Lead image: Bacup CC

So great is the lineage, it need only be designated by first names: Shivnarine and Brian; Curtly and Courtney; Malcolm, Desmond and Joel; Viv, of course, and Gordon, Michael and Andy; Clive, then Wes and Lance and Conrad, and on through Rohan, Garfield and Sonny. And before getting to the pre-War stars, Learie and George, you have the three debutants of 1948 and batting titans of the 1950s, the “three W’s” after whom a cricket ground in Barbados is named: Sir Clyde, Sir Frank and the now-departed Sir Everton. Throw in Richie Richardson and Charlie Griffith, and that’s 14 cricketing knights from those sun-bleached Caribbean shores.

Before his passing on Wednesday at the age of 95, Everton de Courcy Weekes had been the third oldest surviving male Test cricketer. His 10-year career in West Indies colours brought him the monumental figures of 4,455 runs at 58.61 – better than Walcott (3,798 at 56.7) and Worrell (3,860 at 49.5) – as well as the staggering achievement of hundreds in five consecutive Test innings (all of them inside his first 10 knocks), which remains a record to this day, over 70 years later. He went on to become an ICC referee, briefly, as well as a broadcaster and a coach, and was universally regarded as a warm, modest and convivial man with a gentle sense of humour and an appetite for tipple-enhanced card games. And boy could he play. Cricket, that is.

Back in those English summers of the post-War period, long before the county game opened up to overseas players in 1968, Test cricketers would habitually gravitate to the leagues of northern England – usually on much better money than they ever received for international outings – mesmerising the mill towns with their exotic brilliance and lifting local spirits after six years of brutal conflict. The Lancashire League, in particular, was a honeypot for these superstars, coming to host such bona fide greats as Vivian Richards and Shane Warne; Holding, Headley, Hall and Roberts; Dennis Lillee, Steve Waugh and Allan Border; Allan Donald, Kapil Dev and Mohammad Azharuddin, and many more besides.

None of them left so great a mark, though, nor racked up such extraordinary statistics, as Everton Weekes did in his seven seasons at Bacup, a once prosperous cotton town bundled into the Rossendale Valley and overlooked by the forbidding east Lancashire moorlands. Across those seven long-ago summers at the Lanehead ground, a short but steep walk from Bacup town centre, the Bajan maestro crunched, crashed and caressed 9,069 league runs at 91.60 (the highest average in the history of the league), including a record 32 hundreds (only six men have even half that number). Not the worst, then, although his signing was something of a happy accident, as The Authorised History of Bacup CC explains:

“In the winter of 1948/49 West Indies travelled to India for a Test series and spent a night in London en route. Bacup vice-chairman James Hargreaves went to London with the authority to sign Wilf Ferguson, a leg-spinner. Apparently, he declined, but pointed to a young man in the hotel foyer who might be interested. His name was Everton Weekes. The conversation must be preserved for posterity. Hargreaves said, ‘Would you like to come and play for Bacup?’ Weekes replied, ‘Yes I would, provided you think I’m good enough’. The rest is history, glorious history for the town, the club, and the league”.

No doubt the expectant Bacup committee will have been buoyed by news crackling through on the wires that Weekes’ Test scores on that India tour were 128, 194, 162, 101, 90, 56, 48, although they may have been slightly concerned at the alarming drop-off toward the end…

His contract for that 1949 summer was worth £500 (a shade under £18,000 in today’s money), which was no doubt still cheap given the enormous numbers he helped draw through the gate at a ‘bob’ apiece (twenty ‘bobs’, or shillings, in an old pound). Indeed, restored cine-reel from his debut season shows extensive footage of the derby match with neighbours Rawtenstall, which attracted a crowd of around 10,000 to watch Weekes go head to head with Indian star Vijay Hazare.

Hazare would top the league’s bowling and batting averages that year, while completing the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets, a feat that had never before been achieved (Australian Cec Pepper, proing at Burnley, matched Hazare that same summer, and only two have managed it since: Colin Miller, for Rawtenstall, and Chris Harris, for Ramsbottom). Nevertheless, Weekes out-performed Hazare on the day, making 74 to the Indian’s solitary single; after the traditional collection box had been taken round that sizeable and impeccably attired crowd, Weekes’ innings – something of a cameo by his standards – had earned him a colossal £48 (more than £1,700 in today’s money).

Weekes also finished the season as the league’s leading run-scorer – with 1,470 at 70, comfortably his lowest season average for Bacup – as he would in all bar his final summer in Lancashire. And in amongst all that was a top score of 195 not out at Enfield – the skipper declaring mid-over with a double-hundred beckoning – which would remain a Lancashire League record for 53 years, until a certain Michael Clarke made 200 not out on the same ground for Ramsbottom in 2002. First impressions? Pretty steady, you would have thought. Or, translated into Lancastrian: He’ll do for us.

The following summer Weekes toured England with West Indies, amassing 2,310 first-class runs at 79.65 – the first five of his seven hundreds on the trip were 232, 304*, 279, 246* and 200* – but Bacup found an able enough deputy in George Headley, ‘the Black Bradman’.

Back for the 1951 season, Weekes collected 1,518 league runs (at 89.3), which remained a record aggregate for 40 years, as did the seven league hundreds he made that summer. And it might have been even more had his own club not banned him for a game, explains club chairman, Neal Wilkinson:

“In those days, the Lancashire League committee were rather above their station. On one occasion, they asked the FA if they would change the Cup Final date because it clashed with Lancashire League fixtures! As a result, a lot of the club committees were of a similar ilk. If players wanted to play elsewhere whilst under contract – even those as good as Everton Weekes – they had to ask the club’s permission. On one occasion, Everton turned out in a representative match, a Commonwealth XI versus England XI at Kingston upon Thames, without asking. Bacup had taken a stand with the league forum on this, and so suspended him. It didn’t go down well with the supporters, some of whom daubed protest slogans in paint on the roof of the pavilion and tea hut, and even on the outfield, calling for Weekes to be reinstated and for the 12 members of the committee to be sacked. The official club history says, ‘Everton responded with great dignity. He could easily have taken his bat home and found another club. He didn’t, and matters were settled in a happy reconciliation, with the suspension lifted after just one week’.”

This being Lancashire – where the idiosyncratic rules and playing conditions often belie some hard-nosed economic rationality – the finals back then were timeless single-innings matches played over as many consecutive weekday evenings as were necessary to get the game finished, although each innings was suspended at 130, with the other team then invited to bat, before the ‘first’ innings would resume. No one seems to know why. At any rate, Bacup’s perma-performing pro took 6-61 from 32 overs as Nelson were bowled out for 168, in two stints. In reply, Weekes entered at 8-2 and scored an unbeaten 119. It was all done in two nights’ work. The scorecard doesn’t reveal whether there was a Player of the Match award.

Yet perhaps the most extraordinary performance of all those he etched across the pitches of Lancashire came a couple of years earlier, and for another club. With the Bacup committee long having learned their lesson, Weekes was drafted in as sub-pro for neighbouring village Walsden of the Central Lancashire League for their Wood Cup final against Middleton. Save for the innings suspension coming at 150 rather than 130, it followed the same quirky ‘timeless weekday’ format of the Worsley Cup, and so a game that was due to have started at Rochdale CC on August 4 was instead completed on September 1 at Werneth after many rain-truncated evenings during which, says Walsden president Allan Stuttard, “Everton learned how to play three-card brag, which he told me was why he went on to become bridge champion of Barbados”.

Middleton scored 220 all out from 88.3 overs either side of their enforced hiatus, Weekes’ figures a remarkable 43.5-10-92-9. However, when it came to Walsden’s first turn to bat, Weekes was stranded in Ireland after a golfing engagement, and so he didn’t see his team subside to 45 for 5 on their first night’s batting. Rain prevented any further damage, and thankfully the Bajan was on the right side of the Irish Sea by the following evening, coming in at number eight with the innings in deep trouble at 46 for 6. He shepherded them to the 150 suspension without further damage, and then, after finishing off Middleton’s innings, picked up the thread of a 148-run partnership with Jim Wilkinson of which Weekes made 135. He ended unbeaten and triumphant on 151 (out of 178 while he was at the crease), duly securing himself a place in a second club’s hearts.

Having helped Bacup to the itch-scratching Worsley Cup in 1956, Weekes missed the following Lancashire League season due to his second and final West Indies tour to England – by far the most barren series of his career, with 195 runs at 19.5 – and returned in 1958 for a last Lancashire League campaign with his focus firmly set on winning the title. In the meantime, however, he elevated his final Worsley Cup average to 95.41 by carrying his bat for 225 out of 354 against neighbours Rawtenstall in a game spread over six evenings – Monday to Monday, either side of the weekend’s fixtures – which they won by 52.

The title race was again duked out with Burnley, whose pro was Weekes’ West Indies teammate, the hard-hitting off-spinning all-rounder Collie Smith. The teams faced off in the third-last game and, amid the showers, Weekes played an uncharacteristically restrained innings of 56 not out to secure a draw that kept their rivals at arm’s length and which, after victories in their final two outings, ultimately proved enough for the greatest Bacup professional of them all to sign off with that long-coveted Lancashire League trophy in his hands. It was a fine way to bow out, although it was hasta luego rather than adiós.

“He last came to the club in 2014, just short of his 90th birthday,” recalls Wilkinson. “It was a lovely evening. There was a junior match being played, four or five of his old teammates who were still alive attended, and we took the old photo from 1949 off the wall and he re-signed it”.

As he looked out at kids almost 80 years his junior starting their own cricketing stories on what was once his patch, his stage, his manor, no doubt the sounds (and perhaps the more elegant shapes) will have set those fuzzy old memories flickering once again across the old man’s thoughts, memories that transport a man, however fleetingly, to that time when they would be forever young: memories of runs, runs and more runs, runs for the cause, and then carousing around town with those teammates who would still be friends almost 70 years later, before heading back up the hill to his two-up, two-down on Gordon Street for Mrs Sharrold’s leftover ‘tater pie.

Eighty-one times the great man strode out to bat at his home away from home in east Lancashire, far from the familiar crystalline waters and swaying palm trees of Barbados, and only 44 times was he dismissed there. Eighty-one innings in which the grateful Bacupians were treated to the small matter of 5,619 elegant runs at a piffling average of 127.7, with 25 hundreds and 26 fifties.

Just in case you missed that: Everton de Courcy Weekes’ home batting average, rounded up, across seven seasons for Bacup was one hundred and twenty-eight. No wonder Bradman thought him the greatest West Indies batsman he ever laid eyes on. And there was quite a lineage.