by Mayukh Ghosh
It’s been a few years since a casual conversation with Stephen Chalke made me aware that a new book on England’s tour of West Indies in 1953/54 was on the way. He sounded quite excited by the project.
Stephen’s Fairfield Books went on to publish a few more books before he bowed out of the publishing business but there was no sign of this book. A quiet enquiry from my side was reassured as Stephen said it was still under preparation.
Much later, it arrived. Finally.
Written by David Woodhouse.
It was worth the wait. Not many cricket tour books can match the standard set by this one.
David Woodhouse’s rather strong connection with cricket began well before he entered his formative years. He belongs to a family of staunch Worcestershire supporters – his paternal grandfather was a life member there and a good club cricketer.
On the other hand, his maternal grandfather’s last words to him when he visited him in hospital during the first Ashes Test of 1993 were ‘Gooch is out.’
As a cricketer too, David had his days. He learnt hard-ball cricket in Yorkshire, representing Humberside Colts.
And after all these years, he still turns out for The Gardeners and wishes to continue as long as he can.
As for the writing gene, that is inherited from his late father Frank, who was a university lecturer and then Director of the British Institute in Florence. He followed in his footsteps by studying literature, albeit English not Italian, and did a Ph.D. on Byron.
About twenty years ago, with John Leigh, he published a series of books on the language of sport.
In his words: “We owe a lot to the BBC's Adrian Chiles, who championed Football Lexicon so that it was on the Christmas bestseller lists in 2004, and the Independent on Sunday's James Hanning, who commissioned us to write a column on clichés and cant called Mark My Words. John and I were rather proud that we never missed a week while that column ran.”
When asked how he came to think about this book, he gave a detailed explanation:
“As often happens, I developed the idea for the book while I was writing another one: researching the Cricket Lexicon, in about 2005, I was looking for some 'regional' usages of language and read Len Hutton's last memoir, Fifty Years in Cricket. There wasn't much Yorkshire dialect in the book - it was ghosted by a southerner (Alex Bannister of the Daily Mail) - but I found its dry account of the 1953/54 tour utterly compelling. I was already aware of some of the difficulties Hutton encountered in the Caribbean but I immediately wondered why there were so many histories of the Bodyline tour but none of this one (the only two monographs had been published immediately afterwards, by Bannister and E.W. Swanton).
“So, I slowly started reading about the tour - an article now on Cricinfo by Stephen Chalke was an early inspiration - and came to realise there were fascinating issues beyond the cricket; indeed, I'd forgotten that the penultimate chapter of Beyond a Boundary refers specifically to this series. I'd always been fascinated by Hutton, who was one of my father's heroes (my first full-sized bat, a Len Hutton autograph, was passed on to me by my father). But I also became fascinated by West Indies cricket. My wife well remembers that for the decade between 2005 and 2015, even if we were on holiday in somewhere like Japan, I'd always be reading a book about the Caribbean. Obviously, West Indies were the best team in the world when I was growing up, so people like Richards and Holding were idols to me. But I had not appreciated the complexities either of West Indian cricket or of British West Indian history: I would say the two books which helped me the most were Liberation Cricket, edited by Hilary Beckles and Brian Stoddart, and The Growth of the Modern West Indies by Gordon Lewis.
“Both those books are 'academic' and, because I have an academic background, I originally conceived of Who Only Cricket Know as quite an academic book, with the cricket more as a background both to the 'post-colonial' writing of figures such as James, Fanon, Lamming and Hall, and also the post-war cultural and social commentary of British writers such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.
“But, when I started researching, in earnest, contemporary newspapers at the British Library and the MCC archive at Lord's, the cricket was so absorbing I was beginning to realise it should take centre stage. I was also very lucky that Alan Moss, the last surviving MCC player, gave me a wonderful interview. He was an absolute pleasure to talk to, as were the other players and spectators who kindly agreed to speak to me.”
He also acknowledges that he had luck by his side and it played a crucial role in more ways than one.
“Then I had four more pieces of luck.
“First, I was able to give up full-time work in about 2016, which meant I could have a crack at writing the book properly.
”Second, it was natural for me to approach Stephen Chalke, who is the great oral historian of 1950s cricket, with a precis. Stephen was nearing retirement at Fairfield Books, the publishing house he founded, and I think slightly reluctant to take new things on. But the precis struck a chord with him and he put all his considerable wisdom and enthusiasm into it. It took me so long to get the structure of the book right that, to my regret, we could not publish it before he retired. Stephen was quite right to tell me it wasn't ready and he kindly oversaw a seamless transfer to Wildfire, the new owners of Fairfield. I can never thank Stephen enough for the help and encouragement he has given me.
“Third, the process of making the book friendlier to the general reader, which Stephen had got going, was helped by a man called Nigel Llewellyn, a Lancashire member I met quite by chance at a Lord's Test match. Nigel was such a patient reader of many drafts, but I'll always remember the first thing he said: "'Antinomy' is not a word a cricket lover will necessarily understand. We need a bonfire of the antinomies'. He was right.
”Last but not least, Wildfire took the book on enthusiastically and gave me a wonderful editor, Richard Whitehead, who writes the obituaries for Wisden and has a book about the history of the FA Cup about to come out (which I can heartily recommend). Richard was an invaluable sounding board in the home straight. I remember finishing the last serious draft in the early hours of the night India beat Australia at Brisbane.
“So, with all this invaluable help, and a lot of time for my thoughts to mature, I hope I finally just about cracked both the narrative voice of the book and its structure. I was blocked for a long time on quite how to give enough background to the islands without smothering the cricket, and quite how to tell the story of two long and symbolic journeys (by Hutton and Worrell) without slowing the pace of the narrative down too much. The book is still probably too long for some tastes but I promise you it could have been much longer, given how interesting some of the material is - and I've tried to put some of the details from the cutting room floor on the website which accompanies the book.”
An undertaking of such proportion faces its fair share of obstacles and one of the major ones while unearthing facts about cricket played in West Indies about 70 years ago was about the lack of properly archived information.
“There are gaps in the English archive too, but the West Indies was more of a challenge in that their Board of Control has never made minutes of their meetings available. The official records were reportedly destroyed in a fire, although I believe Vaneisa Baksh (who is writing a biography of Worrell I am much looking forward to) has managed to track down copies of some minutes made later in the 1950s.
“For 1953/54, I had to try my best to read between the lines, from interviews with players and other witnesses, memoirs and newspaper reports (many Caribbean papers are preserved on microfilm in the British Library).
“The power struggles in West Indian cricket administration - for example between Karl Nunes and Noel Nethersole in Jamaica or Errol dos Santos and Jeffrey Stollmeyer in Trinidad - are fascinating but very difficult to get to the bottom of.
“Furthermore, figures such as Headley, Worrell and Weekes kept a dignified silence about some of the more egregious treatment they were subjected to by the Board.
“Perhaps it is part of the fascination of this tour that we have to make some educated guesses about the motivations and behind-the-scenes conduct of some of the protagonists, even if we must be careful to allow for insular and ideological bias when weighing up information leaked to, or scooped up by, the media on both sides.”
I was intrigued to know how he managed to deal with the uncertain areas and whether that made him leave out a lot of material from the final cut.
“What I tended to do when the evidence was deficient or contradictory was to try to present it in a balanced way and leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.
“I suppose there were a few subjects, such as the more off-hand gossip about the tourists' nocturnal activities, where I felt it wasn't fair to draw material inferences. I also didn't want to make grand claims without being able to prove them beyond reasonable doubt.
“On the website I've speculated a bit more: for example, I'm pretty sure Warner offered the tour captaincy to David Sheppard before turning to Hutton, but I can't definitively prove this so I've put the argument for that on the website and left it more implied in the book.”
And finally, if he’d like to do anything differently had he got a chance to redo this again:
“Inevitably, I've spotted a few solecisms which I would hope to correct in another edition. But more generally, at the risk of sounding smug, there's not much I would have ended up doing differently.
“I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether I've got the balances right between cricket and background, West Indies and England. I also hope the sequence of the book, essentially following the two pioneering journeys of Worrell in West Indies cricket from 1950 to 1963 and Hutton in English cricket from 1952 to 1954/55, makes sense - with the Test matches in the Caribbean still centre stage.
“I suppose I could have pushed some of the parallels with the present day more, but I wanted to respect the nuances of the historical material.”
It is not a book for the random cricket fan.
It is for the more serious students of the game.
At the risk of making a very bold statement, I can say that if one wishes to read only one cricket book in 2022, there is little chance that anything else will be worthier.