BASIL D'OLIVEIRA

He Dared To Dream

V. Ramnarayan

 THE TALL, DARK, MUSCULAR YOUNG MAN who was whacking a cricket ball to all parts of the ground, was exceptionally talented. So were some of his regular playmates. But he was different from the others in one respect. He dreamed of playing in far-off lands, of becoming an international sportsman of the highest calibre. This dream stayed with him for years and years until one day ...

 That would be going ahead of our story. Basil D'Oliveira, our hero, was a Cape Coloured: the other three major racial groups in South Africa during the old days of apartheid were white, African and Indian. Only the whites were allowed to play on the beautifully manicured cricket grounds in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Young Basil and his friends had to walk ten miles from their homes in Signal Hill, Cape Town where they lived in segregated coloured communities, to a vast open ground where they played their matches. Some 25 teams shared the rocky, boulder filled grounds, and it was possible while you were preparing to hold a brilliant catch to be knocked down by a ball from a match being played behind you.

 Unlike their white counterparts who played on immaculate turf pitches, Basil and his friends played on matting wickets. On the morning of a match, they walked the ten miles to their ground, rolled and watered the wicket, and nailed the matting on the mud wicket after it rolled out into a hard cake 22 yards long. They then placed boulders on the matting to keep it down while they went to change into their cricket clothes.

 The boys received no coaching. They practised on the streets near home, sometimes getting jailed for that as it was against the law to play on the road. Such small inconveniences rarely deterred them from pursuing their passion for cricket - and football. D'Oliveira learnt to play fast bowling by successfully fending off tennis balls --delivered from ridiculously close quarters - which constantly whistled past his ears. This prepared him for the vicious bounce of the matting surfaces on which some of their matches were played.

Whenever he could, Basil went to Newlands, the Test stadium in Cape Town, to watch Test matches played by white South Africans against visiting white teams. He would clean his father's pigeon loft to earn the shilling he needed for a Test match ticket, sit in a segregated enclosure and watch "gods like Peter May, Denis Compton, Colin Cowdrey, Neil Adcock and Hugh Tayfield". Though he was never bitter about being debarred from playing at Newlands because of the colour of his skin, he always supported the visiting team ‑‑ "after all, they weren't denying me the chance to play in
such a magnificent stadium" .

 By the time Basil stepped into his twenties, he was quite a force to reckon with in non-European cricket in South Africa. By 1960, he had played all the levels of cricket open to a Cape Coloured. And that included home and away games against Kenya. He once scored 225 in 70 minutes! On another occasion he scored 46 runs in an eight-ball over! As if to prove that he could bowl a bit too, he once took nine wickets for two runs with his off breaks!

 By now, D'Oliveira was quite obsessed with playing cricket in England and making a name for himself there. In 1958, he began a correspondence with John Arlott, the famous BBC radio commentator. "English cricket and John Arlott had always been synonymous to me. I ... hung on every word of Mr Arlott whenever I heard his radio commentaries in Cape Town. His voice and the words he spoke convinced me that he was a nice and compassionate man, so I started writing to him, asking him if there was any chance at all of playing cricket for a living in England," D'Oliveira said.

 Arlott had no illusions about the young South African's chances of being accepted as a professional cricketer in England on the strength of his deeds in non-European cricket in South Africa, but he replied to him regularly. Eventually, impressed by his correspondent's cricket statistics, and the modesty, politeness and persistence of his letters, he circulated the astonishing figures among club secretaries only to be met with indifference. "Those runs were scored on very good wickets against unknown opposition," they would say, but the wickets he took were, according to them, obtained on surfaces that favoured bowlers!

 By January 1960, D'Oliveira had all but shot his bolt. He married his childhood sweetheart Naomi after putting off marriage for so long because cricket would leave him little time for his family. He was already thirty though his age remained a mystery for years - birth certificates were unheard of in his circles.

 Hardly a month later, Arlott wrote to him again, this time to inform him that he had secured him a contract to play as a professional for a club called Middleton in the Central Lancashire league. John Kay, a Manchester journalist, had persuaded the club on the strength of Arlott's ecommendation, to hire D'Oliveira to take the place of the fearsome West Indies fast bowler Roy Gilchrist who was returning home.

 The contract was for just one year and the money offered was only £ 450 out of which he would have to pay £ 200 for his fare. How could D'Oliveria live on the remaining      £ 250 for a whole season? That too with Naomi now pregnant?

 "Bas, you'll never forgive yourself if you give up now," Naomi said.

 "Don't worry, Bas, we'll get you there," assured Damoo 'Benny' Bansda, an Indian friend, "and don't worry about Naomi, my family will take care of her." He, D'Oliveria's brother-in-law Frank Brache and another friend, Ishmeal Adams, formed a committee to raise funds. White cricketers like Peter Van der Merwe, a future South Africa captain, and Gerald Innes played in fund-raising matches along with coloured cricketers unmindful of the law. Innes joined Benny and Co. in walking round the ground at these matches with buckets in which they collected coins and notes. They raised £ 450 in just over a month.

 Tom Reddick, a former Nottinghamshire player who had coached in Lancashire, gave D'Oliveira advice on how to cope with the poor light, soft turf wickets and wet conditions that he would encounter in the league. He didn't have the heart to tell him that he hardly stood a chance of making the transition to the new, vastly different conditions.

 On the flight to London, D'Oliveira could not sleep. It was only the second flight of his life and it was a marathon journey. John Kay was there to receive him at London airport on a cold, damp April morning. "When we landed, I stumbled down the steps, trying to adjust to the kind of gloom and dampness I'd never experienced and wondering why there were so many photographers clicking away at the passengers," D'Oliveira recalls. They were there to photograph Middleton's strange new import from the "dark continent". Soon he was whisked away to a television interview which he barely survived with his elementary knowledge of English and his surprise at being treated as an equal by whites.

 Soon, with the help of Kay and Arlott ("You look just like a Pakistani, Basil"), D'Oliveira settled down at Middleton. There he was greeted like a long, lost brother by his club officials. And they were all white! He was warmly welcomed by his landlord Clarence Lord and his wife Mary. English conditions nearly undid D'Oliveira. In his first five matches, he totalled 25 runs! He practised and practised but to no avail. Senior professional Eric Price shared a few precious secrets with him. "Wait and relax," he said, "the weather will get better and the wickets harder. Till then, you've got to wait for the ball to come to you and work it away off the backfoot."

 Soon D'Oliveira overcame his initial depression and began to adjust to his new surroundings. The runs started flowing and at the end of the season, he finished at the top of the averages, even ahead of the West Indian great, Garfield Sobers.

 Basil D'Oliveira, the Cape Coloured from Signal Hill, Cape Town, went on to become a British citizen and an England Test player in 1966, barely two years after being signed by Worcestershire to represent it in the county championship, thanks to the efforts of the county captain Tom Graveney, one of England's great batsmen. It was a proud moment for D'Oliveira to walk out as a member of the England team along with Graveney, Cowdrey the England captain, Ken Barrington, and other players whom he had once admired from afar. He went on to play 44 Test matches with considerable distinction during the next six years.

 Ironically, England's tour of South Africa in the summer of 1968 was called off, as D'Oliveira was not allowed to play by the host country because he was coloured and England refused to drop him from the team.

 Based on D'Oliveira's autobiography, Time to Declare