Basil D'Oliveira: Cricket and Controversy

"Another biography. Basil D’Oliveira, a South African who played for England, was one of the most important men in cricket history, and this book makes a claim that he’s one of the most important men in 20th-century history, that one innings in 1968 against Australia of 158 runs resulted in the boycott of South Africa and ultimately the dismantling of apartheid. So it’s a huge claim: that a brief stint on a cricket pitch, not even against South Africa, achieved something that mass protest and any amount of diplomatic pressure had failed to achieve. And by the time you’ve finished you feel he might be right. Which is quite an accomplishment. Basil was Cape-coloured, so in South Africa he had a status higher than some, but under apartheid considerably lower than is necessary for him to play against white men. But then he came to England and nothing could stop him. He was a genius batsman. He got picked for England and in 1968 he scored his 158 against Australia. The following year England were scheduled to tour South Africa and if D’Oliveira had been anybody else he would have been picked for the side straight away. But he wasn’t. Nobody said it was because he was a bit too dark. The MCC claimed nothing had been considered but cricket, implying, against all evidence that he wasn’t good enough. Anyhow, one of the chosen squad suffered an injury, and they did, actually, pick D’Oliveira. There was an unbelievable amount of rubbish involved, but they picked him, and the upshot was that the South African prime minister objected and the tour was called off. The English couldn’t take instruction openly from another government about the racial constitution of a cricket team. It opened the flood gates and England refused to play cricket in South Africa until 1992. Except the rebel tours of the 1980s, of course, but they weren’t sanctioned – just mercenaries."

"It’s partly biography, but it also focuses, in the second half of the book, on the wider issues in, and background to, the D’Oliveira affair in 1968. I wanted to include something about race and sport. I thought of Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James, a great West Indian writer and activist. It’s a memoir, it’s focused a lot on his life in the West Indies, in Trinidad, in the 1920s, and then going to Lancashire with Learie Constantine in the early 1930s. That’s very interesting and illuminating about overturning the white domination of cricket in the West Indies. But it’s all so long ago, and it’s a bit quaint and almost Edwardian, the colonies and imitation-public schools. I decided to go for D’Oliveira instead because that’s more recent, it’s certainly in my memory. It’s surprising to look back now and see how much racism there was in sport. Did you know that New Zealand sent a segregated rugby team to South Africa in 1960? In 1960, New Zealanders were still prepared to leave the Maoris out of their rugby team in order to play rugby against South Africa. It’s quite hard to believe. “The nature of sport is the exercise of physical skills, and the value of sport is just the value that human beings find in that.” D’Oliveira was a so-called ‘coloured’ South African and a wonderful cricketer. He was well-known within black South Africa, a few people had heard of him outside, and he was desperate to develop his sporting career. There was no way he could do this in South Africa: he was captain of the non-white South African team, but they never had anybody to play against. He wrote to the cricket writer and broadcaster John Arlott asking whether there was any way that he could come and play cricket in England, and he left South Africa—there’s always uncertainty about his age, he must have been about 30—and within six or seven years, he was playing for England. It’s a wonderful fairy story. And then the question arose, was he going to play for England on the tour to South Africa? The second half of the book is all about the shenanigans involved in the run up to the selection of the team for the tour, and Peter Oborne, the author of the book, has done a proper historical job. He’s gone and looked in the archives—there are all kinds of records now that have come out, all kinds of minutes of meetings and so on. He makes it clear that the South African government were determined that D’Oliveira wasn’t going to come, but they couldn’t say so publicly. They didn’t want to announce that they weren’t going to have a team with him in, lest he wasn’t selected, in which case they would have blotted their copybook unnecessarily. But they wanted to tell the MCC surreptitiously that they would veto the tour if D’Oliveira was selected, in order to encourage them not to select him. They played a very complicated game, very successfully. What happened was this: D’Oliveira wasn’t in the England team against the Australians for most of the 1968 summer, he’d lost form a bit, he wasn’t first choice. It’s not clear whether at that stage he wasn’t getting in the team because there was a faction that was trying to stop him kyboshing the South African tour … but anyway, through a sequence of circumstances, he got into the team for the final test—and he seized his chance and scored a hugely important and wonderful century, 158. And that was that, we all thought. And then the MCC selection committee, with a number of MCC luminaries in attendance, managed not to pick him—not to pick someone who’s just scored 158 in the last test of the summer season makes no sense at all, but somehow they managed it. Another important thing about the story is that D’Oliveira, who was a completely unassuming non-political, rather quiet fellow, turned out to be a complete hero through all of this. South Africans tried to buy him off that summer. They offered him a coaching contract—in today’s money worth of the order of £150,000—and he said ‘No, I want to go and play cricket in South Africa.’ So, the moral of the book is that race was a huge factor in British and Commonwealth sport until very recently. It should also remind us how hopeless the England cricket authorities are at managing things: that’s a moral that’s still with us. About racism in sport more generally, it’s a complicated story isn’t it? I think that racism has largely disappeared from British sport, and maybe that’s to do with the fact that Britain is pretty successful as a multicultural society. It’s quite recent, something that comes up in the next book that we’re going to talk about. There were racists shouting at black football players in Britain through the 1980s, into the ‘90s, and it’s now disappeared. One would like to think it’s disappeared, both inside and outside sport, but it’s not clear that’s the case across Europe, thinking about soccer. One would like to think it was the case in America: North American sports are fully integrated, and I know of no suggestion that there’s any remaining discrimination within professional sport. But, of course, there certainly are racial tensions outside sport in North America, in a way that I think is not so much so in this country. It’s not clear how far that makes a difference to what’s going on in sport in North America."