ABSTRACT
In 1980, Roland Butcher became the first product of the great post-war migration of Asians and West Indians to play for the England Test side. Since then, others have followed in a slow but steady trickle. They have been joined in the England ranks by whites from southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, this period has also been England’s least successful in the international arena.1 With each setback the efforts to diagnose the malady afflicting English cricket grew more frantic. By 1993, when England were drubbed at home by Australia (and Shane Warne on his England debut) 4-1, some commentators were musing on a possible link between the England side’s poor showing on the field and its social composition. Chris Cowdrey, a member of the sanctions-busting Gatting tour to South Africa in 1989, declared that the Test side was ‘not English enough’. Neil Foster, another of Gatting’s band, complained, ‘We don’t have a truly English side. We have lost some of our identity.’ Reserving most of his ire for the immigrant southern Africans, Foster added, ‘At least Lewis and DeFreitas grew up here.’ Foster’s ‘at least’ was a telling phrase, casually qualifying the ‘Englishness’ of
the two black cricketers. David Frith, the editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, one of the English game’s two pre-eminent periodicals, made that qualification explicit. English cricket, he said, suffered a ‘crisis of identity’. For him the ‘at least’ applied to Allan Lamb and Robin Smith, whose parents were English. Devon Malcolm, he said, ‘acts, thinks, sounds and looks like a Jamaican. This hits the English cricket lover where it hurts.’ The arguments about the ‘Englishness’ of black, Asian and foreign-born cricketers were aired periodically in the cricket press, but received little attention from the outside world until July 1995, when the ‘Henderson Affair’ became national news, much to the discomfort of cricket authorities and cricket journalists. The cover of the July 1995 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly (WCM) advertised
a feature on ‘Racism and National Identity’. Inside was a 2000 word article entitled ‘IS IT IN THE BLOOD?’ by one Robert Henderson, a former civil servant living on a disability pension in Hoxton, a multi-racial area of inner London. The text was illustrated with photos of Geoff Greenidge (captioned ‘the last white player to represent West Indies’) and Phil DeFreitas (captioned ‘to England at 10’).2
