George Hall
The Trust’s archives have much less on the life of George Hall, but more is known of his school career and post-Oxford life, thanks mainly to research by Michael Brumby for the Australian Dictionary of National Biography.
Hall was born in 1891 at Charters Towers, Queensland to a white mother from England and black father from Tobago. Pamela Roberts, in her book Black Oxford, speculates that Hall’s mother, Annie Collett, travelled to Australia as part of a “bounty scheme” designed to encourage young couples and single women to start a new life in New South Wales. Roberts describes Hall’s father, George Hall, as a runaway slave who jumped ships to reach Australia.
Hall attended Townville Grammar School from 1905 to 1909 where he was cricket captain, senior gymnast, an outstanding footballer, shooter and swimmer, athletics champion three years in a row, head prefect and the school's best scholar. The esteem in which he is held by the school is demonstrated in the 1996 naming of the school’s new boarding house after Hall and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Chester Parker (Queensland & Christ Church 1938). A short biography of Hall featured in a 2016 school newsletter describes him as “a brilliant all-round student,” excelling both academically and on the sports field:
“On Sports’ Day he won the high jump, broad jump, 100, 440, 880 yards and mile as well as the 120 yards hurdles and throwing the cricket ball. His record for throwing the cricket ball was only broken in 1996.”
Both Brumby and Roberts quote headmaster Percy Rowland, “he has triumphed over prejudice by sheer merit; whatever will be his future, he can always look back on his years with us as years of success; whatever he does, he will carry with the hearty good wishes of all at the school.”
David Griffiths (New South Wales & Merton 1968), a Rhodes Scholar who has researched Hall’s life, believes that, if anything, most biographies understate Hall’s school achievements: “Hall’s breadth of achievement at high school can surely have only been matched by a handful of others in the first half of the 20th century, not only in Australia, but in the whole of the British Empire. I can think of no Australian, Rhodes Scholar or otherwise, who matched or bettered Hall’s school achievements during those 50 years. No wonder he was selected as Queensland’s 1910 Rhodes Scholar. And no wonder that it was possible for a public subscription to raise funds for his passage to England.”
Hall arrived in Oxford in 1910, initially to read medicine at Lincoln College, but later changing to engineering. Like Mercier, Hall continued to play cricket at Oxford, playing twice for Lincoln College and scoring 100 runs across two innings. Griffiths wonders, “if the prejudice against non-white cricketers led to both Hall and Mercier not ever playing for Oxford. He might have become a star all-rounder in the Varsity match had he ever got there.”
After leaving Oxford, Hall worked at as an inspector at a munitions factoring in Kilmarnock, Scotland before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1918. However, the war ended before he joined a flying squadron.
The Trust lost touch with Hall after he left Oxford, and our archives contain little more than copies of letters trying to re-establish contact, and a flurry of correspondence regarding an incorrect report of his death in the early 1930s.
Hall returned to Australia in 1919, working with the New South Wales Cement, Lime and Coal Company in Kandos. He later moved to Sydney to join the Main Roads Board of NSW, rising (slowly) through the ranks to the position of supervising engineer. He continued to play cricket for many years – Griffiths describes a report by the Mudgee Guardian of Hall top-scoring with 101 runs in a 1923 match, and Brumby reports him being renowned as a “demon bowler” even at the age of 48.
Brumby concludes that despite his ability and recognition by his peers, racism limited Hall’s engineering career. He never married, telling workmates that his “ancestry would be a barrier”. After retirement, in 1956, he remained in Sydney and died in 1972, aged 80.
Antonia White, the Rhodes Trust’s archivist observes, “what fascinates me about Hall is that he must have been such a remarkable person to get a Rhodes Scholarship coming from his background in 1910. Maybe even more so than Alain Locke, who came from quite a distinguished and academic family. It is interesting that he seems to have excelled so much during his school years and won the support of everyone around him, and I think it is lovely that one of the buildings at his old school is named after him. It is sad that he never seemed to reach the heights in his career that he reached at school.”
Born in 1888 in Jamaica, Mercier was educated at Wolmer’s School in Kingston and St Augustine’s College in Canterbury, UK before arriving in Oxford in 1910 to read Theology at Jesus College. We know little of his time at Oxford; he was a keen and talented cricketer, but found opportunities limited by racism within the game.