Jamaica's first black cricketers
published: Sunday | July 17, 2005

Arnold Bertram

IN 2007, Jamaica will be hosting the World Cup Cricket Competition and engaging the international cricketing fraternity on Jamaican soil. Billion dollar investments are being made to ensure that the physical infrastructure is in place, in the expectation of unprecedented expansion of tourism and the entire service economy. These activities are also taking place at a time when the dethronement in 1995 of the West Indies as world cricket champions by Australia, and the continuing decline of regional cricket is not only a matter of great concern, but also a source of humiliation for Caribbean people.

Globalisation it seems has unhinged the nationalist agenda associated with West Indies cricket under the leadership of Worrell, Lloyd and Richards. The present generation of players it seems has no intention of carrying "the burden of responsibility for nationalist pride, regional integration and viability of the nation state. They see themselves as apolitical, transnational, global professionals who desire to maximise financial earnings within an attractive market and are guided by no other considerations".

PRIMACY OF CRICKET

The rebuilding process is urgent and one dimension is to have a greater understanding of the social context in which cricket emerged and the battles for racial equality and democracy that were fought to make cricket an integral part of the national culture. The emergence of multi-racial cricket in Jamaica is certainly a point of departure.

On February 8, 1902, at Sabina Park, Jamaica's cricket team took the field against a visiting English team comprising university players led by R.A. Bennett, which included the Oxford spin-bowler, B.J. Bosanquet, who invented the 'googly', and the outstanding Cambridge all-rounder, E.M. Dowson. The Governor of Jamaica, Sir Augustus William Lawson Manning, himself a cricketer was on hand to welcome the visitors and to remind the audience of the primacy of cricket as a cultural component of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Jamaica's team was led by a 44-year-old Englishman, the Inspector General of Police, E.F. Wright, who had played with the legendary W.G. Grace for Gloucestershire. Playing for British Guiana in the regional tournament of 1882, he emerged as the first great name in West Indies cricket, scoring 123 out of a total of 168, and taking four wickets for 32 runs in 32 overs against Trinidad.

THE EXCLUSIVE PASTIME OF THE RULING ELITE

Yet despite the presence of these outstanding personalities, the public's attention was riveted on two black players, Samuel C. Snow and Frederick Adolphus Foster, who were making history as the first of their race to represent Jamaica in cricket. What was the social framework in which cricket emerged? What factors had contributed to such a radical shift from the exclusivism and elitism that characterised the game, and what were the origins of the two standard bearers of multi-racialism?

The English game of cricket had emerged in Jamaica between the abolition of slavery in 1838 and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 as the exclusive pastime of the planter class. Jamaica's first two cricket clubs, Vere and Clarendon, and the St. Jago, were established by planters in 1857 as social institutions for whites only, and it is instructive to note that in the three parishes where these clubs emerged, out of a total population of 47,456 only 183 persons had the right to vote.

From the sugar plantations the organized game moved to the island's commercial capital, where in January 1863 the ruling elite gathered in the hall of the Collegiate School to launch the Kingston Cricket Club. Among the founders were the colonial secretary, the assistant colonial secretary, the postmaster and the collector general of Jamaica, the assistant manager of the Colonial Bank, the manager of the Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society, the top brass of the British militia and the Canon of the Church of England in Jamaica.

The patron of the club was the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, who two years later as governor would preside over the most ruthless repression of the Morant Bay rebellion. Like its predecessors, the membership of the Kingston Cricket Club was white and this exclusiveness was guaranteed not only by an elaborate set of procedures to join but also by the cost of membership.

The formation of Kensington in 1879 and Melbourne in 1892 continued the pattern established by the Kingston Cricket Club of excluding blacks. David Suarez in his essay, 'A History of Melbourne Cricket Club', noted that "not one black person could be found among the 58 members of the club in 1894." Seven Jamaicans, all members of the Kingston Cricket Club, were included in the first West Indies team to tour Canada and the United States in 1886. The large number of Jamaicans in the team was more a reflection of their ability to pay their way than their expertise in the game. The team performed satisfactorily in Canada but was humiliated by the United States.

The West Indies captain's report on the team's performance stressed the need for more tours, not recognising that the social base of cricket was too narrow to achieve better results. Up until then the closest blacks had got to the organised game was to cut the field and prepare the wicket, except for those rare occasions when the more liberal whites used them to bowl in practice sessions. Still, the enthusiasm of blacks for cricket was evident everywhere. The historian, Algernon Aspinal, provides a graphic description of this yearning. "Black people are particularly enthusiastic about the game. It is quite common to see tiny black children innocent of clothing indulging in it with all the assurance of their elders using sugar canes for wickets, coconut palm leaf for a bat, and whatever they can lay their hands on for a ball."

DISMANTLING RACISM

In 1884 representative government returned to Jamaica after nearly two decades of the Crown colony government. The campaign to restore an elected assembly was part of a larger movement for an expansion of civil rights and for racial equality that was gathering momentum under the leadership of Dr. Robert Joseph Love. A native of the Bahamas and a trained clergyman, Dr. Love had arrived in Jamaica in 1890. In December 1894 he launched his own newspaper, The Jamaica Advocate, to provide a voice for the black population of the country. His role in creating a new political and racial consciousness earned him the distinction of being Marcus Garvey's mentor, as well as "the first public figure to challenge the tacitly held assumption that black and inferior were synonymous."

The same year that Love launched The Jamaica Advocate, the teachers, who were the largest group of qualified professionals in the island, came together to form the Jamaica Union of Teachers (JUT). This institution provided Robert Love with a base of support for his radical democratic platform, and one of the founders, Thomas Burchell Stephenson, pioneered the introduction of cricket to the elementary schools of Kingston.

This was the base from which a group of elementary school graduates, all enthusiastic cricketers, came together under the leadership of David Ellington, a hackney carriage driver, to form the Jamaica Cricket Club to provide blacks with the opportunity of playing organized cricket at the highest level. F.G.M. Lynch, captain of Kingston Cricket Club between 1891 and 1893, provides a glimpse of the personality around whom the first black players coalesced. "Ellington was as great a cricket enthusiast as I ever met and was the first captain.

He could talk of nothing else, read everything about the game, knew all about players in England and elsewhere and was really cricket mad.".

The next step in the process came in 1895, when the Middlesex batsman, R. Slade Lucas brought the first team of English players to the West Indies. They played three matches in Jamaica and at the end of the tour Kingston Cricket Club hosted a concert in their honour. Blacks were hardly ever invited to such functions, but Lynch, a white liberal who opposed the racial policy of his club sent tickets for the concert to the Jamaica Cricket Club. It was out of this initial contact that R. Slade Lucas took an interest in Ellington's club and sent them equipment. In 1898 the Jamaica Cricket Club was renamed 'Lucas' in honour of its benefactor. R. Slade Lucas had also donated the Challenge Cup which was first competed for in 1897 by just four clubs, Kingston, Kensington, Melbourne and Garrison. Jamaica's Senior Cup Competition had begun.

That same year two English teams toured the West Indies, one led by A. Priestly, which played in Jamaica and the other by Lord Hawke. The latter team included Pelham Warner, a native of Trinidad, who disagreed with the racial policies being pursued by white colonials of excluding black cricketers from the teams representing the islands. He became more fortified in this opinion when Trinidad beat both English teams twice through the superb bowling of its black fast bowlers, Cumberbatch and Woods. Warner wanted the West Indies to send a team to England but was convinced that without the black professionals the team would be unable to compete with most of the English counties. Warner was clearly "a supporter of cricket's democratic impulse, a promoter of popular participation at all its levels, and an advocate of all its finest humanist values."

The following year, on May 11, the West Indian Club Limited was launched in London, and among its aims was the promotion of sports between England and her West Indian colonies, with cricket high on its list of priorities. This was the vehicle which realised Warner's dream of a multi-racial West Indies cricket team touring England, when on May 26, 1900, 17 players, including six blacks left Barbados for the seat of the empire.

There were two Jamaicans on the team, G.V. Livingston and M. M. Kerr. The fact that both were white was hardly an instance of discrimination since they were certainly among the best players in the island. In three Senior Cup seasons, Livingston with his impeccable line and length had claimed 78 wickets in 16 matches for his club, Kensington. In Jamaica's three matches against Priestley's Eleven, Livingston bowled 91 overs and took 15 wickets for 139 runs. Kerr, the Melbourne batting stylist, was described as the most accomplished batsman in the Senior Cup Competition.

It was in 1901 that a start was finally made to dismantle the racism which had become institutionalised in Jamaica's cricket, as Lucas Club with its team of young black proletarians was finally admitted to the Senior Cup competition. Two years before Alexander Dixon had become the first black man to win a seat in the Legislative Council, and while the first black West Indian players were touring England, a Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams launched the Pan-African Association in London.

JAMAICA'S FIRST MULTI-RACIAL TEAM

The Lucas team included the all-rounder, Samuel C. Snow, who had come to settle in Jamaica after leaving his home in Demerara. 'Black' Snow as he was popularly called was regarded as an authority on the game, and actually helped with the development of the younger cricketers. In his first Senior Cup season he was one of the few Lucas players to shine.

That same year another black cricketer who had graduated from the prestigious Jamaica College the previous year, turned out for his first season at Kensington Cricket Club. He was Frederick Adolphus Foster, born in Clarendon to the landowner and businessman, James Theophilus Foster and his wife, Hilda. In his second Senior Cup match he made his first Senior Cup century, and the following year he scored 221 runs to record the season's highest aggregate.

Jamaica went down to an innings defeat in all four matches against Bennett's Eleven. Foster's batting was a major disappointment, but he came good with the ball as the leading wicket taker, claiming 15 wickets in three matches, while Snow's 171 runs placed him at the top of the batting averages. Democracy and multi-racialism had won the day.

Three years later in 1904, Lucas won the Senior Cup and repeated the feat for three successive seasons. Black Jamaican cricketers had finally come into their own. Among the Lucas stars who played for Jamaica were H.H. Shannon, the shoemaker, who could neither read nor write, but whose left-arm spinners proved too much for batsmen to handle and Wallwood 'Poly' Nelson, the wicket keeper, "who never stood back to any bowler and often stumped off the pace bowlers". Finally there was John Kenneth Holt, the graduate of Calabar Elementary School, who began playing for Lucas at age 17 and for Jamaica before his 20th birthday. He went on to play for the West Indies, but will always be remembered as Jamaica's greatest Senior Cup player, scoring more than 8,000 runs including 25 centuries, while taking 400 wickets. He played his last Senior Cup match in 1940 when he was 55 years of age and led his club to victory.