Empire Cricket Booklet

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THE GOOGLY, GOLD AND THE EMPIRE

South African cricket and raised it into a position of equality with the Ashes contenders, and provided the platform from which the gold-mining industry could cement an imperial alliance that was to have important emotional and political ramifications in the twentieth century. But this process was complex, combining serendipity, vision and political opportunism. The process begins with Bosanquet's accidental discovery and his ability to develop it as a weapon based essentially on ele gant misdirection. Bosanquet, and his county and international captain, Plum Warner, as well as C. B. Fry, recognised its possibility for defeating Australia to recover the Ashes following the loss in 1902. The plan was success£ully implemented but had run its course, given that it relied on Bosanquet's form and his ability to continue deceiving batsmen while they in tum were working out how to combat his threat. The second phase began when Schwarz discovered that not only could he bowl the delivery, but that he could do so with control far greater than that achieved by Bosanquet. This may not have meant that he never bowled the leg-spinner (as Foster had suggested he took enough wickets without it) but as Foster points out, Schwarz's googly did not rely on deception for its success, particularly in South Africa. It was hard enough to handle even if you knew what was coming. The third element was the fact that Bosanquet's invention was brought by Schwarz to South Africa and did not, as might have happened, spawn a host of English imitators. It was taken up by bowlers who proved highly skilled in the art - White, Vogler and Faulkner - and enabled South African cricket to prove a significant cricketing force from 1905/06 onwards. The fourth element in the story arose from the central involvement of Bailey and Lord Harris in both southern African cricket and in the South African gold-mining industry which was seen the key not only to the economic future of South Africa but, thanks to the critical significance of the gold standard, of the empire as a whole. Bailey's dream was for a South African team to compete on equal terms with England and Australia, and as part of this process he had brought Frank Mitchell and later ReggieSchwarz to SouthAfricato serveas his private secretary. At the time Schwarz was a promising

cricketer, but it was serendipity, through the googly, which turned him into the key fi gu re in the birth of South Africa as a real cricketing power. Bailey could not have gu essed that this would happen. But the cards fell for him, and largely on the strength of the googly, South Africa emerged as not only a cricketing power but also, having at last caught the public imagination, as a drawcard. This allowed Bailey and Lord Harris to set in motion their plan for the triangular tournament, and of course it was the likely emergence of this contest as a credible alternative to the Ashes and the threat it posed to their position that forced Australian acquiescence, albeit after a prolonged - and ultimately successful - campaign of filibustering. Had the tournament proved successful, the momentum to make it a regular event would have been unstoppable, and the prestige of the Ashes would have been reduced accordingly. As it was, the tournament's failure; alongside South Africa's failure to sustain her own success, undermined this aspect, but the legacy of the Imperial Cricket Conference set up to administer it meant that Bailey and Lord Harris were nonetheless able to fulfil their goals: to force South Africa to cricket's top table, to discipline the Australians, and to cement the MCC s position of pre-eminence in world cricket. But there were further considerations, not just of cricket but of empire. And by 1907 these were significant. In England, the South African tourists were in part an advertisement for the success of reconstruction, and the importance of the mining industry. In some degree the strength of the public response to the googly bowlers can be seen as a product of shame and anger about the war, its conduct and its consequences. The reconstruction and all its creations, South African cricket among them, thus functioned as an ex-post-facto justification of the war, to assuage that guilt. That the war still loomed large in the minds of English commentators cannot be in doubt: many explicitly invoked the war, and almost to a man they dubbed the South Africans 'doughty fighters' or some such. Moreover the depression on the goldfields of 1906 to 1908 was not simply an issue of labour shortages - it was also about investment shortages, predicated on uncertainty about the long term profitability of the gold mines, largely because of the labour shortages. The tour did much to promote