BRIAN STODDART Playing the Game: How cricket made Barbados. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

Brian Stoddart’s multi-faceted account of a small island’s cricket history is a tribute to a time when it was the powerhouse of the game.

The peak years of West Indies cricket, both in the mid-1960s and in a period of unbroken dominance from 1976 to 1995, saw plenty of stumps splayed during magnificent pace-bowling attacks from Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall – all Barbadians – as well as sides rich in batting talent.

At the time of writing this review the West Indies were 2-173 overnight in the second innings of the Second Test against India in New Delhi after being forced to follow on. John Campbell was 87 not out and Shai Hope undefeated on 66. I hoped they would each make 100 more. Campbell, a Jamaican, had yet to make a Test century in 24 previous appearances so I hoped he could make a big hundred. Barbadian Hope’s two Test centuries had come in a single match against England at Headingley in 2017, so could he summon up the spirit of his island predecessors like the fabulous 3Ws – Frank Worrell, Clive Walcott and Everton Weekes – or  the greatest cricketer of all, Garry Sobers, or even the good, such as Conrad Hunte and Desmond Haynes?

It might be expected that Stoddart would sing the praises of the great and the good – and he doesn’t ignore them. But, as his subtitle suggests, he delves much further, arguing that cricket is a social influence that has driven island life and is therefore a subject worthy of historical research.

Class and race pervade Barbadian society, organised top-down through the sugar industry and slavery, and social segregation marked cricket from its beginnings. The cricket grounds were carved out of sugar plantations, the plantocracy underwrote the game, and the elite retained dominance:

Barbadian cricket, then, was inexorably tied into this broader concern for social order and protected rights for the elite. That drove the shape and form of those who got to play where, and who did not, the ordering of clubs, and the form of management and authority.

In his acknowledgements Stoddart mentions his debt to archivists, academics, historians, writers, librarians, administrators, former players and players around the world, but what gives the book its especial richness is his own first-hand experience of playing the game.

No doubt many doors were opened when he chose to play for Maple as the sole white man in a fringe lower-status black team. As he describes it, the home ground was reached by a short walk along a beach, although the site ‘had a long and sordid history of family and company profit on the back of human misery and suffering’. Stoddart also widened his appreciation of the geography as well as the sociology of the island’s cricket by taking part in matches on local grounds, and his photographs provide an extra pleasure in the book.

 CLR James’s 1962 classic Beyond the Boundary is naturally referenced, particularly James’s analysis of Trinidadian clubs. Likewise, Stoddart notes the divisions of society through the Barbadian cricket clubs. Wanderers, first formed in 1877, was the club of the descendants of the slave-owning plantocracy; those which followed were Pickwick (1882) for the white middle-class managers, Spartan (1893) for the non-white middle-class, and Empire (formed in 1914 for the rest), which would become the most famous.

Wanderers strengthened its social elitism, but Pickwick began to offer fierce challenges in the 1880s and shortly after the Barbados Challenge Cup Cricket Association (BCCCA) was formed in 1892. There were then seven clubs, including schools (Harrison and Codrington Colleges, Lodge and Combermere). The BCCCA was seen by the controllers as reflecting ‘proper’ society and the elite maintained its authority well into the 1920s, when arguments over the selection of players for intercolonial games led to organisational change.

It took a long time for those at the bottom of the social order to throw off the shackles; in the nineteenth century black players could only be attached to clubs as professional bowlers/groundsmen.

While we can be astonished at the achievements of many world-class players from a tiny island 0.64 per cent the size of Tasmania, with a population just over half that of Australia’s smallest state, there are many more whose possibilities in the game were severely restricted.

They were not selected for Barbados in intercolonial matches, although as the examples of Fitz Hinds and Ollie Layne show, they made other representative appearances. In Stoddart’s words, ‘Hinds was a lower-class black, a tradesman to boot and, in cricket terms, a labouring net bowler’, but outstanding performances, including a score of 50 not out and figures of 5 for 34 against a visiting English team, eventually saw him chosen for the 1900 West Indies tour of England. Layne, a handcart operator and professional cricketer, toured England with the West Indies side of 1906, scored over 600 runs, made a first-class century, and took 57 wickets, including that of WG Grace.

George Francis bowled the first ball for the West Indies in Test cricket in 1928, but he too had to struggle. A ‘poor son of post-slavery plantation life, he developed both playing skills and groundsman expertise’ and was only selected for the 1923 tour of England because his white captain, Harold Bruce Gardiner ‘Bunny’ Austin, businessman and later politician and knight, thought the team needed a servant. Francis was ‘likely more pliant than someone like Hermann Griffith’, a man Stoddart elsewhere terms ‘the founder and guiding spirit of the Empire Cricket Club’ as well as one of the leading players in the 1928 tour of England.

The clubs were one of the main structural elements in the organisation of cricket but the major division was between the two separate cricket competitions: the BCCCA, which became the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) in 1933, and the short-lived Frame Food competition, which provided an enormous boost to cricket among the lower and working-class blacks in 1902, and later gave rise to the Barbados Friendly Cricket Association, which transformed into the Barbados Cricket League (BCL) in the 1930s. As Stoddart notes:

The BFCA was a ‘black’ competition, cross-hatched by occupational status, location and standing. The establishment saw it as being below the accepted level of the BCA with its lofty ‘taking note’ of the newcomers’ arrival, a firm indication of distancing … Barbadian cricket [was] not just a matter of talent and performance but also of colour, class and status.

The main public schools were part of that division because education put distance between the labouring and the schooling classes. A prime example of this was John Goddard, ‘a rare case of a man from a poor white family rising in status’. Goddard attended Lodge school, where he emerged as a great cricketer and athlete before playing for Pickwick, Barbados and captaining the West Indies in the 1950s. From an interview with postwar Test player ‘Foffie’ Williams, Stoddart narrates a story of Goddard drinking several rums with Williams and other black players and telling them his greatest ambition was to see eleven white men in the Barbados team. ‘The others threw their glasses and the Goddard rum through the open window and stalked out.’

The racism was endemic and extended well into the modern era. Stoddart also draws on the testimony of Charlie Griffith, a West Indies star of the 1960s:

The white elite ran the economy, with successful blacks being in the civil service or the professions. There was racial peace and harmony on the surface, but social mixing was rare, in his experience, though he allowed that some younger whites were becoming more liberal. Race and class permeated his cricket world where it was tough for a black man to succeed.

Over time, of course, the black men who accounted for the vast majority of the population did succeed, and after the accession of Frank Worrell as the first black West Indies captain in 1960, took control of the game as they did the legislatures. As Stoddart explains:

The connection between politics and cricket became well established, and following the 1960s and 1970s post-independence years, it was said the best time to get all prime ministers of the independent Caribbean states together was at a Test match.

In his conclusion, Stoddart writes that the original purpose of cricket in Barbados was ‘to instil and reinforce in the population the idea of an English or imperial game played to the same social standards and behavioural norms wherever it might be found’. Looking ahead, he finds it difficult to create a new kind of identity because while ‘the colonial past might have gone, physically as it were, but it remains with us structurally, one elite replaced by another, and that is why change takes so long to achieve’.

Playing the Game is not an easy read because Stoddart packs more nuanced detail into a page than many authors accomplish in a whole book, but it is an important work and essential reading for anyone who cares not only about the direction of West Indies cricket but the future of the global game.

Brian Stoddart Playing the Game: How cricket made Barbados Brickworks Media 2025 PB 370pp $35

Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is These Walls: A Visual Memoir available from www.lulu.com/spotlight/bernardwhimpress

You can buy Playing the Game from cricketbooks.com.au

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library

Tags: Barbados, Barbados cricket clubs, Brian | Stoddart, Clive Walcott, cricket and cricketers, Everton Weekes, Frank Worrell, Garry Sobers, history of cricket in Barbados, Intercolonial cricket, racism, Test cricket, West Indies cricket