Overlooked in the blanket coverage of Michael Parkinson’s death are the radical views he expressed well before became a national treasure for his much-loved BBC celebrity interviews. His formative socialist years were in the Yorkshire town of Barnsley, the son of a miner. That, combined with his love of sport, especially cricket, and even more especially Yorkshire cricket, was perhaps why he volunteered for the 1965 launch of Anti-Apartheid News, writing a sports column for the monthly newspaper, official organ of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Then came the D’Oliveira affair. Born in Cape Town and classified under apartheid as “Coloured” (ancestry inter-racial), Basil D’Oliveira was barred by law from playing for his own country and forced to further his career abroad, from 1966 becoming an automatic choice and star performer for England.
Yet the England selectors did a sordid secret deal with the white South Africans to exclude D’Oliveira when the Marylebone Cricket Club came to select players to tour South Africa in 1968-69. Along with the commentator John Arlott, Parkinson railed against the exclusion, writing in his Sunday Times sports column that the MCC “stand condemned as racialists of the worst kind and we are all tarnished by their shadow”. After the uproar, the MCC eventually did select D’Oliveira, and South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, promptly cancelled the tour. Despite this unprecedented rebuff, the MCC several months later issued a “business as usual” invitation for an all-white South African team to tour Britain in the summer of 1970.
I led a militant campaign to stop it and was hated for doing so. Parkinson was one of the very few journalists to support us. He railed against the “Marylebone Clodpole Club”, whose refusal to bow in the face of public protest he characterised as “a rag-bag of cliche, red herring, zig-zagging, bobbing and weaving… an argument in favour of the tour has all the watertight qualities of a string bag”.
The fight to stop the 1970 tour led to cricket grounds becoming battlegrounds, recorded by Colin Shindler in Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches, for which, by then retired from the BBC, Parkinson wrote a trenchant foreword, his criticism of the English cricket establishment undiminished. “Since 1992, South Africa has been gladly welcomed back into the community of cricket playing nations but the painful struggle she endured in order to get there is a story that should never be forgotten.”
To suggest that politics can be removed from sport is tantamount to saying politics can be removed from life, he also memorably said in an era where such a view was very unusual in sports journalism.
Along with Brian Clough, Glenda Jackson, George Melly and a few other luminaries, Parkinson in 1977 also became a founding sponsor of the Anti-Nazi League in our militant campaign to confront the racism and fascism of the National Front.
Today the ANL is commended. Apartheid is rightly vilified. And condemning racism in sport and applauding “taking the knee” is mainstream for the BBC and most media. But none of that was the case half a century ago. We were in an often-beleaguered minority then when Parkinson stood up steadfastly to be counted with us.
• Labour peer Peter Hain’s South African memoir is A Pretoria Boy
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