Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 26
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 26
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
I’ve never fully understood my motives for returning to South Africa at the end of 1959. Looking back, it would have made much more sense to have remained with ATV and been promoted to a TV director post in London for at least a couple of years. Armed with that experience, I would probably have obtained a film directing job more easily. The fact that a London production company had offered to finance documentaries I would make in South Africa from scripts written by me and approved by them, was an additional incentive to return. However, if I’m completely honest, it was the lure of returning to Africa, the sheer magnificence of the continent itself, added to the rather wild and unpredictable behavior of its people, both black and white. The continuing challenge of life in a country that I called “The land of sudden death” in an article I wrote long ago, still appealed to me. Life in Britain was much safer but dull by comparison.
Whatever the reason, I boarded one of the Union Castle liners leaving from Southampton for Cape Town in late November, arriving a couple of weeks before Christmas. My parents had decided to drive over a thousand miles from Walvis Bay in Namibia to join me in Cape Town. I was mildly surprised. My parents had barely kept in touch with me during my years in the UK and I was quite excited by their decision.
They arrived a few days before my ship docked and had booked into a hotel in Sea Point, not far from the docks. In fact, from memory it may have been one of the five hotels that my maternal grandfather had originally owned before he drank himself to death at the age of 49. My parents, having previously lived in Cape Town for about five years, had a number of friends there and I soon realized that my dad was far more interested in seeing them than meeting the returning prodigal son.
An episode I have written before bears repeating here. The three of us were invited to a splendid dinner at one of the Constantia mansions where many of the richest Capetonians lived. Over the course of the evening my dad, who could be very funny at parties, became increasingly drunk as the night progressed. My mother, as usual shrank into the background as Pop grew rowdier and rowdier. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, I became the butt of his jokes. He announced that he didn’t think I knew what my willy (penis) was for … I didn’t have a clue about girls and if a pretty girl were to offer to kiss me … I wouldn’t know what to do about it. This was so far from reality that I listened open mouthed and disbelieving as he rambled on and on.
There happened to be a very beautiful young woman at the party. She was an English girl who had won a beauty contest with first prize a trip to Cape Town. She had a warm personality and a strong Cockney accent. The men at the party clustered around her all evening. I later realized that my dad had probably approached and, knowing him, had propositioned her, as he did with almost any pretty girl he met. Anyway, she no doubt told him to get lost and this probably triggered his attack on me. I saw that over the years my dad had been increasingly jealous of me as I succeeded, first in sport and later in television. He was in fact a very talented person himself, both as a sportsman and in the arts but he never followed through to achieve real success. For example, at the age of 18, he was the Weybridge Tennis Club champion, and it was arranged for him to have a friendly game against the current British champion. In the event, Pop beat him but never followed through with the sport. He was a natural musician and could play any musical instrument by ear. He was an excellent artist but only produced about five paintings in his life. Remarkably, he had a book of poetry published at the age of 92, most of which were wickedly funny. The point being he had no reason to be jealous of me. He had far more natural talent than I ever had but he never applied it. I, on the other hand, never gave up even when I strayed away from the obvious path to success, as I did a few times.
Back at the party, Pop went on and on about me not having a clue about girls. The pretty little English beauty heard my dad nattering on about this. She looked at me and winked. She then turned to the other guests who were getting fed up with my dad’s nonsense and said, “Let’s put this to the test, shall we?” She stepped forward, grabbed my arm and marched me into the garden. When we were out of sight of the other guests, she asked me what I’d done to upset my dad. I had no idea at the time and said so. She shook her head “’E’s a bloody monster, ‘e is. Anyway, ducks let’s ‘ave a nice chat, then we’ll go back and show ‘im.”
For a few minutes we spoke about show biz and her ambitions, as well as my years in TV. Finally, she said we should get back to the party. As we returned onto the patio, she grabbed me and kissed me long and hard in front of everyone else. The crowd went wild and applauded. The whole effect was slightly spoiled by the fact that my drunken father had finally passed out and never saw my very enjoyable rebuttal!
In those years the center of the film industry was based in Johannesburg not Cape Town and, as already stated, the Apartheid government refused to allow a television channel to open until 1976, sixteen years in the future. They were terrified of showing the rest of the world without Apartheid to the black population of South Africa, as international TV would have done. I told my parents that I proposed to go to Johannesburg and look for work with one of the major film companies there. I never confronted my dad about his behavior at the party and I don’t think he really remembered it. My mother had quietly apologized to me. She was, sadly, so heavily suppressed by him that she tried to justify even his worst behavior.
One day, shortly before they left to return to Namibia, my dad called me downstairs and led me to the parking area of the hotel. He pointed to an ancient but spruce-looking Morris Minor and said, “That should get you to Jo’burg.” I was thrilled. I had taken my driving license in the UK a year or so previously and had bought a classic 1932 London taxicab for £30. It sort of worked and I drove it a few times before realizing that it would cost me a small fortune to restore it. So I hardly ever drove a car after obtaining my license, except for one occasion. Harry Robinson, a composer of Scottish-oriented pop songs in the ’50s and ’60s (“Hoots Mon” and “Wee Tam”) bought a brand-new Citroen with his new-found wealth but had never driven a car before. He asked me to take delivery of it and drive it to his home, where he proposed to practice driving in his quiet neighborhood. He had married a South African-born girl, Ziki Arbuthnot, whose aristocratic English family were due to leave her millions of pounds. My parents were friendly with her father, the Honorable David Arbuthnot, and on occasions he would ask me to ‘baby sit’ Ziki and her sister Caroline while he was out of town on business. The irony of that was that I was two years younger than Caroline, the younger of the sisters. However, David relied on me to chase any of Ziki’s boyfriends away once she returned home, which I did on a couple of instances. My physical presence seemed sufficient to encourage the older boys to leave once they had said goodnight to the gorgeous blonde Ziki. I thought she would hate me for that but strangely she seemed to respect my guard-dog approach. We even dated a couple of times when we met up in London and before she married Harry, who was a lovely guy.
Anyway, driving a brand-new out-of-the-box Citroen across London at peak hour was a terrifying experience. When its revolutionary (at the time) suspension system went up and down according to the road conditions, I nearly wet myself – but somehow I delivered the magnificent machine to Harry in one piece.
So now I finally had a car of my own that actually worked. I spent a week or so still in Cape Town after my parents left familiarizing myself with the very basic Morris Minor. Coincidently, my grandfather (who ran away with an actress to Kenya just before World War II) had been a racing driver in the UK. He was one of the original bunch of drivers who had raced at Brooklands, one of the world’s first motor racing tracks. It was only a few miles from our house, “Hall Place,” and my grandfather (who never did a day’s work in his life) enjoyed the dangers of racing on the Brooklands track which had incredibly steep sloping bends. It was in fact a forerunner of the American Indianapolis with similarly dangerous bends. A couple of drivers went too close to the top of the bends and flew off, invariably getting killed in the process. Anyway, the coincidence was that a chap called William Morris had a garage in the area and began to build motor cars, beginning with the Morris. At one point he had approached my grandfather and suggested that they go into partnership, as grandpa still had quite a lot of money. Sadly, the idea of going into “trade” didn’t appeal to the then-wealthy Dresser so he turned down the man, the founder of the Morris and Austin empires who would earn the title of Lord Nuffield and become one of the wealthiest men in Britain in his day. As written previously, my grandfather eventually ran out of money, flew first class, of course, back to Britain and literally died of starvation a few days later.
Now I had a Morris motor car. It was very basic and was about fifteen years old. It just about managed a top speed of 50 MPH. However, it was mechanically sound and after gaining confidence on the twisting roads around Cape Town, I finally set off to Egoli (the city of Gold). We chugged through the glorious winelands and mountains surrounding the city, eventually reaching the Hex River Valley, where the main road took the traveler up to a new level a thousand feet or more above the valley. The terrain underwent a drastic change as I entered the Little Karoo, leaving the lush vineyards and green fields far below and entering into a semi desert region which grew drier and rockier as it headed into the Great Karoo which covers much of the Northern Cape Province on the journey towards Johannesburg.
I had lunch in the picturesque market Town of Beaufort West, where many or the original Cape Dutch buildings have been preserved. It is the center of a vast sheep industry, where these hardy animals thrive on numerous succulents, occasional clumps of grass and low scrub bushes. The region is famous for its tasty Karoo lamb and fine Merino wool. Angora goats also thrive in this environment producing world-famous Mohair wool. It’s best-known citizen in recent times was Professor Christiaan Barnard who in 1967 carried out the world’s first successful heart transplant in the famous Groote Schur hospital in Cape Town.
Frustratingly, I managed to leave my address book in the restaurant where I had some delicious lamb. It contained the addresses of all my friends in the UK and to this day I regret not making a greater effort to track down at least some of them. In particular, I had been dating a girl called Sarah from Stratford on Avon when working in nearby Birmingham. We did not exactly have a romance but were really close friends. Just before I left for South Africa, I popped down to Stratford and said goodbye to Sarah and her mother. Her mother took me aside and said, “Do me a favor. Sarah hasn’t had many boyfriends. She’s going to miss you enormously. Please at least write to her when you get to Africa.” I never did once I lost the address book and I regret never making the effort. Stratford is a small town and apart from its most famous resident of the past, William Shakespeare, I’m sure even a letter with her name on it addressed to the Stratford post office would have found her.
I stayed the night in Colesberg, another charming Karroo town, which eventually became famous for breeding racehorses in the area. Years later I filmed Gary Player, one of the top three golfers in the world at the time, along with two Americans, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. We even got him to ride one of his racehorses despite his fears that he may fall off and ruin his chances of playing in a US tournament two weeks later (which he won, by the way).
The following day I drove out of the Karoo into the Transvaal, where cattle and maize were the dominant forms of farming. The terrain was much greener and less rugged than the semidesert I had just left. The Karoo, especially in the late afternoons when the sun fell to the horizon, growing warm and reddish along with other pastel colors, had its own unique beauty.
That evening, I drove to the Jo’burg home of my Aunt Diana Wells and her husband Vernon. They lived in the up-market suburb of Bryanston. Diana was my mother’s sister and was only a few years older than me. She had been at a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, when my parents and I started our trek across Europe and Africa, to finally reach Cape Town. Diana was an epileptic and had a difficult life. Her husband Vernon was quite a bit older, and I was impressed by his willingness to cope with Diana’s frequent illnesses. I stayed with them until I had a job and had settled into my new life in “Joeys.” I had left a blossoming career in television in the UK and arrived back in a country which had no TV, but which had a small but busy film industry. I had no contacts in the local film scene but rather arrogantly felt that my TV successes would soon enable me to translate into the movie industry. It didn’t work out like that, but I persevered, eventually carving a new career for myself.
One of the many reasons why I admire and respect Peter Warren has been the way he has persevered against incredible odds to finally come close to producing with his valiant team the world’s next major breakthrough into a new echelon of computing with ExoBrain.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.