in particular seems not to have grabbed his imagination; he and his friend Denis Kuny both flunked their third-year accounting course, and so – after travelling to Europe together on the NUSAS tour – they spent two weeks cramming on the boat back to retake the exam. (They had already missed the normal time for retaking exams, so the fact that they were allowed to retake this one, two days after they got back to South Africa, was a special arrangement made by their professor.) They passed, and so were able then to start their LLB studies.2
It wasn’t an accident that Arthur and Denis Kuny both went on the NUSAS tour. Arthur met Denis in the first year of their BCom studies, and Arthur became part of a larger group of friends of which Denis was also a part. These young people were friends during their university years, and many remained close for the rest of their lives. Arthur in particular formed several very long-lasting friendships here. To some extent the group grew out of a Reform Jewish summer camp, which three members – Joel Joffe, Mark Weinberg and Denis Kuny – had attended together. Sydney Lipschitz, not a camper, also became part of this group; he and Rusty Rostowsky, another member, had been friends since the age of six or seven. No doubt others were added through one connection or another – but, interestingly, all of them were Jewish.
At the time, Denis was still living at his family home in Springs, taking the train into Johannesburg to attend classes. Every now and then, Denis recalls, he would stay over at Arthur’s place rather than making his way home at night: the family were very hospitable.3 In addition, many of these young men played tennis, and their weekly tennis group seems to have become a strong bond among them. So it was not surprising that Denis and Arthur would share accommodation throughout the NUSAS trip to Europe, which featured a two-week ocean voyage, six weeks’ travelling around Europe, and a return boat trip, for a total of about three months. At least one other member of the group, Rusty Rostowsky, was part of this trip too. Though NUSAS would over time become an important site of political struggle around apartheid issues, most of that activity seems to have come in later years; Denis and Rusty recall this trip as entirely non-political.4
If the BCom programme did not grip Arthur, his LLB did and he was an outstanding student. Ellison Kahn would later describe the class of 1954 at Wits, when 27 people received their LLB, as a ‘year of all the talents’.5 It is worth pausing to picture Wits University at that time. Twenty-seven people received their LLB in 1954, the largest graduating class from the 1940s until 1966. The fact that so many graduated was probably itself evidence of these individuals’ talents; in those days, students (with the exception of military veterans) in the Faculty of Law who flunked a single course forfeited all their passing grades for the semester, and so it was easy not to succeed. At the same time, the fact that the graduating class consisted of just 27 people reminds us of just how small a legal world Arthur was part of. This was not a world of impersonal distance but of overlapping acquaintance – more like a village than a cosmopolis.
Arthur graduated with a very good degree, as he himself acknowledged in an interview with Adrian Friedman. Yet among the many strong students who graduated that year, Arthur’s very good friend Joel Joffe, later Lord Joffe, firmly declared that Arthur was not the best.6 A group of very talented Jewish young men – overlapping with the group of social friends we have already encountered – seems to have led the class. Among these men Arthur came in fourth, behind Mark Weinberg, Sydney Lipschitz and Claude Franks. All four, as well as another Jewish student named Douglas Ettlinger, graduated with distinction, no small achievement. Of the others besides Arthur, Mark Weinberg was later knighted in England where, in Ellison Kahn’s words, ‘with innovative brilliance [he] revolutionized the life-insurance industry of Britain’;7 Sydney Lipschitz, now Lipworth, was also later knighted in England and served as chairman of the UK’s Monopolies and Mergers Commission; Douglas Ettlinger had a successful career at the Bar; and Claude Franks died young in a motor car accident.
What made this group of young South African Jews as high-achieving as they were? Jewish observance does not seem to have been what drove them; Arthur, for example, as we’ve already seen, was not particularly observant. Nor does anti-Semitism seem to have been an acute part of their early experience. Perhaps some part was their shared sense of guilt for having escaped both the Holocaust (because of being in South Africa) and service in World War II (because of their youth), as Arthur’s good friend Sydney Lipworth suggested to me. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate their true abilities because they sensed how unfairly apartheid South Africa tipped the scales in their favour, as Sydney Lipworth also suggested. And, as he said, they certainly competed with each other, in class and in their tennis group.8
Arthur’s outstanding performance in the Wits LLB programme helped him to launch his career as an advocate. But what kind of experience was it for him? Were there transformative educational moments that shaped his future perspective on law and on apartheid? Perhaps. Joel Joffe does not recall Arthur being enthralled by any of the law school subjects, but Sydney Lipworth remembers that Arthur as a student loved the law, and that the two of them would study together in the library and argue points of doctrine. Arthur had decided he wanted to be a lawyer without knowing much about the profession; now, perhaps, he was finding that he was fascinated by the tools of the lawyer’s trade.
Whether the Wits faculty taught Arthur lessons about apartheid and the duties of lawyers in unjust legal systems is much less evident. The teachers of that era do not seem to have made it their business to critique the law that they taught. Adam Sitze has commented, ‘Academic jurisprudence in apartheid South Africa was composed of ostensibly opposed traditions, English common law and Roman-Dutch law, which together provided the state with the vocabulary for its self-justification and allowed it to insist on its adherence to the “rule of law”.’9 Wits in those days had four full-time faculty members in law. These included H.R. Hahlo, the Dean, whom Nelson Mandela recalls as ‘a strict, cerebral sort, who did not tolerate much independence on the part of his students. He held a curious view of the law when it came to women and Africans: neither group, he said, was meant to be lawyers.’10 Another faculty member was Ellison Kahn. George Bizos recalls that ‘Ellison Kahn, our professor of constitutional law, believed that Parliament had the power to deprive the coloured people of their vote with a mere simple majority’ – thus taking the pro-government position on a crucial issue of the day, the National Party’s attempt to deprive ‘Coloured’ South Africans of their franchise, despite its having been entrenched in the founding Act of the South African state. But it must be said that the government’s efforts provoked sharp legal and political controversy in South Africa, and Bizos and his first-year classmates ‘seized on a contrary article by Professor DV Cowen that argued against [Kahn’s] notion’.11
It may be that there was some room for independent, and anti-apartheid, thought within the boundaries of the Wits classrooms – or that the faculty’s doctrinaire approach encouraged independence as a matter of sheer reaction. Sitze suggests that South Africa’s ‘fine radical lawyers … typically arrived at their sense of political responsibility despite their training in jurisprudence, not because of it’.12 But this may not be right; perhaps there was simply pleasure and value for students like Arthur in learning how to reason within the complex coils of the law, and law school neither accelerated nor retarded their later decisions to use their deft legal reasoning skills to challenge the overall oppression that the law was working. Sydney Lipworth recalled their being particularly engaged by the class of a third faculty member, J.E. Scholtens, the professor of jurisprudence.
Whatever the impact of the classroom, the external world could hardly be ignored. Arthur’s years at Wits were the years when the National Party, elected to power in 1948, began its ruthless work of systematising South Africa’s already pervasive racial discrimination into the structure of apartheid. There is no indication that Arthur became friends with the few black students who were at Wits when he was, such as Nelson Mandela and Duma Nokwe (later a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile for many years) – in contrast to George Bizos, who encountered Mandela and became friends with Nokwe during his student days. But Arthur had formed, or came quickly to form, his views on apartheid;
