Empire Cricket Booklet

CHAPTER SIX

A. B. Tancred and his Brothers

BERNARD TANCRED HALL 1

Introduction

The four Tancred brothers, Bernard, Claude, Vincent and Louis, all played against England (three in Test matches); Louis also played in the first Test matches against Australia. Bernard, Vincent and Louis remain the sole set of three brothers to have played in official Tests for South Africa. 2 Viewed collectively they offer a case study of a number of common strands in early colonial history: a family, profoundly ignorant of the land and its peoples, who arrived from Europe on the continent of Africa in the early nineteenth century with high hopes and unrealistic expectations; the ebb and flow of their economic fortunes as white settlers in a British colony; and their success as cricketers in an imperial game which offered social status to players and administrators while at the same time exemplifying the core values of the empire. Diamonds, gold, war and peace, all contributed to a scenario in which issues of society, class and race criss-crossed on this field of imperial dreams. If the Tancreds were representative of anything at all, this would suggest that the human race can accommodate a wide dispersion from the mean, for they were anything but average. Cricket was certainly neither a family accomplishment nor a pastime when the first Tancred arrived in South Africa in the form of theRev. DrAugustusJosephTancredwho reached Who were these Tancreds?

Grahamstown with his wife and three children in 1842. Dr Tancreµ was born in Cork in 1802 and, after his education and employment as a curate in Tipperary, Dublin, Christchurch (theninHampshire), Coggeshall (Essex), Redruth (Cornwall) and the Basford (Nottingham) Workhouse, he abandoned or was abandoned by the church, for reasons still not satisfactorily explained. He then converted, as did his wife, to the Roman Catholic faith in Belgium. Thereafter his Catholic faith remained constant, just as his employment continued to be episodic, periods of unemployment typically coinciding with the imminent birth of a child. Throughout his life he was given to wild fantasies - that he might inherit the baronetcy of the Tancreds of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, or become prime minister of the Cape, for example. The Colonial Office in London, keen to establish a farming population as a buffer between the nervous citizens of Cape Town and indigenous peoples further east, had encouraged British settlers to the Eastern Cape with a rosy picture of their future lives. Whether Tancred hoped for fame and fortune in the colonies, or whether his family just wanted to be rid of him, he arrived at the Cape with 'some of Lord Western's best sheep'. 3 He had no experience of flocks of this kind but, undeterred, immersed himself in farming, writing books, and firing off