On the voyage home two months or more later I did form my first mildly serious liaison with a girl of my own age, a young South African who was no great beauty but extremely fit. Her parents had separated and she had little time for the younger stepmother travelling to Britain with her father, so she was happy to escape their attentions. Once the fortnight at sea had ended, however, we met only to establish that the attraction was purely physical. One evening in my room at Cambridge she said in relation to something that one of her parents’ black servants had done: ‘He was only a kaffir anyway so what would he know?’
She was probably only aping the views of her parents but the scales fell at once from my eyes and that was the end of our liaison. Naïve as I was I had nevertheless been appalled by the whole experience of apartheid in practice. It was the cruel pettiness of it all that brought home what I had read in Alan Paton’s moving novel Cry, The Beloved Country. During a few weeks in Cape Town, living in digs and playing some cricket for Western Province’s midweek side, including a few games at the gorgeous and then undeveloped ground at Newlands, I travelled from suburb to suburb by train. To buy a ticket I had to go through an entrance marked ‘Whites Only’. The trains themselves had to be separated, of course. So did every entrance to every building.
It was both absurd and degrading, whatever colour you were, but, of course, especially if you were not white. One day I went instead by bus. Surprised to discover that all races were for once allowed on board, I offered my seat to a large and elderly Bantu lady, who accepted my gesture with exaggerated gratitude. Seeing this act of simple courtesy, the bus conductor practically spat at me and told me to leave his vehicle at the next stop.
This was one of two occasions when I found myself walking back to my digs. The second involved a longer journey, in a much chastened mood. I had been to a horse-racing meeting one Saturday afternoon at Kenilworth, starting with a wallet full enough to allow modest bets on several races but finishing completely empty. That afternoon I was almost a lone white man amongst a seething crowd of mixed races, for most of whom an afternoon of bad luck was much more serious than it was for me. I learned a lesson about never gambling more than you are prepared to lose.
South Africa was still a long way then from the proud establishment of a ‘Rainbow Nation’, but cricket was soon to feel the first tremors of the earthquake that would give birth to a fairer society. One of the earliest stories of my journalistic career concerned the hullabaloo after the Oval Test of 1968 when the England selectors named their touring party for South Africa and decided to leave out the man who had just made a commanding century against Australia, Basil D’Oliveira. I got on well with Basil in later years when we occasionally spoke at the same dinner, although I could never keep up with his thirst for alcohol when the dinner was over and the guests had gone. It was truly formidable and eventually, I fear, caught up with him. He was, however, an impressive cricketer and man.
There are many who believe that the Cricket Council (in which, on such matters, MCC still had as strong a voice as the Test and County Cricket Board) left him out of that touring party because they knew that picking ‘Dolly’ would not be acceptable to South Africa’s Government and their intransigent president, Dr. John Vorster.
Having talked since to many people involved, including the captain of England at the time, Colin Cowdrey, and the chairman of selectors, Doug Insole, I believe their version that both the original tour party, which had preferred Tom Cartwright to D’Oliveira, and the subsequent decision to replace Cartwright with D’Oliveira when the former had to withdraw because of injury, were decisions made for cricketing, not political, reasons. The consequence of the eventual selection, of course, was that Dr. Vorster called Dolly a ‘political cricket ball’ in a speech in Bloemfontein, an Afrikaans stronghold, and called the tour off.
The further consequence was that South Africa’s subsequent scheduled tour to England in 1970 was also cancelled, this time by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, for reasons of security, and that from 1970 until 1992 South Africa played no official international cricket. Brian Johnston and I shared the reporting of the dramatic announcement of the 1970 cancellation, following lobbying from Peter Hain’s ‘Stop the 70 tour’ pressure group, whose threats had led to barbed wire being placed round the square at Lord’s. I loved my involvement with an issue as great as this and saw at first hand the profound effect that major political stories could have on sensitive souls such as Billy Griffith, the secretary of MCC.
It was, strictly from a cricketing point of view, the greatest shame that South Africa was ostracised just at the time that the country had produced the best side in its years as an all-white cricket team. An astute captain, Dr. Ali Bacher, had marshalled a team including Graeme and Peter Pollock, Barry Richards, Mike Procter and Eddie Barlow so effectively that in the early months of 1970 they gave a strong Australia team the biggest hiding it had ever had in almost 100 years of playing Test cricket. South Africa won the first Test by 170 runs, the second by an innings and 129 runs and the last two by more than 300.
Eventually the combination of sporting isolation, economic boycotts and the sheer power of world opinion, condemning the Nationalist party’s stubborn racial segregation policy as utterly unjust and indefensible, forced the political changes that led to the release of Nelson Mandela and the birth of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. Brilliant cricketers such as Clive Rice and Vincent van der Bijl therefore missed the international careers their talent would have ensured, but so, as recent historians of non-white cricket have faithfully documented, did many unsung cricketers of darker hue. Almost immediately the sheer competitiveness of South Africa’s sporting culture enabled the national team to hold its own once their status as pariahs ceased.
For a while I was of the opinion, mistakenly, that a blanket ban, preventing even teams of mixed colour from touring, would merely set back South African cricket while leaving the politicians unmoved, but I came to see the logic behind Hassan Howa’s opposition to compromise. There could, indeed, be ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’, the effective mantra of SANROC, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. Once the ICC had expelled South Africa it was clear that the isolation would have to continue until that society changed radically.
In the intervening years I went back to the country twice to monitor the attempts by the remarkable Dr. Bacher in particular to keep cricket’s flame burning. A man of immense personal drive, he pursued the goal of non-racial cricket by any means he could. He insisted on multi-racial sides in the domestic competitions and made energetic attempts, often with the help of English coaches from county cricket, to build bridges with coloured teachers in the townships in order to initiate, or regenerate, cricket in underprivileged schools.
Bacher would no more let go of his dream of a genuinely multi-racial cricket administration than a dog would relinquish his bone. But he never undersold his case, once reporting to the press after an ICC meeting that he and his loyal associate, Joe Pamensky, had received a standing ovation for the presentation they had just given on the progress being made. ‘That’s not quite correct’, said the more realistic Pamensky. ‘We were standing, they were sitting.’
The little doctor from Johannesburg, like the bearded one from Downend in Gloucestershire in the previous century, was not a man to be deflected from his vision. Harnessing business contacts, he began offering enticing sums of money to cricketers from overseas to play in what became known as ‘rebel’ tours. Reporting for both the BBC and The Cricketer I witnessed two unofficial Tests in the series between South Africa and the West Indies which had much the same intensity as the real thing. Painfully struck on the ear by Sylvester Clarke in one of these games after ducking into a bouncer, an ageing Graeme Pollock was given a taste of what it was like playing against the even fiercer fast bowlers of that period.
Most of the West Indians came to regret their involvement, because it meant burning their boats at home in return for earning money of
the sort that would not become available to mercenary cricketers until the dawn of the Indian Premier League. Purely as a cricketing exercise, however, these games made fascinating watching and it was obvious that Bacher’s attempts to encourage non-white cricket from the grass roots up were starting to bear fruit.
When, at last, Mandela was released he set a glorious example that has enabled all South African sport to flourish. Forgiveness, and the policy of peace and reconciliation applied by other men of goodwill like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, made possible the rebuilding of a nation that might so easily have been torn apart by vengeance. The dreadful injustice of the past had damaged many things as well as millions of people. One effect of the period of isolation in cricket was that a generation of South Africans had grown up without Test cricket.
They have never supported it well since, despite the consistent success of the national team, but there are players to spare these days. Kevin Pietersen and Jonathan Trott, both South African-born and bred but each with a British parent, enabled Andrew Strauss, English-bred and educated but born in Johannesburg and the son of South African parents, to lead England to successive victories in series against Australia.
South Africa have been the stronger side, if not by much, in each of their three home meetings with England since they returned to the fold. They have been enjoyable visits for me, enhanced by exciting visits to big game parks and, in 2010, to the site of the battles between the Zulus and the British Army at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift close to the Buffalo river in Natal. Nor does one necessarily have to go to the well-run, well-trodden haunts of tourists to get a taste of African adventure. During the World Cup in South Africa and Zimbabwe in 2003 I was driving a hired car from East London in the Eastern Province to Port Elizabeth further west. Just as dusk was descending I was overtaken by a battered looking truck with a number of local workers crowded into the open back of the vehicle. It had accelerated past me to a distance of around twenty yards when something flew towards my car from the truck too quickly for me to swerve.
It turned out to be the silencer which had sheared off and, as I very quickly realised, flown straight at my nearside front wheel, bursting the tyre instantly. By the time that I pulled up a few yards further ahead, on the edge of a township called Alexandra, the truck had disappeared. Never a handyman, I did not relish in any way the prospect of trying to fit a spare tyre in the rapidly enveloping darkness. Everything outside was quiet now. I decided first to ring my landlady at the bed and breakfast house where I was staying in Port Elizabeth, to tell her that I would be delayed.
‘Lock all your doors and windows at once’, she advised, with a note of panic in her voice. ‘Ring the police immediately – and the car hire firm.’ I did both, finding it difficult not to be apprehensive in view of the country’s reputation for crime. It was very hot in the car, however, and, while waiting for the police to come to my rescue I opened the two front windows to get some air. Immediately I was aware of several fingers creeping over the glass on either side, belonging to hitherto unseen figures outside. To my relief I quickly realised that they belonged to children from the nearby township. ‘Why have you stopped here?’ they asked, very politely. I told them why. ‘Our father has sent us to see if you need help’, they said.
They could not have been friendlier, although I judged it wiser to refuse their request to get inside the car. Before long two policemen arrived on motor bikes, told them to go home and changed my tyre with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency. ‘You might not have been so lucky in some places’, they said, but I cannot believe that a burst tyre suffered on any road in Britain would, in the end, have resulted in so little trauma.
Crime figures do not, I suppose, lie, but it is a question to some extent of looking after yourself. On my first trip to South Africa as a nineteen-year-old my two most exciting journeys were those made to the Kruger National Park in days when not everyone had experienced African wild life at first hand as seems almost to be the case now (there was nothing more amazing, to my eyes, than the sheer incredible tallness of the giraffes); and another from Cape Town to Johannesburg on the famous Blue Train. I was sharing a compartment in the sleeper with three others and found myself in the bottom bunk as darkness fell and everyone decided that it was time to turn in. Above me was a solidly built Afrikaner who had been friendly over a drink earlier in the evening. As I was beginning to doze I was suddenly aware of a revolver hovering beside my head. I froze. An instant later it was followed by the top of his head: ‘Don’t worry’, he said. ‘If anything threatens us, I’ve got this.’
In Zimbabwe, which I visited for the first time before the country was elevated to Test status, I dare say that burst tyres or the sight of a gun seem like the smallest of inconveniences to the great majority. The long misery for the majority under Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule has overshadowed cricket as it has every activity in what once seemed a blessed country. Its natural attractions are obvious. Judy and I had an exciting visit to a camp beside the Zambezi, where a herd of elephants padded through the individual sleeping huts one evening and we came very close to being upended by a hippopotamus as it rose with what seemed like the force of a whale a few feet from the canoe that we were jointly paddling. Since the talk in the camp was all about a recent visitor who had died in hospital after his leg had been severed in two by a hippo in the same area, this was altogether too close for comfort.
I could not visit Zimbabwe without writing something about their steady superiority at the time amongst the second rank of cricketing nations.
Graeme Hick had made his name in England by then but after seeing the facilities in the main ground in Harare and talking about the development of the game in schools to the national captain, David Houghton, and to various administrators, including the personable but, by association, tainted, Peter Chingoka (who has somehow survived the rises and falls of Zimbabwe cricket ever since), I had no hesitation in recommending that the country should be given Test status and full ICC membership. Such an argument in an influential newspaper was a small feather in their cap but it would probably have been better for all if Zimbabwe had attained one-day international rather than Test status. More often than not, unfortunately, they have been, like most of their citizens, whipping-boys.
For some time, blessed with cricketers of world class like Houghton, John Traicos and later Heath Streak and Andy Flower, they justified their elevation. Alas, cricket disintegration followed social disintegration, as it always must. Fortunes, as I write, seem to have begun their long turn but everyone has been waiting for Mugabe’s death.
21
THE TIMES
‘You can do the job on your own terms. You needn’t go on every tour if you don’t want to. We will pay you well. We want to cover cricket really well. We know you can use your influence to strengthen our list of writers and make The Times cricket pages the best.’
These, or words to this effect, represented the beguiling prospect laid before me by Keith Blackmore, a far-sighted journalist with a shrewd idea of what makes people tick, as we sat in my study at home early in 1999. Then one of the two senior figures on the sports desk, but destined to become the paper’s Deputy Editor, he had taken the trouble to come to see me, knowing that, like most of my counterparts on other newspapers, I was exhausted after an especially demanding tour of Australia. This was the start of his attempt to persuade me to leave the Telegraph to take on one more challenge.
The wearying nature of the long tour of Australia had induced Alan Lee, the gifted and industrious successor to the revered John Woodcock as cricket correspondent, to turn instead to a sport he loved even more, horse racing. But I was tempted, more so when I met Keith again with his colleague, David Chappell, during a pub meal at Warnham. They both lived in Brighton and had gone out of their way to join me at a convivial and convenient place, tired though they must also have been after breaking their journey back from Wapping.
The gentle wooing process was completed by the Edi
tor himself, Peter Stothard. An intellectual with long, dark, curly hair who cares about the writing of good English, he now edits the Times Literary Supplement. He also travelled from London to Sussex to talk to me at home and it was when his chauffeur-driven car came sweeping down the drive that I knew that, flatteringly, they really wanted me.
It was still a desperately difficult decision to make. The Telegraph had for so long been the cricket paper and they had looked after me well on the whole, even if, in my desire to do the job well, I had driven myself a bit too hard. Looking in the mirror revealed someone thinner and greyer than when I had started the business of being a daily cricket writer nine years before. Knowing that I was suddenly in a position to improve my financial status significantly, an opportunity that, at the age of fifty-four, would not come again, I still prevaricated. I did not want to be disloyal, nor to let down Jeremy Deedes, still the managing editor, who had ‘signed’ me in the first place.
I spoke first, of course, to the sports editor, David Welch, who was pragmatic and understanding. Then I was rung – but not visited – by the Telegraph’s own lofty intellectual editor, Charles Moore. Since it was foolish to look gift-horses in the mouth, I plucked up the courage to ask for a substantial rise. He said that he wanted to keep me and duly offered me a decent upgrade but The Times were offering a fair bit more. I took the chance to air my unhappiness about my occasional niggles over grammatical style, and also about recent petty complaints about expenses from one of the watchdogs who did not appreciate how expensive hotel life in Australia had become. Charles was reassuring and I found myself agreeing to stay.
CMJ Page 28