The Wanderers Club

The Wanderers Club at Kruger’s Park is dead;
Long live the Wanderers Club at Kent Park!

(Article extracted from the "Wanderers Club Centenary Magazine September 1988")

It was one of the most significant days in the history of the Wanderers Club;
Sunday October 27 1946.

After a long and bitter legal struggle, the railway administration’s expropriation of the club’s city centre premises had become a hard fact and the Wanderers Club had to face up to the ineluctable prospect of moving its home to the sparse tract of undeveloped land it had acquired ten years before in the northern outskirts if Johannesburg.

A farewell was staged on the old ground. It took the form of a series of exhibitions and games in which many notable old-stagers participated, all of them reflecting the character and spirit of the old club.
The proceedings were hilarious in part, but through them all there was an unmistakable undertone of sadness.

And then at noon, while the pipers of the Transvaal Scottish band played a lament, Victor Kent, the chairman of the club, slowly lowered the tattered old Wanderers flag which was flying in the gentle breeze on the ground in front of the well-filled grandstand, calling out in a voice charged with emotion: "The Wanderers Club at Kruger’s Park is dead; long live the Wanderers Club at Kent Park!"
Except for city noises in the distance, not another sound could be heard in the ground as the plaintive, reedy notes of the pipes drifted across the concourse, where misty eyes told of the sadness everyone felt as the passing of an old friend. Then all joined in singing Auld Lang Syne with lumps in throats and melancholy fervour.

At the same moment a new flag in the club’s colours was raised at Kent Park, ten kilometres away, on what is now the No.1 Oval by Charlie Frank, a famous Wanderers cricketer of the ‘20s and a member of the parent committee, in the presence of a few members of the Wanderers and Jeppe Old Boys cricket teams, who were engaged in a league match.

The photographs below depict the poignant moments. Among those behind Victor Kent at the flag pole on the old ground are Sir Llewellyn Anderson, the first secretary of the club (1888- 1895) and members of the parent committee and staff.
In the Kent Park picture the four people nearest the flag pole are (from left) Alec Hastie, then the assistant groundsman, Duggie Meintjies, the assistant secretary, Charlie Frank and Felix Oliver, both members of the parent committee.








Venture into the Illovo wilderness
In the mid-‘30s the Wanderers Club committee, under the astute chairmanship of Victor Kent, made a momentous decision to acquire some 200 acres of land in the faraway suburb of Illovo on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg for the sum of £47 704.

The property was originally intended as an overflow for the congested grounds in the centre of the city and as a future home for the old club on the expiry of its lease in 1989. The railway expropriation in 1946 caused a big deviation in these notions of the club’s future.

This aerial photograph shows the empty tract of farmland which was to become the Wanderers Club’s only property a decade later.



Club Chairman from 1920-1952. The Illovo Club grounds are named after him





Member of the parent committee in the late ‘30s and was chiefly responsible for the layout of the clubs grounds and golf course.

The re-established home.
An aerial view of the Wanderers Club in the early ‘50s.



Gouging the Fairways.
Excavations on three fairways of the golf during 1955 marked the beginnings of the Wanderers stadium, now one of the most notable cricket venues in the world.