mother saying ‘Arthur can go, but you must look after him’.
My friend Harry Bowman couldn’t come but sent his young brother Alan, enjoining me to ‘look after Alan’.
Marching there we were pelted with stones from the nearby Brixton Cemetery.
This continued when we arrived at Vrededorp, and a contingent of police fixed bayonets and faced us so as that we could not get at the stone-throwers.
Marching back the hail of stones increased in size and ferocity, next to me, Alan Bowman was hit by a stone and broke his pelvis. I bent down to attend to him, and the next thing I saw was Arthur taking off, jumping the low cemetery wall and returning fire to the stone-throwers – so much for my chaperon duties.
On another occasion I asked Arthur to bring some friends to a march to Edenvale – he brought young Reitz. Arthur was articled to Deneys Reitz, Jacobson and Effune.
Young Reitz was hit on the head by a stone, badly hurt.
Afterwards I stopped asking Arthur for help.24
With the exception of Arthur’s brother Sydney, no one whom I’ve asked about these events (including Arthur’s widow) has ever heard of Arthur’s role in them. But several striking details of what Sydney recounts are confirmed by contemporary news coverage. The Rand Daily Mail of 18 June 1952 carries an article called ‘Torchmen Angry over Scenes at Vrededorp’, accompanied by pictures of those injured, including Alan Bowman, whose broken pelvis is mentioned.25 An article two days later on these events (one of many) is headlined ‘Nat. Gangs Started Stonethrowing before Meeting’.26 The description Sydney gives of the events at Vrededorp is partially confirmed by Louis Kane-Berman, then national chairman of the Torch Commando. He writes:
Another meeting which was memorable was an open air meeting held at Vrededorp, a nationalist stronghold. About 3000 torchmen marched to the meeting place. The speakers stood on a hastily erected platform behind which was a derelict wall. Suddenly a hail of half bricks and stones were thrown from behind the wall which fortunately caused only a number of minor injuries, with the result that the meeting broke up. The assailants, of whom there were a great number, were roughly manhandled whereafter the men marched in good order back to the assembly area.27
Arthur would have been 20 at the time of these events. He was, in other words, a young man. No doubt he was impulsive. No doubt he was well aware of his own athletic ability and strength. And, if Sydney’s recollection is correct, he was under physical attack. Moreover, he was brave. But it is still startling to see him engaged in ‘returning fire to the stone-throwers’. He was not, at this moment, non-violent. Nor was he, at this moment, precisely bound by the law; whatever the exact dimensions of self-defence in this setting, Arthur’s response seems to have been guided by anger rather than close calculation.
But Sydney’s reading was that Arthur was very much mindful of justice in that moment. Sydney connected Arthur’s role in the Torch Commando with his reaction as a boy of eight to being wrongly called out in a cricket match – at which point Arthur started throwing the wickets about. The following year Arthur would say, at the Wits student meeting, that the question the students needed to consider was not one of tradition but rather ‘What is right and what is wrong?’ That commitment to justice, that fierce commitment to justice, seems to have been part of Arthur’s role at Vrededorp as well.
And yet the course the Torch Commando was following in the early 1950s did not become Arthur’s course. (The Torch Commando itself soon faded from view as well.) After his brother stopped asking him to go to the Torch Commando events, it seems, Arthur did not pursue the chance to take part. Instead, he focused on his studies and articles. Most strikingly, he seems never to have spoken about these events. Was that simply discretion? Or was it embarrassment about the impulsiveness of his acts? We do not know, but it does seem that Arthur turned away, in his own life, from politics of this violent sort.
Meanwhile, he was occupied with studies, and with many of the pleasures of life as a young man. He played football (soccer) for Wits and for a South African universities team. He also played tennis, along with many of his young Jewish friends who shared this interest. There were in fact at least two groups of young Jewish tennis players in Johannesburg at this time. One was made up of people on the left. Mendelsohn and Shain, in their book The Jews in South Africa, include a photo of nine men in tennis whites, all evidently Jewish, and all but one of whom ‘were later to become political prisoners’ – with the caption ‘Anyone for Revolution?’ Jewish Communists such as the advocate Joe Slovo (one of the pictured tennis players) did play an important role in anti-apartheid activism in the 1950s, though there were always many more Jews who were disposed to make their peace with the ruling pro-apartheid party.
The other group of tennis players, the one that Arthur became part of, seems to have been less political and perhaps more hedonistic. They also intersected with the group of LLB students who led the class of 1954 at Wits, though at least one player – Arthur’s cousin Aubrey Lunz – was not a law student. Not everyone taking an LLB at Wits played tennis, and the line between those who did and those who didn’t may have had something to do with class. The members of this group were not all wealthy, but Sir Mark Weinberg (who recalled he wasn’t one of the most dedicated players) said that they all were from comfortable Jewish homes.28 (In contrast, George Bizos told me, ‘I couldn’t afford a tennis racket.’29)
Joel Joffe, Arthur’s old friend, recalls that their group’s matches took place at tennis courts in the gardens of the homes of two of the members, Rusty Rostowsky and Arthur. (Arthur’s ‘smaller house’ had by now acquired a tennis court – and Arthur was still living there.) There was a vigorous competition between the two houses, Joel remembers, over the quality of the refreshments offered to the players. These were, of course, produced by the black cooks in each house, and were served by black servants in livery and sash.30 Arthur’s friend Sydney Lipworth recalled one occasion when two Communist tennis players joined the party and were discomforted by the liveried servants. Joel recalled that Arthur was quite fond of the cook at his house; he also mentioned that wives and girlfriends would come along for tea on these tennis days. These young people, no doubt with some degree of ambivalence, were enjoying the privileges that the South African racial hierarchy afforded them. And as Sydney Lipworth recalled, those in this group really didn’t have much contact with black people except their servants.31
Arthur and Sydney Lipworth played a weekly match against Joel Joffe and Denis Kuny – a competition that went on for years. Any doubt that Arthur had a competitive side is removed by Kuny’s account of these matches:
It was in this legendary highly competitive ongoing tennis match that Arthur developed what, I believe, was the technique which later became known as ‘sledging’ when used and refined later by the Australian cricket team. Arthur, when things weren’t going too well for him, and Syd (which was quite often as I like to recall it now) would very subtly make sly and very biting remarks about Joel’s and/or my game in order to upset us and put us off our winning strike. (I don’t think that it really worked but it didn’t deter Arthur from trying.)32
Arthur apparently continued to employ this technique even while he was engaged in defending Nelson Mandela in the Rivonia case!
Arthur and Sydney made a good pair, good enough, or almost good enough, to compete in tournaments. Once, Sydney told me, they were signed up for the South African Open together, playing doubles, and on the first day another team was utterly overwhelmed by one of South Africa’s best pairs.33 Their defeat was so total that a newspaper editorialised about the need for greater selectivity in tournament registration. Now Arthur and Sydney had to play, against another of the best pairs in the country. They decided on a strategy: they would
