Empire Cricket Booklet

BERNARD HALL, RICHARD PARRY AND JONTY WINCH

throughout the country. His tremendous enthusiasm for cricket and his hard work in building up the game were off-set by his use of sport as a means of dividing society along racial lines. Supported by Western Province cricket officials who readily agreed to link cricket to official racist ideologies and policies, a cricket policy was established in line with the segregationist strategy developed in the early 1890s by Cecil John Rhodes's Cape government. Sport and Segregation 'Class distinction held firm, in cricket as in real life,' wrote Frith, 'though it has long been a prime claim for English cricket that it has brought all breeds of men together in a pavilion. This it may have done,

tradition. There were numerous black clubs playing cricket in the latter part of the nineteenth century and their players were also prepared to travel great distances to fulfil league commitments and compete in tournaments. We have attempted to redress some of this balance by looking closely at what was loosely (if inaccurately) described as Malay cricket in Cape Town and Kimberley, which underwent its own 'Golden Age' in the 1890s, producing several players who might have been good enough for a representative South African side. Sadly they were never given the opportunity. Politics and economics have always been the key influence in the structure and development of South African cricket. The determination of the Cape

A tea interval under the pines at Newlands during a successful period for Western Province cricket in the 1890s

creating an additional mystique, but it could never bring about any real fusion of species.' 17 In South Africa, the game reflected and reinforced the political and economic as well as the obvious social cleavages and made these manifest in a very particular way. The lack of access of blacks - whether African, coloured or Indian - to the mainstream media and the general lukewarm interest of their involvement (with some particular exceptions in Kimberley) obscured the fact that black cricket has a long and rich cricketing

authorities to prevent a coloured cricketer, 'Krom' Hendricks, from gaining representative selection divided the country and is every bit as significant as the 'D'Oliveira Affair' of 1968 in South Africa's sporting history. The clique that ran Western Province sport in the 1890s and early 1900s is an important focal point of the infamous Hendricks affair. It was not a peculiarly South African case: segregation in the country's sport could be seen as 'a logical extension of the Victorian concept of order