profession, the law.’1 It is easy to imagine him growing up to lead a life of privilege, not without conscience but fundamentally disengaged from the grotesque injustices of apartheid South Africa. Perhaps, like some of his friends, he might even have decided to emigrate. But he became someone quite different: an advocate for the dispossessed, the leader of South Africa’s pre-eminent public interest and anti-apartheid law firm, the first head of the post-apartheid nation’s Constitutional Court. The story of his life is the story of his own transformation, a transformation that was not just the product of choice and will exclusively, but also of something more delicate, an evolution, not even completely understood by Arthur himself, towards what he became. To understand that evolution requires a sense of Arthur’s own personal development, but also a recognition of how distant, and how disturbing, the world into which Arthur was born is from the South Africa that emerged over the coming decades.
Arthur was born into privilege, not only as a white child in South Africa, but as the child of prosperous parents. His father Harry had made a considerable success in the family mattress business, the Transvaal Mattress Company, which Arthur’s grandfather Bernard had founded after the Anglo-Boer War. As Arthur wrote – he did not produce an autobiography, but as he approached the age of 80 he penned a seventeen-page beginning of a memoir, at times matter-of-fact, at times sad and at times self-deprecatingly funny: ‘my father had left school without matriculating when he was young in order to help his father in a mattress business. Over time he proved to be a successful businessman and the mattress factory flourished. It was floated as a public company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and also on the London [Stock Exchange].’2 The Chaskalsons were wealthy enough that in 1934 the whole family, including the children’s nanny, Janet Thorogood, sailed to Europe; his older brother Sydney recalled that ‘the crew were very fond of Arthur … and with a mop of thick curly hair, they called him “Carina”’.3
This business success had not come without effort. Sydney writes, no doubt from family lore, that ‘my aunts sat around work tables sewing mattress covers, and fixing leather tufts to mattresses. Our father, then aged 12, rode a bicycle around the dusty streets of Johannesburg, selling mattresses to nascent furniture dealers.’4 The Transvaal Mattress Company competed with other mattress companies, but ‘in the 1920s business got tough (as usual), and three mattress companies amalgamated – under the name Transvaal Mattress and Furnishing Co. (Pty) Ltd’.5 This company, in turn, must have been the one that went public.
Success had also not come without legal difficulties. In Rex v. Chaskalson and Others, decided in late 1919, a prosecution had been brought against ‘the accused Chaskalson [Bernard] and four others who were the directors, secretary and manager of the Transvaal Mattress Company’. In the magistrate’s court they were convicted of wage and hour violations, including ‘allowing some of their employees to work continuously for more than five hours without an interval of at least one hour’. They successfully appealed, however, on the ground that the statute under which they were prosecuted only made the ‘occupier’ liable, and not ‘an impersonal thing like a company’ or its directors and officials.6
It is not surprising that the Chaskalsons were in the mattress business; as Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, chroniclers of the life of Jews in South Africa, observe, in the late 1920s ‘the emergent furniture and garment industries had a strong Jewish presence’.7 In subsequent generations these furniture makers turned to the professions in increasing numbers, and it appears that two of the other families involved with the company, the Friedmans and Unterhalters, would over time produce lawyers. The grandson of Benjamin Friedman, Basil Wunsh, would later serve as a judge and at Arthur’s request would become a founding member of the board of trustees of the Legal Resources Centre.
The listing on the London Stock Exchange was an achievement; Sydney writes that it was ‘one of the very first South African companies with a London listing’. Not long afterwards it was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as well. This achievement reflected not only Bernard and Harry’s business success, but also it seems Harry’s close friendship with George Mackenzie, at the time the chairman of various companies and a leading member of Johannesburg’s social elite. Mackenzie was not a Jew, but he ‘offered to put our father (the Jewish Govt. schoolboy) up for membership of that holy of holies, the Rand Club. Our father thanked him, but refused, saying that he did not want to be a token Jew.’ They did, however, join the Johannesburg Country Club, ‘a similar iconic establishment’. Meanwhile Mackenzie, not put off, became the first chairman of the newly listed company, with Bernard as the managing director. Sydney writes that the listing was accomplished ‘through the good auspices’ of Mackenzie and ‘his London colleague Sir Nutcombe Hume’.8
Arthur was Jewish, and his family came from Lithuania, the source of the second wave of Jewish immigration to South Africa (the first had been through England). Arthur’s paternal grandfather, Bernard Chaskalson, reached South Africa by about 1895. (Bernard was also known as Benhard or Benhardt; and the family name, Chaskalson, came to be spelled differently by different branches of the family, for example as Chaskelson or Chatzkelson.) One of Bernard’s brothers, Charles, also emigrated to South Africa; other members of the extended family would leave Lithuania for the United States and make their lives there. Bernard had married Dora Schapiro in Lithuania, and they would have seven children. Among them was Harry, Arthur’s father, who was born in 1896, probably in Memel in East Prussia (now part of Lithuania), and then brought to South Africa.
The family story was that Bernard Chaskalson came to South Africa after having first moved to Germany where he owned a mattress factory in Frankfurt. But the historian Richard Mendelsohn told the family about evidence he had discovered that seems to indicate otherwise. It turns out that Bernard Chaskalson filed a compensation claim after the Boer War for damages to his property. According to the material in the compensation file, Bernard emigrated from what was then Russia to the United States in 1880, when he was 23, and became a naturalised American citizen in 1887. Then he emigrated to South Africa in 1896, presumably hoping to benefit from the rush of prosperity resulting from the discovery of gold there. He became a dairy farmer and mattress maker in the Johannesburg area, and then fled to Cape Town in 1899 to avoid the perils of the Boer War, during which he reported he lost £181 worth of mattress-making property. In his letter to Arthur, Professor Mendelsohn wrote that his grandfather’s ‘trajectory is not all that unusual’.9
Harry Chaskalson in 1927 married Mary Oshry, who was born in 1904 or 1905, probably in Cape Town. (There was a family dispute over the location of her birth: her older sister Minnie contended Mary had been born in Lithuania, but Mary had a South African birth certificate to back up her insistence that she was born in South Africa.) Her father Raphael Oshry and her mother Musha Herring also emigrated from Lithuania to South Africa; other Herrings also made this passage. Sydney Chaskalson recalls ‘a no doubt apocryphal story that the inn [that the Herring family owned, in the city of Poniewicz], was one day raided by the local revenue authorities, accused of illegal brewing. Musha was told that if she showed the inspector the still, she would be let off lightly. She agreed, pointed him to the steps leading to the cellar, and when he had gone down a few steps, pushed him down, locked the access door, and emigrated to South Africa.’ True or not, the story reflects that many of the ‘Litvaks’ who left their home for South Africa were fleeing a harsh life. In South Africa, Sydney recalls, Raphael ‘although a highly educated man, was never able to make a decent living, and worked as a watchmaker – Musha scrimped and saved and her main object in life was to educate her sons.’10 But their daughter Mary and her husband Harry Chaskalson were prosperous, and would have their first child, Sydney, in 1928, and their second, Arthur, three years later in 1931.
The family’s heritage in Judaism was deep. Arthur’s paternal grandfather, Bernard, helped found the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol synagogue in Doornfontein, a suburb of Johannesburg then popular with well-to-do Jewish families. Arthur’s brother Sydney writes that Bernard ‘seems to have been either the chairman or treasurer of virtually every Jewish organisation in 1929 Johannesburg’.11 Sydney also recalls being
