Race and Cricket: the West Indies and England At
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RACE AND CRICKET: THE WEST INDIES AND ENGLAND AT LORD’S, 1963 by HAROLD RICHARD HERBERT HARRIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2011 Copyright © by Harold Harris 2011 All Rights Reserved To Romelee, Chamie and Audie ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My journey began in Antigua, West Indies where I played cricket as a boy on the small acreage owned by my family. I played the game in Elementary and Secondary School, and represented The Leeward Islands’ Teachers’ Training College on its cricket team in contests against various clubs from 1964 to 1966. My playing days ended after I moved away from St Catharines, Ontario, Canada, where I represented Ridley Cricket Club against teams as distant as 100 miles away. The faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington has been a source of inspiration to me during my tenure there. Alusine Jalloh, my Dissertation Committee Chairman, challenged me to look beyond my pre-set Master’s Degree horizon during our initial conversation in 2000. He has been inspirational, conscientious and instructive; qualities that helped set a pattern for my own discipline. I am particularly indebted to him for his unwavering support which was indispensable to the inclusion of a chapter, which I authored, in The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations , which was published in 2008; and I am very grateful to Stephen Reinhardt for suggesting the sport of cricket as an area of study for my dissertation. This has been a very fulfilling experience as I have always regarded the 1963 Lord’s Test as a singularly important event in West Indies cricket history. I am also indebted to John Garrigus, William Dulaney and Douglas Richmond for the time and effort they gave in this endeavor. Additionally, I received excellent support from Robin Deeslie in the History Department Office. Her willingness to go the extra mile was of great value on many occasions. Department Chairman, Robert Fairbanks has shown an unwavering disposition to get to the root of my many problems. I will always appreciate his pragmatism and his approval of my appointment as Adjunct Instructor at UTA. iv I appreciate the support of the Staff of the C.L.R. James Cricket Research Centre Library located in Barbados on the Cave Hill Campus of The University of the West Indies. In addition, I acknowledge the assistance which I received from Neil Robinson and his staff at the MCC archives, as well as the staff at the Collindale Newspaper Library. I appreciate the assistance of bookseller J.W.McKenzie located in Surrey, whose help was most beneficial in introducing me to a trove of useful texts on the sport. This trip to the United Kingdom would have been much costlier and inconvenient without the assistance of Dick and Myrtle Hunter who graciously allowed me to room with them during my stay in their country. Most important of all, I acknowledge the support of family, neighbors and friends. Romelee, my wife, has patiently put up with the mess I made of her house. In addition, she performed, in a most pleasing way, the many chores on which I defaulted, prepared an abundance of mainly vegetarian meals that kept me alive when I traveled within Texas for weeks at a time, and tolerated my many moments of impatience and frustration when things did not turn out as I had planned. In fact Romelee became so inseparably linked with my dissertation that she, not I, experienced the stress and headache during those intense moments of my Defense. This accomplishment is as much hers as it is mine. Chamarella, Audeline, George, Ilania, Aunt Sylvanie and Teacher Nal have all been very supportive in many ways; and little Aiden came along just in time to add his not so little voice to their already persistent chorus. In addition I wish to acknowledge the help I received from Dr Raul Peters, who guided me in creating the graphs used in Chapters four and five of this study. My thanks go also to Albert Lebeouf, a dear friend who read the early draft of my work, and to Toni Kemp who did the copy-editing. Former co-workers Shams Khan and Cindy Buffington provided help, motivation and assurance during the early years, months and days of my journey. I will always be grateful to them. Finally, there are many members of my church family whose prayers have been a source of strength to me during my moments of doubt. I am very grateful for their concerns and intercessions. v May 13, 2011 vi ABSTRACT RACE AND CRICKET: THE WEST INDIES AND ENGLAND AT LORD’S, 1963 Harold Harris, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington. 2011 Supervising Professor: Dr. Alusine Jalloh. Cricket became a sport in which there was a clear separation based on race and class; and these distinctions initially determined function within the sport. In England, where the distinction was based mostly on class, the aristocracy, who initially enjoyed watching their workers at play, became involved in playing the game, and determined roles aligned to class. In the West Indies, the distinction was determined by race. However, racial mixing blurred these demarcations and soon the underclass began to encroach onto a space that the sport had created for them. In due course, function within the sport faded into insignificance as the desire to win and entertain combined with capitalist impulses, compelled continual changes particularly in leadership. This dissertation argues that the persistent suppression of the underclass was social silencing, that the economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution enabled the emergence of the English proletariat, and that these forces helped change the sport. A double layer of silence existed in the West Indies and these layers mutated as social, economic and vii political conditions ebbed and flowed. Unlike conditions in England where the availability of abundant resources helped to facilitate the emergence of the underclass, the West Indian underclass found that scarce resources, natural disasters, and the influence of numerous prejudices limited their ability to change their condition. In fact, despite economic, political, religious and social agitation and resistance, cricket became the primary agency through which a West Indian identity emerged, and whereby they were able to demonstrate equality and later dominance on the world stage. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................................................. xii LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................ xv PREFACE ...................................................................................................................................... xvi Chapter Page 1. DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH AND WEST INDIES CRICKET TO 1928 .................... 1 English Beginnings ................................................................................................. 2 West Indies Beginnings .......................................................................................... 5 Race and Class Prejudice in England .................................................................. 12 Race and Class Prejudice in the West Indies ...................................................... 15 England: The Pre-1928 Period ............................................................................. 21 The Hambledon Club and its Legacy ........................... 21 Lord’s and the Marylebone Cricket Club ...................... 25 Explosion in English Cricket: 1846-1928 ...................... 29 West Indies: The Pre-1928 Period ....................................................................... 32 Schools, Clubs and Cricket ........................................... 32 Colonial Cricket ............................................................. 39 Inter-Colonial Cricket .................................................... 42 The Trans-Atlantic Connection Established ......................................................... 49 West Indies’ Road to Test Cricket ........................................................................ 52 2. DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH AND WEST INDIES CRICKET, 1928-1963............ 60 West Indies Cricket, 1928-1963 ........................................................................... 69 ix English Cricket, 1928-1963 .................................................................................. 74 West Indies Cricketers in the English League ...................................................... 78 Captaincy and Leadership .................................................................................... 83 Captaincy in England ................................................................. 85 Captaincy in the West Indies ...................................................... 87 Lord’s and the MCC .............................................................................................. 95 3. THE SPORT OF CRICKET ......................................................................................