Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

LIVES IN CRICKET C.B.Llewellyn A Study in Equivocation NEIL JENKINSON ACS PUBLICATIONS As a cricketer, Charles Llewellyn, often known as Buck, has had two lives. Born at Pietermaritzburg in 1876, then in the British-run Cape Colony, he played in 15 Test matches for South Africa, some retrospectively designated. He moved to England in 1899 and was an allround regular for Hampshire for ten seasons, where his left-handed skills brought him nearly 9,000 first-class runs and over 700 wickets. His intermittent use of wrist-spin – learned from R.O.Schwarz – points to him as a pioneer of methods which have surfaced only occasionally in top-class cricket. Careful with money, he had a difference of opinion over pay and this led to him leaving Hampshire after the 1910 season. He then followed a secondary career as a well-liked professional for Accrington and in leagues in Bradford and Bolton until his early sixties. He died at Egham in Surrey in 1964, following a gas explosion at his home, just when Basil D’Oliveira’s talents were becoming more widely known to the British public. Buck’s ‘second life’ began when various historians realised that he, too, came from a mixed-race family, his mother having been born on the remote volcanic island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, where many occupants had been or were descended from African slaves. During his lifetime, most of his fellow players had simply thought of him as well-tanned and his children were sure he was of ‘white stock’. Neil Jenkinson relates the complex story of a man now widely recognised as the first ‘non-white’ player to represent South Africa in Test cricket. £12.00