they’d hoped: they lost, but respectably (6–2, 6–3), and escaped the scrutiny of the newspapers. There is a certain link between this match and Arthur’s dramatic participation in the Torch Commando: in each case a young man is swinging away.
These young men also played cricket. Rusty Rostowsky recalls that they had an organised team called ‘County’.34 Sydney Lipworth was the captain; Arthur was the wicketkeeper. They were good enough to travel to Pietersburg on one occasion to play a couple of matches there.
After graduation from law school, Arthur and Sydney completed their articles of clerkship. They were now qualified to become attorneys, but they didn’t want to do that. Instead, this was the moment when they would switch from the attorneys’ profession to the Bar as advocates. To do that, however, required a six-month period of ‘cleansing’. The idea (such as it was) was that as former attorneys, or at least former articled clerks, they had links to the attorneys’ profession which might make it unfairly easy for them to elicit briefs from their former professional colleagues. Six months away from the attorneys’ profession was therefore required to cleanse them of this taint.
Forced into six months of professional absence, Arthur and Sydney went to Europe in early 1956. This was Arthur’s second European trip in the 1950s, and his third since his birth. On this trip, Arthur and Sydney struck up a friendship on the two-week ocean voyage with two other young South African men. In Europe, they were able to borrow a car, on top of which they piled their suitcases, and then drove through Germany and into Austria, intending to go skiing. Stopping in a small village, they struck up a conversation with the local policeman, and after a while he asked where they were going. ‘Innsbruck,’ was their answer. ‘No, you’re not,’ was his. Why not? For three reasons, the policeman explained: first, your bags are piled up on top of your car and it’s unstable. Second, you don’t have snow chains or snow tyres. And, third, you’re all drunk. At this point, the policeman took their car keys. You can’t do that, they said. I just did, he responded. The South Africans were obliged to make their way to the local hotel. And there Sydney Lipworth met for the first time the French woman whom he would soon marry, and with whom he would emigrate from South Africa to Europe in the early 1960s.35
It is nice to think of Arthur, at the age of 25, drunk and enjoying himself on a tour of Europe. In later years, at least in public contexts, he would seem sometimes austere, even forbidding: but the high-spirited young man was there inside too. And yet this trip may also have been a step in the emergence of the man Arthur would become. In Chapter Five we will describe the sudden and intense development of Arthur’s romantic life. Now, however, he didn’t meet a future love in the little town in Austria, though his good friend Sydney did. The other two men from their car left and went travelling on, while Arthur and Sydney stayed in the small town, and Arthur witnessed the birth of Sydney’s lifelong romance.
Another incident from this trip also illuminates Arthur’s character. At one point, Arthur and Sydney were in Florence, where Sydney said, ‘Let’s go to the shul,’ not for reasons of religious conviction but because it was in his guidebook as a ‘must-see’. In general Arthur was less intent on seeing all the must-sees than Sydney, but they went to the synagogue, and found themselves at a funeral service. It turned out that the new widow had too few people with her to make up a minyan (the required number of male mourners) for the burial next day. Two Italian Jewish sailors agreed to come, and so did Arthur and Sydney. Sydney, like many others, was struck by Arthur’s kindness, and he saw this moment mainly as an instance of his good nature rather than of Jewish conviction.36 A kind young man, free to chart his own course, capable of high spirits, and about to enter his lifetime career.
In mid-1956 Arthur Chaskalson began the practice of law. Over the next seven years his life would change profoundly. He would go from being a novice advocate to having an impressive and successful practice, and in the process would find a happy fellowship with the other members of the Bar. He would briefly become a member of a political party, the strongly anti-apartheid Liberal Party, but almost as quickly leave this membership behind; meanwhile he would become involved in non-party, but anti-apartheid, political activity that at least bordered on illegality. Even in the field of law itself, he would approach the limits of what law allowed. Important as these developments were, they were only a part of the transitions Arthur was making. Though he remained primarily a commercial lawyer, he began to take political cases, which would assume growing importance in his life. And he would meet and marry the woman with whom he traversed the rest of his life. His life changed professionally and personally; and the two were inevitably connected.
Arthur may have begun his career at the Bar as a ‘pupil’ or apprentice. Years later, in a 2009 interview with Adrian Friedman he said that at that time one or two people might have organised pupillage for themselves, but it was an absolute rarity. But the minutes of a Johannesburg Bar Council meeting on 19 April 1956 include the following:
APPLICATION BY CHASKALSON TO BE A PUPIL
The Chairman reported that Chaskalson had been to see him to ask whether it would be in order for him to do devilling before he is admitted to the Bar.
It was agreed that the Secretary should inform Chaskalson that if he is prepared to pay a fee of £25 he may become a pupil of a junior member of the Johannesburg Bar.
It seems that Arthur was himself one of the rare new advocates of that period who organised pupillages for themselves. But it is also possible that in the end he chose not to pay the fee of £25, and instead simply began his practice.
At any rate he was permitted to join the Bar in 1956 and did so. He joined the group of advocates that came to be known as Group 621. At the time, Johannesburg advocates had their chambers in His Majesty’s Building, but the Bar moved to another building, Innes Chambers, in 1961,1 and Arthur’s recollection is that the group took its name from its location on the sixth floor of Innes Chambers. Group 621 was one of the most prestigious groups, and included a number of leading members of the Bar. These included Bram Fischer, a more senior advocate with whom Arthur would become very close; Fischer, who made his Communist political convictions clear, was also a beloved and respected leader of the Johannesburg Bar. Another member of the group was Sydney Kentridge, not as senior as Bram but already recognised for his exceptional ability; he too would do distinguished work in political cases against the government, and he and Arthur would be friends and colleagues for decades. The fact that Arthur was able to join this distinguished company must have indicated that reports of him from Wits and from his articles of clerkship were very positive.
Arthur did well at the Bar from the first. Not everyone shared his good fortune; new advocates had to wait for attorneys to bring them briefs. Fanie Cilliers, a friend of Arthur’s at the Bar for many years, recalled, ‘The rank junior’s group fees were about R35 per month, and a day in the magistrates’ court would earn him R12.50’2 – so that a young advocate without cases could be in a difficult position indeed. Browde and Selvan, in their ‘largely anecdotal history’ of the Johannesburg Bar from 1940, write that after World War II ‘conditions got better, but even so, survival at the Bar by a newcomer who did not have independent means or a particular following among litigation attorneys was a struggle’. Advocates without cases, they recall, played cards in chambers, went to the movies, or played ‘occasional games of cricket in interleading chambers in His Majesty’s Building’.3 Arthur’s friend Mark Weinberg remembers playing cards with Joe Slovo; when Slovo went into
