When the ship finally reached Kingston, West Indies and England played a timeless Test to decide the series. England amassed an almost unthinkable 849 in two and a half days. Headley’s monumental 223 in the fourth innings – ended when he was stumped on the seventh day’s play, and 10th in all – was the last meaningful act before the English had to catch the boat home, so the match was drawn.
Headley ended the series with 703 runs at an average of 87.87. The Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley would write that West Indians had found in Headley “black excellence personified in a white world and a white sport”.
In October 1930, the West Indian party for Australia and New Zealand assembled in Colon before making the long journey together across the Pacific.
The Australians would meet with success on their faster pitches by bowling at Headley’s midriff, until he altered to a more front-on stance, leaving the legendary leg-spinner Clarrie Grimmett to conclude he was the best leg-side player to whom he ever bowled to.
Headley matched Bradman for centuries in the series – two apiece – but not his weight of runs (336 versus 447). Headley was christened the ‘black Bradman’, but for the West Indian’s avowed fans, Bradman was the white Headley.
West Indies lost the series 4-1, but sailed back having won a Test in Australia for the first time. On the return journey they landed at Colon to be greeted by members a delirious thousand-strong procession.
A further 3,000 crammed into the thoroughfares, as the West Indian population of Panama downed tools to set eyes on their hero Headley.
The four Jamaicans in the party agreed to delay the last leg of their journey home to guest in an exhibition match.
Headley, as the best of the quartet – not to mention the only one black and working-class – was the real draw. It was a match played on a scorched wicket. In keeping with attempts to get the game on throughout much of the region, paraffin was poured on the wicket and set alight in an attempt to dry it.
Indeed, Headley’s mastery on wet wickets owed something to these sawdust-and-kerosene experiences in Central America, and CLR James noted his superiority to Bradman in this regard. Headley averaged 39.85, with seven fifties in 13 innings on what James claimed were “wet or uncertain” wickets while Bradman managed just 16.66 in similar conditions, with one half-century in 15 innings.
By 1934 Headley was declared by Wisden as “beyond all question the best batsman the West Indies have ever produced” and dubbed ‘Atlas’ for carrying West Indies at a time when their batting was weak and inconsistent.
He was tactically astute with a sharp cricket brain, too. Surely only the colour of his skin prevented him from being appointed full-time captain of the West Indies at a time when, more broadly, white colonial interests looked to retain influence as movements demanding independence from the British Empire started to gain traction.
Headley did become the first black man to skipper West Indies side in a one-off Test in 1948, but another 12 years would pass before Frank Worrell would be appointed captain of the team for an entire series.
“Of course I am fully aware of what my grandfather did in the game as a whole,” former England cricketer Dean Headley, the third generation of the family to play Test cricket after George and his father Ron, acknowledged.
“But his early years? I know he was born in Colon, spoke Spanish and played baseball but not much more. I met him only once when I was aged 11. But the fact there are some older people in Panama today still called George Headley shows his legacy even in a country where he is not really known.”
* This is an adapted extract from the multi-award nominated book Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion: A Cricket Odyssey Through Latin America by Timothy Abraham and James Coyne., external