but of being required, every Sunday, to spend the day outdoors in the school grounds.) Because his mother broke the pattern of their schooling, Sydney recalls, ‘Arthur and I, after being close at Pridwin, never saw each other at school again.’ By the time Arthur got to Hilton College, Sydney was enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, and their time together was further limited because their school vacations were on different schedules. So it seems that Arthur, a boy without a father and with a rather unavailable mother, now also lost much of his interaction with his only sibling.
Nevertheless, Arthur recalled that when he went, ‘I was going to a strange school as a boarder without any friends. I was still a shy child, and the prospect did not appeal to me. But unlike my introduction to primary school, I did not protest and accepted that I had to go.’ He had become quite pragmatic, by the age of 14. He told Adrian Friedman that he ‘didn’t really enjoy [Hilton] but didn’t really suffer; just kept out of trouble and saw it as something to get through. No real pleasure from school and no real pain.’49 According to his brother, he graduated in the top three of his class, but Arthur’s own recollection was that he was ‘reasonably good academically’.50 His matric certificate (giving the results from his final high-school exams at the end of 1948) indicates that at least on these exams he did not distinguish himself: he gained four Bs, two Cs and a D, though that added up to a ‘first class’ pass. Many years later, when he was the head of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Hilton College wanted to celebrate his appointment – but Arthur declined.
He finished Hilton College and matriculated in 1948, and the following year he entered the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Even before he left Hilton he knew that he wanted to be a lawyer. He told an interviewer in 2007:
I always knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. When I say ‘I always knew’, when I was at school I had decided that I wanted to be a lawyer. I’m not sure why I decided that, it wasn’t as if there was any individual in my family who had influenced me in any way, my father died when I was young, I had a couple of uncles who were in the law [Willie Oshry, an advocate at the Johannesburg Bar, and Alec Oshry, an attorney in Johannesburg] but I wasn’t close to them and I certainly had no discussions with them about my future. I think I must have decided to become a lawyer from reading and I probably had a romantic idea about what lawyers could or couldn’t do and it was something I wanted to do. And it was strange that I knew very clearly already when I was in my Matric year, I knew that that’s what I was going to do and I knew I also wanted to be an advocate and not an attorney. So how all of that came about is not entirely clear to me, other than that I didn’t vacillate at all. Even when I went to university, I had to do an undergraduate degree merely as a stepping stone, not as anything which would carry with it anything of moment, whereas in fact it was quite useful but I didn’t go into it thinking that it would be of any importance, it was merely something I had to do before I could do law.51
This is a remarkable passage. Arthur knew where his future lay by the time he reached his matric year, and he never wavered from that course. His story reflects will and determination, and indeed Arthur told Adrian Friedman that he was a difficult child, in the sense that you couldn’t tell him to do something he didn’t want to do.52 This story also tells us that something about the law spoke to him very deeply, even though Arthur in 2007 was no longer sure exactly what it was. What Arthur says, however, is still illuminating: ‘I think I must have decided to become a lawyer from reading,’ he tells us.53 Elsewhere he mentioned the Perry Mason books of Erle Stanley Gardner.54 (This was of course not a unique pathway: Cyril Ramaphosa, with whom Arthur would work decades later, may have been attracted to law in part by Hollywood movies and in part by detective novels.55) From these he could indeed have got ‘a romantic idea about what lawyers could or couldn’t do’.56
It is striking that Arthur looked to reading rather than to the people around him to fire his imagination; it is striking too that what drove his choice was a ‘romantic idea’ rather than a more sober assessment of his life prospects. But if Erle Stanley Gardner stories caught his interest, he certainly could have done worse: Perry Mason, the protector of the unjustly accused, using his forensic skills for justice is perhaps a bit like Sir Bedevere, whose service to King Arthur so concerned him as a schoolboy. Arthur, the shy young man blessed with tremendous talents, had found from books a path to live an idealistic life.
His brother Sydney wanted to be a lawyer too, but in a family meeting in 1947 Sydney was asked, perhaps pushed, to give up this plan and go into the family business. With regret, he agreed. Years later, he felt that the choice had been the right one; the family business needed to be saved and built up for the benefit of the whole family, and this Sydney was able to do. Eventually, Sydney recalled, the shares of the company would be bought by South African Breweries (SAB), at a price five times what they were worth when he took over. This family wealth provided Arthur with a cushion against potential hard times, though he would go on to become a successful and well-paid advocate in his own right. He would tell his friend Denis Kuny that he had inherited enough money so that he didn’t have to work, but that he’d never touched these funds.57 Many years later, while in the Constitutional Court, Arthur would recuse himself from hearing a case involving SAB because he still owned a substantial amount of its shares.58 Yet Arthur was never asked to give up his career plans, perhaps because the family knew he would never agree. He told Adrian Friedman that it never crossed his mind to go into the business.59 Sydney, who as a small child was pleased to hear the news of his brother’s birth, never held it against him.
The basic facts of Arthur’s legal education years can be stated simply. He was a young man, growing up in the company of other young Jewish men; he enjoyed sports and was very good at them; he was exploring the life ahead of him, travelling to Europe and accompanying a close friend as the friend met the love of his life; and when he found his courses interesting, he performed outstandingly in them. He was opposed to apartheid, but more in an impulsive than reflective manner. At the same time he showed signs of the fierce conviction for justice that would become so much part of him.
In 1949 he entered the University of the Witwatersrand as a BCom (Bachelor of Commerce) student. He finished this degree in 1951. After joining a European tour organised by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) at the end of the year in 1951, he returned to South Africa and started his LLB (Bachelor of Laws) in 1952. With his BCom in hand, he was qualified to become an articled clerk, and for the next three years he worked in that capacity at the firm of Deneys Reitz, Jacobson and Effune. Meanwhile, like many of his contemporaries, he took courses in the Law Faculty towards his LLB degree; in fact, Law Faculty courses were offered only in the late afternoons, precisely to enable students to work while earning their LLB. He took his degree in 1954. In 1955, he completed his articles of clerkship, and perhaps continued on for some time at his firm; then he and his friend Sydney Lipschitz (now Sir Sydney Lipworth) travelled together in Europe, and in the middle of 1956 Arthur came to the Bar.
Arthur was a good student in his BCom programme, but not a great one. Nor was he an enthralled one. He wasn’t intent on the degree for itself; instead, he told Adrian Friedman that his brother had done the same degree and had recommended that Arthur do likewise.1 He followed his brother’s advice, but he didn’t particularly enjoy the course, except for the law subjects that were included, which he liked very much. Much of the programme was not law: it included three years of economics, three years of economic history; and three years of accounting – though Arthur acknowledged that economics and economic history were quite interesting, and mentioned that Helen Suzman, who would go on to an impressive
