A Word of Refutation from the Archives:
Vol. 19, No. 73, Pages 29–31 (June 1990)
When Herman Griffith died in 1979 a news report of the death and burial informed a generation mostly ignorant of the contribution of the man or its significance in the social history of the country that claimed him as its own. But the information was grossly in error in one important particular: Herman Clarence Griffith, born in Trinidad, was said to have been a member of the Spartan Club. Those who knew Herman and had any idea of the genesis of cricket clubs in Barbados or of implications of membership of one or the other were aware of the monstrosity of that error and would be sure that the old fast bowler and tyrant captain of Empire Club turned in his grave. The author of that story had got the whole thing wrong, upside down and wrong. To correct the mistake it is necessary to begin at the beginning.
The story of the Empire Club, the Blues, must begin with the story of its linchpin, Herman Griffith, at Combermere under the legendary G.B.R. Burton, at Constitution Road. Herman was, confessedly, no great scholar, he had got to Combermere after private lessons from the headmaster at Dalkeith primary school who had taken a fancy to him. His attachment to Combermere was instant and deep. What made it so was the headmaster’s idea, almost revolutionary in those days, that no boy’s talent or interest was inferior. Classroom brilliance was not the only requirement for the good Combermerian: if you were a good scout or good at games, then you were making a good contribution. That message was like a blessing to the young Herman and 70 years after he was still singing the praises of old Burton.
Frank Collymore was an exact contemporary of Herman. I once asked him what games the latter excelled at as a schoolboy. “Everything,” Colly said. “He was a born athlete.” And Colly recalled a school sports meeting at which Griffith won every event except the shot put.
When the young athlete left Combermere he was lucky to land a job, a very minor one, as a junior clerk at the General Hospital on Jemmotts Lane, where he came under the supervision of Julian Cumberbatch, the father of Graham, Wenty, Chester and Hugh, all of them dyed-in-the-wool Spartan men, all of whom had played for the Harrison College first eleven.
After he left school, life for Griffith loomed very dull indeed, for there was no cricket club for him to join, no outlet for his undoubted talent as a fast bowler. He had already caught the eye of Lionel Gittens, a Spartan man, who used to put together scratch teams and organise match “friendlies” which were often played on Saturday afternoons and bank holidays at the Garrison. So impressed was he by Herman Griffith’s cricket, especially his bowling—he bowled fast by instinct—that Gittens determined to put the youngster’s name up for Spartan membership so as to ensure his advance into the senior ranks of the game. He must have been as shocked as Griffith himself that the young promising cricketer was blackbailed.
It was this rejection that led directly to the founding of Empire and to the bitterness of the rivalry between the two clubs. Nowadays when the social distance between these clubs is virtually indistinguishable, it astonishes the younger people to learn that it was not always so and that the Spartan-Empire enmity was of Jewish-Samaritan proportions.
If Herman Griffith had been accepted by Spartan in 1914, then Chrissie Brathwaite and Lionel Gittens and B.I. Gilkes and G.C.A.B. Williams would have had no cause to leave their club in Belleville and set up a rival one. What indeed, as CLR James asks, do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
How different Barbados cricket and, indeed, Barbados social history might have been if Barbados class prejudice had not shown its face at the time. The legend of Empire-Spartan contests would not have come into being, nor would the development of Empire into a breeding ground for Barbados fast bowling as well as an almost natural nursery for the Combermere players: Martindale, Foffie Williams, Pampie Spooner, “Barabbas’’ C.T. Lewis. The equation went Combermere was to Empire as Harrison College was to Spartan, and everyone knew it and understood all its implications and refinements.
The acquisition of the Bank Hall ground is another chapter of the story. Bank Hall was in 1914 a sugar plantation and it struck Chrissie Brathwaite, blunt, aggressive Chrissie, that the owner of the place, a Mr. Wright (so far as I remember from Herman’s story), should be confronted with the simple demand, no less, that he provide an area of land for a cricket ground. To the question, “What money do you have?” Chrissie had no hesitation in replying that he had none, but that he expected Mr. Wright to do the right thing. And so it was that the foundation members of the new club had a ground which they could set about to prepare themselves.
But even after there was a ground to play on, the cricket establishment of the day found it impossible to accept Empire as a participant in the first eleven programme. Year after year the application would be turned down, first on the grounds that the players were not up to the required standard and then for the reason that the ground was not adequate for accommodation of the standard boundaries. It is still not adequate, 75 years after. The story of that battle to be allowed entry into the senior competition is instructive and amusing.
There were four clubs in the programme: Spartan, Wanderers, Pickwick, Harrison College. Spartan, Pickwick and Harrison College could be depended on to vote against admission of Empire and so it went on for some years. Until Mr. Somers-Cocks became the Harrison College Representative. Spartan and Pickwick voted as usual, Wanderers and Harrison College assented and Mr. Somers-Cocks, as chairman, exercised his casting vote in favour of Empire. And so the blood matches started: by the 30s Martindale and Griffith and Spooner and Williams were tearing away on a Bank Hall wicket shining like glass against Lawson Bartlett and Chester Cumberbatch.
But things have changed and now it is possible to be a member of both clubs, a practice which was unthinkable in the early days. This, I suppose, is all to the good—the old enmity and prejudice seem more than a trifle silly at this distance, and yet it ought not be forgotten that it once existed. Only by remembering or by appreciating that things were not always as they are is a true understanding of our society possible.