Empire Cricket Booklet

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BERNARD TANCRED HALL

matches played in South Africa. He top-scored for South Africa in three of his four Test innings and carried his bat in one of them. This leaves the final tantalising question: why was sport in general, and cricket and Grace in particular, so important in the Victorian concept of empire? Other writers have expanded on this theme, and South Africa and the Tancreds do seem to illustrate the general conclusion: the transmission of values the mother country endeavoured to spread centrifugally around the world included sportsmanship,discipline, team spirit,dress code,loyalty to the club and its social life, fraternity, class, national and regional identity. The personnel to carry this message forward often originated in the army and the public schools. In this way a particular view of society,real or imagined, of the Home Counties of England, ruled by the middle and upper-middle classes,could be replicated around the world. Where they came into contact with 'non white' indigenous peoples, they generally regarded themas inferior and the 'do gooding' missionaries who took a different view they often saw as meddlesome priests out of touch with reality. As with 'non-white' people,it was all very different for the Tancred women whose disadvantage in the Victorian era was gender, not race. Sitting at home, acknowledging the Queen, they heard tales of the men who went out into the world of work and sport, including the 'high jinks', the wine, women and song after the games were over. Most women's lives remained centred on domesticity and a genteel social circle. They tended to be apolitical and the era of white-dominated government passed them by in a state of only occasional anxiety, their lives made easier by the services of black servants. Generally,as in thecases of the wives of'AF','AB' and 'LJ'Tancred, they either returned 'home' to England to live with family till they died, or stayed on in South Africa in genteel poverty. The early deaths in the male line left them economically and socially adrift,their social and economic lives having been a function of the success or otherwise of their fathers, husbands or sons. The younger generation benefited from a Roedean education, the Johannesburg colonial branch which A. B. Tancred had helped to establish. These were talented sportswomen, in cricket, tennis, swimming

failed to deliver the sort of jobs he expected, so that he had to make do with a succession of lower-level jobs in sports clubs, as secretary variously of the Driefontein Club,Driefontein Hill Club,Cason Club, Anglo Deep Club and the East Rand Proprietary Club,as well as being for a while the manager of the Polana Hotel in Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique. His understandable frustration after the years in the sporting limelight may have coloured his perception, for it may be that the promises he believed had been made to him were in fact honoured, with due allowance for his lack of working experience, skills and knowledge. For 'WG', at the heart rather than the extremities of empire, it was all very different, for through a long sporting career he devoted his greatest energies to cricket rather than medicine, continuing until long after most cricketers had put away their bats. Cricket was the source of his significant income; he was mercenary and in some ways unscrupulous. 'AB' was perhaps more patrician in his approach to the world, with traces of noblesse oblige from his aspiring Tancred ancestors. Further, Tancred was not the only 'WG' in South Africa, for Edward Ling and R. M. Poore were also briefly garlanded with the same crown. In Australia, George Giffen was sometimes known as 'the Australian W. G.'. 58 Perhaps it was just that if you wanted to pay a lavish compliment to any cricketer, you likened their skills to that of the great man? Back in the clubhouse after the close of play, there may have been many such compliments flowing with the refreshments wherever cricket was played. Yet A. B. Tancred, in spite of all these reservations, did stand head and shoulders above his South African contemporaries in his early career when he established a number of records and was widely regarded by fellow players and spectators as something special. It is possible to find good reasons why he came to be seen as the W. G. Grace of South African cricket. The scoresheets show him to be the best South African batsman of his time. He was a prolific run-scorer at club level and outstanding in the early first-class matches. The Test matches against Warton's teams were the first first-class