Jackie Grant

Kenneth James Grant's son, Thomas Geddes Grant (born in Canada in 1866), founded a trading company, T. Geddes Grant, in Trinidad in 1901, and later discovered oil on a cocoa estate he had bought.

He and his wife Christina had seven boys and three girls.

George and his twin sister Janet (who were always known in the family as Jack and Jill) were the eighth and ninth children; Rolph was the tenth.

Like all his brothers, George was educated at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain.

He captained the school's cricket and soccer teams, and because of his cricket ability he was sent to Christ's College, Cambridge, unlike his older brothers and sisters, who had studied at Canadian universities.

His grandfather, Kenneth James Grant, was a Canadian Presbyterian missionary who lived in Trinidad from 1870 to 1907.

George Copeland "Jackie" Grant (9 May 1907 – 26 October 1978) was a West Indian cricketer who captained the West Indies in Test cricket between 1930 and 1935.

He was later a missionary in South Africa and Rhodesia.

Grant attended Cambridge from 1926 to 1930 to study History and qualify as a teacher, with the intention of returning to Queen's Royal College to teach.

He played first-class cricket for the university, and gained Blues in cricket and soccer.

He also met a fellow student, Ida Russell from Southern Rhodesia, daughter of Sir Fraser Russell, and they became engaged at Cambridge and later married.

A middle-order batsman and occasional fast-medium bowler, Grant played one first-class match for Cambridge University in 1928, then established himself in the side in 1929, scoring 691 runs in 14 matches at an average of 31.40.

Appointed to the Test captaincy at the age of 23, Grant led the West Indies team on its first tour of Australia in 1930–31, and later to its first series victory, when it beat England in 1934–35.

Grant went on to be a teacher in Southern Rhodesia, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada, and inspector of schools in Zanzibar.

He improved on this record in 1930, when he scored 716 runs in 11 matches at an average of 44.75, including his first century, 100 against Sussex.

In 1930, while in his final months at Cambridge, Grant was offered the captaincy of the West Indies Test team on its tour of Australia in 1930-31.

This was an unusual appointment, as not only had he not played Test cricket, he had never played first-class cricket in the West Indies.

He said: "I was younger than all of the sixteen players, save three; and most of these sixteen had already played for the West Indies, and I had not. Yet I was the captain. It could not be disputed that my white colour was a major factor in my being given the post."

At the time the West Indian authorities considered it essential that the Test team be led by a white man, despite the fact that the top players were black, such as George Headley and Learie Constantine.

The tour of Australia was not a success, the West Indies losing the first four Tests easily.

They regained some pride in the Fifth Test, when Grant's two well-timed declarations put Australia under pressure on a difficult pitch and the West Indies won in a close finish by 30 runs.

Despite their modest results, the West Indians were popular in Australia, wrote the Australian cricket historian A. G. Moyes, because they "played cricket as though it was great fun – seriously enough but with gaiety mixed with gravity".

Grant led the team's Test batting averages with 255 runs at 42.30, including 53 not out and 71 not out in the Second Test.

He was the first player in Test cricket to score two unbeaten fifties in the same match.

While teaching in Southern Rhodesia, Grant played for Rhodesia in the 1931-32 Currie Cup under the captaincy of Hamish Campbell-Rodger, helping the team to finish a close second in the competition.

He played his first first-class match in the West Indies in 1932-33, when he led one of the sides in a match to help select the team to tour England later that year.

The 1933 tour of England was another unsuccessful tour.

Of the three Tests England won two and the other was drawn.

Grant scored 1195 runs in the season at an average of 30.64, with two centuries, including his highest first-class score of 115 against an England XI at the end of the tour when he added 226 for the third wicket with Headley.

In the Tests, however, he made only 102 runs in six innings.

In the Second Test at Manchester he asked his fastest bowlers, Manny Martindale and Learie Constantine, to use bodyline tactics.

The English batsmen were unable to play it confidently – except for the captain, Douglas Jardine, who scored his only Test century and saved the English innings from collapse.

Grant said admiringly of Jardine's innings: "Never once did he flinch. Never once did he lose his nerve."

Having now seen bodyline in action, Grant did not use it again.

Grant's last Test series was the English tour of 1934-35.

West Indies won this series two to one with one Test drawn.

In the First Test, on a rain-affected pitch where all the batsmen struggled, Grant declared the second innings at 51 for 6, setting England 73 to win in the hope that the state of the pitch would defeat the English team, but they won with six wickets down after being 48 for 6.

From 1949 to 1956 he was the principal of the mission school Adams College near Durban, until the school was forcibly closed as part of the apartheid punitive education laws.

He then undertook missionary work in Rhodesia, concentrating on the education and welfare of black Africans, until the Ian Smith government refused him permission to return to the country in 1975.

George Copeland Grant was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.