Forty summers ago a Cape Coloured South African playing for England unwittingly threw MCC into crisis over a tour to the apartheid republic
Rob Steen12-Sep-2008″I come down on the side of honesty, a good honest piece of bungling by good honest men.”Thus did Ted Dexter, sometime England captain and one-time prospective Tory MP,characterise the most important selection meeting in sporting history. More recently,in the Sunday Telegraph, the political columnist Kevin Myers delivered much the sameverdict, except that he described the original omission of Basil D’Oliveira from the MCCparty to tour South Africa in the winter of 1968-69 as “cretinous”. In 2003 Observer SportMonthly named it among its “Ten Worst Sporting Decisions”. But were they all too generous?D’Oliveira, the Cape Coloured South African allrounder playing for Worcestershire, was summoned as a replacement for Tom Cartwright three weeks later, whereupon John Vorster, South Africa’s Prime Minister, denounced the party as “the team of the Anti-Apartheid Movement” and MCC cancelled the tour, fuelling the sports boycott that ultimately did much to bring down a despicable regime. Not for nothing would Nelson Mandela convey his heartfelt thanks to ‘Dolly’.It is amazing no film producer has brought this classic political espionage thriller to the screen. It had everything: a battle to beat seemingly insurmountable odds, race, class, Empire and Third World, spies and bribes. The problem is that the jigsaw lies incomplete. For all the decades of denial, the question still demands answering: was D’Oliveira’s initial non-selection politically motivated? Indeed, could the same be said of his demotion to 12th man for the Lord’s Test against Australia two months earlier?Fundamentally the issue was all about power and white supremacy. Cricket was still a game dominated by the white elite. England, Australia and South Africa, the founders of the original Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909, had enjoyed double voting rights until 1958 and the first two would retain their hegemony until India’s improbable 1983 World Cup triumph paved the way for the game’s biggest constituency to assert itself. When the newly formed republic left the Commonwealth in 1961, it continued, with the support of England and the Australasians, towave away any protests by India, Pakistan and West Indies, none ofwhom had ever played South Africa.The growth of the anti-apartheid movement was in keepingwith the climate of the times: free expression, the rejection ofdeference and privilege, dissent going on anarchy. In Octoberthe American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos would hoisttheir Black Power salutes on the Olympic podium in Mexico City.That fateful meeting at Lord’s was on the evening andthrough the night of August 27. There were at least 10 men in thecommittee room: the four Test selectors – Doug Insole (chairmansince 1965), Alec Bedser, Don Kenyon and Peter May – the tourmanager Les Ames, the captain Colin Cowdrey, Billy Griffith andDonald Carr, respectively MCC secretary and assistant secretary,the club president Arthur Gilligan, and the treasurer and allroundomnipotent Gubby Allen, who objected to D’Oliveira on purely cricketing grounds. Only Kenyon,the former Worcestershire captain, could be considered not a member of the establishment. Only three -Bedser, Carr and Insole – are alive now, all over 80.Some, if not all, were privy to the fact that five months earlier Vorster had informed Lord Cobham,England’s senior Viscount, that there would be no tour should D’Oliveira be chosen (their meeting did notbecome public knowledge until the following year). Cobham, who had been Governor of New Zealand,captain of Worcestershire and, like his father and grandfather, MCC president, had been targetedby Arthur Coy, the South African Cricket Association official assigned to persuade MCC not to pickD’Oliveira and hence ensure the tour went ahead.Cobham had considerable business interests in South Africa. In Coy’s words he would “do almostanything to see that the tour is on”. After meeting Vorster he relayed the information by indirect means,keeping it on a need-to-know basis. Had he simply written to Griffith, the secretary would have beenobliged to pass the news on to the club, whose official position, encouraged by Harold Wilson’s Labourgovernment, was that no interference in selection would be tolerated. The tour would almost certainlyhave been called off then and there.”Far more is known about the cabinet meetings of Harold Wilson, or the activities of the secret servicein Moscow, or the details of the Poseidon nuclear missile programme, than what the England selectorssaid and did that night,” reckoned D’Oliveira’s biographer, the political columnist Peter Oborne, who alsocontends that there was “at least one spy” in the room, “feeding information straight back to the SouthAfrican Cricket Association, whence it was instantly passed on to Vorster”. A private letter sent by Coy toVorster a week after the party was chosen promised the “inside story” of the MCC meetings and statedthat D’Oliveira was still a candidate. But the minutes are reported, curiously, to have disappeared.Reviewing Oborne’s book for The Observer in 2004, the Labourminister Peter Hain noted that the “disappearance” of theminutes from that selection meeting would be “both afrustration and a catalyst to the conspiracy theorists. I’m rarelyinclined to join that number but Oborne is persuasive. He contendsthat Vorster used ‘secret pressure, bribery and blackmail’ to preventD’Oliveira being chosen. Which surprises no one. But he adds thatthe MCC, advised by the former Conservative prime minister, SirAlec Douglas-Home, ‘helped to make Vorster’s life as easy as it could’.”Hain, of course, arriving in the UK as a teenager in 1966 as hisliberal parents fled South Africa, formed the “Stop The 70 Tour”campaign that kept Ali Bacher’s tourists from these shores. “Mostanti-apartheid activists didn’t care about sport,” Hain told TWC. “ByAugust 1968 I was 18 and a rank-and-file activist. I’d already seenD’Oliveira bat for England at Lord’s and The Oval: his story touchedme very closely. So when he was excluded I was outraged. All I wasaware of was John Arlott writing an article in The Guardian for whichthe headline read something like ‘Nobody will believe D’Oliveirawas omitted for cricketing reasons’. Everyone knew there was more toit.” When Arlott told the BBC that he would not commentate on thescheduled 1970 tour the most unpleasant letter of condemnation hereceived came from Peter May.Peter Hain, the active anti-apartheid campaigner•Hulton ArchiveIt is via Arlott that D’Oliveira, denied opportunity in hishomeland because of the colour of his skin, entered in the first place.In 1959 a series of pleading letters to him began a chain of eventsthat resulted in a contract with the Central Lancashire League clubMiddleton for 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre. Friendsclubbed together to pay the airfares for Basil, his wife Naomi andtheir newborn son Damian. When he was signed by Worcestershirein 1964, he gave the club a false birth date, late by three years, tohelp persuade them he was worth a gamble. He found a fast friend inTom Graveney. Two years later he played for England. In another two,the storm was falling about his ears through no fault of his excepthis talent.The political dilemma/scandal was blowing in the wind at Lord’s inJune. Nine days before the second Test there he had made an unbeaten87 as England crumbled to Australia at Old Trafford. No other homebatsman reached 50. The previous year he had made his maiden Testton against India, represented the Rest of the World XI in Barbadosduring celebrations for the island’s independence and been namedone of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year. In fact, he had missed onlyone Test since his debut two years previously. Five changes might havebeen a justified reaction to the Manchester debacle. That D’Oliveira was one of them, relegated to 12th man, made no sense except as apolitical expedient, cushioning later shock.Insole, challenged last year on this, denied it robustly, adding:”There was never at any stage any objective in the selectors’minds other than that of picking the best team to beat Australia.”D’Oliveira, though, had suspected the chop. At the eve-of-Test dinner,he subsequently revealed, “a top cricket official told me the only waythe tour could be saved would be if I announced I was unavailablefor England but would like to play for South Africa. I was staggeredand angrily said, ‘Either you respect me as an England player oryou don’t.’ The next day an eminent cricket writer put the sameproposition to me.” D’Oliveira was too discreet to name names, evenin an autobiography published in 1980, but the official was Griffith,the cricket writer EW Swanton, long-time ally of Cowdrey.On cricketing grounds only hindsight justifies D’Oliveira’sdropping on the morning of the match: his replacement, BarryKnight, took 3 for 16 as Australia were bundled out for 78, their worstAshes total for 30 years; and but for rain, the rubber would, in alllikelihood, have been squared. Wary that England had been fatallycautious in Manchester, Cowdrey had wanted a seamer like Knightfor Lord’s, not a swinger like D’Oliveira. In Manchester, Cowdreywould write, the latter – deployed, unusually, as first change – had”bowled tidily but without the thrust to keep the pressure on”.The backlash was strong. The “cynics”, noted Cowdrey, “refused tobelieve that D’Oliveira’s exit was not some sort of fascist plot”. Perhapsthey felt that to have him playing in front of Coy and Co, who wereat Lord’s, would have sent a provocative message when conciliationwas so plainly the aim of the game? Or was it simply punishment forD’Oliveira’s spurning the advances of Griffith and Swanton?Cowdrey, for all his antipathy towards apartheid, had had little hesitation in accepting the captaincy for South Africa, albeitonly after requesting assurances that there would be no politicalinterference in selection. Yet he would later write: “Whatever wemight think about apartheid, at least it seems to work in theircountry; it is none of our business.” His role and influence shouldnot be underestimated. When Vorster decreed that his tour party, bythen including D’Oliveira, was not welcome, he wanted to hop on aplane to the republic and talk the PM round. “I had been at the heartof things throughout,” he wrote, “and could answer every question.”Two years later, when the projected visit by South Africa met thesame fate, he told the Daily Mail: “I cannot reconcile an isolationpolicy and boycott with the Christian ethic.”Getty ImagesIn his autobiography Cowdrey related a chat with his friendDouglas-Home, lately MCC president, on the final day of the OldTrafford Test, when he took the opportunity to introduce the formerPM to D’Oliveira. Sir Alec had just returned from meeting Vorsterin South Africa. According to Cowdrey, Douglas-Home “believed themoral issue was not Britain’s to enter into. He was certain that to breakoff cricket relations with South Africa would have no effect on herattitude to apartheid, however long we refused to play against them.”In the Caribbean earlier in 1968, D’Oliveira had struggled with onlyone half-century in the five-Test rubber and lacked penetration orcontrol with the ball. He had also displeased many in authority,Cowdrey among them, with his fondness for alcoholic consolation. Butif the selectors fancied they had an excuse for not picking him in theparty for South Africa, it went in the final Ashes Test.In July letters had been sent to 30 tour candidates, asking whetherthey would be available: he did not get one. Back on the countycircuit he had struggled for runs. Aware that he had damaged his cause, he felt guilty as well as miserable. It was his bowling thatjerked attention back to his cricket when, during the fourth Test, hehad match figures of 11 for 68 against Hampshire. Put on stand-byfor The Oval, he duly reported for duty on the eve of the match afterCartwright and then Knight phoned in sick. When Roger Prideauxpulled out with pleurisy, fate’s fiendish plot was complete.D’Oliveira survived a number of early chances, including a glaringmuff by the keeper Barry Jarman on 31 – the most important missin cricket history, as Swanton dubbed it – then went on to make acentury. May said in his autobiography that good fortune should notmask the reality and D’Oliveira must not tour. But Cowdrey confidedhis fears: “They can’t leave Basil out of the team, not now” – even ifthat contradicts his subsequent assertion at the selection meetingthat he did not warrant a place.Enter Geoffrey Howard. As Stephen Chalke relates in his 2001biography of Howard, At the Heart of English Cricket, the Surreysecretary’s office phone rang shortly after D’Oliveira was out.”The caller was on the line from Prime Minister Vorster’s officein Pretoria. A fellow called Teeni Oosthuizen. He was a director ofRothmans, based in South Africa, and had been trying to contactGriffith, the MCC secretary. ‘I can’t get hold of him, so will you takea message to the selectors. Tell them that, if today’s centurion ispicked, the tour will be off.'”Innings of his life: D’Oliveira during his 158 at The Oval in 1968•Getty ImagesOosthuizen had delivered another message from Pretoria earlierthat summer, directly to D’Oliveira, a key chapter that would notbe revealed until September. Oosthuizen had offered D’Oliveira ahandsomely paid coaching job back in the republic if he declaredhimself unavailable and he went on courting him until late Augustbut D’Oliveira had declined. As he told the Sunday Mirror nearly 30years later, he wanted “to prove that I could bat and that people fromthe black and coloured community, whatever you like to call it, knowhow to conduct themselves”.Asked in 2001 to respond to Howard’s recollections, Insole replied:”No way I’m saying Geoffrey didn’t tell me of Pretoria’s telephonewarning. What I do remember is opening a very long meeting bysaying, ‘Gentlemen, forget South Africa. Let’s just choose the bestMCC cricket team to go overseas, Australia, anywhere … ‘”The tour selection meeting took place on the final evening of theTest. Three evenings earlier Cowdrey had found D’Oliveira alone inthe dressing room and taken the opportunity for a quiet word. “Canwe get away with it without getting too involved in politics?” he hadwondered. D’Oliveira, he decided, “had clearly thought it all out …even down to the kind of social functions he would attend”. Thereply was riddled with guilt: “Look, I know I have put you all on the spot … but the whole situation isbeyond me. I’m in the hands ofpeople I trust.” But was he?When the tour partyannouncement reached theWorcester dressing room thenext day, Graveney was disgusted.Seeing the shock and dismay onhis team-mate’s face, he usheredhim into the physio’s room,where D’Oliveira wept. “I was likea zombie,” D’Oliveira wrote inhis autobiography. “The stomachhad been kicked out of me. Iremember thinking, ‘You just can’t beat the white South Africans.'”Kindly as ever, he has never believed that Cowdrey did not backhis selection.”I would say the original decision was made on the basis ofcricketing ability but it all looked so awful,” conceded Carr recently toTWC. “I think I believed, or was talked into believing, that it was all oncricketing grounds. There had been so much chatter about it. I thinkthere were people high up in the cricketing hierarchy in England whowere talking a lot about it and knew what the possibilities could be.”There was another twist to the tale, though. On September 16Cartwright was advised by Bill Tucker, the orthopaedic surgeonin London who had worked on Denis Compton’s knee, that hecould risk his shoulder but any aggravation could mean never bowlingagain. Back at Lord’s, in conflab with Griffith, Carr and Insole, he wastorn every which way. He went with his heart. According to StephenChalke’s biography of him, The Flame Still Burns, he had seen “a littlenews item” in the Daily Express, which reported that, when the squadwas announced, members of South Africa’s ruling National Partystood and cheered in parliament. “When I read that, I went cold,” hesaid. “And I started to wonder whether I wanted to be part of it.”Cartwright “knew immediately I’d done the right thing, eventhough it created a lot of upset”. Not that it stopped Cowdrey havingone last go. The tour skipper’s 4.05pm phone call from Lord’s greetedCartwright as he came through his front door, though the captain’sautobiography forgets to mention it.”Colin said, ‘Will you agree at least to start the tour? When youget out there, if things go wrong, there are people out there who arecoaching, like Don Wilson, who we could bring in.’ Basil certainlywasn’t mentioned. Nobody had suggested to me that, if I droppedout, Basil would be the one who took my place.” The answer was stillno. Ten minutes later, avowed Cowdrey, a decision was made on hisreplacement: Cartwright out, D’Oliveira in.The intention, said Cowdrey, had been to let the SACA have a listof the official reserves, D’Oliveira among them, “but now it was toolate”. Curiouser and curiouser: 19 days had passed since the originalparty announcement. Did the absence of the list stem from fear ofthe response? Had it, indeed, allowed Vorster to hide his hand?By any standards the switch from Cartwright to D’Oliveira was aleap and a half. Substituting a batsman who bowled a bit for a bowlerwho batted a bit (Cartwright’s days as a potent allrounder had longpassed) made little sense – unless one interprets the decision as anattempt to curry public favour and/or correct the error of August28. Back then D’Oliveira’s exclusion had been explained away on theground that he offered little as a bowler.”I think some people [at theoriginal selection meeting] puta lot of onus on Dolly’s poorishtour of the Caribbean, maybeunfairly,” Carr recalled to TWC.”Cartwright was a perfectly goodchoice as a bowler-cum-batsman.Then he pulled out and we hadthe toing and froing with SouthAfrica in the meantime, and wedecided that Dolly was the bestbet, but it all looked so fearful.Dolly wasn’t anything like asgood a bowler as the chap he wasreplacing but a miles better batsman. Once it had been decided topick him I think people accepted the position, though some fearedwhat the result might be. I felt it had not been very well handled.”If Cartwright was an active participant in the affair, Barry Knightwas innocently passive. He told TWC recently he was not surprisedto be called up for the Lord’s Test. “They picked me quite oftenthere. I did well there. I knew the slope, bowled on it for years – for theRAF, Combined Services, Essex, Leicestershire.” He had been surprised,though, at D’Oliveira’s demotion at Lord’s, “especially after that knockat Old Trafford. He was a terrific batter who bowled a bit. He kept ittight with those gentle outswingers but you never worried about himas a bowler. I never thought he was all that dangerous, and certainlynot a first-change” – which is how Cowdrey used him at Old Trafford,almost as if trying to set him up to fail. Knight’s unavailability for thefifth Test was pure mischance. He had rolled an ankle at Leyton.Was the circuit abuzz with D’Oliveira talk all summer? “Not in theearly part but as soon as he got that 158 at The Oval it was,” Knightrecalls. “God, we thought, that might cause problems. How could theyleave him out after that?” Had he been fit, he was confident he wouldhave been picked for South Africa himself. “I think they assumed Iwasn’t. I certainly don’t remember any phone calls inquiring about myhealth.” Yet, like D’Oliveira, he was not among the 30 recipients of thatMCC availability letter in July. “They probably never bothered to sendthem to the likes of me and Dolly because we were pros. They knewwe’d go anywhere. Pros like us never said no.”While still officially a state secret, rumours about Vorster’scommuniqué had reached the dressing rooms. “We’d heard, certainlyby then, that he’d said the team wouldn’t be welcome there if Dollywas included,” Knight recalls. “We thought the MCC didn’t have theguts to pick him. When the party was first announced, I thought,’They’re as weak as gnat’s piss. They’re kow-towing to Vorster.’ Thepros were revulsed. It was always them and us. We thought GubbyAllen was a snob, a bit up himself. And Basil was one of us.”Hence the widespread delight around the circuit as he progressed tothat Oval hundred. “Pleased? Oh God, yes. For Basil and because he wasmaking it difficult for them at Lord’s. You thought, ‘That’s got ’em!'”Of the three alive now who were ‘got’ then, Carr was askedrecently about those supposedly missing minutes. “I probably wrotethem,” he said. “I certainly don’t know about them being missing.”Yet no one outside that Lord’s committee room that night has everseen them. Forty years on the mystery remains.