Book Review: Clyde Walcott - Statesman of West Indies Cricket

David Woodhouse says a compact biography of the third W - Clyde Walcott - fills an important gap

The Cricketer | 13/09/2024 at 12:56

The Caribbean Apollo

Clyde Walcott tends to be the third W, often eclipsed in the popular imagination by the graceful Frank Worrell and ruthless Everton Weekes. However, as Peter Mason reminds us in a sympathetic biography, Walcott takes higher rank in the ICC’s retrospective best-ever ratings: his Test average from 1952 onwards (after he gave up wicketkeeping because of a bad back) was 66.

It is hard to think of a contemporary, other than Keith Miller, who would have been such an asset in T20, especially as Walcott developed economical off-cutters in four seasons of Lancashire League cricket with Enfield. To the list of items decommissioned by his six-hitting we can now add “a euphonium that had been left on the boundary edge by a member of the Barnoldswick Brass Band”.

Walcott’s power became symbolic from the moment he “licked” England at Lord’s in 1950. His celebrated back-foot drive inspired CLR James to compare him to the Olympic Apollo, and the poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite to portray him as a sword-arm of liberation.

Brathwaite’s poem, and Mason’s book, lament the fact that many of Walcott’s later contributions (such as his gargantuan series aggregate against Australia in 1954/55) were in losing causes. Indeed, the 1950s proved a largely lost decade during which the continuing colour bar on captaincy poisoned the dressing room – and precipitated Walcott’s premature Test retirement at the age of 32. Mason, as in his 2008 biography of Learie Constantine, therefore spends more time on the achievements of later public life than the disappointments of the cricket career.

Buy Clyde Walcott - Statesman of West Indies Cricket. £9.99 at Bookshop.org here and Waterstones here.

First, Walcott and his wife Muriel devoted their prime years to the programmes of sport development and social welfare funded by the sugar company Booker in British Guiana. Walcott took the territory to unparalleled heights in regional competition, guiding players such as Rohan Kanhai and Joe Solomon into the West Indies side which finally fulfilled its potential under Worrell in the early 1960s. Mason is also well qualified, as a former student of the Guyanese historian Clem Seecharan, to explain how a Bajan of African heritage improved the lives, as well as the cricket, of so many plantation workers of Indian heritage.

Second, Walcott played a key role in the wider Caribbean cricket scene for a quarter of a century. He was team manager on tours of England when West Indies won two World Cups and three consecutive Test series, his strong relationship with Clive Lloyd surviving a rupture during the Packer crisis.

Third, he was the first person of colour to serve as ICC chairman. Mason argues that Walcott, paid only his expenses, personified old-style administration before it became “more aligned to accountancy than to cricket”. At the same time, he presided over reforms heralding a new era in which the real power was transferred from the MCC to the BCCI.

Mason describes Walcott as both “serious” and “unassuming”. This authoritative study, academically inclined but compactly readable, has similar qualities. Perhaps more might have been made of the paradox that the 3Ws were highly progressive figures with largely conservative attitudes. Mason is still right to emphasise that Walcott, just as much as Worrell, remained an “inspiring personality in the realm of black consciousness”. This little book about a big man will fill an important gap in the library of anyone interested in the cricket and history of the Caribbean.