Written in response to:
I enjoyed Nicholas Jose’s marvellous story of the attempt to transplant cricket in China, and of the Chinese spin bowler so wily that he became a coach at the Bradman Museum in Bowral, where he wisely adopted the name of Bruce. A friend suggested that he might have been inspired by Bruce Doolan, but I prefer to think otherwise.
It is a pity Bruce had to return to China, where, it seems, cricket has not developed. Let us hope that it does, and that following Bruce’s example, China will produce cricketers to equal or outshine their compatriots in the Caribbean, where there were, and perhaps still are, notable Chinese cricketers, such as the outstanding Trinidadian batsman Rupert Tang Choon, who in 1946 toured what is now Guyana, with a team of Chinese players, for matches against the Guyanan Chinese. The scoreboard of Chinese cricket matches was wickedly turned into a joke by The Mighty Viking in his calypso, ‘Chinese Cricket Match’. A version of this was recorded by the pioneering audio engineer, Emory Cook, at Bretton Hall, Port of Spain, in the early 1950s, and issued on Cook Sounds of Our Times LP 1180, dance calypso! It is attributed there to The Mighty Dictator (Kenny St. Bernard). In another life I used to enjoy singing this with my friend Neil Lovett. The Mighty Viking’s text can be found in Gordon Rohlehr’s Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, p. 509.
Bruce Clunies-Ross
Jystrup, Denmark