“Absorption by the white race”: Abe Bailey and the Troubled Formation of the ICC

Sir Abe Bailey, 1st Bt by Bassano Ltd
Whole-plate glass negative, 30 June 1911
NPG x31101 © National Portrait Gallery, London

On 19 July 1912, several sporting events took place simultaneously. Perhaps the most prestigious took place in Stockholm, where the fifth modern Olympics was drawing to a close; on that day, Britain won two gold medals in the rowing events. But it was also an important time in the cricket calendar. Two days earlier, Australia had defeated South Africa at Lord’s in the fifth Test of the Triangular Tournament, a competition with ambitious aims to establish which of the three teams which then played Test cricket — England, Australia and South Africa — was the best in the word but which was also designed to boost links between those three parts of the British Empire. The match had been briefly attended by King George V but was in many ways the final nail in the coffin of the tournament, which had already been seriously restricted by poor weather. Australia comfortably defeated an outclassed South African team but looming over them — and doubtless in the minds of anyone watching — were the six leading players who had refused to join the team after a dispute with the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket. Even so, it was clear that only England or Australia could win the tournament, which was already being judged as a failure in the English press and had attracted very poor crowds. On that Friday, the leading English players — including Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes, Sydney Barnes and the Test captain C. B. Fry — were engaged in the second day of the annual Gentlemen v Players match at Lord’s. Typically for 1912, that match was ruined by rain. Meanwhile, the Australian and South African teams were playing matches against Leicestershire and Kent respectively, both of which were drawn, again owing mainly to rain.

But perhaps the most interesting game of all — and one which in some ways represents what was deliberately sacrificed for the sake of the Triangular Tournament and the racist ideology of one man in particular — took place in Fulham on that same day. No scorecard survives of the game but we know a little bit about it. It was the fifth match of Fulham’s “cricket week” and the home team played a team selected by a man called Kojo Thompson who had played regularly for them that season. A brief report in Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game observed that Thompson had put together “a strong team that did not contain a single white face”. His players included Cyril Browne, a future West Indies Test cricketer (who top-scored with 55), and Joseph Alexander Luckhoo from British Guiana, a man who later became prominent in promoting Indo-Guyanese cricket; it is quite likely that another player was J. A. Veerasawmy who played alongside Browne at Clapham Ramblers Cricket Club and founded the East Indian Cricket Club in British Guiana (later known as Everest Cricket Club) of which Luckhoo was the first captain. Thompson himself was from what was then called the Gold Coast and is today known as Ghana. One of the best cricketers in his country, he would probably have been part of a proposed “West Africa” team, including top players from the Gold Coast and Nigeria, which was to have toured England in 1912 but was eventually abandoned, largely because it would have clashed with the Triangular Tournament; but there is more to say on this later. He, like many of his team — including Browne, Luckhoo and Veerasawmy — was studying at the Inns of Court in London and had just been called to the bar. These disparate events on that rainy day in 1912 were all loosely connected and concern the origin of international cricket’s current governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC). The thread that binds them was a South African who, during the Australia-South Africa Test at Lord’s, met King George and may well have been watching South Africa playing Kent: Sir Abe Bailey.

The current ICC website, in the section outlining its history, notes that the Imperial Cricket Conference — as it was originally called — only met three times between 1909, when it was formed, and 1926 but also acknowledges the role played in its creation by Abe Bailey, the driving force in bringing the cricket boards of England, South Africa and Australia together. But the website is silent on why he wanted to do so. The answer is not a comfortable one and it is something which historians in other spheres are increasingly confronting. In general, there has been a welcome trend over the last few years of examining the less savoury stories to be found in the past, and the role of racism in the formation of many places and institutions. Cricket has escaped the spotlight to some extent given that discrimination in the past has always been a part of its “official” history and that headlines have rightly been dominated by recent instances of how racism has affected current players in England. Yet from a historical viewpoint, cricket has been given a remarkably easy ride. While almost anyone with any awareness of the sport’s past can reel off stories about how South Africa was excluded from Test cricket owing to apartheid (although many commentators carefully skate around the “rebel” tours there), or the “D’Oliveira Affair”, fewer are aware of how racism blighted cricket in the Caribbean until the 1960s (unless they have read C. L. R. James’ Beyond a Boundary). Deeper analysis is confined to mainly academic writing. But even this is only a small part of the story. The bigger picture has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The elephant in the room has been the ICC and Bailey’s role in its creation.

So who was Abe Bailey? We can only give a brief outline here, most of which is drawn from an article by Bruce Murray for the South African Historical Journal in 2008.

Abraham Bailey was born at Cradock, a town in the Eastern Cape of what is now South Africa, in 1864. His father was a shopkeeper from Yorkshire who emigrated to South Africa. Bailey had a difficult childhood, involving the death of his mother when he was seven, an uneasy relationship with his father and being sent to England to complete his education. When he returned at the age of 17, he abandoned his father’s business hoping to make money from gold. But he won over £100 in a cricket match — either from a bet or a collection for his own performance depending on who tells the story — which he invested in land. Moving to Johannesburg in 1887, he became a stockbroker and financial agent and made his fortune. Like many speculators, his morals were sometimes lax and he pursued various ways to make money, which he did very effectively. He came to the attention of Cecil Rhodes for his astuteness, and the two men were associated until the latter’s death in 1902. Bailey also diversified into mining and real estate so that by the turn of the twentieth century was one of the richest people in South Africa and was numbered among the so-called “Randlords”, the most prominent (and richest) mining magnates.

For many reasons, Bailey had strong connections to England; we shall come to his business links later but there was also a personal side. Not only was England the birthplace of his father and the place where Bailey himself was educated, he also had an English wife and a residence in that country that he regularly visited. It is unsurprising that his sympathies in South African politics were British and he saw himself (and South Africa) as part of the British Empire. And he was prepared to fight to keep it there. He was involved in the notorious Jameson Raid in late 1895 and had to buy his way out of his imprisonment for his part in it. He fought for the British during the Boer War, serving as an intelligence officer and escaping after he was captured. During that war, he became a lifelong friend of Winston Churchill, who was covering the conflict as a journalist. After the war, Bailey entered politics, initially taking over the seat of Cecil Rhodes in the Cape Parliament, standing unopposed for the Progressive Party established by Rhodes, but going on to represent other parties over the years. As Bruce Murray put it: “Intent on safeguarding the interests of the mining industry and promoting British supremacy in South Africa, Bailey entered the political arena, and over the next decade attempted to carve out for himself a leadership position among South Africa’s ‘British’ population.” He was never quite successful in this, lacking the influence in the political world that he would come to enjoy in the cricketing one. Soon after this, he took over a newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail and became the chief shareholder in a company behind the South African Sunday Times.

George Lohmann, who was recruited by Bailey as a coach (Image: Wikipedia)

In short, Bailey was a man with a lot of interests. There is a lot more that could be said of his life, but we need concern ourselves mainly with his all-consuming passion. Although he liked many sports, a large part of his life — and fortune — was devoted to cricket. Although he was only ever a mediocre cricketer himself, he played for a Johannesburg XVIII and a Transvaal XVIII against an English touring team in 1891–92 and captained Transvaal in the Currie Cup in 1893–94, taking eleven wickets in two first-class games. His only other first-class match came in 1897–98 when he captained “A. Bailey’s Transvaal XI” against Natal. Bailey was also instrumental in the formation of the Transvaal Cricket Union in 1891; the organisation built links with mining magnates to increase its influence. At a lower level, he was also the captain of the Wanderers Cricket Club in the 1890s and financed the recruitment of the English bowler George Lohmann as a coach. The latter was one of many English players recruited in this period in an attempt to strengthen South African cricket.

And it was Bailey’s fanatical determination to drive South Africa up to a level whereby the team could match England which shaped cricket over the next twenty years and still has echoes today. It led to the idea of the Triangular Tournament, the formation of the ICC and the deliberate and cold-blooded exclusion of whole countries from the cricketing world. It also established literal white supremacy as the founding concern of the ICC. But what cannot be denied is that Bailey achieved his ambitions through sheer force of will and almost limitless financial power.

English teams had first toured South Africa in 1888–89 and another three visited in the 1890s, but all were far too strong for the local opposition. Over the course of the four tours, eight “Test matches” were played, all of which were won by “England” — four of these by an innings — but the visiting sides were in no way representative and no-one in England took the games seriously. It was only after the creation of the ICC and the misleading notion that South Africa were a top team that these matches were retrospectively adjudged to be Test matches in literature produced after 1912. Therefore they are — with little justification — today regarded as official Tests, vastly inflating the statistics of several players: for example, Johnny Briggs took 21 wickets in two Tests in South Africa at 4.80 and George Lohmann took 35 wickets in three games at 5.80.

Reggie Schwarz (Image: Wikipedia)

Frank Mitchell (Image: Wikipedia)

The heavy defeats, however, drove Bailey forward and he was determined to build up South African cricket until it could match that of England. He not only employed coaches like Lohmann, he also “poached” overseas talent. For example, he employed amateur English cricketers to work for him in South Africa, thereby enabling them to play locally. His most influential “signings” were Frank Mitchell of Yorkshire — who went on to captain South Africa’s Test team — and Reggie Schwarz of Middlesex — who introduced the “googly” to South African cricket — both of whom worked as his private secretary and played cricket for Transvaal. Following the Boer War, Bailey provided the financial guarantees which convinced an Australian team to visit South Africa on its way home from England in 1902 and bankrolled the visit of a South African team to England in 1904. His backing of Transvaal made it the strongest province in South African cricket, and its players made up the vast majority of the Test team by 1905–06, when South Africa finally tasted success: an MCC team was defeated 4–1 in a Test series that season; South Africa’s win in the first Test was its first at that level, to Bailey’s great delight. Following that result, the MCC invited South Africa for their first official tour of England — the previous ones had been privately organised — which would include their first Tests in England. It was Bailey who provided a large part of the expenses granted to the players. The South African team proved to be very strong, dominated by Schwarz and three other “googly” bowlers who proved indecipherable for the English batters. Although South Africans lost the Test series 1–0, it was an extremely close contest and they were far too strong for most counties, winning 21 first-class matches. The 1907 tour convinced Bailey, and many others, that South Africa had equalled England and Australia in terms of Test quality and drove much of what followed. It was also this idea that led to the disastrous Triangular Tournament of 1912 and indirectly led to the formation of the ICC.

As Bailey was, by 1907, hugely influential in South African cricket, his political views suddenly become relevant. And here we need some more background because for any modern audience looking at South African cricket in this period, the picture is dominated by the exclusion of non-white players from the team and the racism that permeated the country. Although South Africa did not adopt the formal policy of apartheid until 1948, society was dominated by white Europeans and had been for some time. Yet this was hardly atypical for the British Empire in the early years of the twentieth century. In the cricket-playing world, British rulers dominated Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and India, excluding and repressing the indigenous and/or non-white populations. They promoted what would today be classed as white supremacy but an ideology which they considered to be the natural order: that white British men knew best and it was in the interests of the world that they should dominate people whom they considered to be inferior. This was illustrated perfectly by several incidents involving Bailey. Given what followed, the first is somewhat surprising.

When a side was being selected for the first tour of England by a South African team in 1894, one of the leading candidates — and probably the best bowler in South Africa — was W. H. Hendricks, known as “Krom”. But Hendricks was classed as “coloured” and therefore his potential inclusion was controversial. English cricketers who faced him in 1892 thought he would be a success and a considerable attraction in England; some, but not all, of the South African cricketers thought it would have been “intolerable” (the words of A. B. Tancred) to have him in the team on an “equal footing” to the white players. There was a deep desire to keep a clear demarcation between white people and “other” races and this was felt keenly in the white cricketing world. Bailey thought Hendricks should have been selected in order to make the team competitive, but Cecil Rhodes was against the inclusion of Hendricks, supposedly saying that English crowds “would have expected him to throw boomerangs during the luncheon interval”, something which happened to the Aboriginal Australian team that toured England in 1868. Rhodes’ private secretary, William Milton, chaired the selection committee, so Hendricks was not picked; Rhodes later told Pelham Warner that he “would not have it”. Incidentally, Rhodes was later instrumental in the omission of Ranjitsinhji from a team of English cricketers that toured South Africa in 1896–97. Ever the pragmatist, Bailey altered his views to match those of Rhodes, and later wrote: “I was strongly in favour of sending [Hendricks], but I have yielded somewhat.”

Cecil Rhodes, a friend of Bailey who was instrumental in the omission of Krom Hendricks from the South African team (Image: Wikipedia)

This was not Bailey’s only positive intervention on race in this period: he was a supporter of Charlie Llewellyn, another cricketer classed as “coloured” but who claimed to be white. He also voted that “coloured persons” should be allowed to watch matches at the Wanderers Cricket Ground in 1903, the only member of the Wanderers Committee to vote that way. But these events were not the norm for Bailey; two years later, he blocked a request by the Transvaal Indian Cricket Union to be allowed to watch games at the Wanderers and he later expressed strongly racist opinions about Indians. And despite his uncharacteristic support of Hendricks, Llewellyn and for the admission of non-whites in 1903, Bailey’s views on race were stark, well-publicised and unequivocal. When he was the MP for Krugersdorp in the South African parliament between 1915 and 24, Bailey demanded, in the words of Bruce Murray, “segregation for Africans, repatriation for Indians, and assimilation for coloureds through a policy of ‘education, of advancement and improvement, and finally, of absorption by the white race.'” Bailey also wrote in 1915 that sport could play “a great part in creating a better feeling between the two great white races” — in other words, the British and the Afrikaners in South Africa. Nor was this the worst of it. As Gideon Haigh wrote in 2006: “Bailey was otherwise the basest of racists, crudely derogatory of blacks (‘I am for the white race being on top of the black’), Indians and Chinese (‘The Asiatics were the white ants of South Africa, destroying the foundations of our institutions and the roots of the livelihood of the white race’).”

Also relevant were Bailey’s views on the British Empire. Murray describes him as “an ardent imperialist, anxious to integrate South Africa in the British Empire, and to strengthen the ties, formal and informal, between the ‘white’ parts of the empire. In cricket as in politics his concern was to assert the British and imperial identities in South Africa.” And given the increase in South Africa’s cricketing strength — in which he had played a key role — between 1888 and 1907, Bailey had a platform from which he could promote South African cricket and his own views.

This, then, was the background to the formation of the ICC and the ill-fated Triangular Tournament. Perhaps it would be comforting to take the line that Bailey was an exception; that if his views were extremely troubling, he was an isolated figure in the cricketing world. Or that maybe this was a purely South African problem, and everyone knows what South African society used to be like. Unfortunately that was not even remotely the case. We opened with Kojo Thompson’s team and we shall end with it; because despite the mistaken perception that England was largely a white country in the period around 1912, there were several non-white cricketers in England at this time, not just those who played for Thompson’s team. Their treatment — and where they came from — plays a part in this story too. English and Australian cricket had a confused, contradictory and troubling relationship with race at this time. This, just as much as Abe Bailey’s political views, shaped the formation of the ICC…