Heritage & Legacy 1950s
Martin Chandler |Published: 2026
Pages: 501
Author: Niaz, Nauman
Publisher: Boundary Books
Rating: 4.5 stars
As we all know life is full of difficult choices. Some of them are of huge importance and affect the rest of our lives. Great care has to be taken in weighing up the options, and whatever happens we will look back on occasion and wonder what might have been had we taken a different course.
Nauman Niaz was recently responsible for a dilemma in my life, although fortunately other than how I spent my time over a wet weekend in March nothing turned on the decision I ultimately made. But the circumstances were still unusual. I cannot immediately recall any other example of a major writer publishing two substantial bodies of work at precisely the same time, thereby imposing a heavy responsibility on me.
Which was I to read first? Oddly although The Cricket Conversations, a distillation of Nauman’s conversations with the great and the good of the game going back over many years was the one that immediately appealed, as things turned out I ended up reading Heritage & Legacy 1950s first.
Why was this? I am not entirely sure, but suspect it arises out of the fact that my assumptions as to the content of The Cricket Conversations proved to be accurate whereas my expectations of Heritage & Legacy 1950 proved to be well wide of the mark. A dry examination of Pakistan’s history it is not.
This 501 page journey begins with an introduction from Nauman that will appeal to any bibliophile, summarising the contributions to the game’s literature of previous writers on the subject of Pakistani cricket. They are a diverse group ranging from the great enthusiast and chronicler of early tours, Qamaruddin Butt, to Pakistan’s first Test captain AH Kardar, a man who contributed three books on tours in the 1950s and later several more on a variety of cricketing and non-cricketing subjects.
And any book like this needs context, so the history of the Pakistani nation and culture are the first things explained. This is an important part of the book. It is not, I confess with some shame, a subject on which I have much of a grasp despite having considerable interest in it. Part of the problem its that most writers on the politics of Pakistan and indeed South East Asia generally have an agenda.
As we all know Nauman is many things, writer, broadcaster, historian, owner/curator of one of the finest sporting museums in private hands and endocrinologist to name the five that immediately come to mind. What he is not however, or if he is he keeps his opinions very much to himself, is a political animal, so his account of the history and birth of his nation is all the more authoritative for that.
Slowly more and more cricket is woven into the narrative and when Nauman reaches page 118 he is ready for an interlude, and presents a series of short essays on the founding fathers of Pakistan cricket. Some like Mohammad Nissar are familiar names, in whole or in part for their cricketing prowess when Pakistan was part of ‘All India’. Others like Judge Cornelius, the man behind the Pakistan Eaglets, and Mohammad Mian Saeed, the Pakistan side’s captain before they attained Test status, relate to the years in the immediate aftermath of partition.
These 14 figures profiled the formation of the BCCP is recorded in chapter 13, which begins on page 157. There follows a season by season account of cricket in Pakistan. There is, naturally, much on each of the Test series the Pakistanis took part in over the decade of the 1950s, but attention is given to to the matches Pakistan as a nation played before their inaugural Test series in India in 1952/53, as well as the other representative games that were played along the way.
Despite all this it has to be said that Nauman does save the best part of the book until last, and that is the extended profiles of each of the 35 men who appeared in Tests for Pakistan in the 1950s. Beginning with Amir Elahi and ending with Munir Malik the majority are unfamiliar names whose stories, as opposed to brief biographical details, have not previously appeared in print.
A few of the 35 are well known, Hanif and Mushtaq Mohammad, Fazal Mahmood and Kardar. There are others whose lives have been the subject of books or booklets, but only Waqar Hasan, Wallis Mathias and Alimuddin. The remaining 28 are, Intikhab Alam apart, less than familiar names. The one I was particularly keen to read about was Miran Bux. An off spinner who did not make his First Class debut until he was 43. At 47 Bux remains, behind only England’s James Southerton in the first ever Test match in 1877, the oldest man to make a Test debut. His back story, and he only ever played in 15 First Class matches, is every bit as interesting as I expected it to be.
So this one is an excellent read, and whets my appetite for the rest of what I trust will be a series of books. The point should also be made that Heritage & Legacy 1950s is produced on top quality heavy weight paper, and is exceptionally well illustrated. There are no photographs but instead a series of portraits of the many men who find a place in the book, its author included. I did make one mistake which was to assume that these were photographs which had been altered by AI to appear to be oil paintings. In that I was wrong, as all of them were commissioned from a professional painter, so no expense has been spared.
And the finished product is most certainly a heavy tome, whether you go for the standard hard back, deluxe or elite editions, all of which are available from Boundary Books*. Best read whilst sat at a table its only real disadvantage is that its size, realistically, precludes it from being bedtime reading.
*A full description of the book appears here, and an update on its availability here.
Leave a comment