Cricket’s First Revolutionary: Frank Worrell’s Political War Against Colonialism in the West Indies

Martin Chandler | 8:23am BST 28 September 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 230
Author: Beckles, Hilary
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Rating: 3.5 stars

A new book about Frank Worrell has become an annual event. First of all towards the end of 2023 we had Son of Grace by Vanessa Bakhsh, and the following year Simon Lister’s Worrell. Both are excellent in slightly different ways, but I have to say that the last thing I expected was another book in 2025.

And this one is very much a book that has Frank Worrell at its heart, and is therefore biographical on any definition. But at the same time it is not a biography in the sense that Son of Grace and Worrell are.

This one is written by Sir Hilary Beckles, who is a professor of Economic History at the University of the West Indies. He has written widely on the history of West Indian cricket, and at one time was a member of the WICB.

Beckles therefore has an impressive academic CV, but if anything his cricketing one is even more so, certainly in the context of the life of Frank Worrell. It was Beckles who assisted another of the W’s, Everton Weekes, put his autobiography into print. He was also a good friend of Clyde Walcott and, amongst those still with us who knew Worrell well, Wes Hall and Garry Sobers as well.

The word Cricket in the title clearly indicates that this one is, on any definition, a cricket book. It is, as I say, primarily a biography of Sir Frank Worrell, yet at the same time there is not a great deal of cricket in it. The development of West Indian cricket over the period of Worrell’s career is the backdrop, but the book is much more about politics and, more particularly, the supporting and opposing elements that saw Worrell finally accede to the captaincy for the historic 1960/61 visit to Australia.

With an author whose specialist subjects are cricket, history and politics this book was never going to pull any punches and it certainly doesn’t. Beckles writes not only as an expert observer, but also as a man invested in the events that he describes. His writing is a salutary reminder of the importance of the issues he looks at in the context of their time.

Cricket’s First Revolutionary is not the easiest of reads simply because of the force in Beckles’ writing. By the end of the book I felt very much like I had been listening to a symposium arranged by the Civil Rights Movement. That is not, I would stress, intended as a criticism. Sometimes those of us who believe we are paragons of enlightenment need to be reminded how different it feels to be on the inside looking out, rather than on the outside looking in.

But, with the greatest of respect to a man who knows his subject much more thoroughly than I do, I do wonder if Beckles might not have overplayed his hand in one respect. Worrell’s predecessor as skipper, Gerry Alexander, comes across very badly in Beckles’ narrative, which isn’t the way he emerges in much of what I have read elsewhere.

At the end of the day however Cricket’s First Revolutionary is an important book, and certainly recommended, even (and perhaps in particular) to those who have already read either or both of Worrell’s two other recent biographies.