Basil D’Oliveira and the Lost Sons of South African cricket – Still Climbing In to Watch – Part 2

On a white washed wall outside of Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town hangs an oxidizing metal sheet with a hole punched through it by a bronze cricket ball.

It is the work of Donovan Ward commemorating a ‘shameful incident that shone a spotlight on apartheid’s interference in sport’ – the exclusion, by his home country of the ‘Cape Coloured’ Basil D’Oliveira from a list of touring England cricketers allowed entry into that country and the subsequent cancellation of that tour by the MCC.    

The cricket ball and chain stands for the impact of that popular and dignified cricketer on the system of apartheid and provides symbolically a permanent place there for ‘the lost son of South African cricket’.

Yesterday  we left Basil D’Oliveira, his wife and two children distraught with the disappointment of having been left out of the 1968 MCC touring party to South Africa despite that summer topping the England batting averages and, factually at least, coming second in the bowling averages.

As http://basildoliveira.com/worcestershire-ccc/   recounts he took his wife out to dinner that night ‘resigned to the fact that the matter was now out of (his) hands and unaware that tons of newsprint condemning the England selectors were being assembled in Fleet Street printing presses for the next day’s papers’.It was a perfect story for a late summer media storm. 

The headlines would write themselves.  A victim of apartheid, a hero of a rearguard action against the ‘old enemy’ at the Oval, ditched by bumbling, timid selectors, secretive political machinations by one of the last bastions of the Establishment in cahoots with apologist  ‘friends’ in apartheid South Africa; the story had everything.  Members of Parliament protested and the public responded with their ‘hearts’. Within the space of four days, d’Olivera received 2,000 letters, only one of which criticized him.

Answering questions from the press, the Secretary of MCC Secretary, S.C. Griffith, said “Nothing else was discussed at the selectors’ meeting other than cricketing considerations”. 

When questioned by journalists, Doug Insole, Chairman of Selectors, who we met and admired here a month ago argued that D’Oliveira, wasn’t one of the best 16 players in England at that time, and that the decision was based purely on the cricketing grounds that he was considered “from an overseas tour point of view as a batsman rather than an all-rounder.  We put him beside the seven batsmen that we had, along with Colin Milburn whom we also had to leave out with regret.”

Much was also made by those seeking to justify the decision that D’Oliveira’s form had dropped after his omission from the Test side.  Yet by the end of the season he was top of the Worcestershire bowling averages with 58 wickets at 15.74 each.

These explanations were further undermined when subsequently Cartwright, a bowler, withdrew from the party and D’Oliveira was selected to take his place albeit,  friends of the decisions explained, at a time when the other possible ‘all-rounders’ Knight and Illingworth were unavailable.

The prevarication and confused clarifications by the selectors gave the South African Premier the luxury of the excuse that ‘his country was not prepared to receive a team which had been forced upon her by people with certain political aims’. 

MCC formally cancelled the tour on September the 24^th.  It was a significant advance in the movement for a universal sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa – an advance that was made all the more persuasive and pressing by, “the great dignity which Basil d’Oliveira (…) maintained throughout the whole business” to borrow the words of MCC’s President R. Aird.

South Africa had been was suspended from FIFA as far back as 1963. The International Cricket Conference imposed a moratorium on tours in 1970.  The IOC formally expelled South Africa from in 1970.  The Commonwealth leaders accepted the Gleneagles Agreement in 1977. The Davis Cup excluded South Africa in 1970. Rugby to its shame dragged its feet.

For twenty years the exclusion of South Africa from most of the world’s major sporting opportunities rankled with a sports obsessed white power base and its supporters.

As Abdul Minty, the South African exile and member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement said, “We understood, as South Africans, the significance of sport for white South Africa. It was like a religion. And if you hit them hard, then you were really getting the message across that they were not welcome in the world as long as they practiced racism in sport.”

Sporting bodies rapidly ended their boycotts with the fall of apartheid.  Sport which had done so much to bring down the old regime now helped to build a united country.  It is fitting that the prompt and principled action by FIFA should be followed 53 years later by the selection of that Rainbow Nation, South Africa, to hold its World Cup this year.

Nelson Mandela: “Sport is very important for building character because when you’re involved in sport your individual character comes out, your determination, your ability to be part of the team and the acceptance of the collective effort is extremely important in developing your country as well as patriotism.”

Wikipedia concludes its page on Basil D’Oliveira with this reference, which includes words uttered at the unveiling of the memorial at Newlands on behalf of the family by Frank Brache, whose sister is married to D’Oliveira.

“The D’Oliveira family is very grateful for this honour. It is just such a pity that Basil, who lives in the UK and suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease now, will not be able to appreciate it himself.

“On many occasions we had to sneak in and climb over fences to watch the games from the segregated enclosure. Basil used to dream of being able to play here – it’s a dream that was never realised.”

As the TMS photograph at the top of the page shows, in 2009 they are still climbing in.

Let freedom reign.

Originally posted June 2010

South Africa and the Debt owed to a Special Cricketer Part 1

Back in June 2010, Third Man published this post to celebrate the start of the World Cup in SA.  The news this morning that Basil D’Oliveira has died is sad, but there is perhaps a silver lining in his release.  He was the best there was at seeing silver linings.

On the fly-leaf of his autobiography, he wrote, “In many ways, coming into the game as late as I did has been lucky for me … You find your appetitie for good things wonderfully sharpened when you suddenly discover that you haven’t missed them after all as you thought.’

In that sentence, written when the country of his birth was still an appalling tyranny, he spoke unwittingly for the New South Africa.

The post is in two parts.  The second will appear tomorrow.

More than forty years ago cricket played a small part in the long train of events, sacrifices and acts of bravery that have eventually made this ‘dream’ become possible – in particular the resolve, the humility and the dignity of one man – Basil D’Oliveira.

Bas back in S.A. in the winter of 1966 talking cricket

Over the August Bank holiday in 1968 Worcester played Sussex at home at New Road.  D’Oliveira made a fine 128 in the home side’s first innings.  He then took 3 Sussex wickets for 36 to help make Sussex follow on and ultimately lose the match by an innings. 

Back in the dressing room D’Oliveira put up his feet and waited for the announcement of the England team to tour South Africa that winter.D’Oliveira’s fine form in that match had followed a superb 158 batting number six for England against the Australians in the final Test at the Oval the week before. 

This was the famous match when a cloudburst at lunch time on the last day all but robbed England of victory and the chance to square the series.  But remarkably, as Wisden reports, “the groundsman, Ted Warn, ably assisted by volunteers from the crowd armed with brooms and blankets, mopped up to such purpose that by 4.45, the struggle was resumed.”

Third Man had been one of those volunteers, hopping over the fence in front of the Ladies’ Pavilion grabbing a blanket and working to dry up that lake.  As the water gradually disappeared and the umpires agreed that play could continue, we knew two things for certain; Underwood would take the remaining five Australian wickets and Basil d’Olivera would, in a few days, be announced as a member of the MCC side to tour his native South Africa.

Neither prediction turned out quite as we expected.  At first, Underwood gained no response from the wicket – it was too wet.  Only when the late afternoon sun cooked up the wicket did he make the break through, becoming unplayable and winning the match.

Secondly, a few days later, as D’Oliveira waited in the Worcestershire dressing room to hear if his name would be announced for the forthcoming tour to South Africa, tension grew.   The list lengthened without him … until he had to accept the awful fact that he had been excluded by the MCC selectors.

You could have heard a pin drop in the room.  Tom Graveney, swore bitterly.  “I never thought they’d do this to you Bas.”

All this had not come out of a blue sky.  Almost from the moment when D’Oliveira had made his debut against the West Indians at Lord’s in 1966 and begun painstakingly to establish himself as an England regular, speculation mounted about how South Africa would react when, as seemed a certainty, D’Oliveira would be picked to tour the country of his birth, the country whose apartheid system had discriminated so viciously against him.  That state-legitimized and entrenched prejudice had made an exile of him, obliging him to pursue his undoubted cricketing potential first in the Central Lancashire League for Middleton, then in first class cricket for Worcestershire, and finally for England.

Is Third Man seeing things again or is that a Bradman grip that Bas is suggesting? Again from his visit to S.A. in the winter of 1966

In January 1967, Britain’s Sports Minister, Denis Howell, told a cheering House of Commons that the 1968/9 tour to South Africa would be cancelled if there were any moves to ban D’Oliveira from playing.  In the same month, South Africa’s Minister of the Interior said, “We will not allow mixed teams to play against our white teams over here. If this player is chosen, he would not be allowed to come here. Our Policy is well known here and overseas.”

Both MCC and the South African Government were anxious that the tour should take place.  The man who just wanted to play cricket was without intention becoming a game changer on a greater field of play.  He was becoming a cause.

By April 1967, South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, was hinting that apartheid principles could be relaxed in so far as they affected teams from overseas countries “with whom we have traditional sporting ties”. And in September, a South African Test Selector, told D’Oliveira that ‘he was sure he’d be allowed to go on tour if selected’.

In June 1968, Wilfred Isaacs, a prominent man in South African cricket, saw D’Oliveira at Lord’s and talked warmly about the forthcoming tour. He went so far as to offer D’Oliveira his flat and hospitality whenever he wanted it on the trip. Yet when Isaacs returned to South Africa a few weeks later, he forecast to the press that D’Oliveira would not be selected.   Had anyone that day at Lord’s been talking out of turn?

D’Oliveira  maintains that later that month on the eve of the Lord’s Test a high ranking official told him that he could ‘get everyone out of trouble by making myself available for South Africa not England’.  D’Oliveira angrily refused.

In August an official from a tobacco company, offered D’Oliveira a £40,000 ten year contract, plus a car and a house, to coach in South Africa … provided he announced that he was unavailable for the South African tour before the Fifth Test.  He declined.

D’Oliveira had spent the 1966/67 winter in South Africa touring the country coaching, giving demonstrations and talks to people passionate to know more about cricket and passionate to see him play.  The effect on cricket among non-whites of D’Oliveira touring that winter as an England player would have been immense.

But on that August evening as a distraught D’Oliveira family sobbed and hugged each other and slowly came to turns with their disappointment it looked an impossible dream. 

That night the T.V. ‘talent programme’ Opportunity Knocks featured ‘a white guy dressed up like a black man’ singing Al Jolson songs.

(To be continued …)