When Cecil Rhodes was defining the ideal candidate upon whom to bestow one of his Oxford scholarships, the old imperialist could have had Clive van Ryneveld, a future recipient, in mind: a scholar and a sportsman – dashing centre three-quarter, stylish batsman – of outstanding personal qualities.
In his last will and testament, revealed after his death in 1902, Rhodes – a firm believer in the supremacy of the white race – wrote that the awards should go to candidates to whom a “fondness of and success in many outdoor sports such as cricket, football and the like” should count as much as academic attainments and scarcely less than “their qualities of truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness and fellowship”.
Van Ryneveld, who died in Cape Town last month, a few weeks before the end of his 90th year, fitted the bill in every particular, but went on to exceed the requirements in ways that would have horrified his racist benefactor, a man who made his fortune largely from South Africa’s diamond mines and promulgated attitudes that formed the basis for the code of apartheid.
Arriving at Oxford in 1947, Van Ryneveld made the most of his time there. While studying for a law degree, he found time to play in the Varsity cricket and rugby matches (running the length of the Twickenham pitch to score the winning try in the latter), to represent England with distinction in the Five Nations tournament, to represent the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s in 1949 alongside Trevor Bailey, Reg Simpson and Norman Yardley, and, as captain of Oxford, to inflict upon Walter Hadlee’s New Zealand the only defeat of their 1949 tour of England. After returning home to Cape Town, a hip injury having ended his rugby career, his batting and leg-break bowling won him a place in South Africa’s Test side and eventually, against Australia and England, the captaincy.
But there was much more to him than being good at games. A tall, lean, handsome figure, the descendant of Dutch settlers, Van Ryneveld had been born into privilege but rejected the smoother path in favour of following his conscience. Elected to the South African parliament in 1957, two years later he became one of 12 MPs who resigned from the United Party and formed the Progressive Party to campaign against the government’s racist policies. In 1961 he lost his seat and returned to the law.
During the following year a group of about 250 members of Poqo, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carrying pangas and axes, attacked a police station in Paarl, a city in the Western Cape, where they believed several prisoners were being held unjustly. Met with machine-gun fire, they spread the disturbance to nearby shops and houses, some of which were set alight. Seven people – two whites, five blacks – were killed. Around 100 blacks were arrested and Van Ryneveld, working pro bono, defended five men who were charged with sabotage, a capital crime.
Van Ryneveld signs autographs for young fans on a return to Oxford with the touring South Africans in 1951. Photograph: William Vanderson/Getty Images
His work was only partially successful. Two of the accused were acquitted, but three – Lennox Madikane, Felix Jaxa and Mxolisi Damane – were sentenced to death. And on 31 October 1963, the day before their rendezvous with the hangman, the 26-year-old Jaxa sat down in Pretoria’s Central Prison to write Van Ryneveld a letter.
“We are all grateful for the defence you did in order to save our souls,” he wrote in a firm, looping hand. “I shall never forget your courtesy. I believe you did all what you could do for us; we cannot blame you just because we are going to the gallows. At the moment we are still happy though tomorrow we are leaving this earth of sin and woe. I do not say that I am a righteous man and that I will go to the kingdom of God but I have tried my best. I beg to remain, Yours faithfully, Felix F. Jaxa.”
Van Ryneveld preserved the letter and reproduced it in his autobiography 50 years later. “That such a person could be driven to violence and be hanged for it was an awful indictment of the system,” he wrote.
A few years later, finding that his anti-racist views made it difficult for him to continue in the law, he joined a British merchant bank. Throughout his later years he continued to campaign for the development of non-white cricket in the Western Cape as chairman of a charitable trust providing facilities and organising tournaments in the townships.
Two incidents from his time as an international sportsman, both from Test matches against Australia in 1958, will serve as a memorial to his nature. In Durban he declined to appeal for a run out against the great Neil Harvey because he felt the nonchalant way Hugh Tayfield fielded the ball on the fine leg boundary had deceived the batsman into thinking it had gone out for a four. Then in Port Elizabeth, during the final Test, he took off both his ferocious fast bowlers, Peter Heine and Neil Adcock, because he felt they were endangering the opposing batsmen by ignoring his instruction to restrict themselves to one bouncer per eight-ball over. “They were the most hostile overs I ever saw,” he recalled.
His critics accused him of allowing Australia to win the match, his last in first-class cricket, and square the series. It was a decision he later regretted to some extent – “In retrospect we could legitimately have used more,” he wrote of the bouncer ratio – but it stands today as the gesture of a man to whom the world was about giving everyone a fair chance.