Breaking Barriers

Martin Chandler | 8:47am BST 22 June 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 187
Author: Butcher, Roland with Sutherland, Sasha
Publisher: Fairfield Books
Rating: 4 stars

It is a sobering thought that it is as long ago as 1989 that I bought a copy of Roland Butcher’s first autobiography, Rising to the Challenge. I hadn’t had a chance to open it when, following an ‘incident’ soon afterwards, all of my books went into the loft in order to protect them from the by then clear and ever present dangers posed by toddlers with crayons.

As my life turned out it was to be more than twenty years before the books came down again, and whilst Rising to the Challenge must have been on top of the pending pile at the time it went into storage by then that had been long forgotten.

And despite Butcher being an interesting character and consequently my occasionally meaning to read it since I never have. Having now acquired this one, which adds the next 36 years to Butcher’s story, I do not suppose now that I will ever read it from start to finish. But having now read Breaking Barriers, I couldn’t resist reading a few chapters from Rising to the Challenge.

The record that will always be Butcher’s is that he was the first man of Afro-Caribbean heritage to play for England. Born into a very traditional background in Barbados he was raised by his grandmother before coming to England at 13 to join his parents in Stevenage.

The stories of those two very different parts of Butcher’s life are entwined with a love of cricket that eventually saw him taken on the professional staff at Middlesex where his skill with the bat, assisted by his being a fine fielder, saw him reach the England side in 1980. That summer West Indies visited England and if the series was not quite as one sided as that of 1976 England were very much second best.

After the West Indies series there was a brief visit from Australia who were to play two ODIs before  the one-off centenary Test. In the second of them Butcher made a fluent 52, an innings that until very recently was the fastest half century by a debutant in an ODI.

Despite that excellent start there was no place for Butcher in the starting eleven for the centenary Test an omission which, in Breaking Barriers, prompts the comment I thought I should have been playing but in hindsight the centenary Test was the epitome of the England-Australia rivalry. Perhaps the time was not right for someone of colour to be taking part in that celebration.

Not for the only time in the book there is no elaboration on an interesting comment. That Butcher said nothing on that subject in Rising to the Challenge I can perhaps understand, but I do wonder what prompted the statement. The man who ‘replaced’ Butcher in the Test side was Peter Willey, who had batted as well as anyone in the series against West Indies. There was a debutant batsman in the Test, Bill Athey, but he too had made a half century in the ODI. Personally I would much prefer to have seen Butcher in the side, and I am not suggesting for one moment that his comment now, made with the benefit of so many years of reflection is wrong, but a couple more paragraphs on that certainly wouldn’t have gone amiss.

It is inevitable in Butcher’s autobiography that the issue of racism should crop up, and whilst like all did in his era Butcher noted the racist attitudes that were deeply embedded in so many people in the UK, his experiences here do not seem to have been too bad. No doubt that was in part because he played for a county side in which he was frequently one of those dubbed affectionately by teammate Simon Hughes as ‘The Jackson Five’, Butcher, Wilf Slack, Wayne Daniel, Neil Williams and Norman Cowans were all of Afro-Caribbean heritage.

On that subject however the most interesting comment comes from some years later, when Butcher returned to Barbados to take up the position of Director of Sports at the University of West Indies; I had more problems, trouble, hassle and resistance in Barbados than I had had in England my thirty seven years among white people who did not know me or who said they did not like black people.

It is not, I hasten to add, an observation that Butcher immediately moves on from, but it was something on which again he could certainly have written more.

But on the other hand there are other issues which Butcher could easily have ducked. Something I had forgotten about him was that he had signed a contract to join Mike Gatting’s rebels in South Africa in early 1990 before changing his mind and withdrawing. Wrestling with that one clearly wasn’t easy, but Butcher tells the story in detail.

Rising to the Challenge had, presumably, already gone to press before the South African issue unravelled and one of the chapters I couldn’t resist reading in that was the last one – did Butcher express a view on what he thought the future would hold for him and, if so, did it pan out that way?

One thing he did say in 1989 was that he intended to stay in the game …… for several more years. In fact he didn’t, calling it a day at the end of a 1990 summer that brought him just two first team appearances. He expresses the view now that that was a mistake, and again explains himself very well and, in future, I shall look rather more sympathetically on the views of those who, in 2025, feel that professional cricketers play too much cricket.

Having got that one wrong Butcher did correctly foresee a move into coaching, and that that would be as a soccer coach rather than a cricketing one. Butcher’s views on English cricket coaching methods are interesting and explain his eventually choosing to. work with Arsenal and later, and this is something that had completely passed me by, my team Reading.

The book itself is sightly unusual in that it has three forewords, a variety of separate tributes at the end and what amounts an interview between Butcher and his co-writer, Dr Sasha Sutherland, to go with a summary of his many achievements. The book also has an extensive statistical appendix, set out in a somewhat unconventional way and, unusually but very usefully, containing the scorecards from the matches that represent Butcher’s career highlights.

Which observation, I see when I glance down at the word count, brings this review past four figures which, I have to concede, is quite enough even in circumstances where I could quite happily wax lyrical about Breaking Barriers for a few paragraphs yet, a fact which in itself should tell you all you need to know. This is a book that is well worth reading.