Empire Cricket Booklet

•

ABE BAILEY AND THE IMPERIAL CRICKET CONFERENCE

the next year, Bailey resigned from his seat in the Cape parliament to organise the 'British party' in the Transvaal. As Percy Fitzpatrick reported to Lionel Phillips, Bailey told him: 'I am going to take things in hand up there and organise our Party. If one goes for the big thing, one must do it properly (observe the Rhodes impersonal), and there is no one up there doing anything.' 38 In November 1904, the Transvaal Progressive Association was founded as the 'British party', with the central platform that Britain should grant the newly conquered Transvaal Colony representative but not responsible government. In the estimate of the Progressives, the return of internal self-government, promised during the Vereeniging peace negotiations but without any fixed time frame, had to be postponed until there had been a sufficiently large influx of British settlers to ensure a British majority. Otherwise, as Bailey had been the first to warn publicly in June 1904, the Afrikaners, who could be relied upon to vote 'solid' and'endeavour to split up the British', would'wih with the ballot box what they had failed to accomplish with the Mauser'. 39 In December 1904, a smaller group of Johannesburg British formed the rival Transvaal Responsible Government Association to campaign for immediate self-government, striking up an effective alliance with the Afrikaner party, Het Volk, under Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. It was in this evolving political situation that Bailey entered the realm of newspaper proprietorship, purchasing the recently founded Johannesburg morning newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, in 1904. The paper was up for sale and Bailey was persuaded to buy it so as to prevent it from being taken over by'a small band of men of Dutch leanings'. In the following year a syndicate was set up, the South African Mails Syndicate Limited, with Bailey as the majority shareholder, to operate the Mail. In 1906, Bailey was the chief shareholder in the related syndicate that launched the Sunday Times. Nominally in control of the policy of both papers, Bailey's style was generally detached, so much so that in 1915, when the Mail absorbed its rival, the Corner House controlled Transvaal Leader, he confessed that he had preferred the views of the Leader. 4 ° Critics discerned a more direct hand whenever Bailey c. hose to exercise it. In early 1922, when the Rand Daily Mail, under the

his Karoo landholdings, Bailey reputedly claimed that the mantle of Rhodes had fallen on him, to which Sammy Marks responded that as man with some experience of second-' hand clothing, he could candidly predict that the garment would not fit. 31 The prediction proved accurate enough, with Bailey never becoming much more than a marginal fi gu re in South African political life. Jameson reckoned that he was simply out of his depth in politics, intimating in 1904 that' outside business he has not got a single idea'. 32 Very much later, Jan Smuts echoed him when he allegedly advised Tielman Roos:'If you want to do anything right in politics, do the opposite of what Bailey advises you to do.' 33 Bailey's independence, linked at times to extremist views, certainly helped to marginalise him, rendering him 'unreliable' and a 'wobbler' in the eyes of party stalwarts. 'By temperament,' L. E. Neame observed,'he was not a good party man.'34 Shortly after Bailey began his term in the Cape parlia ment as a member of the Progressive Party founded by Rhodes, John X. Merriman, parliamentary leader of the South African Party and a respected liberal, prepared a Cape petition against the temporary importation of indentured Chinese labour, proposed by Lord Milner, the British high commissioner, to solve the post-war labour problems on the Wit watersrand mines. 35 In the Cape parliament, Bailey strongly urged the case for Chinese labour on the mines, and in a letter to Merriman made his position as a Randlord absolutely clear: 'The Chinese I am against as much as anyone, but I see that they have got to come, or the country of South Africa as a whole will go bankrupt.' 36 Altogether, over 60 000 Chinese were shipped to the Witwatersrand on three-year contracts between 1904 and 1907. In early 1905, Bailey wrote to Churchill, then developing a stance in opposition to Chinese'slavery' as a recent convert to the Liberal Party in Britain, to advise that not only were the Chinese working satisfactorily, but they were adding considerably to the local economy: 'Instead of hoarding his wages the Chinaman is spending them far more freely than the Kaffir.m Following the victory of the Progressives in the 1904 Cape general election, Jameson was appointed prime minister, and Bailey made party whip. In