Part 61
Over the years, I have been bombarded by others with so many wonderful and some not so wonderful stories that I was assured would make great movies. For some time, my stock answer had been, “I have an endless fund of my own ideas, I really don’t need to be given any more.”
I think I was outraged by the implied thought that I was simply a writer, and writers do not necessarily have ideas of what to write. However, as the years went by, I had to concede that there were some ideas that would not go away. These were mostly true but untold stories. I still make the claim that, “Give me half an hour and I’ll give you a story,” but in recent times some of these true stories have proven to be irresistible. I’d like to give you a case in point. I’ve written the screenplay, but it’s an expensive movie and, so far, I’ve not had any serious efforts by anyone to fund it. It is based on the book “Skeleton Coast” by John Marsh.
In 1943, at the height of World War Two, the Dunedin Star, a small passenger liner slipped out of Southampton bound for Cape Town and finally to Egypt. The Suez Canal was closed, so that all shipping heading for Africa had to travel down the East coast around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of the continent and turn north again up the West side of Africa.
The Dunedin Star managed to evade any contact with German warships or submarines and entered into the waters of South West Africa, now known as Namibia.
These were dangerous waters. Not just because of possible German attacks but because there are treacherous currents and shallow shoals off the coast of the Namib desert. Over the centuries, it has accounted for the loss of literally dozens of ships. The beaches in this region are littered with the wrecks of both sailing ships and modern steamers. Here and there are still the skeletons of the unfortunate sailors; hence its name, The Skeleton Coast.
The ship had to hug the coast as close as it could to avoid enemy contact. One night, both passengers and crew were awakened by a terrible crash and grinding of metal. The first thought was that they had been torpedoed. However, the captain soon realized that they had run aground on one of the ever-shifting sandbanks just below the surface of the sea.
Captain R.B. Lee ordered an SOS to be sent out. It was apparent that the ship was stuck fast and would be battered to pieces in a matter of days. A tug, the Sir Charles Elliot, was sent from Walvis Bay, hundreds of miles to the south, to try to pull the ship off the sand. A converted minesweeper, the Nerine, also made the trip to pick up any survivors. Two nearby cargo ships offered to see if anyone could be transferred to them.
The situation became increasingly chaotic. Ten passengers and crew were taken aboard the tug, but rough seas and the strong current made further transfers impossible. The ship was breaking up; so, in desperation, the captain launched two lifeboats. They made two trips each to the shore about five hundred yards away, safely landing the remaining seventy-five passengers and a number of crew, but, in many ways, it was out of the frying pan into the fire!
The Namib desert is beautiful in its own way, but it is incredibly inhospitable. Only a handful of oases exist in its eight-hundred-mile long by about a two-hundred-mile strip along the coast. Hundreds of miles from any civilization, the survivors only had the meagre rations from the lifeboats to feed nearly a hundred people. The water would last only a few days. They had no real shelter except for one canvas tarpaulin. To make matters worse, there were a number of infants who would quickly perish if left out in the pitiless sun. Fortunately, there were also a few good Egyptian doctors among the passengers who used the canvas and their skills to protect the babies. In addition the ship’s doctor, a wonderful Scottish character, 75 years old and tough as teak, Dr. Burnwood had lived Africa for years and was a huge support for the passengers, especially for the women and the babies.
Coincidently, one of my first girlfriends as a schoolboy was the doctor’s granddaughter. Her father, Gordon Burnwood was the Olympic yachting skipper I had crewed for at the Hermanus Yacht club. Gordon was also a really tough guy, so I can imagine what his old man, the good doctor, was like.
Meanwhile, back on the Skeleton Coast, the already grim situation worsened when the tug returning to Walvis Bay, the nearest port, ran aground off Rocky Point about a hundred miles south of the Dunedin Star‘s last resting place. Two crew members volunteered to swim ashore with a rope from the tug, planning to secure it somehow in order to allow the rest of those on board to pull themselves hand over hand to the shore. Sadly, both seamen drowned in the attempt. It would have been futile anyway. There was nothing but sand to attach it to! Somehow the rest of the crew and passengers got ashore safely.
It was then decided that a convoy should be sent from Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, to rescue the people on the beach, some five hundred miles away. However, this was before the days of four-wheel drive and fat tires for extreme desert driving conditions. Furthermore, only the leader of the convoy, a police Captain John Brafield Smith, had any experience with driving in the desert. His crew were raw military recruits, mainly from the city of Johannesburg who had never been in the wilds of Africa in their lives. Their journey took six weeks in mostly soft sand and, on some days, they were lucky to progress more than five hundred yards digging and pushing the puny trucks with narrow tires.
Back at the camp in the desert, planes had started to fly overhead, but because of the shortage of parachutes in wartime, they dropped parcels of provisions wrapped in inflated inner tubes to the near-starving passengers and crew of the ship. Many of these parcels burst on impact and those with water canisters simply melted away in the hot sand. Nevertheless, enough provisions and water were saved to keep the desert survivors alive, but the situation became increasingly desperate.
A brave and rather foolhardy South African pilot, Immins Naude, was known for his skill with landing planes on remote beaches. He volunteered to land and, if possible, return with the babies and their mothers. He landed successfully a couple of miles away from the camp on a salt pan, Then, as he turned the plane around to be ready for take-off, the wheels broke through the salt-caked surface and the seemingly hard surface where he had landed. The plane sank deep into the underlying soft sand. He walked to the camp and told the survivors what had happened. The ship’s crew were so depleted by heat and starvation that they did not have the energy to help Naude dig his plane out of the sand; so, for the meantime, he became just another of the survivors.
I had the opportunity of meeting him outside of Johannesburg twice before he died. He was a remarkable, self-effacing man. In addition, while researching this story, I had earlier travelled to Pietermaritzburg to meet with Captain John Brafield Smith. He was a real tough, “old school” copper who almost single-handedly pushed and cajoled his rookies to continue in a terrifyingly unfamiliar environment for the youngsters. So much so that they actually mutinied about twenty-five miles before reaching the camp and refused to go further. Brafield Smith and two of the tougher men carried on in one truck, finally reaching the camp.
There were some wonderful stories that emerged from the camp. One venerable and aristocratic old lady had carried some books with her from the ship. Every day she would read one of the books and tear off the pages as she read, providing toilet paper for her fellow passengers. A pretty young woman fell in love with one of the officers, and a crew member went into a psychotic break, trying unsuccessfully to kill some of the survivors.
In brief then, Brafield Smith and his helpers ferried the passengers to the convoy and eventually set off back to civilization. Some were offloaded at Rocky Point where the tug had sunk and were then flown to safety by planes that had found a stable landing place on the solid, rocky ground of Rocky Point. The remainder stayed with the convoy and also returned to safety.
Incredibly, no other lives other than the tug’s two crewmen were lost, but there was another adventure awaiting the pilot Naude. Weeks later, he went back in another convoy to rescue his plane. They hauled it onto firmer ground, and he and a navigator took off heading for Walvis Bay. Close to the now-famous Rocky Point, the plane’s engines failed. They ditched in the sea and swam ashore. However, the plane’s radio was not working so no one knew where they were. In desperation, they raced across the desert to intercept the returning convoy. They just managed to link up with the trucks and returned to safety.
To my mind, this is an amazing story of courage and survival with a mixture of poor decisions and even incompetence. I have not given up the idea of my screenplay becoming a movie one day.
To my fellow team members of ExoBrain, it is just another example of persistence that we have all shown in our own way as we are about to bring this wonderful ExoTech system to fruition.
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.