Eldoret Rugby and the Enterprise Cup: The Early Years of the Eldoret Sports Club

An overview of "Eldoret Sports Club", a history of Eldoret rugby compiled from information given by C.F. Schermbrucker and "Stompie" Jones, published in English in Habari 2000, the newsletter of the Friends of East Africa. This is a summary for readers of this archive, not the full text.

Eldoret has produced great athletes in our own time. This short history from Habari 2000 tells of an earlier sporting story, the rugby club of "64", which for a time was among the strongest in East Africa.

The early days

Rugby was already being played on the Plateau before C.F. Schermbrucker arrived in Eldoret in 1926. The club's first president was Tommy O'Shea. Turbo then ran its own side, and Eldoret often struggled to raise fifteen players. Soon after 1928 Turbo's players joined Eldoret, and from then on "64" came into its own.

Schermbrucker remembered how he played his first game. He was on a farm when an old box body Rover drove up and Fred Pohl, a stranger to him, got out and asked whether he played rugby. When he said yes, Pohl told him to get in quickly, because there was a match against Kitale in a few minutes. Kitale were the main rivals and were on top until 1928, when the honours became even. A journalist named Pharazyn wrote in the local Nzoia paper that while the Kitale players were searching for the ball "in the hills and dales of the Eldoret rugby field", the home players, knowing their own ground, were "nipping through the forests of grass to score tries".

Building the ground

The ground had just been laid out at Elgon View on the Kisumu road, and it was dry, windswept and far from flat. Farmer members brought dam scoops and oxen and levelled it themselves. Around the time of the first South African Universities tour in 1929 they got a water pipe connected, and the Kikuyu grass they had planted began to grow. The first clubhouse, the tennis courts and the secretary's house of murram blocks were built mostly by the players, with some African help, and trees were planted against the wind. Players paid all their own costs, and those with transport carried those without.

The Enterprise Cup

The Navy, on its regular visits, presented the Enterprise Cup for inter district rugby. At first Eldoret and Kitale entered as one team, but soon played separately. Eldoret won the Enterprise Cup six times in the years before the Second World War, five years in a row from 1932 to 1936 and again in 1939. Their oldest rivals were Nondescripts of Nairobi. Among the players of that time the article names Stompie Jones, N. Duirs, Koppie Eksteen, H. Bristow, Japie Kruger, Lategan and Gordon Goby.

After the war Eldoret were the first winners when the Enterprise Cup was renewed in 1947, reached two more finals and won the Jones Cup four times. Stompie Jones played for East Africa in 1949, and his son later played scrum half for the club. Newer players included Scotty and Bobby Meintjes, Henry and N. Kruger, Tom Thorp, Sonny Boullee, the Engelbrecht brothers, Doc Young, Sholto Douglas and John McLean.

Why it matters

The rugby ground at Elgon View and the clubhouse built by the players became part of what is today the Eldoret Sports Club. Paul Okong'o's article in Habari 2017 tells the same story from a Kenyan point of view, describing the Afrikaner contribution to Kenyan rugby.

Source: "Eldoret Sports Club", compiled from information by C.F. Schermbrucker and Stompie Jones, Habari 2000, pages 5 to 6 of the PDF, Friends of East Africa. Read the original issue. See also the guide to settler stories in Habari.