Title: Stumped for a Title
Author: John Leslie Hendriks
Reviewed by: Garfield Myers

Wicketkeeping rarely features among the highlights when cricket’s connoisseurs wax lyrical.
Yet it is absolutely central to the glorious sport of bat and ball.
It was the element that most fascinated John Leslie “Jackie” Hendriks when he started playing, as a child in the 1940s.
In time he became among the very best. So good that, as former West Indies and Trinidad and Tobago batsman Bryan Davis tells us in the foreword to Hendriks’s book Stumped for a Title, Garfield Sobers, among cricket’s greatest, considers Hendriks the best wicketkeeper with whom he played.
Statisticians say that three times in his 20 Tests for the West Indies, Hendriks kept wicket without conceding a bye in totals of 500 runs and more. For those with knowledge of cricket that’s a stupendous achievement.
That he only played 20 Tests was largely the result of an extraordinary run of injuries; and work commitments — at a time when for many top cricketers the sport was only an amateur endeavour.
A modest man with impeccable manners, Hendriks, now 91 years old, chooses not to burden the reader with too much talk of his own achievements in the 163-page book, which took him many years to complete.
However, we do get intriguing insights of cricket in Jamaica and the West Indies seven decades ago as he summarises his trials and tribulations before being selected.
Even after making the West Indies squad on long tours of India/Pakistan and Australia in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, Hendriks had to be content with playing in between Tests, since his countryman Franz “Gerry” Alexander was captain, then vice-captain, and also wicketkeeper.
But through Hendriks’s eyes, we follow the captivating 1960/61 tour of Australia, tied Test and all. That series, with Frank Worrell as West Indies captain and Richie Benaud leading Australia, is celebrated to this day among the most exciting and closely contested sequence of Test matches ever played.
Before that, we get Hendriks’s perspective on one of the more explosive controversies in the history of West Indies cricket — the expulsion from the 1958/59 India/Pakistan tour, of the fiery Jamaican fast bowler Roy Gilchrist following a falling-out with Alexander.
Hendriks’s memories of cricket in India and Pakistan from 60-odd years ago are worth their worth in gold.
He made his Test match debut in Port of Spain against touring India in 1962 — the year of Jamaica’s political Independence from Britain — following the retirement of Alexander. His run of injuries promptly began, suffering a fractured finger behind the stumps on the first day.
Ironically, Hendriks also made his highest Test score, a dogged 64, in an eighth-wicket partnership of 70 with Wes Hall to ensure a West Indies first-innings lead of 86 runs and eventual victory by 10 wickets.
Serious concussion after being hit on the head by a Graham McKenzie bouncer during Australia’s tour of the Caribbean in 1965 may well have been career ending .
But Hendriks carried on for the regional team until he walked away in 1969 after experiencing highs and lows on tours of England in 1966 and ‘69, India in 1966/67 and Australia/New Zealand in ‘68/69.
His stories of being alongside some of the very best ever to have played the game, of leading Jamaica in the regional Shell Shield tournament in the 1960s and his later years as cricket administrator would by themselves make this book a must read.
But also, wonderful tales of his childhood and schooling provide intriguing titbits about middle to upper class Jamaica in the 1940s during World War Two and further forward to the 1950s. That was a time, as Hendriks reminds us, when the tram car was a popular mode of public transportation in Kingston.
Stumped for a Title, written by Jackie Hendriks and published by Ian Randle Publishers, is available at $3,200 per copy.