Dear Editor,
Three weeks ago, my boyhood friend, historian and cricket writer Clem Seecharan, alerted me to a newly published book on West Indian cricket titled, “Who Only Cricket Know” – Hutton’s Men in the West Indies 1953/54 by David Woodhouse. I was too young for infatuation with the game then but by the time the Englishmen returned in 1959/60, Clem and I were safely ensconced in Scholarship Class, nearest to our Headmaster’s desk, closest to the cabinet that safeguarded the Broadcast to Schools radio and we were ready for them.
The cricketing events of 1953/54 are entirely beyond my memory but this book brings the passions simmering in Guyana, or British Guiana as it was known back then, and indeed the wider West Indies, and entrenches them in the field of play and beyond. On the field, the author positions himself behind the umpire and off the field he observes from behind the colonial officials who ran the colony after suspending the Constitution and jailing some of its political leaders. Two chapters – Chapter 12, ‘British Guiana’ and Chapter 13, ‘Third Test (Bourda)’ just by themselves are worth the price of the book.
Editor, I am always intrigued by authors’ introduction of their works. The more that authors need to explain themselves before letting you into their minds is a subliminal PET scan of their output. David Woodhouse’s introduction is a full nine pages long and it is a gem by itself. Who knows that the Test series of 1953/54 was billed as the “unofficial world championship of cricket”? Less than a year after the conquest of Mount Everest and the Coronation of the Queen, a large part of the Guyanese population stood in racial brotherhood, yes in racial brotherhood, and made the English worry about “No Constitution, No Cricket”.
“Who Only Cricket Know” is an excellent resource for knowing your cricket and for helping to understand the sources of our strengths and the complexities of our soul-searing fractiousness.
Yours sincerely,
Tulsi Dyal Singh, MD.
