Empire Cricket Booklet

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ABE BAILEY AND THE IMPERIAL CRICKET CONFERENCE

One of the stars for South Africa was Bailey's protege, C. B. Llewellyn, the coloured all-rounder who passed for white, and who had joined Hampshire as a professional after playing two Tests for South Africa against Lord Hawke's England teams. At Bailey's instigation, Llewellyn was hired by the Wanderers Club for the 1902/03 season, ostensibly as a clerk but in reality as a coach, but, while he played in the Tests, a special meeting of SACA summoned by Western Province prohibited him from representing Transvaal in the 1903 Currie Cup tournament on the grounds that he was a professional. 54 In 1903, Bailey was the only member of the Wanderers Club committee to vote in favour of allowing 'coloured persons' to watch sports matches at the Wanderers, though he backed away from this position two years later. In 1905, as president of the Club, Bailey, later notorious for his anti-Indian views, intervened to block the request of the Transvaal Indian Cricket Union for permission to 'witness cricket matches' at the Wanderers. 55 The South African tour of England in 1904, under the captaincy of Frank Mitchell, was entirely Bailey's doing. He arranged and financed the tour, South Africa's last in the pioneer era of private venture tours, and nominated the panel of selectors, with SACA simply giving its sanction to his initiatives. 56 Like the previous two South African touring teams, Bailey's team was not accorded a Test, but as with Logan's team, the large majority of their 26 games were deemed first-class. From the playing point of view, as distinct from the financial, the tour was generally acclaimed as a success in South Africa, with the team winning thirteen of their games, losing three, drawing nine, with one, against Middlesex, tied. SACA was so pleased with the outcome of the tour that it awarded South African caps, with the lion rampant, to all members of the team. 57 In Bailey's own later estimate, the 1904 tour repre sented a turning point in South African cricket history. It was during this tour that 'Reggie' Schwarz exhibited the art of googly bowling, which he had learnt from B. J. T. Bosanquet while playing for Middlesex and which he subsequently taught to other South Africans. The famous quartet of googly bowlers - Schwarz, Gordon White, Albert 'Ernie' Vogler and

Aubrey Faulkner - were thereafter integral to South Africa's Edwardian 'golden age: not only injecting new strength into the country's cricket, but also giving it an altogether new prominence. 'It is not too much to say,' Bailey wrote in 1912 in his contribution to P. F. Warner's Imperial Cricket, 'that our claim to be first-class in an international sense has dated from the time Schwarz first came among us: 58 When the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the governing body of English cricket, undertook its first official tour of South Africa in 1905/06, and P. F. Warner's team engaged in England's first official Tests in South Africa, the googly bowlers played a central role in securing South Africa's series victory, thereby ensuring that the next South African tour of England would be a Test tour at the invitation of the MCC. South Africa was now officially recognised as competing on equal terms with England. At the outset, the viability of the 1907 tour ofEngland was threatened when a majority of the players selected indicated they might not be available, and asked after the financial provisions for the team. In February, Bailey interviewed the Johannesburg based players 'as to their going home with the team' and was so disenchanted that he 'even mooted the abandonment of the tour'. In the end he salvaged the tour by agreeing that all players would be paid an allowance of 8/- a day, or £80 in total, for out-of-pocket expenses, and to meet the allowance he arranged for an additional sum of £1 200, over and above the financial guarantees provided by the provinces, to be 'subscribed in Johannesburg', presumably much of it out of his own pocket. To the charge made by Western Province that the allowance was incompatible with the amateur status of the team, and that SACA should never have sanctioned it, the SACA chairman, John Reid of Transvaal, retorted that the precedent set by the MCC for its 1905/06 tour of South Africa was being followed and that 'no better precedent could be wished for'. 59 On the other major point of contention, Western Province won their case. The outstanding Australian batsman, J. R. M. Mackay, who had recently immigrated to the Witwatersrand, was excluded from the touring team on the ground that his selection 'would destroy the South African character of the team'. 60