Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

122 This racial cliquishness halted the rise of indigenous cricket in the colonies. In 1901 the Athletic News suggested that West Indian ‘men of colour’ could never ‘hope to bring the same amount of intelligence to his game’ as the English masters. In 1921 the cricket-loving Lord Harris argued that ‘it is in the matter of patience that the Indian will never be the equivalent of the Englishman’ when playing cricket. In 1939 CB Fry similarly dismissed the Maori as ‘equally undevoted to work or to worry.’ Boosted by the cultural imperative of decades of fictional cricketing glories, the English emigrants pitched wickets as well as tents across the globe. The outcome – and it may be safely claimed that school-based stories had a part in this – was two-fold. On the one hand, happily, cricket was played in all parts of the British Empire, even allowing for the fact that its envelopment of the native populations was - think of South Africa - painfully slow. On the other hand, unhappily, it wasn’t really played seriously anywhere else. The Imperial Cricket Conference was inaugurated in 1909, comprising England, Australia and South Africa. In 1925 the West Indies, New Zealand and India were ushered into its selective counsels. In 1926 Lord Harris decreed that a Test match could only be played ‘between sides duly selected by recognised governing bodies of cricket representing countries within the Empire’. That was exact and that was pre-emptive. It would be 1965 before the Imperial became International. Where football, simpler in mode, less encumbered by the swaddling clothes of patriotic piety and as a later contender on the world scene, soon established a global grasp, cricket remained deliberately imperial. It is a peculiarity of sports history that only one constituent of the Empire, later Commonwealth, that is England in 1966, has won the World Football Cup, and only constituent members of the Empire, not including, sadly, England, have won the World Cricket Cup. The Cardusian notion that only English-speaking races could play cricket was explicit in the literature and culture of the epoch. There is a defining link of style and construct The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching