Headley and Bradman
Friday, May 30th, was the 94th anniversary of the birth of George Headley, the first of the great West Indian batsman. Headley died in 1983.
Headley was born in Panama of Jamaican and Barbadian parents, but learned his cricket in Jamaica where he grew up. Some called Headley the Black Bradman. But for West Indians of his generation, he was Atlas. He carried the batting of a weak West Indies teams in the early years of the region’s involvement in Test cricket.
Headley played 22 Tests, batting in 40 innings, scored 2,190 runs at an average of 60.83. Over his longer first class career of 103 matches, Headley scored 9,991 runs at a phenomal average of 69.86.
The Jamaican politician and former legislator, Arnold Bertram, is writing a book on Headley, to be published this year. The following is the second of a two part excerpt from that book. Bertram this week analyses Headley and his great Australian contemporary, Sir Donald Bradman.
BY ARNOLD BERTRAM
IT is not possible for any biography of Headley to exclude a comparison with Bradman since both share a special niche in the pantheon of cricket heroes reserved for batsmen. Let us begin with what they had in common. Both were gifted with extraordinary intelligence that they applied to cricket. Only the uninformed continue to limit their intelligence to cricket. In the case of Headley, I have always been fascinated by CL James’ speculation that if Headley “had gone to study medicine …… he would have become a great surgeon, seeing everything, remembering everything, hands deft and sure without nerves before the most distressing case.” It is this superior intelligence that allowed them to successfully cope with all the challenges they faced at the crease. One recalls Bradman’s seven successive failures against the bodyline bowling of Larwood and Voce in 1932, before he re-organised his technique; and Headley’s nine successive failures against Grimmet in Australia before applying superior intelligence to once again regain control of the situation.
Both batsmen combined technical mastery and extraordinary powers of concentration to a superlative degree, and not only re-wrote the record books in their time, but also extended contemporary conception of human capacity. To this day, mere mention of their names revives fond memories and stirs deep emotions, indicating the extent to which they enriched the lives of theirs and succeeding generations.
Both taught themselves cricket and developed a passion for the game, achieving excellence through relentless application and effort. Each had an insatiable appetite for batting, played to win and never allowed sentiment to get in the way of this objective. Ivan Heron recalls the following episode, while Cecil Marley was at the wicket with George Headley in a match against Lord Tennyson’s 11 in 1932 and in some difficulty against the bowling of Stevens “George told Cecil that if he was facing Stevens in the next over, he should try and make contact with the ball and look for a single. This was done. George, now facing Stevens, hit several of his deliveries straight back to Stevens. On being asked why he did that when it was known that he could place the ball anywhere in the field he wanted, George’s reply was, ‘I want him to stop the ball in the hope that it may impair his spinning fingers'”.
Bradman’s approach was very much the same as his tactics in the third test of the 1937 “Ashes” series readily attest. Batting first, Australia had reached 200 for 9 when rain came. Bradman promptly declared, sending England to bat on the wet wicket. It was not long before England was in difficulty at 76 for 9 whereupon Bradman, faced with the prospect of batting again on the wet wicket, sternly instructed his bowlers “I don’t want you to get anybody else out.” Bradman’s tactics soon became obvious to Allen the English captain, who declared England’s innings closed in order to bowl at Australia again before the end of the day’s play. Rather than risk his regular openers, Bradman instructed his two tail enders, O’Reilly and Fleetwoodsmith to open the innings. Fleetwoodsmith, who was playing his first Test match, protested vehemently. Bradman was unsympathetic pointing out to Fleetwoodsmith, “You can’t get out unless you hit the ball …You can’t hit the ball on a good wicket, so you have no chance of hitting it out there”
It is also interesting to note as well the extent to which these two contemporaries shared a common social background. Bradman was born in 1908 in New South Wales, Australia. His grandparents had migrated from the English town of Suffolk to Australia in the middle of the 19th century to escape poverty and to search for gold. Bradman grew up surrounded by the rural poverty of Bowral a farming district in the southwest of Sydney where:
The streets were basic and without pavements; people either walked, rode on horseback or in a horse-drawn buggy; there was no town water supply, and if there were no rain, there was no water; consequently there was no indoor sanitation ú people had to make do with earth closets.
George Headley was born in Panama a year later, of West Indian parents, who had migrated during the first decade of the 20th century from Barbados and Jamaica to seek employment during the construction of the Panama Canal. Headley grew up surrounded by the urban poverty of Rae Town, a district in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston. A visitor to Rae Town in 1893 observed that:
The sanitary conditions in some of the lanes were about as bad as could be seen anywhere …… The street was in some places nearly six inches deep in stable litter and at one spot where there had been a house, the vacant ground was used as a dumping heap by the people in the neighbourhood.
Neither failed in a test series and the Second World War deprived both of them of what might have been their best years. By the end of their respective test careers, Bradman had scored 6,996 runs in 80 innings for an average of 99.94, compared to Headley’s 2,190 runs from 40 innings averaging 60.83. For those who contend that Bradman was the superior batsman, these statistics are used to settle the argument. However, what the statistics do not reveal is the fact that at the height of Headley’s career in 1935, he did not play a single test match for four years. One can only speculate what the record books might have read, had Headley, like Bradman, played continuous international cricket for the first ten years of his career.
Bradman’s average and aggregate were certainly enhanced by his playing against the weaker teams of South Africa and India. In 10 innings against these teams he made 1,327 test runs including three double centuries and three centuries for an average of 174. Injury limited Headley to only one inning against India, and he never played against South Africa. Throughout his test career he had to face the full might of England and Australia.
While nothing can detract from Bradman’s greatness, his batting was also enhanced by team support, the likes of which was never available to Headley. This was most apparent in the one test series they played against each other, the 1930-31 West Indies tour of Australia. In that series they both batted at number three. The Australian openers invariably provided a solid start to the innings. Ponsford was particularly prolific, scoring 467 runs in the series to top the aggregates ahead of Bradman’s 447. Then there was Kippax, Woodful, McCabe, Jackson and Fairfax to follow. By comparison, the West Indies openers invariably built no such foundation for Headley. In the 20 innings played by the opening batsmen in the five tests, there were only eight scores of more than 20. Worse, seven of the eight batsmen who followed Headley, only managed an average of nine runs for the entire test series. The outstanding exception was Grant, whose aggregate of 255 placed him second to Headley’s 336.
In 1939 Headley’s innings of 139 at Lords out of the West Indies total of 225 led C.B. Fry, the outstanding English batsman and sports writer to remark that Headley’s middle name should be “Atlas”, in recognition of the way he always seemed to be carrying the West Indies in a manner reminiscent of that figure in Greek mythology holding up the world.
The performance of both batsmen on wet wickets is well worth noting. Ray Robinson compares Headley’s scores on wet wickets in 13 innings between 1933 and 1939 to Bradman’s scores in 15 innings under similar conditions for the same period. Bradman’s average was 16.66, Headley’s 39.85! Hence the observation by Neville Cardus, “that Headley has good claims to be considered on all wickets the finest of the inter-war batsmen.”
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between them is the way in which they were nurtured by their respective societies. Bradman’s Australia was an emerging white society, more socially cohesive with an aggressive nationalism. The emerging nationalist movement in Australia, given its umbilical ties with Britain, seemed unable to express itself in revolutionary politics. It would divert its energies to sports, which provided Australia with an avenue for demonstrating to the rest of the world that it was no mere appendage of Britain. Other games would develop, but in the decade following the First World War, there was only one sport of consequence … cricket. It was this game around which national aspirations ebbed and flowed.
It is in a book on Don Bradman by Phillip Lindsay that we find the most vivid description of what Bradman and cricket came to mean for Australian nationalism. Lindsay was writing in 1928 after Australia had been soundly beaten by England in the last two “Ashes” series. Their difficulties were further compounded with two of their best bowlers, Mailey and McDonald, leaving the game. The whole country was further demoralised by the economic depression of that year, which came with the collapse of the world stock market in 1929. Unbelievably, in this context of gloom and hopelessness, Australia yearned more for a new cricket hero than for a political messiah.
“Yet while we talked, there was one name that often cropped up. Unfortunately, it was not the name of a bowler, a bowler being what we craved most, but that of a batsman. Any name, however, was needed to revive our shrinking egos and on that name we settled, about it we talked, we lovers of cricket, and had there been a god of the game to who we could have prayed, that lad’s name would have risen from almost every home in Australia, freighted with a country’s hopes, imploring heaven that he would not let us down but would carry to greatness the promise he had already shown.”
The Australian business community regarded it as a national obligation to make sure that Bradman remained in Australia to play cricket. Consequently, when Learie Constantine invited Bradman to play League Cricket in England, after the 1930-31 series, and news leaked out that negotiations had been finalized for Bradman to play England, a group of businessmen from Sydney put enough money on the table to ensure that Bradman remained in Australia. By his last test series of 1948 “crowds followed him everywhere, causing traffic jams and general pandemonium.” When it was rumoured he would retire and go into politics, both the Labour and Liberal parties are reputed to have found safe seats for him.
The Jamaica in which Headley grew up never had the social cohesion of Australia. For whereas Australia had an emerging white society, with an aggressive nationalism and everything to prove, Jamaica had been mired in three centuries of racism, which polarised the country on every important issue. Consensus had never been reached, much more unity, on anything regarded as vital to the island’s development. Every outstanding Jamaican personality in every sphere of endeavour had to be satisfied with less than national support.
Headley’s achievement is therefore all the more spectacular for the fact that he made his way to the top in Jamaica of the 1920’s which was then, in every sense a colony, where the spirit of nationalism had yet to express itself, and where a business class to finance any social activity on a national scale was yet to develop. In this context, the efforts of that outstanding businessman and philanthropist, Ruel Vaz, to provide material support for Headley, was indeed far-sighted and commendable. As a young African-Jamaican, Headley belonged to a race that had survived the Atlantic slave trade and plantations slavery, only to face the continued domination by a white minority in post-emancipation Jamaica. In such a society, the discrimination George would experience was as inevitable as the racial solidarity of those for whom he became an irreplaceable source of pride.
When Bradman retired, he was accorded a position in Australian society, only reserved to a head of state. This is best illustrated by the ordeal a prospective visitor or journalist has to go through in seeking an appointment. The following excerpt from Charles Williams “Bradman” is lengthy but indispensable:
“The visitor who wished to see him had to go through an elaborate ritual … to establish ‘bona fides’. Once agreed, a meeting would be arranged, to coincide with a Sheffield Shield or test match which Bradman wanted to watch. The visitor would be instructed … in the procedure he was to follow. At a particular time ú given precisely ú he would go to a particular gate where he would find a ticket waiting for him. He would then walk round to the Committee Room, and introduce himself to the Secretary, who would guide him solicitously to a seat and inform him at what precise time ‘Sir Donald’ would arrive and which steps he would walk up”
Headley’s experience in Jamaica was in direct contrast to the reverence with which Australia treated Bradman, particularly in the twilight of his life. It is extremely sad to recount some of Headley’s experiences in the twilight of his career. Despite his impeccable credentials for the job, Headley captained the West Indies in only one token match in 1948, and was never asked to play a role in the development of West Indies cricket. There are those who still contend that had he been asked to manage the team, the West Indies would not have lost the series to Australia in 1951-52. In his own Jamaica where he was employed as a coach, officialdom eventually subordinated him to bureaucratic supervision. As seems to be the norm, recognition first came from outside as in 1956 he was awarded the O.B.E. and later made a life member of the MCC. Finally in 1973, he was the recipient of the Norman Manley award for excellence. Thirty thousand Jamaicans crammed into the National Stadium to see him receive the award in an emotional ceremony and the occasion provided for an outpouring of national sentiment that was simply overwhelming. Jamaica had finally started to accord one of its finest sons the recognition he deserved.
With the emergence of Sobers, Richards and Lara, Headley’s pride of place among West Indian batsmen is now being debated. I am satisfied with the verdict of Jeffery Stollmeyer, a former captain of the West Indies team, who first met Headley as they both prepared for the 1939 tour of England. His assessment of Headley is made after a life long association with the game at both regional and international levels:
“He was the greatest batsman that the West Indies produced. Of this I have no doubt and my association with Test cricket in the West Indies spans a period from 1939 to the present day, during which I have seen and/or played with the three ‘W’s’, Gary Sobers and Rohan Kanhai their prime; also, Viv Richards of the current crop, great players all. Why should I be of this opinion? Simply because George never looked like getting out. He liked to bat; ‘Why him don’t like to bat?’ he used to ejaculate when one of his team played a rash or unbecoming stroke! He reduced errors to a minimum and he played as well on difficult wickets as he did on good ones. His 61 versus Yorkshire on a sticky dog at Harrogate in 1939 was the best innings, technically, that I have ever seen”.
As for his place in our social history, Michael Manley has the last word:
“When George Headley ignited the Caribbean imagination …… at the beginning of 1930, he was much more than a great batsman serving notice on his peers in the game. When he walked to the wicket, brisk, self-assured, and took guard in his quaintly old-fashioned, ‘two-eyed’ stance, he became the focus for the longing of an entire people for proof: proof of their own self-worth, their own capacity…….What better place to advance this proof than in cricket?….springing as it did from the very centre of the empire of which they were still a part”.
Finally, Headley epitomised to a penultimate degree the Protestant ethic of ‘individual responsibility’ and achievement by ‘the sweat of the brow.’ His life provides further validation of the theory that all forward movement is first of all self-movement. External forces can encourage, support, cajole or even threaten. None of this is as decisive as the motivation and activity of the individual.
I wish more Jamaicans knew the extent to which George Headley gave colonial people, in general, and the Jamaican masses, in particular, a new sense of their possibilities in the world; and how he used the medium of cricket to strengthen the national psyche, stiffen the backbone and exalt the heart.