Barbados Cricket Buckle

The Barbados Cricket Buckle is a repoussé engraving on a belt buckle of a slave playing cricket in Barbados circa 1780–1810. It is believed to be the only known image of a slave playing cricket and the oldest known image depicting cricket outside the British Isles.

"That the belt buckle depicts the slave, unmistakably in bondage, with bat in hand, suggests that the creator must have detected in their cricketing endeavours the germ of the quest for self-expression, if not liberation." Professor Clem Seecharan, Muscular Education.

The Buckle was found in a gravel spit in the River Tweed in 1979 and depicts a “well-muscled mulatto probably the offspring of a white overseer and a black slave mother” at the wicket being bowled out. He is carrying a spliceless bat and has a navy slave chain collar around his neck. To his left a wattle and daub slave hut can be seen and to the right a cane crushing windmill by an Roystonea oleracea cabbage palm tree. The engraving is believed to be portraiture although the identity of the slave is unknown. Metallurgical analysis of the Buckle by Oxford University placed its manufacture in the "early Victorian period or before".

The earliest dated reference to cricket in Barbados is 1806 however cricket had been played in “all the West Indian islands from a quite early time”. Freed slaves played cricket from mid-18th century and there are reports of plantation owners encouraging slaves to play cricket. Barbados suffered a huge hurricane in October 1780 which obliterated most palms, windmills and slave huts. The Buckle engraving predates that event. However the three stumps indicate a date after 1777 when the middle stump was added to the wicket.

Analysis by Oxford University revealed the Buckle to be made of “navy brass” (90:10 copper:zinc) British troops were, for the most part responsible for exporting cricket out of the UK and around the Empire. According to Bowen: “ Recreation had to be found for troops and sailors; cricket was an ideal source of it.” Early references to cricket matches in the press (alongside notices for slave sales) in Barbados were specific to the British military who “played at cricket as a principle stress relieving activity – one that allowed them to ‘play being at home’ whilst being away from home.”

The location of the Buckle in the River Tweed suggested that it may have been owned and originally commissioned by a member of the Hotham family whose estate was upstream. Notably William Hotham, the first baron (1736–1813) who had been stationed in Barbados 1779–1780. The Hothams were also noted cricketers known as “the lucky hits of Westminster”. In 1838 James Kelly noted the significance of “mutual confidence and familiarity” between sailors and slaves. So much so that “In the presence of the sailor the Negro feels a man.”

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