“Who Cricket Only Knows”: Sporting Black Communities in Rural Northants, 1961-1980

The breadth of cultural production in the last decade – for example on screen, stage, and in popular literature – have shown an inherent biased epistemology of ‘Black London’ (and other major cities), as well as the onus on England much to the exclusion of postwar Caribbean histories of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales – and English towns and villages.

Whilst cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol have had some consideration, it is unsettling to observe how provincial England appears beyond the interest of ‘official’ recorders. For example, my family came to Northants from Grenada in 1962. In those days, like the Caribbean, cricket was also a tenet of community-building.

This paper uses Northamptonshire’s Caribbean cricket scene to consider sport as a vehicle for Caribbean community-building in the epistemological south. In the 1960s, clubs like ‘United Social’ in Northampton started and later developed into a major social space. This is further illustrated by the fact Caribbean communities in England did locate each other due to contact or proximity with cricket clubs.

Inspired by original interviews as part of my PhD research, this paper situates diasporic Caribbean cricket community culture in Northamptonshire as a point of forming identity through social development. Beyond focuses on Black London, other stories need to be told – necessary components in troubling our island story. Cricket was another way the different islands came together – something that has remained largely unexplored in screen iterations of the Windrush Generation!