Tales of Babe, Harry, Len and Jan – forgotten stories from SA’s sporting past

There I was, checking the complete list of Wimbledon’s men’s singles winners (sorry, All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club Gentlemen’s Singles Champions). Don’t ask me why I was doing that; even my wife has long since stopped questioning why I visit such obsessive spaces.

Each winner and runner-up has a small flag next to their name on the Wikipedia list to indicate nationality. It’s the flag of that time, unamended by subsequent history, that makes the Nazi swastika next to Gottfried von Cramm’s name very obtrusive. And unfair given that the dignified Von Cramm, who lost three consecutive Wimbledon finals in the 1930s, determinedly refused to be used as a propaganda tool by Hitler and was thrown in jail for his troubles on charges of homosexuality.

Another flag also stuck out, next to the 1921 entry. Union Jack top left, a blaze of red and a crest set in a white circle (or roundel as the heraldry types would call it) – the SA flag of the time from 1912 to the introduction of the infamous Oranje Blanje Blou in 1932.

Now, I thought I knew my tennis history, and if you’d asked me who was the first SA man to appear in a Wimbledon final, I would, not a little smugly, have said Kevin Anderson in 2018. The other Kevin, called Curren, when he was beaten in four sets by the novice Boris Becker in 1985, was flying the US flag on Wikipedia at the time. But I would have been wrong.

In 1921, our very own Brian Ivan Cobham

Norton, known for some unknown reason as Babe Norton, not only reached the Wimbledon final but held Championship point against the legendary “Big Bill” Tilden before losing 7-5 in the fifth. Tilden was the contemporary god of the men’s game, universally acknowledged as one of the alltime greats, who also copped a conviction for homosexuality later in life. One Tilden biographer describes that 1921 final as “the strangest match in Wimbledon history”.

“During the course of play, Tilden employed his drop shot, a stroke he had not invented but had perfected and was the first to use in major competitions.

“The British crowd started booing him, finding the shot unsportsmanlike. Tilden’s opponent, Norton, infatuated with the great Tilden, became as angry with the crowd as Tilden did.

“Down two sets, it looked as though Tilden would not regain his title. But suddenly he came back, or as some observers mention, Norton began to throw points his way.”

Curiously, our Babe remains one of only two players in tennis history to have held a Championship point and never gone on to win a major title. The other is Argentine Guillermo Coria at the 2004 French Open.

Norton was born on Robben Island, of all places, in 1899. (As a digression – a later, far more famous and involuntary resident of that island, Robert Sobukwe, was described as a very strong tennis player in his youth in Graaff-Reinet.)

Norton died in faraway California in 1956. He competed for SA at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, and a crisp photo from the time shows a very fresh-faced, Brylcreemed kid in an ill-fitting Springbok blazer.

Norton lost there in the first round, but his compatriot Louis Raymond won gold. Yet another South African, Charles Winslow, took bronze to add to the two golds he had won in Stockholm in 1912.

And further down the trivia rabbit hole we go as we discover that Winslow’s son Paul played five cricket tests for South Africa in the 1950s, once hitting a blazing hundred at Old Trafford against a high-powered English attack, which included Frank Tyson, Alec Bedser and Tony Lock.

And thinking of cricket, there’s the largely untold tale of Harry Calder, the only Wisden Cricketer of the Year never to play a firstclass game.

Calder was the South African son of a provincial cricketer who attended Cranleigh School in England, where he excelled at the game. There was no first-class cricket in the UK in 1916 and 1917 because of the small matter of the world being at war.

But the cricketer’s bible was not phased by global conflict and went ahead with its traditional choices of the five best players of each year by selecting the most outstanding schoolboy talents.

Of the 10 given the prestigious accolade across the two seasons, Calder alone did not progress his career into the top flight. One of the others, Greville Stevens, went on to captain England against South Africa in Durban in 1927.

Calder returned to Cape Town, worked in industry and took up tennis and golf. When cricket historian Robert Brooke tracked him down just before his death in 1995, he discovered that Calder was completely unaware of the Wisden accolade.

And finally, for now, there’s the amazing tale of Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiane, who ran the marathon for South Africa at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis. This is a scarcely believable story.

The first thing to know is that those Olympics were the strangest in history. They were a sideshow to the St Louis World’s Fair and were run over several months in a slipshod manner, to say the least.

Taunyane was a Sotho man by some accounts (Tswana by others) who had served as a despatch runner for the Boers in the

South African War and was imprisoned on St Helena. He ended up in St Louis as part of a group staging twice-daily re-enactments of the battles of Colenso and Paardeberg at the World’s Fair in which famous Boer General Piet Cronjé played himself! Less is known about Mashiane, but his backstory is assumed to be similar to Taunyane’s.

The St Louis Olympic Marathon was short of entrants, so when a general invitation was sent out at the last minute for anyone to compete, Taunyane and Mashiane decided to participate – inadvertently becoming South Africa’s first-ever Olympians.

Taunyane was entered as Len Tau because the officials could not pronounce his name and Jan Mashiane as Yamasani for the same reason. They were registered as Zulus because that was the only black African identity that was recognised.

The “winner” turned out to have done half the distance by car and was later disqualified. In appalling conditions, Mashiane finished 13th and Taunyane ninth after reportedly losing a lot of time when he was chased off the course by a dog.

In Atlanta, 92 years later, Josiah Thugwane would close up this strange circle of sporting life by claiming a glorious marathon gold for South Africa on American soil.