Empire Cricket Booklet

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W. G. SCHULZE

Colony's Department of Pensions and later transferred to Pretoria where he retired as the commissioner of pensions. He joined Collegians and represented the OFS at rugby and cricket, and was considered extremely unlucky not to have been picked for either the South African cricket team for the 1905/06 Test series against Pelham Warner's MCC team or the 1907 South African tour to England. He also represented the Bloemfontein hockey team, excelled in golf, and played first league tennis in Orange River Colony tournaments, where he twice reached the finals. 54 He was also an above-average marksman. In December 1909, he played for an OFS XV against Leveson Gower's MCC team and in January 1914 against an MCC team with modest success. This match signalled the end of

took to a missionary station. Seven years later, he returned to marry her. 46 Charles and Adela Hilder had eleven children, including Thomas Minter, who was born in 1875. He and his brother Frederick joined the Wakkerstroom Commando and were captured in 1900 near Volksrust, roughly 30 kilometres west of their home. 47 The Hilder brothers were shipmates of De Villiers and Kotze. Thomas was one of four English-speaking cricketers in the Boer team and a member of the selection committee. 48 After the war, he returned to Wakkerstroom. His strength became legendary, perhaps fitting his occupation as a blacksmith. He died in 1943. 49 It was said of him that neither the British nor the atrocious circumstances in which he was transported to Ceylon and his imprisonment for more than two years could kill him; it was a bee sting to the neck that eventually claimed him. 50 George Simon Sennett was one of the most talented Boer cricketers captured by the British during the war. Few of his fellow prisoners of war had so many strings to their sporting bows as young Sennett. He was born at Senekal in the OFS in 1881 where his father was a farmer, and he attended Grey College in Bloemfontein to complete his schooling. It was there that he learnt to play rugby and cricket, two of the many sporting codes in which he excelled. At the outbreak of the war, though barely eighteen, he joined the Lower Witteberg Commando. On 30 July 1900, he was among more than 4 000 Orange Free Staters under General Marthinus Prinsloo who surrendered to General Sir Archibald Hunter in the Brandwater Basin near Fouriesburg. 52 In his 'Song Book', he later described the hardships that prisoners endured while being transported by train to Cape Town before being sent to Ceylon. At nineteen, he was one of the youngest of the hut captains at Diyatalawa. Popular among his peers, he participated in a number of camp sports and represented the 'Orange Free State' team in rugby and cricket in 'inter-provincial games' against Trans vaal. 53 After the war, Sennett returned to Bloemfontein where he took up employment in the Orange River G. 5. Sennett5 1

George Sennett, probably the Orange Free State's most versatile sportsman during the early twentieth century

Sennett's first-class career that spanned more than a decade. He passed away aged 94 in 1976.

A. Smuts 55

Alexus (Alexius) Smuts was born in Ermelo in the south-east comer of the Transvaal in 1879, a region not usually associated with top-line cricketers. 56 He enlisted as a medical assistant and was captured on 4 May 1900 near Brandfort in the OFS, where