Andy Ganteaume obituary

The West Indies cricketer Andy Ganteaume, who has died aged 95, had the extraordinary and unenviable record of scoring a century in his only Test match innings – and never again appearing on the international stage.

A victim of the obtuse racial politics that prevailed in postwar colonial British West Indies, his 112 against England in 1948 was deemed insufficient by the white selectors to win him a recall for the next Test – or any other during the rest of his career. That bizarre circumstance allowed him to finish with a better Test batting average than the great Sir Donald Bradman – and to achieve a far greater degree of fame as a one-hit wonder than he would likely have attained had he played more games at the highest level.

Ganteaume was selected to play in his only Test in his birthplace, Port of Spain, Trinidad, after shining in two home matches against MCC, scoring 101, 47 not out, and 90. There was much local clamour for him to be chosen, but the diminutive 27-year-old, who came from a family of mixed African and Indian descent, had the misfortune to be playing in an era when the team was still picked and captained by members of the white establishment. He was chosen to play only through the gritted teeth of the selectors and because of an injury to Jeff Stollmeyer, a white Trinidadian batsman.

Summoned to hear the news of his selection at the Queen’s Park Oval cricket ground, Ganteaume was confronted by the West Indies administrator Edgar Marsden who, Ganteaume later recalled, “could not disguise his resentment at having to announce something that he did not want to happen”.

Convinced that the establishment wanted him to fail, Ganteaume – who was never the type to kowtow to authority – resolved to make a hefty score on his debut to make himself undroppable. After England posted 363 in their first innings he got his chance. Opening with George Carew, he put on 173 for the first wicket – a West Indies record at the time – and was later joined by Frank Worrell. They progressed well together, putting on 80 as Ganteaume brought up his century to the delight of the local crowd.

The people of Trinidad greatly appreciated Ganteaume’s feat – a public subscription raised enough money to present him with an engraved silver jug and a Raleigh bicycle – but the century-maker was not selected for the next Test in British Guiana (now Guyana). No official explanation was given, but it was put about that he was simply too slow.

Ganteaume was no swashbuckler, relying on an impeccable defence and good temperament to build his scores, but he felt the accusation was unjustified. The real reason for his omission, he argued later, was to accommodate the white Barbadian John Goddard, a lesser player who had to be found a place to keep the racial “balance” and prevent the natural candidate for captaincy – the black batsman George Headley – from taking a full-time leadership role.

For Ganteaume there followed nine years in the wilderness, until, in 1957, aged 36 and well past his prime, he was called up to tour England with the West Indies. Although the sports goods manufacturer Gray-Nicolls brought out a special Andy Ganteaume autographed bat for sale in England, the visit was a frustrating one, for he was largely ignored by his aloof captain, Goddard. After scoring 92 against Glamorgan late in the tour, Ganteaume was named as 12th man for the fifth Test, which was the closest he got to playing against England again.

He featured in two more first-class games before packing up with a career batting average of 34.81 from 50 first class matches. But when Worrell finally became the West Indies captain and the white hegemony started to wilt under the weight of the Caribbean independence movements, matters began to swing in Ganteaume’s favour. In 1961 he was appointed by the Trinidadian government as a national cricket coach for schools, by 1963 he was a selector for Trinidad, and eventually he helped to pick the West Indies side for most of the period from 1974 to 1985. He was a successful manager of West Indies during their tour of England in 1974, and did the same job a decade later in Australia. A cheery conversationalist, with a good sense of humour, he also became an opinionated occasional newspaper columnist in Trinidad.

Though never an out-and-out rebel – he was a churchgoing Anglican and freemason – Ganteaume remained highly attuned to the influence of cliques and was always a fierce opponent of insularity and amateurism in West Indies cricket administration.

While he continued to feel a sense of injustice over his non-selection at Test level, he never allowed himself to become bitter. He was, however, annoyed at the post-1948 whispering campaign against him, which was so successful that he was once introduced at a function – quite wrongly – as the man who had made the slowest-ever Test century.

After a long official silence, Ganteaume wrote his autobiography, My Story: The Other Side of the Coin (2007), in which he firmly but restrainedly blamed his exile on the entrenched racial order of the time. “The aristocracy had to be kept up and the establishment boys had to have a share of the pie,” he wrote. “The welfare of West Indies cricket was incidental, and continued to be so for quite some time.”

His wife Semoy (nee Joseph), whom he married in 1950, died in 2014. He is survived by their three daughters, Jacqueline, Rachel and Deborrah.