Sonny Ramadhin and the History of West Indies Cricket

Sonny Ramadhin, who died on February 27 at the age of 92 was one of the heroes of what was then the proudest moment of West Indian cricket—the first Test match victory by the West Indies on English soil, at Lord’s in 1950. To the people of the West Indies, the significance of the win extended far beyond cricket.

The connection between West Indian cricket and West Indian pride can be seen in an essay by V.S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad to East Indian parents. Naipaul writes of an incident that occurred in his classroom when he was a fourth-grade student in Port of Spain in 1940.

“Who is the greatest cricketer in the world?” asked a question on a General Knowledge quiz. “I saw it as a trap question,” writes Naipaul. “Though I had never seen him play, and he was reported to live in England, no cricketer was better known to me than Learie Constantine. Regularly in the Trinidad Guardian I saw the same picture of him: sweatered, smiling, running back to the pavilion bat in hand. To me the bat was golden…” Yet the young Naipaul wrote “Bradman” as his answer, the name of the Australian batsman who was considered then—as he still is now—the best player to have played cricket.

When the teacher returned his paper to Naipaul, he learned that his answer was seen as wrong: “the pencilled cross on my paper was large and angry.” In this essay, published 34 years after the classroom incident, Naipaul says of his teacher, “It is possible now to see his propaganda for Constantine as a type of… nationalism.”

C.L.R. James was closely involved in the campaign for West Indian self-government. A Marxist thinker and Pan-Africanist, he is remembered today as much for his book The Black Jacobins  – a history of Toussaint l’Ouverture and the slave revolution in Haiti – as he is for Beyond a Boundary, which many regard as the finest book written on cricket. His mission was to recognize and celebrate not just a colonized black man’s capacity for self-determination, but also his capacity for leadership. Toussaint, the Haitian slave leader, was one example he espoused. The other was Frank Mortimer Maglinne Worrell, a cricket player from Barbados.

Racial barriers had become relaxed enough in the West Indies to allow the islands’ representative team to include players who were black and white–playing alongside each other under a common banner against teams like England, Australia, New Zealand, India and Pakistan. E. W. Swanton, a distinguished cricket correspondent who was a part of the English establishment, had this to say: “Cricket in the West Indies was planted like the sugar, the citrus and the cocoanuts, by white colonists. They gave the lead, and when the coloured West Indians followed it with such gusto and skill it became a bond between them, as games should always be a bond between creeds and classes.”

But one notably racist practice continued for decades. From the first Test match in 1928 until the year 1960, only white men were chosen to captain the West Indies team. No black man was given the honour, no matter how good he was, or how awkward it looked to have brilliant black players play under white captains who were often mediocre players themselves. The question became very polemical in the 1950s, when the increasingly assertive movement for self-government and independence in the Caribbean islands and British Guiana coincided with the emergence of Worrell as an exceptional captain.

Constantine, the “greatest cricketer in the world” (in Naipaul’s classroom), had already been overlooked as captain. Writing in 1947, Constantine had said, “I only hope before I die to see a West Indies team, chosen on its merits alone, captained by a black player, win a ribbon against England.” (Constantine had also noted that of all the top-ranked national teams in the world, “the West Indies team alone is composed of men of different race.” In modern times, ironically, England has had a more mixed-race team than the West Indies.)

It is important to understand that a captain of a cricket team plays a greater role on the field of play than a captain does in any other sport. In soccer, for instance, the captain is a symbolic position, with the details of play being dictated entirely by the manager. Not so in cricket, where the captain must make hundreds of decisions in the course of a day’s play, some of which, if bad, could cost his team the match. So, for the West Indies to deny the captaincy to the man in its team with the best cricketing brain just because he is black was a form of self-sabotage–done to preserve the aura of the white man as the one who makes decisions, and the black man as the one who follows them.

Peter Roebuck, a prominent commentator on the game, wrote that “many black players had found themselves obliged to play under fools and even knaves.” To many West Indian whites, “it was inconceivable that a black man could be put in charge of anything, let alone a cricket team… Here was a task requiring tact. White men had been trained to lead, blacks to serve.”

In A History of West Indies Cricket, Michael Manley writes that “it would not have been difficult for Worrell to know that he was by far the best qualified cricketer of his era to hold the captaincy. Only his pedigree was against him along with his long record of resistance to anything he deemed to be an injustice.” In 1958, C.L.R. James wrote, “Once in a blue moon, i.e. once in a lifetime, a writer is handed on a plate a gift from heaven.” He was referring to his opportunity to advocate for Worrell as captain of the West Indies cricket team, “the most furious cricket campaign I have ever known.”

James wrote of the “intimate connection between cricket and West Indian social and political life” – a connection so established that “all except the wilfully perverse could see it.” In majestic prose, drawing on his deep well of historical consciousness, James continued: “It is the constant, vigilant, bold and shameless manipulation of players to exclude black captains that has so demoralized West Indian teams and exasperated the people–a people, it is to be remembered, in the full tide of the transition from colonialism to independence.”

“The sporting journalists of the Caribbean had had enough,” Manley recorded. “Their dean, C.L.R. James, his patriotic hackles no less than his sense of injustice aroused, led the assault.” The public got into the act and “a wave of indignation swept the cricketing world.” The West Indies Cricket Board, administrators of the game, succumbed. And so, in 1960, at the age of 36, Worrell became the first black man to captain the West Indies.

Worrell led his team on a tour of Australia – the hardest cricket challenge of all – and the matches that followed produced some of the best cricket in the game’s history. One match ended in a tie after five days of play, a result never before achieved in Test cricket: imagine a marathon, run over 26 miles and 385 yards, end in a dead heat.

In the end, the West Indies lost a hard-fought series of Test matches played in a spirit of chivalry and sportsmanship. A quarter of a million Australians turned out on the streets of Melbourne to bid the team farewell at the end, as the West Indies players drove through in a motorcade. This was “a gesture spontaneous and in cricket without precedent, one people speaking to another,” writes James in Beyond a Boundary. “You would have to be black,” writes Manley, “and from a colonial background, to understand fully what this meant to the West Indies.”

It is a pity that no calypso song was composed to celebrate Worrell and that tour of Australia, for the calypso has played an important role in the evolution of West Indian politics and cricket. Calypsonians, writes the Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles, “composed and performed melodies that captured the essence of historic moments in a way that newspaper reports could not.” The most enduring cricket calypso of all was composed in 1950, after the West Indies defeated England at Lord’s, the first time they had won a Test match in the Mother Country.

This last fact made the victory one of immense emotional–even political–significance for the people of the West Indies. The victory at Lord’s, Manley said, “was a great Caribbean event.” Beckles writes that “the ground exploded in dance, song and bacchanal, West Indian style, and signaled the beginning of a process that was to refashion the culture of cricket crowds in England.” English spectators were hushed by nature, and clapped when they appreciated a good hit, or clever ball, or athletic exhibition of fielding. The West Indians in the crowd, present in numbers after immigration from the islands had begun in 1948, were by contrast boisterous. Two calypsonians, Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner, were at the ground and led jubilant West Indian fans across the field – Beckles says – “in a procession of improvised singing.”

To the Caribbean, writes Manley, “the victory was more than a sporting success. It was the proof that a people was coming of age. They had bested the masters at their own game on their home turf.” And they had done so, he continues, “with good nature, with style, often with humour, but with conclusive effectiveness.”

Lord Beginner, whose real name was Egbert Moore, composed a calypso called “Victory Test Match” which remains a much-loved song to this day.

 

John Goddard, a white man, may have been the captain – as was the unfortunate racial norm at the time – but the architects of the win were two inexperienced bowlers, Alf Valentine of Jamaica and Sonny Ramadhin of Trinidad. That Ramadhin was East Indian added socio-political significance. The community lived in tense coexistence with blacks, the frictions being the result of cultural difference as well as the fact that the East Indians had been imported to the West Indies to do plantation work that many blacks had spurned after their emancipation from slavery.

The win at Lord’s united all West Indians – especially blacks and East Indians – in a shared success, with Lord Beginner’s astute lyrics giving special billing to the two bowlers of different races.

Cricket, lovely cricket
At Lord’s where I saw it,
Cricket, lovely cricket
At Lord’s where I saw it,
Yardley tried his best
But Goddard won the Test
They gave the crowd plenty fun
Second Test and
West Indies won
With those two little pals of mine
Ramadhin and Valentine.

Satya Varadarajan is a history major at New York University.