First published in The Nightwatchman in 2014

At 8pm on August 27 1968, the England selection committee assembled at Lord’s, where it was decided that Basil D’Oliveira – a Cape Coloured South African immigrant who had qualified to play for England – was undeserving of a place in MCC’s tour party to South Africa. Five months earlier, South African Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes “John” Vorster had tipped off England’s senior Viscount Lord Cobham that the tour would be scratched if D’Oliveira were selected.

His omission sparked public outcry, and his eventual call-up prompted Vorster to denounce the side as “the team of the anti-apartheid movement”, which inclined MCC to cancel the tour. While MCC were adamant that politics hadn’t contaminated either selection process, its committee members were cast as politically naive buffoons for letting the nation down and South Africa off the hook. The D’Oliveira affair was a catalyst that precipitated South Africa’s omission from international cricket, which effectively ostracised South African sport and created a pressure point that would be an Achilles’ heel of the South African government.

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The Swinging Sixties weren’t all about peace movements and pick-me-ups. In 1968 came a whirlwind of social upheaval and violent protest: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the My Lai massacre, the Prague Spring and the student-worker uprisings in Paris. Civil rights, gay rights, anti-war protests and second-wave feminism fuelled activists; the anti-apartheid movement was fitting with the age. In October, American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos would unleash their Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in Mexico City. Man would soon walk on the moon, yet it would be 26 years before the formation of a democratic government in South Africa.

As the world turned its back on apartheid South Africa, MCC’s willing engagement was the last-man stand of the belief in cricket as the glue of imperial harmony. Befuddled by the decay of social order, MCC echoed the identity crisis of post-imperial Britain. The Tory-tailing private club had become an archaic ruling body, with the imminent birth of a new umbrella governing body for English cricket, the Cricket Council, soon to incite a gradual relinquishment of power and responsibility.

The selection room was filled with men of substance but with their precious game under threat, did their hearts rule their heads? Politics “were mentioned because they were there” and “you can’t just clear it out of people’s minds”, yet Insole made an honourable, perhaps self-deceptive, attempt when he pronounced to the group: “Let’s forget it all and get down to picking a cricket team.” Thereafter, politics swayed either in a subconscious, unspoken or self-deceptive manner, while the notion that D’Oliveira may not have coped with the prospective stresses and publicity “might have been in the back of people’s minds”.

Even today, the last remaining survivors of that infamous selection meeting are still trying to convince themselves, at times rather unconvincingly, that the selection was based entirely on cricketing merit. Carr, for one, was “talked around”, “pretty sure”, “talked into believing” and “under the impression” it was a genuine cricketing decision. Helpful, warm and esteemed former pilots of English and world cricket, Carr and Insole dismiss popular conspiracy theories yet acknowledge that the selection meeting could not be held in a vacuum, detached from the outside world – no matter how hard they may have tried.

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