Cricket: A Modern Anthology. Jonathan Agnew

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СКАЧАТЬ movement is now well documented. The television coverage of the Basil D’Oliveira affair and the 1971 Springbok tour to Australia that encountered so much anti-apartheid hostility meant that the horrors of the system and the vehement protests were brought into people’s daily lives. The rest, as they say, is history.

THE BASIL D’OLIVEIRA AFFAIR

       Basil D’Oliveira

      I held the envelope, staring at it, wondering what was inside but somehow scared to open it. We knew no one in England and I knew of it only as a place where, according to others, I should go to try my luck as a cricketer. Naomi nudged a little closer. She didn’t say a word, but I could feel her willing me…. “Go on, open it, it will be all right.”

      And how right she was! Suddenly the room, already filled with the early morning sunshine, seemed twenty times brighter. After nearly ten years of rumour that I would be going overseas, here was the first real sign. The letter was from John Arlott. Our success on the Kenya tour had convinced him that someone should take the initiative to find out if this chap D’Oliveira did have real potential. He was prepared to do everything he could to get me to England, but first he wanted to hear from me if I was interested.

      At any time during the previous ten years I would have dived in off the Cape and started swimming up the West coast. Now I had to stop and think, think for two, and perhaps even for three. Naomi and I had been married three months and we had just begun to suspect that she was pregnant. “Well,” she said. “What are you waiting for?” I couldn’t say much. I was trying to imagine the consequences of now doing something which for so long had seemed impossible. I heard Naomi say, “You know you’ve got to go, darling. I’ll wait here until…”. She didn’t finish the sentence. Like me, she couldn’t guess what would happen after I had said “Yes”.

      I dressed and went in search of Benny Bansda, an Indian chum who had been my champion for years. He was head barman in one of Cape Town’s biggest hotels, The Grand in Adderley Street. Benny was also a prolific writer on all sporting matters and, after years of campaigning on my behalf, had written the article for World Sports Magazine which had finally persuaded John Arlott to write to me.

      Benny’s first reaction was, “Great! What are you waiting for?” I confessed that my big fear was that I didn’t know—had no way of knowing—if I was really good enough. Benny said: “There’s only one way to find out.” With that he grabbed a piece of paper and he wrote to John Arlott saying that, if any specific job could be found, I would leave right away.

      Before I got back home everybody on Signal Hill, it seemed, knew already that I was on my way to England. I learned later that, when John Arlott received my letter, he contacted John Kay of the Manchester Evening News and an authority on Lancashire League cricket. John knew that Middleton, for whom he had played, was looking for a new professional and had been negotiating with Wes Hall, the West Indies fast bowler. Wes had provisionally accepted the offer but he insisted that the announcement should be delayed for several months. I gather that Wes was worried he might lose his job and be out of work for six months if it was learned that he was going to take up a League job in England in the spring of 1960.

      When the news did leak out that Wes was thinking of going to England, he wrote to Middleton to explain that he could not complete the contract. This coincided with the moment that John Kay received the inquiry from John Arlott. Together, they persuaded Middleton to make me an offer. It was £450 for a year’s contract, out of which I had to pay my fare to England, which would cost about £200.

      This offer, for which I had waited so long, carried with it its own problems. When I sat down to work out the money matters, I realized that I would have to turn it down because I simply could not afford to travel. I had no money. My parents had none.

      I had been earning and contributing to the household expenses. The doctor confirmed that Naomi was expecting our first child and, even if I could have managed to live in England, there wouldn’t have been a shilling to send home for Naomi or my parents out of what would have been left of my contract money.

      I was about ready to accept it as a dream lost when the coloured lads in Cape Town and all over South Africa threw themselves into a campaign, started by Bansda, to raise the money to send me to England. I think that they, as much as I, felt the honour of an English club coming to them for a professional. Nobody had been asked before and no one had gone before. Coloured clubs all over the country started to arrange special games and collections and white South Africans joined in.

      I have never forgotten that, without the help of white South African cricketers—including Peter Van der Merwe who subsequently captained the Springbok Test team—and other first-class players like Jim Pothecary and Dick Westcott, the money which was needed to get me to England might never have been raised. These cricketers played in a side led by Gerald Innes, a former South African tour player who arranged a Sunday match against my own team. This game brought one of the biggest crowds ever seen on the Claremont ground in Cape Town. Together the coloured cricketers and the white cricketers went around with collecting boxes and raised over £150.

      I don’t know exactly how this match came to be staged or who turned blind eyes, but we knew then—and there has been plenty of evidence since—that the dogma of Mr. Vorster’s cabinet is not by any means a true reflection of the wishes of many South African cricketers.

      Benny Bansda’s campaign eventually raised £450. A word like gratitude seems so inadequate. Every moment I live as a first-class cricketer I owe to all those kind people who spontaneously got together to give me the chance of a new career.

      Raising the money to come to England was not the whole problem. The brief talks with the English county cricketers who had been in South Africa on coaching trips had taught me something about the conditions which existed in England. But now I needed to have it all analysed. Particularly, I needed to know what conditions were like in the League. I had heard that they were different from county cricket but I had no idea in what way.

      The man who could best help me was Tom Reddick, who had previously played for Middlesex and Nottinghamshire, and subsequently had been coach to Lancashire. At that time, as I have said, he was coaching in Cape Town. There was probably nobody anywhere in South Africa who knew more about League conditions.

      I telephoned him and he said I could go to his house right away. His first words were: “You might just as well know now, lad, you are going into one of the hardest forms of cricket in the world, but I wish you well.” He said he would prefer to see me going into county cricket but, if I wanted to try the League, he would give me all the help he could.

      First, he told me exactly what a professional had to do. It wouldn’t be just playing cricket on Saturdays and lazing around for the rest of the week. It meant working really hard for the club on the ground, helping with the wickets, and coaching the local lads by night.

      Four nights each week I visited Tom at his house. I would be waiting for him at six o’clock when he came home and, though he had already devoted a full day to coaching the university students, he would patiently spend hours teaching me everything he could. Not the least important was how he tuned me mentally for the change.

      By the time Tom finished with me, my feet were once again firmly on the ground. He warned me that cricket in the Central Lancashire League would not only be vastly different from the cricket which I had been playing, but it would also be different from the first Test match I had seen in Cape Town ten years before, which was indelibly printed on my mind.

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