Remembering Sir Everton Weekes, the last of the Three Ws
At last, cricket is back. But even the game’s most ardent and devoted followers won’t be surprised that summer gave Southampton a miss and that the rain gods dominated the first day of the Test.
The start was delayed by the most irritating of announcements – a wet outfield. Then the rain came down. Writing this column before the second day’s play is due to start, one can only hope for sunshine. Some will think hope is not enough and will try prayer.
Meanwhile, there was happy news in compensation; amateur cricket will be permitted to restart on Saturday. There are of course restrictions, some of which seem rather silly given what is happening and are at least tacitly permitted in other sports… notably football. The cricket ball must be handled as little as possible and disinfected at regular intervals; football matches aren’t interrupted by disinfection of the ball after throw-ins. Social distancing must be observed – just as it isn’t in football when a corner kick is taken. Batsmen must sanitise their bats after dismissal, an alternative, I suppose, to hurling the willow disgustedly away.
Tea must not be served. This is bizarre, even weird. Pubs and restaurants are open all over the land (except, I suppose, in Leicester). People are enjoying picnics in parks and on beaches, but the tea interval is deemed dangerous, even though at many clubs, like our local one, tea, sandwiches and cakes are usually served outside the pavilion when the sun is shining. It’s not clear whether there is a prohibition on players bringing their own thermos and tiffin box.
A maximum of thirty people “to include players, coaches and official is allowed”: so, no wives, husbands or children permitted. No spectators of course. Does this mean you mustn’t stop, sit on the grass beyond the boundary and watch a game being played in a public park or on the village green? If it does, it’s daft. All in all, many of the conditions being imposed seem pretty fair nonsense.
On a more important matter, when rain stopped play at the Test, Sky, to their credit, devoted time to having Ebony Rainford-Brent and Michael Holding speak about racial prejudice in cricket. Both were eloquent and persuasive, and sadly what they said is still necessary. Overt discrimination, if not what it was, has not yet disappeared. All the same, it’s fair to remember that it is now sixty years since the West Indian captain had to be a white man.
Michel Holding, born in 1954, was six when Frank Worrell became the first black man to be appointed captain of the West Indies. That was thirty-two years after they first played Test cricket. Though not appointed for a series as Worrell was, George Headley, the first great West Indian batsman, did captain their team in the First Test in 1947. Headley born 1909, played only three tests after the Second World War, the last against England again when he was forty-four. He had 40 Test innings in his career, scoring 10 hundreds, and averaging 60. Since his highest score in five post-war innings was only 29, his average would have been a few points higher if his career had ended in 1939. That year he became the first player from any country to score a century in both innings of a Test at Lord’s. The Press called him the “Black Bradman”; he was that good. West Indians responded by calling Bradman “the White Headley”. They were born with a few months of each other, Headley just the younger. Australia never toured the West Indies till 1954, so they met only in three Tests in Australia in 1930-1. Bradman scored two centuries (the second a double), Headley one. The Australian attack was probably stronger. Clarrie Grimmett took 25 wickets in the three matches. If you would like to know just how good Headley was, you should read C L R James, the first great West Indian cricket writer, still one of the best ever.
The news of the death of Sir Everton Weekes, the last of the Three Ws, was sad, though death at 95 isn’t depressing. Pity, of course, he didn’t make his hundred, but then in his Test career, he was out four or five times in the 90s, most famously being run out for 94 against India when a hundred would have been his sixth in successive Test innings. He was a batsman who was both correct and destructive. Like Bradman, Headley, and Len Hutton, he preferred to keep the ball on the ground. There were, of course, far fewer sixes in those days than there now with modern bats, which allow even mishits to soar over the boundary.
His death means that only Sonny Ramadhin survives of the 1950 West Indian side, the first to win a series in England – and none of the England team who played against them. There was a lovely interview with Ramadhin in The Guardian. Only nineteen in 1950 and the first of Indian extraction to play Test cricket for the West Indies, he baffled almost everyone that summer, bowling both off-breaks and leg-breaks with no easily discernible change of action. Hutton played him best, he said, even though even he couldn’t pick him, but trusted his judgement to play him off the pitch. John Goddard, a well-to-do white man of course, was the captain, and Sonny recalled that after their victory at Lord’s where he took 11 wickets, Goddard produced a case of his own estate’s Rum. The young Ramadhin didn’t drink, preferring ginger beer, though many years later he would keep a pub in Lancashire where he played League cricket for many years. Goddard was a more than useful Test cricketer, averaging around 30 with both bat and ball, but returning as captain in 1957 he did Sonny great damage.
That was in the first Test at Edgbaston. England was all out in the first innings for 186, Ramadhin 7 for 49. West Indies replied with 474. Ramadhin took two early wickets and then came the great or infamous stand of 411 between Peter May and Colin Cowdrey. Unable to read Ramadhin they cynically played him with the front pad, reaching down the wicket and trusting on the umpire’s reluctance to give a front foot lbw. This was bad. Goddard’s captaincy was worse. He had Ramadhin bowl 98 overs, and though he still went for less than 2 an over as indeed he did for most of his Test career, something was broken. He was never quite the same bowler again, though he would play Test cricket for another four or five years and have a long and successful career in the Lancashire League and, later, a couple of good seasons for Lancashire in the Championship.
Now one wonders, as I didn’t then or for many many years. Were even the Three Ws – Worrell, Weekes and Walcott – too deferential, even cowed, to tell Goddard to take Sonny off, let someone else break this partnership, then bring him back to bamboozle the middle and lower order? Or did one of them make this suggestion only to have it arrogantly dismissed?
As I say, one wonders. Incidentally, Goddard himself bowled only 6 of the 258 overs in that England second innings. Was he shirking his responsibility or, to be more generous, did he suppose or at least hope that the umpire would, at last, give May or Cowdrey out, lbw? Johnny Wardle, England’s twelfth man, great slow bowler himself, thought the whole thing shocking, disgraceful. May and Cowdrey should have been out twenty times at least. Of course, there was no DRS then to see justice done.