Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

110 Chapter Twenty-One Afterwards In the years which followed, hostility to the apartheid regime in South Africa increased, culminating, as far as cricket is concerned, in the successful campaign to abort their cricket tour to England in 1970. In that same year, Major Rowland Bowen, a diligent researcher and a trenchant compiler of cricket history, published Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development throughout the World . In the chapter ‘The Golden Age of Cricket 1894-1914’, Bowen included a discussion of developments in the game over that period in Southern Africa. He drew attention to the plight of ‘Krom’ Hendricks (referred to in this book in Chapter One) and to the attitudes of white South Africans to the notion of coloured players, about which he claimed British soldiers commented in letters home during the Boer War. He chronicled the rise in the profile of cricket at the Cape culminating in the tour in Australia in 1910/11 and the Triangular Tournament in 1912. Following this unexceptional lead-in, Bowen continued: … but a member of the South African team was the only man who has been openly avowed as a coloured man … C.B.Llewellyn, the Natal-born professional who played under qualification for Hampshire. [In 1910/11] he was tormented by his white fellow tourists to such an extent that for peace and quiet in the hotels where the team stayed, he had to take refuge in the WCs and lock himself in. His chief tormentor was J.H.Sinclair, the leading Transvaal batsman.’ Bowen was, of course, correct in his speculations about Buck’s racial origins, but his allegations about the baiting of Buck were, and remain, unauthenticated, though Bowen’s reputation as a cricket historian was in those days so high that his revelations were generally accepted. He overstepped the mark when he associated the name of Jimmy Sinclair with the bullying; such an activity was highly unlikely. He and Buck had enjoyed a lengthy association. They were born within a few months of each other in 1876 and had often played on opposing sides in the Currie Cup