Sport

AAM supporters asked spectators to boycott the Springboks v Glamorgan cricket match at St Helen’s, Swansea, 31 June 1965

This young anti-apartheid supporter was asking cricket fans to support an arms embargo against South Africa outside the St Helen’s cricket ground in Swansea in 1965. Inside the ground the all-white South African cricket team was playing Glamorgan.

In 1967 the Secretary of the MCC, Billy Griffith, visited South Africa and called for the country to be readmitted to the International Cricket Conference. This letter from AAM Hon. Secretary Abdul Minty to MCC President Sir Alec Douglas-Home asked the MCC to cancel all future tours by all-white South African teams and to support South Africa’s exclusion from the ICC.

Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) was set up to campaign against the all-white South African tour scheduled for the summer of 1970. This press release announced the launch of the group at a press conference in Fleet Street on 10 September 1969. The cricket tour was preceded by an all-white South African rugby tour of Britain and Ireland in 1969–70. STST organised direct action against the tour.

Anti-apartheid supporters protested at all 24 games played by the South African Springbok rugby team in their 1969/70 tour of Britain and Ireland. The demonstrations combined direct action which disrupted some of the games, co-ordinated by Stop the Seventy Tour (STST), and mass marches organised by the AAM. 200,000 copies of this leaflet were distributed outside the grounds.  

Ernest Rodker was active in Stop the Seventy Tour and helped organise direct action against the Springbok rugby tour of Britain in 1969–70. He was arrested on several occasions and was part of a group that organised undercover action to disrupt the tour. He was very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in its earliest years and in the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, as well as in the campaign against the Vietnam war.

This is a complete transcript of an interview carried out as part of the ‘Forward to Freedom’ AAM history project in 2013.

Ernest Rodker was active in Stop the Seventy Tour and helped organise direct action against the Springbok rugby tour of Britain in 1969–70. He was arrested on several occasions and was part of a group that organised undercover action to disrupt the tour. He was very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in its earliest years and in the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, as well as in the campaign against the Vietnam war.

In this clip Ernest describes his involvement in a protest at Twickenham as part of the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign.

Alan Brooks was the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Organising Secretary, 1967–70 and Deputy Executive Secretary, 1987–91. In 1988 he organised the Nelson Mandela Freedom March from Glasgow to London. He also worked as the head of the International Defence and Aid Fund’s research department and for the Mozambique Angola Information Centre (MAGIC). In the early 1960s he served two years as a political prisoner in South Africa.

In this cliip Alan Brooks talks about the campaign against the all-white South African rugby and cricket tours in 1969–70.