Son of Grace

Martin Chandler | 9:45am GMT 24 December 2023

Published: 2023
Pages: 326
Author: Baksh, Vaneisa
Publisher: Fairfield Books
Rating: 4.5 stars

The name of Sir Frank Worrell shines out like a beacon from the annals cricket history, he is universally regarded as a great cricketer and leader of men. But despite that Worrell remains, for those interested in him, a source of some frustration as whilst his achievements on the cricket field are well chronicled the essence of the man remains elusive.

There have been books, the first of them an autobiography, Cricket Punch, published in 1959. As books of its type go it isn’t bad, but it reveals little of its author, and in any event it was published prior to his taking over the captaincy of the West Indies team.

In 1963, just after Worrell’s retirement, the Guyanese broadcaster Ernest Eytle published Frank Worrell, a biography to which its subject provided a commentary. That one is very much a cricket book rather than anything more wide ranging.

After Worrell’s tragically early death in 1967 there were two slim books published in the Caribbean, by Undine Guiseppe and Torrey Pilgrim, in 1969 and 1992 respectively. Neither added a great deal, although in 1987 a very slim biography, also titled simply Frank Worrell, appeared from English writer Ivo Tennant. That is better, and is certainly more than a review of a cricket career, but still not the complete package.

And then came Veneisa Baksh who, to my certain knowledge, has been working on this book for at least a decade. At times I wondered if it would ever appear, and I now understand why. Perhaps surprisingly no personal archive of Worrell’s exists, and many WICB records have been destroyed. It has therefore been a constant struggle for Baksh to locate source material. Fortunately with dogged persistence, and a great deal of help from the ever dwindling number of people who knew Worrell, over the years she has managed to secure access to much that supplements, clarifies or even corrects what has been written before.

Something that struck me as an odd thing to appear in a biography is the detailed physical description of Worrell that appears in the introduction. In a book that contains a decent selection of images of its subject that initially seemed a little unnecessary, but in fact it serves only to underline the thoroughness with which the author has gone about her task, and sets the tone for what is to come.

Sadly neither Lady Worrell nor her and Sir Frank’s only child Lana survived the 1990s, so family contributions were limited to those from Lana’s son. To balance that out however in his 90s Sir Everton Weekes gave freely of his time, as did many others from the cricket world and all of them help graft detail onto the reasons for Worrell’s legendary status.

The Worrell story is told, as so many biographies are, as a chronological journey through his life. His background, as is often the case, sheds much light on the man and has been thoroughly researched and is well presented. Also dealt with fully are Worrell’s on field achievements which are slotted seamlessly into the narrative. It is however to Baksh’s eternal credit that throughout the book the story remains one of Worrell the man rather than Worrell the cricketer.

Perhaps inevitably the most interesting part of Worrell’s story concerns the West Indies captaincy. It has been written about many times before, but never as thoroughly or authoritatively as here. Somewhat less well known, but no less intriguing is the proposed West Indian tour of South Africa in 1959 and the reasons why it never ultimately took place, and new light is certainly shed on that one.

Worrell is one of the more important figures in the history of cricket and of the Caribbean and, had not leukaemia claimed him at just 42, who knows what he might have gone on to achieve. What is certain is that Vaneisa Baksh’s efforts have produced a fitting and comprehensive tribute to a man who was much more than simply a cricketer. In many ways perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Son of Grace is to say that at no point whilst reading it did I realise that that there was no statistical appendix, which demonstrates very well that Sir Frank Worrell was a great deal more than just a cricketer.