WHEN WHITE CRICKET WAS GIVEN OUT
Just over 50 years ago, SA’s top white cricketers staged a protest in the hope that authorities would allow black players to accompany the team to Australia. But it failed to save the tour they so badly wanted. Sporting isolation had well and truly begun
These have been strange days for SA cricket. No spectators, the traditional New Year’s Test match in Cape Town played at the Wanderers in Joburg, and the Cape Town Test now being played at Newlands in the second week of January.
At least cricket is being played. It took careful negotiations and good personal relationships at the highest levels to save India’s tour to SA this summer. That wasn’t the case 51 years ago, when diplomacy and friendship were not enough to save a tour by white SA cricketers to Australia, and SA was banished from the international game.
Back in 1971, Australian cricket fans expected to see the SA team, which had successive series victories over England (away in 1965) and Australia (twice at home 1967/1968 and 1970), on their turf.
In April of that year, Newlands — the venue for this week’s final Test against India — was the scene of a last-ditch attempt to save the tour. At the start of a match between Currie Cup champions Transvaal and the Rest of SA, the players staged a walk-off that they hoped would persuade the authorities to allow black players to accompany the team to Australia. Their bid failed, and by September that year the invitation was withdrawn. Apartheid was no longer acceptable, not even to white SA’s old friends and comrades-in-arms.
Seventy years earlier, not even a war could stop an SA cricket tour. While the SA War of 1899-1902 still raged, SA’s 1901 cricket team went “home” to the UK, even though the writer Arthur Conan Doyle called it a scandal. But by 1971 the campaign to isolate white SA sport had properly begun.
As Peter Hain and André Odendaal show in their recent book, Pitch Battles, moves to isolate white sport had in fact started earlier — the table tennis federation was banned in 1956. But the big sports kept playing.
During the 1963/1964 SA tour to Australia, for example, prime minister Sir Robert Menzies told the visitors, according to Dick Whitington in Bradman, Benaud and Goddard’s Cinderellas :“I hope you win the fifth Test. It might put an end to all this nonsense about your Test matches not being regarded as official.” At the time there had been pressure from the black countries in Test cricket to have matches involving SA declared unofficial.
Black members of the International Cricket Conference (West Indies, India and Pakistan) had wanted official contact to stop, but England, Australia and New Zealand carried blissfully on.
Until 1970, that is.
By then, the SA rugby tour of the UK in the northern winter of 1969/1970 had been disrupted by Hain and his associates. And Australia’s unions had also found their voice, not least in the form of future prime minister Bob Hawke. Protesters made the 1971 Springbok rugby tour a hellish experience — so much so that the right-wing premier of Queensland declared a state of emergency.
Then there was the “Dolly” controversy of 1970 — a great shock to cricket. When SA prime minister John Vorster wouldn’t accept an English team which included the Cape Town-born coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira, even the stiff suits of the English cricket establishment baulked.
The tour was off.
One of the reasons D’Oliveira was in England in the first place was the cancellation of another “tour that never was”. Having led nonracial SA teams against combinations from East Africa in the late 1950s, D’Oliveira and his teammates were excited at the prospect of a visit by a West Indian team. When that fell through, many of them headed for England’s professional leagues.
By the time Transvaal took on the Rest of SA in 1971, in a match marking the 10th anniversary of the republic, the tour of Australia was already in jeopardy. After one ball was bowled, the players staged a walk-off and declared themselves in favour of the application by the SA Cricket Association (Saca) “to invite two nonwhite players to tour Australia, if they are good enough, and further subscribe to merit being the only criterion on the field of play”.
The Rest of SA were unanimous in support, but Mike Procter reports in Cricket Buccaneer that the Transvaal team had four “no” votes. Only two Transvaal players were on the field at the time of the walk-off, so the resolve of the four was never tested. Clive Rice, later an implacable opponent of race quotas, and Ray White, a future controversial president of the United Cricket Board, were in that Transvaal team.
Asking two coloured players to join the tour was Saca’s desperate attempt to placate international opinion, but the invited players rejected the invitation with contempt, just as the country’s best bowler had done back in 1894. Back then, when the various entities that today make up SA elected to send a cricket team to England, it was obvious that the Cape Colony’s demon fast bowler, Krom Hendricks, a coloured man, should be selected.
But when a supporter, trying to placate the racists, suggested that Hendricks be included as a baggage manager, the player responded scathingly. In a letter to the Cape Times, he wrote: “I would beg to state that if chosen I would not think of going in that capacity.”
Hendricks’s selection would in any event be vetoed by the bigotry of Cecil John Rhodes, as Jonty Winch and Richard Parry record in Too Black to Wear Whites.
One of the two men approached by Saca in 1970, left-arm spinner Owen Williams, echoed Hendricks when he refused to go as a “glorified baggage master”. Williams achieved great things at all levels in domestic and inter-race cricket in SA, toured with D’Oliveira and had a spell in the highly competitive Lancashire leagues before emigrating to Australia.
Saca’s other target, Suleiman “Dik” Abed, became a legend of the leagues and was voted Enfield Cricket Club’s all-time great. He captained the Netherlands at the 1982 ICC Trophy.
It would be nice to think that offering black players tour places with no intention of letting them play started in 1894 and stopped in 1971, but it did not. When SA was again allowed to play internationally in 1991), four young players were sent along to India to gain experience: only the two whites among them, Hansie Cronje and Derek Crookes, went on to win caps. The other two, Hussein Manack and Faiek Davids, did not.
The same thing happened at the 1992 World Cup — more “experience” for Yaseen Begg and Faiek Davids, but no playing time. The one coloured player selected as a full team member, Omar Henry, played just one game.
Which is one game more than captain AB de Villiers and coach Russell Domingo allowed Aaron Phangiso at the 2015 World Cup. Later that year, reserve specialist batsman Khaya
Zondo had to look on as a white player was flown to India when a batsman was injured. Finally, “Black Cricketers in Unity” wrote a protest letter to Cricket SA, objecting to being treated as “water boys”.
We were accused of being complacent. We weren’t. We did protest and it was a brave thing to do in a police state
Lee Irvine
The Australian tour cancellation in 1971 gave white SA cricket a chance to reflect. The world was telling it apartheid had to end.
So, in a sense, were the cricketers. Lee
Irvine, who didn’t play in the Newlands match in 1971 but was a certainty for selection for the tour to Australia, is quoted in Andrew Murtagh’s Sundial in the Shade: “We were accused of being complacent. We weren’t. We did protest and it was a brave thing to do in a police state.”
At the time of the Newlands walk-off, just 3.4% of the white electorate supported the Progressive Party, the only legal party then supporting (conditional) voting rights for black people. Even the far-right Herstigte Nasionale Party attracted more votes (3.5%). Many English-speakers claimed to be antiapartheid and voted for the United Party (36.9% in 1970), but by then it had become a reactionary blob of a party that stood for not very much.
Starting in 1971, Saca received touring teams put together by UK businessman Derrick Robins. SA picked all-white “national teams” against these multinational tourists until 1975, when Edward Habane and Sedick Conrad were selected.
By the time of the visit of the International Wanderers in 1976, SA cricket had undergone a kind of unity process out of which the SA Cricket Union (Sacu) was born. Except, this house of cards came tumbling down, and June 1976 was just a few months away. Thereafter, some coloured and black players stayed with the establishment entity, but most returned to the nonracial SA Cricket Board (SACB).
Sacu continued to pursue tours, with the rebel era threatening to cause as much disruption to world cricket as the Packer World Series until the final such tour in 1989 ended in violence, confusion and retreat by the white cricket establishment.
There would be no proper unity until Nelson Mandela was free. Even then, there were arguments that the ANC had given white cricket its tours without getting much in return, and generations of SA cricketers who were not white had been lost to Test cricket.
Young started coaching cricket in 1983 and began writing
about the game in 1996, when he edited the Langa Cricket
Club’s 21st anniversary brochure