by Arunabha Sengupta
William Milton was among of the many many who rushed to South Africa to make his fortunes during the mad mad 1870s. A former Rugby International for England, he migrated to the Cape in 1878. On arrival, Milton first popularised rugby union. Winchester Rules, thus far promoted by George Ogilvie in the Diocesan College died a sad death.
Milton soon became the president of the Western Province Cricket Club as well. And international cricket finally arrived at the Cape as an Old Boys’ effort.
Major Robert Warton was an Essex cricketer on paper, but his cricketing accomplishments had been quite ordinary. His appearances for the county had been in a couple of low key games, none of them first-class. But, far more importantly, he had been trained as a military officer in Sandhurst and posted in the Cape in 1883.
It was on the initiative of Milton that Warton, visiting England in 1888, was asked to assemble a team to visit South Africa. The result was the motley collection of a few average and a few brilliant cricketers arriving at the Table Bay, eagerly awaited by a large crowd, of whom ‘a large percentage [were] Malays and Kaffirs.
Lavishly entertained, the side led by C Aubrey Smith had a shaky start involving four surprise defeats in their first six odds matches. But, by the time the journey of 15,975 miles encompassing 146 days had been completed, they had won most of the others, including the two representative matches that went on to become curiously recognised as Test matches in 1897 — bringing historian Rowland Bowen to the verge of apoplexy.
Played at Port Elizabeth, the first representative match not only saw the exclusion of the entire population of non-white cricketers across the land. Milton, the rather autocratic organiser, also drew flak for ignoring all of the deserving Afrikaner cricketers as well. It is often Milton’s British exclusiveness as the Western Province Cricket Club supremo that is blamed for the eventual Afrikaner fascination for rugby rather than cricket.
Owen Dunell, a Port Elizabeth businessman hailing from Eton and Oxford, leads white South Africa in their first ever Test match. On the other side is Aubrey Smith of Charterhouse and Cambridge. Milton is in the South African side as a hard hitting all-rounder. Dunell’s wife embroiders SA on each of the caps of the home cricketers.
It could not have smacked more of an archetypal, and rather exclusive, Old Boys’ Club.
Milton himself led the country in the second representative match.
The two Tests were no more than a group of privileged friends getting together for a relaxing game of lopsided and mediocre quality.
However they are still recognised as Test matches.
(The international matches played by Basil D’Oliveira and his non-white South African teammates against East Africans and Kenyan Non Europeans are still not considered first-class)
Milton emerged as the right hand man of Cape Colony Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes. The De Beers Consolidated Mines had made Rhodes rich beyond mortal conception. Empowered by a Royal Charter, he moved to create his new kingdom, leaping out of the Cape, striding past the Boer countries, and occupying the land between the Limpopo and Zambesi, 300 miles North of Transvaal. The Pioneer Column was set up and it was a collection of farmers, doctors, parsons, butchers, bakers, army deserters, unemployed, one solitary Jesuit priest, and several cricketers.
The connection with cricket went beyond that. The formation of the Pioneer column took place during the same days as the inaugural Currie Cup, and many of the important gatherings took place in the same Central Hotel in Kimberley where the cricketers were staying. Milton, the double international and WPCC head, a close friend and Parliamentary secretary of Rhodes, later assumed office as the Administrator of Mashonaland. In fact, one some the first expeditions to cross the Zambesi, even before the Pioneer Column, had been led by the same Major Warton.
When clamours grew all around for Krom Hendricks, the coloured fast bowler, to be taken on the South African tour to England in 1894, Cecil Rhodes who proved to be the biggest stumbling block and ultimately the man who decided against it. The disapproval was conveyed to Milton. It was Milton who sent the message back to the cricket authorities, effectively putting an end to any chance of racial intermingling in official South African cricket.
William Milton later became the Administrator of Southern Rhodesia, and named his first-born Cecil after his great friend and benefactor.
One of the early Englishmen who lovingly sowed the seeds of Apartheid.
The archetypal embodiment of the ‘golden age of cricket’, the sort whose true story is often hastily suppressed by the grey-bearded sentinels of cricket’s erstwhile empire.
William Milton was born on 3 Dec 1854