CLR James talks to Stuart Hall, about cricket, Trotsky, the Black Jacobins…
This is a brief extract from a transcript of a TV programme made by the BBC in 1976 and then shamefully not used. The programme was a lengthy discussion between CLR James and Stuart Hall. There is a link to the whole transcript below (you may need to register-free). CLR James was the author of Beyond a Boundary (1963) which John Arlott thought was the greatest book on cricket ever. The link that James made between politics, history and cricket is far too little known
Is it in that period when you are watching and writing reports that you first come to see cricket as something really important in terms of the whole historical presence of the West Indies?
No. No. I had always seen cricket in a manner beyond the ordinary. Chiefly in the writings of C.B. Fry,
who to this day I know as one of the finest nonintellectual writers of the twentieth century. He analyzed cricket with an insight and a severity and yet with a breadth of view that you don’t find normally. I had been trained on him. I had been brought up on his books. Then I played cricket in Trinidad, where we all played together. I was not an international cricketer, but I used to play with Constantine, and Wild, Cipriani, and the rest used to play with him.
Then I come here and I get mixed up with cricket in the Lancashire League. On a morning, a Saturday morning in Lancashire League cricket in Nelson, there would be 10,000 people present; there were many Lancashire League matches that were far more interesting and important than county matches. So I got into that, and I got into county cricket reporting for The Guardian, reporting test matches.
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