by Kalyanbrata Bhattacharyya
The Windrush Generation
England in the immediate post-war period was in dire straits in terms of their economic resources.
They were running short of human resources and a desperate need was felt for recruiting skilled, as well as unskilled workers, in order to refurbish their crumbling economy. The areas most adversely affected were public transport, production of raw materials like iron, steel, and coal for industry, repair of the ravages caused by the war, as well as the medical service.
Thousands of men and women from underdeveloped countries like India, Pakistan, the African continent, and the West Indies were attracted at the prospect of jobs and migrated to the United Kingdom after the Labour Party under the leadership of Clement Atlee assumed power soon after the war and encouraged emigration.
The ship, Empire Windrsh, arrived with 492 migrants from the Caribbean islands at the Port of Tilbury in Essex on the 22 June 1948 and they were housed in Brixton, the southern underground terminus of the Victoria line.
The newspaper, Evening Standard, reported that even before the ship arrived, an aeroplane was stationed at the port to greet them! England thus became an ‘open country’.
Linda McDowell, a British geographer and formerly, Professor at Oxford, who specialized in ethnology of work and employment, wrote a scholarly article, ‘How Caribbean Migrants Helped To Rebuild Britain’, and estimated that nearly 42,000 migrants arrived in the United Kingdom from the Caribbean islands by the 1950s.
Most of them settled in London and the adjoining southern parts of England. The national population census reported that by 1961, people born in the Caribbean islands exceeded 1,61,000 in number in the United Kingdom. This huge surge owed partly to the apprehension that the Conservative Government led by Harold Macmillan was likely to promulgate the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962, prohibiting the unrestricted entry of foreign citizens to the United Kingdom.
The response to this immigration was lukewarm since the white population feared that the burgeoning number of black people settling in their country permanently would be usurping their job opportunities in the future.
The assurance from the government that most of these immigrants were not likely to make England their permanent abode, did not hold much water among the indigenous population. Immigration went on unabated since many of the Englishmen, lured by the prospect of better job prospects, financial rewards, and higher living standards, sought to move to other countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Young people, particularly from Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad flocked in groups to the United Kingdom for getting out of the shackles of social discrimination, repression, or for relief from utter penury.
The Wretched of the Earth, borrowing the title of the book by Frantz Fanon, the French-West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher with a Marxist bent of mind, even took recourse to jobs with positions overtly inferior to their indubitable technical competence.
They now started treating the new place virtually as their ‘new home’, though some felt that they were treated as inferior to the British workers and the Report of the Working Party of Coloured People Seeking Employment in the United Kingdom, came out with the scathing and abhorrent remark that the input from these migrants was not impressive, their behaviour was irresponsible, and they were often given to squabbles and skirmishes.
The attitude towards the migrants was discriminatory and patients in the hospitals were reluctant to be attended by black nurses. HRH Harris wrote a dissertation, Race and Cricket: The West Indies and England at Lord’s, 1963, which was presented to The University of Texas at Arlington for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 2011, and alluded to what Sir Neville Cardus, the most venerated writer on the game ever, wrote,
‘When we see Constantine bat, bowl or field, we know at once that he is not an English player, not an Australian player, not a South African player. We know that his cuts and drives, his whirling fast balls, his leapings and clutching and dartings in the slips are racial; we know that they are the consequences of impulses born in the blood, heated by the sun, and influenced by an environment and a way of life much more natural than ours – impulses not common to the psychology of the over-civilized quarters of the world.’
Harris also hinted at the somewhat insular attitude of Sir Neville, and wrote,
‘As cricket spread through the missionary zeal that was inseparable from its Victorian ethos, teams from England, led by members of its aristocracy, transplanted the game along with its associated virtues into its colonial and other holdings. In order to ensure compliance with written and unwritten codes, MCC and privately owned organizations sent out teams in order to determine their level of advancement and their preparedness to engage the English at progressively higher levels. Cricket soon became a primary benchmark by which a nation or region could gauge its equality with England, and by which England could determine the success of its civilizing mission... For your good cricketer the ends of the earth have come to a resting-point at Lord’s, and wherever he may be at the fall of a summer’s day his face should turn religiously towards Lord’s. Lord’s is the Cosmopolis of cricket.’
However, the Caribbean entry not only improved the economic fabric of the United Kingdom but contributed enormously towards the changing socio-cultural milieu and their age-old conservatism. They became an inseparable and integral part of post-war England.
As the migrant Caribbean population stayed back, their children were born in their alien land mostly in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and by the late 1970s they reached their adulthood. They attended schools and some of them went to colleges and universities as well and participated in cricket and other sports. In this backdrop, Ronald Butcher arrived to play for England as the first black cricketer.
The first black cricketer
Ronald Butcher was the cousin of Basil Butcher, one of the stalwarts in West Indian batting in the late 1950s and ’60s, and was born on the 14th October in 1953.
He came to the United Kingdom with his parents from Barbados in 1967. After dabbling in cricket in his early days, he joined Middlesex in 1974, and was chosen to represent England for an ODI match against the touring Australia at Edgbaston, Birmingham, in 1980, and scored 52 in just 38 deliveries.
A further half-century in the final of the Gillette Cup earned him a place in the team to tour the West Indies in 1981 when Ian Botham was appointed as the captain. He made his debut as a middle-order batsman at Bridgetown, Barbados, his native island, in the third Test match on the 13th of March and was greeted warmly with open arms.
The headline in a local newspaper read, ‘Our boy their bat’. He scored 17 and 2, and England lost the match by 298 runs. He played in two more Test matches at Antigua and Jamaica and failed again.
He played in two ODI matches against the West Indies at Kingston Jamaica and Albion in Guyana, scored 1 and 5, respectively, and with that ended his short stint of 3 Test matches and 3 ODI matches in an inconsequential manner which spanned over a few months only. His career in Test cricket lasted for less than a month.
Butcher was decidedly unlucky since in his debut series he had the misfortune of experiencing two overwhelmingly tragic events.
Robin Jackman, the fast-medium bowler from Surrey, was deported from Guyana soon after their arrival for the second Test match. He had sporting ties with South Africa earlier and following the Gleneagles agreement drafted in June1977 and attended by the Heads of Government Meeting at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, the committee banned the participation of one and all who participated in sporting activities in South Africa.
It was described as a ‘dangerous sickness and an unmitigated evil.’
The Guyanese government revoked his visa, the English team was locked inside the Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown, and the scheduled second Test match was abandoned. Thus, Jackman was credited with the unique distinction of being born in one country, India, growing up and playing in another, England, having sporting connections with the third one, South Africa, and finally deported from the fourth one, the West Indies!
It seems that England’s cup of sorrow was not yet full and Ken Barrington, the charming, jovial, and avuncular Assistant Manager of the England team died in his sleep from a massive cardiac attack on the 14th of March and it is believed that his death owed much to his habit of heavy smoking, a previous attack in 1968, which led to his premature retirement from Test cricket, and the strain of coping up with the Jackman Affair only a week ago.
The English cricketers were devastated and their mind was no longer in the game following two such unforeseen disasters, and they had been merely going through the motions thereafter.
The stress and shock were all the more agonizing for a new-comer, like Butcher, to adjust to such nerve-wracking experiences. The series of misfortunes were now unbearable and England succumbed to abject defeat in the hands of the mighty West Indies by 2 matches to nil, one match being cancelled. Botham performed miserably as the skipper, his form declined abysmally, and one of the greatest all-rounders in the world returned to England a desolate and forlorn figure.
It is often said that Butcher’s failure owed much to his quintessential Caribbean mental make-up and fallibility. He had little restraint in his selection of shots and tried to belt every ball out of the ground almost compulsively. Additionally, his vulnerability against extreme fast bowling was exposed in the West Indies. He was a stylish batsman and his batting was a treat to the eyes. His fielding was brilliant at cover-point and in the slips as well. He suffered from a serious injury to his face and almost lost his eyesight when he was struck by a delivery from George Ferris, the Antiguan fast bowler, who later settled in Leicestershire.
Post-cricket
Butcher retired from First-class cricket in 1990. In the previous year, he had been toying with the idea of joining the rebel team to South Africa under the leadership of Mike Gatting, his county captain, but was dissuaded by the reaction from the media which threatened his benefit match in the future.
After his retirement, he started his own business and in the year 2000, applied for the job of cricket coach of the West Indies though it went to Roger Harper, the off-spinner, from Guyana and the West Indies, in the early 1980s to the ‘90s. Later, he worked as a coach for Tasmania and Bermuda and the assignment came on the heels of their defeat against Canada in the America Cup Tournament, held in Toronto.
In 2004, he was appointed as Director of Sports at the University of the West Indies’ Cave Hill Campus. Though he was not a success, he was the trailblazer for black cricketers in the England team like Wilf Slack, Philip Defreitas, Gladstone Small, Chris Lewis, Michael Carberry, Jofra Archer, and others.
Thus, Ronald Butcher has entrenched his place in the English cricket history following the changes in her social and economic milieu after the second World War and English cricket underwent some radical changes in her attitude. The composition of the English cricket team changed dramatically after his arrival and is likely to remain so in the future. One only hopes that one day, one of them shall lead the England cricket team.