‘average’ West Indian was immutably bound to Britain by ‘Crown and cricket’

Swanton, Last Over, p.136: ‘To the average Barbadian and Trinidadian, I suppose, England tends to mean the place where the Queen lives and the place where the cricketers come from.’


PAGE 134

‘practically solved’ … ‘desire for self-government is combined…’

[GARBETT, Cyril], ‘Island Impressions: Sunshine and Shadows in the West Indies by The Archbishop of York’, The Times, 15 February 1954, p.7.


‘the man on the street has a love for cricket which is second only…’

Ken Jones, Public Opinion, 2 January 1954, p.7.


‘honour of the game’ … ‘Len Hutton and his men…’

The Gleaner, leader article, 28 December 1953, p.8.


a ‘nervous tension and conflict’ … ‘startling exhilaration’

Compton, End of an Innings, p.114.


‘so-called world championship tag was a nuisance’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.93; compare Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run, p.185; Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.124; Evans, Gloves are Off, p.135; Compton, End of an Innings, p.114.


PAGE 135

…the English players ‘seemed to think that they were the big boys’

Walcott, Island Cricketers, p.79.


‘managing in our irritation at constantly falling over each other…’

Graveney, Cricket Through the Covers, p.111.


the lack of ‘off-the-field comfort’ … ‘nowhere as good…’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.70.


the ‘cacophony’ of barking dogs … the cockerels …at dawn

Bannister, Cauldron, p.32.


…when the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor found the South Bank breakfast…

The Traveller’s Tree, p.335:

Even Kingston had its compensations. One of these was the obsolete splendour of breakfast, a sparkling still-life that could only have fallen from the volutes of a tropical cornucopia: paw-paw, sour-sop, mango, pineapple, and ice-cold mandarins peeled and impaled on forks were the merest forerunners of a multiplicity of eggs, kedgeree, sausages, bacon, fried banana, a cold wing of fowl, hot rolls, a week’s butter ration, and marmalade. It was a breakfast fit for a tropical potentate or a Regency prize-fighter. Thus fortified, I left the pleasant coolness of the South Camp Road Hotel and wandered into the blinding town.


‘that I was not to fraternise with the opposition’

The Freddie Trueman Story, p.36. Compare Ball of Fire, p.50.


‘staying together and reminiscing…’ … ‘answered in monosyllables’

Worrell, Cricket Punch, p.89.


‘It was terrible the way he stopped the England players fraternising with us’

Ramadhin, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.201.


Weekes, with the tranquility of a nonagenarian, now plays down…

Telephone interview with the author, 31 January 2018.


‘personally I found the West Indies players good types…’

Statham, Cricket Merry-Go-Round, p.99.


McWatt…was often seen discussing the finer points of wicketkeeping with Evans

Sandford, Godfrey Evans, p.115.


PAGE 136

Worrell detected a ‘definite policy’ of non-fraternisation

Cricket Punch, p.82.


‘Conversation and pleasantries did not flow as easily as I expected…’

Stollmeyer, Everything Under the Sun, p.143.


‘He said to us, in effect: “Well, we’ve got to do these people…”’

Evans, Gloves are Off, p.130. Compare his interview in Len Hutton Remembered, p.72.


what several of Hutton’s men called his ‘win-at-all-costs’ attitude

Evans, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.73. Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.124.


…from interminable engagements and ‘potent drinks’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.95.


what Laker called the ‘defeatist attitude’ of the previous tour under Allen

Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.124.


PAGE 137

‘the people of the West Indies quickly realised that we meant “business”’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.48.


‘intensity of purpose’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.33.


‘He pities none’

Constantine, Cricketers’ Carnival, p.47.

Nor was Compton paying an unequivocal compliment when he suggested Bradman was ‘as it were, the most merciless of entertainers’ (End of an Innings, p.41).


‘one side cannot afford to be magnanimous in Test cricket…’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.41.


‘Don’t take pity on them Indian bowlers’

Mike Brearley, On Cricket, p.214; the same story was told with slightly different wording in The Art of Captaincy, p.238.


‘fraternisation between the rival combinations…’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.23.

For their part, Lindwall thought it was Hutton, unlike Compton and Edrich, who ‘wouldn’t have a drink with us’; Miller recalled ‘Len didn’t talk on the field; his idea was to play it like a war. Godfrey, Denis and Bill were the other way’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.191, p.193).


West Indies had buckled against the same combination the previous winter

‘Why did West Indies fail in Australia, having succeeded so overwhelmingly in England? The answer can be given in one word – pace’ (Gordon Ross, Testing Years, p.118).


a determination ‘to establish an ascendancy over our rivals’

Statham, Cricket Merry-Go-Round, p.89: he is talking specifically here about the mindset going into the first Test, but it clearly applied to what Statham calls the ‘first big game of the tour’, where he says he and Trueman ‘were able to make the ball rise awkwardly’.


‘typical thoroughness’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.33.

May’s biographer Robert Rodrigo pointed out that the Australians were ‘experts in persuading their opponents to select the team most favourable to the Australian interest’ and that had been undermined early in the 1953 season by their ‘clever grasp of team-destroying tactics’ (p.60).


‘the days of missionary work and of Caribbean semi-holidays were over’

May, A Game Enjoyed, p.50-51.

[May referred to ‘the missionary work’ of previous tours which he had previously summarised, but I have omitted ‘the’ without an ellipsis as I thought this would be distracting]


PAGE 138

‘simply lacing’ into the local hero

Swanton, Adventure, p.25.


Valentine had been ‘whipped like a schoolboy’

Jones’s match report in Public Opinion, 9 January 1954, p.8: on the second day, Valentine was the ‘open target of the butchers’ – Watson and Compton ‘whipped him like a schoolboy for his untidiness’ [I have taken the liberty of slightly compressing the phrase].  When he came on for a short spell the next day, he was among the bowlers to receive a ‘severe spanking’ from Watson and Graveney.


…promising that this was ‘the shape of things to come’

Bannister, Cauldron, p.36, a story repeated by Ray Robinson in The Wildest Tests, p.43.


Trueman, described as in ‘full fury’ by The Gleaner

Report by Strebor Roberts, 7 January 1954, p.10.


‘crumpled … like shredded wheat’ … ‘petrified’

Ken Jones, Public Opinion, 9 January, p.7: ‘Let it be understood: we are in for it.’


‘penetrating power’

This was Roberts’ conclusion after the colony games in his first Test preview (Gleaner, 15 January, p.12): ‘The performance of the MCC fast bowlers in both Colony matches must inspire confidence in their penetrating power’.


PAGE 139

‘Trueman is truly a fast bowler because he seems to suffer…’

Michael Manley, Public Opinion, 9 January, p.4. Compare Cricket Punch, p.77.


‘Psychologically, it is a team with what I call “bite.”’

Michael Manley, Public Opinion, 9 January, p.4.


‘another Lindwall’ … ‘a real menace’

Walcott, Island Cricketers, pp.81-82.


…clarification that the new ball would be taken after 65 overs

There is some convoluted correspondence in the MCC Archive suggesting that Billy Griffith and Cyril Merry, assistant secretary and secretary of the governing bodies respectively, had verbally agreed on 65 overs, but that this was lost in translation and the Board of Control had decreed 200 runs (the playing condition which prevailed when Australia toured in 1954/55). But eventually it was agreed that the new ball in our series should be taken every 65 overs.


In Hutton’s version of events, Stollmeyer asked for a limit…

Hutton, Just My Story, p.50. Repeated in Fifty Years, p.98.


An informal bumper-limit had been agreed on South Africa’s 1952/53 tour

See Fingleton, Ashes Crown The Year, p.20.


Stollmeyer later denied he made such a request

Stollmeyer, letter to The Cricketer, 28 April 1956, p.120.


‘Trueman’s fiery nature was being used to carry out the MCC’s plan…’

Worrell, Cricket Punch.


‘Public Target Number One’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.49.


PAGE 140

‘young, feeling his oats, glorying in the violence of being a fast bowler’

Arlott, Fred, p.73.


‘if the batsman gets hit that’s his fault, if he hits me that is my fault’

The Gleaner, 12 December 1954, p.10.


‘Freddie was given the impression that a fast bowler…’

Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.127.


‘up to a point that was a right approach’ … ‘some of the younger players …’

Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.124.


his ‘first mistake’ of the tour was to give Trueman his head

Hutton, Just My Story, p.48.


‘one of the finest hookers I have seen in all my years of cricket’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.49.


‘George went down and the crowd went up’

Trueman, As It Was, p.154.


‘What have you done? What have you done?’

Trueman, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.164.

For another anecdote involving these same repeated words spoken by an introspective Yorkshireman, in this case Boycott, to a young colt, in this case Botham, see Hotten, The Meaning of Cricket, pp.141-42.


‘fielding with one hand he was still brilliant’

Michael Manley, Public Opinion, 16 January, p.4.


PAGE 141

‘“They ain’t gonna like that, man…”’

Trueman, As It Was, p.154-55.


‘we deliberately treated George as gently as we dare…’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.49.


Bailey and Hutton may well have been trying … to play Headley into the Test side

The next winter Pat Landsberg noted the Australians bowling in a non-threatening fashion to the Jamaican keeper Reggie Binns: ‘Australia have before now bowled a man into a Test side, and then bowled him out of it’ (Kangaroo Conquers, p.28).


‘appealed with such frightening vigour …’ … ‘frequently scowled and muttered…’

Bannister, Cricket Cauldron, p.30.


‘bad effect’ … ‘Tony Lock’s natural enthusiasm…’ … ‘Trueman roused them…’

Compton, End of an Innings, p.117.


Karl Nunes … made an informal complaint to Palmer and a formal written complaint to Lord’s

‘Nunes … has made an unofficial protest to the MCC manager … A letter, reporting alleged unsporting actions by MCC players, has been sent to Lord’s’ (Rostron, Daily Express, 14 January, 1954, p.8).


PAGE 142

‘the two young offenders were given some friendly but pointed advice…’

Bannister, Cauldron, p.30-31.


‘I must say it was a terribly difficult problem…’

Palmer, as reported by Rostron, Daily Express, 14 January 1954, p.8.


Moss suspects Hutton deliberately put Trueman and Lock in a room together…

Interview with the author, 31 March 2015.


a grievous ‘managerial blunder’

Laker, Spinning Round the World, p.122.


Trueman ‘retained a good deal of his Service spirit’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.49.


‘language which was both unusual and colourful’ … ‘within the scope…’

Compton, End of an Innings, p.116.


a ‘spot of swearing and an aggressive approach’

[I’m afraid I have mislaid the Johnston reference.]

Compare Bedser, recalling how close the Surrey team was under Surridge: ‘We’d call everyone everything, but it was forgotten in five minutes’ (Dellor, Lost Voices).


a ‘master’ of sledging

Dennis Lillee, Menace: ‘Tony Lock was a hard taskmaster, a tough uncompromising captain both on his team-mates and the opposition. If you are talking sledging, he was a master.’

But, despite the fact Lock gave him the nickname ‘Fot’ – ‘Fucking Old Tart’ – Lillee had genuine affection for his captain, and says he ‘had the respect of everyone, including the opposition’ for both his hardness and his humour.


on-field language which was ‘appalling and would not be tolerated today’

Walcott, Sixty Years, p.50.

Compare Island Cricketers, p.79: ‘Some of the language used on the field and directed against West Indies players was revolting.’


‘catapulted into a society…’ … ‘he spoke as a Yorkshireman…’

Miller, Charles Palmer, p.89.

Trueman admitted that he found functions ‘hard’ (Freddie Trueman Story , p.52)

Compare Wardle’s observation that before his first tour under Allen, ‘I had never been farther west than low tide at Blackpool’ (p.119).


‘Pass t’ salt, Gunga Din’

Trueman, Ball of Fire, p.61.


‘clung to him throughout his career, for it seemed the sort of thing…’

Birley, Social History, p.278.


pure ‘invention’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.72.

Statham thought the legend developed after a function with a ‘High Commissioner’ in Barbados, and pointed out that Trueman ‘as a junior member of the touring side … would not have got within shouting distance of the top table’ (1969, p.30). Trueman himself (1976, p.61) dated the allegation to the 1952 India series in England (and vehemently denied it). Compare Arlott 1971, 64.

Various other stories attached themselves to Trueman on the 1953/54 tour. Bernard Heydorn’s short story ‘Cricket Lovely Cricket’ provides a fairly unmistakable portrait of him, along with the rumour that ‘this bowler was as irreverent off the field as he was on it, pinching the Governor’s wife’s backside at a cocktail party, after he had had a healthy drink of Guiana’s fireass rum’ (Mcdonald etc, Bowling was Superfine, p.160).


PAGE 143

‘The courtesy of our visitors’ replies seemed to be based…’

Worrell, Cricket Punch, p.89.

Worrell is in fact making a more subtle point than saying the English players were rude to members who were not white. He is saying that they had no grasp of the fact that, if brown and black people were in the pavilion, there was a good chance that they were socially well connected.

V.S. Naipaul made a similar observation in 1962: ‘In the West Indies, as in the upper reaches of society, you must be absolutely sure of your company before you speak: you never know who is what or, more important, who is related to what’ (Middle Passage, p.18).


‘colour prejudice was never in Len’s mind when he issued the instruction’

The Freddie Trueman Story, p.37.


‘the gradual exclusion of white folk is a bad thing…’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.65.


‘the white upper-class stream of Caribbean society’

Manley, History, p.63.


Walcott was offended by the ‘subtle implication’

Island Cricketers, p.95.


‘that absolutely innate, unspoken, taken-for-granted assumption…’

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger, p.210.


Richard Hoggart …coined the phrase ‘sub-Kiplingesque’…

Hoggart, Local Habitation, p.11.


black-face minstrels were still an integral feature of seaside towns…

In his study, Blackface Mintrelsy in Britain, Michael Pickering refers to troupes of minstrels in Scarborough in the late nineteenth century, and observes that nigger-minstrel buskers were a ‘sight on piers until World War Two’ (pp. 21, 69-70). See also Chapman 1988 and Calvert 2018.

Cyril Washbrook was a grammar-school boy but when Frank Parr dared to play some jazz on his trombone in the Lancashire dressing-room, his captain gave him particularly short shrift: ‘What do you want to play that fucking nigger music for?’ (Chalke, Remembered Gate, p.176-77). In 1952, when this incident took place, the f-word was probably considered more offensive than the n-word, but this quotation is a telling example of prejudices that were carried almost automatically by many in the period. Ron Atkinson turned thirteen that year.


there was a thriving Gilbert and Sullivan society in Fulneck

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.39: ‘My two maiden aunts were schoolteachers and organised Gilbert and Sullivan shows for church funds and other charities. Gilbert and Sullivan became part of my boyhood…’


the ‘white man’s burden’ and ‘lesser breeds without the law’

Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was written in 1899. It is sometimes forgotten that it was originally sub-titled ‘Address to the United States’ and occasioned by the Philippine-American War.


PAGE 144

‘temperamental race of people’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.52.

Even in Fifty Years of Cricket, a thoroughly more mellow book, Hutton made a generalisation about West Indian fast bowlers not making ‘the utmost use of their intelligence’ (p.166).

I don’t know whether Kilburn was subconsciously registering something when noting that Hutton ‘didn’t get on frightfully well with the West Indians’ in 1953/54 immediately after observing that his happiest tour was in 1938/39 in South Africa, which was ‘a white man’s paradise just before the war’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.128).


what Hall calls ‘sedimented’ racial attitudes

Familiar Stranger, p.233.


‘the thoughtless colour prejudice ubiquitous in public schoolboys in those days’

Fowles, in the Single Wickets anthology edited by Martin-Jenkins, p.120.


‘tougher sound’ of the ‘ghettos’ … a love for the ‘Jamaican people’

Trueman, As It Was, p.150.

According to Trueman, this style was more ‘bop and rhythm and blues’ than ‘calypso’, with a ‘hard edge’.


what Evans called MCC’s ‘siege mentality’

Sandford, Godfrey Evans, p.113.


a fertile ground for a ‘second Mau-Mau’

As cited by Mona Macmillan in The Land of Look Behind, p.19.

Greene had spent four months in Kenya in 1954 and wrote an impassioned letter to The Times asking for more balance in the coverage of the conflict (‘A Nation’s Conscience’, dated 30 November, published 4 December, p.9).

A common complaint of West Indian migrants to Britain, as recorded by Ian Thomson in an interview with the Jamaican Helen Fairweather, was that the British thought they were African – ‘They think we all just drop from the trees in the jungle like black monkeys’ (The Dead Yard, p.14).


whose dreadlocks, some suggested, had been adopted in homage …

Thomson suggests followers of the first Jamaican preacher of Rastafari, Leonard Perceval Howell, ‘began to wear their hair in dreadlocks in imitation of Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau-Mau’ (Dead Yard, p.105). Although Stuart Hall recalled their refusal to cut their hair was ‘regarded at the time as an unfathomable logic’ (Familiar Stranger, p.49). Howell’s ‘Pinnacle’ community had been broken up and dispersed by the local militia in 1953.


The Planter’s Wife, a popular anti-Communist picture…

For some academic commentary, see Richards 1997, p.144; Webster 2005, p.122 – the latter observes the film was one of Rank’s biggest box-office successes in 1952.


‘briefed not to go out after dark, after 6.30, unless we were in a motor car…’

Trueman, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.164.

Peter Abrahams ventured downtown in 1957: ‘Despite the warnings of my friends in the suburbs about Kingston’s slums after dark, I felt safe, among friendly, unaggressive people’ (p.134). On the next MCC tour, Alan Ross walked through the port area without feeling frightened (1960, pp.145-46).


PAGE 145

‘I wrote home regularly and my mother kept my letters….’

Keith Thomas, Diary, London Review of Books, 37.3 (5 February 2015), pp.42-43.


‘Their world is strange, exotic, violent, a bewildering place…’

Graveney, Cricket Through the Covers, p.111.


…most Jamaicans were also left ‘bewildered and insecure’…

Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (1952), p.165.


who could barely hear themselves above the din of firecrackers…

Compton, End of an Innings, p.113.

Charles Bray on the colony game: ‘Had a stranger wandered into Sabina Park on Saturday, he must have wondered whether it was a cricket match or a public fireworks display’ (Port of Spain Gazette, 5 January 1954, p.6).

Evans, rather typically, says in his 1956 autobiography that, after the noise in the colony game, press and loudspeaker announcements curbed thundercrackers in the Test (p.82) – and then in his 1960 memoir (p.132) says they were ‘continually’ thrown onto the field in the Test match.


and saw members of the crowd toting guns…

Evans, Action in Cricket: ‘There was even a gun-fight over in the corner of the ground reserved for coloured spectators!’ (p.84).

Compton is another to emphasise the ‘taut and explosive’ atmosphere before the first Test and the potential for ‘violence and hostility’ (End of an Innings, p.114). In fairness, he also often credits Caribbean crowds for their genuine enthusiasm and wit, believing them to be ‘the most knowledgeable about cricket in the world’ (p.112).


PAGE 146

‘like so many England teams we were slightly arrogant…’

Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run, p.186


Rumours quickly circulated…

Walcott made the point that West Indian communities ‘thrive on gossip’ and that ‘rumour travels fast’ (Island Cricketers, p.78).


‘It was assumed by our fellow countrymen from the supercilious behaviour…’

Worrell, Cricket Punch, p.88.


‘nurtured a sense of inferiority in the governed’

Sherlock, Norman Manley, p.27.

In this piece of rhetoric from 1938, Manley was in fact quoting directly from a speech by an ‘indiscreet Englishman’.


as V.S. Naipaul later put it, a ‘standing provocation’

Middle Passage, p.220.


What Compton called Hutton’s determination to be a ‘non-mixer’

End of an Innings, p.115.


PAGE 147

…which Michael Manley suggested to his Public Opinion readers…

Another Jamaican, Gladstone Mills, agreed that ‘at least the American colour bar was more frank, forthright and honest than the British’ (Grist to the Mills, p.81). This point had been made as early as 1934 by Una Marson: ‘In America they tell you frankly where you are not wanted by means of big signs, and they don’t try to hide their feelings.  But in England, though the people will never say what they feel about us, you come up against incidents which hurt you so much you cannot talk about them’ (quoted in Schwarz, West Indies Intellectuals, p.118).

Although Ian Thomson, in his excellent study of modern Jamaica published in 2009, felt ‘things had improved’ since the 1950s, he still concluded ‘colour prejudice in Jamaica is as subtle as it is pernicious’ (Dead Yard, p.300).


‘I am a great admirer of your cricket but where I come from …’

Cited in Lawrence, Masterclass, p.54 and White, George Atlas Headley, pp.68-69. The South African pro was Jim Blackenberg, who had been involved in some league battles with Constantine.


Tony Greig’s terms of making them ‘grovel’

The infamous and much chewed-over remark Greig made as England captain before the series of 1976 is replayed in the film Fire and Babylon, about 34 minutes in, and its ramifications are discussed there and in Simon Lister’s book of the same name.


‘The West Indies were on top most of the time…’

Compton, End of an Innings, p.68.


…to make ‘life physically unpleasant’ … ‘was undoubtedly resented…’

Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run p.186.


the West Indian media made fewer complaints than the English in the 1980s

‘It is interesting,’ Peter Adrien observes, ‘that no attempt was made to civilise the Englishman, F.R. [sic] Trueman in the post war period when England resorted to the “bodyline” to humble the West Indies’ (Moments in West Indies Cricket, p.75).


‘having its effect on the players’

Hutton, Just My Story, p.53.


‘These black beggars don’t like us’

Swanton, Sort of a Cricket Person, p.182.

Although Swanton went on to make the point that English teams had the same sort of surly attitude in Australia, where ‘the “black” was omitted’.


‘MCC had hardly set foot in Jamaica…’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.93.


PAGE 148

‘embarrassed to hear European residents …’

May, A Game Enjoyed, p.51.


‘matters were not helped’ … ‘and so uphold the so-called racial supremacy’

Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run, p.186.


‘white West Indians’ and ‘Englishmen who were in residence there…’

These and the following quotations in the paragraph are from Bailey, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run, p.186.

Writing in 1962 about his home island of Trinidad, Naipaul noted a difference in attitudes towards these two different groups:

In spite of the abuse in which the white indulges, particularly for the benefit of the outsider, there is no general feeling against local whites. Against ‘expats’, however, there is a growing animosity; their presence in positions of power is a threat and a humiliation, a reminder of the days when the top posts were reserved for expatriates, and a reminder of prejudice encountered in England. But this animosity is not widespread; it does not go beyond certain insecure sections of the middle-class.

(Middle Passage, p.78).

When Gladstone Mills remembered a ‘rigid stratification of whites, creole whites, browns and blacks’ in the Jamaican civil service, he was presumably implying that expatriates considered themselves superior to the ‘creole’ whites born on the island (Grist to the Mills, p.59).

However Bridget Brereton provides a contrary view. While agreeing that ‘race prejudice came as easily as breathing to most whites living in the West Indies’, it was especially typical of whites with roots on the islands: ‘for them it was even more essential than for the Europeans to preserve their racial “purity” because of their long history of association with the blacks as slave owners and employers’ (in Knight and Palmer 1989, p.93).

To complicate the picture further, Stuart Hall makes the point that middle-class browns would mimic the attitudes of the local whites to the point where they were even more snobbish: ‘My mother was complaining (again) about the ‘servant problem’, and (again) about how “the younger ones, these days, don’t want to work” and were inclined to be “uppity”’ (Familiar Stranger, p.58).


many of them would have passed the notorious Tebbit Test

This is a complex subject discussed further in Chapter 10.


‘The first day I was at the bar with one or two of the other boys…’

Bannister, interviewed by Miller, Charles Palmer, p.87.


PAGE 149

‘amazed’ to hear that ‘MCC were considered to have slighted West Indies…’

May, A Game Enjoyed, p.51.


Palmer remembered being ‘totally ignored’ …

Miller, Charles Palmer, p.88.


‘older whites’ … ‘holding aloof from the coloured people’

[GARBETT, Cyril] ‘Island Impressions: Sunshine and Shadows in the West Indies by The Archbishop of York’, The Times, 15 February 1954, p.7.

Stuart Hall describes the ‘ambivalent’ feelings the old-fashioned colonial type provoked: they were deferred to but ‘at the same time they constituted for us “natives” a sort of running joke, a constant source of casual humour, even ridicule, which made us feel superior. They appeared to us so foreign in their dress, manners and behaviour, so uptight, so profoundly in the wrong place!’ (Familiar Stranger, p.20).

As an incidental gloss on the philistinism of West Indian settlers, Michael Craton has argued that the long tradition of their sending back their children to England for education created ‘a kind of unnatural selection’ in which the most successful left and least successful stayed (in Bailyn and Morgan 1991, p.347).


‘the intransigent attitude of those rare planter-types…’ …  ‘beat these black fellows’

Swanton, West Indies Revisited, p.280.


‘Across the entrance was strung a banner exhorting the employees…’

Bannister, ‘My Life Reporting Cricket’, 1980 Wisden, p.114.


‘outspoken, bloody-minded, Jack-as-good-as-his-master’

Michael Parkinson, 2007 Wisden, p.42.


PAGE 150

‘English players have an added responsibility on a tour like this…’

Nunes, reported in Daily Express, 14 January 1954, p.8.


‘an instinctive genuflection to imperial practice’

Bertram, Jamaica at the Wicket, p.261.


‘the indigenous population’ … ‘fair-play and self-control’

Baldwin made these remarks in a Rectorial Address to Glasgow University on ‘Freedom and Discipline’ (Speeches, pp.285-86).


some colonial civil servants were not expecting to hand over control…

In August 1954, a few months after Hutton’s men had returned from the Caribbean, one of the question-and-answer pamphlets produced by the Colonial Office, to assist ‘opinion forming’ across the empire, insisted that the best jobs in the West Indian civil service were ‘certainly not’ reserved for Britons, while adding: ‘Local talent is not always available or necessarily the best answer … It is a great advantage to the West Indian territories to be able to draw on the United Kingdom and its colonial service for well-qualified and experienced men when they need them’ (quoted in Chamberlain, Empire and Nation-Building, p.164).


‘West Indies cricket would be doomed if ever a black captain was appointed’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.94.