“Calm Superiority”: The Quiet Success of Frank Martin

Frank Martin (Image: State Library of South Australia)

The first two men to score Test centuries for the West Indies were Clifford Roach and George Headley; both received great acclaim in later years when the West Indies had become the best team in the world. The latter in particular was revered as one of the greatest batters of all time. The third centurion for the West Indies had a more modest career, but played a crucial role in the first overseas win by the West Indies. In the final Test of a gruelling tour of Australia in 1930–31, having lost the first four games in the series, the West Indies managed a tense victory assisted by helpful conditions and two daring declarations. Headley was the key figure with a dominant century in the first innings and 30 runs in the second. But playing a much more defensive role, Frank Martin scored 123 not out and 20. He also took crucial wickets, recording match figures of four for 111 in 45 overs, including the vital one of Stan McCabe to end a partnership that threatened to win the game for Australia in the fourth innings. Yet few people today remember Martin. It did not help that he played alongside some famous names — Headley, Roach and Learie Constantine — as well as cricketers who were very well respected at the time (albeit similarly forgotten today) such as George Francis and Herman Griffith. Nor was Martin ever a player who would draw the crowds; his value lay in his dependability and calmness in a crisis.

Frank Reginald Martin was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 12 October 1893. Little is known about his early life except that his father’s name was George Alexander Martin. He attended Jamaica College, where he performed well academically. At some stage, he worked an assistant in the Registry of the Collector General’s Office. In 1921, by which time he was working as an accountant, Martin married Myrtle Elise McCormack, with whom he had two children: Rona Dorothea Martin (born in 1924) and Frank Reginald Martin (born in 1926). By the time his children were born, Martin had begun to work as a clerk with the United Fruit Company, a job he continued for many years. When he twice visited England with the West Indies cricket team, travel documents listed him as a clerk (in 1928) and a cashier (in 1933).

Only vague details are available about Martin’s early cricket. He played for Melbourne Cricket Club in Jamaica, but he did not have the opportunity to play at a higher level for a long time. No first-class cricket was played in Jamaica between 1911 — when an MCC team toured the Caribbean — and 1925, when Barbados visited to play three matches. By the time of the latter tour, Martin was among the leading players in Jamaica and he was selected as an all-rounder batting at number four. Against the extremely strong Barbados team — undefeated in the Intercolonial Tournament played between Barbados, Trinidad and British Guiana since 1910 — Martin scored 195 out of Jamaica’s 411 for eight declared, therefore recording a century on his first-class debut. He was less effective with the ball, bowling 26 wicketless overs as the visiting team demonstrated their batting ability in a reply of 426 for two as the match was drawn.

Martin was less successful in the other two games, and failed to take a wicket (although he bowled only nine overs in each match), but Jamaica just about held on, and both games were draws, albeit favouring Barbados. But Martin had been able to demonstrate that he could succeed at first-class level, and retained his place when a strong MCC team played three first-class matches against Jamaica in 1926. He scored 66 in the first game (as well as taking four for 44 in the second innings), 44 in the second and 80 in the third. His success against English teams continued in 1927, when against a touring side led by Lionel Tennyson, the former England captain, he scored an unbeaten 204, at the time the highest innings for Jamaica in first-class cricket . He was also used as a left-arm spinner; although he took few wickets, he was generally economical (for example in the match in which he scored a double century, he had figures of 35–15–36–0 in the first innings). And when another team by Tennyson visited Jamaica the following year (when George Headley surpassed Martin’s record by scoring 211), he scored an unbeaten 65 in the first match, while in the third his scores were 63 and 141 not out.

By the time of the final games on that tour, Martin was occasionally opening the batting, but he often batted at number four or lower. In his 65 not out, he batted at number nine. Part of the reason for his variable batting position was the nature of his job with the United Fruit Company. He generally did not take time off for cricket, but had an arrangement by which he would work in the mornings before a cricket match. If the team was batting first, he would stay at work until the lunch interval unless the captain telephoned him because wickets had fallen early. In that case, he drove to the ground (usually he was already wearing his cricket whites) so that he could bat if required.

Martin was one of the most reliable batters for Jamaica, particularly before the emergence of Headley. A left-hander, he batted patiently and had an excellent defence, although he was able to punish any loose deliveries. As a slow bowler, he often delivered long accurate spells while other bowlers rotated at the other end. He was regarded as a good fielder, particularly to his own bowling, and a good runner between the wickets. He was also one of the key advisors to the Jamaican captain, Karl Nunes. From 1926 until 1947, he was also one of the selectors for Jamaica. But his reputation as a “stonewaller” meant that there was some criticism of his play; he was sensitive to complaints that he scored too slowly. One lifelong friend recalled in an obituary how Martin once showed him a chart of his scoring rates that proved he was “always ahead of the clock” in scores of 25 or more.

The West Indies team that toured England in 1928; Martin is standing fourth from the left in the back row

For all these concerns, Martin was a certain selection for the 1928 tour of England by the West Indies team. Followers of cricket in the West Indies (and in England) hoped that the visitors would build on their impressive 1923 tour, and an equally effective display against the 1926 MCC team that toured the Caribbean. Owing to the growing reputation of West Indian cricket, the team had been awarded Test status and the 1928 tour would incorporate their first matches at that level. As one of the most solid batters in the Caribbean, and with the possible advantage of being a left-hander, Martin had the potential to shore up a batting line-up that was heavy with stroke-players, and was familiar with the team captain, his fellow Jamaican Karl Nunes. But there were problems with the selection of the team: Nunes was not a universally popular choice as leader and when the first-choice wicket-keeper George Dewhurst withdrew from the tour, the captain was forced to take the gloves full-time; and because Victor Pascall, a successful member of the 1923 team, had lost form through a combination of age and illness, the team lacked a proven spinner. It was hoped that Martin could fill that particular breach, but he had never been a front-line bowler.

Previews of the tour identified Martin as good batter. For example, The Cricketer described him as: “A left-hander whose batting may well prove to be a feature of the coming tour. Can hit well and has strong defence.” He largely justified such predictions, but the tour was a disaster for the West Indies. The three Tests against England were each lost by an innings, and the batting proved completely unreliable, particularly against spin. Martin was one of the few to enhance his reputation. He took time to find his form, and scored just one half-century in the first month of the tour, but innings of 56 against Ireland and 81 against the Minor Counties got him going in June. He scored a non-first-class century against the Civil Service, fifties in consecutive matches against Lancashire and Yorkshire, and towards the end of the tour scored 165 against Hampshire and 82 against Kent. He was fairly consistent — he reached double figures 32 times in 46 first-class innings — even though Nunes (perhaps aware of his versatility because they played together for Jamaica) constantly shifted Martin’s batting position. He most often opened or batted at number three, but there seemed to be no settled plan, which perhaps reflected the unreliable nature of the team’s batting.

Martin run out for 21 in the second Test against England at Manchester in 1928; A. P. Freeman can be seen in the act of throwing the ball from mid-on. The other batter was Clifford Roach and this misunderstanding began a collapse from 100 for one to 206 all out. (Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 28 June 1928)

Martin had one of the best batting records for the West Indies. In the Test matches, he was solid: although his highest score was only 44, he scored 175 runs in six innings at 29.16, which placed him at the top of the West Indies Test averages (among those who batted more than twice) and he was comfortably the leading scorer. In all first-class cricket, his final record — 1,370 first-class runs at an average of 32.62, with eight fifties and the one century — placed him third in the team averages, and he was the second-highest run-scorer (he was the leading run-scorer if non-first-class games were taken into account). He was less effective with the ball — 19 first-class wickets at 44.89 — but offered useful support to the main bowlers.

His statistical success was backed up by the positive impression he made on English writers. The Wisden review of the tour praised him: “Martin, a left-hander, was probably the most difficult man on the side to dismiss. He watched the ball closely, and played back very hard, while on occasion his steady left-handed slow bowling helped to keep down the runs. He had a happier personal experience in the Test Matches than any of his colleagues, being only once out for less than 20, and never for a single figure.” The Cricketer was similarly complimentary: “Martin and Roach, so far as the Test matches go, were the best batsmen. Martin is a very sound left-hander, with a good defence, strong on the leg side, and a cool head … Both these men appeared to play with far more confidence than the rest of their colleagues, with the exception of Constantine”.

However, J. N. Pentelow, writing about the tour twelve months later in Ayres Cricket Companion, said: “Martin was easily the most consistent bat on the side. He is nothing like what [George] Challenor was in 1923; but what had been said of his steadiness and imperturbability was fully justified. He would go on for hours playing the safety game, waiting for the easy one to hit. But a batsman of his parts should not do so much of the pendulum business. Time after time his bat met the ball, only to send it to the bowler or to mid-off. It would pay him to take more risk. Yet one is sure that in the game he played he was considering the interests of his side.” After listing Martin’s highest scores, Pentelow concluded: “But he ought to have made more.” Writing in Cricket and I (1933), Learie Constantine viewed Martin’s achievements more positively: “But if many failed [during the 1928 tour], certain men stood out as absolutely first-class cricketers. There was the calm superiority of Martin in county games and Tests, not a Challenor by any means but a master of defensive play.”

Martin had a quieter time when another English team — Sir Julien Cahn’s Eleven — toured Jamaica in 1929; he passed fifty just once. When another MCC team toured the West Indies in 1930, Martin only played in the final Test. This was not necessarily a reflection of his ability; for a combination of reasons, including a desire to keep down costs and a bias towards selections from the host nation, the West Indies selectors (which involved a different group of selectors for each Test) chose different captains for each Test and a total of 27 players in four Tests. When the MCC visited Jamaica, Martin scored an unbeaten 106 (in what transpired was his final appearance for Jamaica) and was picked for the final Test. In a high-scoring draw that had to be abandoned after nine days, Martin scored 33 and 24, although he took just one wicket in 54 overs.

The West Indies team that toured Australia in 1930–31. Back row: G. A. Headley, C. A. Roach, E. A. C. Hunte, F. I. de Caires, O. C. Scott, O. S. Wright, I. Barrow, E. L. St. Hill. Middle row: H. C. Griffith, L. N. Constantine, J. E. Scheult (assistant manager), G. C. Grant (captain), R. H. Mallett (manager), L. S. Birkett (vice-captain), F. R. Martin, E. L. Bartlett, G. N. Francis. Front row: J. E. D. Sealey (Image: State Library of South Australia)

Given his experience and his record for Jamaica, Martin was always a certainty for the West Indies team that toured Australia in 1930–31, even though he was 37 years old when it began. The tour was regarded as a success; although the playing record of the team was poor, they were popular with spectators and it was generally believed that they performed better than results indicated. Martin was not a success for the most part; The Cricketer considered him “disappointing”. He had several low scores in the early games, and when he did make a start, he was dismissed in the 20s and 30s. He did not reach fifty until the West Indies had been in Australia for over a month, and his unbeaten 79 came against a weak Tasmania team. Apart from a fifty against a “Victoria Country” team, he did not make another substantial score until hitting 56 in the return game against New South Wales in the penultimate match. By then, Australia had won the first four Tests (three by an innings and the other by ten wickets) without too much difficulty; Martin’s highest score had been 39. At times he was used quite heavily as a bowler, for example taking three for 35 in the first match against New South Wales, and bowling long spells in the first and third Tests. And in the fourth Test, he took three for 91 from 30.2 overs.

The visiting team had been surprised by the slow pace of the pitches in Australia, and as the tour drew to a conclusion, pleaded behind the scenes for something with more life so that they could play better cricket for the public. Coincidentally or not, the pitch for the final Test, played at Sydney, was faster and Martin finally found his form. Opening after the West Indies won the toss, he batted throughout the first day. He had George Headley had added 152 for the second wicket in 146 minutes, out of which Headley scored 105. Martin reached fifty from 96 deliveries in 102 minutes (with five fours), his first such score at Test level in his ninth game. But after that, he slowed down as Headley reached his century from 169 deliveries and faced most of the bowling. After Headley was dismissed, Martin played a similarly supporting role alongside his captain, Jackie Grant. Just before the close of play, Martin reached his century in 273 minutes from 288 deliveries (his second fifty had taken three hours and 192 deliveries) and finished the day on 100 not out, and the West Indies were 299 for two.

On the second day, he and Grant took their third wicket partnership to 110, out of which Grant scored 62. But rain fell to affect the pitch, and wickets fell rapidly. In this period, Martin excelled; Wisden noted: “He showed marked skill especially when the pitch was getting treacherous.” The increasingly sticky pitch prompted Grant to declare with the total on 350 for six; Martin was left unbeaten on 123 not out (after 347 minutes). He was quickly into the attack and in the helpful conditions removed Bill Woodfull and Donald Bradman before the end of play, when Australia were 89 for five. In easier batting conditions after the Sunday rest day, Australia recovered to 224 but still conceded a first-innings lead of 126. However, more rain again made run-scoring difficult and the West Indies struggled to 124 for five at the close of the third day. Martin had again opened, but could only manage 20 runs.

Frank Martin batting in the nets at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1930–31 (Image: Wikipedia)

Rain completely washed out the fourth day, and the prospect of further difficult conditions persuaded Grant to declare on the overnight total, leaving Australia needing 251 to win; because Australian Test matches were played to a finish, there was no time limit for Australia to score the runs, and this was the first time in an Australian Test that any captain had declared both of his team’s innings closed. Martin again struck early, removing Bill Ponsford, and Australia were soon 76 for six. But Alan Fairfax and Stan McCabe added 79 for the seventh wicket; Martin had McCabe caught, but runs continued to come and the touring team became a little nervy before the last man was run out to give the West Indies a 30-run win. It was their first overseas victory in a Test match and when combined with the teams win over New South Wales in the immediately preceding match meant that the tour ended well, and the result was acclaimed both by the Australian crowds and back at home in the Caribbean.

Martin ended the tour with 606 first-class runs at 27.54 and 21 wickets at 45.23. In the Tests, he scored 254 runs at 28.22 and took seven wickets at 64.00. But the match at Sydney was his final Test. After the tour, when he had returned home, Martin announced (at a dinner given by the Jamaica Cricket Association in honour of the Jamaican members of the touring team) that he felt he had to retire from representative cricket. Stating that his employers, the United Fruit Company, had been very generous in allowing him time off to tour, he felt that he owed it to “give them of his best services without interruption.” Therefore when another team organised by Lionel Tennyson visited Jamaica in 1931–32, Martin was absent.

Nevertheless, he was not quite done and would probably have played more Tests but for injury. After what was likely some behind-the-scenes negotiations, he was chosen for the West Indies team that toured England in 1933. As he was 39, his selection was not universally popular and in some quarters he was described as a “has-been”. A preview in The Cricketer noted that his selection had been a surprise but noted his steadiness and ability on the “big occasion”, although it was critical of his fielding. He began the tour steadily, and scored a first-class fifty against Oxford University. But when playing against Middlesex in early June, he suffered a leg injury while chasing the ball. It was so serious that he was unable to play again on the tour, and therefore that match was his final appearance in first-class cricket. His absence affected the balance of the team, and Wisden noted: “The loss of such a valuable all-round man could not fail to be very severely felt.” C. L. R. James, writing in the Manchester Guardian at the end of the 1933 season, suggested that Martin’s absence made the team vulnerable to collapse and meant that there was no-one to counter the leg-spin bowling and slow-left-arm bowling against which the batters generally struggled.

Nevertheless, Martin remained with the team until the end of the tour (he acted as the team scorer in at least one match) and as had been the case on the 1928 tour was joined by his wife towards the end; they travelled home together with the rest of the side.

Martin’s final career figures were respectable: 3,589 first-class runs (at 37.77), 74 first-class wickets (at 42.55), 486 Test runs (at 28.58) and 8 Test wickets (at 77.37) in nine matches for the West Indies. In 15 matches for Jamaica, he scored 1,262 runs at 70.11, including four centuries (with one on each of his first and last appearances for the team).

The rest of his life was lived away from the spotlight; a friend called him “reticent and quiet”. When discussing cricket, he always advised people to “play their natural game”. He continued to work for the United Fruit Company, and later founded the Unifruitee Senior Cup Club cricket competition. Little else is known of him or his life. His wife died at the age of 57 in 1950 of arteriosclerosis and cerebral thrombosis. Martin died in Kingston in 1967, at the age of 74, from a coronary thrombosis. There is probably a lot more that could be said of him, but like so many of his contemporaries in the West Indies, he remains a mystery except in his achievements on the cricket field.

“The Coming Man of West Indies Cricket”: The Rise of Ellis Achong

Ellis Achong (Image: The Complete Record of West Indian Test Cricketers (1991) by Bridgette Lawrence and Ray Goble)

One of the ironies of cricket history is that a man who is primarily remembered for his association with a type of delivery known by the now-obsolete (and racist) term “chinaman” rarely, if ever, bowled that style. Ellis Achong was an orthodox left-arm spinner from Trinidad and Tobago who had a brief and largely unsuccessful Test career in the 1930s. He was also an accomplished footballer in his younger days but after a long period in the shadows, he emerged as Trinidad’s leading spinner in 1930. In 1933, he was chosen to tour England with the West Indies team where he worked very hard for little reward. But the legacy of that tour was not just the infamous and probably apocryphal story involving Walter Robins; for Achong, it led to a twenty-year professional career in the English cricket leagues.

Ellis Edgar Achong was born at Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago on 16 February 1904. As almost every piece ever written about him is at great pains to emphasise, Achong had Chinese ancestry, but we know nothing about his family except that his father Lawrence Augustus Achong was a cocoa merchant and his brother Harold played alongside him on the football field. His mother may have been called Isabella (in 1930, Achong visited New York with a West Indies cricket team; on the immigration forms, he listed his closest relative as Mrs Isabella Achong). Achong told a London journalist during the 1933 tour of England that he was educated at St Mary’s College in Trinidad, and his travel documents indicate that his occupation was a clerk. Other than this, as in the case of so many West Indies cricketers from before the Second World War, the rest of his early life is a mystery. It is not even clear how he came by his nickname of “Puss”; newspapers commonly referred to him as Puss Achong as early as 1932.

Whatever his achievements as a cricketer — and this was the sport from which he would later make a living — Achong was perhaps a better football player. In Trinidad’s football competition, he played on the left wing for the exceptionally strong Maple team, where his team-mates included his brother Harold and the West Indies Test player Clifford Roach. He was so good that he first played for Trinidad in the Intercolonial Tournament at the age of 15: he was a regular between 1919 and 1932 (after which time he lived in England). Achong’s entry for the Trinidad Sports Hall of Fame stated: “He cast a fine image for himself as a left-winger and was noted for his clever dribbling and crossing”. His reputation was such that even as late as the 1950s, he was still revered as one of the best players to appear for Trinidad.

But there is a hint that there was a hard edge to Achong’s football. In 1929, he was banned for unsporting behaviour in the final of Trinidad’s FA Trophy. The Heritage Society of Trinidad’s Everton Football Club, Maple’s opponents in that game, records what happened:

“In a hard-fought match with Everton leading 3-2 with 12 minutes remaining, the referee George Rochford ordered Leslie of Everton and H. Achong (Maple) off the field. In response, Ellis Achong ordered the Maple players off the field. Ellis Achong and his brother Harold were later suspended by the TAFA [Trinidad Amateur Football Association] for their behaviour, the captain [Ellis Achong] being banned for the remainder of the season and the first four matches of 1931 while his brother got a four-match ban.”

The referee, in his report, stated: “I consider the behaviour of the two Achongs the most disgraceful exhibition of unsportsmanlike conduct that I have ever had the misfortune to witness.”

If Achong was recognised in Trinidad as an excellent footballer, it was his cricket that brought him wider recognition. He was a left-arm spinner — not, as widely and lazily claimed today, a wrist-spinner. He told the Sunday Dispatch in London during the 1933 tour that he had never received cricket coaching but picked up what he knew from watching other players. In cricket, as in football, he played for Maple, a team about which we know plenty, because one of Achong’s team-mates was C. L. R. James, who wrote extensively about the his experiences in Beyond a Boundary (1963). According to James, Maple was the club of “the brown-skinned middle class”, in which skin colour was crucial — those with darker skins were generally excluded.

As was the case for several cricketers whom he must have known well but for whom we have almost no information, James is almost silent on Achong. He mentions that he, Achong and Roach both played and practised together when they were at Maple. He also mentions a time — which he does not date except to say it was in the mid-1920s — in which Achong was playing in the annual North Trinidad v South Trinidad match; at the start of the second day, it had been agreed by the North team that Achong was the most likely bowler to dismiss the South, but the fast bowler George John, who had over-bowled himself on the first day, refused to hand over the ball and the captain was too intimidated to insist.

But there is not a word from James about Achong’s later career in England, even though league cricket is a major theme of his book. While it may simply have been that there was not the space to go into detail about Achong, it does serve as a reminder that we cannot take James completely at face value as a cricket historian, and there may have been other factors at play of which we are unaware.

In Achong’s case, we can piece together the story from elsewhere. When he signed a contract to play for Rochdale in 1933, a feature appeared in the Nelson Leader which quoted from Trinidad’s Sporting Chronicle. The cricket competition in Trinidad, known as the Bonanza Cup (after the department store which sponsored it), was slightly more complicated than James described it. There were two divisions and movement between teams was not uncommon. The Sporting Chronicle stated that Achong first played for St Mary’s College in the “second-class” competition between 1921 and 1924, but transferred to Maple for the 1925 season. However, he only stayed there for two seasons: from 1927 until 1933, he played for Queen’s Park Club. This latter move is surprising; Queen’s Park was, according to James, a club exclusively for white cricketers.

There is clearly more to this story than we can know, but along with his fiery football temperament, might hint that Achong was a more complex figure than comes across in the simplistic story which is usually told about him.

Victor Pascall in 1925

For most of the 1920s, Achong’s path to the Trinidad first-class cricket team was blocked by the presence of Victor Pascall, the leading left-arm spinner in the West Indies. Pascall was not only a very effective spinner, who did well during the West Indies’ 1923 tour of England, he was also a capable batter (and far better than Achong). Pascall’s final game for Trinidad was in 1927, and after he was overlooked for the 1928 tour of England (he played in the trial matches), he never played any other first-class cricket. Although he played in the North Trinidad v South Trinidad match in 1929 (he may have played in other important games, but CricketArchive has no record of them), he was left out of the Trinidad team which played in the 1928–29 and 1929–30 Intercolonial Tournament. There may have been health reasons for this, because he died in July 1930 at the age of 43.

By the time the MCC toured the West Indies in early 1930, Achong had secured his place in the Trinidad team. He appeared in both of Trinidad’s matches against the MCC, which were played on the matting pitches of the Queen’s Park Oval. Making his first-class debut in the first game, he took four for 43 and three for 39 as Trinidad won by 102 runs. The Cricketer indicated that it was Achong’s flight and variation in pace on a slightly difficult pitch which brought him success. In the second, he took four for 53 and one for 23. His return of twelve wickets for 158 runs in the two games was enough for him to be chosen in the full West Indies team for the Trinidad Test match (These matches were only retrospectively recognised as official Test matches, and their status at the time was a little uncertain).

There may have been another factor in Achong’s selection. The leading batter on the English side was Patsy Hendren; he had scored two unbeaten double centuries against Barbados and hit 80 and 36 not out in the first Test. But in the two Trinidad matches, Achong dismissed him twice in four innings. In the second innings of the first game he was caught by Constantine off Achong’s bowling for 96. Constantine recalled in his Cricket in the Sun (1947) how Hendren had unleashed a barrage of swearwords at Achong upon his dismissal, which might suggest something had taken place on the field leading up to that moment. But in contrast to his success in Barbados, Hendren scored only 178 runs in four innings.

However, Achong’s inclusion in the Test team may simply have been a result of the chaotic home selection policy. Each West Indies team for the series was picked by local selectors, so for the Trinidad Test it was a selection panel from Trinidad. And so it is hardly surprising that eight home players featured in the Test team. Such selectorial parochialism — and a desire to reduce expenses by keeping travel costs to a minimum — was repeated all series and resulted in 27 players featuring for the West Indies across the four Tests. Making his Test debut, Achong took two for 64 in the first innings, including the wicket of Hendren for 77, but sprained his ankle and was unable to continue after delivering just four overs in the second; Hendren scored another unbeaten two hundred and the England team won by 167 runs.

A review in The Cricketer Spring Annual for 1930 said that Achong “was indebted to Constantine’s fielding and to some bad batting for the majority of his wickets. He is too slow for matting [on which all his games against the MCC were played], and furthermore pitches the ball far too often on, or even outside, the off-stump instead of on the middle and leg. Still, he has a nice action, and can spin the ball well. Might be useful in England.”

Having established his place in the Trinidad team, Achong took part in his first Intercolonial Tournament, which took place in Barbados early in 1932. This gave him his first experience bowling on turf pitches; but according to an interview he gave the following year, Learie Constantine had already coached him on what to expect. Achong was an unqualified success. In the first match, against Barbados, he took four for 26 as he and Ben Sealey dismissed the home team for 71; in the second innings he took one for 24 from 21 overs to keep a tight grip on the scoring. Trinidad won that match by six wickets to qualify for the final against British Guiana, the reigning champions. Guiana took a first innings lead of 33, but Achong’s three for 74 in 34 overs were crucial in maintaining control. Trinidad set Guiana 324 to win, and Achong was the match-winner, taking seven for 73 in 36 overs as Trinidad won by 82 runs.

Such a performance established Achong as the leading slow bowler in the Caribbean, and it was inevitable that he came into consideration for the 1933 tour of England. His choice was unquestioned, at least in Trinidad. As early as May 1932, the sports critic of the Trinidad Daily Mail had picked out Achong as the best choice for the slow bowler: “He is left-handed, a fair swerver, a good finger spinner and generally flights cleverly.” The Sporting Chronicle was more equivocal, noting that he was already thirty years old, and questioned whether Trinidad’s Ralph McGregor was a better and younger option; however it concluded that the latter was not half the bowler Achong had been at the same age, and described Achong as the “coming man” of West Indies cricket. The Trinidad Journal suggested that “Achong lacks real cricket brain, but [Hedley] Verity [England’s slow-left-arm bowler] hasn’t got much on him. He is a strong boy and will get his spin on the best of these wickets.”

Achong was picked for the two trial games played in Trinidad; he took three wickets in the first innings but only one in the other three. Nevertheless, his reputation (and the lack of other good options) meant that he was chosen for the West Indies team, one of six Trinidad players (Constantine played occasionally, making it seven at times).

Achong photographed in 1933 (Image: Illustrated London News, 19 August 1933)

C. L. R. James, writing at that time for the Manchester Guardian, discussed Achong in a preview of the tour: “The problem bowler of the side is Ellis Achong — slow to medium left-hand. On his success or failure much will depend. He is powerfully built, can bowl all day and will probably spin his leg-break quickly away on the best wicket he meets in England. He can flight the ball and keeps a good length. In a wet summer he would get a hundred wickets easily. A dry summer, on the other hand, would help considerably in developing his subtlety and awareness.” A preview in The Cricketer (which made quite a deal of his ethnicity) described him as the best bowler in the West Indies, despite his disappointing performance in the trials.

The tour was to prove a difficult one for the West Indies. The batters struggled, despite a hot and dry summer which produced some good pitches. But a bigger problem was that, unless Constantine was playing, the bowling was largely toothless; everything depended on Manny Martindale, the only dangerous bowler in the team. The Wisden review of the tour said of Achong: “The weakness of the West Indies attack was the lack of really first-class spin bowlers. Achong, left-handed, accomplished much good work and in the Test match at Lord’s bowled admirably for a long spell. Probably, if the season had been a wet one, he would have come out with a much better record than that of 71 wickets for 36 runs each. He, Martindale, [Vincent] Valentine and [Oscar] Da Costa bore the hard work of the attack throughout the tour.” “Second Slip” in The Cricketer merely observed that Achong bowled a lot of overs for his wickets.

The simple fact is that Achong did not have a good tour. Part of the reason was his heavy workload. An injury early in the tour to F. R. Martin meant that Achong was often called upon by the captain G. C. Grant to keep one end going so that Martindale could rest. Of the team’s 30 first-class games, Achong missed just three: only Clifford Roach played more games (G. C. Grant and O. C. Da Costa played the same number but none of the others were specialist bowlers). Achong bowled plenty of overs in the West Indies’ extended series of warm up matches, and took seven wickets in a two-day match against the Club Cricket Conference. But the opening first-class game, played against Northamptonshire, set the template: West Indies lost by an innings but Achong bowled 53 overs (taking two for 77).

He had some success. He took four for 52 against Cambridge, and against the MCC at Lord’s, Achong’s five for 49 in the fourth innings bowled the West Indies to a 152-run win against a strong team. In an interview after the tour, Achong said that the latter was his best performance, and he had been presented with the ball afterwards. But subsequent games were more notable for his workload than his success: 31 overs in an innings against Hampshire, 30 against Surrey, 40 against Glamorgan, 45 against Derbyshire. Later in the season, he also bowled more than 30 overs in an innings against Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Gloucestershire, an England XI, and in two of the Test matches. This was quite a step up for a man accustomed to only bowling at weekends; now, he was required six days a week for most of the summer. His workload was perhaps most intense at Old Trafford during the second Test when he bowled for three hours without a break. He later said, in an interview when he had returned to Trinidad: “[Old Trafford] was a hard trial for me, but I stuck to my task as I knew the situation required it.”

Apart from four for 78 against Somerset and six for 108 against the Minor Counties (a match in which he bowled 65 overs for eight wickets), he had little to show for the amount of bowling he did. His only other notable returns were four for 84 against Leicestershire, four for 70 against Glamorgan and, in a non-first-class game, four for 31 against Staffordshire.

With no other slow bowler in the team, Achong also played in all three Tests but took only five wickets at 47.40. And yet it was the second of these games which ensured for Achong a fame which was far out of proportion to his meagre achievements at Test level. The story is well known, but bears repeating. Achong was bowling at Old Trafford while England were under considerable pressure; the West Indies had built a big score and their bowlers, Learie Constantine (playing his only Test of the series) and Martindale, had unleashed “bodyline” bowling. England, having lost early wickets to the pace barrage, were rescued by Douglas Jardine, their captain, who scored his only Test century. He shared a 140-run partnership with Walter Robins, who scored 55 before he was out stumped off Achong’s bowling.

Walter Robins in 1935 (Image: Wikipedia)

Supposedly, as Robins came off, he retorted to the umpire words to the effect of: “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman!” To which Constantine, who was standing nearby, replied: “Do you mean the bowler or the ball?”

And according to a surprising number of respectable sources, this was where the term “chinaman” came from. But this is a fantasy as “chinaman” had been used to describe a variety of deliveries since as early as the mid-1920s; its origin seems connected to the Yorkshire team which used it to describe unusual deliveries. The connection with left-arm wrist spin arose when applied to the bowling of the slow-left-armer Roy Kilner (who sometimes bowled wrist-spin) and later to that of Maurice Leyland. There was even an earlier variant on the Achong tale during the 1932–33 MCC tour of Australia when Herbert Sutcliffe was dismissed by Hunter Poon in a game against Queensland Country; Poon, like Achong, had Chinese ancestry and at least one press report (the Nottingham Journal in February 1933) made the same unfunny joke about the delivery.

There are two other points about this story. The first is that it is almost impossible to pin down when and where it originated. According to his son, Robins (who died in 1968) was aware of the tale (although he personally attributed it to Patsy Hendren) but may have been simply referring to the “joke” rather than the incident. The second point is that, for all the supposed romance of this “origin” story, Achong did not bowl wrist-spin and no contemporary source ever suggested, or even hinted, otherwise. Had he done so, even as a one-off, someone would probably have noticed, not least Neville Cardus, who was fascinated by left-arm wrist-spin and reported on the 1933 series, including that Old Trafford match.

A little hint of what might have occurred was revealed by Tony Cozier in his obituary of Achong, printed in The Cricketer in 1986. Achong told Cozier that, during the stand between Jardine and Robins, Constantine suggested to him that he try “something different” and therefore he “chang[ed] his usual orthodox delivery to wrist spin, the off-break.” Cozier relates how, in a radio interview, Achong explained to him: “It pitched perfectly and turned back nicely and when Robins saw it coming back on him, he opened his legs, the ball went through and he was stumped.”

Achong’s version included Robins’ retort of “Fancy being out to a bloody Chinaman!” but did not mention Constantine’s reply. This interview therefore cannot be the sole source for the anecdote, although it might be evidence that something actually happened. Achong said: “They tell me that since then that particular ball has been called the ‘Chinaman’ but how true it is I don’t know.” Cozier considered it plausible, even though he pointed out that Achong rarely bowled wrist-spin deliveries. Incidentally, the obituary of Achong written by Reds Perreira for Wisden Cricket Monthly made no mention of the incident, and Achong’s Wisden obituary included an unquestioning retelling of the whole story (albeit saying that Achong was “essentially an orthodox slow left-armer” who bowled a wrist-spinner to Robins which “gave rise to the use in England of the word chinaman to describe such a delivery”).

Perhaps it is true that Achong bowled a one-off wrist-spin delivery in desperation; but it may also be true that he did not. Possibly he later played up to the legend and went along with the idea that he had briefly experimented. Despite many claims which can be found in various sources, we can state categorically that the name for that delivery did not originate from this incident, that Achong did not invent either the name or the delivery (which is suggested in some places), and that Achong was not a wrist-spin bowler.

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The West Indies team at Liverpool for their match against Lancashire: George Headley, Ellis Achong, Cyril Christiani, Manny Martindale, Herman Griffith, Benjamin Sealey, Vincent Valentine.

Unaware of how that one delivery would live on, Achong finished the tour with 71 first-class wickets at the average of 36.14 from 960 overs. He was the second-highest wicket-taker in the team after Martindale but some way down the averages. He bowled almost 300 overs more than the next hardest-worked bowler, Martindale. However, several English bowlers delivered more overs than Achong that season: A. P. Freeman bowled over 2,000 overs and there were many others — spinners and faster bowlers — who delivered over 1,000. Achong’s record also compared unfavourably to other left-arm spinners during that hot summer: Yorkshire’s Hedley Verity took 190 wickets at 13.43, Sussex’s James Langridge had 158 at 16.56, Warwickshire’s George Paine had 125 at 24.60 and Gloucestershire’s Charlie Parker took 119 at 27.47.

Achong had been interviewed during the tour by a correspondent from London’s Sunday Dispatch during a rain break in July. He lamented the lack of slow bowlers in the West Indies, which he attributed to the exciting attraction of emulating Constantine, Griffith or Martindale: bowling slowly was “not exciting enough”. He also defended the team from claims that it was unfamiliar with leg-spin, citing the record of Cyril Browne. At the end of the tour, as the players prepared to leave England (and when he falsely claimed never to have bowled on a turf pitch before his arrival in England), he again made a point about wanting to encourage young players at home to “forsake the fast stuff” and take up spin.

In another interview upon returning home, Achong praised Grant’s captaincy and said that there was a great team spirit. He also discussed the tour in general. The team were kept entertained; for example, Achong was one of a party which went down a coal mine in Sunderland, which he called a “great experience”.

By almost any measure, it was a forgettable summer for Achong, except for his own personal achievement in being chosen to take part. Had it not been for that dismissal, his role in it would have been forgotten. But an unexpected development at the end of the summer meant that he would become famous for something other than a story fabricated by others, and would spend almost twenty years living in England.

The Slow-Burning Career of Vin Valentine

Vincent Valentine (Image: The Complete Record of West Indian Test Cricketers (1991) by Bridgette Lawrence and Ray Goble)

To play just one Test match for England or Australia is almost to guarantee a form of cricketing immortality. Representative cricketers from elsewhere are not so fortunate. While there were some superb cricketers in the West Indies teams of the 1920s and 1930s, little is known about many of them. Other than Learie Constantine and George Headley, most are long-forgotten mysteries; and even Headley has been poorly served, being the subject of only two fairly obscure biographies. Test players such as C. R. Browne, Joe Small, George Francis, Manny Martindale and Clifford Roach — all of whom played many times for the West Indies — do not feature in the pages of history books. What chance then those on the fringes of the team, such as Victor Pascall, James Neblett, Ellis Achong, Ken Weekes or Vin Valentine? To find information involves locating meagre snippets which might tell us something. And occasionally, someone’s story can be reconstructed. In the case of Vin Valentine, we find a cricketer who was selected to tour England in 1933 in the hope that he would follow in the fast bowling tradition already established in the West Indies team. He fell some way short, but he was a far better cricketer than attested by his mediocre playing record. His tale involves a varied life away from sport, a family scandal and a cricket career more successful than hinted at in the pages of Wisden or ESPNcricinfo.

Vincent Adolphus Valentine was born at Buff Bay in Portland, Jamaica, on 4 April 1908, the son of William Adolphus Valentine (1879–1961) and his wife Edith Frederica (née Thompson, 1880–1953). He had an older sister Edith Gwendoline (1906–1960) and five younger brothers: Rudolph Wentworth (1909–1923), Clifford Howard (1911–1996), Herbert Vernon (1912–1984), Sydney Albert St George (1915–1996) and Arthur Lloyd (1917–1983). We know little about Valentine’s early life; a feature in the Jamaica Gleaner in 1937 and his obituary in the same newspaper provide most of what we know.

Valentine came from a cricketing family. His father William was a good bowler at a local level, and played for St Georges Cricket Club in Jamaica for many years, but his main job was in accounting. He worked as the cashier for the United Fruit Company from around 1898 until 1930. Several of Valentine’s brothers also played for St Georges, often alongside each other. Valentine was educated at Jamaica College from 1920, and by 1923 he was part of the school cricket team, where he established a reputation as a promising all-round cricketer. As early as 1926, Valentine was playing alongside his father for St Georges and the pair often opened the bowling together. Away from sport, Valentine qualified as a teacher and by the 1930s, he was working at Hope Farm, a government-run school which mainly taught agriculture.

Any progress Valentine may have made as a bowler was hampered by a lack of opportunity. Jamaica, owing to its distance from other cricket-playing regions in the Caribbean, took no part in the first-class Intercolonial Tournament. As a result, Jamaican cricketers of this period lacked exposure at the highest level. Visits by English teams, such as those organised in the 1920s and 1930s by Lionel Tennyson, were crucial, and it was against Tennyson’s team in 1927 that Valentine first suggested that he might be more than just a good prospect; in one match, playing for a “Portland Combination XV”, he returned figures of five for 104. He also played against teams organised by Tennyson in 1928, playing for Middlesex, and in 1929, playing for “Jamaica Next XV”. By 1929, Valentine had reached the top level of Jamaican cricket, making his debut in the Senior Cup for St Catherine Cricket Club. At this point, his progress seems to have temporarily halted. Possibly he lost form or fell behind his bowling peers. But there may be another explanation.

In October 1930, the Gleaner solemnly reported that William Valentine, Vincent’s father, had been found guilty of fraud. He had been entering false amounts into the accounts of the United Fruit Company which meant that over £100 was missing. Although he was only charged on two counts, there were suggestions that he had been committing fraud for some time. Although the report was very discrete, it looks as if Valentine senior had been in financial difficulty and had felt that he needed to take the money to support his family. He pleaded guilty, and several witnesses gave evidence of his previous exemplary character. Nevertheless, the judge — while expressing his regret — sentenced him to twelve months. After this, William largely disappears from the records until his death in 1961 (although he stood as an umpire in some local cricket matches in the late 1930s) but the disgrace must have badly affected both him and his family.

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Vin Valentine in 1933

Meanwhile, his son continued to progress slowly. In 1931, he left St Catherine and joined Kensington. He played a crucial role in his new team winning the Senior Cup — not least when he dismissed a well-set George Headley in a crucial game — and his good form took him to the brink of the Jamaica team. When Lord Tennyson brought yet another team to Jamaica in 1932, Valentine made his first-class debut. He did not need to bat, as Jamaica scored 702 for five declared; Headley scored an unbeaten 344 and shared an unbroken partnership of 487 with Clarence Passailaigue. When Tennyson’s side batted, Valentine took one for 71 from 28 overs, dismissing Charles Dacre. In the follow-on, he took three for 57 (all three wickets were top-order batsmen) but suffered an injury stopping a hard drive from George Geary which ruled him out of the remaining matches played by Jamaica that season.

At a lower level, he continued to make his name known, not least when, in September 1932, he scored 30 (including two sixes) and took five for 16 in eight overs while playing for a Civil Service team against St Catherine. What type of cricketer was he? As a bowler, he had a smooth, economical action which took advantage of his height; this allowed him to bowl long spells without tiring. He bowled a good out-swinger, not something that West Indies pace bowlers often produced in this period. As a batter, he liked to score quickly and was more likely to attempt big shots rather than defend; when his batting came off, it was usually entertaining.

At this time, all attention was fixed on the tour of England which was to take place in the 1933 season. Although this was to be just the second Test-playing tour by a West Indies team to England, the side was already in transition. In the 1920s, the strength of West Indian cricket lay in its fast bowling. George John and George Francis had been instrumental in the team attaining Test status, and in the first three series played by the West Indies — against England in 1928 and 1929–30, and against Australia in 1930–31 — Francis, Learie Constantine and Herman Griffith were generally very effective. By 1933, Francis and Griffith were past their best. Francis was not selected for the 1933 tour, although he played one Test as a reinforcement after injuries depleted the team — he was in England playing league cricket. Griffith was included but at the age of 39 was a shadow of the bowler he had been. As Constantine was not able to play often owing to his commitments with Nelson in the Lancashire League, the West Indies selectors needed to find new fast bowlers.

When trial matches were held in Trinidad during late January and early February 1933 to assist in the selection of the team, Valentine was among those given an opportunity. His elevation came from nowhere as a preview piece in the Gleaner, printed in January before the matches were held, did not mention him as a candidate. He played in a non-first-class match game for G. C. Grant’s XI against J. R. Edwards’ XI (although in the event, both teams used thirteen players); after a wicketless nine overs in the first innings, he took three for 19 in eleven overs in the second. Although in the next match — one designated as first-class and played between G. C. Grant’s XI and C. A. Merry’s XI — he took only one wicket, he had evidently impressed the selectors (There may also have been some one-day games, unrecorded on CricketArchive, according to a report in The Cricketer’s Spring Annual). He was chosen in the West Indies team, at the expense of another Jamaican fast bowler, Leslie Hylton. A comparison of their overall playing records suggests that the selectors made a mistake, and factors other than ability may have been behind Hylton’s omission.

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The West Indies team in 1933. Back row: Manny Martindale, Freddie Martin, Cyril Merry, Vincent Valentine, Ivan Barrow, Oscar Da Costa, Ellis Achong. Middle row: Herman Griffith, Teddy Hoad, John Kidney (manager), Jackie Grant (captain), Archie Wiles, Clifford Roach. Front row: Ben Sealy, Cyril Christiani and George Headley.

The preview of the 1933 tour in The Cricketer observed that Valentine was one of a number of fast bowlers in the West Indies team — alongside Constantine (when available), Griffith and the untried Manny Martindale — and had been selected on the strength of his performance in the first trial match. His batting had also been a factor. Despite his lack of experience, having played just once for Jamaica, F. J. C. Gustard, who wrote the feature, thought that Valentine might prove the “dark horse” of the team.

Instead it was Martindale who established himself as the leading bowler in the team — and within a few years as one of the best in the world. Valentine bore a heavy workload throughout the tour, but he was a failure, finishing bottom of the bowling averages among the team’s regular bowlers. Wisden simply said: “Valentine was the next fastest man [after Martindale], but his 36 wickets cost a lot of runs, and he was never in the same class as Martindale.”

Valentine made a slow start to the tour, hardly bowling in the warm-up games and taking only four wickets in his first two first-class games. He did better against Hampshire, taking six wickets in the game, three in each innings. After a quiet match against Middlesex, against Derbyshire he took four for 83 in the first innings; these were to remain his best figures in first-class cricket. Apart from three for 80 against Lancashire, he continued to find it hard to take wickets; he was omitted from the team for the first Test and played in the second despite his poor form. This was the game, played at Manchester, in which Constantine (playing his only Test of the series) and Martindale used bodyline bowling — short-pitched deliveries aimed at the body with a leg-side field in place — against the English batsmen who found such bowling at the pace delivered by the two fast bowlers almost impossible to play. As a result, West Indies took a narrow first innings lead and held out for a draw, the first time they had avoided defeat in a Test match in England. Newspaper reports noted, however, that the pressure evaporated whenever Valentine came on to bowl, despite his pace. He recorded figures of none for 49 from 28 overs — economical but lacking any threat. With the bat, he scored 6 in the first innings and an unbeaten 19 (in 15 minutes with three fours) in the second.

Valentine bowling to Cyril Walters at Old Trafford in the second Test of 1933

In a series of minor games after the second Test, Valentine finally began taking wickets: four for 42 and four for 44 against Northumberland; five for 73 against Durham; and two for 20 against Norfolk, all in the same week. Despite a quieter time when first-class games resumed, he held his place for the third Test, which the West Indies lost heavily. Valentine took his only Test wicket — Wally Hammond — at a cost of 55 runs in England’s innings, and scored 6 and 0 as the batting collapsed twice to the English leg-spinner C. S. Marriott, who in his only Test took eleven for 96. This was the end of Valentine’s brief Test career: his final record was one wicket for 104 runs and 35 runs at 11.66.

He proved expensive in the final games, not least in conceding none for 150 from 36 overs against Gloucestershire and he took only four wickets in his final five first-class games (although he managed three for 33 in a minor game against the Eastern Counties). Valentine recalled, in a 1939 interview, that by the end of the season, he and the other players were exhausted: “Just dying for the day when the tour would be over.”

Valentine ended the tour with 36 wickets at 42.80. With the bat, he managed a few useful innings. His only fifty of the tour in first-class games was scored against Middlesex; he scored an unbeaten 59 batting at number nine but more importantly shared a last-wicket partnership of 132 in 58 minutes with Griffith (who scored 62), taking the total from 250 for nine to 380 all out. Late in the tour, he managed a couple of 40s, one against Gloucestershire and another against an England XI. Overall, he scored 391 runs at 17.00. If a 1937 piece in the Gleaner indicated that he had been unlucky and bowled better than his figures suggested, Valentine never again came close to the West Indies team.

Valentine, along with most of the other Jamaican members of the team, departed slightly before the others, on 14 September. But when he returned home, he was ill for some time and did not play any cricket in the 1934 season, which may have affected his chances of re-establishing himself. He did not play in Jamaica’s match against the MCC touring team in 1935. He recovered well enough in 1935 to top the Senior Cup bowling averages with 30 wickets at 9.16. Around this time, he was probably at his best as a bowler, and he reached the peak of his career soon after. Although the opposition were English, his success came not in a Test match but when Yorkshire toured Jamaica in 1936. Valentine took five for 54 against the visitors in a non-first-class game for “Jamaica Next” (and scored an unbeaten 53) but was omitted from the Jamaican team for the first of three first-class games against Yorkshire (which the home team lost). He played the final two matches, and the Gleaner in 1937 suggested that the Yorkshire players considered him Jamaica’s best bowler. In two very high-scoring draws, he took seven wickets at 32.42: he took three for 98 out of a total of 465 in the second game and four for 119 (from 56 overs) out of Yorkshire’s 556 for nine in the second. He was top of the Jamaican bowling averages. He also scored 93 runs in three innings, with a top score of 36. It was comfortably his best performance as a first-class cricketer.

Out of contention for the Test team, and as Jamaica played so few first-class games, Valentine’s career at the highest level was effectively over. His final first-class match was played for Jamaica against the visiting Oxford and Cambridge Universities in 1938; he took one wicket in the game. In 24 matches, he had scored 500 runs at 17.85 and taken 49 wickets at 40.40. But he was not done as a cricketer in Jamaica.

He continued to play in the Senior Cup, and moved to Melbourne for 1936. His form fell away, perhaps owing to his heavy workload against Yorkshire, with 19 wickets at 21.47. From 1937, he played less frequently, preferring to appear in the less competitive Evelyn Cup for the Farm School cricket team. He gradually drifted away from cricket — presumably owing to his career outside the game — although he was still playing for St George’s in 1939 (alongside his brother Herbert) and for Melbourne in the Senior Cup in 1941 (he scored an unbeaten 96 in one game) but seems to have retired in the early 1940s. Even in the late 1940s, he remained a good bowler. In a sensational return for Melbourne in the Senior Cup that year, he took seven for 45 against St Catherine. Meanwhile, he continued to play in friendly matches, appearing for a number of teams. One of these, the Musketeers’ Cricket Club, he captained. When he retired as a player, he took up umpiring, which he performed into the 1960s.

Former West Indies cricketers at the Machado Cricket Festival at Sabina Park in 1963. Back row: John Holt Senior, Raymond Phillips, Ernest Rae, Rolf Grant, George Mudie, Vin Valentine, Hines Johnson, Dickie Fuller, Esmond Kentish, Ivan Barrow, Peter Bayley, Franz Alexander. Front row: Jackie Hendriks, Ken Rickards Senior, Allan Rae, Everton Weekes, Alf Scott, George Headley Clyde Walcott, John Holt Junior, Jimmy Cameron (Image: Gleaner Archives)

Unsurprisingly, information about Valentine’s life away from cricket is sparse. In 1942, he married Winsome May Thomas (1914–1982), a dressmaker, in Kingston. They had two children, Judy and Denis.Valentine’s occupation at this time is unclear. At the time of the 1933 tour, he was still a teacher. Alongside the other teachers in the team — the captain Jackie Grant and Ben Sealey — he was a guest at a function organised by the National Union of Teachers in London. On his marriage certificate in 1942, he gave his occupation as a clerk, while his death certificate stated that he was an accountant. At some point before the mid-1950s, Valentine moved into marketing, the occupation given in his Gleaner obituary. He worked in the Marketing Department in Kingston, although it is not quite clear when he made the switch. Between May and October 1954, he took a course in mechanical accounting in England. Arriving on the Northern Lights and departing on the Bayano, he travelled first-class both ways. While in England, in between his studies, he played cricket for Dulwich, doing quite well. By this time, another Valentine had surpassed him in cricketing fame; the unrelated Alf Valentine had been one of the stars of the West Indies’ triumphant 1950 tour of England. Some newspapers reporting on Dulwich’s cricket confused the two men and reported that A. Valentine had played for the team.

The course may have been connected to Valentine’s promotion in the Marketing Department; by the time of his retirement in 1962, he had reached the position of Deputy Marketing Administrator. Otherwise, Valentine seems to have led a quiet life away from the spotlight, largely forgotten as a cricketer, although in 1971, he was made a life member of Kensington Cricket Club. Valentine died on 6 July 1972 at Half Way Tree, Saint Andrew, Jamaica, aged 64. His cause of death was listed as recurrent pyelonephritis (kidney inflammation) which was linked to a cerebral thrombosis from two months earlier (which had left him partially paralysed). A generous obituary was printed in the Gleaner, but nothing appeared in Wisden, despite his presence on the 1933 tour and his two Test matches for the West Indies.

An Indispensable Giant: Manny Martindale and the 1933 West Indies tour of England

Manny Martindale (Image: The Complete Record of West Indian Test Cricketers (1991) by Bridgette Lawrence and Ray Goble)

During their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, the West Indies team was known for its fearsome pace bowlers. Names such as Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall are still remembered today. But the history of West Indian pace bowling stretches back much further than that. Among the names of forgotten players is one whose Test record stands comparison with any of his successors. Of those to take 30 wickets for the West Indies, Manny Martindale has a better average than anyone other than Marshall, Joel Garner and Curtly Ambrose; he is ahead of such legends as Holding and Courtney Walsh. In ten Test matches between 1933 and 1939, he took 37 wickets at 21.72; that his career was spread over seven years is an indication of how little Test cricket played by the West Indies in the 1930s. Although this means that he has far fewer wickets than the others mentioned here, it is indisputable that his record was excellent despite his limited opportunities. It could have been even better; his last three Tests came when he was probably past his peak: in his first seven Tests, he took 33 wickets at 14.84, and was probably the most feared fast bowler in the world. To some extent, he carried the West Indies bowling attack, and was the first indisputably world-class bowler to play Test cricket for the team. Honoured and respected during his lifetime, his name is unfamiliar to most cricket followers today.

Martindale’s opportunity came when he was an unheralded bowler chosen for the West Indies’ 1933 tour of England. This included the their second Test series in England, but results until then had been mixed. The West Indies lost all three Tests of their first series, played in England in 1928, drew 1–1 at home against England in 1929–30 (despite a strange selection policy which led to 28 players — and four different captains —representing the team in four Tests) and then lost 4–1 in Australia in 1930–31. In this time, few players emerged at Test level. The nucleus of the successful team from the early 1920s which secured Test status — players like George Challenor, Joe Small, George John, George Francis and Cyril Browne — had passed their best and gradually faded. Learie Constantine was immense at first-class level but his successes at Test level were more intermittent; Clifford Roach was wildly inconsistent. The only world-class player was George Headley, who first played against England in 1930 and was one of the best batsmen in the world throughout the decade. The selectors needed new players to step up if the West Indies were to establish themselves at Test level.

While Martindale was given his chance on the 1933 tour, he was not the first successful fast bowler to play for the West Indies. Before the First World War, there was Tommy Burton and “Float” Woods. In the 1920s, George John and George Francis were devastating during the 1923 tour of England. Constantine, Francis and Herman Griffith troubled many English batsmen in 1928 and were quite effective in Australia in 1930–31 too; but if these three were intimidating and drew respect from some of the world’s best batsmen, their Test records were no more than respectable. Griffith has the best statistics (44 wickets at 28.25), but he and Francis were often effective without being devastating. Moreover, both were past their prime by the time the West Indies attained Test status; in contrast, when Martindale reached his peak, the West Indies were well-established at that level. But Martindale was not an obvious candidate to replace them in 1933. Even in the West Indies, when he made his debut he was unknown outside Barbados, where he grew up. Where did he come from?

Emmanuel Alfred Martindale was born in 1909 in the parish of St Lucy, Barbados. The family lived at Selay Hall in the St John parish. Martindale’s father William was a shipwright and his mother Elivra (née Bishop) was a domestic servant, but no-one in the family had previously shown much interest in cricket. They were wealthy enough — or were perhaps given a church scholarship — to send Martindale to the prestigious Combermere High School.

Martindale began his cricketing career as a batsman, and it was in this role that he captained the extremely strong cricket team of Combermere. One of his team-mates was Charles Spooner, another promising fast bowler who played alongside Martindale for Barbados in the 1930s, although he never quite succeeded at first-class level and later emigrated to Trinidad, for whom he briefly played. When Martindale left school at the age of 18 in 1927, he joined Empire Cricket Club, which had been formed in acrimonious circumstances in 1914. At the time, there were only four main clubs in Barbados, two of which were exclusively white and a third was Harrison College, a school team. The fourth club, Spartan, was for members of the black middle classes, but when Herman Griffith was refused membership in 1914 owing to his lowly social status — he was a junior clerk at the hospital — several players left the club in disgust and formed a new club, Empire. Griffith was a founding member and the club captain, as well as an established Test bowler by the time Martindale joined the club.

Herman Griffith in 1930 (Image: Wikipedia)

Alongside Martindale and Griffith in the Empire team, forming what must have been a formidable pace attack, were Spooner and “Foffie” Williams, the latter of whom played four Tests for the West Indies either side of the Second World War. The club had became established as the home of the working class population of Barbados, and owing to the circumstances of its formation, matches against Spartan were intense and often unpleasant, played before enormous crowds. For example, in 1935, Martindale unleashed a barrage of short-pitched bowling on the Spartan batsmen, who protested to the umpires; the latter saw no problem with his bowling and therefore Spartan refused to play, conceding the match.

When Martindale first played for Empire in 1928, he was a batsman who bowled occasionally, but Griffith was impressed by him, particularly as he had grown considerably since first playing cricket. It was Griffith who convinced Martindale that he would be better served concentrating on bowling fast. He suggested a training regime to build up his physique, including swimming and skipping, and saw enormous potential in Martindale. Griffith coached Martindale and encouraged him to play other sports as well, including athletics, swimming, tennis and football. In this latter sport, he represented Barbados at full-back. Away from sport, he worked as a sanitary inspector in the Barbados public health department; Griffith had a similar job by then and might have used his influence to secure a similar position for his protégé.

Under Griffith’s guidance, Martindale’s success at Empire led to his selection for Barbados. He made his first-class debut in late 1929 when he was part of the Barbados team which lost heavily to British Guiana in the Intercolonial Tournament. Figures of none for 128 and four for 52 made little impression on the batting as Guiana scored 610 and 379 in their two innings. In January 1930, he returned one for 120 from 30 overs against the touring MCC team, which scored 560 for seven against Barbados (although a fast full-toss broke a bone in the foot of Bob Wyatt).

During June 1930, an unofficial “West Indies” team visited New York to play some local clubs, mainly comprising ex-patriot West Indians in the Harlem area. Martindale was one of those chosen, alongside players like Ellis Achong and Ben Sealy; they sailed on the S. S. Matura and spent three months in America. No records of the tour survive, but his inclusion in the team is another indication of Martindale’s promise. The passenger list documenting their arrival reveals Martindale’s closest relative in Barbados to be Mrs Louise Martindale of St Michael’s.

When the Intercolonial Tournament returned in 1932 after not being played during the 1930–31 season, Martindale’s match figures of four for 72 could not prevent a six-wicket win by Trinidad. But whether he was being championed by Griffith, or by figures in Barbados cricket who saw the potential of the young fast bowler, he was given an opportunity in the trial matches organised to assist with selection for the 1933 tour of England. Across two matches (only one of which was first-class), he took eight wickets (his best figures were three for 54 in the second game).

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The 1933 West Indies team that toured England. Standing: Manny Martindale, Freddie Martin, Cyril Merry, Vincent Valentine, Ivan Barrow, Oscar Da Costa and Ellis Achong. Middle row: Herman Griffith, Teddy Hoad, John Kidney (manager), Jackie Grant (captain), Archie Wiles and Clifford Roach. On the ground: Ben Sealy, Cyril Christiani and George Headley.

The watching selectors were convinced and he was included in the team to tour England in 1933 alongside Griffith and Vincent Valentine as part of the fast bowling attack; Constantine’s commitments with Nelson Cricket Club restricted his availability, but he was expected to play occasionally. The preview of the tour in The Cricketer said of Martindale: “A fast bowler who, without doing anything remarkable to date, is regarded as most promising, and who bowled well in the trials. As a batsman, he is a useful tail-end hitter.” The writer expected Martindale to do well, but believed that the main support for Griffith would come from the left-arm spinner Ellis Achong, and thought Valentine could surprise a few people. But other than Griffith, and with Constantine largely absent, the bowling lacked experience; Martindale for instance had only 17 first-class wickets, and the main bowlers (apart from Griffith) had only 109 first-class wickets between them before the tour began.

As soon as the team arrived in England, Martindale attracted attention; the Times correspondent who watched the West Indies practising at Lord’s before the tour began observed: “In E. Martindale they have a bowler of pace worthy to succeed Constantine and Francis.” And when the team played two weeks of interminable warm-up games against low quality opposition, Martindale was quickly among the wickets, including figures of nine for 27 in a twelve-a-side game against Blackheath. He took this form into the first-class programme; in his second match, against Essex, he took eight for 32 in the first innings and recorded match figures of twelve for 105. The Times correspondent was happy that Martindale had bowled at off-stump, in contrast to the controversial “bodyline” tactics which dominated the sporting press, in which fast bowlers targeted leg stump — or even outside — with short-pitched deliveries with a concentrated leg-side field placed to catch deflections as the batsmen defended their bodies. But bodyline bowling was to loom large over the tour, and Martindale would play his part.

By the end of May, when he took six for 61 against Hampshire, Martindale had 34 wickets in first-class games at an average of 14.21. He had also taken five for 70 when the West Indies defeated a strong MCC team at Lord’s; Constantine, making one of his rare appearances also took four wickets and the pair shared nine wickets in the MCC’s first innings. However, the first note of criticism had crept into the press coverage as neither Martindale nor Constantine had been afraid to pitch the ball short.

Learie Constantine in 1930 (Image: Wikipedia)

Perhaps the amount of bowling he was doing affected him, because Martindale missed some games with a strain in June, and was less effective that month (taking just 15 first-class wickets). Nevertheless, he made his Test debut at the end of June in the first game of the three-match series. His opening partner was George Francis, summoned from league cricket to take the place of Constantine, who was not released by Nelson to play the game. The attack was completed by Martindale’s Empire team-mate Griffith. But Martindale was the most successful bowler. He took four for 85, helping to bowl England out for just 296, but on a rain-affected pitch, that was enough for England to win by an innings — their fourth innings win in four Tests against the West Indies in England. Martindale was again among the wickets in July with eight for 66 against Nottinghamshire but the high-point of his tour came in the second Test, played at Manchester.

During the West Indians’ match against Yorkshire, which Martindale missed, Constantine — making one of his rare appearances — experimented using bodyline against the Yorkshire batsmen. The idea was largely that of the West Indies captain Jackie Grant who was frustrated by the slow-paced pitch which neutralised his fast bowlers. He and Constantine discussed the issue at length; the players also talked about the idea during their train journey to Manchester and decided to try using the tactics during the second Test, the only match of the series for which Constantine was available.

When the Test began, West Indies batted first and scored 375 — comfortably their highest Test total in England — before unleashing bodyline when England replied. Constantine and Martindale initially bowled in fairly orthodox fashion, albeit frequently dropping short. After an uneventful start, the first wicket fell to a run out and the two bowlers began a consistently short-pitched attack after lunch on the second day with a leg-side field in place. Wally Hammond was particularly discomforted by the approach. Constantine struck him on the back with a short ball and sent several more close to his head. Another short ball, this time from Martindale, struck Hammond on the glove and from there flew onto his chin, splitting it open. The batsman had to retire briefly — looking furious as he walked off, clutching his injury — and returned with a plaster covering it. In Bodyline Autopsy, David Frith suggests that he muttered about quitting the sport if it was to be played like this. Playing uncharacteristically aggressively when he returned, Hammond hit the slow bowling of Headley for two sixes but the fast bowlers, who were rotating by this stage, continued to pitch short. One such ball, pitched on leg stump by Constantine, Hammond hit in the air to be caught by Martindale at long leg. Soon after this, another short ball removed Bob Wyatt when Constantine held a miraculous catch off Martindale at short square leg. Les Ames came in to bat, and managed to share a partnership with Jardine. However, he was less than comfortable, and Jardine told him: “You get yourself down this end, Les. I’ll take care of this bloody nonsense.”

Footage of the second Test of 1933; the selected clip begins with Hammond’s injury, and Martindale is the first bowler seen immediately after. Constantine can also be seen bowling to the bodyline field.

By this stage, the bowlers were operating with a full bodyline field ranged on the legside. Contemporary reports give little indication of the tension that others remembered during the electrifying passage of play; on the contrary, while suggesting that the fast bowling was exhilarating, they indicate that the crowd enjoyed the spectacle. The only hint of trouble came when Constantine — accidentally or otherwise — sent a full toss over the head of the England captain Douglas Jardine. At one time, England were in serious danger of collapse, but Grant’s curious tactic of resting his two fast bowlers at the same time for a long period, and using the far less dangerous Ellis Achong, Vincent Valentine and Oscar Da Costa, allowed Jardine and Ames to rebuild the innings.

After tea, Martindale and Constantine returned, with an even more pronounced leg-side field — at one stage, seven fielders were positioned on that side of the wicket — and Ames was dismissed as the bodyline tactics resumed. But after another thrilling passage of play, both bowlers were exhausted and lost their effectiveness, allowing another recovery. The next morning, Jardine went on to reach his only Test century, drawing praise from all quarters — including the West Indian bowlers — for his batting against the tactic which he himself had introduced to Test cricket. Martindale finished with five for 73 from 23.4 overs, although for most of the innings Constantine was the faster and more dangerous bowler.

England finished just one run behind — the first time the West Indies had led on first innings in a Test in England — and Jardine used E. W. Clarke to bowl bodyline in return. But it was the left-arm spinner James Langridge who caused most problems, inducing a West Indies collapse. However, there was not enough time for England to force a win, and West Indies had managed to avoid defeat for the first time in their fifth Test on English soil. Most subsequent writers have suggested that this Test, when English spectators saw the bodyline attack used against their own batsmen, marked a turning point in the attitude of the MCC. From then on, background manoeuvres began which aimed to end the tactic and within two years, it had been outlawed.

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The West Indies team during their match against Lancashire at Aigburth. Left to right: George Headley, Ellis Achong, Cyril Christiani, Manny Martindale, Herman Griffith, Benjamin Sealey, Vincent Valentine.

The match report in Wisden said: “At Manchester, however, we saw a lot of [bodyline] and, judging by the opinions afterwards expressed, it met with little commendation. Jardine himself had to bear the greatest brunt of this form of bowling. Both Martindale and Constantine directed it at him with unflagging zeal, and it was to the great credit of the English captain that he played it probably better than any other man in the world was capable of doing.” The report in The Cricketer brushed over the issue, noting that Jardine played the “leg-theory” bowling well, and if most of the batsmen were dismissed on the leg-side, none seemed too intimidated. An article in the same issue by “Second Slip” congratulated West Indies on their good batting display, but made no comment on the bowling tactics.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the match was the slight hysteria it provoked retrospectively. For example, E. J. Smith, who umpired the game, told his biographer Patrick Murphy in 1981 that Martindale and Constantine bowled round the wicket, pitching up to four balls each over short at Jardine; there are no contemporary suggestions that this was the case. But many attributed the turn of public opinion in England against bodyline bowling to the impact of this match — the editor of Wisden, for example, wrote that “most of those watching it for the first time must have come to the conclusion that, while strictly within the law, it was not nice.”

Footage from the first day of the third Test, showing some of Martindale’s five wickets

Martindale continued to be successful after the second Test. He took five for 93 in England’s only innings in the third Test, although his team lost by an innings, and England took the series 2–0, a result Constantine later attributed to the poor captaincy of Grant. But in his first Test series, Martindale took 14 wickets at an average of 17.92; of the other bowlers, only Achong (five at 47.40) and Griffith (three at 30.66) took more than a single wicket. Against a strong England team — only for the last Test were the selections more experimental — this was an excellent record.

In the game immediately after the final Test, Martindale took eight for against Sir Lindsay Parkinson’s XI at Blackpool and although relatively expensive in the final matches, ended the tour with five for 87 (and eight wickets in the game) against H. D. G. Leveson Gower’s XI at the Scarborough Festival. In all first-class games, he took 103 wickets at 20.98. Wisden said:

“Headley, as a batsman, stood out head and shoulders above the rest and Martindale, as a bowler, was almost equally indispensable … Without any injustice to the rest of the team, it can almost be said that in their different departments Headley and Martindale were giants … Nobody in bowling approached Martindale, who, possessed of an excellent action, often maintained a great pace and during the tour took over a hundred wickets at a cost of nearly 21 runs each.”

But Wisden viewed the tour as disappointing, not least because the West Indies were so dependent on Headley and Martindale, and thought that their batting let them down. Curiously, “Second Slip” in The Cricketer argued the opposite, that it was the bowling which was too weak, although he noted that the West Indies enjoyed public sympathy and support during the tour. On Martindale, he wrote: “From the word ‘go’, it was obvious that Martindale, who is fast with a long run and the fashionable West Indian jump in the middle of it, would have to do the greater part of the damage. He did so, taking over 100 wickets.” But he also complained that none of the bowlers averaged under 20 — which was generally seen as the cut-off for an excellent bowler. And it is true that Martindale was only 26th in the national bowling averages, but any criticism would have been harsh. Martindale had no support: none of the other regular bowlers averaged under 35 and, apart from him, only Achong took more than fifty wickets. This left Martindale with an exhausting workload, and this is reflected in a few matches where he was more expensive than usual. Had Constantine been available to share the burden, or if Griffith or Valentine had proven more effective, it is likely Martindale’s record would have been even better. Additionally, the hot 1933 summer produced a succession of good batting pitches, making for even harder work for bowlers. For a young bowler on his first tour of England, Martindale’s record was extremely good; without him, the West Indies would have been toothless in the field.

Martindale’s success during the tour prompted interest from several clubs in the Lancashire League, but he declined their offers. Part of the reason might have been that he did not want to leave his family for any prolonged period. In July 1932, he had married Gillan Gittens from Church village in Barbados. She was the same age as him, born around April 1910, and their marriage proved incredibly strong for the rest of their lives. By the time of the 1933 tour, their first child, Colin, had been born. Perhaps for this reason, Martindale preferred to return to Barbados and continue his career as a sanitary inspector. But within two years, by which time he was the most feared fast bowler in the world, he was ready to make a new life in England with his growing family…

Notes

Most of the information on Martindale’s family and early life comes from A War to the Knife (2019) by Richard Bentley, who interviewed Martindale’s grandson Roger. Bentley names Martindale’s wife as Gillan Hunte, but the English birth records of their youngest three children indicate that her maiden name was Gittens. Other information comes from an interview Martindale gave in 1936 when he joined Burnley Cricket Club, and a similar interview given at the same time by Herman Griffith.

Only Peaks and Troughs: The Inconsistency of Clifford Roach

Clifford Roach in Australia in 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Before the emergence of George Headley, who remains — statistically and by reputation — one of the greatest cricketers to play the game, there had been several good batsmen for the West Indies. However, the success of players such as Charles Ollivierre, George Challenor, Tim Tarilton, Wilton St Hill or Joseph Small came almost exclusively at first-class level. None had succeeded in Tests; they either did not get the opportunity or could not translate their success at a lower level into runs against international attacks. But there was one batsman who briefly shone in Test matches just as Headley made his debut. Although Clifford Roach never had the remarkable consistency or mental strength of Headley, he had notable success; he even became the first Test centurion and later the first double-centurion for the West Indies. But he was overshadowed by his team-mate, and suffers by comparison.

Clifford Archibald Roach was from Port-of-Spain in Trinidad and Tobago and played in the local competition, the Beaumont Cup, for Maple Cricket Club. Like several of his contemporaries, he features in the famous Beyond a Boundary (1963) by C. L. R. James, who characterised Maple as “the club of the brown-skinned middle-class” which rejected any cricketers “with a distinctly dark skin”. A substantial part of Beyond a Boundary concerns how James agonised over which team to play for after leaving school; it was Roach’s father who persuaded James — who like Roach had a darker skin than would usually have been acceptable to the club — to join Maple. But James — who is often surprisingly silent regarding cricketers with whom he must have spent a lot of time — has little to say on Roach. He describes him as “an untalkative but cheerful soul” who enjoyed many battles against the fast bowling of Learie Constantine. James, who worked as a teacher in this period of his life, also recalled giving private tuition to Roach, “and even coached him at cricket a little, though he was rapidly able to coach me.” Later, when he played alongside Roach for Maple, they opened the batting together.

As well as James, Roach received coaching from George John and quickly began to emerge as a player of distinct promise in Trinidad. His timing was fortunate; the reputation of West Indian cricket was in the ascendant following a successful tour of England in 1923, and a very competitive series against a strong MCC team in 1926. Trinidad, too, had emerged from a long spell under the shadow of a dominant Barbados team to become the strongest side in the Caribbean. Roach first played cricket for Trinidad in 1924 at the age of 19, but had no great success at first-class level before the 1928 West Indies visit to England.

This was a hugely important tour as it would include the West Indies’ first Test matches. Team selection was a hot topic in newspapers across the region, and long discussions of the merits of likely players occupied a period of almost eighteen months. The composition of the West Indies team was hindered by the convention that each of Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica would contribute a certain proportion of players. The original intention was for Trinidad to have five players in the team, although only four actually took part in the tour — one selection, the wicket-keeper George Dewhurst, pulled out at the last minute, with catastrophic results for the balance of the side. The other Trinidad players had strong records: Learie Constantine had toured England in 1923 and was an accomplished and improving all-rounder; Joe Small, who had also visited England in 1923, was a very stylish batsman and good bowler; and Wilton St Hill had a record second-to-none and was probably the best batsman in the West Indies in the mid-1920s.

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Clifford Roach (left) and Archie Wiles during the 1933 tour of England

But Roach was in the mind of the Trinidad selectors from an early date; he was one of nine players who were asked in July 1927 if they would be available to tour England. Largely based on his promise and his success with Maple — certainly not on his first-class record, which at the time consisted of four matches, no fifties, 171 runs and an average of 24.42 — he was chosen in the trial matches to assist with team selection. At the time, the most likely selection from Trinidad was a batsman called Archie Wiles who had a long and distinguished record at first-class level. He also, at a time when West Indies cricket was run by Europeans, who dominated every aspect of life in the region, had the advantage of being white. Although the success of Small and St Hill had challenged the traditional perception among the West Indian cricket elite that only white batsmen were good enough, discrimination against black cricketers lingered. Therefore, Roach’s 84 in the opening game — his maiden first-class fifty — was important, particularly as St Hill scored a century and Wiles failed. The latter was unsuccessful in the other two matches as well, despite being given every opportunity. Even though Roach achieved little after the opening game, he had done enough to be included in the West Indies team alongside St Hill; there was no room for Wiles, and the role of “veteran white batsman” was taken by Barbados’ E. L. G. Hoad.

Even allowing for his success and Wiles’ failure, it is still surprising that Roach was chosen for the tour on little more than potential. Several newspaper articles suggested that his excellent fielding was a big factor, and here he had the advantage of being twelve years younger than Wiles. Some reports even indicated that his ability to bowl played a part in his selection; but this was something he rarely did at first-class level. While he may have been a useful bowler on Trinidad’s matting pitches, he posed little threat on other surfaces and took just five first-class wickets in his entire career. And on the 1928 tour, he bowled only 48 overs, taking two for 194. Incidentally, the omission of Wiles was controversial, particularly in Trinidad; he was eventually chosen to tour England in 1933, when he was 40. Unsurprisingly, he failed badly.

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The West Indies team at the Oval in May 1928. Back row: Wilton St Hill, George Francis, James Neblett, Frank Martin, George Challenor, Joe Small, Clifford Roach, Learie Constantine. Front row: Maurice Fernandes, Claude Wight, Karl Nunes, “Snuffy” Browne and Herman Griffith.

The tour of 1928 was a chastening one for the West Indies. The batting was an abject failure and all three Test matches were lost by an innings. Internal feuds and poor leadership from the captain Karl Nunes meant that no recovery was possible and results collapsed as the tour neared its end; the 1928 West Indies had one of the worst records of any touring side to visit England before the Second World War. However, Roach was a relative success with the bat, finishing fifth in the team’s first-class averages with 26.56. He did not score a century but managed nine fifties.

Roach played in the West Indies first ever Test match, a complete mis-match. While the West Indies bowlers impressed, the batsmen were helpless. Roach’s debut innings was ignominious: batting at number six, he was run out without scoring. His second innings was slightly more successful; although he made just 16 runs, he shared a partnership of 56 with Joe Small, who hit the West Indies’ only fifty of the game. For the next two Tests, Roach was the only success of the visiting team. Promoted to open, he passed fifty in both games, the only batsman to score a half-century in the series other than Small, although his highest score was just 53 (scored out of an opening partnership with George Challenor of 91 in 70 minutes) and his average 21.83.

The summer was successful in another way too as he qualified as a solicitor while the tour was ongoing. He joined several of his team-mates in having careers in the legal profession: Karl Nunes and Vibart Wight (the vice-captain) were also solicitors; C. R. “Snuffy” Browne was a barrister; and Learie Constantine was a solicitor’s clerk at the time and qualified as a barrister in the 1950s. Roach worked as a solicitor for the rest of his life — long after his cricket career ended and even after his health began to fail.

Nevertheless, after a tour during which several reputations were ruined completely and no batsman came to the fore, the promise shown by Roach was seized upon. His success led to predictions that he would succeed George Challenor — who at the age of forty was past his best — as the premier batsman in the Caribbean. But it was not to be; he remained inconsistent throughout his career, mainly owing to an unwillingness to defend and play the situation. Clayton Goodwin, in his Caribbean Cricketers from the Pioneers to Packer (1980), wrote: “Roach was in such a hurry to score runs and to entertain that he ignored tactical considerations at his peril. He would have suited present-day instant cricket, and would have interested the patrons of the commercial game.”

As the only new discovery from the tour, he continued to improve when he returned home. In the 1928–29 Intercolonial Tournament, he scored 48 in the first game against British Guiana, then in the final against Barbados, he scored 86, his first fifty for Trinidad as his team won by an innings. In October 1929, his scores of 26 and 72 could not prevent British Guiana winning the tournament but firmly established him as one of the leading batsmen in the Caribbean. Therefore, he was a certain selection when an MCC team arrived in the West Indies to play a four-match Test series.

The 1929–30 series was a strange one; the matches were only later confirmed as official Tests and their status was a little fluid when the tour took place. The English team was one of two MCC sides touring that winter and this uncertainty meant that the record books show that England played two Test matches on the same days (11 January 1930 and 21 February 1930) in different parts of the world. The need to send two English teams also diluted the available talent, and the team that toured the West Indies contained many veterans, including the 52-year-old Wilfred Rhodes and the 50-year-old George Gunn.

Nor were the home team at their strongest. As ever, selection for the West Indies was complicated by matters of finance and regional differences; a huge number of players appeared for the home side in the four Tests, many only selected on their home territory. The reason was that local selectors chose each Test team. In total, 27 players appeared for the West Indies in the series, and each Test had a different captain, selected from the host nation. Only two men played in all four Tests for the West Indies — George Headley and Roach. And for Roach, although he went into each game with a different opening partner, the series was a triumph. In the first match, which was drawn, he scored 122 on the first day to become the West Indies’ first Test centurion, and followed up with a 77 in the second innings. But nothing better encapsulates the wild inconsistency of Roach’s career than what happened next when the MCC visited his home island of Trinidad. In the two first-class games played against the tourists by the Trinidad team, Roach scored 2, 13, 9 and 0. In the Test match, he scored a pair, dismissed for 0 by Bill Voce in both innings, and England won by 167 runs.

Writing about the series in Cricket and I (1933), Learie Constantine recalled what happened next:

“Before his six failures Roach had been invited to play in British Guiana [the venue of the next Test], but after his disastrous experiences he did not know what to do and cabled offering to stand down and avoid embarrassing them if they wished to drop him. The Selection Committee replied instantly, telling him to come as he was very much wanted. Before Roach left, [the former West Indies and Trinidad fast bowler] George John, who had coached him in his early days, paid him a visit at his office.
‘Well, what are you going to do over there?’ asked John.
‘I am going to fight for the first hundred,’ said Roach, ‘and if they let me get that, then I am going to get my own back in the second.'”

According to Constantine, when the West Indies won the toss in that third Test, Roach and his opening partner Errol Hunte batted very carefully, scoring only 38 before lunch; Roach “took not the shadow of a chance, playing every ball with the utmost care in the very centre of the bat” and Hunte followed suite. Eventually, their partnership was worth 144 when Hunte was out but Roach went on to his century, and “with his reputation restored proceeded to make up longstanding arrears. He hit the bowlers as if with malice. No theory, no arrangement of field, could stop boundary after boundary, and despite his slow beginning, when he was caught in the last over of the day he had scored 209, as complete and satisfactory a reversal of ill-fortune as any day-dreamer could have wished.” He was out to the last ball of the day, having scored the first Test double-century for the West Indies; his team won on the fifth day by 289 runs, their first Test victory.

The final Test was something of an anti-climax for Roach; his scores of 15 and 22 made little impact on a match that lasted nine days before being drawn, after some huge scores. The series ended 1–1 which was probably a fair result even if it did not reflect the bizarre way that the two teams had been chosen. Roach scored 467 runs at 58.37 in the series, but even as he apparently established himself, he was eclipsed. George Headley scored 703 runs at 87.87, and was regarded as one of the world’s best batsmen — second only to Bradman, and perhaps surpassing him on difficult pitches — for the next decade. Roach will always be the first centurion and double-centurion for the West Indies, but after that series, his moment had passed.

It is worth remembering, when considering Roach’s success (Headley later proved himself in more difficult conditions against better bowlers) that the English attack was a limited one. During the series, Roach faced Ewart Astill, a 41-year-old medium paced bowler who never played a home Test; Nigel Haig, a 42-year-old fast-medium bowler who had played once for England in 1921 but was some way past his best; and Wilfred Rhodes, the 52-year-old legend who was nearing retirement and was little threat compared to his great days of thirty years before. The only bowlers anywhere near their peak were Greville Stevens, an erratic leg-spinning all-rounder who never quite reached Test standard; Les Townsend, a Derbyshire all-rounder whose formidable county record never translated to Test level; and Bill Voce, who was then a promising 20-year-old fast bowler some way short of his best and fearsome post-bodyline reputation.

The Trinidad and West Indies team-mates Clifford Roach (left) and Edwin St Hill (right) in Australia in 1930-31 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Given the limited nature of the England attack, perhaps it is unsurprising that Roach enjoyed by far his best series. He never again replicated this success at Test level. Although he was an obvious choice for the West Indies team that toured Australia in 1930–31, apart from an innings of fifty in the first Test he achieved little, too often falling to medium-paced bowling or to the Australian spinners. The West Indies team was out-matched in the first four Tests and only in the final Test was there a recovery. Roach played his part with two innings in the thirties; West Indies managed a creditable win by 30 runs. His only other success was a century against Victoria, but as he had been expected to be, alongside Headley, the leading batsman in the team, it was a disappointing tour. The suspicion was that he had been unable to temper his aggression; given the Australian approach at the time of strangling scoring opportunities, it is quite likely that he fell prey to his own impatience, not least as he made starts in many of his innings.

This lack of restraint, and a poor season for Trinidad, led to some calls for him to be omitted from the West Indies team that toured England in 1933. Nevertheless, he was selected and drew praise from Wisden, which stated: “If not nearly so sound as Headley, Roach was easily the best man in the team to watch, his batting on many occasions being brilliant to a degree. Nothing, indeed, in the whole tour was so dazzling as the innings of 180 Roach played against Surrey at the Oval.” That innings, lasting just 170 minutes and including a century before lunch, was his biggest success of a tour which brought him 1,286 runs 25.72, a poorer return than his debut tour five years before. His Test record was similar too; after a pair in the first Test, he scored half centuries in the other two games to finish with 141 runs at 23.50. For all his attractive strokeplay, his defensive play was poor, and post-mortems on the tour in the Caribbean seized on his unreliability. In an interview given when the players arrived home (and reported in the Jamaica Gleaner), the West Indies captain, Jackie Grant, defended Roach’s aggressive approach because it was attractive to spectators, and implied that he had been unwilling to bat lower in the order, a position several critics suggested would have better suited his approach.

Back in the Trinidad team, Roach scored the last of his five first-class centuries in September 1934 but was dropped from the West Indies team after playing the first Test against England in 1935. Although he was not yet 31, his Test career was over. There were frequent calls in the 1930s for him to be recalled, but while he continued to have success at first-class level, he never was. After playing on until 1937, he was dropped by Trinidad too, despite remaining on the fringes of the team. He continued to play for Maple a little longer, opening the batting for Maple alongside the future Test player Andy Ganteaume — who later recalled how Roach had “a mischievous sense of humour and a somewhat carefree disposition” — in 1939 and casually taking 14 runs from one over by an opposition fast bowler. His overall Test record — 952 runs at an average of 30.70 — seems low for someone of such evident talent, and disguises a career that consisted solely of peaks and troughs.

Roach was, however, far more than just a cricketer. He was just as famous in Trinidad and Tobago for his exploits as a footballer, although he perhaps never reached as wide an audience as he did in cricket. He played for the Maple team during the 1920s and 1930s, but also represented Trinidad at international level, competing in football’s version of the Intercolonial Tournament. One of his team-mates was Ellis Achong, who also played Test cricket for the West Indies. While there are no records readily available, Roach was still revered as one of the best players to appear for the island in the 1950s.

Roach spent time in England during the Second World War — although it is unclear why — and played several wartime charity matches for the various “West Indies” teams that appeared regularly around England. In these, he was joined by several of his former Test colleagues, including Constantine, Achong and Edwin St Hill. After this, Roach seems to have lived a quiet life and largely faded into obscurity. He could sometimes be found in the pages of newspapers, commenting on cricket issues of the day, and he enjoyed some fame in later years, when the West Indies were the strongest side in the world, by virtue of his status as the first man to score a Test century for the team. He was particularly impressed by the leadership of Frank Worrell in the 1960s, and maintained that he was the best Test captain that the West Indies had ever had.

At some point in the 1930s, Roach married Edna Violet Winter. The couple had nine children in total, several of whom eventually moved to England. Later, Roach struggled with diabetes. He also suffered from arteriosclerosis, made worse by his diabetes, and had to have one of his legs amputated in 1968. When his second leg also had to be amputated in 1970, he travelled to London — where many of his children lived — for the operation and to have artificial legs fitted. The costs were considerable: tickets to London for he and his wife cost J$433 (Jamaican dollars); the two legs cost a total of $500; and their expenses in London amounted to $220. However, the London-based West Indies National Association paid the costs of renting a flat, hiring a television and telephone, and for transportation to and from the hospital for his twice-weekly appointments.

A report in the Jamaica Gleaner in 1970 stated:

“When the weather is good in London … [Roach] goes window-shopping from his wheelchair. He is philosophic about his future life in Trinidad where he intends to continue with his career as a solicitor … On his future without a leg, Clifford Roach quietly says: ‘I admit to some fears about having to walk with two artificial legs. I had enough hell to walk with one. But it’s not good crying about it. I have had to adapt and accommodate myself to the problem.’ Let us applaud Clifford Roach, man with courage.”

Although many of his contemporaries — such as Small or the St Hill brothers — faded into obscurity and were forgotten once their careers ended, Roach remained a respected figure right up until his death in 1988. In 1984, he was entered into the Trinidad and Tobago Sports Hall of Fame for his sporting achievements. As late as 2008, he was honoured by the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation as part of their centenary celebrations. But at the same time, he suffered from playing at the same time as the peerless Headley; he barely features in Michael Manley’s History of West Indies Cricket (1995) except to be compared unfavourably with Headley. But there were few, if any, batsmen in the world in the 1930s who were Headley’s equal, and Roach should not be judged unfavourably for being a mere mortal. If his career was marked by inconsistency, his highs can never be equalled, simply because he was the first to get there. If he is remembered less today than he once was, at least Roach was one of the few West Indian cricketers from the 1920s and 1930s to receive the recognition that he was due.