Empire Cricket Booklet

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ORIGINS OF SEGREGATION AT THE CAPE

And as the next section will suggest, he had good political reasons to avoid black involvement in the tour. Despite the absence of black players, enthusiasm for the tour was high and Africans and coloureds attended many of the games, particularly those in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. They generally supported Warton's Englishmen. Odendaal suggests that this was because mission-educated Africans were in favour of the British ideals, which they saw themselves as looking to emulate while faced with the colonial reality, but coloured and African spectators may simply have seen the English team, and particularly its professional players, as more representative of their interests than the colonial teams drawn from the exclusive cricketing establish ment. 5 8 Interestingly, some English professionals may have had the same view - a number were noticed fraternising with well-dressed 'Malays' in the Cape Town crowd. Ironically, while coloured and African spectators may have supported the English (and not the colonial population) - a tradition that was to last throughout the colonial and apartheid years - the Warton team came under attack for its failures in the area of 'fair play'. As Jonty Winch has documented, there was considerable tension between Kimberley and Cape Town over the tour arrangements, fixtures and finances. These tensions were inflamed by Charles Finlason, the fiercely independent pro-South African and pro-Kimberley journalist and cricketer who accused the tourists of not playing fairly and even cheating. Whatever the merit of these accusations, Finlason clearly had a personal axe to grind, but the issue stemmed in part from the aristocratic pretensions of the amateurs and the breakdown of class in the colonial context, following the Australian model. 'In South Africa,' as Finlason put it, 'the people are very much Republicans and ... everyone is as good as his neighbour.' 59 This democratic perspective was better represented in Kimberley than in Cape Town, partly because of the tensions and uncertainties faced by the former following the Witwatersrand gold rush which began in 1886. Kimberley, which had been the spark in

southern Africa's economic development, was suddenly in danger of becoming a backwater, choked by the economic monopoly that Cecil Rhodes and De Beers held over the town. The gloom was deepened in the sporting arena by the desertion of the public from Kimberley's cricketing cause and epitomised by the fact that the crowd 'jeered and hooted' their own team's return game against Major Warton's 1888/89 tourists. 60 This had much to do with Kimberley's monumental display of stonewalling, scoring 187 in 134.3 (four-ball) overs in reply to the tourists' 299, and then continuing to block in the second innings through a dust storm and rain interruptions for a drab draw. Before sailing to England in 1889, Sir Donald Currie presented the Currie Cup to A. B. Tancred on behalf of Kimberley, but for the town it seemed to have come too late. All eyes had turned to the Transvaal gold fields and beyond. For Cecil Rhodes, Kimberley had served its purpose and he was dreaming of greater things, of the El Dorado to be found in what was to become Rhodesia and, in more feverish moments, of painting the map imperial pink from the Cape to Cairo. 61 For the cricketers of Kimberley, the compulsion to follow the money to the Transvaal was soon to prove irresistible. Charlie Vintcent, Kimberley's star bowler via Charterhouse, dissolved his stockbroker partnership with A. B. Tancred and headed for the Transvaal, as did the surgeon-batsman Dr Tom Dixon, and even the rabidly pro-Kimberley Finlason departed to the Klerksdorp goldfields in disgust. 62 While Kimberley's cricketers refused a challenge from the touring Natal team for the Currie Cup in the early part of the 1889/90 season, on the grounds that they had not held the trophy for a year, a full scale 'Malay' tournament was taking place in Cape Town. Although a Kimberley coloured XI toured the Cape in early 1890, winning at Robertson, Worcester, Paarl and Wellington as well as against a detachment of the North Staffordshire regiment at Fort Knokke in Cape Town, they did not participate in the tournament which featured the Cape Town Union Club, Claremont, Red Crescent from Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth.