by Abhishek Mukherjee
August, 1906.
After putting up 296, Nottinghamshire bowled out the touring West Indians for 149, and set them 327. It was a tough ask, but Oliver Layne dropped anchor at one end, while a teenager took charge at the other.
He raced to 108 in 125 minutes, setting up a chase that ended with time running out when they were 292/7. The Trent Bridge crowd witnessed a day of intense cricket, and cheered for the boy who had made their money worth.
After the tour, WG Grace marked him as a future star. It turned out to be prophetic. Despite his toothbrush moustache, George Challenor was indeed the first world-class batsman in the history of the islands.
Challenor scored 5,822 runs at 38.55 with 15 hundreds. For perspective, Victor Trumper averaged 44.57 and Clem Hill 43.57, and both had exposure to quality domestic cricket to hone their skills and prepare themselves before tours to England.
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The West Indians always had their bowlers. Learie Constantine, George Francis, Joe Small (all genuine pacers), Snuffy Browne, George John (both medium-fast) and Victor Pascall (left-arm spin) – all of them black – had all impressed on the 1923 tour of England.
Unfortunately, the matches followed a pattern, While the bowlers kept bothering the opposition, their batsmen were hardly consistent, which led to collapses. And match after match did the man they called The Father of West Indian Batting prevent utter disasters.
He finished the tour with 1,556 runs at 51.86. Of his teammates, Small (776 at 31.04) was the next best. Nobody else managed even 600 runs.
In fact, the whole team managed 6,310 runs, between them, which meant that Challenor scored a quarter of the entire aggregate. Of the eight hundreds the tourists scored on the tour, Challenor alone had six. He crossed ninety twice more, had an 87, and five more fifties.
In fact, with a 200-run cut-off, only Patsy Hendren and Phil Mead averaged more than Challenor in the entire English season. Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe got less. Let that sink in.
The England cricket fraternity had expected, and witnessed such feats from Australians, not West Indians.
When West Indies played their first Tests, on the 1928 tour, they featured Challenor. Unfortunately, at forty, he was well past his prime, and could do little in a series where West Indies lost all three Tests by an innings. However, on this tour he became the first West Indian to reach 5,000 First-Class runs.
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Challenor was white. He came from a privileged background. The edge his complexion gave him over his teammates perhaps makes any comparison unfair.
But it remains a fact that West Indies never had a world-class opener, let alone a pair, since Challenor, till Allan Rae and Jeff Stollmeyer came along. And Barbados, till Conrad Hunte.
Keith Sandiford, who had elsewhere pointed out that Challenor used to play for the "most snobbish and elitist of clubs," wrote that "the only true cricket champion produced by Barbados before World War II was George Challenor."
CLR James had (rightly) pointed out had Constantine had the racial privilege of Challenor, he could have chosen to spend a life at home. The same James had to agree that Challenor "set a standard and pattern for West Indian batting from which at times it may have deviated, but which it never lost."
George Challenor was born on 28 June 1888.