Origin of Cricket in South Africa: Garrisons to Gold

The earliest surviving evidence that cricket was played in South Africa is an advertisement. In January 1808 the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser carried a notice for a match between officers of the Artillery Mess and officers of the Colony, with a wager attached. Two years earlier the British had taken the Cape for the second time and intended to keep it. The notice tells us almost nothing about how well anyone played. It tells us a great deal about who was playing, where, and why.

This page covers the arrival of the game at the Cape and everything that followed until the middle of the twentieth century: the garrison matches, the coastal clubs, the mining boom that carried cricket inland, the Currie Cup, the first Test in 1889, the googly bowlers who briefly made South Africa formidable, and the hardening of a racial line that eventually ran through every level of the sport. It ends before the modern national team's story begins. That is told separately in our account of the history of South African cricket.

A notice in a Cape Town newspaper

The Cape changed hands repeatedly around the turn of the nineteenth century. Britain occupied it in 1795, handed it back under treaty in 1803, and retook it in 1806 during the Napoleonic wars. From that point the settlement carried a permanent British military and naval presence, and permanent garrisons produced cricket wherever the empire put them.

The mechanics were the same at the Cape as they had been in the Indian presidency towns and in the Caribbean. Officers had learned the game at school in England. Barracks had flat ground attached. Long postings in a small colonial capital left a great deal of time to fill. The result was regular play on open land near Cape Town, watched by whoever happened to be passing, and reported in the two-page newspapers of the settlement when the wagers were large enough to be interesting.

Soldiers, then settlers

What turned garrison recreation into a colonial institution was immigration. The British settler parties who arrived in the Eastern Cape from 1820 onward were not soldiers. They were farmers, tradesmen and clerks with families, planted along a contested frontier, and they brought the habits of English provincial life with them. Cricket was one of those habits.

By the 1840s the game was being played on a settled basis in the eastern coastal towns as well as at the Cape. Port Elizabeth Cricket Club, formed in 1843, is generally regarded as the oldest surviving club in the country. Grahamstown, Cape Town and the settlements of the frontier districts all had organised cricket by the middle of the century, and the mission schools and colonial grammar schools of the Cape had begun teaching it to boys, which is the step that makes a game permanent rather than fashionable.

Clubs, schools and the coastal towns

Two institutions carried cricket in nineteenth-century South Africa. The first was the town club, run by merchants and professional men, playing on ground that the club either owned or borrowed from the municipality. The second was the school.

Western Province Cricket Club moved to Newlands, under the eastern slope of Table Mountain, in the late 1880s, and the ground has been in continuous use ever since. St George's Park in Port Elizabeth was laid out earlier still and remains the oldest ground in the country to have staged Test cricket. Both were laid out as multi-purpose colonial recreation grounds rather than as cricket stadiums, which is why both retained their bandstands, their oak trees and their peculiar shapes long after they had become international venues.

The school pipeline

The Cape's English-language schools followed the English model with unusual fidelity, down to the house system, the fixture calendar and the annual match against a traditional rival. Diocesan College in Rondebosch, South African College School, Grey High School in Port Elizabeth and Grey College in Bloemfontein all had established cricket by the second half of the century. Natal, colonised later and settled heavily by British immigrants after 1849, built the same structure around Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

These schools produced a steady supply of competent cricketers from a small slice of the population, and they went on doing so for a very long time. The line from those fixture lists runs unbroken through most of the twentieth century and into the modern era: Graeme Smith, who captained South Africa in more Test matches than anyone has captained any country, came out of that school system, as did a large proportion of the men who played alongside him.

It also, from the beginning, defined who was in and who was out. Access to those schools was a function of race and money in a colony where the two were closely correlated, and the pipeline that fed the representative teams was therefore narrow by design rather than by accident.

Diamonds, gold and the inland game

Cricket in South Africa would have remained a coastal affair had the interior stayed empty. It did not.

Diamonds were found near the Vaal and Orange rivers around 1867, and by the early 1870s the diggings at Kimberley had become one of the largest concentrations of population in southern Africa. Gold was found on the Witwatersrand in 1886, and Johannesburg went from open veld to a substantial city inside a decade. Both rushes drew tens of thousands of men from Britain, Australia and the Cape colonies, and both created instant towns with money, leisure and no established institutions of any kind.

Cricket clubs formed almost immediately in both places. Kimberley's Eclectics club drew the mining magnates and the professional men who followed them. In Johannesburg the Wanderers Club was founded in 1888, two years after the gold discovery, and its ground beside the railway station became the principal venue on the Rand for the next half-century.

What the mining towns changed

The mineral rush altered South African cricket in three lasting ways.

• It moved the centre of gravity inland. Within twenty years of the gold discovery the strongest cricket in the country was being played on the Highveld rather than at the Cape.
• It brought money. Mining capital paid for grounds, for touring sides and, eventually, for the trophy that organised the domestic game.
• It brought Australians and English county professionals, who arrived to dig and stayed to play, raising the standard sharply and abruptly.

There was a fourth consequence, less often mentioned. The mines ran on African migrant labour housed in compounds, and compound cricket, organised by mine authorities and by the workers themselves, became one of the earliest settings in which black South Africans played the game in numbers. It was recorded barely at all, because nobody with access to a printing press thought it worth recording.

The Currie Cup

In 1888 a party organised by Major R. G. Warton sailed from England to tour South Africa, captained by C. Aubrey Smith, who would later become a well-known character actor in Hollywood. Sir Donald Currie, the Scottish shipowner whose Castle Line carried the team out, presented a trophy to be awarded to the South African side that performed best against the tourists.

Kimberley won it. The trophy was then handed to the South African Cricket Association to be used as the prize in an inter-provincial competition, and the Currie Cup became the national first-class championship. The first competition was played in 1889-90 and won by Transvaal.

The provincial map

The competition was small at first and often irregular, interrupted by war, distance and money. Its structure nonetheless set the shape of South African domestic cricket for a century.

Union	Base	Ground
Transvaal	Johannesburg	Old Wanderers, later the Wanderers
Western Province	Cape Town	Newlands
Natal	Durban	Kingsmead, from the 1920s
Eastern Province	Port Elizabeth	St George's Park
Griqualand West	Kimberley	De Beers Diamond Oval
Border	East London	Buffalo Park
Orange Free State	Bloemfontein	Ramblers, later Springbok Park

Two features of this arrangement deserve attention. The provinces were unions of clubs rather than administrative regions, so the competition was effectively a contest between the club structures of a handful of towns. And because those clubs applied the membership rules of the society around them, the competition was closed to the great majority of the population from the moment it began.

An English tour, and Test status in 1889

Warton's team played two matches against a combined South African side, at St George's Park in March 1889 and at Newlands a fortnight later. England won both easily. Neither match was regarded as a Test at the time by everyone involved, and both were given that status subsequently, which is why South Africa's Test record starts with a pair of games that were arranged as an afterthought to a private tour.

The early years were grim. South Africa lost heavily at home and abroad for the better part of two decades, and English sides regularly toured with squads well below full strength on the reasonable assumption that they would not need more. The Imperial Cricket Conference, founded in 1909, admitted England, Australia and South Africa as its three original members, so South Africa was inside the game's governing structure from the start despite a playing record that did not obviously justify it.

Matting, and why it mattered

Almost all South African cricket before the 1920s was played on matting laid over a prepared surface of gravel, clay or ant-heap. Turf pitches came late and spread slowly, and for a long period a South African cricketer's technique was formed entirely on a surface that behaved unlike anything in England or Australia.

Matting gave bowlers more bounce and far more grip than turf. Spinners could turn the ball sharply on the first morning. Batters learned to play back and to trust the bounce, which made touring sides look clumsy at home and made South African batters look badly equipped when they went abroad. The disparity in results between home and away series in this era is almost entirely explained by the surface.

The googly generation

Then, briefly, South Africa became the most interesting team in the world.

Reggie Schwarz played county cricket for Middlesex alongside B. J. T. Bosanquet, who had invented the googly, and learned the delivery from watching him. Schwarz took it home. Within a few years South Africa had four wrist-spinners bowling variations of it in the same attack: Schwarz, Aubrey Faulkner, Gordon White and Bert Vogler. On matting, against batters who had never faced anything like it, they were close to unplayable.

In 1905-06 South Africa beat England for the first time, winning the opening Test at the Old Wanderers by one wicket with Dave Nourse unbeaten at the end, and then taking the series 4-1. The 1907 tour of England was lost narrowly rather than heavily, and the googly bowlers took wickets on turf as well. Faulkner was more than a bowler; he was a genuine all-rounder and the best batter South Africa had produced to that point.

Nourse, Taylor and the long middle

The googly era faded. The 1912 Triangular Tournament in England, contested between England, Australia and South Africa in a wet summer, went badly. In 1913-14 Sydney Barnes came out with an England side and took wickets at a rate that has never been matched in a Test series, and the only South African who consistently withstood him was Herbie Taylor, whose back-foot method on matting became the model for a generation.

Dave Nourse played for South Africa from 1902 to 1924 and was known for the rest of the century as the father of South African cricket. His son Dudley Nourse captained the side after the Second World War. Between the wars the team improved steadily without ever becoming formidable. In 1935 South Africa won a Test at Lord's, with Xenophon Balaskas taking nine wickets in the match, and took the series 1-0. It was their first series win in England and it took another fifty-odd years to be repeated.

The last Test before the war was the timeless match at Kingsmead in March 1939. It ran for ten days. England, set 696 to win, had reached 654 for five when the match was abandoned as a draw because the tourists had a ship to catch. The idea of playing to a finish did not survive it.

Krom Hendricks and the drawing of the line

South African cricket did not drift into segregation. There is a documented moment at which it was chosen.

Krom Hendricks was a fast bowler from Cape Town, of mixed descent, and by common contemporary assessment among the quickest in the colony. When a South African side was selected to tour England in 1894 he was an obvious candidate on cricketing grounds and was left out. The correspondence around the decision survives, and it is not ambiguous: the objection was that his selection would be politically unacceptable, and pressure was applied by senior figures in the Cape administration and the cricket establishment to ensure he was not chosen. A suggestion was made that he might travel as a baggage handler instead. He declined.

Hendricks went on playing club cricket at the Cape and was progressively squeezed out of the competitions he had been eligible for. He never played a first-class match for a Cape provincial side. His case is the clearest single marker of the point at which South African cricket resolved a question that had, until then, been left informally open.

From custom to law

What followed was a hardening. The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 out of the two British colonies and the two former Boer republics, on terms that excluded almost all black South Africans from the franchise. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted African land ownership to a small fraction of the country. Segregation in sport did not need separate legislation at that point because the club structures enforced it perfectly well on their own.

After 1948, when the National Party took power and began building apartheid as a formal legal system, the informal arrangement acquired statutory force. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and the removals carried out under it destroyed clubs and grounds outright, most visibly in District Six in Cape Town, where an entire community with its own long-established cricket was dispersed. Facilities followed the law. Turf wickets, covered stands, coaching and school grounds went to white cricket. Everyone else played on whatever was left.

The cricket that grew on the other side of the line

Excluded cricketers did not stop playing. They built a parallel structure, and the scale of it is the part of this story most often left out.

Separate governing bodies emerged for coloured, Malay, African and Indian cricket over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each running its own clubs, leagues and inter-provincial competitions. The oldest of the national tournaments, the Barnato Memorial Trophy, was contested by coloured cricketing unions from the late 1890s, which makes it very nearly as old as the Currie Cup. Indian cricket built a dense club network in Durban and on the Natal north coast. African cricket, weakest in resources, was strongest around the mission schools of the Eastern Cape and the mining compounds of the Rand.

SACBOC

In 1947 those bodies came together as the South African Cricket Board of Control. SACBOC ran a national inter-provincial competition, the Dadabhay Trophy, from the early 1950s, arranged tours to and from East Africa, and worked steadily to break down the racial divisions inside its own membership so that it could put out genuinely representative sides.

It did this without grounds, without money, without press coverage and without any prospect of international recognition. Matches were played on gravel and matting, often on municipal land that the players had cleared themselves. Scorebooks were kept by hand and many were lost. A player of real quality in this system had two possible futures: a lifetime of club cricket at home, or emigration.

Basil D'Oliveira took the second. He was a Cape Town all-rounder who captained a SACBOC representative side, scored heavily in a competition nobody outside it was watching, and left for England in 1960 to take a professional contract in the Central Lancashire League, arranged with help from the broadcaster John Arlott. What that decision eventually did to South African cricket belongs to the next chapter of this story.

The counting problem

One question is worth stating plainly because it has no answer. Nobody knows how many Test cricketers South Africa did not select between 1889 and 1970. The records of the separate leagues are patchy, the standard of competition cannot be compared directly across a divide that was never crossed, and the players themselves are mostly gone.

What can be said is arithmetic rather than speculation. The Springbok teams of that era were drawn from a white population that was a small minority of the country's total, and from an English-speaking subset of that minority in the cricketing provinces. Every other side South Africa played was selecting from a wider pool. That the team was competitive at all under those conditions says something about the density of its school and club structure. What it might have been is unknowable, which is the point.

Provincial cricket to mid-century

By the 1940s the Currie Cup had settled into a recognisable shape. Transvaal, Natal and Western Province were the strongest unions, with Eastern Province competitive and the smaller unions of Griqualand West, Border and Orange Free State making up the numbers. Turf pitches had replaced matting at the major grounds. The competition ran on an irregular calendar, sometimes annually and sometimes with a season skipped, and was suspended entirely during the Second World War.

Standards rose after the war. Dudley Nourse made a double century against England at Trent Bridge in 1951 while batting with a broken thumb, an innings that entered South African folklore, and a generation of cricketers who had lost six years to the war produced a national side markedly better than the one that had gone into it.

The domestic structure that produced them was recognisably the one that would carry South African cricket into isolation twenty years later: seven provincial unions, a handful of large grounds, a school system that fed the clubs directly, and an entire parallel cricketing world running alongside it that the Currie Cup did not acknowledge existed.

What the origin left behind

Three things were fixed before South Africa played the cricket for which it is now remembered.

The first is depth in a narrow channel. The school and club structure of the Cape, Natal and the Transvaal was as good as any comparable system in the world, and it produced technically sound cricketers in quantity. It also drew from a fraction of the country, which meant the national side was always simultaneously well coached and badly selected.

The second is the conditions. Matting, then hard, fast, high-bouncing turf on the Highveld, made South African cricket a game of pace and bounce, and the fast-bowling tradition that runs from Peter Pollock through Allan Donald to Dale Steyn starts on those surfaces.

The third is the fracture. From 1894 onward the game in South Africa had two histories running in parallel, one recorded and funded and internationally recognised, the other neither recorded nor funded nor recognised at all. Reuniting them after 1991 was not a matter of changing a selection policy. It meant merging two structures that had been built separately for a century, and the arguments about how to do it have run ever since. Cricketers such as Hashim Amla, who came out of the Indian cricketing community of Durban that SACBOC once administered, are the visible result of that merger working.

For what the national side did with all of this, from the strong teams of the 1950s through isolation and the rebel tours to readmission and after, continue with the history of South African cricket. For the same imperial pattern producing very different outcomes elsewhere, compare the origin of cricket in England, the origin of cricket in Australia and the origin of cricket in Zimbabwe, where a settler game on the same subcontinent took a different course. The oldest rivalry the game has, and the one against which South Africa measured itself for decades, is covered in our guide to the Ashes, and the full set of national arrivals is collected in our cricket history index.

Elsewhere on the site, our player database covers the cricketers this system eventually produced, the selector tool lets you build an all-time South African side from those names, and the cricket quiz includes a run of questions on the early tours and trophies described above.