Learie: The Man Who Broke The Colour Bar

My thanks to the publishers for an advanced review copy of this book about Learie Constantine by the veteran sports writer and cricket correspondent, Brian Scovell. It is a book about cricket in the age of Constantine and it provides a wealth of information about the matches played and the characters in the game during the years of his illustrious career. It also tells us something about the Britain of those days and a little about the politics of cricket and its place in the struggle for freedom from colonial rule for the West Indian nations.

The author has a prodigious memory for detail and people. He was Learie’s ghost writer at times when he worked as a cricket commentator as well as his unofficial chauffeur. He is clearly very fond of Learie and his wife Norma, who were good friends of his, and he is a fair and rather open minded gentleman, notably less racist than many of his generation, if prone to the odd sly comment on how people may think today.

If your interest is mainly in the politics of Learie’s life and the place of cricket in the West Indian colonial struggle, read CLR James’ book ‘Beyond a Boundary’. But if you are a real anorak when it comes to cricket match incidents, turning points, batting and bowling averages and, especially if you like to recall tremendous feats of fielding, this book is for you as well!

Baron Learie Nicholas Constantine of Maraval in Trinidad and Tobago and Nelson in the Palatine of Lancaster, whose grandfather was a slave and whose parents were cricket fanatics, was an all rounder - prone to impetuosity with the bat, a pretty good bowler and an absolutely fantastic fielder. He could catch a ball with his hands behind his back and he was an enormous crowd pleaser. A big man with a big laugh, with an instinctive and genuine way with people, he was a gentleman and a very determined man of incorruptible principle.

There is a wealth of fascinating detail in this book, which gives a real flavour of the times; sometimes appalling, sometimes trivial and sometimes astonishing.

In 1906, when Learie would have been 5 years old, Tommie Burton, son of an white father and a black mother in Barbados dismissed W G Grace twice and achieved startlingly good bowling figures. However, he refused to clean the boots and bats of white members of the touring side and he was never selected again, never played again and moved to Panama.

In 1967 Horlicks was the sponsor of the second Pakistan test at Trent Bridge.

Joseph Harold Anthony Hulme gets a mention. He played 225 matches for Middlesex, 333 matches for Arsenal as a right winger and managed Spurs 1945 to 1949 before becoming a sports journalist.

Not all the stories work so well. The tragic story of cricketer Leslie Hylton’s murder of his wife, for which he was hanged, is immediately followed by the ‘laudable achievement’ of his bowling average of 19.3. And then, there’s Sir Dingle Mackintosh Foot QC who surely does not deserve to be remembered for choking to death on a chicken sandwich in Hong Kong.

Learie and his wife and daughter lived for 20 years at 3 Meredith Street, a terraced house, in the small mill town of Nelson. I am looking forward to viewing the plaque on their house sometime when we are allowed to travel again.

The cricket club there paid unheard of money to attract him. The young family were greeted with the grinding, mindless racist letters commonly received by black immigrants all over this country for a long time after their arrival, but many years later, after Learie had finally finished qualifying as a barrister at the age of 53, the Nelson Leader reported this under the banner ‘Local Boy Makes Good’!

The book does cover some of the political achievements of this remarkable man. In July 1943 the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square told him and his wife and daughter to leave because American military personnel staying there complained, despite having taken their advanced booking in the full knowledge that they were black. Learie eventually won the High court case he took against the hotel. He wrote a book entitled Colour Bar. He refused to cover South African cricket matches because of apartheid. He campaigned for Seretse Khama who married a white woman. And he famously publicly reproved the Bristol Omnibus Company for refusing to employ a Jamaican man in 1963, when he was High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago, an intervention which lost him that job.

I hope people will read about Learie Constantine in this book and others. His was a life which should be known and celebrated.