Arriving in Cape Town
We arrived in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. The priest who was my cabin companion was entranced after a day’s visit with the coloured community on the Cape Flats and worked there for the rest of his life.
When the organiser of the party arrived in Cape Town a week later, he took a look at me and said, “I have the perfect job for you Donald – the Railway Mission in Bechuanaland (Botswana).” It was the one job I knew something about as I had had a friend who had worked there and from her stories taking to drink was an occupational hazard! It was a complete non-job. It had been started some fifty years earlier when the expatriate railway workers were all British. They had since been replaced by Afrikaners, members of the Dutch Reformed Church. The caboose one lived in was hooked on to the end of a goods train and one was shunted up and down the railway in Bechuanaland at odd hours of the morning. One got out and tried to find the one in twenty who might be English speakers.
Pretoria
I refused the offer to join the Railway Mission and was given option number two – something called “The Pretoria Native Mission”. It really was enormous fun, with a wide variety of congregations. Some services were held in European churches in the suburbs. The centre was a wooden building that had been there since the year dot, just out of Church Square in Pretoria, right in the heart of government. Others were out in “native locations”, as they were called, on the edge of Pretoria, some on Dutch farms and others on “native reserves”, up to sixty miles from Pretoria. This was the terminology of the day. It was a complete cross-section of society. My boss during my time in Pretoria was Father Pip Woodfield, who had previously been the head of a teacher training college. I respected and liked him.
Apartheid had not been named at this time but it was there. It was practically impossible for people in Pretoria to know what was happening. Some of the ‘native locations’, were guarded and whites were allowed in. In any case, who would ever want to drive ten miles to a ‘native location’? There were horror stories about what might happen to you.
In Pretoria there were two quite different townships. Atteridgeville and Lady Selbourne were the only two places in the Transvaal where Africans had been able to buy land freehold. The conditions in Lady Selbourne were terrible. There was no police station. The nearest was in Pretoria itself. There was a women’s mission called Tumelong (the place of faith). On one occasion when there were four women missionaries working there, somebody broke into their house, they all jumped on him and pinned him to the ground. Three managed to hold him down whilst the fourth went to telephone the police. The reply was “Where are you speaking from?” “From Tumalong Mission, Lady Selbourne.” “We can’t go there at night, it’s not safe!” “We live here and we are sitting on this man. What do we do with him?” The final reply, “Continue sitting on him. We’ll come and collect him in the morning!”
Atteridgeville was a model township and a great deal of imagination had gone into it. It was named after Mrs Atteridge who was an imaginative mayor of Pretoria and somehow had got it through her hardline Council. It was very well done, as things were at the time. The roads were not all in squares. The houses were of many different designs and had gardens! Each road was planted out with a different species of tree. It really looked extremely human and one of the most inspiring places I had ever seen. It is still going. It was just too good to knock down when apartheid was introduced in 1948.
Ishmael, one of the clergy team, was an absolute saint and lived in Atteridgeville. Among his many congregations was one at the big ISCOR steel works. He used to hold a Eucharist at 4.30 in the morning for the day shift before they went on duty. I remember Ishmael telling me once that he had got up at 3.45a.m. and tried to start his motor-cycle. He tried kick-starting if for half an hour and it just would not fire. He had to give up and he came to me later in the morning and said, “Father, I’ve failed.” He was one of the hardest working people I have ever met.
South West Township was built at the same time in Johannesburg, Orlando, now renamed Soweto. They ordered a thousand houses and began by building the loos, so there were a thousand loos laid out in straight lines across the African veldt as far as you could see. Then came the houses, absolutely identical, in straight rows. They did not even name the roads. They had one set of numbers running throughout it, so your house might be ‘893 Orlando’. I had never seen anything quite so impersonal and awful. Fortunately I did not work there.
School feeding programme
There was concern about malnutrition in the schools connected to the mission and their ability to feed the school children. One of my jobs was running a feeding scheme for several schools. We had 2d(1p) per child a day with which to feed 5,000 children, including overheads. We were able to achieve it and kept the children reasonably fit.
We could not afford to spend much on transport and some of the schools were fifty miles away. We decided to supply food that could be sent once a term: maize-meal, which was cheap as the staple food, as much high-protein food as they could afford and vegetables. The cheapest protein was cheddar cheese. A cheese weighed about a hundred pounds, like a barrel of tar, and could keep a school going for a term. It was about 10d(5p) a pound.
The schools could not grow any fruit. Those in the country were on Afrikaans farms and in the townships there was no land. Cheap oranges were available. They were graded into five different sizes, the smallest were almost given away. A thirty-eight pound ‘pocket’ cost 20d(10p) and held up to one hundred oranges, so it was possible to give each pupil and orange a day for about 0.1p per head.
They varied the diet as much as they could. Some of the schools were on the route of an Islamic baker, a member of the Aga Khan’s Ismaeli sect, who lived in Pretoria. He said to me that if I ever wanted money for my school I should just ask his accountant. As a Muslim he was bound to give ten per cent of his income to the poor. The ten per cent automatically went into a special account. It was there for the asking. He thought I would make good use of it.
Periodically there were bread shortages and the van was empty when it reached a couple of schools thirty miles out of Pretoria. I went to see the baker who immediately told his driver to go to the furthest schools and give them all they wanted. He would then ration the European outlets on his way home. It reminded me of the generosity of the Islamic Faith.
4th Pretoria Scout Troop
I was in Pretoria for eight and a half years. I had two “Cape Coloured” congregations. They were a small community, 5,000 out of a total population of 150,000. They had little place in society and found it hard to find work. Employers already provided loos for “Whites” and “Natives” and could not be bothered to build a third set for “Coloureds”. The Coloureds had just one mediocre school and a smaller but much loved church school called “The Good Shepherd”. I am still in touch with two SPG missionaries who taught there in the 1940s.
At the School of the Good Shepherd I suggested starting a Scout Troop but there were problems. There were white Scouts and native Pathfinders and never the twain could meet. No time for Baden Powell and all that stuff about being a brother to every other scout – unless he was the same colour as you.
The Pathfinders had only recently been accepted into the worldwide Scout Movement. Until then, everything had to be a little bit different. The patrol-leaders’ stripes had to be horizontal, whereas in then white Scouts they were vertical. Now that the Pathfinders were recognised as part of the Scout movement, the stripes could be vertical – but the rule that they must never attend gatherings of white Scouts remained absolute. Our boys decided to throw in their lot with their Black brothers and so became the 4th Pretoria Pathfinders.
They had no equipment or money. Everything had to be begged for their first camp. The Black troop at St Peter’s Rosettenville on the Witwatersrand lent us two tents – fine, except that they were full of holes. One tent came from a white Scout troop on condition that only Europeans slept in it. That ruled out the Assistant Scoutmaster, as he was Coloured. Beggars could not be choosers. The cooking-pots were borrowed from the Jewish community – no colour restrictions but no pork products were to be cooked in them.
At 3.00 am on the first night of the camp we had the biggest downpour I had ever experienced. The heavens burst open and just poured water – not rain – on to us, accompanied by a high wind. There were shouts and laughter and two tents collapsed. The contents of both arrived in my tent, the only one still standing. No question of who was which colour, just 25 bodies in one tent. It was hilarious and none of the 4th Pretoria will ever forget their first camp.
In 1950 a camp was held at Umgababa on the Natal coast. None of the scouts had ever seen the sea. Pretoria is about 400 miles from the Indian Ocean so it was quite an expedition to get there, especially as I was not allowed to travel third class on the train. I had to travel at one end of the train and the boys at the other. I held all the tickets to add to the complications. On the way back there was a kindly ticket inspector who said that the law only applied in the Transvaal so I could join my boys until midnight, when I would enter the Transvaal, and then I would have to leave them. At the other end of the carriage was a tall bearded Zulu. He never took his eyes off me. After a little while he got up and stalked the whole length of the carriage to where I was sitting. He pulled a half-crown out of his pocket, gave it to me and said, “That’s for being without apartheid.” Half-a-crown was a lot of money – as much as a farm labourer earned in a day. Each of the four provinces had its own traditions regarding this. The Cape was the most liberal, the Coloured had a vote, which the other three never had. Natal was mildly liberal.
Umgababa was a ‘Native Reserve’ south of Durban, just outside the ‘White’ part of the Natal coast. We descended on it in 1950. None of the boys possessed a swimming costume so they bathed in the Indian Ocean. Then the owner of the local hotel came and said he had had a complaint from one of his guests. Through her binoculars she could see the boys were bathing in the nude and was offended. The hotel was half-a-mile away. I said I was sorry but the boys could not afford bathing suits. It was hard to expect them not to swim on the only time they had ever seen the sea. I suggested that his guest should turn her binoculars in the other direction.
One morning a telegram came from one of the parents in Pretoria, 400 miles away: ‘Please deny or confirm drowning tragedy.’ There were 30 boys in the camp and they had gone off in four different directions (on patrol hikes?). It was impossible to know who was there and who was not. I phoned my boss in Pretoria, Fr Pip Woodfield and found he was being besieged by parents. I told him I couldn’t guarantee that they were all safe because they had gone off at the crack of dawn, but nobody had told me anybody had drowned! I would count them when they returned. The Coloured community was so tight that once a rumour started, everyone heard it within minutes. All the boys returned to camp in one piece.
The Coloured people in Pretoria spoke among themselves a dialect of Afrikaans laced with a few Malay words. They kept English for important things such as school and church. To me they would only speak English. I had to learn enough Afrikaans to know if they were swearing.
The troop kept going for another 40 years after I left it in 1951. It was entirely run by successors of the boys who joined in the 1940s. Willie Hoods visited me In Uxbridge in 1985. He joined in 1946 as the smallest Cub in the Pack and became a very good Scout before I left five years later. I had lost touch with him for a long time and was astonished to learn that after Independence he ended up as Deputy Administrator of the Transvaal. Long before then Willie and his wife Gloria had started a school for handicapped Coloured children and have been raising funds for it ever since.
I have had visits from others. One was working in Canada; the wife of another who went to Australia wrote last Christmas (2010) to say that he had died. The 4th Pretoria has been an important part of all our lives.
In 2005 Jane and I stayed with Willie and Gloria Hood. Willie Hood gathered together 11 members of the troop from all over South Africa for a wonderful reunion in his home in Pretoria when I handed over the Log of the 4th Pretoria that I had made and kept. What a party! Willie is on the left in the front row.