Learie Constantine Joins Nelson — Lancashire League, 1929

Constantine had played for the West Indies in their first Test in June 1928. He had a Test record (89 runs in 6 innings at 14.83) that did not match his all-round county form. Lancashire League clubs, looking for a marquee professional, made him an offer he could not refuse.

Constantine had been recommended to Nelson by Sir Leonard Crawford, who had toured the Caribbean and seen him play. The Lancashire League at that time paid better than English county cricket and offered Sundays off — a critical concession for a player whose Test career still had to be planned around English summers. The contract was for 800 pounds a year, more than three times the average county professional's pay.

Constantine joined Nelson in April 1929. In his first season he scored 820 league runs at 40 and took 95 wickets at 9.92, helping Nelson to win the league. Across nine seasons (1929-37) Nelson won the Lancashire League seven times — the most successful run by any league club in any decade. Constantine's contract was extended four times; by 1937 he was the highest-paid cricketer in the world.

The symbolic effect was as great as the cricketing one. Constantine became the first internationally famous black cricketer to live and play in the north of England as a member of a white community. He fought a successful 1944 race-discrimination case against the Imperial Hotel in London. He was knighted in 1962, became Trinidad and Tobago's first High Commissioner to Britain, was appointed to the House of Lords in 1969, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

“I came to Nelson as a cricketer; I left it as a man.”

Constantine remained at Nelson until 1937. Other West Indian, Indian and South African Test players — Headley, Sobers, Worrell, Weekes, Wesley Hall, Wes Hall — followed his example into the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues. The migration of Caribbean professionals to England's industrial north was a foundation of West Indian Test cricket through the rest of the century.