The Education of Bruce Mitchell and the ‘Union Babies’: History, Accumulation and the Path to Triumph at Lord’s, 1924–1935

Abstract

Born just before Union, Mitchell’s was the last generation of Springbok cricketers to learn the game on matting, and the first to benefit from the changeover to turf carried out between 1926 and ’35. This chapter examines what this entailed, for Mitchell personally as he worked to make technical adjustments, and as part of the reconstruction of South African cricket after the disastrous tour of England in 1924. Global cricket too was undergoing profound change as a new ‘mental economy’ infused the game, efficiency replacing style, mirroring the wider dissemination of instrumental reason throughout post-war societies. In South Africa, meanwhile, expansion of the Union state’s instrumental capacity underwrote a capitalist economy predicated upon the ongoing appropriation of African labour and reinforced the legislative cornerstones of ‘separate development’.