The crowd in the Bodega Bar was in high spirits. In the harsh winter of 1888 there was no fireplace because there was no firewood, but the libations, mainly gin at six pennies a tot, provided warmth, as did news from the capital.
The men were fortune-seekers, drawn by potential riches to this “barbarously primitive” camp, in the words of one of them. In just two years the camp had become a town, about to grow into a vast city. The bar where they met stood on Commissioner Street in newly minted Johannesburg; just a few miles to the south a gold reef had been discovered.
They had come to dig for that gold, but digging was a tedious business and they needed light relief. Among any mining skills the newcomers brought was also the ability to play a range of games. The most popular were a bat-and-ball one from the early 1700s and a more recent variation developed at the English public school Rugby.
Both codes, with the conventional association football and athletics, required an open piece of land, preferably level. Even on the treeless veld space was running out, with tents being pitched, plots sold and houses built. Those in the Bodega Bar were eager to hear news of an appeal for space they had sent to the president himself in Pretoria.
Paul Kruger had accommodated a delegation on his stoep. He sensed these people — uitlanders, he called them — could be trouble, but their promise that sport would divert attentions from politics appealed to him. The republic would be generous and grant them part of what was then Kruger’s Park in Johannesburg and today encompasses Park railway station, part of the city centre and Joubert Park, named, in a bit of toadying, for Kruger’s minister of mines, Christian Joubert, who had arranged that the land be leased for 99 years at £50 (R1,200 today) a year.
Amid euphoria at the news, the men in the Bodega Bar now needed to carry out their plan and establish the “supra-club” they had been dreaming about, bringing all the disparate clubs and teams together under one umbrella. Proposals for a name included Zingari (gypsies), a popular term at the time, but the Bodega bunch opted for the less exotic Wanderers because, as one of them remarked, “all of us are constantly wandering about looking for gold”.
One of those at the Bodega Bar, Herman Eckstein, who had come to Johannesburg as a mine manager for the Anglo-German magnate Alfred Beit, was elected the first president of the Wanderers Club. Another randlord in the making, JB Taylor, was on the committee, along with his brother WP in the chair.
The committee promised to build a pavilion, tennis courts and an athletic track, plant trees, sink wells and create fields for cricket and football (both round and oval-ball versions). It would cost no less than £2,000, they said.
Agreeing on a club name and the way ahead was the easy part. Little gold was being produced from the mines at the time and the committee began to wonder if it would find enough players. Its members need not have worried. Within a few years the mining camp had grown from 3,000 to a bustling city of 100,000 and successful capitalist entrepreneurs from the diamond fields of Kimberley had arrived to invest in machinery that would take the diggers down to levels where the real gold lay.
In the prevailing prejudice of the time, the club was open to only white people; white women were barely tolerated. By 1912 such bigotry had softened and petitioning by the South African Olympic Committee, and some of the club’s leading cricketers, that black membership be allowed was indulged, then rebuffed.
Cricket, though not always the most popular sport at the Wanderers (lawn tennis topped the list for many years), was the game that made the club known throughout the world and those five gave it a start.
The Olympic committee had pleaded especially for the Chinese, “who had contributed generously to local athletic funds”. A local attorney, who was already gaining a reputation as an activist, appealed twice for membership. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was turned down both times with the excuse that the club was “full”. It would take almost 100 years for it to be open to all.
More immediately ominous was the railway from the Cape that had been running since 1892 and slowly encroaching on the club’s land. At first it was not seen as a threat; it brought too many comforts and speed of travel. The arrival of immigrants, mostly male, had been a trickle across the veld by wagon or coach; the rail turned it into a flood.
One of the immigrant fortune-seekers who arrived about two years early for the train came with some fanfare, not because he was a future film star. Charles Aubrey Smith joined the Wanderers and went straight into the First XI. He was a fast bowler, a useful lower-order batsman and a good slip fielder. He had also been captain of England, until a few weeks before, having led his team to victory at St George’s Park in the first Test match to be played in South Africa. Smith decided Johannesburg offered greater attractions than Test cricket and was given a huge welcome.
He captained the Wanderers and Transvaal cricket teams, and, as an aspiring actor, starred on the local stage. In later years he went to Hollywood, became a famous supporting actor (once with a teenage Elizabeth Taylor in Little Women) and established a cricket club where Boris Karloff kept wicket, with David Niven and Laurence Olivier occasionally making an appearance. In 1932 the club hosted an Australian team that contained many of that country’s best players at the time. C Aubrey Smith, as he was always credited on screen, is believed to be the only Test cricketer to have played against both Donald Bradman and WG Grace. Certainly the only Wanderers member.
The Bullring is no longer owned by the Wanderers Club, but remains one of its enduring symbols in myth and memory.
One of the possible myths of the Old Wanderers is the longest six ever hit. It was said to have been struck somewhere between 1896 and 1910 by Jimmy Sinclair, the AB de Villiers of his day, who was famous for big hitting and scored South Africa’s first Test century.
In one of his 15 innings at the Wanderers he was said to have hit the ball out of the ground and into a passing railway wagon on its way south. The ball was eventually found in Cape Town. “Probably apocryphal,” says renowned cricket statistician Andrew Samson, who has searched in vain for the evidence. “But it may have happened. He was certainly in the habit of giving the ball a good whack.”
Not in any doubt is that the new Wanderers is one of the most intimidating in world cricket, even for a batsman in form.
Just the walk to the wicket can be alarming. Unlike other Test venues, the batsman is observed from the moment he leaves the dressing room. “It concentrates the mind, a bit like a walk to the gallows,” said Eddie Barlow, who had often made the walk, but never feared the hangman.
Hugh Bladen, now 78 and a Wanderers member since he was 11, who played virtually every sport the club offered, remembers such a walk in 1956. Peter May, a great England batsman and captain who had come into a tour match for the MCC against Transvaal having scored four successive centuries, made the journey to the crease only to fall first ball to fast bowler Peter Heine.
— THE BULLRING
As befitted his later Hollywood stardom, C Aubrey Smith’s departure, like his arrival, had the touch of theatrical timing and drama. He left just in time to avoid a financial depression, the “Great Panic of 1893”, that began in the US, then spread across the world. Two years later war threatened.
Kruger and his government were no longer on good terms with the uitlanders and Cecil John Rhodes was stoking conspiracy. By 1895 the arch-imperialist attempted a coup in the republic through his sidekick, Leander Starr Jameson. The notorious Jameson Raid worsened tensions between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the Wanderers became, not for the first time, a parade ground for military volunteers. Four years later, a real war broke out between the republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State against Britain.
Uitlanders, many of them Wanderers members with imperial sympathies and hoping to escape the draft, fled Johannesburg, most to the Cape and Natal. When South Africa sent a cricket team to England in 1901, despite the war still raging, five Wanderers players were in the party.
Cricket, though not always the most popular sport at the Wanderers (lawn tennis topped the list for many years), was the game that made the club known throughout the world and those five gave it a start. In March 1896 the club became established in the cricket world when the first Test was played on its ground. It could not have looked more different to the Bullring of today: a bare tract of red grit with a green patch of coconut matting in the middle. People in neighbouring flats and houses complained of the dust. “The heat underfoot and almost constant dust causes much discomfort to the players,” according to a contemporary account.
It took almost 40 years, but to become more acceptable to international cricket and avoid being mocked for its “ancient dilatoriness”, the Wanderers would need to lay down a turf wicket with grass outfield, like venues at the coast. There was surprising resistance from members, so a vote was taken in 1934, with 87 to 23 in favour. “The mitigation of the historic dust evil had weighed heavily,” wrote Thelma Gutsche in her history of the club.
The pitch diggers struck rock and two “certificated miners had to blast out the encumbrance”, according to Gutsche. Kraal manure and sludge (given free by the municipality) encouraged growth of grass, but the smell annoyed the same neighbours. Once the grass took root, the stink evaporated, but another problem arose: tomato plants began to sprout. This time the neighbours were invited to “come along with their baskets and help themselves”. By March 1935 the ground had its “singularly beautiful turf outfield and pitch”. In the first match, Transvaal scored 609 and Free State replied with 70 and 74 for six before rain washed out the game. No one blamed the wicket.
The beautiful new Wanderers did not have long to live, however. By 1945 the railway cast covetous eyes on the “playing ground” gift from Kruger. The city was expanding, the railway, once a single track, had grown to eight platforms with about 100,000 passengers passing through Park station every day. If anything had to give, it would be the club.
Not that the Wanderers was unprepared. Soon after the turf wicket had been laid, the club’s far-sighted chair, Victor Kent, arranged for 200 acres (about 81ha) of land to the north of Johannesburg to be bought for £47,704. When the government expropriated the old Wanderers in 1945 to extend Park station, the new Wanderers began to take shape on land that lay beyond Rosebank in a suburb called Illovo that was considered to be the city limits. It would be called Kent Park.
It was a most traumatic, and expensive, time for a club that had suffered a devastating fire in 1898 and had survived the effects of two economic depressions and three wars. In the spirit of new beginnings, the Wanderers built, then rebuilt, a splendid clubhouse that was damaged by fire in 1978, then razed by another in 2004.
On the Kent Park estate the club had added a golf club and an iconic stadium. The Bullring on Corlett Drive has hosted one of the slowest Test matches (between England and South Africa in the summer of 1956/57), the fastest ODI century (AB de Villiers, 31 balls in 2015 against the West Indies) and one of the most dramatic run chases in cricket history (the 438 game between South Africa and Australia in 2006).
The stadium was sold to the city council in 1989 for R4.3m, invested in a development fund that has helped keep the Wanderers financially sound. It has also put some of that bad history behind it, having carried out club chair Doug Roberts’s promise in 1981 to open the club to all.
Those in the Bodega Bar might have harrumphed, complained about the price of the hooch, but would have been impressed today by what they’d started 135 years before.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.