Empire Cricket Booklet

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W. G. SCHULZE

The ball was fashioned from corks salvaged from bottles, sail twine and a 'slab' of raw hide. When play commenced, it was in Market Square (now Church Square), facing the parliament building. All went well despite the quarterly Dutch Reformed Church gathering of Boers crowded into the square with their wagons and tents, when play would be 'interrupted by young Boers, who took great delight in preventing our play. This, of course, led to reprisals on our part, and we used to sally forth at night with sharp knives, cut down the tent ropes, and let the tent descend gently upon the sleeping occupants; or we would dam-up one of the four furrows running round the square, and so flood the whole of it, which generally resulted in a pitched battle between town and country, in which the former usually came off second best'. No doubt this did little to foster goodwill between English- and Dutch-speaking residents. When Sir Theophilus Shepstone annexed the Trans vaal in 1877, British regiments were stationed in Pretoria and, as happened elsewhere, sport followed the flag. The outbreak of hostilities between Boer and Briton in 1880 only temporarily interrupted the progress of cricket in Pretoria, though events took a turn for the worse with the Jameson Raid (1895-1896) and the South African War (1899-1902). Until the outbreak of war, cricket in Pretoria was disadvantaged by a shortage of grounds, a small population and limited Boer enthusiasm for this most English of games.7 Nonetheless, visiting English teams did visit Pretoria in 1892, 1896 and on the eve of war in 1899. In 1906, the MCC touring team played in Pretoria. When the visiting English cricket team under Lord Hawke went to Pretoria in 1899, Hawke recalled: 'I would not go to see President Kruger, but Mitchell and Clem Wilson did. He received them in a tall hat and frowsy frock coat at six a.m., smoking a strong pipe, but they could not persuade him to come and see us play.' 8 In the Boer team in Ceylon, four members can be positively identified as being from the Transvaal: Tommy Hilder, Alexus Smuts, Sydney Tennant, and Phillipus Oosthuizen. As far as the Orange Free State (OFS) is concerned, one early English-speaking commentator looking back on the scene remarked:

The match played by the Boer prisoners of war in Colombo has been well known since the publication of Luckin's book in 1915. 5 Reading the account of this historic event, however, leaves one with the impression that there must have been more of a story to tell, and this chapter is the outcome of fresh research into those distant events with that in mind. Its aim is four-fold: to provide a brief background to the Diyatalawa camp where the Boers were incarcerated for nearly two years and the cricket club they formed; to explore the relevant biographical background of some of the Boer cricketers who participated in the match; to describe the match itself; and, finally, to locate the game in its broader political and social context. We begin, though, with a brief look at the growth of cricket among Afrikaners in the Orange Free State and South African Republic. Cricket in the Boer Republics Two members of the Boer team in Ceylon, Pieter de Villiers and Gert Kotze, were originally from the Cape; none were from Natal; most were from the Boer republics. The development of cricket in the Cape, especially Cape Town and Kimberley, is well documented. If one considers that the Boers in Ceylon embraced cricket with much apparent enthusiasm, the question that arises is: what was the state of the game in the Boer republics before the war? Potchefstroom was the capital of the Transvaal until 1860, but it was not until 1863 that it became the home of the first cricket club in the Transvaal, and it was only in 1905 that a visiting English team, the fifth to tour South Africa, played there against Westem Transvaal. Cricket of a rudimentary sort reached Pretoria, capi tal of the Transvaal Republic, in 1870 and, if Julius Jeppe's memories are to be believed, it was far removed from the ideal type exported from England: about a score of barelegged youngsters pushed, dragged, and rolled the trunk of a willow tree through the rank vegetation of Pretoria's main street to the village carpenter's shop ... day after day the cunning way in which he (the carpenter) fashioned two bats out of that trunk ... an old Hottentot, clever with his needle, was commissioned to manufacture a ball ... 6