by Arunabha Sengupta
(The Stop The Seventy Tour is dealt with in meticulous detail in the author’s new book Apartheid: A Point to Cover)
From invasions and sit ins on rugby pitches to climbing or handcuffing oneself to the posts, the Stop The Seventy Tour movement had seen everything during the visit of the Springbok rugby side. While Dawie de Villiers and his men made their weary way around Britain, they were welded shut in their hotel rooms, their bus to the venue was once hijacked. All the while chants, slogans and marches continued across the land.
The protesters hit the cricket grounds as well, even while the rugby tour was being hounded. In a synchronised move, anti-apartheid and anti-tour slogans were written across the premises of 14 of the 17 county clubs in the course of one night—specifically Surrey, Middlesex, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Essex, Lancashire, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Kent, Yorkshire, Sussex, Glamorgan and Warwickshire.
After all, the rugby tour was just the dress rehearsal. The adamant, and largely callous, decision by MCC that the 1970 tour of the South African cricket team would continue as usual—even after Vorster’s refusal to accept D’Oliveira as one of the visitors has cancelled the 1968-69 England tour to South Africa—had set the entire country aflame with protests. The goal of the movement was to stop the 1970 cricket Tour
Now it was May, and it had been a while since the rugby side had made their gingerly departure after a horrid and unsuccessful tour. The cricket tour of the summer had metamorphosed into a political hot potato, a massive issue of international proportions. While MCC held on to their blinkered, rigid stand, leaders of a number of countries of the world were losing sleep.
It was at this moment that innovative protests reached a new high. It was orchestrated by the ingenious David Wilton-Godberford—a 20-year-old London biology student, who had decided to unleash a plague of locusts on the grounds to stop the tour.
By the time he talked to The Times on the evening of 10 May 1970, Wilton-Godberford had already bred 50,000 locusts, mostly desert and African migratory, at his Colwyn Bay residence. The insects, up to 1.5 inches long, were kept in glass-fronted cages, and were kept warm by electric bulbs. He also had many eggs in his possession. The eventual target was 100,000 locusts.
The 11 May edition of The Times quoted him saying: “Anything up to 100,000 locusts will be let loose at a particular ground and I think the plan is fool-proof. They will ravage every blade of grass and green foliage. The greatest care will be taken to ensure they are in the correct physiological stage. So that their appetites will not be impaired they will not be fed for 24 hours before the moment of truth […] It takes 70,000 hoppers [locusts] 12 minutes to consume one cwt. [about 51 kg] of grass. The crack of a solid army of locusts feeding on the grass will sound like flames. The South Africans are going to dread this trip; they will see more locusts than they have ever done back home”
Wilton-Godberford had thought out the entire thing. At the time of the ‘onslaught’, the insects would not have grown wings, and the weather would kill them within a month, before their wings would develop.
As Abhishek Mukherjee later wrote: “Cricket has seen its share of insect invasions. Swarms of bees have stopped even Test matches; flying ants, grasshoppers, and leatherjackets … have caused hold-ups; and flies often disrupt batsmen’s concentration in Australia (Kevin Pietersen even swallowed one at Melbourne).”
So, this incredible direct-action method was not extremely farfetched.
Peter Hain and his young brigade of Direct Action activists, Rev David Sheppard and the other champions of more conservative methods of protest, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Labour government thinktank, and even some Conservative MPs played stellar roles in the ultimate cancellation of the tour.
From bus hijacks to daubing of the grounds to cuffing oneself to the goal posts to organising an impromptu cricket match in front of Lord’s, there were plenty of incredible manners of protest.
But, David Wilton-Godberford’s role—minor though it might have been—stands out as unique even in those days when ingenuity was the order of the day.