#BTColumn – Honouring Lamming: Farewell professor

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by Ralph A. Thorne

I will not presume to gild the lily of so brilliant a tribute as has been already written in the editorial of this publication, Barbados TODAY. In honouring Professor George Lamming, I will merely locate his work within the context of cricket that we love so much. Having the honour of introducing him on Andrew Mason’s cricket show many years ago, that engagement purchased me two credits.

First, it revealed to me that the name intended by CLR James for his seminal work was ‘Beyond the Boundary’, and, secondly, it gained me a friendship that I have treasured to the day of Professor Lamming’s passing.

The closeness of Professor Lamming’s friendship with CLR James and the former’s assigned task of delivering the letter to the publishers, caused me to conjecture that Professor Lamming must not have been too distant from the content and the philosophy of that great text. I will come back to the book.

In a subsequent essay, Professor Lamming described himself as a good cricketer, and he must have justified this claim when he played for the famous Empire Club, upon his departure from Combermere School.

It is told reliably that he walked to the wicket in his first game for Empire as an opening batsman, in a team that included Frank Worrell. At that age, young men have no premonition of things and life to come, except only that young George Lamming would have been aware that, in his walk to the wicket, he would also have been walking in Frank Worrell’s footsteps of graduation from Combermere to Empire. There was no Cave Hill Campus of The University of the West Indies in 1946. In those days, the walk of bright young men and women was a nervous and perilous journey, when even merit was joined by social disadvantage.

Young Worrell chose cricket. Young Lamming chose literature. And CLR James and Professor George Lamming teach us that the two disciplines are not that distant after all. Young Lamming’s simple walk to the wicket was, in a more profound sense, a walk in a noble tradition, a walk of historical significance.

In 1953, when ‘In The Castle Of My Skin’ is published, the reference to cricket is interwoven with the other social events that occurred in the island. What we learn is that there was a reverence for George Headley. In ‘Castle’, he writes:

“Every boy who felt his worth as a batsman called himself George Headley. In most cases the only knowledge most people might have had of Jamaica was the fact that George Headley was born there.”

Without too much of an interruption, the narrative in the book returns to the tensions that preceded the riots. That his text flowed so smoothly from cricket to social upheaval, would reveal his philosophical approach to literature. Indeed, he would write in an essay many years later:

“I have never been able to separate the creative imagination from the political culture in which it functions.” In another way, he would often say that there was no separation between the aesthetic and the political, between art and politics. Let us therefore now reflect on the English poet John Keats’ affirmation that “beauty is truth, truth is beauty,” and ultimately towards the Christian Scriptures that tell us that there is no greater liberating force than truth.

But let us come more particularly to cricket, which CLR James, himself described as more than simply a game, when he said: “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.” That is cricket as aesthetic. Here is Lamming’s cricket as the political.

“England made us pupils to its language and its institutions; baptised us in the same religion; schooled boys in the same game of cricket with its elaborate and meticulous etiquette of rivalry. Empire was not a very dirty word, and seemed to bear little relation to these forms of domination we now call imperialist.”

So here was Professor Lamming placing cricket at the centre of England’s colonial agenda, bringing us back to CLR James’ famous dictum: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands.”

And so, relieving the burden of that history would have been, in Professor Lamming’s youthful time, Headley, the Three W’s, Goddard, Rae, Stollmeyer, Ramadin and Valentine, Hall, Griffith, Gilchrist, Hunte and others, and then the king of them all, Garfield Sobers, playing cricket as it had never been played before in England in 1966.

As a personal reflection, I recall having lunch with Professor Lamming one day, when we had a chance encounter with Sir Everton Weekes. I paused to gauge the nature of the inter-personal relationship of these two great West Indians.

They greeted each other with such friendly warmth and I reflected that this was a great meeting of the West Indian embodiment of cricket and literature. These two authors of West Indian de-colonisation had to know each other.
Sir Everton was a member of the team that famously defeated England in 1950, in England, and Professor Lamming would have published ‘In The Castle Of My Skin’ in 1953, in England.

We know Professor Lamming as a writer and in later times, I think he was a greater philosopher even. It is insufficient to say that language was his tool. It was as indispensable as the fingers that held his pen. Of language, he said: “Language is at the heart and horizon of every human consciousness…. a spiritual possession which allows us to reflect on who we are and what we might become. It is not inherited. Every child, in every culture, has to learn it as his or her necessary initiation into society. It is, perhaps, the most sacred of all human creations.”

If cricket has been one of England’s sacred human creations, I want to believe that Sir Vivian Richards’ batting returned it to the world in a way that had never been done and that Professor George Lamming returned English Language to the world in a way that had never been done.

And we discover the truth that in these two Caribbean patriots, there has never been a separation between cricket and politics, between art and politics, and that the truth of the West Indian cause for Independence was a beautiful cause, perhaps, in the sense that John Keats, the poet, intended. What a beautiful game; what a beautiful Independence!

Professor George Lamming would often describe the 1962 break-up of West Indian political federation as an enormous tragedy. Let us therefore, for the sake of all of us who understand the historical and social importance of cricket, pledge that it shall never be erased from our island landscapes and that it will continue to be a thing of beauty that truthfully unites us.

This man of elegant language, this lover of wisdom, this purveyor of uncomfortable truths, this gentleman of the best human graces, this lover of cricket, has departed from us and we mark his departure, as he similarly marked his own departure from Creighton’s Village, in the closing words of ‘In The Castle Of My Skin’:

“He paused and then a cat scampered across the road. It seemed to run from one side to the next, but we couldn’t see anything. We drew nearer the house. And he felt for the steps with the stick.” ‘You must be good to yourself,’ he said. He passed his hand over my head and then bent forward and kissed me on the brow. “Tis the last thing the old man can give,’ he said. ‘A kiss of blessing. Perhaps you’ll remember Pa ’cause you won’t ever see him again.’

I was going to speak.

‘You won’t see me again, my son’ he said, and felt his way up the steps. The door closed gently behind him. I stood for a moment waiting to see whether he might put on the light. The feeling had seized me again. You had seen the last of something.

“Twas a night like this nine years ago when those waters roll.” The village/my mother/a boy among boys/a man who knew his people won’t feel alone/to be a different kind of creature. Words and voices falling like a full shower and the old man returning with the pebble under the grape leaf on the sand: You won’t see me again, my son.

The earth where I walked was a marvel of blackness and I knew in a sense more deep than simple departure I had said farewell, farewell to the land.”

Ralph A. Thorne, Q.C., is Member of Parliament for the Christ Church South constituency and has been actively involved in cultural arts and sports for many years.