In the 2020 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Colin Shindler revisits the infamous ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ saga and the impact it had on the cricketing summer and beyond.
Colin Shindler’s book on the events of 1970, Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches, is published this summer
When Brian Johnston died in January 1994, Test Match Special’s lunchtime interview “A View from the Boundary” passed to Jonathan Agnew. South Africa would be touring England for the first time since readmission – and playing their first Test at Lord’s since 1965. With commendable eagerness, Agnew thought it would be a good idea if his guest on the Saturday were Neath MP Peter Hain who, as chairman of the Stop the Seventy Tour committee 24 years earlier, had been a bête noire of the English cricket authorities.
TMS’ long-standing producer, Peter Baxter, was not initially as keen as Agnew had hoped. Baxter had joined the BBC in 1966, and remembered only too well the events of 1970, when the invitation to the South Africa Cricket Association was withdrawn 12 days before their players were due to land. He thought the BBC hierarchy would remember, too, and treated Agnew’s bold idea with circumspection. Had Johnston been alive, Baxter believed, he would have rejected Hain (who had been brought up in South Africa), or insisted another broadcaster interview him. For Johnston, Hain remained the sideburned 19-year-old student who had wantonly destroyed a summer’s cricket.
Eventually, recognising Agnew’s enthusiasm, Baxter relented, and the invitation to Hain was despatched and accepted. As play began that Saturday, Trevor Bailey – one of the TMS summarisers – took Baxter aside and quietly requested a schedule that would not require him either side of lunch: Bailey wanted to avoid any contact with Hain, whom he had not forgiven for what he still regarded as a sorry episode.
The opponents for the five scheduled Tests became a Rest of the World team captained by Garry Sobers. Yet taking the field in the first match were Richards, Procter, Barlow, and Graeme Pollock; in the third, they were joined by Peter Pollock. Wisden 1971 included one article on the matches, written by the editor, Norman Preston, and another on the tour’s cancellation, for which he commissioned the statistician Irving Rosenwater, rather than Arlott, the obvious candidate and a regular contributor.
Rosenwater wrote a measured piece, but his political sympathies were apparent as he described the mayhem of the protests in terms of arrests made and policemen injured. It added little lustre to the Almanack. Robert Winder, the book’s historian, wrote in 2013 that an article by Arlott “would have cemented Wisden’s moral authority around the world. As it was, it put a question mark over the idea that cricket even knew the meaning of the ‘fair play’ culture it so keenly espoused.”
Perhaps we should not be too censorious. Fifty years from now, it is possible historians will wonder how we made such a meal of Brexit.
