Cricket in Barbados is more than a game, says historian BRIAN STODDART

Ever since CLR James released his seminal Beyond a Boundary in 1963, we have all known that cricket has always been way more than a game in the Caribbean. All that background social meaning was displayed in Fire in Babylon and a concomitant social erosion has dogged the West Indies for the last 30 years and more.

  Yet, outside the writings of Clem Seecharan in Guyana, the story of all that has remained largely generalised, stuck at a polemic rather than a detailed local level – even though we also know that each major West Indian island has a distinctly different profile. As Clem points out, the ‘Indian dimension’ (as in Rohan Kanhai and Shivnarine Chanderpaul) stalked Guyana and Trinidad – but not Barbados.

And then there was the sheer, overwhelming dominance of Barbados in the Caribbean game, an island just 34 by 23 kilometres and rarely exceeding a population of 250,000 at any point in its confronting history.

The deeply ingrained colour, class and caste divisions that marked Bajan cricket were a major source of the island’s social reorganisation following the 1834 abolition of slavery. Chattel slavery was replaced by a complex set of social restrictions that saw the elite plantocracy preserve its social power.

For generations, participation was driven more by exclusion than inclusion. By the 1930s there were even two separate competitions. The Barbados Cricket Association involved white elite and semi-elite clubs, respectable mixed race ones and the famous Empire CC which was meant to be for the black majority, yet imposed membership restrictions. At the opposite spectrum, the Barbados Cricket League was for the impoverished masses. Every player on the island ‘knew’ which team was for them and, more importantly, not for them.

The world got to see some of the best ever players only by chance. The iconic Everton Weekes grew up in a slum next to the island’s most important ground and provided practice for its white members. He got to play against those whites only because, after playing in the BCL, he joined the Army XI in the island’s premier competition.

A decade or so later, Garry Sobers’ window of opportunity opened only after he was placed in the police band by the force’s white boss, a member of  the elite white club. Frank Worrell left the island to escape those strictures and was castigated for most of his short life for having done so.

Coming from a slightly better off family, the third of the ’Three Ws’, Clyde Walcott, joined the respectable brown club but mostly made his way by becoming a coach in British Guiana (Guyana).

Those rising to global attention were vastly outnumbered by those in the Barbados Cricket League who did not, despite being just as if not more talented but were weighed down by their backgrounds. For many of them, their hardest task was to overcome the inherent social barriers and gain selection for Barbados.

Putting all this together into book form began for me with the archives – not just the cricket ones but also the broader sources sketching a social system totally alien to most of us here in Australia. I learned of the individual struggles that went on for recognition, prime among them the man who became known as Fitz Hinds. A house painter turned professional player, he was never allowed to be a contender for the island’s elite XI. Yet so good was he that he was selected for a West Indies touring side to England in 1900. He typified the plight of most of the island’s poor – chattel slaves before 1834, wage ones after and struggling to rise above their station while their former owners became even richer, compensated by the British government for the loss of their slaves.

I conducted countless interviews, too, with the likes of  Everton and Clyde through to Tony Cozier and Ezra Moseley and relative unknowns like the marvellous George Harris, known as ‘Two Man’ as he was said to be twice as fast as the normal fast bowler.

There was to be another defining research angle, some practical fieldwork – as I like to call it – involving me playing for a season in 1985 with Maple CC, up on the west coast, close to where the British had originally settled.  I had six months leave from my university to do the research and took another six months unpaid leave to make it a year, went to live, research and play in Barbados at a time when the old restrictions were being tested only because the supply of white players ran out.

It was one of the best years of my life. I was the only white man in our XI, in fact the only one in the whole league, so at most grounds where I turned up with my teammates the spectators (and there were still a lot of them then) would inevitably soon be shouting:

                        ‘There’s a white man playing for Maple!’

                         ‘There’s a white man out there.’

It was a bonus for me that Maple¹ was not one of the hallowed clubs, as I met a far wider range of people than I would have otherwise. I saw and experienced the later 20th century consequences of all those restrictive social practices developed during the early to mid-19th century, and how that provides Barbados with ever-present challenges both in cricket and more broadly.

The book then, is a definitive version not only of how cricket came to prominence in Barbados – but how it has also played a major role in shaping island life as it is now.

PICTURED: Brian with Ken Piesse at the Mt Eliza launch of his wonderful new book