Berbice had always been the backwater by Shan Razack

Berbice had always been the backwater by Shan Razack 

Berbice batsman distinguished themselves in Test cricket after relativeobscurity. Berbice was often considered an obscure cricketing entity, relegated to the cellar and deemed incapable of really producing anyone of Test  match caliber. Even so, because it was extremely difficult in the earlier days for the boys from the rural areas to get on the national side.It was, in fact, the Demerarians who led the way in promoting inter-colonial cricket in the West Indies during the last third of the 19th century. They undertook the first visit to Barbados in 1865, became Trinidad’s very first opponents in 1869, and hosted the first Barbadian touring team in 1871. It was a Demerarian, a colonial Police Inspector E.F. Wright who recorded the first century ever achieved in first-class cricket on Caribbean soil. At Georgetown, in September 1882, he struck an astonishing 123 at Trinidad’s expense in a first innings total of 168, which itself was then the highest score ever made by a West Indian. Four years later, it was another Demerarian, George N. Wyatt who did most to facilitate the first tour of a composite West Indian team. In 1886, three Barbadians and six Jamaicans joined four Demerarians in an invasion of Canada and the United States. They played thirteen matches, won six, lost five and drew two.It was not until 1944, some 79 years and 48 matches later, that a player from the Ancient County was selected to represented the country. He was the big, barrel-chested John Trim, a pace bowler. It was not until nine years later and20 matches, in 1953, that a batsman from Berbice represented the country. Opening batsman Charles Paul, the uncle of Leslie Amsterdam had the distinct honor of doing so. It didn’t take long this time, just a matter of two years, for two of the finest in West Indies, nay, world cricket Rohan Kanhai and Basil Butcher to emerge. Along with Joe Solomon, they were to open the floodgates for other outstanding batsmen in Berbice to stake their claim. 

Two decades after 1955 saw the emergence of a significant number of batsmen from Berbice-Kanhai, Butcher Solomon, Fredericks, Kallicharran, Baichan, Shivnarine, Lambert, Sonny Moonsammy, Amsterdam and Romain Etwaroo. A most remarkable fact about these batsmen is that Kanhai, Butcher, Solomon, Kallicharran and Etwaroo are all from Port Mourant on the Corentyne Coast. Fredericks and Amsterdam come from Blairmont. Shivnarine from Albion and Baichan from Rose Hall Estate. They are all plantation towns. Lambert is from New Amsterdam.

The game of cricket flowered in such communities because it was one of the few means whereby isolated rural townships asserted their identity in their county, and in the wider context of Guyanese society. In Port Mourant, a town whose population was 99 per cent Indians in the 1950s, cricket was clearly a means whereby a powerful sense of ethnic identity found expression in the greater community of a turbulent British Guiana.

Berbice had always been the backwater; British Guiana players were always selected from the Georgetown clubs. Berbice was favored with one representative now and then just to oblige… ‘But the organization of an inter-county tournament in 1954 meant that the brilliant backwoodsmen would no longer languish in anonymity, sustained by mere village adulation, however, exuberant.

Basil Butcher has spoken of what gave the boys from Port Mourant the chance. He writes: “The revival of Guyanese cricket in recent years has been the direct consequence of the organizating , a dozen years ago, of annual representative matches between the two counties (Berbice and Demerara). For the first time it became virtually impossible for a young player of real promise to go unnoticed. Quite possible neither Rohan Kanhai, Joe Solomon nor I would have reached Test cricket under the old system. All three of us won a place at the national level as a result of playing for Berbice in the inter-county tournament.”

John Trim, a fast bowler who played for the West Indies against England (1947-48), India (1948-49) and Australia (1951-52) was Kanhai’s next door neighbor and his first mentor in cricket. Butcher lived 200 yards away, Solomon half a mile away. Ivan Madray, a right-hand, leg-spinner who represented the West Indies in two tests was also from the same community along with Kanhai, Butcher and Solomon. Butcher, Solomon and Kanhai played for Port Mourant Cricket Club under skipper Johnny Teekasingh in the early fifties.

Kanhai was not only the most talented of the four, but also the boldest, the one with the strongest will and the clearest sense of purpose. He stood out from the start. Realizing the virtually impossibility of being selected as a middle order batsman in a side containing the three terrible W’s, he elected to qualify as both opening batsman and wicket-keeper/batsman, two of the most difficult positions on the side. It was as wicket-keeper/batsman that he was called in 1954 to play a feature match in Georgetown, in which he scored over fifty and held five catches, which was sufficient to gain his place as second wicket-keeper on the Guyana touring team to Barbados in February, 1955. He developed fast as the standard of the competition improved and was able to score an aggressive fifty odd against the Australian touring team in 1955. One year later, October 1956 Kanhai, Butcher, Solomon and (Madray) all represented Guyana in the Quadrangular Cricket Tournament among Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana and created history by each scoring a century in the match against Jamaica. Kanhai crowned this performance with 195 run out against Barbados, Solomon also scored a century in this match. It was in this match that Skipper Clyde Walcott encouraged Kanhai to temper his aggressiveness and compile big scores rather than being satisfied with only a century.

Clyde Walcott who was living in Guyana and working as Welfare Office on the sugar estates, feels that he had a great influence on the emergence of Kanhai during this period. Berbice has now been placed on the cricketing map. Hither to unrecognized, the prowess of Berbicians at cricket received a fillip and publicity with the advent of Robert Christiani at Port Mourant Estate and the coming to British Guiana as cricket coach.

Guyana cricket had logged behind the rest of the Caribbean mainly because of the fierce internal conflicts between the Black, Asian and White communities and because of the blind conservatism of the elite Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC). British Guian occupying more than 83,000 square miles was the largest of the British West Indies colonies and possessed a population those days in excess of 600,000. There was no valid reason for such a protracted slump. The turning point came with the appointment of Clyde Walcott as Cricket Organizer and Coach on the estates of the British Guiana Sugar Producers’ Association (BGSPA) in 1954. Walcott did his best to destroy the social and ethnic barriers that had impeded Guiana cricket. He gave strong encouragement and support to such budding stars as Basil Butcher, Lance Gibbs, Rohan Kanhai, Joe Solomon, Alvin Kallicharran, Roy Fredericks, Clive Lloyd, Ivan Madray, Ivor Mendonca, Charlie Stayers and Colon Wiltshire. During the age of Walcott (1954-1970) which lasted well into the period of Independence, when British Guiana changed its name, Guyana became a powerful once again. Signs of improvement were evident almost at once. In a Quadrangular cricket tournament at Bourda in 1956, Butcher, Kanhai and Solomon shared five centuries between them in two games against Barbados and Jamaica.

It was an opportune time. The West Indies team of 1950 was on the verge of decline. The retirement of Rae and Stollmeyer meant that a pair of openers was needed. Injury to Walcott’s back had forced him to abandon keeping wicket. Kanhai was therefore an obvious choice for the 1957 tour to England. Butcher and Solomon, middle order players would have to wait the retirement of two of the W’s. It remained difficult to penetrate the West Indies through the middle order. Talented newcomers are as Kanhai, Solomon, Nurse, Rowe and Richards have all done sometimes compelled to serve as openers, and many, like Nurse, find themselves shunted up and down the order at who know what price to both composure and achievement.

Kanhai, an opener in 1957, had to face the battle and hostility of the great Fred Truman, who recognized a kindred spirit. His philosophy of destroying the bowling often lead, as it was to do 12 years later in the case of Roy Fredericks, the loss of his wicket after he had passed the score of 50. It was a philosophy, nonetheless which was to give Kanhai his particular charisma throughout his first ten years of Test cricket, and which may even have cost him the captaincy of the West Indies in 1974. One of the reasons suggested for the West Indies losing the Fifth Test against England was Kanhai’s swashbuckling batting in a situation which required sobriety.

1958/59 was a watershed period for Garry Sobers and Rohan Kanhai and the West Indies as a whole. The end of the Pakistan tour saw the retirement of both Clyde Walcott and Everton Weekes who clearly had plenty of cricket left in them. As late as 1965, Weekes was scoring a century for the Barbados Colts against Australia. Frank Worrell took a two-year break from Test cricket to complete a degree at Manchester University. The middle order was now wide open to new talent. Basil Butcher and Joe Solomon were national choices to fill the gap left by the retirement by Weekes and Walcott. There was, in addition, the talented Collie Smith, every bit as explosive as Kanhai, and a great off-spinner. There was an air of newness and exuberance about the side which toured India in 1958.

After initial difficulties against Gupte’s leg-spin, Sobers and Solomon set out to destroy him in the second innings of the Second Test. Together  (Sobers 198, Solomon 86 both run out), they scored at the rate of six runs an over, and paved the way for Kanhai’s bruising knock of 256 in the Third test, which was his first Test hundred as Sobers’ 365 against Pakistan some months earlier has been his. A few months later, Kanhai was to score a double century (217) against Fazal Mahmood in the first West Indies tour to Pakistan. Basil Butcher batting most often at number six, scored centuries in the Third and Fifth Tests, and was the major architect of the West Indies Fourth Test win, while Kanhai and Solomon also played crucial roles. Basil Butcher had three other scores of 60 and above, aggregated 486 runs at the very good average of 69.43. Joe Solomon scored 351 over six appearances. Thrice not out, he averaged a fantastic 117. His reputation, for dependability and reliability was fully established on the tour. Yet neither Butcher nor Solomon were securely ensconced in the team.

On the 1960 M.C.C tour to the West Indies, a brilliant young Barbados team under Weekes’ captaincy beat England, and brought a wealth of new talent into focus. Seymour Nurse, who had scored 215 in that match immediately became a competition with Butcher for the Number Five or Six slot. It took only failures by Butcher- the First Test he made (14) coming after a Worrell/Sobers partnership of 399, when Butcher was out trying on captain’s instructions to force the pace, and the Second Test 9 and 9, coming when the entire team had failed twice -to convince the selectors to drop him from the 1960/61 tour to Australia, as well as the 1962 team against the Indian touring side.

The selectors, in a rare act of grace, retained Joe Solomon who had performed no better than Butcher against England. It may have been Solomon’s potential as an all-rounder-a technically correct batsman at home against leg spin, a fair leg-spinner himself, and a neat efficient fieldsman-which swung things in his favor. His inclusion in the First Test team provided two of the most memorable moments in the history of test cricket, when he twice ran out batsmen by throwing down the stumps, and converted an Australian romp home into a gripping tie.