of unpaid office work − a job as secretary at a girls’ high school, Hoër Meisieskool Helpmekaar, and freelance work for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).
Huberte was to maintain her close involvement in Rupert’s business enterprises over decades. At an early stage in Johannesburg she was offered a position at Voortrekkerpers at a salary higher than that of her husband’s. She declined the offer, however, ‘because I had to work for Anton for free, and I knew their set-up. But everything one accomplished was an adventure.’
TIB was registered on 16 March 1943 and would eventually develop into a company with diversified interests in tobacco, liquor, coal mines, wool brokers, tea and coffee. Contrary to what is sometimes told in business circles, Rupert already started to diversify at a very early stage in his career.
The entry of Rupert and his partners into the liquor market − the second depression-proof product − was prompted by the rather poor performance of Voorbrand as a result of wartime constraints and, perhaps, over-reliance on Afrikaner sentiment. Rupert realised that the highly competitive tobacco industry would not give them enough of a foothold in industry. They had to look wider, also southwards.
In September 1943 he and one of his co-directors, Coenie (Oupa) Kriel, started making inquiries. In October they travelled to Paarl in the Western Cape where they met Canzius Pretorius, accountant of the Koöperatiewe Wynbouersvereniging (KWV). He advised them that the only way to enter the liquor industry would be to buy a Cape company, Forrer Brothers. With the aid of the company auditor, Roux van der Poel, they negotiated the purchase of a 50% interest for £17 500.
In the north of the country money for capital expansion was scarce on account of the failure of institutions such as Kopersbond and Spoorbondkas. Rupert therefore started selling five-shilling shares to the more established, wealthier community in the Western Cape, notably the wine and export grape farmers, who would become the mainstay of his business empire. His investors were all Afrikaners; nobody else was interested.
De Wet Theron of the farm Montpellier near Tulbagh, who had previously been a wine expert at the KWV where his father, Hennie, was chairman, assisted Rupert in his recruitment drive. Among the earliest investors who put their trust in Rupert were Frank le Roux and Paul Roux of Paarl, founders of the KWV.
Rupert had to divide his time between business interests in Johannesburg and Cape Town, a thousand miles to the south. For three years he commuted, mainly by rail. In one year he spent 63 nights − more than two months − on bunks in train compartments. He had sold his little DKW after a shop owner in Linden, Johannesburg, studying the battered jalopy, observed: ‘Rupert, I won’t be able to do business with you.’ Eventually he replaced it with a second-hand Studebaker. But by then he had crisscrossed the winelands in the DKW in the company of De Wet Theron, selling shares to leading farmers in those fertile valleys.
In early 1944 the outstanding debt on the purchase price of the Forrer Brothers’ company still stood at £9 000, money Rupert did not have. This was not an unusual situation for an entrepreneur; contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs are often not people who start off with ample supplies of money or have access to big capital. They are rather enterprising individuals who spot opportunities and strive passionately to exploit them. Nevertheless, times were hard at a stage that Huberte has described as a ‘dark period’ in their lives.
On 29 January 1944 the Ruperts were in Cape Town when they learned that Anton’s mother had died the previous night at a hospital in Port Elizabeth, where she was due to have a heart operation. She was only 50. They left for Graaff-Reinet immediately. Fuel was rationed and they had no coupons left. At Oudtshoorn Jurgens Schoeman, a businessman and farmer who was one of Rupert’s directors, filled their tank and they managed to reach Graaff-Reinet in time for the funeral. On the way they stopped for a while so Huberte could, as she put it, ‘finish crying’: she had loved her mother-in-law dearly, describing her as ‘a lovely woman’. They also discussed what to do about Rupert’s youngest brother Koos, then only fourteen. The moment they arrived in Graaff-Reinet, Koos hugged Huberte and asked: ‘You’re taking me with you, aren’t you?’ Huberte reassured him. He would come to live with them. After the funeral Rupert returned to Cape Town to attend to unfinished business. Huberte stayed behind to make the necessary arrangements for her and Koos’s departure for Johannesburg.
A few days after his mother’s funeral Rupert was booking into a hotel in Paarl when a report in the afternoon newspaper caught his eye: his good friend and staunch supporter Jan de Kock of MTKV had died tragically. He and the chairman of MTKV were crossing a flooded low-level bridge when their car was swept away by the torrent and they had both drowned. De Kock was the one who had shown such confidence in Rupert’s unproven ability when Voorbrand was founded. To Rupert this was a double blow, losing both his mother and one of his best friends in the space of week.
Less tragic but nonetheless distressing was the news soon afterwards that his accountant and friend Daan Hoogenhout was resigning from Voorbrand to go farming in Botswana. That venture folded after a year and Daan returned to the fold, this time as accountant of the latest venture, Distillers Corporation. In 1948 he was to return to the tobacco group.
But 1944 started badly for Rupert. And he still had to find the £9 000 to pay the Forrer Brothers. The day in March when the money was due Rupert addressed a group of wine farmers at De Doorns in the Hex River valley, known for its export grapes. ‘I showed them a few labels for wine bottles and sold them my ideas. I sold them a dream,’ he said afterwards.2 His dream earned £11 000 in TIB shares within a couple of hours. It was one of the closest shaves of his career up to then. He drove back to Cape Town via Wellington and Bainskloof − the Du Toits Kloof Pass had not yet been built – and before closing time the money was in the bank. That evening he made his first long-distance call ever to Huberte to share the glad news. She treasured the memory, a memento of comradeship.
Rupert, who has prized loyalty so highly throughout his career, would never forget the support he received in the 1940s from the wine farmers in particular. This loyalty and continued involvement in an industry that yields relatively small returns compared to the management attention devoted to it would again be strongly manifested during the restructuring of the South African liquor industry in 1979.
In due course, the farmers’ investment in TIB shares would prove to be an investment of a lifetime. Several Rembrandt shareholders from the early years became millionaires, some multimillionaires. The wealth of quite a number of other affluent Western Cape families, thus to a large extent also the prosperity of the region itself, rests on the foundation of Rembrandt shares. One farmer at Paarl bought £2 000’s worth of shares for each of his four children. Shortly after the turn of the century each child’s shares were worth R132 million. At the De Doorns gathering, which had saved Rupert’s skin that autumn morning in 1944, a woman bought shares for £500. In 2001 her son told Rupert that his mother’s investment had secured him and his sister a comfortable retirement.
Someone who later regretted not having bought shares was Piet Meiring, the South African head of information Rupert had consulted in Johannesburg about the festival newspaper he published during the Great Trek centenary. Meiring was especially regretful as he and Dr Hendrik Verwoerd were plunged into debt in the war years as a result of two business ventures in which they had been involved as co-directors, a garage and a market agency delivering market produce to housewives. ‘Extravagance and mismanagement led to the failure of the two enterprises, with Dr Verwoerd and I as sureties at the bank, ’ Meiring wrote in his memoirs. They owed R50 000 each to Volkskas and Sasbank. The banks were lenient and wrote off part of the amount, but Meiring had to sell his car and some of his paintings to redeem the debt.3
The affair also left a mark on Verwoerd, who was accommodated by the banks through the mediation of Fritz Steyn. Rupert is convinced that this financial failure led to Verwoerd’s hostility towards capitalism. ‘He was prejudiced against the business sector because of his own
