The Colour Bar.

It appeared that the six-mile race was but one in a series of similar incidents. "The athletes were quartered in the basements of the grandstand with thin partitions between the sections. On one occasion, when one of the Trinidad men was ringing up, several S.A. men kept on drumming on the wall, making it impossible for him to hear or say a word. Another Trinidad man thought this was too much of a good thing, went through to persuade the rowdies to stop, but soon found a brawl on his hands. He got into it all right, and broke three ribs in one of the South Africans."

"Were all the South Africans like this?"

"No, there were three or four who were really decent chaps. The others were sort of 'high society' and drew the colour line pretty strongly. They even wanted to 'have a go' at Mr. Creake, our manager from New Zealand. He's got some coloured blood in him. The managers of the South Africana were mainly to blame, You know, kept on telling their chaps to 'remember about the niggers.' and all that. Wouldn't let them forget it. They even came up to our boners when they were fighting a coloured chap and told them to 'stick it in to him!'"

I ventured a mild exclamation that all this was hardly in accordance with the oath of loyalty to the amateur spirit of the games and the brotherhood of the Empire.

The New Zealand representative laughed.

"There's a whole lot more, too. One night some of the South Africans got one of the Trinidad chaps on his own. They flattened him and started to 'put the boot in.' I honestly believe they'd have kicked him to death if the police hadn't arrived in time. That chap was in a real bad way."