By Clayton Goodwin
There has been a rush of books about Sir Frank Worrell. Three have come to our attention in the last few months alone – those by Simon Lister, Vaneisa Baksh and Hilary Beckles (as reviewed here) – as well as others written in years gone by. Interest has been shown, too, in Caribbean cricket writers and broadcasters of yesteryear, with justified commendation for Tony Becca, Tony Cozier and Reds Perreira. Yet one man seems to have slipped through the net – I have seen little or no notice paid to Ernest Eytle. That interest may be due to a guilty conscience on my part as I had had no idea of his significance when we met fleetingly in the offices of Magnet News, edited by Aubrey Baynes, in the mid-1960s.
Ernest Eytle, who hailed from the then British Guiana, was a radio broadcaster, author, dramatist, lawyer, and, if Learie Constantine’s judgement is anything to go by (as it should), a fine cricketer in his own right. His post-mortem fame has become overshadowed by that of his brothers Tommy Eytle, a television actor of some celebrity, and Les Eytle, mayor of the London Borough of Lewisham. That may be due partially to his premature demise in the later-1960s not along after the publication of his book Frank Worrell in 1965 and the passing of its eponymous subject two years later.
Frank Worrell has very much the flavour of a chat between acquaintances – friends, indeed – in that while the author sets out a commentary of the cricketer’s life on the pitch, Worrell, himself, tags his own comments on to the end of the chapter. That they do not always tally, and the latter may had been contributed some time later, adds to the conversational tone. The content has topicality, too, as it was published just after Sir Frank had retired. The narrative concludes narratively a little earlier with a description of the tour to Australia in 1960-61, the cricketer’s first apotheosis, and is rather skimpy on the tour to England in 1963, his second. The format, too, shows Worrell as the man before the hagiologists got to work on shaping the cult image.
By use of contemporary opinions, controversies, rifts, newspaper commentaries and his own personal reminiscences Eytle provides an air of immediacy and us with the opportunity to read history as it is being made and not after it has been written. Little instants give flavour to the times. I was interested to read that Ben Bowers and his Band played in the hotel in which the cricketers were staying in Brisbane in 1960/61 which provided relevance to an entertainer who had prominence at West Indian social events in London later in the decade, and it showed, too, that the lives of Worrell, his colleagues and contemporaries were not bound by cricket alone.