Cricket: A Modern Anthology. Jonathan Agnew
happen after I had said “Yes”.
I dressed and went in search of Benny Bansda, an Indian chum who had been my champion for years. He was head barman in one of Cape Town’s biggest hotels, The Grand in Adderley Street. Benny was also a prolific writer on all sporting matters and, after years of campaigning on my behalf, had written the article for World Sports Magazine which had finally persuaded John Arlott to write to me.
Benny’s first reaction was, “Great! What are you waiting for?” I confessed that my big fear was that I didn’t know—had no way of knowing—if I was really good enough. Benny said: “There’s only one way to find out.” With that he grabbed a piece of paper and he wrote to John Arlott saying that, if any specific job could be found, I would leave right away.
Before I got back home everybody on Signal Hill, it seemed, knew already that I was on my way to England. I learned later that, when John Arlott received my letter, he contacted John Kay of the Manchester Evening News and an authority on Lancashire League cricket. John knew that Middleton, for whom he had played, was looking for a new professional and had been negotiating with Wes Hall, the West Indies fast bowler. Wes had provisionally accepted the offer but he insisted that the announcement should be delayed for several months. I gather that Wes was worried he might lose his job and be out of work for six months if it was learned that he was going to take up a League job in England in the spring of 1960.
When the news did leak out that Wes was thinking of going to England, he wrote to Middleton to explain that he could not complete the contract. This coincided with the moment that John Kay received the inquiry from John Arlott. Together, they persuaded Middleton to make me an offer. It was £450 for a year’s contract, out of which I had to pay my fare to England, which would cost about £200.
This offer, for which I had waited so long, carried with it its own problems. When I sat down to work out the money matters, I realized that I would have to turn it down because I simply could not afford to travel. I had no money. My parents had none.
I had been earning and contributing to the household expenses. The doctor confirmed that Naomi was expecting our first child and, even if I could have managed to live in England, there wouldn’t have been a shilling to send home for Naomi or my parents out of what would have been left of my contract money.
I was about ready to accept it as a dream lost when the coloured lads in Cape Town and all over South Africa threw themselves into a campaign, started by Bansda, to raise the money to send me to England. I think that they, as much as I, felt the honour of an English club coming to them for a professional. Nobody had been asked before and no one had gone before. Coloured clubs all over the country started to arrange special games and collections and white South Africans joined in.
I have never forgotten that, without the help of white South African cricketers—including Peter Van der Merwe who subsequently captained the Springbok Test team—and other first-class players like Jim Pothecary and Dick Westcott, the money which was needed to get me to England might never have been raised. These cricketers played in a side led by Gerald Innes, a former South African tour player who arranged a Sunday match against my own team. This game brought one of the biggest crowds ever seen on the Claremont ground in Cape Town. Together the coloured cricketers and the white cricketers went around with collecting boxes and raised over £150.
I don’t know exactly how this match came to be staged or who turned blind eyes, but we knew then—and there has been plenty of evidence since—that the dogma of Mr. Vorster’s cabinet is not by any means a true reflection of the wishes of many South African cricketers.
Benny Bansda’s campaign eventually raised £450. A word like gratitude seems so inadequate. Every moment I live as a first-class cricketer I owe to all those kind people who spontaneously got together to give me the chance of a new career.
Raising the money to come to England was not the whole problem. The brief talks with the English county cricketers who had been in South Africa on coaching trips had taught me something about the conditions which existed in England. But now I needed to have it all analysed. Particularly, I needed to know what conditions were like in the League. I had heard that they were different from county cricket but I had no idea in what way.
The man who could best help me was Tom Reddick, who had previously played for Middlesex and Nottinghamshire, and subsequently had been coach to Lancashire. At that time, as I have said, he was coaching in Cape Town. There was probably nobody anywhere in South Africa who knew more about League conditions.
I telephoned him and he said I could go to his house right away. His first words were: “You might just as well know now, lad, you are going into one of the hardest forms of cricket in the world, but I wish you well.” He said he would prefer to see me going into county cricket but, if I wanted to try the League, he would give me all the help he could.
First, he told me exactly what a professional had to do. It wouldn’t be just playing cricket on Saturdays and lazing around for the rest of the week. It meant working really hard for the club on the ground, helping with the wickets, and coaching the local lads by night.
Four nights each week I visited Tom at his house. I would be waiting for him at six o’clock when he came home and, though he had already devoted a full day to coaching the university students, he would patiently spend hours teaching me everything he could. Not the least important was how he tuned me mentally for the change.
By the time Tom finished with me, my feet were once again firmly on the ground. He warned me that cricket in the Central Lancashire League would not only be vastly different from the cricket which I had been playing, but it would also be different from the first Test match I had seen in Cape Town ten years before, which was indelibly printed on my mind.
For the first time I realised that I would not always be playing on good wickets. I would also have to learn how the conditions of wickets changed with the weather. And I had to learn something about the English weather! Perhaps the most forbidding of all Tom’s warnings was that, in the League, I would each week be facing some of the best cricketers in the world, each of whom was in the game to earn a living.
Tom Reddick certainly helped me to come to England. More important, he helped me to stay, especially during the early days when, if I had not had his words to hang on to, I might have given it all up and rushed back home.
Tom gave me something as well. He probably didn’t realise it at the time and maybe doesn’t now. After our coaching sessions at the back of his house each night he would invite me in for a drink. This was the first time I had ever entered the home of a white man.
I wish he could have been with me in London nine years later, at a function just before Christmas, 1968. In a room glittering with chandeliers, a hundred or more English cricket celebrities sat down to dinner, elegant in their dinner jackets. The occasion was to present a cricket trophy.
As winner of the Lawrence trophy the previous year, I was there to present the silver cup to the new winner, my county captain, Tom Graveney. I also had to make a speech. I sat at the top table between the M C C President, Mr. R. Aird, and Secretary, Mr. S. C. Griffith. I think that, if Tom Reddick had been there, I might have made him feel a little proud and with a glance I could have told him how grateful I was for preparing me for that moment.
John Kay was waiting for me when I arrived at London Airport. He had been in London the previous night to cover a boxing match and had stayed over to meet me and to take me back to Manchester. I had hoped that he or John Arlott would be there, but I was not prepared for the shock when I reached the doors of the aircraft and started to walk down the gangway.
John Arlott had been broadcasting the previous night and had casually mentioned that I would be arriving the next day. As I soon came to learn, a word lightly dropped is enough for the British journalists and photographers who, so far as I have been able to see, keep their readers better informed than is the case anywhere else in the world.
The day was April the First and, if I had been aware of anything, I would have asked myself what sort of fool I was to be taking this step down a gangway into a sea of faces and flashbulbs which made the