Empire Cricket Booklet

•

GEOFFREY LEVETT

work in near slavery-like conditions. 76 The Chinese were made to live in self-contained compounds and forbidden to mix with the rest of society, so that they were in effect imprisoned. In Britain this caused an uproar, especially amongst the Liberals who came to power in December 1905. The incoming government terminated any fresh arrival of Chinese labour; and was being pressed to end the contracts of those already working in South Africa and repatriate them. The campaign against the use of Chinese labour focused on the iniquitous mine owners as the cause of the problem, and that campaign continued in parliament and the press throughout 1907. 77 White labourers took advantage of the repatriation of Chinese labour to strike for better pay and conditions, and mine owners responded by employing Afrikaners from the countryside as strike-breakers. The British army was used to break up the striking miners, and again this caused uproar in Britain where British troops were perceived to be ordered by the mining magnates to put down British workers in favour of Afrikaner blacklegs. 78 The Rand mining magnates had something of an image problem at the time of the South African tour. On the day of the arrival of the South African team in London, a dinner was held at the Savoy Hotel for General Botha, the head of the government of the Transvaal, by the London representatives of the Transvaal banking, commercial and mining interests. The chair of the dinner was Lord Harris, the chairman of Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa (Limited). In his welcoming speech to Botha, Harris outlined his wish that together they could work to obtain the magnificent ideal of political union for South Africa. 79 In one sense, Harris had already achieved a union for South Africa in the cricket team that had arrived that very morning. For Lord Harris was the prime organiser of cricket as an imperial sport.He was steeped in the empire, having been born in Trinidad, the son of the British governor of the island. In 1890, he became the governor of Bombay and attempted to use cricket as a way of bonding Indians to the empire, inviting LordHawke to bring the first MCC team to play in the sub continent. To accusations that to make so much of cricket was rather frivolous for a serious politician, 'Harris replied grandly that cricket afforded a far

of reassuring the British public of the Britishness of South Africa. There were many critics of South African policy. In Britain the war had divided public opinion. There were those labelled 'Jingoes' who saw the war as a crucial demonstration of the might of the British empire, and a moral victory over the backward and 'rm-English' Boers. But the war had also stirred a great feeling of anti-imperialism among some sections of British opinion, stimulated to a great extent by the belief that it was fought by honest British soldiers on behalf of international capitalists. The most serious and intellectually rigorous critic of the war was J. A. Hobson. 7 2 Hobson was concerned with the economic consequences of the imperialism being played out in South Africa, as well as the racial character of South Africa, which he described as 'a weird mixture of civilization and savagedom: Uitlanders, Boers and Kaffirs' working under the sway of Jewish-British financiers in Johannesburg, which was 'essentially a Jewish town'. 73 Hobson's racial categorisation was a part of his wider argument against the idea of imperialism, but many other critics of the South African War based their criticisms largely upon the opinion that the British were becoming 'a janissary of the Jews' in protecting the mining industry from control by a Boer government. 74 Even Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist, was criticised for having associates who were of 'German Jew extraction'. 75 The 'South African millionaire' was a recognisable stereotype in popular culture, as well as among political commentators. In an ideology that saw British racial superiority as a justification for imperial expansion, the continuance of British interest in the Transvaal, where the 'cosmopolitan' mining magnates were perceived to be dictating government policy, was seen as an affront to that superiority. In some quarters South African society was seen as being antithetical to the British way of life. At the time of the 1907 tour, there was further con troversy over the mining magnates' use of imported Chinese labour. Owing to the scarcity of African labour in the wake of the war, the mining companies, supported by Milner, had resorted to using cheap imported Chinese labourers, who were forced to