Empire Cricket Booklet

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TWO CRICKETERS AND A WRITER

years her father was visited by 'many members of the South African touring teams and I can well remember the gr eat friendship among them all' . 10 It is a well-written letter and Mrs Anderton appeared to have a thorough knowledge of her father's cricket career. She corrected Allen on aspects of his article and provided several interesting observations which will be referred to in the course of this chapter. But it does seem that Mrs Anderton was either ignorant of, or misled, with regard to her father's back gr ound or more likely was herself unprepared to acknowledge the position. Bruce Murray and Christopher Merrett suggest that 'she painted a totally erroneous picture of her gr andparents. It is entirely in keeping with the times that an elderly woman in 1970s Britain would

hierarchy of colonial society, they were 'regarded as being of mixed race'. 12 People who knew Llewellyn generally considered that he was coloured. J. M. Kilburn wrote a chapter about his childhood heroes, Sir Lancelot of King Arthur's Court and C. B. Llewellyn of Undercliffe Cricket Club. 'For a season or two,' he recalled, 'my season in the street and on the public recreation gr ound was played as Llewellyn; not in imitation of Llewell yn , not in the assumed name of Llewellyn, but in the alternative identity, as Sir Lancelot would become alternative identity in day-dreams over a book.' After explaining his 'hero worship' in some detail, Kilburn concluded that Llewellyn 'gave an inspiration and it stayed with the picture of shirt sleeves rolled down for batting, of cap always worn for both batting and bowling, of a creaminess of flannels against whiteness of pads and boots. Llewellyn was a tidy-looking cricketer, of medium height, sturdily built; he was dark-eyed and dark skinned and South Africans called him coloured.' 13 The gr eat English all-rounder, Wilfred Rhodes, told Kilburn that he remembered Llewell yn as 'looking "like a rather sunburned English player"'. 14 Jack Newman who played in the same Hampshire side as the South African mentioned that Llewell yn had 'mixed blood'. 15 The Cape Times interviewed Herby Taylor who confirmed that the player was indeed coloured: 'Llewellyn in fact worked for my father [Dan Taylor] as a checker at Durban Point before he turned to professional cricket. At the time my father had the government contract for transporting goods off the ships into town.' 16 Jack Williams, in his book Cricket and Race, said of Llewellyn: 'Some who knew him in the Bolton area in the 1930s have said that in the 1980s he would have been taken for an Asian.' 17 In considering the evidence available, it does appear that Llewell yn was South Africa's first and probably only 'coloured' representative until Omar Hemy in November 1992. 18 No other early Test players of colour have been noted despite the work that has been carried out on players' back gr ounds by the South African Cricket Annual and the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians. Bowen's claim, that Llewell yn 'was the only man who has been openly

Major Rowland Bowen, the controversial founder and editor of Cricket Quarterly, caused an outcry when he claimed Jimmy Sinclair was Buck Llewellyn's 'chief tormentor' on the 1910/11 tour to Australia

have attempted to cover up her mixed ancestry.' 11 Merrett had earlier written a detailed piece for The Cricket Statistician in which he noted that Llewellyn had been born out of wedlock to Thomas Buck Llewellyn, who had been born in Pembroke, and that the question of Llewellyn's race rested 'on the origins of his mother, born Ann Elizabeth Rich in 1845 at Jamestown, St Helena'. He writes that from 1838 onwards 'hundreds of Saint Helenans emigrated to the Cape and some moved on to Natal' where, in the