Cricket in South Africa — The Cape Colony Grounds and the Western Province Club, 1850s

The earliest recorded cricket in South Africa dates from 1808, when a garrison match was played at Green Point, Cape Town. By the 1850s cricket was firmly established among the British settler community and the military garrison, with regular matches on the Green Point Common and at Newlands. The Cape Town Cricket Club, founded in 1829, was the oldest civilian club and the centre of the game; in the 1850s it played regularly against garrison sides, visiting naval teams and occasional inter-district opponents from the farming communities of Stellenbosch and Paarl, where British settlers had established small clubs. The infrastructure of grounds, clubs and regular competition built in the 1850s was the foundation on which the Western Province Cricket Club was formed in 1864 and on which South Africa's Test debut — in 1889, against England at Port Elizabeth — eventually rested.