Though he made his first West Indies squad on tour of India in late 1958, Jackie Hendriks had to wait until early 1962 to make his Test cricket match debut.

Yet, even outside of Test matches, the workload for everyone on overseas tours in those days was weighty because of the many tour games.

Hendriks recalled that in India in 1958 the West Indies played 18 matches, including five Test matches, “and then we crossed the border to Pakistan”.

And while the main Indian cities provided good accommodation, some of the other places the West Indies visited were “really rough, rough, rough”, said the 82-year-old Hendriks as he spoke to the Jamaica Observer at his New Kingston apartment.

“Some places we stayed were not in our view habitable, some of them looked like stables converted, but in the big cities everything was fine,” he said.

“In Bombay, we stayed at the Cricket Club of India where the Test matches were played in those days and we lived upstairs. It was wonderful,” he said.

As reserve wicketkeeper to the captain, Gerry Alexander, it was Hendriks’ role to play in most tour games. That allowed Hendriks to prove that he was able to read the ‘mystery’ spin of Sonny Ramadhin. The latter, predominantly an off-spin bowler, befuddled the world’s batsmen in the 1950s with a variant delivery that turned the other way. 

Hendriks said he read Ramadhin’s deliveries from the hand. He couldn’t understand why so many others struggled with the vaunted spinner who took 158 wickets in 43 Tests at 28.98 for each wicket. Ramadhin, a Trinidadian, developed a famous partnership with the Jamaican left-arm finger spinner Alf Valentine, which earned them the tag “spin twins’.

“I could never understand why people couldn’t pick him (Ramadhin),” said Hendriks. “He had two separate actions; he had the off spinner which was the normal thing, and then he bowled the leggie (leg break) from here, like so, like that,” said Hendriks, twisting his wrist to illustrate the leg break delivered from the back of the hand.

Hendriks had first spotted Ramadin’s leg break during practice at Sabina Park in 1955, ahead of a Test match. Ramadhin had come to Kingston ahead of the Test team and practised with the locals at Sabina Park as Hendriks kept wicket.

“Allan (Rae) was batting and kept hitting Ram out on to Emerald Road, and then somebody like Alty Sasso would come in and couldn’t make head or tail of him. That’s when I found out this thing that looked to me like a leg break,” said Hendriks.

He next met Ramadhin on the tour to India in 1958. “We were in the indoor nets and Gerry (Alexander) came to me and he said, ‘You better come behind the nets and watch Ram.’ I said, ‘it’s alright Gerry I don’t have to, I can read Ram.’ And he said ‘No, no, come, come.’ And so we went and he said ‘Okay, you call it now,’ and I said, ‘Off break, off break, off break, leg break, off break, off break, leg break. And he said, ‘How you do that, how you knew that? And I said, ‘Well, I kept to him in the nets at Sabina and to me, he has two different actions’. I never had any problems keeping to Ram …

“In fact, I remember one match I was playing in Australia (in 1960/61), up country, and a little man went down the wicket (against Ramadhin), played and missed and I stumped him. Somebody said ‘Ahh Jackie boy, that one is an easy one,’ and Gerry Gomez (team manager who played some tour games) said ‘you know how many wicketkeepers I have seen down the leg side and the ball passing on the offside…’”

Led by incisive fast bowling from Roy Gilchrist and Wes Hall and a tide of runs from the young batsmen, including Garfield Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Basil Butcher, Collie Smith, Joe Solomon, West Indies easily won the five-Test series 3-0. Sobers hit three centuries and Kanhai pushed on from his maiden Test century in the third Test to a six-and-a-half-hour 256, firmly establishing himself as one to watch.

A sour note came at the end of the series with the controversial eviction of Gilchrist from the tour due to bad behaviour. Yet, even with that, the West Indies went to Pakistan in early 1959 with high expectations.

There they met up on matting wickets and the highly-skilled Pakistani fast bowler Fazal Mahmood who was a master in those conditions. To Hendriks, the West Indies were also undermined by the umpires, about whom, he said, they had been warned in India.

“Gary (Sobers) was given out lbw playing forward, off his glove, the ball actually hit him on his glove; JK (Holt) was given out caught at gully, a ball that pitched about a yard in front of the gully fieldsman. Collie (Smith) was given out lbw to a ball outside his off stump. Wes (Hall) lost an appeal for lbw against Hanif (Mohammad) who made a hundred.

“The umpire told Wes, ‘Sorry, missing leg’. Then that night, Wes said, ‘Hanif boy, I thought I had you’. Hanif said, ‘No Wes, that ball was missing off stump.’ Wes said, “Missing off and missing leg that ball would have hit the hell out of the middle stump.’

“So the next Test match we played in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) at Dhaka…   Sobers was given out lbw again in his third innings and the last innings, he decided ‘I going to beat this ball,’ and he was eventually caught. When he was leaving the field, a Pakistani fielder said ‘Ahh Gary, first time out in Pakistan!’

According to Hendriks, the situation got so bad that even the normally unperturbed Collie Smith lost his cool. After being given out, incorrectly Smith thought, for the second time in the first Test, the little Jamaican responded with great anger. “I had never seen Collie go on like that,” said Hendriks. He was shouting: “I want to go home, I want to go home… I can’t stay here…,” recalled Hendriks.

It took a while, but Smith was eventually cooled down. Pakistan won the first two Tests with Fazal Mahmood taking 21 wickets in the three-Test series. West Indies bounced back to win the third Test as Kanhai hit a masterful 217.

With Alexander as captain and wicketkeeper, Hendriks played no role in the England tour of the Caribbean in 1959/60, which the tourists won 1-0. However, Hendriks was back as reserve keeper to Alexander for the Australian tour of 60/61, with the West Indies being led by Frank Worrell.

By then tragedy had struck hard. Hendriks’ close friend and fellow Jamaican Collie Smith had died following a car crash in England in September of 1959. Sobers, the driver, and Jamaican fast bowler Tom Dewdney survived.

Hendriks had known Smith since school days, the latter representing Kingston College in Sunlight Cup cricket while Hendriks played for Wolmer’s. They had roomed on the tour of India/Pakistan and kept in touch after, with Hendriks receiving a letter from Smith just weeks before his death.

“Collie was a wonderful person,” said Hendriks. In fact, Hendriks believes that Smith would have been given the captaincy of the West Indies team ahead of Sobers following the retirement of Frank Worrell in the early 1960s.

The appointment of Worrell followed an intense campaign led by the Trinidadian philosopher, historian, journalist and cricket writer C L R James. Like many others, James insisted that the time had come for a black West Indies captain (Worrell) to replace whites and high browns such as Alexander.

It’s a period Hendriks remembers with disfavour, because he believes Alexander was treated unfairly purely because of his high-brown, or near-white complexion.

“I was very angry,” recalled Hendriks, “because knowing the man Alexander, he was portrayed in a completely wrong light. I thought that Gerry was every bit worthy of his place in the side, as he proved in Australia in 1960/61 (as wicketkeeper and batsman) when he was the man of the series,” said Hendriks. 

“I found this thing about his colour very upsetting,” said Hendriks, a situation made more ironical because, as he pointed out, Alexander was not white.

“Gerry was one of my dearest friends and it hurt me very greatly to hear these people going on about the colour of his skin, after he had done such a damn good job when he got that young team in 58,” said Hendriks.  

James, in his landmark book, Beyond a Boundary, published in 1963, conceded that he had treated Alexander unfairly. But he appeared to suggest his approach was justified because of the wider considerations involving the need to appoint Worrell.

James wrote: “It was hard on Alexander. He was not a good captain and in any case he was keeping wicket, which is no place for a captain. But it was hard on me also. Alexander is a fine soccer player, he kept wicket magnificently, he is a good defensive bat and is a hard fighter. I put my scruples aside and I think that for the first, and I hope the last, time in reporting cricket I was not fair. But I was determined to rub in the faces of everybody that Frank Worrell, the last of the three W’s , was being discriminated against…”

As it turned out, Alexander went to Australia as vice-captain to Worrell and the two worked well together with Alexander scoring a century in the third test, which West Indies won. Australia won the five-Test series 2-1 with the first Test ending in an amazing tie. The series is still considered among the most competitive and exciting ever played.

Having proven his point, Alexander retired from cricket immediately after, to pay attention to his profession as a veterinarian, which, as Hendriks pointed out, had been largely neglected because of cricket.

Alexander’s exit ensured that Hendriks made his Test debut against the touring Indians at Queen’s Park Oval in February 1962. But misfortune struck immediately. Diving down the leg side to collect a wayward Wes Hall delivery on the first day of the Test match, Hendriks broke a finger. He still managed to top-score with 64 as West Indies won the Test match by 10 wickets, and eventually the Test series, 5-0. But after that first Test, Hendriks had to wait until 1965 to next represent the West Indies.

West Indies toured England in 1963, but Hendriks was unavailable due to work commitments. In 1965, against Bobby Simpson’s Australians, Hendriks played the first four Tests of the series, winning admirers with his glove work before injury again forced him out. He was batting in the first innings of the high-scoring fourth Test at Kensington Oval when he was floored by a blow to the head from a Graeme McKenzie bouncer.

According to Hendriks, the ball bounced sharply after hitting a crack. Hendriks remembers seeing the ball “go past the bat handle”.

As he tried to get his head out of the way, the ball hit him “on a bone behind my left ear”. He fell straight to ground, face down, and those looking on felt he was close to death.

And yet, according to Hendriks, he never lost consciousness. “It was painful as hell,” he said. But he clearly remembers the Australians, led by Simpson and Norman O’Neill, gathering around and lifting him off the field.

He remembers the Australians telling news photographers ‘choice words’ as the latter ran onto the field. Most frightening for Hendriks was his own lack of response when a doctor in the Kingston Club Pavillion asked him to “squeeze my hand”.

“I found that I couldn’t squeeze his hand and it took minutes for movement to return,” Hendriks recalled.

He spent four days in hospital and remembers hurrying back to bed after finding that he was “walking like a drunken sailor on rough seas”. That injury could be read as an advertisement for batting helmets.

But Hendriks pointed out that the batsmen of his day relied on their technique to avoid getting hit.

“Nowadays you see batsmen hitting the bouncer from squarely in front of their face because of the perceived protection provided by the helmet back in my day, batsmen moved out of line of the ball, watching it all the way to play the hook shot,” said Hendriks.

(To come: Hendriks discusses the final phase of his playing career, the top West Indies players of his day and the state of West Indies cricket)