Empire Cricket Booklet

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A. B. TANCRED AND HIS BROTHERS

and lacrosse. Yet for them marriage, not a career, whether in business, the professions or in sport, was the only door open as for the majority of women of their generation. Unfortunately the talents of these Tancred women did not lie in the direction of marital success and, whether due to bad luck or judgement, they proved to be singularly unsuccessful in this department. Perhaps this was statistically no more nor less significant than the disasters to which most families could point, yet for the descendants of old Dr Tancred, the 'eccentric divine' and rumbustious member of the old Cape parliament, it came to seem by some of his female descendants as if the curse said to be laid upon him and his heirs had cast a long shadow down the generations. The Tancreds had come a long way since old Dr Tancred's death in 1867 and they had both benefited

from and contributed to South African cricket. They had lived through exciting times and not without incident on their own account. Yet what did it all represent? In spite of their Irish origins, to them England was now more than ever the mother country, cricket a civilising influence and a gateway to the emerging middle class. It was also a game that to some extent crossed the class and English/ Afrikaans-speaking divide without doing much to remove these barriers. It did nothing to encourage an inclusive society in which black and white would play alongside one another. In the end then, cricket was yet another instrument of imperialism, defining both the creed and the values by which it would rule. And if W. G. Grace was an icon of the empire, A B. Tancred and his brothers were members of its colonial team.