Sonny Ramadhin and the 1950S World of Spin, 1950-1961
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research College of Staten Island 2004 Sonny Ramadhin and the 1950s World of Spin, 1950-1961 David M. Traboulay CUNY College of Staten Island How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_pubs/80 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SONNY RAMADHIN AND THE 1950S WORLD OF SPIN, 1950-1961, WITH AN EPILOGUE ON THE MODERN FATE OF TRADITIONAL CRICKET DAVID M. TRABOULAY 1 CONTENTS PREFACE 3 CHAPTER 1: LOCATING RAMADHIN AND SAN FERNANDO 5 CHAPTER 2: THE SURPRISING CONQUEST OF ENGLAND, 1950 23 CHAPTER 3: BATTLE FOR WORLD CHAMPION: AUSTRALIA, 1951 45 CHAPTER 4: THE PAST AS PROLOGUE: BUILDING A TRADITION 54 CHAPTER 5: INDIA IN THE CARIBBEAN, 1953 81 CHAPTER 6: PLAYING AT HOME: ENGLAND AND AUSTRALIA, 1954/55 99 CHAPTER 7: VICTORY IN NEW ZEALAND, DEFEAT IN ENGLAND, 1956/57 119 CHAPTER 8: THE EMERGENCE OF PACE: TOWARDS A NEW ORDER 138 CHAPTER 9: THE GREAT 1960/61 TOUR TO AUSTRALIA; FAREWELL 151 CHAPTER 10: HOME AND THE WORLD: LEAGUE CRICKET 166 CHAPTER 11: EPILOGUE:THE FATE OF TRADITIONAL CRICKET 177 2 PREFACE The idea of a study of Ramadhin and cricket in the 1950s arose from the desire to write something about San Fernando, the town where I was born and grew up. Although I have lived in America for more than forty years, San Fernando still occupies a central place in my imagination and is one of the sources of the inspiration of whatever little I have achieved in my life. Another enduring inspiration, even passion, has been the memory of playing cricket in Trinidad as a young man. So, the decision to write about Ramadhin came almost immediately. A young cricketer from San Fernando and a descendant of Indian indentured immigrants, Ramadhin’s magical performances for the West Indies cricket team in the world where cricket was played still resonate in my mind and the minds of West Indians who grew up in the 1950s. I am not sure whether Ramadhin’s prowess was the reason why I grew to love cricket, but it was a factor. Before leaving for Europe to study in 1960, I was a promising spin bowler and was selected for South Trinidad youth team and a Trinidad team against Pakistan. On my return to Trinidad in the mid-1960s I represented Trinidad “B” team. So, cricket was “in my blood,” so to speak. This book on Ramadhin is, therefore, a labour of love, intended to be an act of giving thanks to my little town of San Fernando. I am indebted to Mr. Justice Ralph Narine who gave me access to all his articles and documents about Ramdhin. He also made it possible for me to visit Sonny and his wife, June, in Oldham, Lancashire, and begin a friendship that continues today. I must mention the encouragement given by my friend and cricket enthusiast from Sri Lanka, Harold Sirisena, and my colleague from Barbados, Professor Calvin Holder. I am hoping that my grand-nephews, Marcus Bridgemohansingh, Christian Abdool, Caidan and Trizdan Mohammed, will rekindle the flame of cricket that meant so much to their great-uncle; and also my grand-nieces, Paige and 3 Syana, since women’s cricket is finding its place in the sun. The work on Ramadhin was completed three years ago, but I felt that it was still incomplete. One reason was that the fortunes of the West Indies team had sunk low since the early 1990s, and the other was that cricket as I knew it was changing radically. I began to investigate why the West Indies teams seemed to have lost the discipline and passion that brought supremacy in cricket and, at the same time to interrogate the changes that were taking place in both the manner and matter of the game. I have concluded that the answer to the first issue was cyclical. It may be that it was simply a case that rebuilding a competitive team was taking longer than in the past. The second question about the innovations in cricket was more important and I have included a final chapter, an epilogue, posing the question of the fate of the romantic tradition of cricket in our postmodern world. 4 CHAPTER I LOCATING RAMADHIN AND SAN FERNANDO How interesting that both the cricketer Sonny Ramadhin and the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul left Trinidad for England in 1950; Ramadhin as a representative of the West Indies cricket team to tour England that summer, and V.S. Naipaul to study for a degree in English literature at Oxford University. As fate would have it, both would make England their home, apart from occasional visits to Trinidad. Among the nations where cricket is played, Ramadhin became famous after his bowling exploits that very year along with his Jamaican colleague on the team, Alf Valentine, because that cricket series established the West Indies, then colonies of Great Britain, as one of the top teams in the world. Understandably, it took much longer for V.S. Naipaul’s talents to be recognized and to be placed on the world’s stage, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. In the minds of people the journey from a small place to the metropolis excites the imagination. Trinidadians of East Indian ancestry, Ramadhin and Naipaul took different paths for their voyage, cricket for Ramadhin, and schools and books for Naipaul. Recognising that their talents were nurtured in large part by their upbringing and experiences in Trinidad, each has acknowledged his indebtedness to Trinidad for nurturing his abilities. Ramadhin represented the West Indies until 1961, when at 31, he retired from international cricket, although he continued to play English League cricket until he was 55. His name today remains a household word only for the cricket generation of the 1950s. Ignored for the most part once his playing days for the West Indies were over, there was a resurgence of interest in Ramadhin in the 1990s and he was awarded national honours at the turn of the millennium. This belated recognition coincided with 5 the increasing confidence and assertiveness of Trinidad’s East Indian communities as Trinidadians. Ramadhin was justifiably an Indian hero of Trinidad, but, in truth, in the 1950s Ramadhin was considered a West Indian hero in the eyes of the masses in the West Indies and the Diaspora, particularly in England. Bowling with his cap on and his sleeves buttoned down at the wrist, this 5’ 4” West Indian mesmerised opponents, bringing joy to the masses huddled around the radios and redifusion sets of villages and street parlours and shops, listening to the cricket commentary from far off England and Australia. Ramadhin’s impact was immediate, concrete, visceral, local, and appealed to the emotions. Given the nature of his profession as writer and intellectual, and, of course, his critical view of the Third World, including the Caribbean, V.S. Naipaul hardly stirred the emotions of West Indian people, except for a small section of interested readers. No one can deny, however, that Naipaul’s acclaim and writings have brought glory to West Indians. Naipaul and Ramadhin were early representatives of the mixing of peoples and cultures from the different continents, at first unequally and for some coerced by Western imperialism, and then by global capitalism, a phenomenon and a historical movement that may very well be the defining feature of the second part of the 20th and 21st centuries. In this respect, the world has changed utterly from when Ramadhin and Naipaul left small Trinidad in 1950. The world audience, more than specifically West Indian, have found interesting and resonant Naipaul’s understanding of the late colonial and post-colonial world, its pain and sense of dislocation. An essentially Westernised audience find Naipaul’s narrative of living in colonial Trinidad and his intellectual and emotional journey to self-competence in England fascinating. We follow the transformation of Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair in Mystic Masseur (1957), Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men (1967), and Mr. Biswas in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) with laughter, empathy, 6 and sadness.1 In spite of the stagnation of life in colonial Trinidad, the main characters of Naipaul’s novels struggle heroically to overcome their situation, and to achieve a measure of success and happiness by reinventing their lives with great difficulty, to be sure, and self- discipline. Some achieved success by leaving Trinidad for England. But, whether their transformation took place in Trinidad or in England, the sense of rootlessness and dislocation remained persistent. Naipaul captivated his readers not only by describing the post-colonial sores of the Third World with his brilliant literary style, but he has continued to argue that Western civilisation had become the universal civilisation, and its cultural values of individual happiness, responsibility, choice, and the life of the mind were destined “to blow away” more rigid systems.2 At this stage, it is a good question to ask why I have included this brief piece about V.S. Naipaul in the story of Sonny Ramadhin. To compare the achievements of a Nobel Laureate whose works continue to please and be read by people around the world with a cricketer, even a renowned one, whose accomplishments have gone unnoticed by most except cricket enthusiasts of the 1950s seems inappropriate. Yet, the link between Ramadhin and V.