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Reply to "Sir Wes Hall was a relentless force who tormented England's batsmen for West Indies, but also starred for Accrington CC"

It was a measure of how little the legendary West Indian players earned in 1960 that Sir Wes managed to negotiate Accrington up to £1,000 (£21,000 in today’s money) from the £500 that committee member Alan Doherty first offered him. 

The player’s bargaining position was enhanced by the 46 wickets he took in eight Test matches on West Indies tour of India and Pakistan in 1958-59. He’d earn a £100 bonus at most for a summer’s Test achievements.

When he has finished out in the middle, chuckling at the soft turf which caused his right foot to ‘slip and slide over the crease’ and created no-ball trouble in the summer of 1960, some of his old teammates have arrived at the club. These proud and undemonstrative Lancastrian men formally extend a hand of welcome but he dispenses with all that. ‘Give us a hug man,’ he tells Russ Cuddihy.

If ever an encounter demonstrated sport’s capacity to create bonds that cross cultures and oceans then it is this one. In these parts, they don’t even pronounce their legendary former professional’s name the way that West Indians do - sticking resolutely to their own Lancastrian vernacular, ‘Wess’, or ‘Wessley’.

Yet Sir Wes and 78-year-old Cuddihy, who was a print worker when not anchoring Accrington’s middle order, are immediately wreathed in conversation about the visitor’s liking for Vimto, the present fortunes of Accrington Stanley and, inevitably, the Lancashire League. ‘Come on you Reds,’ Sir Wes unexpectedly says, summoning from the recesses of his mind the favoured chant of Stanley’s fans.

Their conversation is laced with sorrows, of course, as Sir Wes is acquainted with knowledge of which individuals have gone ‘to the great beyond’ as he puts it. Eddie Robinson was an 18-year-old leg spinner who radiated energy and was good enough for county cricket, if not Tests, when Sir Wes first knew this place. ‘He’s dead? He’s gone?’

Lindon Dewhurst, son and namesake of the Accrington captain, is another. ‘The young left-hander?’ asks Sir Wes, his grasp of old names extraordinary.

He takes all of this into a short, five-mile drive to Blackburn where he finds that the passage of recent years has been less than kind on his old opening bowling partner Jim Eland, a right-armer of unstinting accuracy now lost in the fog of the dementia which has left him terribly diminished.

Another Lancastrian handshake is offered. Another Barbadian response comes back. ‘Give us a hug man,’ Sir Wes tells Eland, squeezing into a small sofa where his old friend sits, slightly slumped.

For the West Indian, it is a relief simply to be recognised by him. ‘I was worried that you wouldn’t know me but now I know that you do,’ he tells him. ‘I went to the ground and saw my end and your end. It was pretty soggy out there.’

FM
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