The middle class, colonialism and the making of sport

This essay continues with the theme of the making of sporting culture, initially considering how sport might be made by the middle class. Discussion of middle-class sporting culture in Britain broadens to an examination of the development of sport in the colonial contexts of Empire. While sport was undoubtedly used within colonies as a means of cementing a collective cultural bond to Empire, the historical development of sports such as cricket clearly show the people of colonized races and ethnic groups as actively involved in the making of their own sporting cultures.

The middle class and the making of sport

If it can be contended that certain forms of sporting culture have been made by the working class, can a similar claim hold for the middle class? As discussed in the previous essay, the idea of culture being ‘made’ is taken from E.P. Thompson's cultural Marxist account of historical agency in The Making of the English Working Class. From this perspective, the making of culture occurs within the context of class ‘struggle’ and has relevance only to the working class. However, furthering the step beyond Thompson initiated in the previous essay, it will be argued here that an understanding of the cultural history of sport benefits from affording agency to the middle class; i.e. in certain regards it is pertinent to say that the middle class has been responsible for the ‘making’ of sporting culture. A number of sports, including golf and tennis, bear the historical imprint of middle-class agency. As with the case of the working class, this is not to say that these sports were invented by the middle class but that particular sporting cultures of golf and tennis have been ‘made’ by the middle class, or segments of that class.1

To deny that the middle class ‘makes’ sporting culture not only risks limiting the historical account, but also obscures the critical insight that can be gained from viewing middle-class involvement with sport in this way. The assumption is often put that the middle classes were drawn to particular sporting activities because these activities provided opportunity to commune with nature. Advocacy in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods for certain sports promoted this association. A 1906 edition of the Yachting Monthly appealed to middle-class romanticism by declaring that sailing offers ‘the solitude of Nature and the presence of the immeasurable’.2 Even in golf, where the natural landscape is significantly denuded to accommodate the field of play, the appeal to nature was incorporated into the design of courses for the English middle class.3 The appeal to nature appeared most disingenuous when voiced in connection with hunting. Having initially benefited from the population shift from countryside to town, hunters began to ‘feel the pinch’ through the 1800s as town sizes expanded to the point of impacting on land used for hunting.4 The resultant romanticizing by hunters of the rural tradition of their sport and the attachment to land appears more an expression of self-interest than a commitment to preserving the natural order through sport.

A case for the historical connection between foxhunting and nature has been restated in recent times by the well-known philosopher Roger Scruton. According to Scruton, foxhunting has, from the time of its emergence in the latter half of the 1700s, provided humans with the possibility of a return to ‘the fold of nature’.5 A prominent voice in the contemporary debate about foxhunting, Scruton is dismissive of critics who seek to have the sport banned on the basis of accusations of cruelty to animals. Firstly, he argues that foxhunting is not actually cruel because, inter alia, it gives the fox a fair chance of escape, only ailing foxes usually fall prey to the pursuing hounds, and the kill is made very quickly. Secondly, and more importantly, he contends critics fail to appreciate that the naturalness of foxhunting, in terms of the union it provides between man, animal and the outdoors, has been a source of moral virtue over generations; ‘in those the centaur hours … real life returns [as] the blood of another species flows through your veins, stirring the old deposits of collective life, releasing pockets of energy that a million generations laboriously harvested from the crop of human suffering’.6

Scruton acknowledges that foxhunting commenced as an upper-class sport and ascribes its origins to the need of the aristocracy to escape the travails of ‘civilization’ – understood in Kulturkritik terms as affairs of governance and politics – via a totemic reconnection with natural life. Scruton claims that ‘today we are all civilised … and live from the funds of human artifice’. Accordingly, we could all do with a little foxhunting, but, ‘unlike the old aristocracy, we lack culture and … ready awareness of our condition’.7 Despite this elitist depiction of the ordinary person, Scruton does not regard foxhunting as an exclusive leisure domain for the socially and economically privileged. Although highly ceremonial it can be, and has been over time, enjoyed on a communal rather than class basis. Anthony Trollope remarked as far back as 1867, that to view foxhunting as ‘confined to country gentlemen, farmers and rich strangers’ is a misjudgement. Recognizing a broad mix of professions and vocations in attendance on any given hunting day, he referred to the ‘democratisation’ of ‘an average hunting field’.8 However, according to G.M. Trevelyan, while the colourful image of ‘the hunt’ enjoyed cross-class appeal, the activity of fox-hunting remained largely exclusive.9 Trollope would thus appear to extend the popular perception of the hunt, held by non-participants, into an account of its lived character. The social reality of the hunt was quite removed from the liberalist optimism projected by Trollope. During the 1800s, hunting did become ‘open to all’ in the sense that anyone was welcome to participate, ‘the dustman was welcome to ride beside the duke’, and on occasion did so.10 However, while this contact certainly involved ‘fraternization’, democracy is another matter. The fleeting conservations that took place between those at either ends of the class scale during the hunt and periods of rest did nothing to unsettle ingrained social hierarchies. Indeed, the social inclusiveness of the hunt was made possible ‘only because the ideals of deference on which the openness of the hunting field depended were accepted by all’.11

The hunting for all argument was more conducive to conservative than liberal ends, hunting being seen as a practical means of keeping classes in place rather than disassembling barriers. Accordingly, it was used by the upper middle class as a ‘counterweight to the forces of radicalism’ that were strengthening in the nineteenth century.12 Scruton's claims for the social inclusiveness of foxhunting today are in keeping with the conservative ideal. He indicates that there is no place for ‘egalitarians’ within the cultural domain of hunting. Such minded people will be put off by the ceremony of hunting and the related necessity of costume as a reminder of ‘courtliness’. Foxhunting is thus not about ‘the modern idea of equality’, but an appreciation for the natural order of life that the hunt symbolizes.13 This is not to suggest that Scruton's claims for the cultural significance of hunting are insincere. His account in On Hunting is passionate and makes a convincing case for a Kulturkritik demarcation, where hunting exists as culture standing above ‘civilization’.

From this perspective, culture is not made because it is natural; making would suggest a human intrusion into nature. For Scruton, to speak of foxhunting being made would be a vulgarization, a failure to appreciate the naturalness of the hunt. This outlook effectively relegates matters of social relations to a secondary consideration. The hunt comes first and people find their place within it, unconcerned with thoughts of equality but in a spirit of natural ‘communion’. Based on this understanding Scruton dismisses the feasibility of a class analysis of foxhunting. A key argument of this essay is that historical enquiry needs to adopt the view that the middle and upper classes made their own sporting cultures. To insist that only the working class makes culture risks leaving the type of argument advanced by Scruton, in regard to foxhunting, go unchallenged. To challenge Scruton need not mean rejection of the Kulturkritik distinction between culture and civilization. To suggest that forms of culture are made collectively by humans is not to diminish the terminological significance of culture or to conflate culture with civilization, but to suggest that the lived experience of culture can only be understood within social context. Nor is the relationship between culture and nature to be denied. What is to be challenged is the slippage – apparent in Scruton's position – of the notion of naturalness into the realm of the social. This slippage risks obliterating the very distinction between culture and civilization on which Scruton's advocacy of foxhunting depends.

Having been made as a cultural expression of the conservatism of the English upper middle class, foxhunting came to serve an important ideological function for that class. Those who uncritically accepted the terms of the hunt, at which ever end of the class scale they may have been located, at once complied with ‘the established system’. The contrivance of foxhunting as an activity ‘open to all’ was logically, if disingenuously, extended to the idea that it benefited all and to be critical of the hunt was to be un-English. Itzkowitz thus suggests that foxhunting has been used to promote patriotism by stealth.14 The link between foxhunting and patriotism can be interestingly considered in relation to Orwell's definition of patriotism in his 1945 essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’. According to Orwell, patriotism is ‘a devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people’. Orwell favoured patriotism over nationalism, because while the latter is aggressive the former is defensive, ‘both militarily and culturally’.15 Although Orwell regarded patriotism as a relatively benign expression, his own definition glimpses ideological possibilities. Foxhunting, as discussed here, provides good example. Given its conduciveness to the English environment, foxhunting, by comparison to other sports, did not feature in the cultural extension of the British Empire. Rather, as indicated above, it provided a significant ideological tool for the English upper class to extol their way of life to their own countrymen. Such has been the particular patriotic – culturally defensive – end served by the sport of foxhunting.

Sport, nation and empire

Of course, the sentiment of patriotism was not historically confined to British shores. In 1886 Lord Rosebery, future British Prime Minister, suggested that patriotic feeling for home should rightly extend into imperial ambition.16 In joining the Liberal Party debate on the issue of imperial expansion he argued against ‘wild, hot Imperialism’ in favour of ‘sane Imperialism’. The latter, for Rosebery, involved a ‘larger patriotism’ – rather than militarism – and the pursuit and maintenance of a British Empire could be morally defended on this basis. While France and Germany tended to directly impose customs and values upon their territories, Britain relied on the velvet glove of ‘cultural imperialism’.17 Towards the end of the Victorian period, sport had come to play an important role in this regard. As Holt notes, ‘sports were thought to help create a climate of relations that would bind the Empire together’.18 Initially, sport served to sustain a cultural loyalty to the homeland amongst emigrants, beyond this to provide a cultural bond between colonizing and colonized peoples. According to J.A. Mangan, it was cricket that emerged, not only as the most prominent sport within the British Empire, but also, as ‘the symbol par excellence of imperial solidarity and superiority epitomizing a set of consolidatory moral imperatives that both exemplified and explained imperial ambition and achievement’.19

An understanding of cricket is, therefore, integral to an understanding of the relations of colonialism within the British Empire. Furthermore, while there are points of commonality to be considered, the cultural experience of cricket differed from one national context within the Empire to the next. The chief interest in this essay is to understand how sporting cultures were made in colonial contexts; i.e. not only how these cultures were made by the agents of imperialism but how they were received and re-made by colonized peoples. Cricket is an especially interesting example in the latter regard. While cricket was no doubt a key aspect of British cultural imperialism, in the way identified by Mangan, its most interesting stories are those of reclamation associated with the emergent cultures of that sport in the non-white reaches of Empire such as India and the West Indies. Ashis Nandy's fascinating book, The Tao of Cricket, opens with the sentence, ‘cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’.20 Nandy's challenge to the view of cricket as quintessentially English can be logically extended to debunk the idea that cricket was merely handed down by the British and compliantly absorbed by the local inhabitants of Empire.

Indeed, this was not the story of cricket from the time of its inception in India. The title of the opening chapter – ‘The Homesick Colonial and the Imitative Native’ – to Ramachandra Guha's history of Indian cricket is instructive.21 Cricket was brought to India by the British during the colonial expansion of the 1700s; in 1792 the Calcutta Cricket Club became the first cricket club to be established in at outpost of the Empire.22 According to Guha, cricket provided ‘a source of much comfort to the expatriate Englishman’, a means to ‘re-create memories of life in England’.23 This idea of ‘consolation’ suggests to Guha that cricket was initially kept by the British for themselves, there being no apparent ‘intention of teaching the natives to play’.24 The initiative to take up the game was borne of the ‘native’ people rather than the proselytizing influence of the British. Guha recounts how the Parsis of Bombay, a people given to mercantile affairs, emulated their overlords in both business and pleasure. While Parsi traders were hard at work, their sons used idle time to play the bat and ball game they had learnt from diligent observation of English soldiers playing cricket in an area close to the Army parade ground.25

Cricket had some similarity to games already played by Parsi youth but, according to Guha, ‘in artistry, technique and dramatic interest [it was] far superior to anything previously played on the sub-continent’.26 The boys initially played with makeshift bats and on rough and uneven surfaces, hardly conducive to an even bounce of the ball. Reaching manhood, the Parsi boys founded their first cricket club in 1848, the Oriental Cricket Club, which soon became known, and still exists, as The Young Zoroastrians. Over the following 20 years, several Parsi cricket clubs were formed, and in 1890 a select team, the Parsi Gymkhana, struck a blow to imperial pride by defeating an amateur English touring side that included the Yorkshire County Cricket Club captain, Lord Hawke.27 English pride had previously been dented when the national team lost to Australia in Melbourne in 1877, in what has become known as the first international test match. However, a defeat by ‘native’ colonials, even though of a reputedly weak English team and in a match of inferior status, was a bitter pill to swallow, as indicated by press reports of the day.28

Success against the English by an Indian national team in test cricket was long awaited. India played its first test match against England in 1932 but did not win against that country until the final test in the drawn series of 1951–52, played in India. India's first series win came on home soil in the 1961–62 series. Of the ‘coloured’ cricket-playing nations of Empire, the West Indies has tweaked the imperial nose most often. An all-West Indies team first played an England team in Trinidad in February 1897, winning the game by three wickets.29 The first test series to be played in the West Indies against England in 1929–30 was drawn. While losing the subsequent 1933 series in England, the West Indies was victorious in the next series played between the countries at home in 1934–35.30 The success of the West Indies in these early years of test cricket against England does not, of course, undermine the argument that cricket was used as a means of cultural imperialism. But it does, as in the case of that sport's history in India, unsettle the view that cricket was simply handed down to a compliant colonized people.

The making of West Indian cricket

Cricket emerged in the late 1800s colonial West Indies, following Emancipation. In a potentially unruly social climate, it was used by ‘colonial administrators’ as a means of promoting the ‘values, norms and prejudices’ conducive to their rule.31 Local elites were supportive of this ideological usage of cricket as it helped firm their position within the British colonial system. Relatedly, ‘cricket and its associated moral code’ was placed at the heart of the elite schooling system in the Caribbean.32 Stoddart thus identifies cricket as ‘being central in the creation of hegemonic cultural values’ that assist the ‘social reproduction of class hierarchies'.33 In this statement Stoddart looks to the work of Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of hegemony, to explain how cricket became diffused into the cultural lifeblood of the English-speaking West Indies as a form of power that becalmed potential resistance to colonial authority. Gramsci – writing while imprisoned by the Italian fascists in the 1930s – predicted that governing states in the West would increasingly rely upon consensual rather than coercive means to maintain rule, and this would occur via the dissemination of a dominant value system in ‘civil society’, schools taking on a particularly significant ideological function.34 From the 1970s, neo-Marxist scholars have adapted Gramsci's notion of hegemony to account for the role of the mass media in capitalist society.35 While Gramsci intended his notion of hegemony as an extension of Marx's position on the false consciousness of the industrial working class, scholars have more recently applied it to power relations concerning gender and race.36

Gramsci's idea of hegemony involved explaining not only how power works to keep subaltern classes in place, but how these classes may mobilize against such power. Gramsci was a binary thinker, believing power from above fertilizes resistance below. Active resistance, he argued, can result in a ‘crisis in hegemony’ and destabilize existing authority relations.37 In regard to the present discussion, if hegemony is considered to be a concept relevant to an historical explanation of cricket in the West Indies, it must be looked at in terms of resistance from below as well as power over, or from, above. British imperialism may have been held in place in the West Indies culturally by cricket, but, if this is the case, then conversely, the role of cricket must be regarding as significant to the demise of British rule in the Caribbean. A Gramscian understanding of this kind can be found in the writing on cricket by the late West Indian social critic Tim Hector. Hector writes of the development within West Indian cricket of ‘a black style’, a style which is oppositional to that of the ‘oppressor's style’ and is ultimately anti-hegemonic. Relatedly, upheavals in cricket coincided with industrial and political militancy in the 1930s, synergizing into what Hector refers to as a ‘revolution from below’.38

Michael Manley notes that grassroots political protest in the British West Indies became systematic by the late 1930s, in a way that it had not been before.39 The widespread experience of hunger and poverty demanded that ‘the old order had to change’. The mobilization against the imperial overlord came more readily and apparently through the agency of political parties and trade unions. Cricket largely stood apart from this grassroots radicalism. The conservative organizational structure of the West Indies Cricket Board and its associated clubs and district bodies ensured that cricket, despite its broad-based appeal, remained under the formal domination of ‘the upper echelons of Caribbean society’.40 The impetus for challenging this domination came, not surprisingly, from figures close to the game, and no figure loomed larger in this regard than that of the great West Indian all-rounder Learie Constantine. Constantine, who debuted for the West Indies against England in 1928, openly contended that West Indian cricket reflected the racial inequality that characterized British rule in the Caribbean. He became a prominent advocate from the 1920s for the appointment of a black cricketer as captain of the West Indian team.41 Constantine and his contemporary, George Headley, were obvious candidates to take on such a role, but the connection between cricket and colonial authority was resilient enough to keep inferior white players in the West Indian captaincy until 1960.

Historical coincidence between politics and cricket can be seen with the appointment of Frank Worrell as the first black player to the captaincy of the West Indies in 1960 and, a decade earlier, the first test victory and series win against England in England (1950) by a touring West Indian team. Occurring subsequent to the Montego Bay Conference of 1947, the 1950 tour to England was the first made by a West Indian team united in the spirit of federation. Agreement had been reached at the conference, by a predominance of the Island colonies, to form a Federation ‘at the appropriate time’ and to operate according to the principles of ‘loose’ association in the meantime.42 Resultantly, according to Manley, ‘the 1950 side was the product of a far more confident and sophisticated society than its predecessors in the 1930s’.43 The Federation of the West Indies, including the main cricket-playing Islands, was formed in January 1958, putting the final process towards independence of governance from Britain in place. Against this political backdrop, the drive for a black West Indian to become national cricket captain gained momentum. Following a disappointing, albeit close, series loss to England in the 1959–60 test series at home, rumblings loudened within the press for the replacement by Worrell of the white West Indian captain Gerry Alexander.44

Frank Worrell's first test series as captain of the West Indies was to Australia in 1960–61. The series was narrowly lost to the Australians but Worrell was widely praised for rejuvenating the spirit of the West Indian team and ‘restoring adventure to the game’.45 According to Manley, the West Indies regained ‘respect as a cricketing power’, earning it by ‘playing the cricket that comes most naturally to them, fluent, attacking, attractive’.46 Coming to the captaincy late in an illustrious career, Worrell's period of on-field leadership was fairly brief (Garfield Sobers became captain of the West Indies in 1965 upon Worrell's retirement from international cricket). However, the attacking spirit developed in the series against Australia continued and reward came with a clean sweep series victory against India in the West Indies in 1961–62, and a commanding series win over England in England in 1963.

Although coming from a middle-class background, Worrell is remembered as a man of the people. Having grown up within ‘the unyielding racial hierarchy’ of Barbados, Worrell relocated to the less rigidly race-divided Jamaica in 1947, and, following a lengthy period with the Kensington Cricket Club, switched to the decidedly working-class club known as Boy's Town in 1960.47 Worrell's most eloquent eulogist, C.L.R. James, attributes the move to Boy's Town – unlikely for a middle-class black – to Worrell's ‘unbridled passion for social equality’. James continued, ‘It was the men on his side who had no social status whatever for whose interest and welfare he was primarily concerned. They repaid him with an equally fanatical devotion.’ Worrell's wrangles with cricket authorities for higher pay and involvement in the campaign that eventuated in his elevation to captaincy can, accordingly, be regarded as acts of benevolence rather than self-aggrandizement. Lending further to this interpretation, Worrell was regarded by those who controlled the sport in the West Indies as a ‘cricket Bolshevik’.48

In retrospect Worrell's appointment to the captaincy of the West Indies might be seen more as indication of the gradual relinquishment of cricket from the grip of colonialism, than a radical break from the racial division within the sport. Worrell was, after all, an atypical black West Indian, middle-class, well-educated and closely associated with England from his experience as a professional playing in the Central Lancashire League. In short, awarding the captaincy to him may have been a compromise solution acceded to by the cricketing elite in grudging response to the groundswell for change.49 Accordingly, ground was given on race, yet not on class. Nevertheless, whatever the particular interpretation of events, the history of cricket within the West Indies reflects the history of British colonialism and the politics of race embedded within that history.

The ‘maple man’: C.L.R. James, cricket and colonialism

The superlative account of this historical relationship is given in C.L.R. James's much cited book Beyond a Boundary (1963).50 Written in autobiographical form the book not only identifies the centrality of cricket to James's life, but the centrality of cricket to the cultural life of the West Indies, and the cultural significance of cricket more generally. The most frequently cited phrase from Beyond a Boundary, ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know’, makes clear enough James's wont to provide an understanding of cricket as something more than a ludic activity.51 Indeed, although admitting to blissful incomprehension of the social gravity of cricket during his youth in Trinidad, James acknowledges the formative role of cricket in his preparation as an activist: ‘Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.’52

Raised within the educated black middle-class community of Port of Spain, James, as a young man, chose to play cricket for Maple, the club that was regarded as appropriate for an individual from his background. In making this choice he declined the opportunity to play for Shannon, a club associated with the black lower middle class. In doing so, he was denied an early life opportunity to become acquainted with his friend and idol of later years, Learie Constantine. James regretted the decision even more so for delaying his personal ‘political development’ and restricting his contact with people further down the racial hierarchy of the West Indies than himself. James notes how, as a boy, he accepted the ‘Puritan’ ethic of cricket, which was imparted through the local version of the English public school system: ‘I knew what was done and what was not done … I never cheated, I never appealed for a decision unless I thought the batsman was out, I never argued with the umpire, I never jeered at an opponent … My defeats and disappointments I took as stoically as I could.’53

Significantly, although recognizing the ideological use of cricket by the British, James never rejected its moral code. Resultantly, James has been accused of being so ‘seduced’ by the sport that he cannot reflexively adjudge the ‘values of cricket’.54 From this critical reading, James's heralding of achievements by outstanding black West Indian players, such as Constantine and Worrell, is not made through indigenous Caribbean eyes per se, but from a perspective jaundiced by the desire to ‘prove [oneself] to the “master”’.55 Amongst his various other activities, James wrote articles on cricket over the years for British newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald. He also wrote pieces for specialist organs such as The Cricketer. James's prodigious writings on cricket varied from match reports to eulogy and social observation, therefore from more matter-of-fact reporting to critical commentary. Although of the latter category, Beyond a Boundary might be seen to sit incongruously within James's scholarly œuvre, which consisted of such highly regarded works as The Black Jacobins, a political history of the revolution in Haiti in the late 1700s, and the unfinished American Civilisation.56 Alternatively, Beyond a Boundary might be regarded as a work of ‘cultural politics’ coherently situated further along a publishing trajectory from his works on ‘real politics’.57 In the context of the present volume, mention of this latter reading prompts comparison between James and Raymond Williams.

James's most direct intellectual engagement with Williams was his 1961 review of Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, in which he acknowledged Williams as ‘the most remarkable writer that the socialist movement in England has produced for ten years or perhaps twenty’.58 His use of the word socialist is decisive as he goes on criticize what he reads as Williams's non-Marxist and, therefore, inadequate account of post-war British society. In particular, James suggests that Williams's analysis is not based in Marx's historical materialism and, as such, explains moments of class upheaval as little more than random events disconnected from the historical inevitability of international revolution. Williams's eventual way forward into Marxist theory and politics came via his turn to Gramsci in the 1970s. While sympathetic to Marxist theory, Williams rejected the economic determinism of classical Marxism. He believed that material social relations are best explained ultimately in cultural rather than economic terms, and hence came to refer to his theoretical position as ‘cultural materialism’.59 James's intellectual maturity and curiosity had peaked by the time Gramsci became available to the English readership in the 1970s. His dialogues on Marx were made via more traditional interpreters such as Trotsky and Lenin, so it is difficult to know what he would have made of Williams’ retrieval of Marx through Gramsci. However, the shift to a ‘cultural politics’ in Beyond a Boundary inevitably raises the question of the relevance of the notions of hegemony and counter-hegemony to James's account of the lived politics of cricket in the West Indian context.

James's simultaneous recognition of cricket being used for the purpose of ideological control by the colonial oppressor and as a means of resistance by the socially oppressed may appear compatible with a Gramscian hegemonic model. However, upon closer inspection, the power from above, resistance from below dichotomic is somewhat at odds with the seamless telling of the historical struggle of West Indian cricket proffered by James. To return to a terminology from the previous essay, James tells a ‘history from within’. Given the autobiographical nature of Beyond a Boundary, James is himself, as author, located within this history, as are the various characters that fight for and find liberation through cricket. For James it would be too simple to say that the cricketing legends whose stories he recounts were leading characters in counter-hegemonic contestation. Cricket was a part of the cultural landscape known to these cricketers from their childhood. What they achieved politically they achieved within the ‘code’ of the game, not in contravention of it. The hegemony model does not suit James's account because it tends to suggest a cultural uprooting that he does not make case for in Beyond a Boundary. James's history tells of a challenge to social relations in the West Indies mirrored in cricket, but in the very same book he argues for the cultural purity of the sport through an attempt to recognize cricket's aesthetic essence.

According to James, the aesthetic essence of cricket has both performative and imaginative dimensions.60 Cricket's performative beauty is in its inherent drama. Many sports can be regarded as dramatic, yet in a superficial way in that they work up to a dramatic finale. For James, this is but melodrama whereas cricket contains real drama within every component of its play. He contends that each of cricket's ‘isolated episodes’ are ‘completely self-contained’, ‘each single one fraught with immense possibilities of expectation and realisation’.61 These episodes constitute the ‘total spectacle’ of cricket and are indicative of its ‘structural perfection’. According to James, cricket, like life, is a continuous drama and this is why ‘the end result [of a match] is not of great importance’. Cricket's imaginative beauty is, for James, in its capturing of ‘significant form’. In this regard James is inspired by the famous art critic Bernard Berenson,62 who praised Renaissance artists such as Masaccio and Raphael, because of their ability to evoke ‘the imaginary experience of certain complicated muscular movement’.63 James likens the greatest of cricketers to these painter's works of art, in a player such as W.G. Grace ‘significant form [is] most unadulterated and permanently present’. In terms more familiar to cricket, the player with significant form can be said, according to James, to exhibit ‘style’.

James's unwavering belief in the aesthetics of cricket gives it Kulturkritik like distinction, whereby cricket as culture stands conceptually apart from cricket as socially inscribed human practice. However, James, obviously enough, did not believe that cricket as artistic engagement is sealed off from society. On the contrary, he argues that the embodied history of social relations brought to the game by cricketers characterizes the ‘style’ they display. This can be seen lucidly in his account of the great batsman Rohan Kanhai: ‘in Kanhai's batting what I have found is a unique pointer of the West Indian quest for identity, for ways of expressing our potential bursting at every seam’.64 Via this recognition James can proclaim without fear of contradiction, ‘Cricket is an art, a means of national expression’.65 Art is art, but its resonance is born of place. James is able to share with other West Indians a particular appreciation of Kanhai's art and that of other Caribbean cricketing greats he has witnessed over the years. With ‘coloured’ countrymen he can share ‘the sensation that here was one of us, performing in excelsis in a sphere where competition was open … a demonstration that atoned for a pervading humiliation, and nourished pride and hope'.66

In a review of Beyond a Boundary, shortly after its publication, V.S. Naipaul declared the book to be one of the finest ‘to come out of the West Indies, important to England, important to the West Indies’.67 This is to recognize, from Beyond a Boundary, that the significance of cricket to the West Indies can never be disconnected from its colonial roots. James's story of cricket is not just of relevance to the place(s) called the West Indies, it is a story of relevance to the place called England as well. In a letter to Naipaul, James declares that while his book ‘is West Indian through and through’ it is also ‘very British’. He continues, ‘originating as we are within the British structure, but living under such different social conditions, we have a lot to say about the British civilisation itself which we see more sharply than they themselves’.68 Furthermore, while James condemns the racial oppression of colonialism he retains conviction of the humanistic temper of his public school background, a quality he very much associates with the spirit of cricket. Thus he concludes Beyond a Boundary, ‘Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hughes and the Old Master himself [viz. W.G. Grace] would have recognised Frank Worrell as their boy’.69 It is such portrayal that leads to James being accused of writing from the perspective of an English colonial rather than from that of a West Indian of African descent. However, such criticism misses the point made by Mark Kingwell, that James's commitment to what he regarded as the essential values of cricket represented a successful anti-colonial strategy, because those same humanistic values, which may well exist in a purified sense, were never followed by the colonizers in their attempt to impose cultural imperialism. Accordingly, by accepting and adhering to the values of cricket, James ‘beat the masters at their own game’.70

Sport, colonialism and cultural traffic

James's view that the cultural impact of colonialism was felt by not only the colonized country but also by the colonizing country, is similar to a position advanced by the Australian art historian and anthropologist Bernard Smith. In European Vision and the South Pacific Smith makes the not initially surprising claim that Australian art needs to be understood through a related understanding of British art.71 But, further to this, he claims that to understand British art from the late 1700s requires an appreciation of the cultural impact of the voyages made to Australia and the South Pacific by James Cook. Cook's second voyage carried the artist William Hodges whose representations of the people of the South Pacific created considerable interest upon his return to Britain. His paintings revived debate about the dramatist Dryden's notion of the ‘noble savage’.72 On the one hand satirists mocked the primitive characters in Hodges artwork, on the other, some commentators saw splendidly attired natives assumedly happy with their lifestyle. This latter view connected with the impression taken from Cook's journals of an idyllic social existence located at the bottom end of the world. At a time of considerable social concern coinciding with qualms about rampant industrialization, Hodges’ paintings were viewed by some as a moral riposte to what had gone wrong with Britain.

According to Smith, ‘The idea of an antipodal inversion of natural laws was not an easy one to reconcile with the idea of a carefully ordered hierarchy both physical and moral which was securely held together by the laws of nature’.73 Following European discovery, the lands of the South became unmoored from their imagined place, in the words of Smith's scholarly interpreter, Peter Beilharz, ‘the reflux from below … return[ed] to haunt the metropolitan consciousness’.74 Beilharz notes that for Smith, the Antipodes is not about place but displacement, the Antipodes suggests a relationship rather than geographical location.75 The relationship is one of power inequity, but although ‘unequal by nature’, it involves ‘a great deal more fluidity than those formally in control could themselves imagine’. Beilharz uses the term cultural traffic to explain the dynamism of the antipodean relationship as discussed by Smith.76 The term suggests that the relationship involves ongoing reciprocity and mutual impact, and that it features the movement of people and/or cultural practices and items.

In the manner of Smith on the Antipodes, so we might regard the depiction of the Caribbean by James in Beyond a Boundary; whereas the West Indies refers to place(s), the Caribbean refers to a relationship. Relatedly, cultural traffic can be adapted interestingly as a term to explain the uses of sport within the respective relationships of the Caribbean (cricket) and Antipodes (cricket and rugby) to Britain. In this regard, cultural traffic can refer to the to-and-fro movement of sports people between centre and periphery for such events as test matches and also the residential relocation of players to take up opportunities in, for example, English inter-county cricket and as ‘professionals’ within county leagues. James discusses how players from the Caribbean such as Learie Constantine – whom James followed to England – were able to attain financial security and develop as cricketers and individuals through their time in England, in remove from the racial hierarchy of cricket in the West Indies. James also notes that Constantine was aware of his atypical experience as a black West Indian living in Britain, both in terms of his sporting profile and his residence in a small northern town. Constantine and James were a rare sight on the streets of Nelson, Lancashire in the 1930s. While Constantine appreciated the adulation he received from local cricket supporters he, and James alike, ‘could not get rid of the feeling that whatever [they] did would be judged as representative of the habits and standards of millions of people at home’.77

Constantine, and Frank Worrell after him, may well be regarded as unusual representatives of West Indian cricket in Britain. Both were intellectuals, Constantine joined James in a number of public commentary forums. However, as a cricketer Constantine lent to the carnival image that has become popularly associated with Caribbean, or as it has been called, Calypso cricket. A powerful hitting batsman and frenetic fast bowler, the term most often used in England to describe Constantine was ‘electric’. Hill argues that such reference gives recognition to Constantine as a ‘dazzling virtuoso’ who lit up a sport often stereotypically associated with dull English summers.78 That Constantine's accomplishment in the Lancashire County League occurred in the 1930s prompts Hill to regard him as a ‘symbol of this New World modernity’. While this is an interesting consideration, the representation of Constantine as ‘electric’ also prompts query into the extent to which he fitted with a perception of black physicality and pre-modernity. The image of the highly energetic black athlete can be related back to the idea of the ‘noble savage’, and, from there, read ambivalently. Constantine's press appears to have been overwhelmingly positive, hence the use of a word associated with brightness and antonymous with darkness. Yet, West Indian cricket has not always been viewed so positively, and although reference to darkness may be avoided, criticism, in relatively recent time, has been couched in terms conjuring savagery from a foreboding and distant place. Thus the successful West Indian fast bowling attack during the era of Clive Lloyd's captaincy in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s was accused by the English cricketing press of, inter alia, ‘brutalizing the game’.79

An interesting early example of ambivalence in response to the appearance of the ‘noble savage’ within the history of sport and Empire can be traced to what has become known as the Native tour of Britain in 1888–89, by a select rugby team from New Zealand comprising a majority of Maori players. As part of his study of the tour, Greg Ryan examines responses by the English press, at the time, to the exotic sporting visitors. Early reports were cast in the characteristically patronizing terms of the day. The Daily Telegraph greeted the tour with a flippant inversion of history:

We have been invaded, and the Maori is upon us … Yet the timid may take heart of grace; this invasion of peaceful and pleasant character threatens no new danger to England … It is but another of those ever-welcome colonial invasions in which our fellow subjects from across the sea come to wage friendly war with us in some of our national sports and pastimes.80

Using the tour to profess the virtues of sport as colonizing influence, an article in The Times declared:

The colonising race that can imbue the aboriginal inhabitants of the colonised countries with a love for its national games, would seem to have solved the problem of social amalgamation in those countries … Wherever the Englishman goes he carries the bat and the goal posts.81

While the early press reports continued favourably and the Maori were generally complimented for their behaviour on and off the field, a condescending attitude toward the play of the New Zealand team tended to prevail. Furthermore, a comment in the Sydney Bulletin that the team ‘appear to combine the best elements of a football team and circus’ was a forthright version of similar sentiments expressed in English papers.82 The performance of the haka prior to matches lent to this misinterpretation. But as Ryan suggests, facile dismissal of the native tour at the time failed to appreciate its cultural significance and has led to its historical neglect.83 The latter problem is particularly pertinent to New Zealand where, to the current day, the Native tour bears a prefatory historical status. The first official All Blacks tour, by a predominantly Pakeha team, was made to Britain in 1905. The naming of this team as the ‘Originals’ has done little to acknowledge the rightful place of the Native tour within the history of rugby.

It was on the latter tour that the ‘wing-forward’ formation was seen for the first time in rugby away from New Zealand. This type of play was invented by Thomas Rangiwahia Ellison and is elaborated in his landmark instructional manual The Art of Rugby, published in 1902. Ellison, a prominent player in the Native team, declared the play of his team as innovative in comparison to that of the lacklustre ‘Britishers’. On the latter, Ellison remarked, ‘Their play generally was of one style and description, from start to finish … They all seem to have tumbled into a groove, and stuck there.’84 Ellison's ‘wing-game’ was deployed by subsequent successful All Blacks touring teams over the next two decades until it was counteracted with the imposition of the eight-man scrum, which was codified into the rules of rugby in 1932. In giving impetus to the changes that would come to international rugby, Ellison, and the Native team of which he was a member, gives an early obvious relevance to Smith's term cultural traffic being applied to sport. Interestingly, Ellison was a graduate of Te Aute College, a school for Maori boys founded in 1854 along the lines of the English public school. Like the Queen's Royal College, attended by C.L.R. James in Trinidad, it can be said that Te Aute was concerned with familiarizing its pupils with the gentlemanly ‘code’ of the Empire. Ellison does not elaborate on his experience at Te Aute but noting that his ‘real introduction to the game’ occurred at the college, suggests that it was there he learnt to accept defeat in ‘good spirit’ along with knowledge on the finer points on forward play.85

The contemporary Maori scholar Brendan Hokowhitu regards Ellison's claim of originality for the Native team's style of play as, ‘an exemplary statement of tino rangatiratanga’. This term, more literally meaning chieftainship, is commonly used as an expression of Maori self-determination.86 Hokowhitu goes on to suggest that the subsequent historical forgetting of the Native team in New Zealand relinquishes an opportunity for symbolic recognition of an incipient common culture through rugby. The depiction of the 1905 All Blacks team as the ‘Originals’ and ‘trailblazers’ in the sport, not only denies the Native team its historical significance but also erased an important cultural connection between Maori and Pakeha.87 The subsequent history of self-determination for Maori within New Zealand rugby has been one of ongoing struggle, a struggle, as Hokowhitu suggests via Marqusee, involving not only the refusal of oppression but an index of collective and individual creativity.88 The dominant image of Maori within rugby as hyper-masculine and violent shows little understanding of the cultural impact of Maori on the sport, and the cultural significance of the sport to Maori. Although the Maori elite within rugby may have displayed ‘both the strength to lead and the weakness to follow’, given the colonial origins of rugby and the related link to such institutions as Te Aute, the involvement of the select school-trained elite, such as Ellison, has been crucial to Maori being able to embrace the game more generally.89

Sport and colonialism: the ‘long revolution’

In The Black Jacobins C.L.R. James examined how the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture arose from African culture tinged with political radicalism born of Western idea. This mixture of influence encouraged James to regard the slaves engaged in revolt as responsible for the making of their history and legitimating the struggle against colonial oppression.90 The struggle within sport against colonialism is at best a ‘long revolution’, but such is the case with culture as the title of Williams's book of that name was meant to illustrate. James's Beyond a Boundary gives view to this long revolution in motion, the great black West Indian cricketers playing to the ‘code’ of the game but at the same time carrying the struggle of their people. This is not to suggest a subversive or conspiratorial struggle against the code. The likes of Constantine and Worrell, as with James himself, loved the sport of cricket too much to use it in such an undertaking. Their belief in the aesthetics of cricket was matched by an admiration for the game's moral virtues. They never regarded cricket as racist, only the social relations imposed on the sport through the circumstances of colonialism could be thus indicted. For these aestheticians much about the goodness of life can be learnt from cricket when played according to the unfettered humanistic spirit of the game.

In an excellent biography on C.L.R. James, Paul Buhle alludes to cricket being double-edged, ‘It “proved” to the colonizer … that “civilizing” had been a successful mission; and to the colonized that civilization was by no means the monopoly of the mother country but a larger game that anyone could play’.91 Although cricket arrived as the game of the colonizers, unlike other forms of culture and elite institutions, it could not remain the exclusive preserve of white colonists or the local black middle class. As James's famous title indicates, cricket embraced as popular art in the West Indian islands moved beyond social boundaries of privilege and opened up a common culture that bonded the scholarship boy James to the Trinidadian working class. Within this context of lived cultural experience a Caribbean way of cricket emerged, and Manley thus speaks of a natural fluency and attack; James's reference to style is reinterpreted by Hector as black style. The historical success of the West Indies and New Zealand national teams in cricket and rugby respectively, prompts thoughts of the empire striking back.92 However, usage of this familiar cinema-speak phrase risks trivializing the cultural significance of cricket and rugby in the places that are the West Indies and New Zealand and, more problematically, failing to observe the cultural traffic of sport that moves within the relationships that are the Caribbean and the Antipodes.

Notes

 1 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, provides an historical account that lends to the idea of golf and tennis being made by the middle classes.

 2 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, provides an historical account that lends to the idea of golf and tennis being made by the middle classes, 51.

 3 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, provides an historical account that lends to the idea of golf and tennis being made by the middle classes, 135.

 4 Birley, Land of Sport and Glory, 118–19.

 5 Scruton, On Hunting, 69.

 6 Scruton, On Hunting, 69

 7 Scruton, On Hunting, 69

 8 Trollope cited in Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 4.

 9 Trevelyan, English Social History, 406.

10 Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege, 25.

11 Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege, 177.

12 Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege

13 Scruton, On Hunting, 40–1.

14 Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege, 23.

15 Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, 411.

16 Jacobson, ‘Rosebery and Liberal Imperialism’, 86.

17 Holt, Sport and the British, 212.

18 Holt, Sport and the British, 212

19 Mangan, ‘Britain's Chief Spiritual Export’, 2.

20 Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, 1.

21 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field.

22 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 4.

23 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 5.

24 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field

25 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 12–13.

26 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 13.

27 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 33–4.

28 Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field, 35–6.

29 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 22.

30 Details of these cricket test series are taken from Tyler, The Illustrated History of Test Cricket.

31 Cummings, ‘The Ideology of West Indian Cricket’, 25.

32 Stoddart, ‘Cricket and Colonialism’, 251.

33 Stoddart, ‘Cricket and Colonialism’

34 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 10–12.

35 For example, Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture.

36 For some examples in relation to sport see Hughson, Inglis, and Free, The Uses of Sport, 121–32.

37 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12.

38 Hector, ‘One Eye On the Ball, One Eye On the World’.

39 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 60.

40 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 61.

41 His position on this issue is emphatically stated in Constantine, Cricket in the Sun, 62: ‘The West Indies teams, mainly composed as they always are of coloured players, should have a coloured captain … every coloured player who has ever turned out in an international side has been conscious of it, and it rots the heart out of our cricket, and always will until it is changed’.

42 Anglin, ‘The Political Development of the West Indies’, 41.

43 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 123.

44 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 148–9.

45 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 157.

46 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 158.

47 Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket, 129.

48 James, ‘Sir Frank Worrell’, 202.

49 Stoddart, ‘Sport, Colonialism and Struggle’, 117.

50 James, Beyond a Boundary.

51 James, Beyond a Boundary, ix.

52 James, Beyond a Boundary, 65.

53 James, Beyond a Boundary, 26.

54 Tiffin, ‘Cricket, Literature and the Politics of De-colonisation’, 191.

55 Tiffin, ‘Cricket, Literature and the Politics of De-colonisation’, 191

56 James, The Black Jacobins; James, American Civilisation.

57 Farred, ‘The Maple Man’, 172–3.

58 James, ‘Marxism and the Intellectuals’, 114.

59 For further discussion of the relevance of Williams's ‘cultural materialism’ to sport, see Hughson, Inglis, and Free, The Uses of Sport, 129–32.

60 James, ‘What is Art?’, Beyond a Boundary, Chap. 16.

61 James, ‘What is Art?’, Beyond a Boundary, Chap., 197.

62 James, ‘What is Art?’, Beyond a Boundary, Chap., 199.

63 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, 147.

64 James, ‘Kanhai: A Study in Confidence’, 165.

65 James, ‘Kanhai: A Study in Confidence’, 171.

66 James, Beyond a Boundary, 93. At this point James is discussing the Trinidadian cricketer of the 1920s, Wilton St Hill, but his description could equally apply to Kanhai as a more recent representative of the West Indian people.

67 Naipaul, ‘Cricket’, 22.

68 James, ‘Letter to V.S. Naipaul’.

69 James, Beyond a Boundary, 261.

70 Kingwell, ‘Keeping a Straight Bat’, 379–80.

71 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific. The book was originally published in 1960.

72 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific. The book was originally published in 1960, 82–3.

73 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific. The book was originally published in 1960, 73.

74 Beilharz, Imaging the Antipodes, 78.

75 Beilharz, Imaging the Antipodes, 97.

76 Beilharz, ‘Bernard Smith’, 433–4.

77 James, Beyond a Boundary, 124.

78 Hill, ‘Cricket and the Imperial Connection’, 60.

79 Williams, Cricket and Race, 117.

80 Ryan, Forerunners of the All Blacks, 44.

81 Ryanw, Forerunners of the All Blacks, 50.

82 Ryanw, Forerunners of the All Blacks, 52.

83 Ryanw, Forerunners of the All Blacks, 124–7.

84 Ellison, The Art of Rugby, 66.

85 Ellison, The Art of Rugby, 61.

86 Hokowhitu, ‘Rugby and Tino Rangatiratanga’, 76.

87 Hokowhitu, ‘Rugby and Tino Rangatiratanga’, 87.

88 Hokowhitu, ‘Rugby and Tino Rangatiratanga’, 90.

89 Cf. Hokowhitu, ‘Rugby and Tino Rangatiratanga’

90 James, The Black Jacobins. For a comparison of this work with E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, see Linebaugh, ‘What if C.L.R. James had met E.P. Thompson in 1792?’

91 Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 18.

92 The Empire Strikes Back was a title used evocatively by authors at the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in a study of the emergence of race issues in British culture in the 1970s. In regard to cricket and colonialism Appadurai uses the somewhat more relevant term ‘The Empire Plays Back’ as a sub-heading in his article ‘Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket’, 38.