More and more sport nowadays means there’s more and more sport to forget. Here are the stories of three forgotten sportsmen:
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More and more sport nowadays means there’s more and more sport to forget. Here are the stories of three forgotten sportsmen:
Donate to The Luke Alfred Show on Patreon.
Get my book: Vuvuzela Dawn: 25 Sporting Stories that Shaped a New Nation.
Get full written episodes of the show a day early on Substack.
Check out The Luke Alfred Show on YouTube and Facebook.
More and more sport nowadays means there’s more and more sport to forget. Here are the stories of three forgotten sportsmen: the member of a travelling circus who had a tragically short England cricket career, the big-game hunter who was recalled to kick for the Springboks, and the ‘Bok eighthman who charged his bar tab to management. It was the one and only time he wore the green and gold. ________________________________________________________________________
“Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past,” wrote Virginia Woolf somewhere, I can’t for the life of me remember where. In this week’s podcast we’re going to do exactly that. We’re going to listen to the past and, in so doing, will have a look at some of sport’s weird and wonderful characters.
Many of them aren’t remembered much anymore. Often they’ve been tragic. Sometimes they’ve been inadvertently comic. Most often they’ve been a strange concoction of many strands and many things. What they are, and what the mean, is perhaps best left to you, the listener and reader, to decide. Here are their stories, stories which have been largely forgotten but not forgotten enough to be left out of this podcast.
Edmund “Ted” Peate was born near Leeds in Yorkshire in 1855. As a young cricketer he joined a troupe of wandering acrobats, clowns and cricketers called Trelor’s Clown Cricketers. They were so named because they were managed by one Thomas Trelor.
Originally from Cornwall, Trelor was not without trickiness. He also went by the name of Arthur Thomas Edward Treloar, for example, spelled slightly differently. He once played cricket for Middlesex and, I believe, a county then called “Glamorganshire”, but it was his ambition to bring a group of wandering clowns and cricketers to the villages and downs of rural England. It was with these itinerant minstrels that a young Peate – Peate was spelled in his case P-E-A-T-E – honed his craft as a slow left-armer.
Soon Peate, a bowler who could sink a delivery into a currant bun like a pair of teeth, had attracted the attention of Yorkshire, his local county club. Before long he became one of England’s premier left-arm slow bowlers along with Alfred Shaw. It was no surprise when Peate was called up for England.
Some thought he had the hex over WG Grace, the pre-eminent colossus of the Victorian game once dubbed “institutional” by the cricket writer, Neville Cardus. Whether this is strictly true or not, Peate and Grace were contemporaries. For Peate Grace had immensely high regard.
Peate’s debut came in the New Year’s Test between England and Australia at Melbourne in early 1882. Playing alongside his captain, Shaw, as well as others such as the two Billys, Bates and Midwinter, and Arthur Shrewsbury, Peate took the last Australian first innings wicket to fall to give him his first wicket in Tests. His analysis was 59 overs, 24 maidens, one for 64, Australia scoring 320 in response to England’s 294. Run-a-ball cricket was clearly a yet-to-arrive figment of the collective imagination.
The scoring wasn’t fluent on either side. England faced 170.2 eight ball overs from Australia, while Australia faced 237 overs from England. Not surprisingly perhaps, given that the cricket was so stodgy, the match ended in a draw.
A cricketer’s international diary in the 1880s wasn’t quite as well and luxuriously stocked as it is today and the match that made Peate really famous was his second Test, which happened seven months later in England. In the one and only Test of the series, England played host the Aussies at the Kennington Oval in South London. Grace and Peate were by now in the same side. It was a low-scoring game, Australia’s 63 batting first, playing England’s 101. The visitors posted 122 in their second dig, Hugh Massie scoring 55 of them and Peate taking four wickets to add to his four in Australia’s first innings.
England needed to score 85 runs in the final innings for victory. It wouldn’t have been the highest total of the match. Surely the task wasn’t beyond them? They had Grace, the coming phenomenon, and with grace they would surely prosper.
As luck would have it, Peate, batting at number 11, was last man in as England made a hash of reaching the winning total. He joined Charles Studd – that’s two d’s – with the England total on 75 for nine, still ten runs short of victory. Peate scored a two off Harry Boyle, the Australian bowler, and then, to the dismay of many, took a mighty heave across the line to be bowled by Boyle for two.
When asked about it afterwards, he said that he couldn’t trust Mr Studd to get the runs for England, so tried to do so himself. Honesty was one thing, craven honesty quite another. Peate’s answer was nowhere appreciated. You just didn’t lose cricket to Australia.
Whether Peate was reminded or not of his days with Trelor’s circus when he was at the crease, the cricket establishment blamed him for England’s seven run defeat. It was the first time that England had lost a Test to Australia in England so it was a sad day for cricket and cricketers everywhere. And, of course, it prompted the famous obituary to English cricket printed later on the pink pages of The Sporting Times.
You know the death notice, I’m sure, but just to remind you, it said: “In Affectionate Remembrance/of English Cricket/which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882/Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances/ Rest in Peace. N.B. The body will be cremated and the ashes will be taken to Australia.” And so, what has come to be known as The Ashes were born.
There were more capable batsman in the England side who failed twice in the Oval Test against Australia in 1882. Think of “Monkey” Hornby, otherwise known as “The Boss”, and Bunny Lucas. Batting orders were more promiscuous in those days and teams shuffled their orders as though they were a pack of playing cards, so it is difficult to know who exactly the best batters in the side were. Studd scored a duck in the first innings – which tends to support Peate’s view that he couldn’t be trusted. Still, Peate was the fall guy. And he fell far. Lower than a bog. The Sporting Times obituary stuck to him as if he had been tarred and feathered.
He played the last of his nine Tests just under four years later, having taken a record 214 wickets in county matches in 1882. But he was never allowed to forget the Oval defeat and in later life put on weight. It was said coyly that he developed a fondness for alcohol. Peate died, aged 45, in March 1900. If he was a victim of his own suspicion, he was also victim of a kind of pre-death death notice; he played on but his cricket death had been creepily forseen in the pages of the Sporting Times.
Studd didn’t fare much better as a cricketer, although the reasons for his withdrawal from the game were different. He came from a prosperous family and had two popular cricket-playing brothers. The Oval Test was his first and he only played four more, mainly – as far as we can tell – because he was over-taken with a missionary zeal that surely would have been better employed as an opening batsman or a canny lobber. As a relatively young man he fell under Baptist missionary, Hudson Taylor’s spell, and spent ten years as a missionary with Taylor’s Inland China Mission.
He lived longer than Peate, however, dying in what was then the Belgian Congo in 1931. I will share a section of Studd’s obituary in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanac – make of it what you will. “Later on, the state of the multitudes of the Belgian Congo, which had not been touched by any missionary agency, made such a strong appeal to Studd that he went out to that uncivilised region and, despite numerous illnesses and many hardships, devoted the remainder of his life to missionary work there.”
Posed photographs of Peate and Studd show very little, mired, as they are, in the photographic conventions of the day. Peate had a long, slightly doleful face, and a walrus moustache. Studd, an Eton and Cambridge man, looked slightly more dandified, wearing – in one photo I saw – what I fancied was a maroon-coloured cravat or neck-tie.
As we follow Woolf’s mild injunction to listen to the past, another photograph of a forgotten man. It might even ring some distant bells. You probably all know it, but let me describe it again for you. The black-and-white photograph of which we are talking shows rugby poles in the background and, behind that, a sign for Quinn’s bakery, mayonnaise and jellies.
In the foreground are two rugby players. One is lying out-stretched on the grass, having steadied a ball which is no longer there, while the other is dejectedly walking away from out-stretched player, head on chest, his back turned away from him in a portrait of suffering.
One object links the two players in the foreground with the posts in the background, and that it is a rugby ball. Most of us don’t see the rugby ball at first, but it is there, drifting to the left of the uprights as we look at them, hovering for all eternity.
There is also a kind of secondary aesthetic bridge within the photo which links the foreground to the background. That’s the scoreboard. The scoreboard is on the left of the photo as we look at it, to the left of the frozen ball as it misses the posts. What catches our eye about the scoreboard is that it is incomplete. It says, from top to bottom: British Isles 23, Suid–Afrika (it is a bi-lingual scoreboard) 2-something.
We quickly realise the scoreboard has been suspended like this in expectation of a successful kick. The kicker, who is dejectedly walking away, his head hung so low that he looks like a whipped animal, has four successful kicks under his belt but this one he has missed.
His name is Jack van der Schyff and this is the last of his five Tests because his miss means that South Africa lose the Test by one point: 23-22. He is never forgiven. Like the ball in the photo, his rugby career freezes. There is no thaw. Like a creature in the permafrost, he is frozen forever.
Van der Schyff was allegedly of mixed race, so his position in the Springbok team was already subject to a kind of pragmatic largesse. The administrators and selectors were prepared to forgive him the colour of his skin, however, because he was so damn good.
It was said that he could casually hit a drop-kick from the half-way line and, when the mood took, could play on the flank. He had grown up in Kimberley, attending Kimberley Boys’ High. Danie Craven, Springbok rugby’s supremo, spotted him while training the South African Army as an instructor in Kimberley during the Second World War and, although impressed, told him to bide his time because he path was temporarily blocked.
He did. Time was a big theme in Van der Schyff’s world. When an opportunity arose, he took advantage of it. He played provincially for Griquas, Western Transvaal and Rhodesia. As a Springbok for the first time he played in all four Tests against the visiting 1949 All Blacks. The Boks won the series 4-0, although the margins of victory were narrow. The New Zealanders argued later that the Tests would have been even closer if they had been brave enough to disregard their host’s wishes and selected Maori players.
The story goes that after the 1949 series against the All Blacks, Van der Schyff was either involved with or witnessed a mine accident. So began a period of wandering. He went up to the Copper Belt in Kitwe, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. He continued playing rugby and indulged in his favourite hobby – big-game hunting. In 1954 he returned to South Africa with his sweetheart to get married.
The following year, entirely against the run of play, he was chosen for the Springboks’ against Robin Thompson’s visiting British Lions. Interest in the series was laced with a tinge of hysteria. There was a flourishing black market in tickets. Some estimated that the Ellis Park Test, the one in which Van der Schyff hung his head in shame, attracted 90 000 spectators. Thousands of them were in the ground illegally.
Like Peate, Van der Schyff stood at an angle to the dominant culture. Peate was a northerner and I would imagine – although I have never seen it confirmed – a professional. Where he was educated we do not know.
Van der Schyff was of mixed-race, from the far-flung reaches of the Northern Cape. There was an expedience to picking him against the Lions. And there was an expedience to dropping him, too. Van der Schyff died in 2001. He had problems with his heart, which seems appropriate for a man who first hung his head in shame and later banned from setting foot in the Garden of the Elect.
The British Lions again provided the opposition for the Springboks in another seldom-told story of rugby wonder. It was 19 years later, during the all-conquering Lions tour to the Republic led by the Ulsterman, Willie John McBride. McBride’s trip in 1974 was his fourth to the country and he was sick and tired of being on the losing side. With pipe-smoking amiability, he commandeered a talented, powerful and, when they needed to be, brutal side to face the Springboks.
They were well-prepared. And they were in luck. South African rugby was bumbling through a phase of extreme introversion, a sort of Dark Rugby Ages. Technically, particularly in the scrums, they were way off the pace. And they favoured backs-to-the-wall, ten man rugby, conducted by fly-halves with big boots but small imaginations. Willie John and his management team had thought about it long and hard and reckoned the ‘Boks were ripe for the taking.
The first Test at Newlands only served to confirm McBride’s view. In mud and wind and rain the British Lions won a crabby first Test at Newlands 12-3, the home side’s points coming through a Dawie Snyman drop-goal. The Boks, the Bok selectors and their fans were dumbfounded. Not only had they lost but they’d been beaten in the scrums, the traditional seat of South Africa’s emotional power. They took solace from the fact that the second Test was upcountry, at the citadel of Loftus Versfeld. The rugby planets would re-align at Loftus. It was partly a matter of picking the correct team.
The Lions stayed in Cape Town after the first Test, playing a mid-week game against Southern Universities at Newlands next. Several anti-apartheid activists ran onto the field to protest against the Lions presence in South Africa. They unfurled a banner. This was something anti-apartheid protester Peter Hain had tried in vain to address with McBride before the Lions left for South Africa. Hain may as well have been speaking Mandarin to Willie John.
Southern Universities, an amalgamation of UCT and Maties players, were beaten 26-4 on the day, their points coming from a try by tearaway Ikeys eighthman, Dugald MacDonald. MacDonald, a Bishops boy who grew up in Plumstead and surfed the Muizenberg waves when he could, was a free spirit. His reading diet consisted of as much Ian Fleming and James Hadley Chase as he could get his hands on.
He and some of his UCT mates loved watching the film of the Barbarians’ game against the All Blacks at Cardiff in 1973 when a moved started off by Phil Bennett and rounded off by Gareth Edwards resulted in that try. It was the kind of rugby they wanted to play.
After having been on the bench for the first Test, MacDonald was one of seven changes for the second. He found the atmosphere in the ‘Bok camp was so tense going into the Test that barnstorming play was out of the question. You dared to even crack a joke.
The players were forbidden from reading the newspapers and had little or no contact with the outside world. The selector, Ian Kirkpatrick, came up to MacDonald beforehand and said that “you have the ability to spark a side” but this didn’t look like a side who wanted sparking. They were too scared for that.
After an age of waiting for the 24 year-old MacDonald and his fellow Springboks, Saturday afternoon eventually rolled along. It was a beautiful winter day on the Highveld, with a big blue sky. Gerhard Viviers, the sage of the commentary booth, was in good voice. He said in his pre-match patter that this was probably “the most important match in Springbok rugby history” and he was right.
So there you have it. The stage was set. The majority of those in the towering Loftus stands believed that after 80 minutes, the rugby status quo would return and the ‘Boks would take their rightful place on top of the rugby-playing world.
The ‘Boks were not the only side who thought the hard Loftus turf would provide a good opportunity for running rugby – the Lions did to. They honoured their pre-match intentions by running in five tries, three after half-time. Although they ran in five tries, they actually won at a canter. The Lions’ 28-9 victory was up until that stage the heaviest defeat ever suffered by the Springboks.
Poor MacDonald hardly touched the ball, as the action spooled away from him in eddies just beyond reach. It was a bitter anti-climax, made more so in the post-match revelry. Some of MacDonald’s university mates came up to Pretoria to see him play. Afterwards they drank many a beer and charged it to ‘Bok management. From MacDonald’s point of view it wasn’t a career-enhancing move. He was dropped for the third Test as the Springbok selectors panicked. Which is exactly what they had done after the first Test. 1974 – the year of panicking dangerously.
I phoned MacDonald to ask his permission to tell this story before writing this podcast and found him baby-sitting his grand-children in London. He said, sure, he had no issues. “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a bitter 73 year-old staring into my coffee wondering what could have been,” he said, and that was good enough for me.
There were others like him that year the Lions came to town. Leon Vogel only played in one Test, as did Polla Fourie, Roy McCallum and Johan de Bruyn, and that list is by no means exhaustive. My sympathies have always lain with MacDonald. He was young, naïve and was cut from different cloth. He should have been given another chance.
Afterwards he took himself off to Oxford University before heading to Rovigo and Toulouse, where he was one of a trinity of loosies with Jean-Pierre Rives and Jean-Claude Skréla. He had good fun on the rugby field and rugby provided the introduction into his working life. The game was better to him that it was to either Peate or Van der Schyff.
MacDonald was once-forgotten but, thanks to a self-published book about his one-and-only Test is forgotten no longer. The other two, playing longer ago, are further forgotten but not forgotten entirely. That’s the tricky thing about writing about the forgotten in sport because, although there are legions of the forgotten, there are also those who haven’t been forgotten enough to make them disappear totally from view.
They occupy a strange place: a kind of netherworld of the forgotten. It’s like an official stamp of approval, an official category because, let’s not forget, the authentically forgotten don’t find their way into history. They don’t find their way into newspapers or podcasts. And they don’t find their way into public consciousness because well, they are the truly forgotten, souls lost in the wilderness of history, with nowhere, nowhere to go.
Ends.