Hats and helmets have long been a tradition in cricket, but the reason for the inclusion of this particular type of headgear has little to do with the game itself.
We saw in chapter 23 that, after the Isandlwana massacre of British soldiers by Zulu forces in January 1879, alongside the regulation pith helmets of the fallen men were found cricket whites. When the British war correspondent H. Rider Haggard later visited the scene of the massacre, he ‘walked over the battlefield finding the occasional relic of the battle: crushed cartridge cases and a broken cricket stump and bail’.
But it was an earlier generation of British redcoats who brought cricket to the broiling South African sun. There is questionable evidence that the unfortunately named Charles Anguish (he later committed suicide) was the first to play cricket in the country when he took up a post with the civil service in the late 1790s.
That can’t be corroborated, but what is for certain is that a match was staged in January 1808 between officers of the 60th Regiment and Officers of the Colony. The game was advertised in the Cape Town Gazette and Africa Advertiser, and at stake was a large sum of money.
Cricket remained the preserve of the British military and civil service for the first half of the nineteenth century, and where they were posted so cricket took root. The oldest cricket club in South Africa is Port Elizabeth, founded in 1843, and within twenty years there were clubs as far afield as Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Johannesburg. Matches were staged in this decade between ‘Mother Country’ XIs and teams composed of ‘Colonial Born’ players. Again, there is evidence that the Bantus and Khoikhoi may have played cricket in the 1840s, but to all intents and purposes it remained a sport for the white settler – and the privileged white settler at that. Describing the Western Province Club, A.G. Steel writes that in the 1860s its matches were ‘very social functions, regularly enlivened by a military band, and often graced by the presence of the Governor and his staff’.
The matches may have been enlivened by bands, but on the hard, dry pitches of South Africa the batsmen got all the exhilaration they needed from the unpredictable bounce of the ball. Indeed, no first-class match would be played on turf in South Africa until the 1926/27 season, matting being considered safer.
Nonetheless, cricket continued to spread, and in 1876 the colony staged its first organised tournament – the Champions Bat Competition – at Port Elizabeth, featuring teams from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown and King William’s Town.
The tournament continued on and off for the next fourteen years until in 1889 cricket in South Africa was transformed by the arrival of an English touring party led by Aubrey Smith, later to become a Hollywood actor. The visitors played nineteen matches, winning thirteen and losing four with two unfinished. According to Wisden, ‘all the beatings were sustained in the early part of the trip, and it is no libel to say that for a time generous hospitality had a bad effect upon the cricket’.
Two Test matches were among England’s victories, the first at Port Elizabeth in March 1889, when England won by eight at Cape Town a fortnight later. England won again, but Bernard Tancred helped himself to a small slice of cricket immortality when he became the first Test batsman to carry his bat, the opener finishing unbeaten on 26 out of South Africa’s total of 47.
Two of the tourists, Smith and Monty Bowden, remained in the colony at the end of the tour, and that wasn’t the only thing that stayed in South Africa. Prior to their departure from England, the squad had been given a cup by a Scottish shipping magnate called Sir Donald Currie. His instructions were for the cup to be given to the best provincial side that the tourists played. Kimberley were handed the cup, and the following year they were challenged to a match by Transvaal. The cup – soon christened the Currie Cup – was won by Transvaal, and thereafter the cup became the jewel in the domestic crown of South African cricket.
In 1894 a team of South Africans embarked on a tour of England, playing mostly second-class fixtures, though they did beat an MCC side in which an ageing W.G. Grace was present. South Africa’s first tour overseas ‘excited little interest’ in England, according to one cricket historian. Yet even before the tourists had left the colony there was a foretaste of the trouble that lay ahead for cricket, and South Africa in particular. One of the players selected for the tour was Krom Hendricks, a fast bowler of Malay extraction considered the ‘[Fred] Spofforth of South Africa’ by the coach of Western Province. When Cecil Rhodes found out he vetoed the idea, the prime minister of the Cape Colony saying it would be ‘impolitic’ to include him in the squad.
Where the British military set foot, so cricket took root
A year later Rhodes attended a dinner and sat next to Pelham Warner, a Middlesex player and later captain of England. ‘They wanted me to send a black fellow called Hendricks to England,’ Rhodes informed Warner. Warner said he had heard Hendricks was a very fine bowler. ‘Yes, but I would not have it,’ replied Rhodes. ‘They would have expected him to throw boomerangs during the luncheon interval.’