Frank Keating on the great Basil D’Oliveira, who celebrated his 70th birthday this week. Or did he?
The one-time enemy of the state has a few times been welcomed back to the new South Africa as prophet and treasure. “Oh sure, they’ve even given me full red-carpet treatment in the Orange Free State,” says Basil D’Oliveira with a laugh. But even when lunching with Nelson Mandela, the exile had to admit his heart remained in beloved Worcester (the English version).
At the slightest excuse the old warhorse throws back his head and whinnies with great gusts of laughter at the good fortune of it all. But luck does not come into it; ambition and courage, talent and generosity are more like it. D’Oliveira was 70 on Thursday officially, that is. If you believe any Wisden of the 1960s or 1970s, he is 67. If you believe his friend and mentor Tom Graveney, then Basil is 75 at least. So is it not time he came clean? Cue more chortling mirth: “Let’s settle for 70 this year but one day I promise I’ll tell you and you can have a little scoop.”
The unquestioned truth is that, if he had admitted his real age more than 40 years ago, he would never have gone to England, would never have played brazenly bold cricket for England and one of the 20th century’s most remarkably heartening and limpidly romantic sporting stories would never have been told.
The hair is swan-white now, spectacles on nose and bonny grandchildren all around him. The piercing eyes still glisten as bright as the presence and the humours. His two hip replacements of a decade ago are playing up and he is booked in for a hospital scan. His steadfast rock of ages Naomi, who so encouraged him to leave Cape Town and embark on his ludicrously daft adventure all those years ago, had serious surgery last year but is on the mend and full of the joys again.
They still live in the same house the Worcestershire chairman, Sir George Dowty, sold him for 2500 as an incentive to come south to the Severn from the Lancashire league in 1964 and there is still a “Dolly” of course down there by the riverside, for son Damian (after 13000 runs for the county) has followed his father as coach and assistant to the dynamic Australian Tom Moody. “In two years Tom and Damian will have Worcester at the top again, you’ll see, and that’s where England will be as well if they continue to pick the youngsters and then stick with them.”
That Worcester grass remains greener and flatter by far than the dusty pot-holed scrubland on which Basil, the Cape coloured printing apprentice, had to play his youthful cricket when apartheid’s segregation was at its most shamingly malevolent and only white men could play in a first-class game. But among his own, the “second-class”, non-white players, he was prodigious on those broken, stony wickets of Signal Hill across from Table Mountain.
More than 50 centuries (once, 225 in 70 minutes, another time 46 off an eight-ball over) and wickets each season by the hundred, inspired him to write to England and the BBC commentator John Arlott, whose compassionate voice he had warmed to through the wireless crackle and static. I have seen the letter, handwritten in printers’ green ink: “14 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town. Dear Mr Arlott, I daresay this is only a minor detail compared, I presume, to your other escapades, but I am sure that you would try your best and use your powerful assistance to help me…”
It went on to explain his outrageous mission. And, as the world and his wife are now famously aware but so inspiring is the heroic tale that any excuse is worth its retelling wise, generous Arlott badgered John Kay of the Manchester Evening News, and together they found the distant pen friend a position as pro for the summer at Middleton in the Lancashire league, at 450 for the six months and an extra guinea for every 50 or five-for.
Basil arrived, bewildered, on April Fool’s Day 1960. The northern pitches were totally alien to him but he still ended that summer ahead of Garfield Sobers at the top of the league averages, gloriously took it from there, and by 1964 (with him still fibbing about his age) some Lancashire committeemen were keen for him to join the county until the Old Trafford eminence Cyril Washbrook disabused them: “The fellow’s nothing but an uncouth Sunday slogger.”
But at the end of that summer Arthur Gilligan chose him for his XI against the Australian touring team and he joyously clocked McKenzie, Connolly and Veivers all over Hastings for four sixes and 18 fours in 119. Thus did Graveney come to organise his arrival at Worcester. “Amazingly Baz still couldn’t believe he was good enough.”
In his first brace of championship innings against Essex, though, he hit Bailey, Knight and Hobbs for 106 and 163 and within the 12 months he was ringing Naomi to tell her he had been picked for England. They both broke down in tears. He wore his glistening new England cap in bed, sweet-dreaming, the night before playing against West Indies at Lord’s, the first of his 44 Tests. Oh, for an England number six or seven now who could average 40,06 in Tests, hit five 100s and take 47 wickets and 30 catches.
It was the second of those five centuries which engraved his name into history’s permanence. Basil’s epic, enriching, 158 in the final Ashes Test against the 1968 Australians at the Oval was scored on the eve of England’s winter tour to, of all benighted places, South Africa. “The D’Oliveira Affair” was born.
Before he strode out to bat, he rang Naomi: “Pull up a chair, love, put on the telly and enjoy it; I’m going to be at the crease all day.” When he ran the single to complete his 50, the bowler’s end umpire Charlie Elliott muttered to Basil: “Well done but by golly, lad, you’re really scaring those buggers at Lord’s.”
When he completed his century and Kennington rose to cheer, Elliott added: “Brilliant, m’boy, but, oh dear, you’ve set the cat among the ruddy pigeons now.”
And so he had. Appallingly D’Oliveira’s name was missing next day when they named the touring team. The Cape crusader would not be returning to play on the white man’s fields of his birthplace.
There was uproar as MCC members resigned, MPs clamoured for a debate. Then, when Tom Cartwright judiciously withdrew injured and Basil had to be selected, apartheid’s fhrer John Vorster said “we will not accept a team chosen not by MCC but by our political enemies”. To all intents South Africa were pronounced sporting pariahs for the next two decades.
Triumphant through it all was D’Oliveira’s dignity. That winter the Queen awarded him the OBE and to celebrate he scored a resplendent, undefeated, 114 out of 274 to save the Dacca Test against Pakistan on England’s replacement tour. (In fact, few in the history of cricket can ever have celebrated more rejoicingly, or carousingly, than Dolly).
His own best remembered innings was neither of those “my first county season, me 55 not out, Tom 59 not out, to win on a wicked Cheltenham turner against Allen and Mortimore … good ol’ Tom, much as I tried to emulate him he’d always make more than me.”
Hey, steady with the “old”, Graveney swears you’re at least five years senior to him … and up rumbles again that great belly-laugh of, as it always was, the utmost good cheer and fellowship.
Happy birthday, sure, but exactly which one?