Description
Black and white group portrait, mounted on card of South African Cricket Team. 5 players standing in back row, 2 sitting in middle row and 4 sitting in front row, all wearing flannels, caps and striped blazers, 1 is in leg pads. There are 2 gentlemen standing on either side of the back row and 2 further gentlemen sitting in the middle row, all wearing three-piece suits. Located on steps to a Pavilion, people can be seen in windows in background.
Display caption
Triangular Tournament, 1912
Team Photograph of South Africa, 1912 M.2015.892
The original idea for this tournament was suggested in 1907 by Abe Bailey (see caption 2) an increasingly powerful figure in South African sport and politics linked through shared business interests with Cecil Rhodes. His aim was to promote cricket and kinship through inter-rivalry within the British Empire at a time shortly before the Transvaal Colony was finally absorbed into the Union of South Africa – a result of the British victory in the second Boer War.
The tournament was to be repeated every four years beginning in England in 1912 but a combination of the worst summer’s weather for 70 years and a British public that did not embrace matches between Australia and South Africa, amongst other factors, doomed the project to failure. The format has never been successfully repeated.
