Politics, Selection and Mistaken Identity: The Life of Errol Hunte

Errol Hunte in Australia in 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Early West Indian Test cricketers are poorly served by historians; many are little more than a name on a scorecard. Such a fate is perhaps inevitable for almost anyone who played so long ago unless they were from England or Australia, but even so there are many cases from the Caribbean in the period before the Second World War. One of the more extreme is the Trinidadian wicket-keeper Errol Hunte. He played three Tests in 1930 and toured Australia in 1930–31, but his Wisden obituary was just a few bland lines. To measure it in a different way, his Wikipedia article is one sentence at the time of writing. His biggest claim to notability was that for many years, Wisden confused him with another player and split his Test appearances with the unrelated R. L. Hunte of British Guiana, a simple case of mis-transcribing “Errol” as “R. L.”, an error uncorrected until 1967. Gideon Haigh wrote about this mistake for ESPNcricinfo in 2006, but even he had little to say about the player himself. Perhaps it is time to redress the balance a little.

Errol Ashton Clairmonte Hunte was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on 3 October 1905. Almost nothing is known about his early life except that in the 1920s he played for Maple Cricket Club in Trinidad. In Beyond a Boundary (1963), C. L. R. James — who also played for Maple — C. L. R. James described it as the club of “the brown-skinned middle class”, which might give some clues about Hunte’s background. Hunte’s first appearance in the record books came when he played for North Trinidad against South Trinidad in 1925; two years later, he played for the North against the South once again, this time in the Beaumont Cup, when one of his team-mates was C. L. R. James, and then again in 1928. He did not distinguish himself with the bat in any of these matches, although he was playing alongside some of the biggest names in West Indian cricket (there is no indication of whether he kept wicket in these games, but it is most likely that he did). In May that year, when some of those names were taking part in a very undistinguished tour of England that incorporated the first Test matches played by the West Indies, Hunte and his fellow Trinidadians Edwin St Hill and Ben Sealey visited New York as part of a West Indian cricket team. The sailing record provides some of the only information we have about Hunte: that he was a teacher; that he was unmarried and lived with his father, T. W. Hunte, in Belmont; and that he was 5 feet 11 inches tall.

The following January, Hunte made his first-class debut for Trinidad, playing as the wicket-keeper against Barbados and British Guiana as his team easily won the Intercolonial Tournament at home. But Hunte’s highest score in three innings was 26, and his selection reflected the somewhat confused nature of Trinidad’s team in this period following the mysterious withdrawal of the team’s regular wicket-keeper George Dewhurst from first-class cricket. Hunte was one of several wicket-keepers tried in this period. If his batting made no impact, he must have impressed to some extent with the wicket-keeping gloves. He retained his place when the team defended their title later in the year in British Guiana (playing once more for North Trinidad in the meantime) but again achieved little of note (batting at number ten in both innings, having appeared in the middle order in his first two matches).

Embed from Getty Images

The West Indies team for the first Test in 1930.  Back row: (Unknown), (Unknown), Edwin St Hill, Clifford Roach, Frank De Caires, Leslie Walcott, Errol Hunte, (Unknown). Front row: James Neblett, George Headley, Learie Constantine, Teddy Hoad (captain), Cyril Browne, Derek Sealey, Herman Griffith.

But either his wicket-keeping shone, or he had batting success in local Trinidad cricket because not only did the Trinidad selectors stick with him, he was chosen as the wicket-keeper for the West Indies in the opening Test match for England’s tour in 1930. Nor did his selection owe anything to regional politics because his debut was in Barbados, meaning that the Barbados selectors must have judged him to be the best wicket-keeper. In a drawn game, he batted at number eleven and scored 10 not out and 1. However, a gossipy article a few weeks later in Trinidad’s Sporting Chronicle suggested that he had not impressed the cricket authorities in Barbados, an opinion echoed in The Cricketer’s review of the tour published in England.

When the series moved to Trinidad, Hunte became (presumably inadvertently) caught up in a mysterious controversy involving the former Trinidad captain and wicket-keeper George Dewhurst, who had withdrawn from the West Indies team that toured England in 1928 over selection issues and not played for the island since. However, with the visit of the English team, there were moves afoot not only for Dewhurst to return to the Trinidad team, but also to captain the West Indies for the Trinidad Test. As was normal practice, the MCC team played two matches against Trinidad before the Test match. In the first, the home team were captained by Nelson Betancourt, a 42-year-old who had played intermittently for Trinidad since 1905 and had a very undistinguished playing record. The wicket-keeper for this match was Hunte, who batted at number eleven in the first innings, scoring 12 not out, and 20 not out (when he cannot have batted last, but his position is not known) in the second as Trinidad won by 102 runs. For the second game against the MCC, Hunte was replaced by Dewhurst, who also captained the team in what was regarded by some elements of the press as a trial to see who should captain the Test team. Several newspapers predicted that he would be named as captain, but when the team was announced, Betancourt was captain and Hunte had been retained as wicket-keeper.

Given his lack of batting form, it is remarkable that Hunte was asked to open he batting alongside Clifford Roach, and even more remarkable that he scored 58, his maiden first-class fifty. His half century came in 102 balls with eight fours, and he shared a second-wicket stand of 89 with Wilton St Hill (after Roach was dismissed without a run scored). Wisden noted that he and St Hill “played steadily”. He scored 30 in the second innings, sharing an opening partnership of 57 with St Hill. West Indies lost that game but Hunte, having impressed in the role and with his batting, was retained as wicket-keeper when the teams travelled to British Guiana. He once again opened the batting and this time shared an opening partnership of 144 with Roach; he scored a dogged 53, reaching his half century from 195 deliveries. Nevertheless, he had a great deal of luck; Wisden observed: “MCC’s [England’s] fielding was badly at fault when West Indies opened their first innings with a stand of 144, Hunte being missed four times.” Hunte was first out, and Roach went on to a double century. Hunte scored 14 in the second innings and West Indies won by 289 runs.

Hunte did not retain his place for the final Test, played in Jamaica, making way for the local wicket-keeper Ivan Barrow. But he had impressed some critics. The review of the tour in The Cricketer stated of Hunte: “An ungainly wicket-keeper, but active and effective. Kept very moderately in Barbados, but very well in Trinidad. Proved himself a most useful opening batsman, having a very stubborn defence. He can also hit the ball hard. Ugly and ungainly in this department too.” In Trinidad, the Sporting Chronicle viewed him as an “able” keeper who showed “high promise” with the bat. But Wisden became very confused; Hunte was listed in the averages as two separate people. His debut was listed as a cricketer called “E. Hunte” but the other two appearances were attributed to “R. L. Hunte”, and this mistake was perpetuated in later editions of the almanack, which recorded one Test appearance by E. Hunte and two by R. L. Hunte. The reasons are not hard to find: Wisden seemingly had no correspondent on hand and, compared to The Cricketer, displayed patch knowledge of West Indian cricket. As there was a cricketer in the Caribbean called R. L. Hunte (Ronald Hunte, who had a twenty-year career with British Guiana), the confusion of the initials with the name “Errol” is understandable but inexcusable in a publication concerned with statistical accuracy. The mistake was not corrected until the 1967 edition of Wisden.

Left to right: George Headley, Derek Sealy and Errol Hunte in Australia in November 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Given his success with bat and gloves, it was inevitable that Hunte would be selected for a tour of Australia in 1930–31. He and Barrow were the main wicket-keepers (although Derek Sealy kept wicket later in his career and could have filled in), but the suspicion was that Hunte was chosen as much for his batting as wicket-keeping; for example, the Daily Gleaner in Jamaica suggested: “Anyhow Hunte as a good opening batsmen may be played more in that capacity than for his keeping qualities.” If so, he was picked based on a very limited record. Furthermore, there were some doubts about his health going into the tour; the Gleaner reported that he had been “a trifle seedy”. Yet he must have recovered because in later years, the doctor responsible for the health of the team on tour told Andy Ganteaume that Hunte was “the finest specimen of a man” he had seen.

The Australian press showed considerable interest in the team, particularly the black players. A tour preview in the Adelaide Advertiser, written by Thomas D. Lord of Trinidad, gave a brief summary of Hunte’s career and described him as an excellent wicket-keeper and worthy successor to Dewhurst. It also stated of his batting: “He is endowed with great patience and concentrates on a sound defence but when once he sees the ball well, he hits hard.” Another oddity about Hunte’s tour was that he was advertised in Sydney’s Daily Pictorial as an aspiring author: “Hunte has a remarkable flair for literature, and he has written a vivid human drama specially for the “Sunday Pictorial.” The story duly appeared on 30 November, called “The Soul’s Awakening”

Whatever the literary merits of the story, Hunte’s tour on the field was undistinguished. His highest score in five first-class matches was 29 and although he was given several chances to establish himself, Barrow was the favoured wicket-keeper throughout the tour and played all five Test matches. The Cricketer review of the tour noted that “wicketkeeping [was] a weak-point for some time with the West Indies” and that Barrow had been played in the Tests. However, during the tour an article in the Trinidad Sporting Chronicle suggested that Hunte had been left out following an incident in a match against Queensland. According to the article, Hunte “with great show and confidence appealed for a catch” at the wicket when Victor Goodwin was batting. The appeal was turned down and Hunte “proceeded to make demonstration in seeming disgust” and threw the ball away. The article suggested that “on account of this and other similar reasons”, Hunte was omitted from the Tests. The newspaper concluded that “Hunte should not have taken this sort of local Savannah Cricket habit to Australia” and felt “pretty sure that his inability to accept decisions against his appeals in the proper manner and his all too demonstrative yet not always safe methods when performing behind the wicket have been responsible for the small number of his appearances in the big matches.”

Hunte batting in the nets at Sydney in 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

This account was denied by the batter Frank Martin when he returned home to Jamaica. In a speech at a dinner to honour the Jamaican cricketers who played in Australia, Martin was critical of the Sporting Chronicle for printing the article and mildly rebuked the Gleaner for reprinting it. He said that he was sure “that the intelligent public, knowing the source from which that article came, would not, or did not place any credence to it.” He called Hunte “a fine fellow” and a “sportsman”, for whom such actions would be “quite foreign”. He said that no such incident took place and that the story was “only a crude way of excusing the exclusion of Mr Hunte [who] was excluded from the team because Mr Barrow proved himself a very good keeper.” The endorsement of Hunte received a warm reception from his Jamaican audience.

Even if there was no truth in the rumours, Hunte never played for the West Indies again. His name was discussed prior to the 1933 tour of England, but a writer for the Port of Spain Gazette said: “I understand that there is prejudice against Errol Hunte. In fact I know there is. The quicker the selectors put this behind their backs and think of nothing else but the success of the side the better for them. For Hunte is not only a proper wicket-keeper but a good batsman with a fair experience and where so much is uncertain it is best that the side should have as many batsmen as possible.” As was the case in 1930 and 1930–31, there is a definite sense that Hunte’s selection was tied up in matters beyond the field, even if we cannot be too sure what they were. But when he failed in a trial match for the tour, he was omitted from the team. An account in The Cricketer stated: “Hunte and De Caires both visited Australia and both failed as batsmen in the trials; indeed, C. L. C. Bourne kept wicket in the former’s place and he perhaps never had more than an outside chance.”

Hunte retained his place as Trinidad’s wicket-keeper for the 1932 and 1934 Intercolonial Tournaments (there was no tournament in 1933, with games instead arranged to inform selection for the 1933 tour of England). His highest score in these games was 56, and after scores of 2 and 2 opening the batting against Barbados in 1934, his first-class career was over (although he captained South Trinidad in the Beaumont Cup as late as 1937). His role as Trinidad’s wicket-keeper was taken by Allman Agard.

Nevertheless it is likely that Hunte had chosen to make himself unavailable for financial or career reasons. By 1930, he no longer worked as a teacher but was instead a clerical assistant at a magistrate’s court in Princes Town and Moruga, on an annual salary of £110. And it seems that some time in the early 1930s, Hunte married (only the first names of his wife are known — Olive Leona — and we know that she was born in 1906) and in 1934 he became the father to twin girls. A son (1940) and another daughter (1942) came later. Perhaps he chose to concentrate on his career in order to support his family.

He certainly remained a civil servant in later years, and travelled extensively. For example, he visited New York (with his wife) in 1949. But he and his family also spent some time in England. In 1954, he spent time in England working for the British Council in Liverpool, accompanied by his wife and four children; his eldest daughters were working as a civil servant and as a librarian. Hunte stayed for several months, living in London. In 1960, he spent six months in England, working as a civil servant at the Colonial Office in London. And in between these extended visits, he also spent time as a delegate at the conference on Local Government at the University College of the West Indies in 1957.

But he was not done with cricket and worked as a government coach in a scheme organised by the Ministry of Education and Culture. He became head of the Community Development Department and worked alongside several former West Indies cricketers included Ellis Achong and Andy Ganteaume. In his 2007 autobiography, the latter wrote: “Errol was one of the finest gentlemen one could ever meet. Errol was an exceptional individual. He had a very pleasant manner, a lovely sense of humour, was also a good billiards player and an outstanding card player who was always able to avoid any unpleasant exchange with any other player.”

Hunte died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1967, leaving an estate worth £1,565. His final address was D8 Empire Flats, St Vincent Street, Port of Spain. His probate was handled in England two years later. He had a brief obituary in Wisden, which even if it had corrected his misidentification as R. L. Hunte, made another mistake, saying that he played for British Guiana (again, probably a confusion with the real R. L Hunte). It called him a “good opening batsman”. Hunte’s obituary in The Cricketer went the other way, and called him (perhaps a little generously) “an outstanding wicket-keeper in intercolonial cricket”. But as was the case with so many of Hunte’s contemporaries in the West Indies teams, there was little interest in going any further. Yet in many ways, his cricketing career and his life in general are perfect illustrations of West Indies cricket in the early 1930s: a combination of good fortune, the effects of politics (through no fault of his own) and — despite the obstacles — some very good cricket before real life intruded.

“Clearly unfair treatment”: Andy Ganteaume’s Only Test Match

Andy Ganteaume

Although Donald Bradman’s legendary average of 99.94 in Test cricket is usually listed as the highest in the history of the game, there are technically two men with a better record. The highest average is currently held by Australia’s Kurtis Patterson, who played two Tests in 2019; he scored 30 in his first Test and 114 not out in his second, giving him the average of 144. At the time of writing, Patterson has not played a Test for four years but at the age of 30 has time to come back, which would almost inevitably see his average plummet to mortal levels. But the second highest average is set in stone; in 1948 Andy Ganteaume, playing for the West Indies, scored 112 in his only innings of his only Test match. While this might have statistically placed him forever above Bradman, it does beg the question of why a man who had scored a debut century would be dropped. The answer involves the unjust nature of West Indian cricket after the Second World War.

Andrew Gordon Ganteaume was born on 22 January 1921 in Belmont, a suburb of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His parents, Arnold Ganteaume and Amy Daniel, were not married — a considerable scandal at the time — and his mother was a teenager who still lived at home when he was born; therefore he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents. Although it was a very religious household, his grandparents never held the circumstances of Ganteaume’s birth against him or his mother. His early life revolved around St Margaret’s Anglican Church (the rector of which was Canon Francis Lee Merry, the father of the Trinidad and West Indies cricketer Cyril Merry), where he was an altar boy and sang in the choir.

Ganteaume attended St Margaret’s Anglican School, but at the age of eight moved to St Francis Boy’s Roman Catholic School (where the headmaster of the primary school was Ben Sealey, the Trinidad cricketer) with a view to qualifying for an exhibition at St Mary’s College. He did not particularly enjoy school, especially the severe and humiliating punishments meted out. But it gave him a platform as a keen sportsman.

Although he was a good footballer — and played other sports too — Ganteaume excelled at cricket. He first represented St Francis at the age of twelve, when he was the youngest player. In later years, he captained the school team and began to play in Trinidad’s local competition. After leaving school, he joined the Maple Club in 1939 after being proposed for membership as soon as he was eligible at the age of 18. Maple was more than just a cricket club; the team participated in many sports, including football and tennis, but also offered a thriving social scene.

In his 2007 autobiography, My Story: The Other Side of the Coin, Ganteaume noted that the club membership was composed of “various ethnicities”, including some men who were also part of the Queen’s Park Club and Cosmos Club, “where the membership was mainly of a lighter skin colour”. In the 1930s and 1940s, skin colour was an important factor. Trinidad was still a British “colony” ruled by white Europeans. Although there was some limited democratic representation, most of the population had limited political power. Government, employment and everyday life were dominated by the white European “elite”; racial discrimination was normalised and ubiquitous. Even cricket was affected. Membership of some clubs was effectively restricted based on skin tone, and this had an effect on the nature of the local competition. C. L. R. James wrote extensively about the his experiences in Beyond a Boundary (1963); in the 1920s, he too had played for Maple, and he described it as the club of “the brown-skinned middle class” from which those with darker skins were generally (but not always) excluded. Such matters without a doubt were factors in Ganteaume’s career, throughout the course of which it was the expectation that administrators, selectors and captains for the Trinidad and West Indies teams should be white.

Local cricket in Trinidad was intensely competitive and featured many Test players. When Ganteaume joined Maple, he opened the batting alongside Clifford Roach, who had first played for the West Indies in 1928. In his autobiography, Ganteaume wrote: “When I first opened the innings with [Roach] I was on ‘cloud nine’. I was saying to myself ‘Is it I?’ We both got good scores and there I was at the opposite end seeing him play the hook shot for which he was rated one of the best exponents.”

Ganteaume also played football for Maple, having joined from the team known as the Colts, between 1939 and 1953. While never quite reaching the same heights that he did as a cricketer, he was clearly an accomplished footballer; he represented North Trinidad against South Trinidad in 1945 and later played for Trinidad.

Meanwhile, having failed to qualify for an exhibition at St Mary’s, Ganteaume had left school at the age of fifteen in 1937. He became a draftsman for the Port of Spain City Council, then began to work as a temporary clerk for the Water and Sewage Department; although he was promised a permanent position, this was never offered. In 1942, he began to work at the Wartime Control Board. Overall, he had plenty of time for cricket, but unlike many famous West Indies players in this period, he never played professionally; he was always an amateur with a career outside the sport.

Ganteaume’s cricket progressed rapidly; he played for North Trinidad against South Trinidad in 1940, and the following year made his first-class debut for Trinidad, in a game against Barbados. Picked as the wicket-keeper and batting at number eight, he scored 87 alongside Test players such as the Stollmeyer brothers and Gerry Gomez. At one point when Ganteaume was keeping wicket, a ball was skied towards forward short-leg where Gomez was fielding; Ganteaume was going for it when the captain, Victor Stollmeyer, called for Gomez to take the ball. Ganteaume stopped; Gomez dropped the ball and “snarled at me, saying ‘Andy, it was your catch’.”

Shortly after the match, Ganteaume was injured. This struck at the wrong time; when he recovered his form was poor and he lost his place after that one match. Recalled in 1942 as a specialist batter, he struggled to make runs but held his place despite a string of poor scores. In February 1944, he regained the wicket-keeping gloves and the following month he broke through with an innings of 97 against British Guiana. The opposition included Berkeley Gaskin, who later played for the West Indies. After Ganteaume was out, Gaskin said to him: “Laddie, don’t you like to see your name go up in lights? Well as you batted, nobody will remember 97 next week. The difference between 97 and 100 is not merely three for people like us.” As he said this, Gaskin touched the skin of his arm: he meant that black players needed to do far more than white players to receive recognition.

Ganteaume (right) walking out to bat with Jeff Stollmeyer, his regular opening partner for Trinidad (Image: My Story: The Other Side of the Coin (2007) by Andy Ganteaume)

But soon Ganteaume was undroppable. In October 1945, he scored 58 and 67 in two games against British Guiana; in February 1946, he hit 112 and 85 against Barbados; and that July he scored 159 against Jamaica. All this success came while he was the wicket-keeper, but in 1947 he played as a specialist batter. He was less successful, but had bad luck, most notably being run out for one against British Guiana in a game in which his opening partner Jeffrey Stollmeyer scored 324 and Trinidad scored 750 for eight declared. Although Stollmeyer, when he was Trinidad captain in later years, asked Ganteaume to resume his role as wicketkeeper, he always refused as he considered it too taxing to combine the role with being an opener.

In January 1948, the England team — which at the time toured under the auspices of the MCC — visited the West Indies, captained by the 45-year-old Gubby Allen. Injuries hampered the visitors but the main problem was that the selectors had treated the tour as an experiment, expecting easy opposition as had been the case many years earlier: only a handful of the players would have made the full-strength England team and Allen was a bizarre choice as leader. The result was that the MCC team did not win a single match, and lost the four-Test series 2–0. As Wisden gloomily noted: “The prestige of English cricket suffered severely through this complete failure”.

The West Indies selectors made some equally odd choices. The strangest was the deliberate decision to have three captains in the four Tests: George Headley for the first and fourth (although he only captained the first Test as he was subsequently injured); Jeffrey Stollmeyer for the second (he too was injured for this game and Gerry Gomez led the team); and John Goddard for the third (he also replaced Headley as captain in the fourth). But this in itself was revolutionary for West Indies cricket. Headley, who had been one of the best batters in the world (and of all time) before the Second World War, became the first black captain of the West Indies Test team (John Cameron, who was mixed race, had been the vice-captain on the 1939 tour of England, and had led the team in first-class matches). It was only through the insistence of N. N. Nethersole, the Jamaican representative on the selection panel, that Headley was appointed captain, and his fellow selectors refused to appoint him for the entire series, resulting in the unsatisfactory arrangement of multiple captains. In his autobiography, Ganteaume was scathing — and accurate — in his appraisal of what took place:

“[The selectors] were unrelenting in rejecting [Headley as captain for the series], despite Headley’s seniority and infinite knowledge. The compromise was to give him the ‘privilege’ of doing the first match. But ‘the aristocracy had to be kept up’ and the ‘Establishment’ boys had to have a share in the pie. The welfare of West Indies cricket was incidental, and continued to be so for quite some time. If one is thinking cricket, can the idea of Headley playing under Stollmeyer, Gomez and Goddard be more ludicrous? I submit that if Headley did not have the ‘impediment’ of being of African descent, his being captain for as long as he could play would not have needed discussion.”

This was not the only issue. For a combination of reasons — mainly a tendency to favour local players — the home selectors picked 19 men across the four Tests, eight of whom played just once. This was nothing new in West Indian cricket: the two previous MCC tours, in 1930 and 1935, had involved similar selectorial merry-go-rounds and in the 1930 series, there had been a different captain in each Test.

George Headley (left) and Jeff Stollmeyer, photographed in India during the 1948–49 tour (Image: Everything Under the Sun (1983) by Jeff Stollmeyer)

For the home players, if such inconsistency of selection could produce a very unsettled team, it meant that anyone in form had a good chance of being picked. After the MCC began their tour in Barbados, drawing the Test match there, the second leg took them to Trinidad. As had been the format of MCC tours for twenty years, the visitors played two first-class games against the hosting team before the Test match. Several West Indies players also travelled to Trinidad, including Berkeley Gaskin, who informed Ganteaume that he had a good chance of making the Test team; Ganteaume replied that he would have to make a hundred, referring back to their 1944 conversation. Gaskin said: “Oh, you know.” Gaskin also noted that George Carew, a white player from Barbados with an unremarkable record, expected to play in the Test. Berkeley asked Ganteaume: “You know the man?” Ganteaume replied: “Oh yes, I understand.” Ganteaume also spoke to Headley, who was there despite his injury; when asked by Ganteaume if he would be fit by the time the teams moved onto British Guiana, Headley replied: “No, little man, I’m done with this shit.” Ganteaume suspected that he had no wish to play under Goddard, not even as vice-captain.

When Trinidad played the MCC, Ganteaume opening the batting as usual. In a high-scoring draw, he made 101 in five hours on the first day and an unbeaten 47 in the second innings. Norman Preston, an English journalist and future editor of Wisden, was covering the tour and was critical of Ganteaume’s slow play. In his autobiography, Ganteaume recalled that some spectators heckled him during the innings, but argued that the MCC had opted for deliberately negative tactics, bowling wide to defensive fields. Reaction was more positive from other quarters. One of the English players, Joe Hardstaff, spoke to Ganteaume at a cocktail party at the end of the first day and praised him for his batting and his refusal to be put off by the crowd. The correspondent for The Cricketer, a Trinidad journalist called Philip Thomson, was also sympathetic, noting in his report that the MCC’s Richard Howarth bowled to a “packed off-side field”.

The Test selectors’ favoured candidate as opener was a white Trinidadian called Kenneth Trestrail; in the second innings of the MCC match, he was promoted to open — he usually batted at three — and scored an unbeaten 53, having been out for the same score in the first innings, when he struggled against the MCC’s defensive tactics. Although Ganteaume had outperformed him, Trestrail was picked for the Test squad, which contained only Jeff Stollmeyer as a specialist opener. When Stollmeyer pulled out with injury, George Carew was added to the squad rather than Ganteaume.

Ganteaume batting during his Test century; the wicket-keeper is Billy Griffith of England. Note the matting pitch which was still used at the Queen’s Park Oval at the time. (Image: My Story: The Other Side of the Coin (2007) by Andy Ganteaume)

In the second game against the MCC, Ganteaume made his case unanswerable with a match-saving 90 in the second innings (Trestrail, again promoted to open, scored 10 and 2). When he was out, he was sent for by one of the Trinidad and West Indies selectors, Edgar Marsden, who told him he had been picked in the West Indies team. Trestrail later offered his congratulations and said that he deserved selection. Therefore a few days later, Ganteaume made what proved to be his only Test appearance, at the Queen’s Park Oval.

England were all out for 362 shortly after lunch on the second day of the Test. When it was the West Indies’ turn to bat, Ganteaume opened with Carew, who told him as they went out to begin the innings that he planned to hit Jim Laker out of the England attack as he was concerned by the threat he posed. The pair made it to tea without being separated (Carew 33, Ganteaume 31), and when Laker came on after the interval, Carew attacked him immediately. Ganteaume therefore opted to take singles and give him the strike as much as possible. By the close of play, the score was 160 for no wicket; Carew had scored 101 and Ganteaume was on 52. Wisden said of Carew: “Wearing a chocolate-coloured felt hat and chewing gum the whole time, Carew, in an unorthodox display, used the hook and pull freely in a dazzling exhibition.” The following morning, Carew was out lbw early on but Ganteaume, supported by the more aggressive Everton Weekes and then Frank Worrell, reached a century. Wisden observed: “Ganteaume maintained his defiant attitude, but by this time everyone was admiring the cultured batting of Worrell. Ganteaume duly reached 100 out of 279 in four and a half hours.” He reached the landmark despite the drinks cart coming out with his score on 99 — which he implied in his autobiography was a ploy by the English team to break his concentration.

But around this time, runs had slowed to a trickle; 46 runs had come in an hour and Gomez, the West Indies captain for that game, sent out a note to Ganteaume and Worrell — addressed to both men — soon after Ganteaume reached three figures informing the two batters that they needed to increase the scoring rate. Worrell was given the note and, when the two batters met in the middle, showed it to Ganteaume, who later wrote that “he handed it to me without comment.” Ganteaume recalled saying “Let’s see what we could do”, to which Worrell replied “Let us sun them some more.” But with his score 112, Ganteaume tried to hit Howarth over extra-cover and was caught. He said in his autobiography: “I have never stopped regretting not strictly following Frank’s advice.” He had scored his runs in around 270 minutes, out of a total of 306.

Frank Worrell (right) passing the note from Gomez to Ganteaume (Image: My Story: The Other Side of the Coin (2007) by Andy Ganteaume)

When he returned to the dressing room, Gomez came to him saying “Andy, that’s not what I meant “, but Ganteaume did not respond. He noted in his autobiography — having clearly spent many years considering the matter — that during their stand, he had scored just eight runs fewer than Worrell. Later, Hardstaff again complimented him but said that he should have not given his innings away; instead he should have batted on for a double century. Norman Preston was critical once more: “Ganteaume was slow and boring. Eventually he completed his century avoiding Howarth’s packed off-side field, pushed a single to leg.” Yet, Ganteaume noted, Preston praised innings by Jack Robertson of 133 in five-and-a-half hours in the England second innings as “solid as a rock” and “a great innings”. Preston also was impressed by Billy Griffith, who had scored scored 141 in 354 minutes — his maiden first-class century — on his Test debut for England in the first innings, when he had been pressed into service as a makeshift opener. Ganteaume observed: “So much for balanced and objective commentary!”

When Ganteaume was out, the later batters forced the pace: Gomez scored 62 in 86 minutes and E. A. V. Williams thrashed 31 in 16 minutes (with seven fours) before the West Indies were all out for 497. Thanks to Robertson, England replied with 275, leaving West Indies needing to score 141 to win. But two hours of play had been lost to rain early on the final day, leaving only 57 minutes left; Ganteaume did not bat as Gomez sent in bigger hitters in a vain attempt to score the runs. The West Indies finished on 72 for three and the match was drawn.

Thomson, in The Cricketer, said that although Ganteaume had looked slow in comparison to Carew, he “played extremely well” on the second evening, and “got a richly deserved hundred” on the third day. He added: “A substitute for Headley, this fine little batsman has an ideal temperament”. Most of the attention in the Wisden report focussed on Griffith, but the writer had a word for Ganteaume: “One cannot praise Griffith too highly for this stupendous effort. At the same time credit must be given also to Ganteaume, a 27-year-old clerk in the Trinidad Civil Service who, in the absence through injury of J. B. Stollmeyer, stepped into the breach and, like Griffith, claimed a century in his first Test.”

Although Ganteaume was praised locally, the slow pace of his innings meant that he was partially blamed for the West Indies having insufficient time to win. The “Establishment” view was expressed by Stollmeyer in his 1983 autobiography Everything Under the Sun; he suggested that the West Indies failed to win because of “slow batting in our first innings when the position of the game called for the batsmen to push on”. Although he did not name the culprit directly, it was clear where he placed the blame: “Andy’s innings in its latter stages was not in keeping with the state of the game and his captain was forced to send a message out to him to ‘get on with it’.” When Stollmeyer told Ganteaume what he planned to write, the two had a public argument; Ganteaume wrote a detailed rebuttal to the claims — with detailed evidence, including a photograph of the note sent out by Gomez — which appeared in several publications, including Wisden Cricket Monthly, and later in his autobiography.

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Gerry Gomez in 1950

But Stollmeyer acknowledged the most controversial aspect of the innings: Ganteaume was left out of the following Test. Thomson called him “unlucky” in The Cricketer. His replacement as opener was John Goddard, who did not usually bat in that position; he had been in the middle order for the second Test, but took over as captain for the third. In Ganteaume’s absence, the West Indies played an extra bowler. Stollmeyer (who was still not fit for that game) suggested in his autobiography that Ganteaume could not have played without unbalancing the team, but as Ganteaume countered, the side that took the field had just one specialist opener. The obvious player to make way for the extra bowler would have been Goddard, but that clearly was not going to happen.

Ganteaume spent several paragraphs in his autobiography comparing his scoring rate to that of other players in the series, including on the opposition, and noted that he received far more criticism. It clearly rankled even after half a century. He also noted that in later years the perception was that he had been dropped for slow scoring; some even thought it must have been an exceptionally slow innings, which Ganteaume was always happy to correct. And some relationships were clearly damaged by the incident; Ganteaume suspected, all those years later, that Stollmeyer might have had an influence on the matter as the success of both Ganteaume and Carew might have brought his own place into question.

Even if it is accepted that there might have been tactical reasons for Ganteaume’s omission, or if his slow scoring had been a factor, there was no obvious cricketing explanation for what came next. When a West Indies team was selected to tour India later in 1948, George Carew was selected as one of the opening batters. Ganteaume was overlooked, and never played another Test match, even though he had been on the original list of players asked about their availability for the tour (Carew had not been on that list). Stollmeyer wrote to Ganteaume, expressing regret that he had not been chosen (a photograph of the letter featured in Ganteaume’s autobiography), but told him to keep playing with a view to selection for the forthcoming 1950 tour of England. But despite his good form — including an innings of 147 against Jamaica in January 1950 — Ganteaume was overlooked once again.

When he was also omitted from the team that toured Australia in 1951–52 — despite scoring 183 runs (with two fifties) in four innings in the trial matches — he became increasingly disillusioned with cricket. In 1951, he married Barbara Joseph — the couple went on to have three daughters — and chose to drop out of the Trinidad team after playing in February 1951. He wrote in his autobiography: “I had had enough of going around the region for the past ten years and would retire from cricket at intercolonial level. I had recently been married and I thought it was time to prepare for raising a family.” Even this issue was not straightforward. He was accused by some of his team-mates of retiring in a fit of pique after being overlooked for the captaincy, and briefly fell out with Rupert Tang Choon, the newly appointed captain, and Otto Massiah. It was certainly true that he missed out on the position several times, but at the time, and in his autobiography, he denied that the issue played any part in his thinking.

Ganteaume returned to the Trinidad team in October 1953, accepting an invitation to play under the captaincy of Gomez, and for the first time in several years he agreed to be wicket-keeper. But he did not enjoy himself: “Things became sour early on when the captain, Gerry Gomez, adopted a manner of talking down to players which I found unnecessary, and upsetting, as in the case when I missed a stumping chance from a delivery pitched in the ‘rough’ caused by the bowlers footmarks. At the end of the over Gerry, on meeting me at the other end of the pitch, stopped and in a searing manner said to me, ‘What happened just now?’ I told him that the ball was pitched in the rough which he obviously would have seen. He moved on without comment.”

Later in the game, Ganteaume injured a finger while keeping and retired from the match with Gomez’s agreement. In the dressing room later, Ganteaume mentioned it was a finger he had injured a few weeks earlier; although Gomez said nothing at the time, he later grumbled to the other players that Ganteaume should have said if he had an injured finger. When this got back to Ganteaume, he remarked that “If I knew I had an injured finger I should have said so. I said that at this stage of my career I did not have to hide an injured finger to get into a team.” A friend later told him that when Gomez heard this, he said: “Your friend doesn’t want to play cricket anymore.” Ganteuame replied that he did not particularly wish to do so in that atmosphere; he once again withdrew from the team. This episode might explain Ganteaume’s career in a nutshell: where many players might have backed down to the establishment — in this case the white captain — he was never willing to do so. Perhaps he had a reputation as a “troublemaker” that played a part — consciously or not — in the selectors continually overlooking him. Or maybe a quiet word from Gomez or Stollmeyer had the same effect.

And there might have been other factors in the background. In 1950, Ganteaume had left his job with the Wartime Control Board and worked as a salesman for Sports and Games, a company in which Gomez was a partner. But he had been sacked in 1953 for what he described in his autobiography as a clash with a handyman. That might have contributed to any ill-feeling between him and Gomez. In any case, his cricket career looked to be over.

It was only the intervention of Learie Constantine, who had returned to Trinidad in 1956 after years living in England, which caused Ganteaume to resume playing. Constantine asked Ganteaume why he was not in the team, and used his influence with the West Indies Board to have him recalled. Ganteaume played for Trinidad in 1956 and in early 1957 he was included in the West Indies trial matches for the tour of England later that year. He scored a century and a fifty and was selected for the tour as an opening batter and the reserve wicket-keeper. Ironically, the decision to select him ahead of a younger opening batter (or a specialist wicket-keeper) was one of many issues to be heavily criticised in the aftermath of a 3–0 defeat by England.

Ganteaume and Clyde Walcott walking out to bat in England during the 1957 tour (Image: The Guardian)

The 1957 tour of England was not a happy one; a falling out between Stollmeyer and Errol Dos Santos, the president of the West Indies Board, meant that the captaincy defaulted to John Goddard, who had led the team successfully in England in 1950. Ganteaume noted that the patently unfit Goddard frequently ignored his players, for example walking past Ganteaume on one occasion in the hotel without speaking. He rarely mixed with the team and made several disparaging comments to others about his players. Ganteaume also noted that there were divisions within the team, recalling a conversation on the outward journey in which Denis Atkinson was critical of Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott because they earned a living from cricket in England.

Ganteaume, who only played irregularly, became increasingly dissatisfied, and was not shy of expressing an opinion, which cannot have improved his prospects. He had a chance to play in the final Test, but told Worrell, one of the tour selectors, that he did not want to deprive a professional of a match fee. He was twelfth man and Nyron Asgarali played. But Ganteaume’s tour was not a success. He scored 800 runs at an average of 27.58, albeit including seven fifties, and in Wisden Norman Preston (by then the editor) wrote: “None of the four recognised opening batsmen, [Bruce] Pairaudeau, Ganteaume, Asgarali and Rohan Kanhai, came up to expectations.”

That was largely the end of Ganteuame’s playing career. He made one appearance for Trinidad against Pakistan in 1958 then withdrew again. However, he continued to score runs for Maple and became the team captain. In later years, he dropped into the Maple second eleven to give younger players a chance but only retired completely in 1973. Meanwhile, he was appointed a selector for the team now known as Trinidad and Tobago (the name changed after Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence in 1962). When the team captain (and the most likely alternatives) were unavailable for Trinidad and Tobago’s visit to Barbados in 1963, Stollmeyer offered the captaincy to Ganteaume. He accepted and returned to play one final game, batting at number eight. He finished his career with 2,785 first-class runs at 34.81.

But Ganteaume’s life away from cricket had not stood still. After leaving Sports and Games in 1953, Ganteaume joined Shell Leaseholds Distributing Company as a warehouse supervisor and then as a bond supervisor. In 1961, he became a government appointed sports coach, working in primary schools to teach cricket and football. He continued to be associated with West Indies cricket. He was a Test selector for a majority of the period between 1974 and 1985, only leaving the role when it was decided to have a selector from each country, and was the team manager for the home series against England in 1974 (being involved in discussions over Tony Grieg’s controversial run out of Alvin Kallicharan) and Australia in 1984. Reappointed as a selector in 1986, he eventually resigned owing to unhappiness over how he had been treated by the West Indies Board. Occasionally, he provided radio commentary alongside Tony Cozier, who assumed that Ganteaume’s “belated recognition” in management and selection had offset “the 1948 episode”, and so was surprised by the content of My Story: The Other Side of the Coin in 2007. But Cozier wrote after Ganteaume’s death: “I came to know Ganteaume well enough to be more than just a casual acquaintance. Never once did he show any bitterness about the clearly unfair treatment he received; I can’t recall him ever discussing it. His analysis of the game and his reasoning as long-term adjudicator of Player of the Match was sharp. It was away from the play that his typically quick Trinidadian wit, sense of fun and infectious laugh were most evident, with cricket invariably its theme.”

Ganteaume remained very close to Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott in later years. Weekes said: “He was a real gentleman and a great friend. He was never argumentative but would listen to what anyone had to say with understanding, if not necessarily agreement.” But maybe this lack of agreement — the unwillingness to compromise with an unfair system or regarding what he saw as injustices, and his willingness to speak out — was the main reason he only played one Test match. Men with less talent played far more, particularly if they had friends in high places.

As for Ganteaume, he remained on friendly terms with Gerry Gomez in later years, but less so with Jeff Stollmeyer. He died at the age of 95 in 2016.

Note: Although Ganteaume’s autobiography was the main source used for this article, I am indebted to Michelle Ganteaume for providing further details about her grandfather and his family.