Empire Cricket Booklet

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BERNARD TANCRED HALL

acrimonious letters to colonial governors, as well as attempting to start a school in Grahamstown in which he predicted he would be the outstanding teacher. However, it was not long before the reality of the colonial situation was brought home to him as to others: I shall forever recollect the 12th April 1846, that cold and dreary night I fled into Graham's Town, South Africa, where I had not one friend that I could ask for my family a temporary shelter, or the least hospitality. I procured a cold damp store, occupied for years by salt hides (the only place to be had) belonging to a Kafir trader who demanded an exorbitant and usurious rent when he found I could procure no other shelter. There, in the depth of winter, without even a fire place, amid stench and annoyance of every kind, I was compelled to remain during three months unassisted by anyone, and cared for by few, until I was able to procure the small contracted place from where I write to your Excellency amid the noise, hubbub and uproar of children. 4 As a curate in England, Tancred had battled with officialdom over the ill-treatment, as he perceived it, of the inmates of the Basford Workhouse during his brief curacy there. This concern for justice came to the fore again in the Eastern Cape in the matter of Smith v Lindsay in which he supported, perhaps instigated, the prosecution brought by Smith, a civilian wagon driver, against Colonel Lindsay who was in charge of the fort at Peddie and who ordered Smith to be flogged. The case hinged on the right of the army to flog civilians and the colonial authorities in Cape Town took this very seriously, sending Attorney-General William Porter who 'hurried from Cape Town, with pressed horses ... to throw his mantle over the gallant colonel now before you at the bar'. Porter's enthusiasm for the cause was obvious when he declared that he was 'not an advocate for flogging but an advocate who has been pretty well flogged in his time'. It was all the more surprising therefore that when the judge summed up in favour of Lindsay, the jury ignored him and found in favour of Smith. Tancred, who had been behind Smith in this action, became something of a folk hero in the area. 5

This commitment to civil rights did not however extend to 'non-white' injustices. When his wife died at Grahamstown aged 35 in 1847, he returned to Europe with the children, leaving behind assets to be used to found a hospital in which, 'in the event of your deciding to establish such an Institution ... you erect a small and separate establishment for the respectable indigent who may be afflicted with the fever, and who, though willing to embrace a decent asylum of comfort when labouring under such an awful disease, would prefer to endure the greatest privations of home, rather than be mixed up with people of colour and indiscriminate cases' . 6 The ideas and feelings of race and class were deeply embedded in colonial society, the white deserving poor almost a race apart. Leaving the children to be educated in France, Dr Tancred returned to the Cape where he married the daughter of a wealthy Clanwilliam farmer and entered the first Cape parliament where he was later described as 'that joyous adventurer'/ and was long remembered for his eccentric, perhaps unbalanced, and often drunken behaviour until his death in 1867. 8 Augustus Frederick Tancred The eldest son of Dr Tancred's first marriage, Augustus Frederick Tancred, born in London in 1834, was the only child to join his father at the Cape after leaving school in France. 9 In 1859, he was resident in Grahamstown and described as a clerk and magistrate, and living in High Street. 10 He then became secretary to the Union Boating Company in Port Elizabeth where he worshipped at St Augustine's Roman Catholic Cathedral and contributed to the cost of the 'new' organ. On 19 December 1861, he married Mary Ellen Smith who was of 1820 settler stock. In 1863, he was insolvent but, by 1870, he was honorary secretary of the Port Elizabeth Choral Society. These were the parents of 'the cricketing brothers Tancred'. Like many others at the time, they were shortly to relocate to Kimberley. Before the diamond rush began, what became Kimberley was in a region sparsely inhabited by the Griqua peoples. In 1869, a shepherd discovered