A Guyanese cricketing icon…Basil Fitzherbert Butcher is a ‘Special Person’

Jan 13, 2013 News

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“I played my first test match in Bombay; five against India and three against Pakistan, and in the first six test matches I made 50 and above, including two centuries. This feat was never repeated by a Guyanese.”

By Michael Jordan
The old-timers still speak of the century he made against the Aussies while batting with an injured hand. And they still remember the day he got a letter from his wife with sad news from home—then went on to pull the West Indies from the jaws of defeat.
Back then, we had no television sets to let us view the exploits of our heroes. But somehow, with ears glued to radio sets, we got an insight into their personalities.

Sobers and Kanhai were the stroke-players extraordinaire. Lance Gibbs was the wily bowling wizard. And we knew that Basil Fitzherbert Butcher was the mentally tough one, the immovable rock of the West Indies team; the man who we felt would possibly collapse on the field rather than see his side lose.
He was born on September 3, 1933 at Port Mourant, Berbice, to Mr. Ethelbert Fitzherbert Butcher, a Barbadian who migrated to British Guiana, and his Guyanese wife, Mrs. Mathilda Elizabeth Lowe.
His father worked at the Port Mourant Sugar Estate while his mother ran a bakery.
Young Basil attended St Joseph Anglican and Corentyne High School. Back then, there was no television, no video games and certainly no internet to distract a boy. But there was cricket. Lots of it, and the young man from Berbice was fortunate that the back fence of his home was right next to the Port Mourant Community Centre.
“We had nothing else to do. My back fence eventually became the fence for the community centre ground. All I had to do was jump that back fence and I was in the community centre ground at the sugar estate.  We played volleyball, football, a lot of table tennis, draughts…but cricket was the main thing. Everybody played cricket. We played every day. There were 24 cricket teams on the estate.
“We made balls out of wood, we played with coconut and monkey apple bats, we played with soft and hard balls.”
Basil believes that this unorthodox kind of cricket, without helmets and other protective gear developed good traits in cricketers of that era. If you failed to concentrate, that wooden ball would crash into your leg, and you would go home with badly bruised shins.
But in that colour and class conscious colonial era, not one of those ‘country boys’ dared to even dream of playing cricket for British Guiana or the West Indies.
“Where I was born and where I grew up, that could not be achieved,” the former right-handed batsman said. “We were not right for that kind of dream. We never thought of cricket at any other level than at the Port Mourant cricket ground. When John Trim (a fast bowler who had played for Port Mourant) was selected to play for Guyana, we felt very excited that a man from Port Mourant had represented British Guiana, but we never thought of emulating him.”
By the age of 18 he was on the Port Mourant Estate cricket team. It was around then that former test cricketer Robert Christiani was appointed Personnel Manager at the estate.
“He actually opened our eyes…the first time we went into the junior staff club was with Christiani. Those were things outside of our world.”
By another stroke of good fortune, in the mid 1950s, Barbados and West Indies batting star Clyde Walcott was sent to British Guiana to coach and organize cricket on sugar estates.
“One of the first things that Walcott did was to improve the facilities. He gave us groundsmen and gave us all the equipment that we needed. He also organized competitions between sugar estates.
Butcher, who was by then captain of the Port Mourant  Club, and other ‘Port Mourant boys’ like Rohan Kanhai and Joe Solomon, benefited immensely from Walcott’s stint in British Guiana. So much, in fact, that the ‘country boys’ could finally dream about representing their homeland.
“We started getting called for trials in Georgetown and playing trial matches for Guyana. Clyde Walcott used to carry up a Georgetown team to Berbice and we started playing against national cricketers like Lance Gibbs, ‘Bruiser’ Thomas, Colin Wiltshire and Norman Whyte, the Guyanese players and potential Guyanese players. They were coming up to Berbice every weekend. Ninety-five of the players were from sugar estates. There was also the inter-county cricket, with Berbice and Demerara being the main rivals.”
“When you started playing against these guys, you stated to assess yourself to see how much you had to do to catch up with them. After the first year, around 1954, myself and Kanhai got picked in the Guyana team and that opened the gate for the other Berbice players.

“People started playing cricket with an objective to play for Guyana. But we still didn’t think of playing for the West Indies. People like Clyde Walcott and Christiani were playing for the West Indies; we were nowhere near there. Those guys were the big men.”
Basil first donned pads for British Guiana in 1954, playing two games against Barbados in his father’s former homeland. The following year, Butcher and Kanhai were in the British Guiana team that played against Australia when the men from ‘Down Under’ toured the West Indies.  In 1956 he played in the Quadrangular tournament (involving British Guiana, Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica). Some of those teams comprised cricketers who would become legends.
“Garry Sobers was playing his second game for Barbados; he was 16 or 17 then; Conrad Hunte was playing, and those were the guys that came for the Quadrangular tournament and we gave them a hiding. That told us that once you can do that to Barbados, the other teams would be ‘mashed up’ easily. We played against Australia and I got 48. Then we went to Antigua and I made 96 against Roy Gilchrist (a fearsome West Indies fast bowler) in Jamaica. Then in 1956, we won the quadrangular tournament.
And now he could truly dream of playing for the West Indies. The team was touring England that year, and young Basil had high hopes of being selected. But to his disappointment, that was not to be.
“They didn’t change the team. All the old fellows went. Kanhai, Sobers and Smith were the only youngsters that went on the tour.”

SELECTED
His break eventually came when the West Indies returned from England and the Pakistan cricketers came to the West Indies. “Myself and Joe Solomon made hundreds against the Pakistani team in the Guyana versus Pakistan match, and we were picked to go to India in 1958-59.”
In his first Test against India at Bombay (Mumbai), the reliable right-hander, batting at number six, made 28 and 64 not out. In the four-test series he complied 486 runs, including his maiden century (103), batting at number five, in the third test at Calcutta, and 142 ,three weeks later, in the fourth test at Madras (Chennai).
“I played my first test match in Bombay; five against India and three against Pakistan, and in the first six test matches I made 50 and above, including two centuries. This feat was never repeated by a Guyanese.”
“There were some very poor umpiring decisions and matting wickets which we were not accustomed to playing on, but we were not going to come back to Port Mourant not having done well, we had to come back with something to show our people. We did not disappoint them.

“We lost to Pakistan, but beat the India side three-nil. Roy Gilchrist destroyed them. “
And what was it like seeing those huge crowds?
“The first time I saw 110,000 people was in the first test in Karachi, Pakistan. There was a crowd of 90,000 in Calcutta in the third test and 70,000 at the Bradbourne stadium in Bombay. The people were so close to us that when the spectators started making noise it scared the life out of you. But once you started playing, you forgot that they were there.”
He remembers with a rueful laugh being ‘bamboozled’ by the legendary Indian spinner Subhash Gupte during that 1958-59 tour.
“He sent me to school. He is the best leg spinner I have ever seen, and if they had given him better wickets to bowl on, the series would have been a different one. I didn’t pick him (read his bowling) then, I couldn’t pick him now. If you played to four deliveries you missed them all.
“I can remember after the first innings, we came in for lunch, and I took off my gloves and I sat down ‘propping sorrow’, worried about what this man was doing. You could laugh now, but I couldn’t smile or laugh then.
“I said to our manager Berkeley Gaskin: ‘Mr. Manager, I don’t know what that man doing, I play to four balls and I miss all four,’ and he say ‘Butch, if you in doubt, push out,’ and that was all he had to tell me.”
Then came the 1963 England tour.
“England is the country where everybody wants to do well. I remember during the first team meeting, Frank Worrell, our captain, said to us,  ‘I want to let you gentlemen know that only two of us in this team are recognized as good cricketers, that is myself and (spin bowler) Alfred Valentine. Garry (Sobers) made 365 in Jamaica but that isn’t recognized here, the Englishmen only recognize you for what you do in England.
“I was determined to do something in England. We started playing seriously, and our team had some young people who were ready to fight for what we wanted. We all came from the same background, no rich man’s child; (so) if you don’t do well you will suffer. You had to put your best foot forward every time. We benefited from that attitude.  The cricket was not like it is today. It was a glorious thing, your success brought glory to yourself and your country, not that anything was wrong with money.”
The English team included fast bowling icons Fred Truman (a former record holder for most wickets) and Brian Statham. But the young Berbician had already faced far more hostile bowling from the fearsome Jamaican Roy Gilchrist. At the time, the temperamental Gilchrist was considered by many to be the fastest bowler in the world. His career was also sadly cut short following an altercation with a Pakistani on the field.
“We were fortunate that we began our professional life with Gilchrist. ‘Gilly’ played against us in 1955, Jamaica against Guyana; then he came and played in the Quadrangular tournament in 1956. ‘Gilly’ was the fastest bowler I have ever seen. So when Statham and those (English) guys were bowling, they weren’t bowling at any pace to scare anybody.
“Gilly was a serious cricketer. I remember I pushed this ball past ‘Gilly’ at Bourda, and ‘Gilly’ took off and saved one run. Gilly and Lance Gibbs had the same competitive mentality.”
It was on this tour that Butcher displayed the mental toughness that would become a hallmark of his career.

Batting through bad news
Butcher, who was then a Public Relations Officer at the Port Mourant Estate, had left a pregnant wife back in Guyana when he departed for the 1963 England tour. The young couple was expecting their first child.
During the second innings of the Lord’s test, Butcher was in the pavilion during the lunch break when he received a letter from his wife. She had suffered a miscarriage.
A deeply upset Butcher went to the crease with the West Indies at 15 for two. Not only was he burdened by the loss of his first child, but also by the thought that his test career was in jeopardy.
“I had not made many runs in the first test or in the first innings, and this letter came at a time when I might have been dropped.”
Somehow, the resolute Guyanese managed to stay in his crease and make a memorable 133, saving his team from defeat in the process.  West Indies won that series by three tests to one, with Butcher scoring two centuries, including the one at Lord’s.
Wisden Magazine noted: “Butcher emerged as the most dependable batsman. He alone never appeared to be out of touch during the whole tour and his record of only two hundreds can be attributed to the fact that he was never average conscious. His 133 in the thrilling Lord’s Test was a most valuable effort and emphasized the soundness of his methods.”
He then played against the tough Australians in 1965, scoring a total of 405 runs, including 117 at Port of Spain in the second Test. His exploits resulted in former Australian captain Richie Benaud rating him as “the most difficult of all the West Indians to get out”.
Butcher followed up with more heroics during the 1966 tour of England. In the second test at Trent Bridge, West Indies appeared to be down and out at 65 for two in the second innings, still 25 runs behind England’s first innings total.
It was at that point that the familiar “immovable object” named Basil Butcher joined his fellow-Berbician, Rohan Kanhai at the crease. Batting for seven and three-quarter hours and sharing in three successive partnerships, Butcher made 209 not out (with 22 fours). It was the highest innings of his career, and according to Wisden magazine, “effectively won a match that had the appearance of being lost when he faced his first ball seven and a half hours earlier.”
He would enjoy more success in Australia in 1968/9 with another 405 runs, including two centuries.
In the short England tour in 1969, he headed the batting averages with 984 runs, including three centuries.
And the second time he was allowed to bowl in a test, Butcher took five English wickets for 34 runs, during a high-scoring game at Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1967/8. He bowled again in two other tests – in the next test at Bourda and a year later at Lords.
He also had the distinction of batting with an injured hand in a Guyana versus Australia match and scoring a century. He was voted Wisden’s 1970 Cricketer of the Year.
Though he still had lot of cricketing left in him, Butcher made his final tour to England in 1969.
By then he had an average of 3,104 runs from 44 test matches, including seven centuries. His first class career, spanning 1954 to 1972 comprised 11,628 runs, including 31 centuries.
Butcher is full of praise for the captains he played under, particularly Sir Garfield Sobers and the late Sir Frank Worrell.
“Garfield Sobers and Frank Worrell were excellent captains. The difference was that one was a tactical expert (Worrell) and the other was a gifted expert. Garry Sobers was a man who would set the field and put himself in a position and the next thing you would see him diving and picking up a catch. He was extraordinary. He was a bold, positive man; he never thought that anybody in the team could fail.”
Basil remained busy after retiring from test cricket, playing a major role in developing cricket in Mackenzie, where he now resides.  He was influential in developing the careers of cricketers such as Keith Cameron, Clayton Lambert and Vibert Johashen.
He is a former national cricket selector, a former Chairman of the West Indies team selection committee, in 1968; Vice President of the Guyana Cricket Board and also its Assistant Secretary. Along with Rohan Kanhai, he was among the first inductees into the Berbice Cricket Board Hall of Fame.  There is also a Basil Butcher Tribute Trophy.
The father of seven has a son (Basil Jr.), a fitness expert, who helps to coach the US women’s cricket team.
Like many of the cricketers of his generation, Butcher is unhappy with the present state of Guyana and West Indies cricket.
“There are a number of things that some of us have done, and we feel it is our responsibility to put back into the game. But the atmosphere today is not conducive. We are lucky to have (Shivnarine) Chanderpaul, (Chris) Gayle and these guys to stay with the ups and downs they have had to go through. I take my hat off to them for still playing for the West Indies and doing so well.”
He blames the decline in Guyana and West Indies cricket on the fact that many of the individuals in managerial positions have little cricketing experience.
“The whole problem with our cricket is administration. They (the administrators) didn’t bring anything to the table; they took everything off the table. Sport is not something from a book; you have to have the experience. It would take our cricket (locally) two to five years to get back where it was. We don’t even have good cricket grounds to play on.
Every other country uses the experience of people who participated in the game. Here, we find some people and you’re saying ‘who the hell is that guy?”
“When cricketers and sportsmen go back into the administration of the sport, they take back to the table the experience they accumulate from the development of the sport, and that goes for cricket like any other sport.”

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