Empire Cricket Booklet

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JONTY WINCH AND RICHARD PARRY

African cricket is referred to' and then in the next paragraph writes of the 'contrasting 1 personality of Lord Harris, who he says 'adopted on the cricket field the attitude that all cricketers are equal, regardless of colour, and this attitude became widely known and made him a much respected [governor of Bombay] 1 . 19 His treatment of Sinclair will be discussed in more detail below, but his assessment of Harris is highly debatable. As Ramachandra Guha's award-winning book, A Corner of a Foreign Field, illustrates, the Lord Harris created by Bowen is an unjustified and unfortunate myth. 'Indeed,' writes Guha, 'had [Harris] played cricket more often with or against Indians, he might have been less disliked.' Harris's racist administration made no exception for cricket: an English journalist wrote

avowed as a coloured man (there have been plenty who have not)', overstates his case. Clearly at least some contemporaries saw Llewellyn as 'coloured' but this does not equate to being 'openly avowed', nor is there any other evidence of coloured players being selected for South Africa. Bowen seemed more concerned to try to upset the white South African cricketing establishment than he was to presenting a factual analysis. But it must be said that the real truth of racism and the categorisation of individuals by arbitrary and subjective criteria inevitably makes it difficult to form hard-and-fast statements in this area. More damningly, Bowen lambasted Sinclair for a deed that 'should never be forgotten when South

Wisden described Jimmy Sinclair as 'one of the first men who made South African cricket famous'