The first of the greats
Before Lara, Richards and Sobers, before Walcott, Worrell and Weekes, before even Headley, came George Challenor. The first of the great West Indian batsmen. His career straddled the First World War, and also the rise of the West Indian team to full Test status. 1923 was Challenor's season. That year he was the star turn in the last tour to England before the West Indies became a Test-playing nation, in 1928.
In 1906, as a precocious 17 year-old with all the right social connections, Challenor had toured England on the back of his promising form in Bajan domestic cricket. In 1923 he returned a fully-flowered talent. By early June Challenor had begun to set the county circuit alight. He scored consecutive hundreds against Oxford and Essex, and set about a hot-streak that gathered momentum as the summer wore on. In August he took an unbeaten 111 off Gloucestershire, scored 155 not out against Surrey and 110 against Glamorgan in the space of seven days.
He finished the season third in the first class averages with 1,556 at 51. In the words of Wisden, "he was regarded as having reached the standards set by the best English batsmen." He was granted honourary membership of the MCC, even though he was unable to compete in the customary qualifying matches. In short, he cut quite a dash through English cricket's high society.
The good impression he made was crucial in convincing the Imperial Cricket Council that the West Indies were ready for Test cricket. Again in the words of Wisden, "his admirable batting did much toward raising cricket in West Indies to Test match standard." Challenor returned to England again in 1928 for the West Indies' first Test tour. By then he was 40, and his light had faded. He mustered a mere 101 in his six Test innings.
Challenor had several advantages in making his way in the world. As a player he was a great stylist, a man who, as CLR James wrote, "took each maiden over as a personal affront". He was also from a cricketing family, one of seven brothers who played the game and the son of a rich and influential father. Most crucially, of course, he was white.
Such was the institutional racism of the MCC, the ICC and ultimately the WICB at the time that it would have been impossible for a man of any other hue to make the impression, or the advances, that Challenor did.
The resistible rise of the white West Indian Test captain
For the first 20 years of their Test existence, the West Indies were captained exclusively by white players, despite the fact that Challenor's tour in 1923 was the last occasion on which the best player in the team was a white man.
Tony Cozier wrote in his History of West Indian cricket that the refusal to appoint a black captain was "historically understandable at a time when it was generally considered that by ruling classes that the black man was not ready for leadership, political, social, sporting or otherwise." He is more forgiving than most.
The selectors' thinking was transparently ignorant and prejudiced even in the 1930s. Some of the appointments they made were deserving men and excellent cricketers, but none were as accomplished a player as many of the players they commanded. In 1930 the job was given to a callow Cambridge graduate, Jackie Grant. He had no experience of leadership before being appointed, and was not even in the West Indian team at the time. Nonetheless, with the likes of Learie Constantine, fast bowlers Herman Griffith and Manny Martindale, and George Headley in his side, Grant did well. He led the team to a series victory against England in 1934/35, though he was off the field injured (Contstantine stood in for him) during the day's play that clinched the series.
Grant quit soon after to pursue his calling as a missionary in Rhodesia. In 1939, for the tour of England, the selectors were faced with a power-vacuum, at least among the white players in the side. Constantine and Headley were the outstanding candidates by a distance. Neither got the job. Instead Grant's younger brother, Rolph, was appointed. A mediocre player who hardly held a place in the Cambridge side, Grant a gentleman all the same, an amateur football international and the heavyweight boxing champion of Trinidad.
In the immediate aftermath of the war Constantine would captain the Dominions against England team in the celebration Tests and was applauded by Keith Miller for "doing a fine job". Headley meanwhile had secured his place as the second greatest bat of his era, behind only Don Bradman. Headley himself had been described by Constantine as a "master strategist and tactician." Popular pressure in Jamaica meant Headley was granted one Test as captain against England in 1948. Otherwise though the WICB held firm, their attitude increasingly anachronistic among the social and political advances being made in the Caribbean at that time. John Goddard was given the captaincy. By now the ranks beneath him included the three Ws, Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott and Everton Weekes, men of a calibre that could not be denied.
Goddard was hailed for leading the side to victory in England in 1950. But in the following tour of Australia, Goddard lost the dressing room's support and resigned from the captaincy. Frank Worrell later wrote that Goddard had taken too much claim for the series victory in England, and as such the players had refused to provide tactical help to him in Australia. The West Indies lost 4-1. Jeffrey Stollmeyer, a thoroughly sound opening bat, took over the captaincy and held it for 14 matches. He was the last credible white contender to be captain of the side. When he was replaced, at first, in 1955, by the hapless and inexperienced Denis Aitkinson, and ultimately in 1959/60 by Gerry Alexander, the bough broke.
Beyond boundaries
And at the centre of the flood of popular opinion that finally forced Frank Worrell into the captaincy was the Guardian's own CLR James. James is less revered as a cricket writer than Neville Cardus, but surpassed his mentor in so many ways. His work as a Marxist theoretician and historian distinguishes him as one of the finest minds to have dwelt on cricket. The combination of the his and Cardus' talents made the Guardian's cricket pages of the 1930s seem a golden, and now sepia, era.
But James' outstanding work was done away from these pages. After a lifetime's wandering, James returned home to Trinidad in 1958. He took up a position as editor of The Nation, the official paper of Eric Williams' Peoples National Movement. Williams, a lifelong protege of James', became Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago in 1956. In his study of James' life, Basil Wilson wrote "James returned to the Caribbean willing to abandon his own revolutionary activities and work for the building of the PNM into a mass force." James found Trinidad to be a society in the "full flood of transition from colonialism to independence."
And it was there, in charge of a paper which James himself described as staffed by "a grossly incompetent accountant, a disloyal assistant, an office boy, a borrowed type writer, one filing cabinet and one desk" that he set about his extraordinary public campaign. His aim was to overcome 50 years of prejudice and see a non-white man appointed Test captain. Over the following 15 months, James' writing turned The Nation into a paper with "a circulation of 12,000 and the respect and confidence of a large majority of the population."
His readers took up the fight only they armed themselves with bottles, which they would eventually unleash on the pitch at the Queen's Park Oval in Port of Spain, forcing a halt to the third day's play between England and the West Indies in 1960. The next day James wrote a piece entitled 'Alexander Must Go', calling for the immediate installment of Frank Worrell to the captaincy. The edition sold out overnight.
"Week after week I carried on unsparingly," James would later recall, "putting everything that I had into it." James insisted that he would "exhaust every argument [in favour of Worrell] before touching on the racial aspect", though he knew that there was a "public conviction that the captaincy for years had been manipulated in such a manner as to deliberately exclude black men". And he believed this was one of the key reasons for the crowd riots in 1960.
For James, this fight was about so much more than the removal of Alexander. To him the selectors' "whole point was to continue to send populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain. The more brilliantly the black men played, the more it would emphasise to millions of English people: 'Yes, they are fine players, but, funny, isn't it, they cannot be responsible for themselves - they must always have a white man to lead them.'"
His open letter to the Queen's Park Cricket Club, published February 12, 1960 and reprinted in full in his majestic book Beyond A Boundary, is, for power and rhetoric, untouched by anything else written on the cricket. It is at once an appeal to reason and a declaration of war. Literally so, as it ends:
"If, however, there has to be a fight to cure our society of the dangerous abcess which has now burst, then fight there will be. Foremost in the desire for a peaceful solution, The Nation likewise, if nothing else suffices, will lead the attack; it will be strategic, comprehensive and final."
The argument was irrefutable, and James was expressing the will not just of himself, but of much of the Caribbean population and of many other fine men within West Indian cricket. Worrell was made captain and duly led the side through one of the most entertaining series in the history of Test cricket, their 2-1 defeat in Australia. Alexander was the last white man to captain the West Indies.
Almost fifty years on and CLR James would surely have welcomed Brendan Nash, so recently returned from Queensland to play for the land of his father, into the West Indian team. So long, that is, as he earns his place through the runs he scores. Nash's selection has been hailed by headlines that, for anyone who knows their history, seem not just ironic but even a little odious. 'Nash cracks Caribbean barrier', The Sunday Times pronounced at the top of a piece by the (typically excellent) writer Simon Wilde, which went on to refer to the 'marginalisation of the game's white community'.
Nash has presumably faced the same problems that any player does when they transfer national allegiance late in life. The right of Nash to be selected, after all, was what exactly what CLR James worked for; to enable all men who merit it, regardless of skin colour, to have equal opportunity of selection. Nash, like Lloyd, Richards, Lara and all the other players who have since worn the West Indian shirt, stands on the shoulders of the men who went before him; Challenor, Constantine and Headley, Worrell, Weekes, Walcott, and, of course, CLR James.
