Back to the future

Learie Constantine
By Peter Mason

Signal Books, £9.99

This highly readable account of the life of one of the fathers of West Indies cricket arrived in the SPIN office in the week of the Stanford 2020 and Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency. And it’s no stretch to regard this biography of Learie Constantine, whose twin passions were racial equality and playing entertaining one-day cricket for big money, as rather timely.

Constantine’s grandfather had been born into slavery but Constantine himself was to become the first black member of the British House of Lords, taking his seat shortly before his death in 1971. From the 1930s onwards, suggests Mason, Constantine was the most high profile black man in British public life, using his fame as a cricketer to advance the cause of racial equality via politics and panel show appearances.

A fast, aggressive bowler, hard-hitting batsman and – according to Don Bradman – indisputably the greatest fielder of his time, Mason credits Constantine as being the inventor of West Indies cricket as we now recognise it. Until Constantine’s time and beyond, West Indies always had a white colonial captain and the stodgy, stolid values of English cricket prevailed in the islands.Constantine campaigned against this tirelessly until, finally, Frank Worrell became the first black official West Indies captain as late as 1960.

Constantine’s reputation was first made in a Windies’ tour game against Middlesex at Lord’s in 1929 in which he scored 103 in an hour and took 6/11 off 39 balls to inspire a famous victory. His stats from the sporadic Tests played by the Windies were not all that and he eschewed county cricket in favour of playing in the Lancashire League, taking 776 wickets for Nelson at less than ten runs each.

The self-appointed guardians of cricket’s decency who sneer at the popular enthusiasm for Twenty20 would do well to read Mason’s book. Constantine believed the one-day format of League cricket, finished in an afternoon in front of a paying crowd of 10,000, reflected the true spirit of the game and that, by comparison, county cricket was stuffy and snobby and dull. Constantine, says Mason, was probably the highest-paid sportsman in the UK in the 1930s: while a footballer’s maximum wage was less than £400 a year, Constantine earned over twice as much in a season of League cricket.

Decades ahead of his time, Constantine even proposed one-day international cricket. (The fact that his entertain-at-all-costs approach was seen by many in the English game in the 1930s as rather old-fashioned muddies the anti-T20 argument still further.)

Despite never playing county cricket, Constantine became one of the most in-demand players of the day, both on and off the field. As the ‘acceptable’ face of black cricket, his 1954 book, Colour Bar, comparing race relations in the UK to South Africa and the Deep South caused a big stir; he helped set up the first Race Relations Act in 1965 and, showing the breadth of his celebrity, was in the same year a judge of the Miss World contest.

Mason’s biography – no more than 60,000 words in a neat pocket-sized format – rattles along, putting most painfully stretched accounts of modern cricketers’ lives to shame. Mason’s writing wears its research lightly to give us an intriguing insight into a packed and remarkable life, whose stories and controversies still resonate today.