Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

8 death on 17 November 1914. He traded for many years as a painter and decorator, but when he died, the business was in debt. Anne paid off the amount owing and took over the business with her son Walter at premises in Printing Office Street. When she died in 1920, her estate was valued at £1,000, about £35,000 in 2012 prices. She had come a long way since the 1870s, when Pietermaritzburgers with a St Helena background were regarded as on the margins of white society; by the early twentieth century ‘Saints’ as they became known were becoming part of the coloured community and no longer linked for statistical or other purposes with the whites. When Natal was accepted into Cape Colony in 1843, it was a fundamental condition of the foundation that ‘there should not be, in the eye of the law, any distinction whatever founded on mere difference of colour, origin, language or creed’, but as the nineteenth century wore on, this aspiration became more and more honoured in the breach, until as Christopher Merrett notes, ‘At the turn of the nineteenth century, policy towards those who were not white was characterised in the increase of controls designed to protect the ‘civilised’ whites.’ Both Indians and Africans were the object of virulent racism; Indians suffered because they were feared as commercial competitors; Africans were not; they were regarded with a blend of paternalism, fear and contempt as immature. By 1904/05, the local Pietermaritzburg paper described an attitude of mind which is remarkable in retrospect: ‘The majority of persons are agreed in condemning the practice of allowing natives and coloured persons generally to walk on the pavements of the city … .’ By that time, Buck Llewellyn, as the son was also known, had been absent from his native land for five years, with the exception of the summer of 1902/03. The signs of racial segregation were well established by the turn of the nineteenth century. It is the view of Christopher Merrett that central to sport in late nineteenth- century Natal is the issue of identity. There, sport simultaneously played the role of unifier amongst whites, and separator from everyone else. Yet, in this atmosphere so unfavourable to one whose skin was light, but not white, Buck prospered as a cricketer. Why should this have been the case? First, conditions in Pietermaritzburg were conducive to the development of a promising young cricketer. The city has been described as a veritable cricket paradise: The military, the civil service and the ordinary civilian … were A Need for Friends