Nineteen-Sixty was not a particularly good year for South Africa. January was not too bad, but on 3 February Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, made his famous ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African Parliament in which he warned of the storms to come. This did not sit well with South Africans, particularly those of the ruling Nationalist Party, who regarded it as an interference in South African internal affairs.
Then on 21 March an inexperienced police commander made a grave error of judgment when he gave the order to fire with machine guns on a crowd of demonstrating black Africans in the small town of Sharpeville.
Within thirty seconds the death toll was sixty-nine and many of those killed and wounded were women.
On 30 March a State of Emergency was declared in South Africa, and on 1 April the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution deploring the shootings at Sharpeville which were categorised as a massacre.
On 4 April the Union Expo at Milner Park opened its gates to the public.
By this time Johannesburg had become a magnet attracting the journalistic hot-shots—the international leg-men. World news is where you find
Time
magazine rubbing elbows with
Paris-Match,
both of them trying to get a beat
on
Stern.
Noel Barber was there from London, and Robert Ruark represented Scripps-Howard. This was Ruark towards the end of his life—the famous hard-drinking, bestselling novelist and old Africa hand. At this time his idea of breakfast was half a bottle of Scotch and a couple of lightly boiled aspirins. I read one of his two-thousand-word cables and wondered how the desk man back in Chicago was going to make sense of it.
Then there was the brash character who entered the bar of the Federal Hotel, a drinking hole favoured by newspapermen and broadcasters, announcing, ‘I’ve come to interview your Prime Minister—Forwards or Backwards or whatever his name is!’
And, of course, there was the home-grown newspaper talent such as James Ambrose Brown. After Sharpeville all the surviving wounded had been put into Baragwanath Hospital around which the Army had thrown an iron cordon. Jimmy Brown penetrated the ring by wearing a white coat, an ostentatious stethoscope, and a preoccupied medical expression. He got his exclusive eyewitness interviews and duly made his scoop. Early 1960 was an exciting time for newsmen in Johannesburg.
And where did I come into all this? I, too, was a newspaperman, freelancing for the
Rand Daily Mail
and the Johannesburg
Sunday Times,
and my one aim in life at the beginning of April 1960 was to cover the Union Expo. I was not interested in political matters and scurried about the feet of the journalistic giants doing my own thing. So let us take a look at the scene of the crime, the Union Expo, which was my beat.
Every year at Milner Park in Johannesburg there is an event called the Rand Easter Show. Originally it was an agricultural show—indeed it is still organised by the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society—but it has been overtaken by industry and taken on an international flavour
because a dozen nations have built permanent exhibition halls which are brought into use only once each year for about ten days around Easter.
Here the French push their wines, perfumes, military helicopters, and minor guided missiles; the Germans display Bavarian beer and heavy machinery; the British offer Harris tweed, Scotch whisky, and Stilton cheese; the Japanese are there with transistor radios, the Czechs with Bohemian glass, and the Belgians with Browning rifles. The cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats are still there but somehow they seem lost among all the machinery.
Ironically, 1960, the year of disaster, was the Golden Jubilee of the founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Government had decided that this was an occasion for celebration, so a couple of new exhibition halls were built in Milner Park, artists and sculptors were commissioned to decorate them, and the Rand Easter Show was lengthened to three weeks and rechristened the Union Expo, a coinage to chill the blood of anyone who respects the English language. Attendance was expected to top the million mark.
Long before the gates opened on 4 April I had been busy. The
Rand Daily Mail,
Johannesburg’s English morning newspaper, was to run a special daily supplement on the Expo and there were many pages to be filled. And I had hopes of pushing material to the
Sunday Times,
the
Mail
‘s stable companion. So I was kept busy interviewing exhibitors and anyone else who would provide a good story.
Among these was Kobus Esterhuysen, a relaxed Afrikaner who was an exhibition designer of no mean talent and who was responsible for the Combined Provinces Pavilion. He admitted rather shamefacedly that it was he who had coined the term Expo, and added that he was having trouble with the bats in the Transvaal Pavilion. It seemed he had an animal exhibit and the bats would not hang upside-down properly. It made a paragraph.
By the time the Expo opened I was so busy that I drafted my girlfriend, Joan Brown, into helping me. All that first week we scurried about, me working full time, and Joan in the few hours she could spare from her job in a city book shop.
I had no time to think of the political scene but the politics were there and would not go away. The international pressmen were at the Expo in strength on Saturday, 9 April, because Prime Minister Vervoerd was to be guest of honour and was due to make a speech in the Main Arena, supposedly a ‘keynote’ speech on the State of Emergency.
Just before three I joined them in the arena, standing before the VIP box where C. J. Laubscher, the general manager of the Expo, was sitting with the Prime Minister, the Mayor of Johannesburg, the President of the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society, and a dozen assorted visiting firemen, including my designer friend Kobus Esterhuysen. Behind us, in the arena, were about 500 prize cattle. There were thirty thousand onlookers in the stands.
I was with Stan Hurst, Features Editor and principle layout man of the
Sunday Times.
Stan was a good friend and was to be best man at the wedding when I married Joan later that year. He looked at Vervoerd, and said, ‘He’s got to pull a rabbit out of the hat today. He
must
—the country can’t go on like this.’
Vervoerd made his speech in both English and Afrikaans, the two official languages of the country. It was of mindnumbing dullness, much to the disgust of the visiting newsmen who were not as hardened as were we locals to the stupifying qualities of South African political discourse. There was not a word spoken that was newsworthy, so when the speech ended they vanished from the arena, some going direct to the airport where they had booked flights for the Congo which was due to erupt at any moment, others back to their hotels, but most drifting into the bar, that
haunt of all good newsmen, to swap lies and steal stories from each other.
But for Joan I would have joined them; South African barrooms were for men only.
The next item on the program was for Vervoerd to come down into the arena and inspect the cattle. ‘A lousy speech,’ Hurst commented. ‘Nothing in it for me. I’m going home; maybe I’ll take a nap.’ He looked at Vervoerd who was chatting with Alec Gorshell, the Mayor of Johannesburg. ‘Are you covering the cattle?’
I shook my head. ‘I leave that to Terence Clarkson.’ Clarkson was an elderly reporter on the
Rand Daily Mail;
he knew less about cattle than I did, but he could disguise his ignorance better. I grinned. ‘He’ll look up what he wrote last year and rejig it.’ I checked the time. ‘I promised to meet Joan in the Members’ Pavilion after the speech.’
Stan nodded. ‘Okay; I’ll see you in the office tonight.’
He went away, and 1 walked towards the Members’ Pavilion which looked out on to the arena. The only newspaperman left was the photographer from the
Farmer’s Weekly
who was stuck with the job of following the Prime Minister as he inspected the bovine regiment in a timeless ritual of South African life.
Joan was lucky enough to have found a table in the crowded Pavilion so I ordered strawberries and cream, dropped a few acid words about Vervoerd’s speech, and then we got down to figuring the work plan for the rest of the day.
Less than five minutes later there was a slight disturbance in the arena, merely a couple of shouts and nothing more. None of us heard the gun. A man at the next table stood up and craned his neck, then sat down again. ‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘I think a bull got loose.’
The thought struck me that a bull loose in the same arena as a Prime Minister might prove interesting and, after
all, I was a reporter. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,’ I said to Joan.
I got into the arena by showing my press tag and headed towards the VIP box fifty yards away. There was a small crowd of perhaps a dozen men at the bottom of the stairs and the people who should have been seated around the box were standing and staring. There was not much noise; just a hum of conversation and the lowing of cattle from the arena.
As I got closer a struggling man was hauled away by two policemen. He was not being handled gently. Another man, a stranger, was lying on the steps, dead or unconscious, with someone bending over him. I touched the elbow of an onlooker. ‘What’s happening?’
‘He
shot
him!’
‘Who shot who?’
‘The bastard shot Vervoerd.’ The man’s tone was incredulous.
There wasn’t another reporter in sight. ’
Who
shot Vervoerd?’
‘Someone called Spratt.’
‘Where is Vervoerd now?’
‘Lying on the bottom of the box there.’
The photographer from the
Farmer’s Weekly
was busy taking pictures. He had problems—three of them. The first was his camera. It was an elderly Speed Graphic five-by-four, cut-film camera, a type I thought was obsolete in the 1930s. Slow to load and heavy to hold. His second problem was that the VIP box was too high for him to see into. He was holding his camera above his head with stiffened arms, leaping into the air, and opening the shutter at the top of each leap in the dim hope of getting a useable picture.
His last problem was the Mayor of Johannesburg who hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper every time he leaped up.
I turned and ran back to the Members’ Pavilion and unceremoniously scooped up Joan from her table. I said
in a low voice, ‘Vervoerd’s been shot; we’ve got to move fast.’
She got the point. ‘Where to?’
‘The press room.’
The press room at Milner Park offered jaillike accommodation for frequently protesting reporters. There were a few battered and ink-stained deal tables, a few rickety chairs—and four telephones. In the bar of the Members’ Pavilion were half a hundred news-hungry reporters, each of whom would cheerfully give his arm for a telephone in the next fifteen minutes, and I was determined to get mine first.
The press room was empty. I said, ‘Ring
Sunday Times
editorial and tell them Vervoerd’s been shot by a man probably called Spratt. There’ll be more to follow as soon as I can find an eyewitness. And don’t let go of that bloody telephone no matter who wants it.’
On the way back to the arena I passed the door to the Members’ Bar and hesitated. Maybe I’m not competitive enough and maybe I’m a damned fool but I pushed open the door and went in. There, bellied up against the bar counter, were the Fourth Estate’s finest—the international team. Now, because I have a stammer, journalistic legend in Johannesburg has it that I went into the bar and shouted, ‘Ver-Ver-Ver-Ver-voerd’s b-b-b-been sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-shot!’
My version is that I caught the eye of Bennett, a reporter for the
Rand Daily Mail,
went up to him and said, not too loudly, ‘Ver-Vervoerd’s been shhhot.’
He grinned at me. ‘Pull the other leg—it’s got bells on it.’ He went on drinking so I shrugged and left them to it.
I needed an eyewitness and then I remembered that Kobus Esterhuysen had been in the VIP box. He and I had got on well together so I elected him as my eyewitness and went in search of him. He was not hard to find because he was standing just by the VIP box.
‘Hi, Kobus; hoe gaan dit?’
‘Kannie kla nie.’
I switched into English because my Afrikaans, while serviceable enough to establish rapport with an Afrikaans speaker, was certainly not good enough for detailed discussion. ‘Got anything to tell me?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Who shot the boss?’
‘Pratt,’ said Kobus. ‘David Pratt.’
‘Not Spratt?’
Kobus shook his head. ‘I know him. David Pratt of Moloney’s Eye.’
That brought me up short. ‘Of
what?’
‘Moloney’s Eye Trout Farm in the Magaliesburg. Pratt supplies all the Johannesburg restaurants.’
‘Spell it,’ 1 said, and Kobus obliged. ‘Did you see it happen?’
‘Couldn’t help it,’ said Kobus. ‘We were just getting ready to go down into the arena when that
skelm,
Pratt, came into the box, said something to the Prime Minister and then shot him in the head twice.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I don’t know, he didn’t speak loudly. Anyway, I grabbed him, and…’
‘
You
did?’ Kobus was not only a model eyewitness but a participant.
‘That’s right. He was waving the gun about and struggled a bit. Then someone helped me and we got the gun off him—then the cops took him.’
The public address system blatted out, ‘Clear the arena of all those cattle. Will everybody leave the stands in an orderly manner and don’t panic—don’t PANIC—DON’T PANIC.’
Kobus looked across the arena to the stands on the far side. A restlessness was sweeping across the multihued crowd, and he said dispassionately, ‘Bloody fool! That’s enough to put anyone into a panic.’
I said, ‘Where’s Vervoerd now?’
Kobus jerked his thumb. ‘Still in the box. A doctor’s having a look at him.’
‘Then he’s alive?’
‘Only just.’
‘Know anything about Pratt?’
‘A bit. He…’
‘Save it,’ I said. ‘I have to get this back to the office. Where can I find you in the next half hour?’