Anti-racist campaigning cricket aficionado dies at 61

Mike Marqusee, an author who combined a passion for sport with an equally strong devotion to equality, died on 13th January in St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney.

Born in the USA, Mike came to the UK to go to university – and stayed. During the 1980s he lived in Haringey. Then a member of the Labour Party, he threw himself into two causes in particular: fighting the cuts which the (Labour) Council was making and the “Positive Images” campaign, which sought to present “positive images” of lesbian and gay people and lifestyles in order to counter the homophobia then prevalent in the UK. The former led to a 1,000-strong lobby of the Council (the Labour Party responded by calling the police and locking the demonstrators out of the Town Hall) and the latter led to Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “Clause 28” which made it unlawful for public bodies such as schools to “promote” lesbian and gay sexuality.

Mike left Haringey to live with his soul-mate and the love of his life, barrister Liz Davies.  They had a slightly unconventional relationship in that Mike, having finally set down a home base, was prone to wandering off – often spending several months of the year in India to follow the cricket and to write for The Nation.

The 1990s saw Mike publish two books on cricket. There was the first edition of Anyone But England: Cricket and the National Malaise which explored the relationship between England’s national summer sport and the English national identify. It went on to have two later editions. The decade also produced War Minus the Shooting: A Journey Through South Asia During Cricket’s World Cup – another exploration of the relationship between cricket and the politics of a people who revere the game, almost by way of balance.

Mike’s other sporting work was Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. He was an activist as well as an author, though – finding time to be a key part of setting up Hit Racism for Six, a campaign to stop racism in cricket which inspired others to speak out and organise against racism in football too. He wrote If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew and was very active in setting up the Stop the War Coalition to campaign against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2007 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma – a bone marrow cancer – and his life took a different turn as he worked out how to live with the disease. When he had, he wrote about that too: the personal was, again, political.

Mike was no saint. He could be wrong, the tree he barked up wasn’t always the right one – and he was arguably far too liberal in his use of the semi colon. But there was always time in his life to side with the oppressed against the undeservedly powerful, to fight for equality and to enjoy cricket. It was a short but valuable innings.