Bluebadge & Others

By Bluebadge
April 17 2009

Our very own Bluebadge, under the nom de plume Geoff Levett, has contributed to this fascinating book on pre WW1 cricket in Southern Africa. Here, especially for MTWD readers, he draws out the Middlesex connections, in particular the Oolta-Poolta tour of 1907. This will be the last of our 2008/09 off-season features, folks and I have saved a cracker for last! Many thanks, Bluebadge.

 The ‘Oolta-Poolta’ Team - The 1907 South Africans and their Middlesex connections 

As a fledgling historian I’ve been researching the development of early South African Test cricket and its connection with imperialism and financial networks in the wake of the South African War of 1899-1902.  I thought I’d spare MTWD contributors the postcolonial theory and get straight down to an account of the ways in which Middlesex players were instrumental in the rise of the South Africans to become the third oldest Test-playing nation by means of a new secret weapon – the googly.   

Most cricket lovers will know that the googly was invented by one of Middlesex’s own sons, Bernard James Tindal Bosanquet. Bosanquet developed the ball (a delivery from a right hand wrist spinnner that turns from the off to a right-hand batsman rather than from the leg) while playing a game with a tennis ball called ‘Twisti-Twosti’ with friends. On the cricket field it rapidly became the wonder-ball of its day, almost unplayable to those unfamiliar with it, and leading to Bosanquet’s greatest ever bowling season with Middlesex in 1904, when he took 132 wickets at an average of under 22.  

In 1901 and 1902 an ex-St. Paul’s schoolboy named Reggie Schwarz played a handful of matches for Middlesex in a side that also contained Bosanquet. Few spectators could have imagined that Schwarz, who had already played rugby for England three times, would go on to represent South Africa at cricket. Presumably Schwarz was deemed a ‘clubbable’ chap by Bosanquet as he was invited to tour with a team that Bosanquet took to Philadelphia in late 1901.   

Schwarz must have seen the googly for the first time on that 1901 tour to America, yet it wasn’t until 1904, when the South Africans toured England in a non-Test capacity, that Schwarz learned the googly. Though it wasn’t as a team-mate of Bosanquet’s that Schwarz learned it, but rather as an adversary.

In the intervening years Schwarz had emigrated to South Africa, first fighting for General Botha in fronteir wars in South-West Africa, and subsequently becoming the personal secretary to Abe Bailey. Bailey was a big man in the region - politician, Randlord, and one of the most powerful patrons of South African cricket of the Edwardian era.   

Playing against MCC in the first match of the tour Schwarz was out for a duck, stumped from a Bosanquet delivery, and Bosanquet took 9 for 107 in the innings. Schwarz, never previously considered a front-line bowler, practiced the googly in the nets and discovered such an aptitude for it that he became the leading wicket-taker on the tour, ending up with 96 wickets at 14.81.  

By the time that South Africa returned on their first Test status tour of England in 1907 Schwarz had taught the googly to three other members of the South African team -  Gordon White, Aubrey Faulkner and ‘Ernie’ Vogler. Schwarz himself was never considered an actual leg-break bowler, for in fact he only bowled the googly. The development he made was to speed up the delivery so that it was bowled at virtually medium pace, with a real rip off the pitch that made him very difficult to score against.

Faulkner, Vogler and White, who did turn it from leg, were described by CB Fry as ‘three of the best leg break and googly bowlers ever known’.  

The Oolta-Poolta Squad of 1907   

In fact ‘Ernie’ Vogler too was a former Middlesex player. Born in the Eastern Cape he played domestivc cricket in South Africa before coming to London in 1906 to try his hand at becoming a professional.  He played for MCC several times that season and appeared just once for Middlesex in 1906. Perhaps his limited opportunity in England was down to his colonial upbringing. Edwardian cricket opinion struggled no less with the idea of imports than does the modern era, one correspondent to ‘Cricket’ stating that, ‘we do feel very strongly that the introduction and engagement of Colonial players into our County teams is entirely against the spirit of real county cricket, and does much to do away with the spirit of espit de corps’. Plus ça change…

Vogler was doubly rejected by the English game since MCC refused to allow him to publicise his own brand of cricket balls during the tour.   Vogler, in fact, was the best bowler of the quartet, R. E. Foster describing him as the best bowler in the world during the 1907 tour. But all four had a tremendous impact on the imagination of the British public. EHD Sewell in CB Fry’s magazine dubbed them the ‘Oolta-Poolta’ Team, oolta-poolta meaning upside-down in Hindi.

The googly as mastered by the four was described as ‘the most destructive ball in cricket’.     Although South Africa lost the series 1-0 their googly bowlers made a huge impact. Schwarz topped the English averages with 143 wickets at 11.53, while White, Faulkner and Vogler took nearly 300 wickets between them at less than 16 apiece. 

Another Middlesex man, who was in the England team that summer, paid them the ultimate compliment for the time when he said that, ‘not since the days of the earlier Australian teams have any bowlers been more talked about than Vogler, Schwarz, Faulkner and White. People used to flock to see them bowl’.   

As a postscript three of the quartet had a tragic fate in their post-cricket careers. Of the four perhaps Aubrey Faulkner is the most famous for being one of cricket’s suicide victims, gassing himself in the store room of hs cricket school in 1930, the note he left behind said, ‘I’m off to another world, via the bat room’.  Both Gordon White and Schwarz died in 1918 - White of wounds received in Palestine, Schwarz of Spanish Flu in northern France. Of the four only Vogler lived to a ripe old age back home in South Africa, dying in 1969.   

Editor’s note: 

Bluebadge is too modest to say that he has contributed a chapter in a substantial text on this subject which has just been published: Empire and Cricket.  I had the privilege of reading a draft of his whole contribution and I must say I found it fascinating.  He uses the nom de plume Geoff Levett for some obscure reason and is even willing to shed his cloak of anonymity to help the book.    All profits will be going to a South African sports charity.  

The book, “Empire and Cricket: The South African Experience 1884 to 1914, Bruce Marray & Goolam Vahed (editors),UNISA Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-86888-540-4” is available from following web address: 

http://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=21704&P