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Do we have a school named after Lindy Delapenha?
Lindy Delapenha: Jamaica’s greatest footballer is a man ahead of his time
The Desmond Allen Interviews
Indulge me a bit, if you will, in some joyful speculation. If Jamaicans, mere mortals though we be, could turn back the hands of time, who would dare to deny it that Lindy Delapenha would be crowned Jamaica’s greatest footballer? Or put another way, if Lindy Delapenha had chosen professional boxing instead of football, and punched as hard he kicked, even Mike Tyson might not have found the cojones to face him in the ring.
Delapenha could have been great in any of almost a dozen sports – add to football and boxing games such as cricket, tennis, athletics, hockey, gymnastics, golfing, swimming and diving. But he belonged to a different era and the Master of Time might have purposed it for him to have been the man, if a thorough search of history is undertaken, to have set the stage for large numbers of black British players to go into professional football in that cradle of world class soccer.
After a phenomenal performance as a schoolboy athlete – and Delapenha tells it with surprising modesty – he was sent to England with the hope of being signed to an English football club. He took with him the unbelievable feat of participating in 16 events over a day and a half in boys championships here, forcing the authorities to change the rules to say that no single athlete should take part in more than four events in any one championships.
While Delapenha was serving with the British armed forces in the Middle East after the Second World War, an English football scout saw his soccer artistry and powerhouse kick that was later to dominate newspaper headlines in a country not yet at the time ready to hand out accolades to blackness. If the records are to be believed, and they are not yet challenged, Delapenha is not only the first Jamaican to play pro football in England; he is the first black overseas player and only the second black man to play League football in England.
And in the way fate makes a mockery of men, he would savour the sweet taste of revenge against Arsenal, the mighty Gunners who had refused to sign him and then felt the sting of his boots when he engineered their defeat at Middlesbrough some years later.
Choosing to stay with football, he turned down an invitation to run for Britain in the 1948 Olympics and otherwise might have etched his name alongside Arthur Wint and Herb McKenley in the annals of Jamaican sports history. When he hung up his boots and returned to Jamaica in the 1960s, it was to become one of the legendary sports commentators of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC), the radio and television complex that was established by Norman Manley to reflect the national image to the young nation. With Roy Lawrence, he would take credit for bringing international football to the JBC screens, even if the audience complained bitterly that they did not want it. Put in there too the fact that he organised the JBC coverage of the biggest games to be hosted by Jamaica up to that time – the Commonwealth Games of 1966. And he had only been three weeks at the station.
He kept his head above the political fray when the JBC was transformed into a virtual political battleground during the memorable 1970s. And he stayed there until the station changed hands and his became one of the faces deemed too old to remain on television.
A man before his time
Lloyd Lindberg Delapenha was unquestionably a man before his time. Men who are mere spectators to sport should know their limitations, and the interviewer admits to a paucity of qualification to tell adequately the story of this incredible man. Sports aficionados might one day forgive this uninvited intrusion. But it is a story that begs… excruciatingly so… to be told and told now.
Josephine Delapenha probably knew from his strong cry that she had given birth to a special boy on May 27, 1927. His only sibling is sister, Monica Delapenha now living in Miami. At the time of Lindy’s birth, Josephine and her husband, Lester Delapenha were living at the corner of North and Church Streets in downtown Kingston. Both of them, middle class people, operated restaurants across from each other at Barry and Church Streets. Lindy grew up to appreciate his mother’s famous coconut ice-cream, for which people were said to have traveled from as far away as Savanna-la-Mar and Montego Bay on the other end of the island.
His father owned the popular racehorse, Master Jack, which was raced at the Knutsford Track in New Kingston where the precursor to the Caymanas Race Track was then located. Lindy has memories of growing up at Brentford Road near Cross Roads to which his parents had moved. He was six or seven and recalls living in a big front area where he used to kick a tennis ball around. If boys will be boys, he was and he remembers getting “a big buss ass” from his mother for going into his father’s old Buick motorcar and releasing the brakes. Mrs Delapenha was the disciplinarian, he says with he-who-feels-it-knows-it emphasis.
From Brentford Road, it was next to Kensington Avenue where his most vivid memory was of the 1936 hurricane, during which his backyard collapsed into a gully. Luckily, the house was spared. The boys in the area used to organise sports days and would sometimes run in spikes on the concrete! He was sent to the Central Branch Primary school which was called Convesorium and located at Church Street. He was a small boy but made the cricket team for the Matcham Cup. J K Holt who would gain notoriety for his exploits, also played at the same time, as did John Prescod Sr, father of the former commissioner of corrections.
Delapenha recalls with amusement the time when George Headley, the cricket legend and a good friend of his father’s, came to see him play at Lucas, having heard good things about the boy wonder. Calamity struck. Lindy was bowled for a duck with the very first ball that he faced!
His mother didn’t think he was doing well academically at Central Branch and moved him to St Aloysius, a school run by Catholic sisters. Here too his talent in sports led to his inclusion on the Cub Scout football team. He remembers his great disappointment when on the eve of his first match, the massive 1937 fire broke out in the immediate precincts of the school. Fanned by a brisk wind from the sea, the blaze raced from East Queen Street where it started, leaving massive destruction of property in its path, including the famous Arlington House, Broadway and the convent which housed the nuns who ran the school.
“It was the biggest fire that Jamaica had ever seen and the pall of smoke was so huge we thought all of Kingston was burning down,” he recounts.
The Wolmer’s years
In 1939, Delapenha was sent to Wolmer’s Boys, again only to excel in sports. He played Sunlight Cricket for the school with people like Allan Rae, Solo Binns, the three Dujon brothers – father and uncles of Jeffrey Dujon, the classy West Indies wicketkeeper. He remembers the fearsome Jamaica College player, Jimmy Cameron “whose wicked off spin seemed to come from out of the back of his hand and who took many wickets”. On the track, he represented Wolmer’s in the 100 yards and the 200 yards sprints at Class Three in the Championship sports, the forerunner to Boys Champs. The diminutive Delapenha also made the school’s boxing team and, inevitably, the Manning Cup football team. He played one match against St George’s at the end of the 1939/40 season at the age of 12, possibly the youngest boy to play Manning Cup. Clearly size did not matter and Delapenha, playing inside right, scored one of six goals against St George’s at the Sabina Park game.
Mrs Delapenha was visibly perplexed. Yes, Lindy had been outstanding in several sports and she liked the idea that he was so treasured by a prestigious school such as Wolmer’s. But she had sent him to school to learn the academic subjects and she would exchange his many sports trophies for ‘A’ grades any day. In any event, she was not convinced that anything would come of these many sporting achievements. She had taken him from Central Branch and sent him to St Aloysius, but that did not work. But she determined in her heart that she would try that trick one more time. “Let’s send him to boarding school – at Munro College,” she persuaded her husband.
A phenomenon at Munro
Delapenha was duly enrolled in Munro College and he instantly liked the place. He didn’t seem to mind the cold misty mornings in the high hills of Malvern which, in its own way, prepared him for the frosty climes of future England. His academic work improved too, though not to any great heights, he admits. But he did well in English Language and Literature, both of which would serve him well during the broadcasting years of the JBC.
To no one’s surprise, it would again be sports for which Lindy Delapenha would be remembered at Munro. He played cricket for the school, recalling that twice a year, George Headley used to bring down a team called the Aguilar 11 comprising past and present Jamaica cricketers. Headley could not help being impressed.
“I made two centuries – 129 and 126 – against them on two separate occasions,” says Delapenha, relishing the moment. As much as he did well in cricket, he did even better on the track. In 1945 he would do what no other school boy had ever done and force a change in the rules governing schoolboy athletics in Jamaica. In the two-day boys championships, he participated in 16 events – eight heats and eight finals – placing first in the 800 and the mile; second in the 200, 400, 110 hurdles, long jump and relays; as well as third in the 100. At the time his best performance in the 100 was 10.1 seconds.
Astounded at what they had witnessed over a day and a half, doctors at the meet insisted on testing Delapenha to determine for themselves what manner of athlete was this. They came to the conclusion that henceforth no schoolboy should participate in more than four events at any one meet, and the rules were changed forever by the Schools Association which ran the boys championships of the day.
Hmmm - What are the ISSA rules today?
The story is also told of another amazing feat involving Delapenha the year before that. Long before the DaCosta Cup, symbol of rural schoolboy football supremacy, was introduced, there used to be a competition for the Olivier Shield between the top two Manning Cup teams and the top two rural teams. In that year, these were Cornwall College and Munro College, torrid traditional rivals, and Calabar and St Jago, then known as Beckford and Smith.
The final came down to Munro and Calabar. With 10 minutes to go, the score was Calabar – 4, Munro – 1. Delapenha and his teammates got busy. In one of the most gutsy performances ever, Munro turned the tide. With one minute to go, the score was level at 4-4. And then the referee awarded a penalty to Munro. Goal! and the game ended Munro – 5, Calabar 4. It was a game that none who watched that match would ever forget.
Before Delapenha left Munro College, he was decorated in seven school colours – football, cricket, tennis, boxing, gymnastics, hockey and athletics, crowning one of the greatest schoolboy athletes of all time. In the Senior Cambridge exam, the story was different, but he managed to pass two of the five required subjects – his pet subjects English Language and Literature. “My life was a life of sports,” he explains. I spent my time trying to make myself more proficient as a sportsman. I had very little interest outside of sports.”
In Her majesty’s Service
All the time, Delapenha was being watched by the Munro sportsmaster, Ken Dunleavy, an Englishman. Dunleavy, a very perceptive man, witnessed time after time the sheer athletic prowess of this outstanding student, especially in football, noticing too that he was not as academically blessed. After thinking over the matter, he wrote a letter to Delapenha’s mother, in which he suggested that she sent him to England to seek to play club football. Mr and Mrs Delapenha discussed the suggestion. In any event, they had seen Lindy’s passion for sports and had resigned themselves to the fact that sports would be his future.
“My father drummed up the money and I went to England on a boat called the Lady Nelson, a vessel taking home wounded prisoners of war from Japan and Germany by way of Jamaica. I paid 40 pounds sterling,” he recalls.
This was November 1945. On the high seas on his way to England, Delapenha went over in his mind the plan given to him by Dunleavy who had also written a letter of introduction for him to take with him. He was to enlist in the British army and ask to be assigned to the Physical Training Corps where many sportsmen were discovered. It was also here that many athletes were placed, a strategic move to protect the sportsmen from front line battle, he says. The corps is remembered for the outstanding Blackpool outside right, Stanley Matthews. But once in England, Delapenha was placed in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. This was not the plan Dunleavy had so carefully laid out, but fate was at work.
Delapenha’s infantry was dispatched to Egypt in the Middle East where he spent 18 months. From the land of the Pharaohs, he did service in Greece. But importantly, while there, his football skills were discovered. Professional football had been suspended in England during the War. With the fighting over, England was putting its life back together and professional scouts were out looking for potential players to restart the competitions. Delapenha was sent on a physical training course in Gaza, Palestine where he placed first and a scout saw him and got excited. But the Battalion Commander decided he would not let him go, wanting him to remain to continue representing the battalion in athletics and cricket. In cricket there, he recalls playing against the great Tom Graveney of Gloucester and England, making 115 runs against his batallion. Out in Egypt, he also played hockey and participated in diving exhibitions. In one such event, he knocked out a tooth when he hit the bottom of the pool.
The Delapenha Waltz
On the eve of his departure from the army, Delapenha was playing football one day when a scout saw a flash of brilliance and gave him a letter to take to Arsenal FC. That did not work out and he went to Portsmouth near Southhampton in the south of England for a trial game with its reserved team against the Rovers. This was 1948. At half time, Manager Bob Jackson decided he had seen enough and signed Delapenha immediately. He played inside right for Portsmouth for two years, gaining a First Division League Championship medal in the 1948 season. For a time he was dogged by injuries, including a hamstring pull that sidelined him for six weeks. Today that would be remedied in half the time, he reflects. With the first team, he played one game in 1948 and eight first-team games in 1949. He also played in the reserves and ended with a total of 44 League matches for Portsmouth before being transferred to Middlesbrough for 6,000 pounds.
It is at Middlesbrough, also affectionately called Boro, where he would spend the next nine years, that Delapenha achieved legend status, scoring 90 goals in 260 League games. Newspaper headlines serving the area told the story of Delapenha’s exploits, as the first black overseas player in the English League: “Delapenha’s a floodlit dazzler”; “Boro waste all Lindy’s good work”; “The Delapenha waltz”; “Delapenha the artist”; “Delapenha was Boro’s only good forward” and the like.
In a special section on the history of the Middlesbrough Football Club, the Evening Gazette of February 16, 1991, gave back page exposure to a cartoon caricature of Delapenha and wrote: “…He had one of the hardest shots of any Boro player and scored many of his goals before the goalkeeper could move. He scored 100 goals in 300 appearances and in the 1953-54 relegation season, he was the top scorer with 18 goals.”
At Middlesbrough, Lindy earned 12 pounds a week, and got an additional two pounds for each game won and one pound for each game drawn. Among the teams beaten by Lindy’s Boro were Newcastle and Sunderland. Boro remained in the first division for his first six years, getting as close as fourth place in the League in 1954, before being relegated to second division.
Woman of his dreams
While at Boro, Delapenha met the woman of his dreams. Joan Crawford was a school teacher and a bright and beautiful woman, he says. He knew it immediately that she would be his wife. They have three children – the late Paul Delapenha who died of cancer in 1997; Linda Delapenha-Wynter and Marie-Clare Lyons, remembered for her second placing in a Miss Jamaica-World pageant in the 1980s. You’ll forgive Lindy as he dotes about grandson Bradley Wynter, “the brightest thing you’ll ever see”.
But before all that he would he would leave Boro after a string of severe injuries, to join third division team, Mansfield Town on transfer. He was now in the 30s. Mansfield about 8 miles from Nottingham in the English midlands, would come to worship Delapenha. He spent four years there in which he delighted the crowds with something they had rarely seen. And then it was time to go home.
The home-coming
He accepted a job offer from the Sugar Manufacturers’ Arthur Bonito who played cricket for Jamaica and returned home in 1964. As sports co-ordinator, his task was to organise all the sporting activities of the various sugar estates across the island – about 18 of them at the time. He also coached the several teams. The highpoint of the job, which lasted for a year, was the staging of field days for the various sports. But over the years sugar had been losing its status as king and when the industry went bad, the Sugar Manufacturers offered him a lump sum and a ticket for his passage back to England. He took the money and tore up the ticket. Delapenha was home for good.
Roy Lawrence and the JBC
Roy Lawrence was in charge of JBC Sports and invited Delapenha to join him there in 1966. Three weeks into the job as sports commentator, Delapenha was thrown in at the deep end. Lawrence went off to cover the five-test England-West Indies series in England and he found himself with the formidable task of co-ordinating JBC’s coverage of the huge Commonwealth Games, under the direction of Merrick Needham who was put in charge of the local organising committee. But Delapenha did well and when Lawrence left the station in 1968, he was appointed director of sports at JBC.
He and Lawrence took credit for bringing international football to local television, although, according to Delapenha, the viewers were terribly against it. “But we persisted. And look at the interest in overseas football today,” he exclaimed. “Nowadays you often get the foreign sports news before the local!”
At the JBC he worked at different times with people like Wycliffe Bennett, Gloria Lannaman, Tino Barovier, Hector Bernard, Dennis Hall, Leonie Forbes, Desmond Chambers, Headley Thompson whom he poached from The Gleaner, Hugh Crosskill jnr, Allie McNab, Tino Geddes, Patrick Anderson, Pat Lazarus and Gladstone Wilson, among of a host of other familiar names.
He moved to ‘Morning Time’ on television in 1987 and hosted it for 10 years, with Erica Allen, Fae Ellington and Darcy Tulloch. The JBC was sold to the RJR Group in 1997 and he was informed that he and Ellington were too old for TV, bringing his career at the corporation to an end after 30 years.
These days, he spends time playing golf and assisting his friend Donald Chong who operates Yes Golf in the Trade Centre on Red Hills Road, opting to take payment in the form of access to free equipment to play golf. He also does some commentary on horse racing for KLAS Sports Radio where the famous voice stills holds listeners, as if he were born for this thing.
Next week: Bishop Herro Blair – Messenger of peace to troubled communities
Lindy Delapenha: Jamaica’s greatest footballer is a man ahead of his time
The Desmond Allen Interviews
Indulge me a bit, if you will, in some joyful speculation. If Jamaicans, mere mortals though we be, could turn back the hands of time, who would dare to deny it that Lindy Delapenha would be crowned Jamaica’s greatest footballer? Or put another way, if Lindy Delapenha had chosen professional boxing instead of football, and punched as hard he kicked, even Mike Tyson might not have found the cojones to face him in the ring.
Delapenha could have been great in any of almost a dozen sports – add to football and boxing games such as cricket, tennis, athletics, hockey, gymnastics, golfing, swimming and diving. But he belonged to a different era and the Master of Time might have purposed it for him to have been the man, if a thorough search of history is undertaken, to have set the stage for large numbers of black British players to go into professional football in that cradle of world class soccer.
After a phenomenal performance as a schoolboy athlete – and Delapenha tells it with surprising modesty – he was sent to England with the hope of being signed to an English football club. He took with him the unbelievable feat of participating in 16 events over a day and a half in boys championships here, forcing the authorities to change the rules to say that no single athlete should take part in more than four events in any one championships.
While Delapenha was serving with the British armed forces in the Middle East after the Second World War, an English football scout saw his soccer artistry and powerhouse kick that was later to dominate newspaper headlines in a country not yet at the time ready to hand out accolades to blackness. If the records are to be believed, and they are not yet challenged, Delapenha is not only the first Jamaican to play pro football in England; he is the first black overseas player and only the second black man to play League football in England.
And in the way fate makes a mockery of men, he would savour the sweet taste of revenge against Arsenal, the mighty Gunners who had refused to sign him and then felt the sting of his boots when he engineered their defeat at Middlesbrough some years later.
Choosing to stay with football, he turned down an invitation to run for Britain in the 1948 Olympics and otherwise might have etched his name alongside Arthur Wint and Herb McKenley in the annals of Jamaican sports history. When he hung up his boots and returned to Jamaica in the 1960s, it was to become one of the legendary sports commentators of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC), the radio and television complex that was established by Norman Manley to reflect the national image to the young nation. With Roy Lawrence, he would take credit for bringing international football to the JBC screens, even if the audience complained bitterly that they did not want it. Put in there too the fact that he organised the JBC coverage of the biggest games to be hosted by Jamaica up to that time – the Commonwealth Games of 1966. And he had only been three weeks at the station.
He kept his head above the political fray when the JBC was transformed into a virtual political battleground during the memorable 1970s. And he stayed there until the station changed hands and his became one of the faces deemed too old to remain on television.
A man before his time
Lloyd Lindberg Delapenha was unquestionably a man before his time. Men who are mere spectators to sport should know their limitations, and the interviewer admits to a paucity of qualification to tell adequately the story of this incredible man. Sports aficionados might one day forgive this uninvited intrusion. But it is a story that begs… excruciatingly so… to be told and told now.
Josephine Delapenha probably knew from his strong cry that she had given birth to a special boy on May 27, 1927. His only sibling is sister, Monica Delapenha now living in Miami. At the time of Lindy’s birth, Josephine and her husband, Lester Delapenha were living at the corner of North and Church Streets in downtown Kingston. Both of them, middle class people, operated restaurants across from each other at Barry and Church Streets. Lindy grew up to appreciate his mother’s famous coconut ice-cream, for which people were said to have traveled from as far away as Savanna-la-Mar and Montego Bay on the other end of the island.
His father owned the popular racehorse, Master Jack, which was raced at the Knutsford Track in New Kingston where the precursor to the Caymanas Race Track was then located. Lindy has memories of growing up at Brentford Road near Cross Roads to which his parents had moved. He was six or seven and recalls living in a big front area where he used to kick a tennis ball around. If boys will be boys, he was and he remembers getting “a big buss ass” from his mother for going into his father’s old Buick motorcar and releasing the brakes. Mrs Delapenha was the disciplinarian, he says with he-who-feels-it-knows-it emphasis.
From Brentford Road, it was next to Kensington Avenue where his most vivid memory was of the 1936 hurricane, during which his backyard collapsed into a gully. Luckily, the house was spared. The boys in the area used to organise sports days and would sometimes run in spikes on the concrete! He was sent to the Central Branch Primary school which was called Convesorium and located at Church Street. He was a small boy but made the cricket team for the Matcham Cup. J K Holt who would gain notoriety for his exploits, also played at the same time, as did John Prescod Sr, father of the former commissioner of corrections.
Delapenha recalls with amusement the time when George Headley, the cricket legend and a good friend of his father’s, came to see him play at Lucas, having heard good things about the boy wonder. Calamity struck. Lindy was bowled for a duck with the very first ball that he faced!
His mother didn’t think he was doing well academically at Central Branch and moved him to St Aloysius, a school run by Catholic sisters. Here too his talent in sports led to his inclusion on the Cub Scout football team. He remembers his great disappointment when on the eve of his first match, the massive 1937 fire broke out in the immediate precincts of the school. Fanned by a brisk wind from the sea, the blaze raced from East Queen Street where it started, leaving massive destruction of property in its path, including the famous Arlington House, Broadway and the convent which housed the nuns who ran the school.
“It was the biggest fire that Jamaica had ever seen and the pall of smoke was so huge we thought all of Kingston was burning down,” he recounts.
The Wolmer’s years
In 1939, Delapenha was sent to Wolmer’s Boys, again only to excel in sports. He played Sunlight Cricket for the school with people like Allan Rae, Solo Binns, the three Dujon brothers – father and uncles of Jeffrey Dujon, the classy West Indies wicketkeeper. He remembers the fearsome Jamaica College player, Jimmy Cameron “whose wicked off spin seemed to come from out of the back of his hand and who took many wickets”. On the track, he represented Wolmer’s in the 100 yards and the 200 yards sprints at Class Three in the Championship sports, the forerunner to Boys Champs. The diminutive Delapenha also made the school’s boxing team and, inevitably, the Manning Cup football team. He played one match against St George’s at the end of the 1939/40 season at the age of 12, possibly the youngest boy to play Manning Cup. Clearly size did not matter and Delapenha, playing inside right, scored one of six goals against St George’s at the Sabina Park game.
Mrs Delapenha was visibly perplexed. Yes, Lindy had been outstanding in several sports and she liked the idea that he was so treasured by a prestigious school such as Wolmer’s. But she had sent him to school to learn the academic subjects and she would exchange his many sports trophies for ‘A’ grades any day. In any event, she was not convinced that anything would come of these many sporting achievements. She had taken him from Central Branch and sent him to St Aloysius, but that did not work. But she determined in her heart that she would try that trick one more time. “Let’s send him to boarding school – at Munro College,” she persuaded her husband.
A phenomenon at Munro
Delapenha was duly enrolled in Munro College and he instantly liked the place. He didn’t seem to mind the cold misty mornings in the high hills of Malvern which, in its own way, prepared him for the frosty climes of future England. His academic work improved too, though not to any great heights, he admits. But he did well in English Language and Literature, both of which would serve him well during the broadcasting years of the JBC.
To no one’s surprise, it would again be sports for which Lindy Delapenha would be remembered at Munro. He played cricket for the school, recalling that twice a year, George Headley used to bring down a team called the Aguilar 11 comprising past and present Jamaica cricketers. Headley could not help being impressed.
“I made two centuries – 129 and 126 – against them on two separate occasions,” says Delapenha, relishing the moment. As much as he did well in cricket, he did even better on the track. In 1945 he would do what no other school boy had ever done and force a change in the rules governing schoolboy athletics in Jamaica. In the two-day boys championships, he participated in 16 events – eight heats and eight finals – placing first in the 800 and the mile; second in the 200, 400, 110 hurdles, long jump and relays; as well as third in the 100. At the time his best performance in the 100 was 10.1 seconds.
Astounded at what they had witnessed over a day and a half, doctors at the meet insisted on testing Delapenha to determine for themselves what manner of athlete was this. They came to the conclusion that henceforth no schoolboy should participate in more than four events at any one meet, and the rules were changed forever by the Schools Association which ran the boys championships of the day.
Hmmm - What are the ISSA rules today?
The story is also told of another amazing feat involving Delapenha the year before that. Long before the DaCosta Cup, symbol of rural schoolboy football supremacy, was introduced, there used to be a competition for the Olivier Shield between the top two Manning Cup teams and the top two rural teams. In that year, these were Cornwall College and Munro College, torrid traditional rivals, and Calabar and St Jago, then known as Beckford and Smith.
The final came down to Munro and Calabar. With 10 minutes to go, the score was Calabar – 4, Munro – 1. Delapenha and his teammates got busy. In one of the most gutsy performances ever, Munro turned the tide. With one minute to go, the score was level at 4-4. And then the referee awarded a penalty to Munro. Goal! and the game ended Munro – 5, Calabar 4. It was a game that none who watched that match would ever forget.
Before Delapenha left Munro College, he was decorated in seven school colours – football, cricket, tennis, boxing, gymnastics, hockey and athletics, crowning one of the greatest schoolboy athletes of all time. In the Senior Cambridge exam, the story was different, but he managed to pass two of the five required subjects – his pet subjects English Language and Literature. “My life was a life of sports,” he explains. I spent my time trying to make myself more proficient as a sportsman. I had very little interest outside of sports.”
In Her majesty’s Service
All the time, Delapenha was being watched by the Munro sportsmaster, Ken Dunleavy, an Englishman. Dunleavy, a very perceptive man, witnessed time after time the sheer athletic prowess of this outstanding student, especially in football, noticing too that he was not as academically blessed. After thinking over the matter, he wrote a letter to Delapenha’s mother, in which he suggested that she sent him to England to seek to play club football. Mr and Mrs Delapenha discussed the suggestion. In any event, they had seen Lindy’s passion for sports and had resigned themselves to the fact that sports would be his future.
“My father drummed up the money and I went to England on a boat called the Lady Nelson, a vessel taking home wounded prisoners of war from Japan and Germany by way of Jamaica. I paid 40 pounds sterling,” he recalls.
This was November 1945. On the high seas on his way to England, Delapenha went over in his mind the plan given to him by Dunleavy who had also written a letter of introduction for him to take with him. He was to enlist in the British army and ask to be assigned to the Physical Training Corps where many sportsmen were discovered. It was also here that many athletes were placed, a strategic move to protect the sportsmen from front line battle, he says. The corps is remembered for the outstanding Blackpool outside right, Stanley Matthews. But once in England, Delapenha was placed in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. This was not the plan Dunleavy had so carefully laid out, but fate was at work.
Delapenha’s infantry was dispatched to Egypt in the Middle East where he spent 18 months. From the land of the Pharaohs, he did service in Greece. But importantly, while there, his football skills were discovered. Professional football had been suspended in England during the War. With the fighting over, England was putting its life back together and professional scouts were out looking for potential players to restart the competitions. Delapenha was sent on a physical training course in Gaza, Palestine where he placed first and a scout saw him and got excited. But the Battalion Commander decided he would not let him go, wanting him to remain to continue representing the battalion in athletics and cricket. In cricket there, he recalls playing against the great Tom Graveney of Gloucester and England, making 115 runs against his batallion. Out in Egypt, he also played hockey and participated in diving exhibitions. In one such event, he knocked out a tooth when he hit the bottom of the pool.
The Delapenha Waltz
On the eve of his departure from the army, Delapenha was playing football one day when a scout saw a flash of brilliance and gave him a letter to take to Arsenal FC. That did not work out and he went to Portsmouth near Southhampton in the south of England for a trial game with its reserved team against the Rovers. This was 1948. At half time, Manager Bob Jackson decided he had seen enough and signed Delapenha immediately. He played inside right for Portsmouth for two years, gaining a First Division League Championship medal in the 1948 season. For a time he was dogged by injuries, including a hamstring pull that sidelined him for six weeks. Today that would be remedied in half the time, he reflects. With the first team, he played one game in 1948 and eight first-team games in 1949. He also played in the reserves and ended with a total of 44 League matches for Portsmouth before being transferred to Middlesbrough for 6,000 pounds.
It is at Middlesbrough, also affectionately called Boro, where he would spend the next nine years, that Delapenha achieved legend status, scoring 90 goals in 260 League games. Newspaper headlines serving the area told the story of Delapenha’s exploits, as the first black overseas player in the English League: “Delapenha’s a floodlit dazzler”; “Boro waste all Lindy’s good work”; “The Delapenha waltz”; “Delapenha the artist”; “Delapenha was Boro’s only good forward” and the like.
In a special section on the history of the Middlesbrough Football Club, the Evening Gazette of February 16, 1991, gave back page exposure to a cartoon caricature of Delapenha and wrote: “…He had one of the hardest shots of any Boro player and scored many of his goals before the goalkeeper could move. He scored 100 goals in 300 appearances and in the 1953-54 relegation season, he was the top scorer with 18 goals.”
At Middlesbrough, Lindy earned 12 pounds a week, and got an additional two pounds for each game won and one pound for each game drawn. Among the teams beaten by Lindy’s Boro were Newcastle and Sunderland. Boro remained in the first division for his first six years, getting as close as fourth place in the League in 1954, before being relegated to second division.
Woman of his dreams
While at Boro, Delapenha met the woman of his dreams. Joan Crawford was a school teacher and a bright and beautiful woman, he says. He knew it immediately that she would be his wife. They have three children – the late Paul Delapenha who died of cancer in 1997; Linda Delapenha-Wynter and Marie-Clare Lyons, remembered for her second placing in a Miss Jamaica-World pageant in the 1980s. You’ll forgive Lindy as he dotes about grandson Bradley Wynter, “the brightest thing you’ll ever see”.
But before all that he would he would leave Boro after a string of severe injuries, to join third division team, Mansfield Town on transfer. He was now in the 30s. Mansfield about 8 miles from Nottingham in the English midlands, would come to worship Delapenha. He spent four years there in which he delighted the crowds with something they had rarely seen. And then it was time to go home.
The home-coming
He accepted a job offer from the Sugar Manufacturers’ Arthur Bonito who played cricket for Jamaica and returned home in 1964. As sports co-ordinator, his task was to organise all the sporting activities of the various sugar estates across the island – about 18 of them at the time. He also coached the several teams. The highpoint of the job, which lasted for a year, was the staging of field days for the various sports. But over the years sugar had been losing its status as king and when the industry went bad, the Sugar Manufacturers offered him a lump sum and a ticket for his passage back to England. He took the money and tore up the ticket. Delapenha was home for good.
Roy Lawrence and the JBC
Roy Lawrence was in charge of JBC Sports and invited Delapenha to join him there in 1966. Three weeks into the job as sports commentator, Delapenha was thrown in at the deep end. Lawrence went off to cover the five-test England-West Indies series in England and he found himself with the formidable task of co-ordinating JBC’s coverage of the huge Commonwealth Games, under the direction of Merrick Needham who was put in charge of the local organising committee. But Delapenha did well and when Lawrence left the station in 1968, he was appointed director of sports at JBC.
He and Lawrence took credit for bringing international football to local television, although, according to Delapenha, the viewers were terribly against it. “But we persisted. And look at the interest in overseas football today,” he exclaimed. “Nowadays you often get the foreign sports news before the local!”
At the JBC he worked at different times with people like Wycliffe Bennett, Gloria Lannaman, Tino Barovier, Hector Bernard, Dennis Hall, Leonie Forbes, Desmond Chambers, Headley Thompson whom he poached from The Gleaner, Hugh Crosskill jnr, Allie McNab, Tino Geddes, Patrick Anderson, Pat Lazarus and Gladstone Wilson, among of a host of other familiar names.
He moved to ‘Morning Time’ on television in 1987 and hosted it for 10 years, with Erica Allen, Fae Ellington and Darcy Tulloch. The JBC was sold to the RJR Group in 1997 and he was informed that he and Ellington were too old for TV, bringing his career at the corporation to an end after 30 years.
These days, he spends time playing golf and assisting his friend Donald Chong who operates Yes Golf in the Trade Centre on Red Hills Road, opting to take payment in the form of access to free equipment to play golf. He also does some commentary on horse racing for KLAS Sports Radio where the famous voice stills holds listeners, as if he were born for this thing.
Next week: Bishop Herro Blair – Messenger of peace to troubled communities
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