Learie Constantine was one of the first great cricketers to emerge from the Caribbean, but he was much more than that. After his death in 1971, Wisden published this assessment of a remarkable life.
Learie Constantine (Lord Constantine) died on July 1, 1971, aged 69.
The parents of the child born in Diego Martin, Trinidad, almost 70 years before, may in their highest ambitions have hoped that he would play cricket for the West Indies. They cannot have dreamt that he would take a major share in lifting his people to a new level of respect within the British Commonwealth; that along the way he would become the finest fieldsman and one of the most exciting all-rounders the game of cricket has known: and that he would die Baron Constantine, of Maraval in Trinidad and Tobago, and of Nelson, in the County Palatine of Lancaster, a former Cabinet Minister and High Commissioner of his native Trinidad.
Learie – or Connie to 40 years of cricketers – came upon his historic cue as a man of his age, reflecting and helping to shape it. He made his mark in the only way a poor West Indian boy of his time could do, by playing cricket of ability and character. He went on to argue the rights of the coloured peoples with such an effect as only a man who had won public affection by games-playing could have done in the Britain of that period.
Learie Nicholas Constantine, born September 21, 1902, was the son of Lebrun Constantine, a plantation foreman who toured England as an all-rounder with the West Indian cricketers of 1900 – when he scored the first century for a West Indies team in England – and 1906. In 1923 they both played for Trinidad against British Guyana at Georgetown, one of the few instances of a father and son appearing together in a first-class match; both of them long cherished the occasion. In constant family practice, the father insisted on a high standard of fielding which was to prove the foundation of his son’s success.
A devout Roman Catholic, of easy humour and essential patience, he lived a contented domestic life with his wife and his daughter, who is now a schoolteacher in Trinidad. His outlook was that of a compassionate radical and he maintained his high moral standards unswervingly.
To the end of his days he recalled with joy the great moments of his cricket and the friends he had made. His wife survived him by barely two months: and Trinidad posthumously awarded him the Trinity Cross, the country’s highest honour.
