requirements for the physical layout of factories. ‘Oom Jurie Losper, as he was known, couldn’t meet those requirements – and Graaff-Reinet’s biggest factory had to close down,’ Rupert remembers.
In Boetie Rupert’s childhood days Graaff-Reinet, like most country towns, had no electricity, running water or tarred streets. Drinking water was collected from the runoff of rainwater from rooftops. Gardens were irrigated from furrows fed by Maggie’s Well, a perennial spring that produced two million gallons of fresh water daily on the site where the town reservoir is today. This water, boiled, was used for ablutions. Piped water did not come till the late 1920s. Lighting was provided by candles and paraffin lamps. When electricity finally arrived, it was expensive at a shilling a unit. In the early 1920s John Rupert drove a Model-T Ford, which was replaced with a Chevrolet in the mid-twenties. Later the vintage Chev was displayed in the Transport Museum at Heidelberg, Gauteng.
One of Boetie Rupert’s earliest memories was a visit to his great-grandmother Emma Susanna at an old-age home in Cape Road, Port Elizabeth, shortly before she died in 1919. His mother also showed him a letter to her from this Colchester-born ancestor, which ended with five crosses and a message in her native English: ‘And remember to give my love to Anthony.’
Port Elizabeth was where the Ruperts spent their holidays. Grandmother Rupert lived there from 1923 till her death in 1930. So did her daughter Florence, Aunt Florrie, a teacher who introduced Boetie to experiences that stimulated his early interest in industry and museums. He was taken to the snake park and the museum and, when he was old enough in the early 1920s, to various factories around Algoa Bay. Places they visited included the first assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, the Wool Exchange, the Pyotts biscuit factory and the Mobs shoe factory. Years later Anton Rupert told visitors at a Port Elizabeth show: ‘Coming from Graaff-Reinet where there were no industries, it was a dream and a magical world to me to see how “something” was manufactured.’5
South Africa’s transition from agriculture and mining to an industrial country left such a lasting impression that it influenced his choice of career. ‘Production has always fascinated me. Later at university I realised how important industry was as a source of employment opportunities,’ he said in a radio interview.6
In Port Elizabeth he also saw his first talkie, ‘The singing fool’, starring Al Jolson. Before that he had seen only silent films, like the cowboy films of Tom Mix. But he never became a film enthusiast and showed no particular interest in the cinema in later years.
In Anton Rupert’s boyhood years the most important people in South African country towns and villages were authority figures like the school principal, the magistrate and the minister of the local congregation. Sundays were strictly Calvinist in Graaff-Reinet, a town very much under the influence of the Murrays, who like other austere Scottish church fathers had become ministers of the South African DRC. Children had to attend church and Sunday school, sport on Sunday was considered sinful and even sewing was forbidden on the sabbath lest the needle pierce God’s watchful eye. John Rupert never went to church, but his wife Hester took the children while he went mountaineering. Although she did not flaunt her religion, she was devout. And whatever his religious convictions, her husband’s values were staunchly Calvinist: an ethos of hard work, integrity and sobriety governed Anton’s upbringing and indelibly stamped his character. So rigorous was John Rupert’s moral code that he never defended an accused who had confessed his or her guilt to him. Yet the absence of rigid orthodoxy on the part of his parents left the eldest son with a lasting distaste for niggling rules and regulations that curb innovativeness and individuality.
Boetie Rupert started school in 1923 at the age of six. Although there was no school uniform, the children had to wear shoes. On his first day at school Boetie was pushing his baby brother’s pram and ended up in a water furrow. His brand-new shoes and outfit were drenched and he had to go home to change into old clothes and shoes before venturing out on his school career. Boetie completed substandards A and B in one year. He was left-handed but, counter to the common practice in those days, he was not forced to write with his right hand. For that he could thank Dr Karl Bremer, their family doctor, who had recently qualified abroad and brought home some enlightened ideas. He lived across the road from the Ruperts and his daughter Elizabeth (Van der Merwe, a writer of children’s books) was a classmate and close friend of Boetie.
Initially his scholastic performance was mediocre: in Sub B he came ninth in his class. Then a rebuke by his teacher in front of the whole class shamed him into excelling. Soon he was top of his class, to the chagrin of Elizabeth Bremer, his inveterate rival. She remained at the Volkskool till they were in Standard 7; then her father became a member of parliament − later Minister of Health − and the Bremers moved to Cape Town.
Hester Rupert was much loved by the young, who shared many childhood joys and sorrows with her. She read books with Boetie, a voracious reader in his own right. Apart from the family’s collection of children’s books, he scoured the well-equipped town library for newspapers and magazines like Scientific American and Illustrated London News, besides any book that captured his lively curiosity. At night his mother sat up with him while he read and studied and brought him a hot drink at bedtime.
With his father he went for long walks across the veld, sometimes to the Valley of Desolation (the Ruperts called it the ‘mountain cathedral’). He loved this wide, arid landscape, so ancient a dinosaur footprint would cause no surprise, and considers it ‘an absolute privilege’ to have grown up in the Karoo. According to Anton Rupert’s brother Koos, their father preferred mountain climbing to going to church – in a poem he had written about the Valley of Desolation, he described it as ‘the church where I want to pray’. Years later Anton Rupert pointed out in a newspaper interview that many of the great faiths came from the desert − Moses, Jesus and Mohammed had all been desert dwellers. ‘That is where you get seven-year droughts, where the starry night skies make you aware of your puniness, and where you are forced to think.’ By contrast, he quipped, Karl Marx found the inspiration for the communists’ bible, Das Kapital, in the vaults of the British Museum.7
The young Anton spent time at his father’s office, learning about the legal profession. John Rupert impressed on him the importance of meticulous attention to detail, a virtue that Anton was to inculcate in his own children and employees in later life. He also taught him to be wary of praise: ‘Today they shout hosanna, tomorrow they crucify you.’ A compliment, he added, entailed responsibility: you had to live up to it. Among the values John Rupert imparted to his son was the importance of honesty and being true to one’s word.
Boetie Rupert’s introduction to radio was a crystal set broadcasting the 1929 election results. What impressed the twelve-year-old Boetie no less than the second victory of his hero Hertzog was the novelty of radio waves. He and a friend decided to build their own crystal radio. For an aerial they chose a length of galvanised wire, which they wanted to fasten to the roof of the house. While they were on the roof the aerial dropped onto the power lines, causing a short circuit that left the neighbourhood without power for hours. His father was furious.
It was at about the same time that Boetie and his friend Elizabeth stood watching a municipal vehicle procession one day when they saw a billboard advertising cigarettes. In what could have been a prophetic moment, the young Rupert told Elizabeth South Africa should not be importing such cigarettes: ‘We should be making them ourselves.’ He was expressing a sentiment that had been gaining ground among Afrikaners for quite some time. Already in 1880 Di Afrikaanse Patriot had referred to ‘foreign fortune seekers who are completely in control of commerce in our country’.8
In the late 1920s Japie Heese founded the Voortrekker movement for youths at the Hoër Volkskool. Boetie joined and wore the little green badge in his buttonhole. In 1931 it became a countrywide movement, an Afrikaans counterweight to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts. Boetie did not excel at sports, although he enjoyed a friendly game of tennis or rugby. Later in life when a journalist from the American magazine Fortune asked Rupert what his
