Arthur remained actively involved in handling political cases though not full-time. During these years he pursued two other forms of legal work. One was his active involvement in the Bar Council; the other was his representation of private clients in commercial, rather than political, cases. Both of these were important parts of Arthur’s career.
Arthur was a very active member of the Johannesburg Bar Council. As his curriculum vitae recounts, he was a member of the Johannesburg Bar Council from 1967 to 1971 and from 1973 to 1984, the chairman of the Johannesburg Bar in 1976 and again in 1982, a member and later convenor of the National Bar Examination Board (1979–91), and the vice chairman of the General Council of the Bar of South Africa (1982–7). Why did Arthur devote so much time to the Bar Council? One reason, surely, is that he loved the Bar, as was clear from the start of his career as an advocate. To serve on the Bar Council was to help maintain the profession for which he had so much affection. Fanie Cilliers, a friend and colleague of Arthur’s for many years despite their substantial political differences, recalled that in those days the leaders of the Bar, as recognised by those around them, naturally undertook positions of formal Bar leadership.124 Johann Kriegler similarly says that Arthur became involved in Bar leadership because he was public-spirited, and not just running a practice, and he mentioned that Arthur also gave time to Legal Aid (as did Kriegler).125 A second reason, perhaps, was to build his career; Bar leadership surely contributed to the strength of his relationships with other advocates and to his visibility to the attorneys who brought the advocates their cases. But a third reason was politics.
Johann Kriegler recalled how political in nature Bar work was – but perhaps nothing illustrates this more strikingly than Kriegler’s own history at the Bar. He and Arthur knew each other from the ordinary routines of the Bar, and their mutual respect had been cemented when they were opposing each other in a very difficult personal injury case, and each, independently, provided an opinion about the amount of damages – and arrived at figures that were very close to each other. But Kriegler said that their connection grew stronger when he made it public that he himself would not attend a Bar dinner with the new Minister of Justice (because of opposition to the minister’s policies). Kriegler’s decision was especially notable because he in fact had organised this dinner, in his capacity as Bar Council secretary. Until then, Kriegler recalled, he had been suspect in the eyes of lawyers on the left as a presumed supporter of apartheid. There was strong anti-Afrikaner sentiment at the Johannesburg Bar in those days, even though Kriegler himself had come to Johannesburg precisely to turn his back on the Afrikaner establishment. Kriegler was also a critic of the ANC, which he viewed as Communist-controlled; no doubt this distanced him from others, such as Arthur, who while not Communists were equally firmly not anti-Communist. But in any event this step by Kriegler connected him with lawyers of the left such as Arthur.126
There was a lot of work for people like Kriegler and Arthur to do within Bar circles. As Kriegler recalled in our interview, in the sixties, seventies and even more in the eighties, party politics for people opposed to apartheid were almost irrelevant – since the electoral system was a system for whites, and there was no substantial white opposition party to resist apartheid. But the Bar did become a site of struggle. Arthur and Kriegler worked together in mobilising Bar opposition to the new security legislation being adopted by the National Party, such as the 90-day and 180-day detention laws and the sabotage and terrorism laws.
To get the Bar to take a strong stance on these issues was a delicate political task, as the more liberal Johannesburg Bar faced resistance from conservative Bars elsewhere in the country, particularly Pretoria and Bloemfontein. Moreover, the Bar had its own professional concerns, specifically to maintain solidarity so as to avoid encroachment by attorneys. And at the same time the government tried to play the different groups of lawyers against each other. Arthur in response, as Kriegler recalled, was very cool and very measured, walking a tightrope politically and professionally.127 He helped achieve unanimity in 1988 on a General Council of the Bar motion ‘expressing deepest concern at the reimposition of the state of emergency’ – almost, though not quite, a direct condemnation of this oppressive system.128 He would write the following year later, in 1989, that ‘leaders of the profession have helped to create space for and given their support to these forms of [human rights and public interest] practice and have thereby helped to make them possible’.129
One example of Arthur’s Bar work on security issues took place in May 1976. In response to the government’s determination to proceed in Parliament with consideration of the Promotion of State Security Bill on short notice, the Johannesburg Bar Council issued a unanimously adopted statement criticising the bill.130 The Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, responded in Parliament. Kruger’s political career would end after he declared, a year later, that Stephen Biko’s death in detention ‘leaves me cold’. In 1976, he argued that the Bar had involved itself in politics and that he had ‘warned them that if they wanted to come and fight here, we would fight’. He proceeded to aver that the Council should have held a general meeting of the members of the Johannesburg Bar – which the Council had not done, because the government’s decision to move forward with the bill so quickly made it unfeasible.131 He also singled out Arthur, then chairman of the Johannesburg Bar, for sharp attack. While professing to accept Arthur’s bona fides, he said that Arthur ‘openly went – I admire him for that – to the funeral of Bram Fischer’, as indeed Arthur had, and even noted that Arthur ‘read the speech prepared for him by Andre P. Brink, the Afrikaans writer’. In the light of this, said Kruger, ‘the ordinary public is entitled to ask whether that is not the same man who was at a communist funeral’. He reiterated the point a moment later: ‘he [Arthur] placed himself in a position where the public becomes entitled to query the fact that a few months ago, or a year ago, he attended the funeral of a well-known communist’.132
This remarkable attack in Parliament led the Johannesburg Bar Council to issue another statement, this one signed by the vice chairman, Sydney Kentridge, to make clear that Arthur had no part in it. This statement reflected the Bar’s anger, and also the protection that his position in the Bar gave Arthur. Referring to Kruger’s ‘unworthy insinuations’ against Arthur, it concluded:
These insinuations are not only unjustified, but gratuitous and irrelevant, as the statement was that of the Johannesburg Bar Council and not that of Mr Chaskalson personally. As this Bar has absolute confidence in the integrity and good faith of Mr Chaskalson, the Minister’s insinuations bring discredit on no one but the Minister himself.
However, as Mr Kruger happens to be a member of the Bar and as he is by reason of his office the nominal head of the legal profession in this country, his personal attack on Mr Chaskalson must be a matter of shame to all members of that profession.133
It is a sign of Arthur’s attachment to the Bar that he was personally furious about Kruger’s behaviour. Arthur’s son Matthew recalls Arthur ‘describing Kruger at the time as “that shit, Jimmy Kruger”, which was probably the only time I ever heard him swear about a person. He also kept all of the documents from that period’ – unusually, since Arthur generally disposed of documents once he had finished with them. ‘When Jerome and I were cleaning out the house, we found all the correspondence between him and the Bar Council, press cuttings, etc.’134
In other circumstances, Arthur was able to build connections within the Bar across seemingly substantial political divides. That was apparent in his work in the sixties against a bill Verwoerd’s Minister of Justice tabled in March 1967, imposing harsher penalties for a wider range of homosexual acts. This was an issue Arthur would have cared about; when Lorraine’s friend Tony Coghan came out to him – at the time Arthur told Coghan he wanted to marry Lorraine – Arthur was warm and supportive. As Arthur told his interviewer Adrian Friedman, the gay community decided to make representations to Parliament in opposition to this bill; this was, according to Edwin Cameron, the first collective act of LGBTI resistance in South Africa. They assembled a team that included a number of influential Afrikaner lawyers. (No doubt it also helped that Arthur’s former
