Explained: Chinaman, the rare art of left-arm wrist spin

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Here’s a profile of the unique tribe of left-arm wrist-spinners, and the genesis and evolution of their craft.

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What is a Chinaman?

It’s a wrist-spun ball bowled by a left-arm spinner, a mirror-image of the right-armer’s leg break. The traditional delivery in this will turn in to a right-hand batsmen, and a Chinaman’s googly will spin away from a right-hander.

What is its origin?

Charlie Llewellyn aka Buck, a South African allrounder who started playing at the end of the 19th century is considered to be an early practitioner of the art.

For a long time, he was considered to be the first man to be born of white and black parents to have played for South Africa, but in 1976, his daughter took umbrage at a biography which mentioned him as a mixed-race heritage, saying her father was “pure British stock”. It is now generally accepted, however, that his mother was ‘coloured’.

Llewellyn had dark eyes and a very dark complexion, and was considered to be mixed race by many of his countrymen. Conflicting tales have emerged from his career about the racism he apparently faced: On a tour of Australia in 1910, it was reported that he was racially abused and bullied by his own team-mates and that he once had to lock himself in the bathroom — a claim that he later denied.

On the same tour, he famously knocked out the great Australian batsman Victor Trumper and Clem Hill with googlies. ‘The Star’ labelled its match report of the third Test “Llewellyn’s Match” with the strap: “Trumper beaten by a ‘Googlie’.” Beaten by two balls from Llewellyn, Trumper was dismissed by a “googlie”.

In the second Test, Llewellyn took out Hill, and ‘The Star’ screamed, “Llewellyn’s Sensation: The ball which took Hill’s wicket was a googly and completely mystified the batsman who did not attempt to play it.”

Llewellyn’s bowling was considered quirky from the start but did he also learn the art of wrist-spun googly from the originator of the googly, Bernard Bosanquet, the Englishman with whom he went on a tour of the United States and Canada at the end of 1899 season for a team selected by Ranjitsinhji?

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Wasn’t there a Chinese bowler who popularised the term Chinaman?

Ellis “Puss” Achong, a spinner from the West Indies and the first Test cricketer of Chinese ancestry who played in the 1930s and later became an umpire, certainly popularised the term.

The cricket cognoscenti, though, still wring their hands over whether he really did bowl chinaman regularly. Perhaps he used it as a variation from his usual finger-spun deliveries.

Achong did definitely feature in the most used anecdote about the delivery, though.

In the 1933 Old Trafford Test against England, he surprised the English batsman Walter Robins with a ball that broke back in sharply from the off. Folklore has it that as he walked away, Robins remarked to the umpire Joe Hardstaff Sr: “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman”.

The term Chinaman began to be more frequently attached to the wrist-spun balls from a left-arm spinner after Achong.

An associated story goes that Learie Constantine, the greatest allrounder of his time who blazed a trail by becoming the first black man to sit in the British House of Lords, was fielding that day, and overheard the Robins remark and went, “Is that the man or the ball?”

Constantine’s alleged remark can’t be proven but if anyone could have said it, it would probably be him. In 1954, he wrote the book ‘Colour Bar’ and gained entrance to the English bar that year. He returned to Trinidad and became its first High Commissioner in London. In 1964, he resigned over a bus dispute in Bristol, and the subsequent falling out with his Prime Minister. He stayed in England and became a member of the Race Relations Board and sports council, a governor of the BBC, and was later made a Peer.

Why was the ball called Chinaman?

At least two Yorkshire players who bowled left-arm wrist spin, Roy Kilner and Maurice Leyland, have had claims on inventing the term ‘Chinaman’. Kilner turned the occasional wrist-spin deliveries and Leyland certainly bowled a lot of it in the later part of his career.

In 1936, the famous cricket writer Neville Cardus attributed the invention to Kilner (more on that later). In ‘The Adelaide Advertiser’, Cardus also gave a possible answer to the mystery. “The “Chinaman” is a weird sort of “googly” invented by Roy Kilner; I can only imagine that it was described as “t’Chinaman” because of some dark Oriental powers supposed to reside in the delivery.”

Irrespective of whether it was Kilner or Leyland who originated the term, it certainly does tie up with Yorkshire.

Recently, The Guardian’s Andy Bull dug out a reference from 1934 that tellingly states that the term was considered offensive even back then by the Chinese.

“In August 1934 ‘The Yorkshire Post’ warned its readers: “The Chinese … regard the word ‘Chinaman’ as derogatory, and it should, therefore, be avoided.” “John Chinaman” was the stock caricature of a Chinese labourer, used in cartoons, sketches and songs. And in cricket, ‘The Post’ explained, the word referred to “a ball of oriental cunning.”

Was the term Chinaman used only after Achong, as popular history goes?

No. Giles Wilcock, a blogger (oldebor.wordpress) and an author of a book on the player George Macaulay, has in recent years produced extensive research, citing old newspaper articles, to conclusively establish that the term was used in Yorkshire years before the emergence of Achong.

Apart from Kilner and Leyland, Abe Waddington of Yorkshire too bowled the Chinaman. Yorkshire’s chinaman connection dates to 1910, says Wilcock, to the legendary left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes.

He quotes Rhodes talking in an interview about how he was fascinated by googlies he saw even boys bowling in streets of South Africa but couldn’t tame the beast when he tried in training.

Rhodes was an orthodox left-armer; so he must have tried the wristy Chinaman version for his googlies in practice.

A few years down the line, Rhodes would rub shoulders with the young Kilner, another orthodox left-arm spinner who began experimenting with wrist spin. There is no evidence that Rhodes passed on the Chinaman art to Kilner.

Wilcock quotes a biography of Kilner where his brother Norman claims that it was Roy who invented the name “Chinaman”.

Leyland’s Wisden obituary has mention of his association with the term.

“According to Bill Bowes, Maurice claimed he was responsible for the term ‘Chinaman’. Because his chances of bowling were few, he began bowling the occasional left-hander’s off-break instead of the normal and natural leg-break. Whenever two batsmen were difficult to shift or something different was wanted someone in the Yorkshire team would say, ‘Put on Maurice to bowl some of those Chinese things.’ Roy Kilner explained, ‘It’s foreign stuff and you can’t call it anything else.’”

When was the term first used?

It can’t be said for sure, but in a 1926 report about the fourth Ashes Test at Headingley, Bob Crockett, the Australian Test umpire, wrote in ‘The Adelaide Advertiser’:  “Kilner tried to tempt Macartney with a high, slow off-break. ‘That’s Roy’s Chinaman,’ said one professional. I asked him why, and he replied, ‘It is one he trusts to luck with.’”

Two years later in 1928 Kilner died, aged just 37, after he contracted enteric fever while coaching in India. He had served in the war, had been injured twice in Egypt and France in battles, lost his brother in the war, and visited India reluctantly on the invitation of the Maharaja of Patiala.

By the time he boarded the ship back home, he was struggling with the fever and died on reaching England. It was reported that 100,000 people lined up the streets of Yorkshire for his funeral.

Following Wilcock’s suggestion in his blog, a search of the British Newspaper Archive does throw up a few references of Leyland and Chinaman but no such luck for Kilner.

Not that it’s conclusive proof, but it does seem Leyland is the one who was associated more popularly with the term. Perhaps Kilner’s early death was a cause.

In 1929, in ‘The Manchester Guardian’, Cardus again brought up the subject of Chinaman: “He got one of his wickets with a leg-spinner —  the ball named ‘t’Chinaman’ in the Yorkshire team, and much dreaded by those who used to field close to the wicket when Waddington was attacking.”

Leyland was the one who bowled the ball more often and also claimed the term. In ‘The Hull Daily Mail’ in 1931, a match report has the reference: ““At 67 Leyland bowled … at the Pavilion end, and in his second over he disposed of Nichols, that left-hander chasing Leyland’s “Chinaman,” as he calls it – the left-hand off break, which to Nichols turned from the leg stump – and being smartly caught at the wicket by Wood.”

So, we learn that Leyland called the ball Chinaman, as did Kilner before him.

Leyland is an interesting character; he once barricaded the dressing room during a crowd invasion to save his team-mates. Angry that the play was called off due to bad light, the crowd at Ilford charged in, but Leyland stood firm at the dressing room door and even dispersed the crowd with some humour: He emerged with a Hitler moustache and talked gibberish; the crowd laughed and broke away.

It was May 1939, and four months down the line, the UK would declare war on Germany after the invasion of Poland.

Where does the term stand now?

It’s considered offensive, and the 2018 Wisden Almanack, the yellow cricketing Bible edited by Lawrence Booth, purged the term Chinaman from its lexicon. As we have seen, it was considered offensive in the 30’s itself; the world has now caught up.

Booth explained his rationale to excise the term to The Indian Express. “When the Australian cricket writer, Andrew Wu, pointed out that he found the term offensive, I felt the only respectful response was to listen to what he was saying. After that, in the pages of Wisden, we made sure left-arm wrist-spinners were called precisely that.”

What’s the quirkiest reference to Chinaman in popular culture?

In his book on spinners, ‘Twirlymen’, Amol Rajan, the BBC’s media editor, writes about a fascinating meeting involving the novelist Graham Greene.

“It’s a little-known fact that Kim Philby, the high-ranking official of British Intelligence and who worked as a spy for the Soviet Union, used nothing less than the googly to examine the merits and integrity of his contacts. In Chris Petit’s essay ‘The Stiletto of Fiction — or the Chinaman’,  we learn of a meeting between James Jesus Angleton, later the head of CIA, and Philby in London.” Graham Greene, who was drafted into MI 16 by his sister, was also present.

Rajan quotes from Petit’s essay: “Philby asked Angleton if he knew what a Chinaman was. “A left-handed googly”. Greene looked irritated: I thought the yanks weren’t supposed to know about cricket.”

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