Albert Rose-Innes

Who was Albert Rose-Innes?

Albert Rose-Innes - was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa on 16 February 1868 and died in East London, South Africa on 22 November 1946, aged 78. His first-class cricket career began at the same time that South Africa’s did, in 1889 with the first representative match between England and South Africa to be accorded Test status. Prior to this, Rose-Innes would have taken part in recreational matches between teams of unequal numbers or between teams with more than eleven players. But when R.G. Warton brought an English side to South Africa and played the hosts at Port Elizabeth on level terms, eleven versus eleven, a new era was born there, albeit retrospectively.

Rose-Innes scored 0 and 13 and took 5 wickets for 43 runs in England’s first innings of that particular match and on the basis of those figures he was selected for the second Test, played at Cape Town two weeks later. As J. Briggs created records figures of 8 for 11 in an innings and 15 for 28 in a match, South Africa were comprehensively beaten by an innings and 202 runs to lose their first Test series 2-0. Rose-Innes subsequently played five other first-class matches, three for Kimberley and two for Transvaal. He bowled slow left-arm and "terrorised most batsmen", as one account from the period reported. Playing for Kimberley in the very first Currie Cup match, played at Kimberley, he took 5 for 55 in a losing effort against Transvaal. Like so many of his countrymen from the earliest days of South African cricket, Rose-Innes’ death went unrecorded and therefore no obituary appeared within Wisden for him at the time.