Empire Cricket Booklet

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Abe Bailey and the Foundation of the ln,_perial Cricket Conference

BRUCE MURRAY

A Man on the Make

Introduction

Unlike the large majority of the Randlords, Bailey was South African born. The only son of an immigrant shopkeeper, Thomas Bailey, he was born in Cradock in the Eastern Cape on 6 November 1864 and named after President Lincoln. At the age of seven, following the death of his mother and clashes with his father, he ran away from home and spent a year living with an Afrikaner family, which helped give him not only knowledge of Cape Dutch or Afrikaans but also an Afrikaans accent. Thereafter he was sent to his father's native Yorkshire to commence his education, which he completed at Clewer House, a small public school near Windsor which provided a'classical and commercial education' for the sons of tradesmen and shopkeepers. He left Clewer at the age of fifteen, and after working for a while in a London textile firm, returned to the Cape in 1881 to look after his father's Queenstown shop.3 In July 1886, Bailey finally broke from his father and joined the gold rush to Barberton, only to be advised by Sammy Marks, the Transvaal entrepreneur, that everything was over there, and that he should try the new gold mining town of Johannesburg. Before leaving Barberton, Bailey, by his own account, won £144 7s 6d in a bet on a cricket game between 'Trans vaal' and 'Natal', which the Transvaal men won by one run, thanks to the fine spin bowling of Bailey. 4 In another version of the story, Bailey made his way

One of the major gaps in South African historio graphy, and the historiography of South African cricket more particularly, is any systematic account and analysis of the career and contributions of Sir Abe Bailey (1864-1940). 1 A Randlord, as the mining magnates of the Witwatersrand were known, the largest single landowner in southern Africa in his time, press baron and politician, possessing the rare distinction of sitting in the parliaments of three countries, the Cape Colony, the Transvaal Colony, and the Union of South Africa, Bailey was arguably the driving force behind South African cricket prior to the First World War in his determination to place South Africa's cricket on an equal footing with England and Australia. He was also an ardent imperialist, anxious to integrate South Africa in the British empire, and to strengthen the ties, formal and informal, between the 'white' parts of the empire. In cricket as in politics, his concern was to assert the British and imperial identities in South Africa. It was at Bailey's instigation that the Imperial Cricket Conference (ICC), forerunner of the International Cricket Council, was established in 1909 to control Test cricket, with Tests being defined as matches between representative elevens of England and Australia, England and South Africa, and Australia and South Africa. Surprisingly, little serious work has been done on the formation of the ICC. 2