SOUTH AFRICA: A Matter of Courtesy

Freddie Mills is a British boxer, one of the best. A light heavyweight, he had just kayoed Champ Johnny Ralph to win South Africa’s heavyweight crown.

Denis Compton is a British cricketer and a friend of Freddie’s. But in the atlas of British sports—South African edition, at least—cricket and pugilism are as far removed as Capetown and Lord’s, home pitch of London’s swank Marylebone Cricket Club. Last week, as Freddie fought his fight in Johannesburg, Denis—in Capetown to play with the M.C.C. team against South Africa’s Western Province Cricket Club—invited him to drop in at Newland’s Cricket Pavilion.

But when Freddie presented himself with a couple of friends at the club’s dressing room door, he was sternly rebuffed. “You can’t come in,” snarled an attendant. Freddie was nonplussed. While he and Denis held their reunion at the foot of the steps of the pavilion entrance, George Mann, M.C.C. captain, protested vigorously to the South Africans. Club Secretary Walter Mars was adamant. “I have no objection to professional boxers as a class,” he said later, “but I had only to take one look at Mills and his friends to realize they are not the type we desire … It would not be allowed at Lord’s. Why should it happen here?”

In London, a leading member of the M.C.C. contradicted Mars. “Such a thing could never have happened at Lord’s,” he said. “Visiting cricketers can invite whom they like into their dressing rooms. They would of course mention it to the club secretary as a matter of courtesy.”