Empire Cricket Booklet

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JONTY WINCH AND RICHARD PARRY

have depended on it. Apart from his daughter being unaware of the origin of her grandparents, there were occasions when attention being drawn to his colour understandably hit a raw nerve. Examples include the Newlands Test in early April 1899 and the artist's caricature in 1912. Merrett points out that the Natal Almanac, in its categorisation of the population, would have considered Llewellyn ' gr udgingly perhaps, a white man, but marked as different because of his mother'sorigins'. 112 Llewellyn might have clung to this lifeline and resented it being challenged, but he must have realised that it was potentially a temporary state of affairs and could change at any time, particularly in the volatile South African context. In effect, it would become potentially unpleasant for him to play in South Africa. He could merely be grateful that he was given a few years' grace to forge a cricket career in Natal. Hendricks, as Llewellyn would no doubt have been aware, was not as fortunate. The Hendricks position was different fundamentally to that of Llewellyn because he played Malay cricket in Cape Town and for the representative Malay side against W. W. Read's English tourists in 1891/92. Llewellyn never played Indian or coloured cricket. It was a case of being not so much what they were but of being labelled by whom they associated with and of course this is one of the great truths of racism in South Africa. It was what people took you for that was important, and who accepted you defined your status. You were a coloured if enough people thought you were. It was arbitrary and subjective, which brings one to Llewellyn's paranoia about the issue. No wonder he was concerned about whisperings in corridors or selection meetings - at any minute the weight of acceptance could change, totally transforming his life. The fact that Llewellyn's colour was not an open issue and that he had become a respected cricketer at an international level made his case increasingly awkward for South African cricket. The politicised Cape administrators wished to use sport as a divisive influence in society and therefore followed the traditional view that those sportsmen who made money out of the game - the professionals from the workingclasses-wereoutof stepwithadevelopment which projected 'sport as a moral end in itself

may choose to make him the butt for his pictorial jibes'. The editorial conceded'that Llewellyn feels the matter very acutely' and that he and his family had taken it 'to heart', but thought it wrong to assume that the incident was 'a personal affront'. It said of Llewellyn, 'He's a gentleman! -that is the popular es timate of the man, and one that no amount of gentle satire in whitewash will eradicate' but claimed a problem had arisen because 'Llewellyn has spent the greater part of his life among a less robust and demon strative people than the East Lancashire folk'. 1 07 Although Llewellyn subsequently backed down on his request to sever ties with Accrington, he did leave after his contract ended at the conclusion of the 1915 season. 1 08 He returned between 1921 and 1925 but played for the most part in the Bradford (Yorkshire) and Bolton (Lancashire) Leagues until he was well over the age of 50. He was professional for Radcliffe Cricket Club from 1930 to 1932, taking 100 wickets in 1930 and 107 wickets in 1931. 109 Llewellyn lived in England until he died in Chertsey, Surrey, on 7 June, 1964, aged 87. Even then, efforts were made to create some controversy over the fact that the South African Cricket Annual took five years to acknowledge his death. Anti-apartheid literature -and subsequently several sports historians - insinuated that the delay was deliberate because Llewellyn was a player of colour. 11 0 Yet South Africans were unaware that Llewellyn was thought to be of mixed blood until Bowen's announcement in 1970. The South African Cricket Annual in the 1960s was produced by Geoff Chettle in his spare time and cannot be compared to the highly impressive publication that now ap pears. Numerous deaths of leading cricketers were overlooked during the early years of the annual, particularly those of cricketers who died overseas. 'The reason Llewellyn's death details didn't go in the annual,' says Robin Isherwood, 'is because nobody gave Chettle the death details until five years later.' 111

Conclusion

A key issue to emerge from this chapter is the appar ent determination of Llewellyn to resist being pigeon holed as coloured, and he was not surprisingly highly sensitive to this issue given that his career may well