From Janice Turner writing in the TImes....
Yorkshire’s ugly secret was no surprise to me
It’s a short step from the God’s Own Country cussedness and exceptionalism to a fear of outsiders and then racism
I pulled at tea towels on a high shelf and “Yorkshire County Cricket Club, official souvenir” tumbled down. It must be from my parents’ house, since my father was a YCCC member for over 50 years. I see him now, setting off to Headingley, Scarborough or, behind enemy lines, Old Trafford. My mum packing his “snap” into Tupperware boxes. His battered sun hat with the white rose.
In Yorkshire, cricket was always a working-class sport. As a boy, my dad and his pals batted until dusk, a wicket chalked on the shed door. He joined The Wanderers who, unable to afford their own ground, always played away. Even when dying he talked Yorkshire cricket with a young male carer, who joked “Well, you’re not out yet, Dennis”, and my father managed to whisper “Howzat!”.
Yorkshire cricket is woven into the county’s own mythology. I heard a lot of that, too, growing up. God’s Own Country. How Yorkshire was so huge and mighty, “they” (southerners) had to chop it into ridings and later South, North, West and Humberside to hamstring its rough, rebel power. Yorkshire believed it must look out for itself or be screwed over, not unreasonably, as proved by broken rail promises this week.
Its most revered warriors were dour, cussed, stubborn individualists epitomised by “King” Geoffrey Boycott, whom my dad loved, accumulating runs at his own selfish pace, heedless of his team’s needs. Yorkshire’s credo was: “Hear all, see all, say nowt; Eat all, sup all, pay nowt; And if ever tha does owt fer nowt, Allus do it fer thissen”. My dad liked to recite that, although no one was more generous and neighbourly.
A proud Yorkshireman was tough, watchful, self-sufficient, no one’s fool. He prized bluntness over fancy manners or even others’ feelings. (My father couldn’t be polite about
a bad meal, no matter how I pleaded “for once just be nice”.) He regarded outsiders and their foreign ways with suspicion — until you were a friend, then he’d die for you. Such tenets bred a belligerent incuriosity about the wider world, which growing up drove me mad. Then drove me away.
Inevitably from Yorkshire exceptionalism, and a prizing of harsh, unfettered speech, comes racism. Terrible, shameful, ugly racism. The rows I had with my father, the words he’d use, which had me storming from the house, stomping dark streets, swearing I’d never come home again.
For all that, he’d barely met a brown person. My town was almost entirely white, my school had maybe two black children, and they must have endured hell given that my friend, white but originally from Surrey, got enough grief for her southern vowels.
I’d assumed things had improved now that demographics have shifted, Asian cabbies take me from Doncaster station and Morrisons is full of pakoras and rogan josh. No doubt they have improved among an enlightened younger generation. But I was unsurprised by what happened to Azeem Rafiq.
If being born a Yorkshireman was blessed, playing cricket for Yorkshire was to be divine. No wonder it was reserved only for those born on sacred Yorkshire soil until 1992. The county cricket club is Yorkshire exceptionalism’s grand lodge. The birth rule kept the club white decades after every other had at least a token black player. After that, the old guard had to retain purity by cruder means.
What hurt my heart most was Rafiq’s broad Barnsley accent. All he wanted was to belong, to play for the team revered by his community, to be a proud Yorkshireman too. All that abuse he sucked down, the slights, P-words, crass gags about elephant washers and corner shops. Even now, more sad than angry, he believes team-mates who apologise deserve a second chance.
He noted a different culture when loaned to Derbyshire, only a short distance south. In Yorkshire, he saw visiting foreign players, even black ones, treated warmly while the homegrown Asians were disdained. How very Yorkshire, I thought: you’re our most welcome guest, let’s get the kettle on. Just don’t ever think you’re one of us.
What a waste for the club that racism stopped it using one of its greatest resources. While white boys are drawn to football, it’s British Asians who play cricket with the obsession of my father as a boy.
Go to India or Pakistan and in every dusty village backstreet you see a skinny brown lad running up to bowl. The fathers or grandfathers of men like Rafiq brought that love over to Barnsley or Bradford, and placed it on the steps of Headingley as a gift. Only for small-minded blowhards to kick it away. That Asians make up 30 per cent of grassroots cricket but only 4 per cent of professionals isn’t just despicable, it’s profoundly dumb.
Think not just what Asians could do for cricket, but what cricket could do for Yorkshire’s stark racial divide. Interviewing Baroness Warsi in Dewsbury once I was struck by how two communities, with separate schools, clubs and lives, were plonked together in the moors. Cricket could enable integration. Instead, Asians had to set up their own league, which YCCC ensured did not feed into its talent pool.
My father’s racism was a product of his all-white life. He once visited London when our house was being painted by West Indian decorators, led by the elderly, very proper Mr Miller. I dreaded what my dad might say, but after a week of chatting and making tea, he declared: “Mr Miller is a craftsman.”
If that most cussed of old Yorkshiremen could shift his views, so can the wilfully blind who’ve kept the county’s cricket club frozen in time.
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