and diamond routes to Kimberley and Johannesburg. The game was strong enough in the Western Cape for the Western Province Rugby Football Union to be formed that same year; Griqualand West followed in 1886; Eastern Province in 1888; Transvaal in 1889 and in 1889 the South African Rugby Board was founded. Kimberley was the founding city of the South Africa Rugby Football Board in 1889. In 1889 the first nationwide tournament was held at Kimberley, with the Western Province (rugby team) prevailing over Griqualand West, Eastern Province and Transvaal. The first-ever tour of the British Isles by a team from Southern Africa (drawing on players from the then independent republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and the British colonies of the Cape and Natal) took place in 1891, with the trip financially underwritten by (the British arch imperialist) Cecil Rhodes of the Cape and (the resolutely Boer) President Kruger of the Transvaal Republic. Seven years later Britain was at war with the Boer republics, and during the Boer war British troops would play a key role in entrenching the game throughout the country, and games amongst the Boer population in prisoner of war camps popularised the game further. From the early years the game had been enthusiastically and passionately adopted by coloured and black populations in the Cape colony, and the Eastern Cape in particular, but rugby organisation (under the South Africa Coloured Rugby Board formed in 1896) and teams were kept segregated with discrimination against black and coloured players and little government funding. Even before the 1948 elections in South Africa in which the apartheid government came to power and legislated systematically along racial lines, foreign sporting teams going to South Africa had felt it necessary to exclude non-white players. New Zealand rugby teams in particular had done this, and the exclusion of George Nēpia and Jimmy Mill from the 1928 All Blacks tour, and the dropping of "Ranji" Wilson from the New Zealand Army team nine years before that, had attracted little comment at the time. From 1960, international criticism of apartheid in particular grew in the wake of "The Wind of Change" speech by the British Prime Minister, Macmillan, and the Sharpeville massacre near Johannesburg in South Africa. From then onward, the Springboks, perceived as prominent representatives of apartheid South Africa, were increasingly isolated internationally. Coming shortly after the Soweto riots as it did,