Mike Brearley, CLR James & Socrates

Gareth Bland
He was always thought of as superior, and even Rodney Hogg asserted that “he had a degree in people”, but Mike Brearley’s career outside of cricket is perhaps unique in the modern era. It was in 2013 that he gave a speech at the University of Glasgow that acknowledged each part of his professional existence. Applying the Socratic method of inquiry to his chosen subject, Brearley delivered a 50th anniversary address.th anniversary of CLR James’ seminal publication Beyond the Border.
After retiring from all cricket at the end of the 1982 English season, Brearley chose to move full-time into mental health and psychoanalytic work. As an undergraduate Brearley studied Classics and Moral Sciences at St John’s College, Cambridge, then began studying Philosophy at Newcastle University, a career which he combined with playing cricket for Middlesex. As his professional cricket year drew to a close, however, Brearley began training in psychoanalysis in preparation for his life beyond the game.
The context of CLR James’s work – that of a Trinidad-born Marxist intellectual and historian pursuing his love of the game while at the same time being the head of a colonial empire – was important, and doubly important given Brearley’s view of class divisions in the English domestic game. . James’ work was published in the same year, 1963, that the final game of Gentleman v. Players. With a year to go before Brearley won his county title at Middlesex, England’s home version of apartheid cricket had become a tired anachronism. In 1961, at the Scarborough Festival where the Gentleman v. Players was tense, young Brearley, only 18 years old, had come to the table without a dinner jacket. Later, before the last game of its kind, Brearley dismissed the idea of the game as “old colonies“.
Brearley’s subject, CLR James, was well aware of the contradictions inherent in his adaptation of the play which was colonialism. Such contradictions were also seen in his team selection. As Jacob scholar Paul C. Hebert wrote in his review of the Beyond the Border:
For James, choosing a team to play for required navigating a complex system of overlapping social structures where people sought to maintain whatever advantage their skin color or class status afforded them. White teams like Queen’s Park and Shamrock won’t accept James because of his race, playing for Stingo, a team of “plebeians, surgeons, tailors, candle makers, common worker, spraying the unemployed” option because it represents the decline of a middle-class man like James. Of the remaining possibilities—Maple, a team made up of the “brown-skinned middle class,” whose members try to protect the social benefits of light-skinned people, and Shannon, the “dark-skinned middle class team”—James chose Maple, a decision, “which was delayed [his] political development for years” by further alienating him from the popular masses.
With cricketer-turned-philosopher-turned-psychiatrist Brearley, his decline was exposed and reflected in the man himself. Asked about the disrespect shown to him by the Australian crowds during the 1979/80 tour of England, Brearley said “to foreigners” as the voice and background of the university he represented “the English version is that (Australian crowds) they were very suspicious“. However, as Ian Botham’s biographer Simon Wilde has noted, Brearley was a very strong figure when it came to his English counterparts. Wilde wrote:
“He (Brearley) was steady and efficient – he was a doer and a thinker. His predecessors were more distant and – perhaps helpfully in Botham’s case – from the North. His grandfather, from Heckmondwike in Yorkshire, had been an engine worker and a fast bowler; his father Horace, while maintaining the family’s love of cricket as a batsman, became a teacher in Sheffield and then London. Brearley, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy being surrounded by hard-headed Northern cricketers such as Hendrick, Miller, Randall, Willey, Boycott, Taylor, and (if family origins count) Botham, and one of the few players he failed to strike with was Phil. Edmonds, who was born in Zambia and is everywhere a bolshie colonial.”
This same independence of mind and original thinking was seen in journalist Paul Edwards, Cricket Monthly interview, noted by Brearley “He blames the British establishment but also dislikes going to north-west London and the Guardian’s academic consensus. Kerry Packer was never his style, yet he understood the motivation of the cricketers who joined the World Series Cricket and insisted that they be selected as appropriate in the England team he managed in 1977.“.
The ability to understand conflicting situations and concepts is perhaps inherent in Brearley’s training and thinking. It is also the basis of the Socrates method that Brearley used in his essay CLR James. In fact, a method that encourages self-discovery, as it involves deep questioning and discussion, the Socratic method can reveal great depths of self-knowledge and understanding, and it also teases and informs our natural contradictions. Just as Brearley was able to see the injustice of apartheid when he visited South Africa in 1964/5 and spoke out about the treatment of Basil D’Oliveira by the England selectors in 1968/69, and took moral action against both, so did Brearley. he was able to insist that his England colleagues arrested by Packer should be chosen accordingly.
The popular image of Brearley as the graying glory of English cricket is partly true, certainly given his intellectual prowess and his post-cricket career, as well as his literary output and demeanor as a captain. As Jonathan Calder notes in his Liberal England blog, “When Brearley became England captain in 1977 it was almost like putting Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn. Brearley was a liberal North London representative at a time when cricket was still organized.” It is ironic, then, and rightly contradictory that Mike Brearley’s finest hour of cricket should coincide with a man, in Ian Botham, whose political philosophy is so diametrically opposed to the cultural center of North London.
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