Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

111 Afterwards and together for South Africa in international matches from 1895 to 1899. They renewed their association for their country against the visiting Australians in South Africa in 1902 and were kept in touch when Llewellyn was an occasional player in his country’s tours of England in 1901 and 1904. Finally it was Sinclair who put Llewellyn’s name forward before any other player was nominated for the touring party to Australia in 1910, and who proposed a generous salary for him. In his old age, Herby Taylor, when asked to probe his memory, recalled stories of incidents on the trip, but did not mention racism as a motive for them. If Buck’s colleagues became aware of his rate of pay, which was twice that of his professional colleagues, Dave Nourse and Ernie Vogler, that might well have been a cause of dissent! Taylor, when interviewed on the subject for The Cape Times , published on 15 January 1972, implied that Llewellyn was indeed black: ‘Llewellyn in fact worked for my father at Durban Point before he turned to professional cricket. At the time my father had the government contract for transporting goods off the ships into town’. This was the type of work which a coloured clerk did. In his book Overthrows , published in 1975, J.M.Kilburn, who as we have already seen, was an admirer of Llewellyn, described him as a tidy-looking cricketer, medium-height and sturdily built; he was dark-eyed and dark-skinned and ‘South Africans called him coloured.’ Kilburn quoted Wilfred Rhodes recalling Buck as ‘looking like a rather sunburned English player.’ Jack Newman recalled too that he had ‘mixed blood’. Bowen’s tale of persecution, which must now be discredited, was repeated by Patrick Allen in an article about Buck published in The Cricketer magazine for February 1976. He wrote ‘There are conflicting reports about his (Buck’s) experience of prejudice as a result of the colour of his skin’. After referring to erratic selection procedures on the part of the South Africans ‘which may take some explaining’, he too raised the spectre of Hendricks, and of Buck’s alleged ostracism in Australia. Agatha Anderton, Llewellyn’s daughter, gave a spirited riposte in The Cricketer a month later, from her home in Chertsey: Referring to the article by Patrick Allen on my late father in your February issue, I should like to point out that Charles Bennett Llewellyn was born on September 29, 1876, at Pietermaritzburg, of a mother born in Essex and a father born in Bootle, Lancashire, of Welsh descent. Neither was