Who only Cricket Know: A Rare Gem of a Book

by Arunabha Sengupta

Who Only Cricket Know by David Woodhouse
447 pages, Fairfield Books (Nightwatchman), £18.99

Short Review:

The best cricket book I have read in ages. Buy it, read it, savour it.

This short summary is important.

By a conservative estimate some 99.94% of the cricket fans are very adept at quoting the sentence that lends half of itself to the title of this book. However, when it comes to actually reading, even a reasonably big paragraph is often tagged as TLDR. A long review is rather difficult to wade through, let alone a whole book.
However, I think I will be failing in my role as a reviewer if I did not point out to even the most non-bookish enthusiast to make an exception and read this gem.
Because that is what this is. A rare and magnificent gem.

Detailed Review:

MCC, and later England, tours to the West Indies have always been fraught with drama. Mike Gatting had his facial features rearranged in 1986. Sixty years before that Wally Hammond’s extra-curricular misadventures allegedly blighted his constitution and temper for life. Brian Lara went past the 365 posted by Garry Sobers and, a decade later, reclaimed his record. In between a Test match was stopped after just 61 deliveries.

However, seldom did the events put several layers of complex history in a fascinatingly disturbing backdrop as when Len Hutton’s team travelled in 1953-54. The convoluted domains – of class, race, politics, imperial hangover, independence movements, diplomacy, old boys’ clubs, privilege and detriment – not only provided combustible atmosphere for the cricket, they also frequently spilled into the cricket field itself.

The situation was charged with numerous needles. In the aftermath of the heady coronation year which saw England reclaim The Ashes, for the first time a full-strength side from the mother country toured the Caribbean. In the immediately preceding years, the emerging cricketing power called the West Indies had thrashed England both at home and in England.

For the British expats and diplomats in the islands, beating the West Indies at cricket was a matter of ‘life and death’, to ensure the prestige of the local whites. For the locals of the Caribbean, lives of many of whom had been ruffled and relocated by the Windrush, the wins against the mother country had been landmarks celebrated in retellings, prose, poetry and song.
Added to that there were ongoing movements for decolonisation and self-governance, of various degree of impetus in various stages, in the different islands. The inter-island politics in life and cricket were palpable, as was the convoluted racial conflicts between the whites, blacks, browns, Chinese and the different mixed populations.
Finally there were these tremendously gifted coloured cricketers still having to kowtow to the captaincy of white skippers.

As for England they had their own perplexing dynamics in a long-static society in a changing world. Len Hutton, the greatest post-War batsman of the country, had been leading England for a couple of seasons and with a fair amount of success. But it was a stint at the helm that never quite managed to move away from the edge, continually under threat from the undercurrents of the privileged ‘inner circle’ uneasy at the sight of a professional leading the country – Lord Hawke’s three-decade-old prayers gone horribly wrong. From being a representative of the deprived, who finally got the hot seat deserved for so long by him and his professional predecessors, Hutton suddenly found himself in the midst of a diplomatic hot-potato of a tour, where for the West Indians he became the recognisable face of Imperial high-handedness.

The tour saw some thrilling cricket, and Hutton played perhaps the best innings of his life in the final Test, a double hundred that enabled England to come back from 0-2 down to square the series. And the incredibly complex undertones of the series came to the fore when the incident that captured headlines was the master opener failing to acknowledge Alexander Bustamante, the Jamaican Prime Minister who had been one of the several spectators thronging to congratulate him as the players walked in for tea.

Structure:
The cricket of the tour itself forms the middle third of David Woodhouse’s masterly book.  The first part deals with the background to the visit. The author sweeps through the complex historical ties that linked the mother country to the islands, the preparations for  the series in both England and West Indies, followed by a solitary chapter apiece on Jeff Stollmeyer, the amateur captain of West Indies, and Hutton, the professional captain of England. Every other detail aside, I would recommend the book just for these two chapters.

The cricket is described in detail in the meaty middle third of the book.
And after that there is a comprehensive look at the aftermath of the tour, which covers important chapters of the cricket and society of the two rival teams. These include the continuing movement to undermine, and even end, Hutton’s captaincy, the problems faced by the professional Fred Trueman and the amateur Trevor Bailey because of the various incidents during and after the tour, the saga of the three Ws and finally the triumph of Frank Worrell as the first regular black captain of West Indies.

Level of Detail

The level of detail in the book is fascinating. Unlike a lot of books on cricket history, Woodhouse never lets accessible reminiscences and recollections warp the facts. For every incident, be it a dismissal on the cricket field or a speculation of what took place in a cocktail party, every available source – book, newspaper, quotes – are scrupulously analysed and evaluated. The goal throughout remains to form as balanced a judgement as possible. Such balanced judgement  and scrupulous fact-finding can sometimes unearth hilarious nuggets.

“[Trueman’s] arithmetic seems to be out when he claims that McWatt was dropped ‘twice off the bowling of Brian Statham and, to my intense disappointment, three times off my bowling’. He also omits to mention that he was the man at first slip to Statham.”

Woodhouse does not take any shortcuts while explaining the complex history of the islands and goes as far back as necessary at times. And neither does he have any hesitation in dwelling on political and racial undertones which are ostensibly far from cricket.

In the 1930s a ton of sugar sometimes sold for less than a cricket ball, circumstances which led to serious labour unrest across the region

The tone is unvaryingly critical when the subject is the history of imperialism, colonisation and its after-effects.

The image the British cultivated of themselves, as benevolent trustees teaching ‘backward’ races the rules of the constitutional game, was reinforced by the way the politicians negotiating independence, whether they were white, brown or black, were also sometimes Blues.

And he is as critical of ‘multilayered pigmentocracy’ prevailing in the West Indies as he is of the ‘apartheid practiced against professionals in England’.

These factors, contrary to what some existing and self-proclaimed sentinels of cricket writing may insist,  are actually very very relevant to the game. (But, the undertones of cricket and its society are complex and hence Woodhouse may stand to get away with the liberties because he is from the Mother Country himself.)

Balanced Perspective

The author is consistently critical of the privileged ‘inner-circle’ that controlled the game, namely the Warners, the Allens, the Robins.
And some of his criticisms come across as tongue-in-cheek and satiric.

The MCC secretariat, Aird and Griffith, already possessed a bureaucratic talent for converting the liveliest passages of meetings into the deadest passages of prose.

Or the part where Warner’s arguments are paraphrased: ‘as I have played all over the world I think I am entitled to an opinion’.

 As will perhaps be apparent above, the author is gifted with a turn of phrase.  Some further examples of his abilities as a wordsmith I particularly found fascinating are given below:

… tour’s ‘incidents’ – a word now held in the tongs of inverted commas.

A titanic clash of snobbery and bolshiness. (Describing the longstanding feud between Allen and Trueman)

Cricket books are notoriously susceptible to pink tints and over-glorification of the past, and this book in particular was specifically replete with such possibilities.
The three Ws, especially Worrell, those two pals of mine, Denis Compton, Peter May, Hutton himself, Trueman… all these names are prone to hagiography. Add to it quotes from Cardus and the title of the book itself, borrowed from the title of the CLR James book, and the fact that James, Constantine and Headley feature regularly in the book.
Even Swanton, who is a constant presence in the narrative, has been prone to being eulogised often.

In my personal assessment, one of the best features of the book is that it always allows facts to tell the story and not one of the formidable cast of characters is subjected to deification. Woodhouse is never found guilty of such tendencies. The focus remains relentlessly on verifiable facts.

The story of Hutton’s ‘true baptism’ in the Yorkshire first team, aged 17, was relished and probably embellished by Cardus.

Compton is praised when he plays a good innings, and is often pulled up for painting the town red with Evans in tow.
Hutton sparkles through most of the book because of deserving performances with the bat and results as captain, but he is very human and shown as one. In this regard Woodhouse does not fall into the trap of Alex Bannister, the author of Cricket Cauldron, one of the two full-length books about the tour before this.(Swanton’s West Indian Adventure is the other)

The following passage reflects the degree of detail to which analysis of multiple points of view has been carried out before reaching any sort of conclusion.

Trueman opined that ‘Leonard didn’t really have a great deal of time for many amateurs’; Bedser thought Hutton had a ‘fixation’ about the game’s in-built deference to gentlemen which he ‘never got over’. It may be that Trueman was projecting his own contempt for authority and Bedser his own respect for it. But the fact both came to the same conclusion suggests that Hutton had more of a problem with what he called the ‘prevailing system’ than his airbrushed public comments indicated.

Even Worrell, praised eloquently enough for his role in West Indian cricket and society, does not have all his acts converted into eulogy.

For Worrell, who bowled a few bouncers himself with the new ball, the chance of enforcing the follow-on as acting captain seems to have become more important than sportsmanship towards tailenders.

And while Beyond A Boundary, as the title of this book indicates, is discussed and referred to, James himself is not taken as gospel.
This was part of his ‘Alexander Must Go’ campaign, famously evoked – and a touch mythologised – in Beyond a Boundary.

Swanton is dealt with in microscopic detail, his words analysed, weighed and mixed with the requisite pinches of salt extracted from the ocean of establishment-friendliness engulfing the man.
But all through Woodhouse is always scrupulously fair in his evaluation, always leaving judgement to be pronounced by the facts.


Level of research

Cricket books are almost always proclaimed as ‘excellently researched’ … but the levels can vary from paraphrasing Wikipedia, to sprinkling footnotes referring to club archives, to interviewing aged cricketers available for conversation within a range of accessible post codes.
Some even refer to this as ‘oral and archival history research’.
Woodhouse has researched extensively for this book … and to say this one need not blur the distinction between search and research. He has spoken to some of the dramatis personae who were still available for comment, but does not lay too much emphasis on this. He depends on contemporary accounts a lot more, and multiple ones at that.

What specifically delighted me was the amount of cultural references – novels, drama, poetry, lyrics – that Woodhouse refers to while constructing his narrative. No, this being West Indies, his allusions are not restricted to VS Naipaul and CLR James. It is obvious that he has read voraciously, passionately and extensively. From George Lamming to Sam Selvon, from John Wain to Errol John, such references are aplenty.

All through Woodhouse combines all these elements into the tale to weave everything into a fascinatingly told story. That is the other fascinating bit about the book.
A book is finally just that - a book. It needs to be crafted for reading … a plot that many authors of serious non-fiction lose in the maze of facts and details. That is never the case with this volume. Woodhouse tells the story in a masterly manner, and it remains engrossingly readable all through.

Is there no place to put in the mandatory nit-pick? Perhaps one, a very minor one.
While speaking of Australia’s role in Bailey’s formative development, Woodhouse writes of the 1948 series when his three encounters with Bradman’s Invincibles were all lost by an innings and the Essex all-rounder’s aggregate figures were 63-7-283-4.
There were actually four encounters… for Cambridge, Essex, Gentlemen of England  (all lost by an innings) and for South (drawn). Bailey’s figures were 84-7-408-6. And perhaps one could add that the experience included 721 scored in a day, a scar one cannot quite erase.
As one can see, this is a very minor point indeed.

To sum up, this is the best cricket book I have read in a long, long time. Not since Through the Remembered Gate by Stephen Chalke have I read a book of the genre that can be classified as pure literature without any disclaimer.

No wonder then that it comes from the same Fairfield stable that has now been taken over by Nightwatchman.

So, once again I repeat what I wrote at the beginning of my short review…Buy it, Read It, Savour it.