He wasn’t that tall, but his arms were long. Fast bowler wouldn’t be the first thing that popped in your mind upon seeing him, but he was fast. Faster than Wes Hall, with whom he shared the new ball. Faster, perhaps, than anyone else playing at the time.

Roy Gilchrist’s name is hardly ever mentioned in any discussion of the game’s fastest bowlers, but those who saw him in his prime all agree that he could bowl a cricket ball as quickly as any man who ever lived.

The great Sir Garfield Sobers says the Jamaican was the fastest bowler he played with or against. High praise indeed when you consider that group includes Dennis Lillee, John Snow, Fred Trueman, and Charlie Griffith. Pakistan batting great Hanif Mohammad admitted that facing Gilchrist was often a terrifying proposition.

According to legend, Gilchrist once ran in and landed a ball halfway down the pitch that smashed into the sightscreen without again bouncing. Wild in his early days he improved to the point where teammate Basil Butcher, in a 1998 interview, said many considered him the best fast bowler in the world in 1958.

But Gilchrist had a temper. He played for the West Indies between May 1957 and February 1959, and had a tumultuous relationship with the authorities for the entire time. Former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, writing in A History of West Indies Cricket, said Gilchrist was “burdened by those tensions which so often run like scars across the landscape of the personalities of people who come from poverty”.

Encumbered by his short fuse, the Jamaican lacked the self-control that is often required to remain calm in challenging situations. Whenever he felt the least bit slighted he struck out, and was not the least bit reluctant to resort to violence.

He and team Captain Gerry Alexander could not have been more different. Alexander, a decent man, was a Cambridge-educated white Jamaican who did not fully understand Gilchrist’s difficult and complex personality. A disciplinarian, his first instinct was to come down hard on any act of insubordination. This led to a rather combustible relationship.

This potentially volatile mix ignited during the West Indies’ 1958/59 tour of India and Pakistan. Gilchrist achieved his best bowling figures in the third Test of the India leg of the tour when his second innings 6/55 led the West Indies to victory. But, in a tour match against North Zone, he responded to some taunting from Swaranjit Singh, a Cambridge schoolmate of Alexander, by trying to remove his head with a few beamers.

Ignoring a command to desist, Gilchrist continued his assault. His captain had already put him on notice for refusing to apologise for cursing, and there were reports that he even pulled a knife on Alexander. The result of all this is that Gilchrist was sent home after the Indian leg of the tour and never played for the West Indies again, prematurely ending a promising career with 57 wickets at 26.68 in 13 Tests. He was just 24.

After beating India 3-0 the West Indies went on to lose 1-2 against Pakistan and many were convinced that the result would have been different had Gilchrist stayed for that leg of the trip.

Realising his value as the pace spearhead, and recognising that he “was one of them”, according to cricket historian CLR James, there was much outcry for his reinstatement by the fans as they felt the pacer would respond to more sensitive handling.

Gilchrist adored Frank Worrell. Worrell’s biographer, Ivo Tennant, reports that he would even consult Worrell before buying a shirt. The Caribbean masses therefore felt that the Barbadian would have been able to handle their explosive hero. Worrell, who succeeded Alexander after a stirring media campaign waged by James, apparently wanted Gilchrist for the 1960/61 Australian tour. But the West Indies cricket board would not budge and Gilchrist had to spend the rest of his cricketing days playing in the leagues in England, where he took a mountain of wickets. And he was even recruited to play in India in order to help the local batsmen in their quest to handle express pace.

His incendiary nature came to the fore while playing in the leagues too, and there is a report of him using a stump to physically reprimand a batsman. One acquaintance from Australia related that his neighbour was a league teammate of Gilchrist. There was at least one match, his neighbour told him, that Gilchrist is said to have played with a knife tucked into his socks.

His dear wife, Novlyn, was not spared his wrath either. In 1967 a heated argument ended with him cruelly applying a hot clothing iron to her skin, an offence for which he was given a seemingly light sentence of three months’ probation. The judge had very harsh words for the pacer: “I hate to think that English sport has sunk so far that brutes will be tolerated because they are good at games.” Gilchrist returned to Jamaica in 1985 after 26 years in England. Stricken with Parkinson’s disease he died in 2001 at the age of 67.

Some years ago I met a gentleman who I remember as Mr Sang. Around 1959 or so he played a match against one of the strongest teams in Jamaica. He was then around 18 years old and opened the batting for a team from central Jamaica. The game caused him more apprehension than usual because when he took strike it was Roy Gilchrist, off in the distance, getting ready to charge in to bowl to him.

Possibly still the fastest bowler in the world at that time, Gilchrist ran in and delivered what is called in cricket circles a loosener, and Mr Sang was able to gather himself enough to slash it for four through the offside. He was then bombarded by chatter from the close-in fielders, who told him – some apparently out of genuine concern for his well-being – that he might have acted unwisely. Gilchrist was now bound to get riled up, and by disrespecting the notoriously hot-blooded pacer by dispatching his first delivery to the boundary, he might have placed his very life in jeopardy.

All of this only served to heighten his state of unease, and he decided then and there that he would try to appear unconcerned, though he reserved the right to retreat to square leg should he perceive serious menace in any particular delivery.

He realised how futile that approach was when neither he nor the wicketkeeper saw anything of the second ball, which had to be retrieved from under the sightscreen. Still, he managed to bat for a while that day, scoring, as he remembers it, some twenty-odd runs. Moreover, he did not fall to Gilchrist.

Despite the warnings from the close-in fielders, the famous fast bowler didn’t seem intent on maiming anyone that day, operating, it seemed, mostly just above half-pace. But it was still the most hostile bowling he had ever faced and it was an encounter he would never forget.

Since that first encounter he had the good fortune of interacting with the fast bowler a number of times throughout the years, even sharing a few drinks with him on occasion. “Gilchrist,” said Mr Sang, “was one of the nicest men I’ve ever met.”

Garfield Robinson is a Jamaican living in the US who writes on cricket for a few Indian and English publications. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or garfield.v.robinson@gmail.com.