Sports
Such a splendid sporting background has undoubtedly contributed to the crop of great sportsmen and athletes that Queen's College has produced, a respectable winner's list that includes cricketers Tony Greig, who captained England in 14 tests, and his brother Ian; Kenney McEwan, who captained a Nuffield side, played local, provincial and English county cricket, and played unofficially for South Africa in the 1980s; and, more recently, Daryll Cullinan, who established a South African record by hitting 106 runs for Border before he was 17, known at a point in time as one of South Africa's batting hopes for the future.
Queen's has not only produced many South African schools caps in cricket but has also been the spawning ground of many world-class players in rugby, athletics, tennis and hockey. Henry Philips was a Springbok athlete while still at Queen's in 1955.
In the recesses of history, meanwhile, Alan Beswick (a son of Frederick Beswick) was a Springbok rugby star in 1896, and Jimmy White played for South Africa in 1931. Leonard Fletcher captained the Springbok gymkhana team in 1982. Russell Caldecott was selected to represent South Africa at the World Paralymic Games in Sweden in 1994.
The Queen's 1st XV rely on sporting ability rather than superstition in winning their matches, so it might strike the casual observer as strange that there is no number 13 on the team. The number has not been used since 1951, when first-team player Victor Maitland, who wore the number 13 jersey, was killed in a motor accident. The memory of the popular all-rounder, who had a promising sporting career before him, is further preserved today in the Victor Maitland scoreboard that faces the Parry Davies cricket field.
Academics
Old Queenians have made their mark in many facets of South African life: sporting, academic, religious, commercial and civic. One such a figure, who did not even go to school at Queen's but had so much faith in it that he was a founder of the Old Boys' Association, was the mining magnate, financier and legislator Sir Abe Bailey. His son, Herbert, was Old Boys' president in the year that the association's Memorial Hall project was completed.
Other Old Queenians include Neville Zietsman, judge president of the Southern Cape, and Jeremy Shearer, South African representative to the United Nations.
The internationally-known author, Alan Scholefield, is an Old Queenian, as is Russell Kaschula, a senior research associate and lecturer at the University of Transkei's Bureau for African Research and Documentation, who had two of his short stories nominated for the Nadine Gordimer short story award in 1992. André Odendaal, head boy in 1972, won his PhD from Cambridge and lectured at the University of the Western Cape.
Lance Vogel, a PhD in Applied Mathematics, was Dux of the school in 1975 and was named Chief Scientist of the Atomic Energy Corporation in the 2000’s. PJ Wormald, deputy head boy in 1976, was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh) and he has lectured in Glasgow.