“The gentleman stood up at the wicket as tall and straight as a poplar, and his fours were like the sabre cuts of a defiant soldier.”
The year was 1904 and the man described in the Athletic News was Charles Ollivierre – the first black West Indian to play county cricket.
He was like nothing the first-class game in England had seen.
Ollivierre had made his County Championship debut for Derbyshire in 1902 and, two years later, a report carried in the Derby Daily Telegraph could only compare the seemingly outrageous entertainment he conjured with the bat – and recklessness in doing so – to one of the great playwrights of the time.
“Ollivierre is the Bernard Shaw of the cricket world,” the piece stated.
“The plain, common tack is beneath him, and when he cannot work his miracles he becomes indifferent.”
While works of Pygmalion author Shaw have endured, the achievements and influence of Ollivierre have largely been consigned to history.
This was a self-taught batter from a cricketing family who swapped the Caribbean island of St Vincent, where he was said to have learned to bat with “a branch of a coconut tree” and “a small bread fruit for a ball”, for the mountain ranges of Glossop in England’s north west. And it was there that he became a sporting pioneer.
At the age of 24, he left the then British colony in 1900 as part of the first West Indies side to tour England, having become a father just two years earlier.
And he was never to return, being offered a job as a clerk in a Peak District mill and an opportunity to qualify to play for Derbyshire – an undertaking that demanded two years’ full-time residency.
Some of his descendants have only realised their links to Ollivierre in recent years, and say they are “immensely proud to have come from the lineage of a man who broke down significant barriers”.
“He must have been a courageous man to actually get on that boat and go to a place that was cold,” his great, great grandson Marlon Bute, a business owner who lives in Canada, told BBC Sport.
“And it’s in different ways that it would have been cold, not just where the weather is concerned. He was a young black man venturing to the motherland, so to speak, and that should indicate how much he really loved cricket and how much he was determined to follow his passion.
“We understand what it is to want better, we understand the limitations of the circumstances that we were born into.
“We do not see him as a father who abandoned anyone, I prefer to see him as someone who stepped out of the conditions that he was born in.”
During a tour game for the West Indies against Lancashire in 1900, Ollivierre was lauded in the Manchester Courier for having “an extraordinary adaptability for the game”.
He was seen as a man who “bats in a most attractive and really scientific manner”, with a lack of professional coaching meaning he “learned the most of his strokes from cricket booklore and diagrams”.
In other media reports he was singled out as one of the best players for the tourists and, after top scoring with 159 in their win against Leicestershire, it was said his batting “would justify his inclusion in any first-class county”.
Derbyshire were the ones to move for Ollivierre – who had previously played first-class cricket for Trinidad – and he was set up with a job that paid “£150 a year for the two years he is qualifying”, before increasing to £200 after that.
It was a sizeable income at the time, with the average man in the UK earning less than £43 per year, according to the national archives.
Derbyshire captain Samuel Hill-Wood – who would famously go on to become chairman of London football club Arsenal – was instrumental, giving Ollivierre a job at his cotton mill.
He settled and worked in Glossop, and was the headline recruit for the town’s cricket side.
His appearance for a Central Lancashire League game against Middleton in 1901 was said to have drawn “a good assembly”, with “curiosity being evident to see Ollivierre”.
It was in Glossop last year that a blue plaque was unveiled at the club’s ground to commemorate the batter’s influence on English cricket at a time when it was almost exclusively played by white men.
“He was tremendously influential because he got people used to the idea of black people playing cricket,” said Tony Wright, chair of the Glossop Heritage Trust.
A brush with Buffalo Bill
The colour of Ollivierre’s skin and his background was regularly mentioned in match reports.
He was also compared a number of times to Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji – better known simply as Ranji – an Indian prince who played for Sussex and commanded celebrity status for his performances with the bat.
How a black West Indian player was received in rural Derbyshire more than 120 years ago is not clear, but Wright tells a story of Ollivierre and his brush with the famous Buffalo Bill – also known as William Cody – when he brought his Wild West show to Glossop.
“Ollivierre had a team-mate called Alfred Charlesworth who was landlord of the Norfolk Arms, and he used to drink there,” Wright said.
“Buffalo Bill went in for a drink and expressed concern about having to drink in the pub with a black man, so Charlesworth ordered Buffalo Bill out. It’s quite a well known local tale in Glossop.
“It epitomises how Ollivierre was respected locally.”
After two years of club cricket, his long-awaited first-class debut for Derbyshire in 1902 saw the Hull Daily Mail predict that Ollivierre would be “one of the sensations of the season”.
“He is a player of brilliance and dash, and alone he should help mend ‘the fallen fortunes of the state’,” the piece concluded.
He would go on to play a total of 110 matches for Derbyshire and score 4,670 runs, including three centuries and 24 half-centuries, in seven seasons. Ollivierre was also said to be an “excellent fielder” and took 109 catches for the county.
It was one historic performance in 1904, scoring a career-high 229 against Essex at Chesterfield, that guaranteed his place in club and county cricket folklore.
Percy Perrin, who would go on to be named Wisden Cricketer of the Year 12 months later, scored 343 as the visitors amassed a first-innings total of 597.
Ollivierre led the reply with a double century and, after Essex were skittled for 97 in their second innings, the West Indian saw the hosts home to an unlikely nine-wicket victory with 92 not out.
His 321 runs in a single game would stand as the most by any Derbyshire cricketer for 106 years, with Chris Rogers only breaking the record in 2010.
For decades, Ollivierre’s performance and Derbyshire’s win continued to be recalled as “extraordinary” and “never-to-be-forgotten”.
It was as a teenager that Derbyshire’s heritage officer David Griffin first came by Ollivierre, as he flicked through the club’s year book and statistical almanac.
“We always knew of Ollivierre as a record breaker, if nothing else,” Griffin said.
“Although he was a trailblazer in his own right, going back over 120 years, the trail stops because it wasn’t until much later that black cricketers were seen more often.
“He was very much a one-off and unique at the time.”
The ‘gateway’ to West Indian greats
It took almost half a century before a black West Indian scored a century in county cricket after Ollivierre, with Derief Taylor doing so for Warwickshire in 1949 – the year that Ollivierre died.
The next black West Indian to play for Derbyshire was Lawrence Rowe in 1974.
An eye injury is said to have eventually ended Ollivierre’s career with Derbyshire in 1907, although a letter to the editor in the Sheffield Independent in 1909 said that “some have taken exception to his colour” when arguing that “the committee for some stupid reason will not play one of the finest bats in the country”.
After his first-class career, he continued playing club cricket, first with Darley Dale then sides in Yorkshire. He even appeared for Pontefract at the age of 48 in 1924, by which time he was coaching schoolboys’ cricket in the Netherlands.
He died in Pontefract, aged 72, having apparently never grown his family further when in England, and was buried at Fylingdales on the Yorkshire coast.
Short obituaries ran in local newspapers and in Wisden, marking the passing of Derbyshire’s West Indian batter whose name and historical importance would fade from public consciousness over time.
Garrey Dennie, an associate professor of history at St Mary’s College of Maryland and former speech writer for Nelson Mandela, is another of Ollivierre’s great, great grandchildren and sees interest in him as “a resurrection”.
“When we speak of the Caribbean cricket history we look at the great Viv Richards, the Garry Sobers, the Clive Lloyds and all these wonderful players who we see as heroes,” Dennie said.
“In fact there is a beginning point, there is a gateway. That gateway starts with Charles Ollivierre.”
Source – BBC Sport
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