Craven Week in history

The 2014 Craven Week in Middelburg (Mpumalanga) will be the 51st since the first in East London in 1964.

The greatest schoolboy rugby tournament in the world seems to have been around forever. But like all things, it had a birth and a growth.

It was a healthy birth but not universally welcomed. There were those who thought it a bad idea.Schools and schoolmasters are conservative, which is a natural reaction to the constantly changing world in which schools exist. Some did not like the singling out of individuals. Some thought it was against the educational spirit of school sport. Some thought it smacked of professionalism. But it went ahead in 1964.

The initial idea came from Piet Malan, the 1949 Springbok flank, currently the oldest living Springbok, a great rugby man and a great schoolmaster. After all the 75th anniversary of the South African Rugby Board was due in 1964 and, in Potgietersrus, Malan asked Danie Craven how schools in South Africa could figure in the celebrations. Craven's Board decided to get the 15 schools unions together for a week. The man who reacted most quickly was the secretary of the Border Rugby Union, a meticulous accountant named Hugh Robbie. He passed it on to the Border Schools committee whose chairman was Jan Preuyt who is the man who really established Craven Week as it is 50 years later.

At the time Preuyt, an ex-Matie and a former Griqualand West player, who had once been a missionary in Nigeria, was a teacher at Port Rex Technical School and chairman of Border Schools with Dummy Taylor of Queen's College as the secretary.  There was no such thing as a South African Schools organisation.  The schools formulated a proposal and the Union presented it to the SA Rugby Board, who agreed with Craven's pushing.

East London then put on the first-ever Craven Week in July 1964. For many provinces it was a novelty to choose a provincial team. Western Province solved the problem by inviting its long-standing schools to nominate players and from that a team was cobbled together which did remarkably well, better in fact than some "expertly" chosen teams.

The teams taking part in the first Craven Week were Boland, Border, Eastern Province, Eastern Transvaal, Griqualand West, Natal, North Eastern Cape, Northern Transvaal, Orange Free State, Rhodesia, South West Africa, South Western Districts, Transvaal, Western Province and Western Transvaal.  By 1987 there were 28 teams taking part at Craven Week.  In 2000 there were be 32 teams, even though South Africa had entered 1996 with its number of rugby provinces reduced from 22 to 14..  

In 2001 the format changed again and only 20 teams took part – the 14 provinces plus Namibia and Zimbabwe and four regional teams – Eastern Coast, Western Coast, Central and Northern. The regional teams did not last long.

This year there will be 20 teams - one from each province plus Limpopo, Border Country Districts, Griquas Country Districts, Eastern Province Country Districts, Namibia and Zimbabwe. The area most obviously left out is Northern Natal which includes Newcastle, Ladysmith, Dundee, Glencoe, Estcourt and Vryheid.

The names of teams taking part this year will not all be recognised easily from the past - Blue Bulls, Boland, Border, Border Country Districts, Eastern Province, Eastern Province Country Districts, Free State, Golden Lions, Griffons, Griqualand West, Griqualand West Country Districts, KwaZulu Natal,  Leopards, Limpopo, Namibia, Mpumalanga, South Western Districts, Valke, Western Province, Zimbabwe

At that first Craven Week the first SA Schools committee was chosen - Jan Preuyt (chairman), Trens Erasmus (Western Transvaal), Wouter du Toit (Transvaal), Hennie Lochner (Boland) and Meyer Sauerman (Eastern Province).In 1965 Craven Week was again held in East London, to consolidate the new foundation which very soon developed its own spirit and modus operandi.In 1974, for the first time ever, a national schools team was chosen. Thiswas against Danie Craven's will as he wanted Craven Week to be a festival, not a competition and certainly not trials. That is why, when Australian Schools undertook their first tour in 1969, no South African Schools team was chosen.

Since 1974 a South African schools team has been chosen each year.  Till 2010 it was chosen by the schools selectors at Craven Week. In 2010 two teams were chosen - the Craven Week team and another high performance team to play against overseas opposition. In 2012 a group of 44 players will be chosen for trials later in the month to pick the team that will play France, England and Wales.

Forget all the non-competitive talk.  There is no official winner but there is no doubt that the last match on the last day is seen as a final and the winner of that match as the Craven Week champions.  Moreover, while good behaviour is a hallmark of Craven Week, there have been repeated outbursts of bad sportsmanship, mainly as a result of provincialism.

Apart from selecting national teams, Craven Weeks have been a great hunting ground for talent scouts. Many provinces go to elaborate lengths to choose their Craven Week sides and generally it is a week where kudos reigns.

The next big change came in 1980 when Danie Craven forced the Craven Week organisers to open the week to all races. That was the last year in which Rhodesia participated.  South West Africa would also cease to participate when the country became Namibia.

The next big change for all rugby in South Africa came about in 1992 with the fusion of the national bodies.

Right from the 1964 start there were changes in the teams attending Craven Week.  The number of teams increased as new provinces were created and with the entry of teams which had been excluded for political reasons.  Each year since 1980 there has been an effort to give more players a chance to take part in Craven Week.  In 1996 the quota system was introduced.

In 1987 the old SA Rugby Board introduced a Project Tournament, which by 1991 had 16 teams taking part, all based on a quota system that was at least 50-50. In 1987 the Project Tournament's selected team went on to play at Craven Week. In that team were Justin Swart, who later became a Springbok, Etienne Finn, who became a Springbok in 2001, and Louis Mzomba who became an international referee, the first Xhosa-speaker to do so. This system was more or less adopted by SARFU/SARU as the Academy Week.

For many years two teams were chosen at the end of the Craven Week  - the SA Schools XV and the sponsored SA Nampak XV, which team was chosen from the Academy Week and played against SA Schools, has been replaced by the SA Academy XV. Often they played each other. In 2006 things changed. The Academy team became the South African Schools B team and played - and beat - Italy. For the last five years the SA Schools have played in toiurnaments against other couyntries and this year the SA Academy side will play Italy.

In 1988, after 19 years in charge, Jan Preuyt declared himself unavailable for re-election as chairman of SA Schools.  His place was taken by Louis Terblanche of Western Province. In 1996 Terblanche was unavailable for re-election and was succeeded by Christo Bekker of Northern Transvaal.

Later Craven Week came to fall under the United Schools Sport Association of South Africa (USSASA) under the chairmanship of Dries van Heerden of HTS Vereeniging. He was succeeded by  Lindsay Mould, the principal of Grey Primary School in Bloemfontein, the first to chair both High Schools and Junior Schools rugby.

On 27 April 2006 Jan Preuyt died at his daughter’s house in Cathcart on 27 April 2006 He was 83 years of age, survived by his wife, Johlene, six children and nine grandchildren. His ashes were scattered at the Border Rugby Union's headquarters in East London. The ground was once the Border Rugby Union Ground, then the Basil Kenyon Stadium and now the Buffalo City Municipal Stadium. It twice had sponsors' names - Waverley and Absa.

In 2014 Piet Malan, whose brainchild the Craven Week is, is the oldest living Springbok. He turned 95 on 13 February 2014.

There are two other national weeks called Craven Week - the LSEN Craven Week, founded in Potchefstroom in 1980 and since 1989 called the Craven Week, and the Under-13 Craven Week, founded in Potchefstroom in 1972.

Craven Week Venues since 1964

1964: East London

1965: East London

1966: Pretoria

1967: Cape Town

1968: Bloemfontein

1969: Pietermaritzburg

1970: Salisbury - now Harare

1971: Kimberley

1972: Potchefstroom

1973: Stellenbosch

1974: Johannesburg

1975: Pretoria

1976: Wolmaransstad

1977: Oudtshoorn

1978: Middelburg (Transvaal)

1979: East London

1980: Stellenbosch

1981: Worcester

1982: Windhoek

1983: Upington

1984: Bloemfontein

1985: Witbank

1986: Graaff-Reinet

1987: Paarl

1988: Port Elizabeth

1989: Johannesburg

1990: Durban

1991: East London

1992: Pretoria

1993: Secunda

1994: Newcastle

1995: Bloemfontein

1996: Stellenbosch

1997: Kimberley

1998: Vanderbijl Park

1999: George

2000: Port Elizabeth

2001: Rustenburg

2002: Pietermaritzburg

2003: Wellington

2004: Nelspruit

2005: Bloemfontein

2006: Johannesburg

2007: Stellenbosch

2008: Pretoria

2009: East London

2010: Welkom

2011: Kimberley

2012: Port Elizabeth

2013: Polokwane

2014: Middelburg (Mpumalanaga)