As Jason Holder’s West Indies side limps towards the finishing line in the Sydney Test starting today, perhaps they should take inspiration from their pioneering 1930-31 touring side to Australia, who arrived to an uncomfortable reception, lost all of the first four Tests of their trip in an avalanche but then pulled off a monumental upset to win the final Test of the series in Sydney. “One of the biggest bangs ever heard in Australian cricket,” was how one of the local scribes described the 30-run victory against the might of Don Bradman, Bill Ponsford and Bill Woodfull.
Those who wonder whether 24-year-old Holder has been thrown to the wolves in being asked to helm the current rag-tag bunch might also marvel at the hand dealt the first man to lead a Caribbean side to Australia, the white Trinidadian G.C. “Jackie” Grant. Just 23 when he was picked for the task, Grant had moved to England three years earlier and attained his Cambridge “blue” on account of some solid but unspectacular batting in a couple of dozen games for the university. But when he met his squad at Panama for the one-month voyage across the Pacific, he’d never experienced any other first-class cricket, was yet to skipper any major cricket side and hadn’t so much as laid eyes on any of his players before.
If the faces and setting were unfamiliar, Grant at least had a little more talent to work with than Holder now. Still shy of his 21st birthday and 17 years away from becoming his cricket nation’s first black captain, George Headley had been dubbed “Black Bradman” by the press of the day and already boasted three Test centuries leading into the trip, to which he’d add two more down under, while Learie Constantine – widely acknowledged by then as the best and most dynamic fieldsman in the world and by some the fastest bowler too – formed an ageing but formidable pace trio with Herman Griffith and George Francis.
A decent culture shock awaited them down under. Their destination was firmly entrenched in the White Australia policy, so the home board’s secretary Bill Jeanes needed to vouch for the black members of the touring party and assure the Commonwealth government that they’d depart the country at season’s end. Worse, and despite an advance request to the contrary from the West Indies Board of Control, the same Australian administrators who warmly greeted the side at a mayoral reception in Sydney had also arranged separate lodgings for black and white players, for which they received a strong enough formal complaint from their guests that it never happened again.
If the crowds greeted the tourists enthusiastically everywhere they went, there was still the matter of condescending and often blatantly racist Australian press coverage, which makes for uncomfortable reading now. In the lead-up to the series The Australian Cricketer claimed the West Indies squad were “nearly all mercurial, volatile players, and apt to get unduly excited sometimes...In the West Indies the game is lighter-hearted and is played by the temperamental West Indians as it might be expected they would play...” Such assessments were also just clearly untrue, especially in the case of captain Grant’s obdurate batting or the refinement of Constantine’s game that had already occurred in Lancashire league cricket by that point. But even the great all-rounder in his pomp was “genius badly directed” to Australian cricket writing doyen Johnny Moyes.
Worst of all were the newspaper cartoons, a selection of which were recently collected in a fascinating Melbourne Cricket Club Library publication on the tour. “A Black Out” squawked one in the wake of the two-day Melbourne Test debacle, featuring Australian spinner Bert Ironmonger holding fistfuls of the touring cricketers reimagined as game birds. Constantine “amused with his monkey tricks on the field” in another. “One must sympathise with the pressmen in their efforts to identify the fieldsmen, they’re so much alike. This is a black outlook, we’ll have to get them to dress differently.”
Another cartoon with an entirely black panel supposedly depicting the West Indies players returning home to their hotel at 1am after a big night can at least now provide a laugh for its glaring inaccuracy; most among their number were devout Roman Catholics who’d forgo golfing invitations on Sundays in favour of church and their captain, once a school student of C.L.R. James, was a deadly serious lay missionary soon to embark on decades of dedicated service to black South African school students.
Still, the tour was a step forward for cricket and a tick of approval for the West Indies side because previous requests for a series had been denied. They arrived at the recommendation of Charlie Macartney, who’d seen them perform creditably in England two years earlier and thus deemed them a superior challenge to neighbouring New Zealand, though they’d been a far stronger side back in 1926 and now ran headlong into an Australian side reaching its zenith. By then Bradman was an established star, Clarrie Grimmett and Ironmonger a formidable spin duo and Woodfull, Stan McCabe, Ponsford and the majestic but doomed Archie Jackson filled batting slots.
The most eye-catchingly talented of the tourists was Constantine, dynamic fast bowler, smiter of whirlwind hundreds and fieldsman nonpareil; “a sight for the gods” in Moyes’s estimation. Unfortunately most of Constantine’s memorable performances that summer didn’t occur in the Tests, where eight wickets at 50.88 and 72 runs at 7.20 gave no hint to his sublime gifts.  
Yet for all of Grant’s admirable rearguards (the West Indian’s pair of undefeated half-centuries in the opening Test were a first for the game) and Headley’s undoubted genius (“of Bradman’s type but with more polish,” said Melbourne’s Sporting Globe), it was the mercurial all-rounder who made the greatest impression on fans across the tour. In the field Constantine did things Australian crowds had never seen before, shocking spectators in Melbourne by anticipating a weak throw from the boundary and in one blur of motion, intercepting it half-way and whistling the ball over the bails to almost run out Ponsford. “He appears to be a law unto himself in the field, and makes batsmen uncomfortable,” said The Australian Cricketer. “Fielding had begun to look dull until Constantine came along,” claimed another report.
It was the lowered stakes and more convivial atmosphere of tour matches that provided his best stage. In an early tour match against New South Wales in Sydney, Constantine’s whirlwind 59 in the second innings came from in just 35 minutes, four of his blows clearing the fence and as many again hitting it on the bounce. Afterwards Monty Noble claimed to have seen the most “sensational innings” since the war and on account of his feats, word soon spread that the West Indians would be entertainers at the very least and so decent gate receipts would be expected at Test venues around the country.
Against Queensland Constantine would later claim to have fallen to the most remarkable of dismissals: “When I reached 97 I decided to get the three runs by singles,” he said. “I pushed the first ball to cover and called my partner for an easy single. “No”, he screamed, and I had to get back. Whereupon I decided to hit a six. I waited for my ball, timed it to a nicety, and let myself go like a tiger leaping. It was meant to be a stroke past the bowler’s hand and as it seemed to me, bounced sideways like a ricocheting bullet, struck my bat as loudly as a pistol-shot, deflected into the hands of mid-on, trickled out of his palms and was grabbed up by somebody running in behind him before it could drop to the turf. I went indoors a sadly injured man.”
Injured perhaps, but even in failure an entertainer. In a match against a New South Wales Country XI in Newcastle he’d clobber 147 from 69 deliveries. You can only wonder how Constantine, the son of the first West Indian to make a century in England and no sufferer of fools, had greeted the unsmiling enquiries of immigration officials when the team had arrived. In Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R James said of him: “He was born to the purple, and in cricket circles never saw himself as inferior to anyone or dependent for anything on anyone.” Forced by a lack of job opportunities at home to accept his cricket pay-day in England, in retirement from cricket the grandson of a slave had become Baron Constantine, lawyer, politician and Trinidad’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
His captain also found plenty of reason for puzzlement when ignorance reared its head. “It has afforded me a good deal of amused surprise to find how little the average Australian knows about the West Indies,” he’d write in a newspaper column during the tour. Adressing “the colour issue” delicately, Grant concluded, “In our team there is no jarring note.”
But it was in the Tests that Constantine and his team-mates found their greatest trials of the visit. Most of the squad had been reared on matting wickets and felt more comfortable facing medium pacers, so they were simply confounded by the spin of Grimmett and Ironmonger and lost the first four Tests by hefty margins. In the dispiriting two days of the Melbourne rubber the Australian spin duo took 15 wickets between them.
Not everything went the home side’s way and for Bradman it was not the happiest of Australian summers. There was the infamous dispute with the board over his unsanctioned journalistic work during the 1930 Ashes tour but more damagingly, the revelation on the opening day the series started in Geoffrey Tebbutt’s book of that series that Bradman was aloof and not quite the esteemed figure among his team-mates that he was to the world at large.
Perhaps it was these dual pressures that made him mortal; Bradman’s series average of 74.50 was certainly nothing to be sneezed at but ended up by far the worst of his three career series against non-English opponents. Even in the undefeated 223 he made at Brisbane he had been dropped off Constantine at second slip by the tourist’s vice captain Lionel Birkett on just four. “Don gave me one look as much to say that he saw it all, and then settled down grimly,” the bowler would later lament.
Most successful against Bradman was 37-year-old paceman Herman Griffith, a shadow of his former self but having dismissed the great batsman for four in Adelaide and later consigning him to his first duck in Test cricket, soon fond of referring to Bradman as his “rabbit”. Said James of the veteran bowler: “Griffith had had a secondary education, called nobody mister except the captain, and had the reputation of being ready to call anybody anything which seemed to him to apply.”
There were old and new worlds colliding too as the West Indians moved around the country. In the match against Victoria in Melbourne, Constantine met fellow Barbadian Sam Morris, who had arrived on Australian shores 50 years earlier to try and capitalise on the Victorian gold rush but instead found fame as the first West Indian to play in a Test match when he turned out for a depleted Australian side in 1885. Then against Queensland the tourists encountered the tearaway Aboriginal paceman Eddie Gilbert, who allegedly ran up to Constantine after the latter had hit him for six and shook the batsman’s hand. It was the first time anyone had achieved the feat.
But the Sydney Test was where the tourists’ talent and resilience resounded most thrillingly. Sydney was special. So much needed to go right for Grant’s side to pull off the impossible and for once it did, with rain allowing the innovative and risk-taking skipper to declare prematurely twice when the wicket was wet and difficult for Australian batsmen to negotiate.
The home side promptly folded, dismissed for 224 and 220 after centurions Headley and F.R. Martin had pushed the tourists to 350-6 in the first innings and Grant had cannily drawn their second to a close at 124-5. Piloting the side to its first series win against England a few years later, Grant would use much the same tactic with the added flair of reversing his own batting order when the pitch was at its worst. It almost manufactured a miracle win at Bridgetown. He remains an under-explored figure in the ranks of Test captains.
The West Indians’ red letter day afforded them a warm reception in Sydney, and upon reflection Constantine would nominate his catch to dismiss Woodfull for the first breakthrough of the second innings as a turning point in the fledgling cricket nation’s game. “Never before have I ever been frightened at a catch and I hope I never shall be again,” he would recall in 1955. “I went stone cold and my heart began to throb, but I grabbed at my cap, pulled it down over my eyes to shade the sun, and caught sight of the lost wanderer again.” With his catch and that miraculous win, West Indies cricket was suddenly full of hope. What odds an 85th anniversary reprisal?