Old Father Time dances to a new tune

It is appropriate that the West Indians should be visiting these shores in 2000 for it means they will be properly able to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their magnificent first Test win in England, in the Second Test at Lord's in late June 1950.

It might also be recalled that they are observing the centenary of the first ever West Indian tour of the UK, though the matches were not reckoned to be first-class. West Indies' win at Lord's is one of cricket's legendary moments, the preface to their high-ranking performances over much of the rest of the century.

The England of Len Hutton, Cyril Washbrook, Bill Edrich, Godfrey Evans and Alec Bedser was a formidable combine that had won the First Test easily on something of an Old Trafford dustbowl. It is often forgotten that West Indies scored heavily at Lord's, an Allan Rae century in the first innings of 326 and Clyde Walcott's 168 not out allowing a declaration at 425 for 6. All is forgotten beside the amazing exploits of Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. Their respective match figures were 11 for 152 and 7 for 127, as England crashed by 326 runs.

Mid-century Britain had a penchant for the double act. If the nation was not listening to Flanagan and Allen on the wireless or winding up the gramophone to hear Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, then it was off to the flicks to watch Abbott and Costello or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Thus the spin twins, Ram and Val, enjoyed a popular vogue.

Frank Worrell might have displayed incalculable elegance with his 261 at Trent Bridge, as West Indies won by 10 wickets; 503 glorious runs might have been spaciously assembled at The Oval, as they won by an innings, despite a most honourable carriage of bat by Len Hutton with 202 in the first innings, but all eyes were then - and, indeed, memories have been since - focused on Ramadhin and Valentine.

It is scarcely surprising. They bowled nearly three quarters of the overs and took nearly three quarters of the wickets - 59 out of 77 - in the series. Throughout the tour, Ramadhin had 135 victims at 14.88 and Valentine 123 at 17.94. That admirable commentator John Figueroa impishly reminded us how contemporary writers and broadcasters complained they `found the whole thing rather boring! Not enough variety in the bowling, so much spin. Where were the speedsters?'

Part of the charm lay in their overnight success. Both just 20, neither had more than negligible first-class experience and yet the mystifying wiles of the slightly built Ramadhin and the prodigious turn and accuracy of the taller Valentine cut inroads into the seasoned English batting. They were, as Wisden justly remarked, the 'chief executioners'. They provided weaponry previously lacking in support of the majestic batting of Everton Weekes, Walcott and Worrell, the solid Allan Rae and stylish Jeffrey Stollmeyer offering a firm platform as openers.

Figueroa felt at Lord's 'a mass sixth sense that something out of the ordinary was boiling up'. 1950 was the first occasion that West Indies had some local support and famously, to the initial horror of the establishment, the fans spilled out on to what one can barely avoid terming the sacred turf in cheerful adulation. Lord Kitchener led the chanting, swaying procession. Suddenly the English recognised what a calypso was.

Michael Manley has described this as 'a great Caribbean event...the victory was more than a sporting success. It was proof that a people was coming of age'. In effect one of the reasons why there was a raising of St John's Wood eyebrows at the enthusiastic calypso singing was because it was novel and performed by relatively few West Indian adherents.

The major migration of West Indians into Britain had hardly started. What may be suggested is that newfound confidence among West Indians was echoed in the adventures of their great cricket team and, in turn, their buoyant success invigorated that general mood. Perhaps part of this assurance helped sustain families who were wondering whether to take the leap of leaving their homelands for another country.

It is worth noting that the players themselves were insisting more emphatically on a square deal. Frank Worrell refused to tour India with West Indies in 1948/49 when his claim for reasonable remuneration was denied as 'an act of impertinence'. Manley judged that `in that act he served notice that the black professionals of the post-war era were no longer prepared to be exploited as had been the custom with the giants of yesteryear like George Headley and Learie Constantine'.

In 1950 the players were given improved, but not mind-boggling, contracts and in 1960, albeit belatedly, Worrell began his monumental captaincy of West Indies. Such progress was slow then, even grudging. After all, domestic West Indian cricket was still referred to as `intercolonial'.

It was of a piece with the political and economic context. The old plantation mould was yielding to manufacturing - oil in Trinidad; bauxite in Jamaica and the then British Guiana; the making and assemblage of consumer items from toothpaste to television sets in many areas - with American as well as British capital invested. Skills training and social mobility were extended, although these new trades were perhaps not so labour intensive as the old sugar and other agricultural regimes.

Conversely the UK, like its European and North American neighbours, was enjoying an industrial boom; in the 1950s British manufacturing production rose by 30 per cent. There was, almost unprecedentedly, full employment with some vacuum for overseas workers to fill. Where the previous three decades had witnessed British workers emigrating to Commonwealth countries, Great Britain now began to greet workers to its shores from its colonial possessions.

The numbers were not so great as is sometimes imagined; between 1953 and 1962 just 150,000 arrived from Jamaica. Soon, however, they and their families were making their distinctive and crucial contribution to cultural life in their adopted country, not least among cricketing crowds and to the economy, in particular the public services.

With the West Indian territories already enjoying some degree of internal political autonomy, many politicians, West Indian and British, saw a tempting logic in the notion of a united West Indies. As post-war British governments granted independence to colonies, starting with India in 1947, there was an attempt to establish a West Indian Federation but it collapsed.

The West Indian territories, widely spaced and distant from each other, had little of that economic integrity that is normally necessary for political coherence. Colonial economics were determined by the needs of the imperial centre, with goods flowing to and from this salient point, rather than around the islands and other regions.

There was little foundation for a sharing exchange and, without that, little base for a sound political organism. All writers on West Indian cricket comment on the parallel to be drawn in regard to the politics of West Indian cricket management and the occasional difficulty of developing a congruous cricketing machine in those circumstances.

Nonetheless, the 1950 West Indies team, which was only lacking the inclusion of genuine high pace to make it the equal of that small handful of really outstanding international teams over the history of cricket, played a significant role in the unfolding story of West Indian life.

Let us hope that we have travelled a pace or two forward from 50 years ago when, as Figueroa relates, he passed a word across the rails at the Oval Test with the very middle-class law student Allan Rae. A young English woman, overhearing the cricketer's remarks observed: 'Oh, he speaks English.'