First-Class Matches Trinidad and Guyana 1958/59 to 1989/90

109 Guyana Background First-class cricket has been played in two countries on the South American continent. Between 1912 and 1938, visiting teams from England played 13 matches in Argentina, against home sides consisting almost exclusively of expatriate or visiting British players. Further north, the country now known as the Co-operative Republic of Guyana has a much longer and more distinguished history in the first-class game. The country’s colonial history is a little complicated. By the mid-18th century, Dutch settlers had established the separate colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice, each named after the principal rivers flowing north into the Atlantic Ocean. Following the Napoleonic Wars, during which control of these colonies passed for a time to France, they were officially ceded to the UK in 1814. In 1831 their administration was combined to form a single colony, known as British Guiana, with its capital at Georgetown in Demerara. In due course, each of the former separate colonies became an individual county within the new country. As in Trinidad, a process of indenture of workers from India soon began. The name ‘British Guiana’ does not seem to have caught on immediately, not in cricketing circles at least. Cricket is noted in the colony by 1840, but when a match was played between the colony and Barbados in February 1865 – a game that has come to be accepted as the first first-class match in the Caribbean region – the mainland team was referred to as ‘Demerara’. Whether this was because all or most of its players came from the Georgetown area, or whether the team was truly representative of the whole colony but was still given an old name, is unclear. Suffice to say that, until the mid 1890s all first-class teams representing the colony are today styled as ‘Demerara’; it was not until August 1895 that a team that we nowadays call ‘British Guiana’ took to the field in a first-class game. History of internal matches in Guyana As time went on, the county of Essequibo remained very largely undeveloped, but the population of the coastal strips of Demerara and Berbice grew, with NewAmsterdam in Berbice becoming the country’s second-largest centre of population, after Georgetown. Inter-county cricket competitions in the colony began in 1917 when the Flood Cup was established by Thomas Flood, President of what today is Everest CC in Georgetown – but this was for competition between East Indians only, and ended in 1938. The wider cricket communities in the counties were not represented until the establishment of the Berbice Cricket Board in 1939 and the Essequibo Board a few years later; remarkably, it was not until 1992 that an equivalent Demerara Cricket Board was set up, cricket in that county having hitherto been managed through the Guyana Cricket Board. Between the late 1890s and the mid 1950s, the only matches known to have been played by any of the individual county sides were two matches by sides representing Berbice in 1951 and 1952 against visiting national sides from Barbados and Jamaica. The visitors were close to full strength, but in both matches, Berbice – described by the mid-1950s as being ‘a formidable and competitive side’ 1 - managed to secure a draw. Things changed when, for the 1954/55 season 2 , William Stanley Jones - the President of the British 1 From an online article ‘A nostalgic look at Guyana Inter-County Tournaments’ by Sam Sooppersaud, at www.newyorkcricket.com, datelined 25 August 2012. 2 All major internal matches in British Guiana/Guyana were played in the later months of the year, ahead of the main Caribbean cricket season which customarily began early the following year. Throughout this section, reference to (for example) ‘the match in 1954’ refers to the match played in the 1954/55 season, and so on. This is therefore the exact opposite of the position in Trinidad & Tobago, as described in a note on page 12.