To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the West Indies winning the inaugural Cricket World Cup at Lord’s, Colin Babb’s updated and revised ‘They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun: West Indian Cricket and Its Relationship with the British-Resident Caribbean Diaspora’, launches this year. In June 1975, the West Indies beat Australia to win a thrilling Cricket World Cup final at Lord’s. This success was widely celebrated by the Caribbean diaspora in Britain.
In 1948, the Empire Windrush ship sailed from Jamaica with more than 400 Caribbean migrants seeking to create a new future in Britain. Two years later, the West Indies cricket team beat England for the first time on English soil at Lord’s. For some Caribbean migrants, and their descendants who settled in Britain from the 1950s onwards, West Indies cricket offered a source of self-esteem. Whether they were passionate cricket fans or not, cricket provided some of the growing diaspora in Britain with an opportunity to express a collective sense of West Indian identity.
‘They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun’ is a captivating book that reflects on events that influenced the development of the social and political impact of cricket on British Caribbean communities from the arrival of the Windrush onwards. Colin Babb also reflects on his life, with a dose of humour, as a second generation West Indian boy in 1970s/1980s Britain.
Colin describes himself as a ‘BBC’ — a British Born Caribbean. His family are from across the Caribbean region, including Guyana, Guadeloupe, and Barbados. He has worked for the BBC as a radio producer, an online producer, a broadcast journalist, and as a photographer in the Caribbean for education book publishers. He is a regular contributor to Caribbean Intelligence and was this year, once again, a BBC Radio Test Match Special commentary team lunchtime guest.
Colin will talk about They Gave the Crowd Plenty Fun, sign copies of the book, and there will be ’plenty fun’ with mystery prizes, quizzes, video clips and music!
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