Empire Cricket Booklet

BERNARD HALL, RICHARD PARRY AND JONTY WINCH

under arms with the British army by the end of the war'. 35 The Vereeniging peace agreement did not end Afrikaner nationalism, whilst black hopes of advancement did not materialise - 'among black people disillusionment and a feeling of betrayal crept in'. 36 The white elites - British and Afrikaans - consolidated their interests amidst calls for white unification. Although British sovereignty was proclaimed in the former republics, a grant of responsible government was established as the result of a 'strategy that had as its goal the maintenance of British supremacy in South Africa by consent and collaboration'. 37

challenged the Rest at cricket. I was captain of the S.A.L.H. side and the Rest went in first on a very rough wicket. The 'grandstand' was the 4.7 naval guns which had fired on December 15 at the Boer trenches in Colenso village. No wicket fell for half an hour and then a trooper asked if he could 'have a go'. I said 'Yes,' and added, 'Get them out.' He did, and in twenty minutes or so, he obtained all ten wickets in about six overs, all clean bowled, and the sailors and soldiers crowded around him and cheered. I asked him where he had learnt his cricket. 'In Australia, I have played in England, at Lord's.' Then I asked him his name. 'Ferris,' he replied and added, 'Turner and I once bowled England out for 62 in the second innings at Lord's'. 33 The most famous of the matches to be played during the war was that between Boer prisoners of war and the Colombo Colts in Ceylon. A game that might also have been of consequence but was never played was that which the Boers had hoped to arrange in the then Bechuanaland, when in April 1900 Sarel Eloff,commandant of the Johannesburg Commando, sent a letter to Colonel Robert Baden-Powell,stating that he had noticed in the Bulawayo Chronicle that the British in Mafeking 'play cricket on Sundays, and give concerts and balls on Sunday evenings'. He requested that his men be allowed 'to join in'. In reply, Baden-Powell requested that Eloff wait until 'the match in which we are at present engaged is over ... we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days not out against the bowling of Cronje,Snyman,Botha and Eloff,and we are having a very enjoyable game'. 34 The Aftermath: Blacks Pay the Price of White Unity At the outset of the war there was tacit agreement that the conflict would be a 'white man's war' in which 'black people would be excluded from serving as armed soldiers'. Both sides soon realised that they required assistance; the British needed 'as many as 100 000 black people' in various roles. Hence blacks became involved, controversially, in the struggle and 'probably as many as 30 000 blacks were serving

Colonel Robert Baden-Powell referred to beleaguered Mafeking in cricket terms

'There was a high price to be paid for reconciling the warring white tribes of South Africa,' wrote Pakenham, 'and the price was paid by the blacks.' 3 8 Colour remained 'a fundamental division cutting across group and class division'. It was 'a basic Afrikaner and British assumption that South Africa was a "white man's country"'. The Cape was 'the only South African state where political rights were in some meaningful way shared by people who were not white. But even in thatcolonyin1909,onlytenper cent of the registered voters were coloureds and less than five per cent were blacks. Although the Natal constitution did not specifically ban blacks, Indians and coloureds from voting,the law was administered