Empire Cricket Booklet

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ANDRE ODENDAAL

closely early South African cricket was interweaved with colonial and imperial politics. Empire and Cricket ends on a strong note, with a set of chapters promoting the thesis that South Africa gr ew in importance in the international relations of Empire going into the 1900s and that this was reflected in its parallel growth as a cricketing power. The concluding section neatly bookends the bio gr aphies and strong opening chapters discussed above. Heimich Schulze tells of the Boer prisoners of war who played cricket in the concentration camps in the then Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the early 1900s, adding gravy to the bones dished up before. Richard Parry and Dale Slater chronicle the remarkable story of the googly quartet which provided the platform for the rise of South Africa as a competitive international team in the 1900s, beating England for the first time in 1906 and Australia in 1911. Geoff Levett argues that the 1907 South African tour to England (the first under the designation cricket 'Springboks', following the path-breaking Springbok rugby tour the year before) was 'part of the pro gr amme to make South Africa "British"', and Wits Professor Emeritus, Bruce Murray, co-author of Caught Behind: Race and Politics in Springbok Cricket (2004), concludes with a well timed chapter on the formation of the ICC (then called the Imperial Cricket Conference) which celebrates its centenary in 2009. The ICC had its genesis in a larger than-life story in which the cajoling, self-invented Randlord, Sir Abe Bailey, bank-rolled Transvaal and South African cricket, employed and domesticated star British cricketers, sponsored tours and, finally, gate-crashed the England/ Australia party to ensure a place for South Africa at cricket's high table. All this meant that by 1910, when the new Union of South Africa came into being and the country had become a key part of the global economy, South Africa was also well positioned to play a leading part in the expansion of international cricket in the twentieth century. All in all, Empire and Cricket is a work based on solid research by a dependable team of writers and university-trained scholars. The research in late nineteenth-century newspapers is particularly impressive and highlights the possibilities that still exist in these sources for those interested in other

assume new freedoms and orthodoxies, only to be challenged in turn down the line. The contributors to this study on South Africa are predominantly British, European and Australian based - besides Parry and Winch, they are Dean Allen, Keith Booth, Bernard Hall ( gr andson of A.B. Tancred, the first South African player to carry his bat in a Test innings), Geoffrey Levett, Jeremy Lonsdale and Dale Slater - and this mix is a reason for the originality and success of this book. After the impressive innings by the four top-order batsmen, a number of bio gr aphical chapters follow. They deal with the Tancred brothers, the gr eat George Lohmann, who lies buried at Matjiesfontein, Cricket's 'Laird' James Logan, who owned Matjiesfontein, the remarkable all-round soldier-sportsman Robert Montagu Poore, C. B. 'Buck' Llewellyn, Jimmy Sinclair, the famous South African googly quartet of Reggie Schwarz, Ernie Vogler, Aubrey Faulkner and Gordon White, and the colourful Sir Abe Bailey. These chapters are filled with fascinating detail, much of which will be new to South African readers. It is not possible here to give the same depth of analysis to them as the opening chapters discussed above, but each one brings to the fore valuable new knowledge and contributes to the overall solidity of Empire and Cricket. The depth of the research is emphasised by the fact that ten of the twelve contributors already have monographs or doctoral de gr ees to their names. Thus the chapters by Booth, Allen and Lonsdale, for example, are direct outflows from long periods of research and already completed books and dissertations. Key individuals who helped cast the foundations of South African and world cricket are brought to life in new ways at a time when only specialists will remember most of them. (And this is done without recourse to the ' gr eat men who made history' approach.) The biographical essays strive to locate the subjects' lives in a social context to fit in with the concerns of the editors, and are valuable contributions because of the original research underpinning them. The detailing of connections and social networks (for example, the fact that Abe Bailey later became linked by marriage to the Churchills) is a feature of the book and can leave no one in doubt about how