Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

19 no record of him playing further cricket, either in England or South Africa, he maintained an involvement in the game in his adopted country, for he is listed as one of the six men who umpired the first-class ‘Champion Bat Tournament’ held at Cape Town over Christmas and New Year of 1890 and 1891 – though who umpired which matches does not seem to be known. Away from cricket, and from Cape Town, his principal occupation at first was the law, and he was engaged as junior counsel to Sir Henry Bale, the Chief Justice of Natal. But the high veldt of Natal had made a strong and lasting impression upon him, as summarised in this extract from a newspaper report of his death: While engaged in this legal work he laid the foundation of big business interests in the sugar-growing and tanning-bark industries, which later occupied his whole time, and with which he continued to be associated until his death … Mr McMaster was one of the earliest to realise and exploit the highland plateaux of Natal, and quite recently he wrote … for private circulation a most interesting book on the development of Natal, both in this direction and industrially. Mr McMaster had also written a good deal on cricket … .’ Sadly I have been unable to trace any of these writings, or to discover their subject-matter. The continuation of the above report then comes as a bit of a surprise, in the light of his – to put it kindly – dogged performances with Major Warton’s side: As a contemporary of Abel and other famous men of the willow, he was a staunch adherent of forceful batting and an uncompromising critic of the more purely defensive modern tactics.’ 24 Well well! It must have been during this period that he also earned for himself a reputation as a ‘landed proprietor and planter in Natal’, which is how he is described in J.A.Venn’s register of Cambridge alumni, 25 but this description tells at best only part of the story of his time in South Africa. His experiences in that country provided the foundation for the talk he gave to the Royal Colonial Institute in January 1902, as referred to earlier. Summaries of this talk, part geography lesson and part advertising pitch, were published round the world, and it can still be read on the internet today. 26 Natal also saw the birth of two, and probably three, of Emile’s children. Patrick Garnet Walsh McMaster (1890-1962) and Mary Ethel Josephine McMaster (1892-??) were both born in the McMasters’ adopted town of Pietermaritzburg. His third child was Nora McMaster (1894-1979), who is 24 Isle of Wight County Press , 8 June 1929. 25 J.A.Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis: 1752-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1951. 26 The full text of the talk can be seen at www.archive.org/stream/proceedings17goog/proceedings17goog_djvu.txt. A summary of it was printed in the Southland Times in New Zealand, and is accessible online via http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz The Unlikeliest Test Cricketer