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C. L. R. James and the majesty of cricket
The West Indian writer and historian knew that cricket is far more than
merely a sport
https://thecritic.co.uk/c-l-r-james-and-the-majesty-of-cricket/
Artillery Row
By Andy Owen
Next month, the International Cricket Council (ICC) T20 World Cup will
be held across the West Indies and the US before the West Indies test
team will tour England. This comes at a time when West Indian cricket is
at a low point, which appears all the lower due to the previous heights
it reached. Perhaps no team in history is as revered as the West Indies
team that from 1980 to 1995 did not lose a test series.
As well as producing one of the finest teams in history the West Indies
has also produced one of the finest cricket journalists, C. L. R.
James, who’s Beyond a Boundary, was claimed by journalist John Arlott to
be “the finest book written about the game of cricket.” CLR connects the history of the game to the wider social history of England and Empire illuminating why the game is so important to English national
consciousness yet still contains the discrimination which led the
Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report to conclude it is
not yet a game for everyone. CLR also makes the case as to why in face
of competition from limited overs cricket, the longest form of the game
is worth protecting as a timeless and profound art form.
CLR was born in 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. In Beyond a Boundary,
he recounts the importance of cricket to himself and his community, not
just as recreation but in shaping their moral outlook. He learned
teamwork and the subordination of personal inclinations and interests,
to the good of the whole. He learned to keep “a stiff upper lip” and not
to denounce failures, and “to obey the umpire’s decision without
question, however irrational it was.”
After university, CLR played first-class cricket in the Trinidad league.
He had to choose from clubs divided by class, race, and skin-tone. CLR
writes of his recruitment as a dark-skinned university-educated player
to Maple, a club of the light-skinned lower middle class, instead of the
black lower-middle class, Shannon club. He tells us “…faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by
cutting myself off from the popular dark-skinned side, delayed my
political development for years.” Writer, activist, and CLR’s second
wife, Selma James claimed “he saw the game not only as it was played but
as it was lived — and for West Indians that meant first of all a
colonial society stratified by race and class.”
CLR understood that cricket reflected the society of its time and
influenced society. In the years before independence (Trinidad gained independence in 1962) social and political passions that were denied
normal outlets, expressed themselves in cricket as sport was the only
avenue that they could be expressed in. According to CLR, the clash of
race, caste and class stimulated West Indian cricket. Friend and
cricketer, Learie Constantine, would tell CLR that “they are no better
than we.” In Test matches and in northern league club cricket in
England, Constantine consistently demonstrated this was true.
Constantine encouraged CLR to come to England and put him up when he
did. CLR helped Constantine write Cricket and I — the first book
published in England by a West Indian writing about people and events in
the West Indies. Later Michael Holding, a key bowler in that successful
team of the 1980s claimed, “I have five million West Indians depending
on me to perform at my best so they can walk the streets and be proud.”
It was a pride set in the context of years of colonial subservience.
Confidence on the pitch fueled the independence movement.
When Constantine returned to Trinidad in 1954, he entered politics
becoming a founding member of the People’s National Movement. He later
served as High Commissioner to the UK and served on the Race Relations
Board and the Sports Council.
Those who claim that politics should be kept out of sport lack
understanding. The two are inextricably intertwined. CLR highlights that
even the choices of sports available to you is the result of wider
historical and political forces, recognising that he came to maturity
within a system developed over centuries in another land and
“transplanted as a hot-house flower is transplanted.”
The downward spiral of West Indian cricket is mainly blamed on the
economic lure of franchise twenty-over cricket. The 15-man West Indies
squad for the two-Test tour of Australia this year included seven
uncapped players, with many of their best players unavailable for
selection due to this (South Africa have also sent a test team to New
Zealand without several top players taking part in a domestic
twenty-over tournament instead). But the historical analysis CLR deploys
sheds further light on cricket’s plight. As the independent Caribbean nations, some now republics, look more to the US than the old empire for cultural influence, the role of cricket as a cultural force has
diminished. As wider society’s values have changed the importance of a
sport imbued with different values has changed. CLR’s wider analysis
which traces the game’s history to its roots takes up much of the middle
of his book.
In all essentials the modern game was formed between the late eighteenth-century and the first third of the nineteenth. It was the
product of an England still unconquered by the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), ready to be adopted by Victorian society to help manage the
social changes the Industrial Revolution would cause. In villages across
the country the cricket pitch ranked in symbolic importance with the pub
and the church. The three were intertwined in membership and leadership.
The cricket pitch was the place where religious life and pub life met.
It was an England that whenever it could, ate and drank prodigiously.
According to CLR, it was an England that “was not finicky in morals. It enjoyed life. It prized the virtues of frankness, independence,
individuality, conviviality.” Cricket was created by the yeoman farmer,
the gamekeeper, the potter, the Nottingham coalminer, the Yorkshire
factory hand. These artisans — men of hand and eye — made it before rich and idle young noblemen and some substantial city people contributed
money, organization, and status to establish it.
By 1837, the year that marked the beginning of the Victorian Era, they
had evolved a highly complicated game, popular in origin, yet attracting
the leisured and educated classes. It was a time of profound social
change. The countryside around the growing industrial cities was
emptying, and by 1851 over half the population lived in settlements of
2,500 or more, by the 1890s it was eighty percent. There came into
existence an enormous urban public, proletarian and clerical lower
middle class. With the Factory Act of 1847 they gained freedom on
Saturday afternoons. The Victorians wanted to fill this free time with
not just entertainment or recreation, but something as much spiritual as sporty, that embodied all that was noble in the English character.
Whilst the decade of the 1860s saw the rapid growth of multiple
organized sports, cricket was the paradigm of this nobility. In a
nationalistic era, Englishmen regarded cricket, an exclusively English creation, as proof of their cultural supremacy.
The Victorians set about cleansing the game of its Georgian impurities, removing gambling and corruption to purify it (bookies had sat before
the pavilion at Lord’s openly taking bets). The Victorians glorified the
game as not just a sport played for fun but as a perfect system of
manners, ethics, and morals that would provide spiritual and mental regeneration. The Victorians developed a form of muscular Christianity
which suggested there was something godly about strength and power if it
was not exercised cruelly against the weak. Conversely, physical frailty
was a manifestation of moral and spiritual inadequacy. It needed to be
overcome by prayer, moral living, and exercise.
The relationship between cricket and religion was reinforced through
education. Many headmasters of the time were believers in muscular Christianity. None was more influential than Thomas Arnold, headmaster
of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841. He introduced reforms that were
widely copied by other public schools. CLR believes that Arnold
influenced “one of the most fantastic transformations of education and culture.” The Victorian ruling classes accepted Arnold’s methods, but
took on less of his focus on the cultivation of the intellect focusing
more on the role of organized games, with cricket at the head of the curriculum. Cricket and also football, were both seen as not merely
useful substitutes for undesirable activities — like fighting and inappropriate sexual activities — but vehicles to instill positive
virtues. Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays published in 1857 based
on Arnold’s Rugby was instantly popular and helped take glorification of
this cult of athleticism to the masses. The concept of the chivalrous
knight was revived and transformed into the Christian cricketer. The
playing fields became the centre of school life as they would later be
for CLR thousands of miles away. As CLR notes, “The proof of its
validity is its success, first of all at home and then almost as rapidly abroad, in the most diverse places among peoples living lives which were
poles removed from whence it originally came.”
The spread of cricket at home and throughout the empire came to be seen
as key to creating social cohesion, between classes and between the
ruled and rulers. Revd. G. J. Chester in a sermon delivered in 1859, saw cricket as well as promoting the purity of life, being able to “break
down barriers which unchristian pride has built up between class and
class, and to cement bonds of goodwill and brotherly feeling.” Despite
this many clubs set high membership fees to price out lower classes. As
we have seen, when the colonial administrators eventually let locals
play, clubs would discriminate on race, into the twentieth century.
Whilst it was hoped that crickets might spread a unifying morality,
whose shadow persists in the common usage of cricket terms and phrases,
used to describe moral approaches or ethical quandaries (straight bat,
sticky wicket, bowled a googly, simply isn’t cricket) across the cricket playing nations, it was not a unification of equals.
Indeed, there were significant differences in how cricket was viewed
within England. In the northern leagues in particular, working-class
players began to see cricket as a potential avenue of economic
advancement. Emerging cricket purists feared that sportsmanship departed
when cricket was played so seriously. But, as Arthur Thomson noted,
northern cricket with all its seriousness, was a mirror of northern life
at the time, in the wake of the great cotton slump of the 1860’s. The character of northern cricket reflected harsher realities. In southern
England an aristocratic amateurism prevailed, based on the public school system, in contrast to a northern professionalism focused on club
cricket. Stereotypes from this era have persisted. There is still
intense debate over incidents where the “spirit of cricket” is seen to
be desecrated, such as the Australians’ dismissal of England’s Johnny Bairstow when he thought the ball was dead last summer. This spirit is
the ghost of the Victorian ambition for the game. More and more the
spirit of cricket gives way to actions that give the professional advantage.
Whilst even today, it is not uncommon to use quasi-religious references
when referring to Lords, the home of cricket, the Victorians could not
quite purify the crowd of the Georgian habits, as much as they could not
purify wider society of its pre-Victorian virtues of frankness,
independence, individuality, and conviviality. The tension between the
bawdy pagan England and the urban, urbane, buttoned up, now secularised, muscularly Christian, England was never resolved. It is still witnessed
on any given day at a test match. Expensive seats in members pavilions
are for club ties, respectful applause, and tutting at those on the
terraces, who over-indulge in all-day drinking, in an array for fancy
dress and undress, soaked in increasing conviviality as the day unfolds
(and as money and corporate interests are now arguably more important
than class, the best seats are within the expensive corporate boxes,
where the over-indulgence is screened off from view). Grounds north of
London in the cities of the industrial revolution — Edgbaston,
Headingley, and Old Trafford – are still more celebrated for their
rowdier, partisan crowds. The cricket pitch continues to be the place
where a secularised version of church culture meets pub culture, as oil
meets water. In England, however, these packed stadiums remain as
captivated as CLR always was, by what unfolds on the pitch. Without a
final product on the field worthy of the profound values the Victorian
were trying to install their project would not have worked.
CLR claims, “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It
belongs with theatre, ballet, opera, and the dance.” He discusses the aesthetics of movement and form referencing Bernhard Berenson’s writings
on Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture. But he believes that the
closest parallels are with Greek tragedy. The similarities extend to
both on and off the pitch. Tragedies were often performed as part of a
festival that would last the whole day. Staff would patrol the aisles to
keep the rowdiest members of the crowd under control. The theatre was
free, but your seat was determined by your status. The rich had
cushioned seats at the front, while the peasants, artisans and women
were forced to take seats at the back. After a full day of drink, Greek audiences would hiss and groan to show discontent and even launch
projectiles stage-wards. Such a scene has much in common with my
experiences of sitting in the Eric Hollies at Edgbaston — the cheapest
seats in the rowdiest stand — as the noise level increases throughout
the day in direct proportion to beer sales.
On the pitch, CLR, finds similarities with the very structure of the
game and tragedies. Cricket is “so organized that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterizes all good
drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals are pitted against each other in a conflict that is so strictly personal but no
less strictly representative of a social group. One individual batsman
faces one individual bowler. But each represents his side.” While
dramatists strive for their characters to become representative, the
batsman facing the ball, does not just represent his side, he is his
side. In cricket, no matter the individual achievement, its “ultimate
value is whether it assists the side to victory or staves off defeat.”
Its structural enforcement allows ebbs and flows and battles within
battles. “The total spectacle consists and must consist of a series of individual, isolated episodes, each in itself completely
self-contained.” Each has its beginning, middle and end. The ball is
bowled, the shot is played, runs are scored, or wickets fall. “Within
the fluctuating interest of the rise or fall of the game as a whole,
there is an unending series of events, each single one fraught with
immense possibilities of expectation and realization.” Behind these
events is the intense pressure in the minds of the players. Test cricket
is a test of the mind as much as the body. Intense concentration over
long periods is required alongside psychological robustness to cope with
the sledging, mind games and battles within battles. A test batsman may
not know the psychological torment of Oedipus, but he can relate.
Whilst this is all true for the longer form of the game, limited over
cricket, particularly twenty over cricket has a shallower narrative arc
and rarely has time to develop so many subplots. It is as a YouTube
short is to a Shakespearean play.
Shomit Dutta, whose play Stumped imagines real life cricket lovers
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter waiting to bat, highlights the way
cricket reminds us of life’s contingencies, “The weather in cricket is a determining factor and is rather like those mysterious forces you find
in Greek tragedy.” Tragedy teaches us that there is much out of our
control. Mortal actions are subject to forces that transcend, no matter
how hard we attempt to defy prophecies or the unintended consequences of
our actions. Cricket’s endless variables that can influence the result reminds us that luck plays as much of a role in our lives as hard work
and skill. It starts with the toss of a coin. The nature of the pitch
and the changing weather over the days can make it better to bowl at
some stages than others. The interaction of the tight structure and the
chaotic elements, weaving an unpredictable arc through battles within
battles to an often-inevitable end gives a grandiosity and metaphoric
quality to cricket that rivals that of the tragedies. As we have mined
the tragedies for moral lessons, we are able to do the same with cricket.
The penultimate chapter of Beyond a Boundary returns to the West Indies
with CLR after 26 years away. The West Indies had always been captained
by a white man. CLR now editor of The Nation led the campaign for Frank Worrell, to be captain. He was a great batsman and cricketing mind, but
also black. The campaign was successful and emblematic. CLR claimed he
learnt all he needed to about politics on the pitches of Port of Spain.
He places cricket as “part of the historical movement of the times.” His explanation of cricket’s history helps understand who we are and the
tensions within that, that remain. Cricket is one of the greatest gifts
England has given the world, but we were not entirely altruistic in our donation. This gift came from a very specific set of political and socio-economic circumstances. Those circumstances have changed
significantly. Then India was part of the empire, now India’s economy is greater by GDP than the UK’s. They have more influence over the future
of cricket than the country of its birth. Times change but the past
still influences. Cricket is now as much “theirs” than “ours.” Its future is not ours to determine alone, but if we protect it together, we
will continue to enjoy something more than just a sport.
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