AFTER Rhodes and Milton unfairly excluded the outstanding fast bowler "Krom"Hendricks from the South African team for the first tour to England in 1894, Hendricks made numerous efforts to get permission to play in official club and provincial cricket over the next 10 years.
The snobbish racists, who constituted "cricket royalty" in the Cape – Milton, Castens, Bisset, Van der Bijl, Smuts, Simkins, Steytler, Nash, Reid, Neumann and Thomas – frustrated his efforts, step by mean step, until he was past his prime.
They kept him out of the Western Province team and came out with a clear club policy in 1897, which effectively ended his career: "No coloured professional or member shall be allowed to compete in the championship."
Hendricks’s champion, the SACA secretary Harry Cadwallader, who Milton dropped as tour manager, was similarly permanently banished. He was replaced as secretary of the SACA and voted out of his position as secretary-treasurer of the South African Rugby Football Board despite getting the "Football board into shape, financial and otherwise". The same cricket adversaries, close to Milton, were running rugby, including Billy Simkins (president), who had replaced Cadwallader as manager in 1894.
With his base in Cape Town destroyed, Cadwallader relocated to the Transvaal, where he died in 1897 in "such grievous need" that a public fund was set up to assist his wife and children.
The player/journalist Charles Finlason once remarked "for the next fifty years and more the cricketers of this country will have cause to feel grateful" to "Old Caddy". Yet, when Maurice Luckin – one of his successors as SACA secretary – produced the first comprehensive history of South African cricket in 1915, Cadwallader did not receive a single mention. He had been written out of history completely.
The Hendricks/Cadwallader drama demonstrated that cricket and exclusionary imperial power were knitted together from the start. From the time of the formation of SACA and the launch of the Currie Cup competition in Kimberley in the same week in April 1890, cricket was closely entwined with Rhodes’s imperial project to control the diamond fields, spread Empire and annex the land north of the Limpopo River.
Both the white national cricket and rugby associations were started in Kimberley, and the first president of the South African Rugby Board was Percy Ross Frames, who became chairman of Rhodes’s De Beers Consolidated Mines.
Rhodes employed several top cricketers at De Beers and pulled cricket firmly behind what he called the "Imperial factor". Having bought up all the mines in Kimberley and amalgamated them into what became the mightiest diamond company, and having also become prime minister of the Cape Colony, Rhodes set out to conquer and create for himself a country.
At the same time, Kimberley was abuzz with the presence of a force of 200 men called the Pioneer Column, which Rhodes put together to "open up" what we now know as Zimbabwe and to secure the mineral resources there; he believed they were perhaps bigger than those in Kimberley and Johannesburg.
The Central Hotel, where the cricketers stayed, was also where the Pioneer Column was headquartered, and the social festivities surrounding the cricketers and the pioneer columnists overlapped.
In the excitement, the star of the first Currie Cup match, Monty Bowden, the youngest ever English cricket captain, who had stayed behind in Johannesburg after the first tour in 1888/89 international, was signed up as a celebrity participant. He joined several other cricketers on the expedition.
On April 20, Bowden captained All-Comers against the combined Eclectic and Pirates cricket clubs in a "farewell" match. The Daily Independent reported, "The force will have a very powerful cricket team… It would be sad if the Currie Cup found its way to Vryburg or Elibe or some town on the Zambezi."
Milton was standing next to Rhodes when the "prime minister read the telegram" which reported the Column’s safe arrival at Fort Salisbury. He then handed the telegram to Milton with the characteristic remark, “My young men have got the country.”
After the tour shenanigans of 1894, Rhodes tried to take over the South African Republic through an armed coup known as the Jameson Raid in 1896. Cricket players were part of the raid, including the South African vice-captain Godfrey Cripps and the Hon Charles Coventry, the incompetent amateur (picked for the first English team mainly for his public-speaking abilities and because of his father’s influence), who had received a commission in the Bechuanaland Border Police.
Coventry told his men, "We are going straight to Johannesburg… It will be a short trip, everything has been arranged." But the expedition was a disaster. The wrong telegraph wires were cut and Jameson and his men were arrested near Johannesburg on January, 2 1896. Lord Hawke, captain of the 1895/6 English team, and some of his players visited the raiders in prison during the tour, eating and playing cards with them.
The cricketers carried with them considerable imperial ideological baggage and acted as ambassadors for Empire, as South Africa moved towards another war between Britain and the Boer republics.
Following the botched raid, Rhodes appointed his trusted cricket aide Milton to succeed Jameson as administrator of Rhodesia. It was observed that cricket was the principal qualification of his civil service appointees. No fewer than six of South Africa’s first 10 cricket captains became involved in the new colonial administration.
Besides Milton, they included Alf Richards, Murray Bisset, Henry Taberer, Percy Sherwell and HH Castens, the 1894 captain.
Several of them had been part of the lobby against "Krom" Hendricks. Bisset, the 1901 captain and a member of the Western Province Cricket Club, became chief justice.
Castens was Milton’s chief secretary. As acting public prosecutor, he secured the death sentence in the case of Ambuye Nehanda, the Shona spirit-medium and leader in the first Chimurenga (or war of resistance) in 1896/7 and observed executions at the infamous hanging tree in Harare.
Major-General Robert Poore, the great Hampshire and South African batsman, scored a century in between commanding troops that took women as captives and "forced the Shona into caves, from where they were eventually evicted with dynamite". Traditional literature romanticises cricket, the gentleman officer and military derring-do, but realities on the ground don't provide a pretty picture of fair play and illustrate instead how the game was spread through war and conquest by the British in southern Africa.
The cricket establishment became indistinguishable from the imperial venture and its violence and fundamental disrespect for African people. This link was nowhere better illustrated than in the subjugation of Zimbabwe in the 1890s.
● This is an extract from Cricket and Conquest, The History of South African Cricket Retold, 1795-1914. It is available from selected bookshops and www.loot.co.za.