D’Oliveira’s
ambition led him to look for possibilities outside his homeland. Persistence secured
him a contract with Middleton in the Central Lancashire League in 1960. From
there his talent took him to a county career with Worcestershire and 44 Tests
for England. In 1968 he was selected to tour South Africa (after originally
being omitted), which caused the South Africa’s Prime Minister Johannes Vorster
to cancel the tour, and thus hasten his country’s long period of sporting
isolation.
It is a
story of some personal significance for me. D’Oliveira was first picked for
England in 1966 when I was a young fan enjoying his first cricket season. I was
drawn to his forceful, fluent batting, while the nascent proof reader and
pedant within was intrigued that a name could have an apostrophe in it,
or—wrongly according to Oborne—sometimes be written beginning with a lower case
letter.
If 1966 was
my cricketing foundation year, then 1968 was the start of political awareness,
triggered not by events on the streets of Prague or Paris that momentous
summer, but by those in the committee rooms of Lord’s. The understanding that a
man could be refused a place on a cricket team on the grounds of colour was a
shock; that South Africa was organised on racial grounds with whites the
superior race was incomprehensible. As a
nine year old I knew that the proposition that people with other-than-white
skins were inferior in some way to be a nonsense. My certainty on this matter
was because I had seen Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Wes Hall, Clive Lloyd, John
Shepherd, Asif Iqbal, Basil D’Oliveira and others play cricket. No further
information was required.
I have taken
too long to acquire Peter Oborne’s 2004 re-telling of the D’Oliveira story. It
won every award for which it was eligible, and deservedly so. Oborne is a
political journalist with a love of cricket, which is the right way round for
this assignment. He explains the historical and political contexts—everything
to this story—with the utmost clarity and brings the skills of a journalist
accustomed to revealing the mysteries of Westminster to the task of unravelling
the events around the selection of the MCC touring party in August 1968.
Oborne is
particularly strong on D’Oliveira’s cricketing career in South Africa before he
left for England. He argues that D’Oliveira was so good a young player that had
it not been for the whites-only policy he would have been selected for the
South African touring party to England in 1951, 15 years before he finally
played Test cricket at the age of 34 (D’Oliveira maintained the fiction that he
was 31 at that time; he believed that he would not have been selected had his
real age been known). His actual Test career was a proud one: five hundreds, an
average of 40 and a partnership breaker with his deceptively plain medium-pace
bowling. But Oborne makes a persuasive case that had D’Oliveira’s talent been
allowed to flourish unfettered by Apartheid he would have been one of the great
players.
It is
impossible to read without outrage the description of the indignities that were
part of the everyday life of D’Oliveira and every other non-white South
African. The deep imprint that daily humiliation leaves on a human being was
shown by D’Oliveira’s constant unease during his first days in England:
The following day Kay[i] and D’Oliveira caught the train to Manchester. As they walked down the platform, D’Oliveira asked anxiously which was his separate carriage, but Kay firmly told him that things were not done that way in Britain…Kay told Arlott later that “he dined on the train, a factor that he could not get over because he was allowed to eat and travel with white people”
Osborne’s
account reflects very differently upon the reputations of two of the heroes of
my youth. John Arlott, the great commentator and writer, had been appalled by
his experiences in South Africa as the BBC’s man on the 1948/9 MCC tour. So when
letters in green ink from an unknown South African seeking a league contract
began to arrive in the late fifties they were taken seriously. Arlott’s copious
humanity made him determined to secure his correspondent the position as a
league professional that was his dream. The political Arlott knew that if successful,
he would be striking a blow against Apartheid, though he could not have
predicted how great a blow it would be. Without John Arlott, there would have
been no story to tell.
Colin
Cowdrey, on the other hand, emerges as a man of straw. During the South African
tour business Cowdrey assured D’Oliveira of his support while arguing against
his selection in the privacy of the committee room, his responsibilities as
captain compromised by his need to be universally well thought of.
Oborne’s
analysis of the events around the selection of the MCC tour party to South
Africa in 1968 is forensic. He concludes that there was no conspiracy to omit
D’Oliveira. Examination of the sequence of events around the selection has
never supported the view that there was. Not even the bunglers of Lord’s could
have conspired with such incompetence.
D’Oliveira
had had a poor tour of the West Indies in the early months of 1968. He had
become a drinker comparatively late in life and was making up for lost time;
late nights on the rum had taken their toll. Here was a chance, had it so
wanted, for the Establishment to sideline D’Oliveira for the summer. Yet he was
selected for the first Ashes Test, won by Australia, and top scored with an
unbeaten 87 in the second innings. Then he was dropped.
The
conspiracy kicking in? If so, it had no resolve. D’Oliveira had a below-average
summer with Worcestershire and made no case for a recall up to and including
the naming of the twelve for the final Test, from which he was omitted. Debate
about the political viability of the tour all but ceased so unlikely had
D’Oliveira’s selection become. Then Roger Prideaux, the Northamptonshire opener
(and former Kent player), dropped out and was somewhat improbably replaced with
D’Oliveira, a middle-order batsman. Had there been a plot to exclude D’Oliveira
this lifeline would never have been thrown.
He grabbed
it with such relish. 158, gloriously made, and, as a bowler, the breakthrough
as the final hour of the game began, opening the door for Derek Underwood to mesmerise
the remaining Australians on a drying pitch for a series-levelling victory.
Now, they had to pick D’Oliveira, surely.
There were
ten people in the six-hour selection meeting—the four selectors, Cowdrey, tour
manager Les Ames (who had dealt with D’Oliveira’s drinking issues in the
Caribbean) and four representatives of MCC (in whose name England toured in
those days). Oborne talked to chairman of the selectors Doug Insole and studied
all available accounts. Insole told the assembled group that that they should
proceed as if they were picking a team to tour Australia. The political context
was not referred to, which is not to say that it was not a factor.
Oborne
believes that “at least one of the people in the room was acting as a spy for
South Africa”. Others were aware of backdoor communications from the highest
levels in the Cape affirming that the tour would be cancelled were D’Oliveira
picked. Oborne does not go quite as far as he might have done in exploring the
effect that this knowledge had on proceedings.
Though it
would be unfair to cast all those present at the selection meeting as apologists
for Apartheid, the view that sport and politics should be separate would have found
no dissenters. The idea that the cancellation of a major tour would result from
their deliberations would have been anathema to every one of them. It seems to
me that this knowledge was enough to sway them, enough to explain why, as
Oborne says, D’Oliveira had no strong advocates.
Oborne
outlines the cricketing argument against D’Oliveira’s selection and points out
that Colin Milburn (a player born in the wrong time if ever there was) also
missed out, and that Ken Barrington nearly did so. Prideaux and the young Keith
Fletcher (despite a famously disastrous debut at Headingley a few weeks before)
were picked.
The
all-rounder position went to Tom Cartwright, who was no more a true
all-rounder, worth picking as a batsman or bowler, than D’Oliveira. They were at
opposite ends of the all-rounder spectrum, D’Oliveira a No 5 or 6 batsman who
could trundle efficiently, Cartwright a medium pacer of renowned parsimony
(77-32-118-2 v Australia at Old Trafford in 1964—glad I missed that one) but a No
8 or 9 in a Test order at best.
Cartwright
was one of the few left-wing cricketers, and Oborne raises the possibility that
his withdrawal through injury two weeks was politically inspired. Though D’Oliveira
was not a like-for-like replacement—Insole had made a point of saying that he
was regarded as a batsmen only in South African conditions—a fortnight of furore
had made the selectors repentant, and his addition to the touring party was a
formality, as inevitable as the subsequent cancellation of the tour by the
appalling Vorster.
Oborne timed
his book well, sufficiently distanced from the events for historical perspective,
but while many of the protagonists were still alive and talking. The result is one
of cricket’s most important pieces of literature. It is clear-headed and
insightful about the cricket and the politics. Most of all it does justice to
its subject, portraying D’Oliveira as a man of decency and dignity, and reminding
us what a fine cricketer he was.
[i]
John Kay, cricket correspondent of the Manchester
Evening News whose contacts had secured D’Oliveira his contract with
Middleton.
