Part 66
In 1945, John Steinbeck wrote one of his best-known novels, Cannery Row, which was set in and around a street in Monterey, California. The cold but nutrient-rich waters, with abundant plankton along the California coast, attracted millions of pilchards (a larger form of sardine), and a huge fishing industry flourished.
Anyway, in the mid-1940s, due to a combination of unfavorable oceanic conditions, over-fishing and competition from other species of fish, the pilchards simply disappeared. For a couple of years, no one knew where the pilchards had gone, the fishing industry collapsed and places like Cannery Row became a degraded mess for a while. However, due to the success of Steinbeck’s novel and the subsequent movie, Cannery Row became the focus of a bustling tourist industry.
The pilchards clearly wanted no part of the burgeoning Monterey tourist industry and searched for a new home, which happened to be the coast of Namibia. The conditions for these little fish were very similar to that of the California coast. The Atlantic Ocean has cold water and is also incredibly rich in plankton. Plankton, by the way, describes millions of micro-organisms of various shapes and sizes that drift with ocean currents. The name is derived from the Greek, “planktos” meaning “drifters.” So, the pilchards found a new home and by the late 1940s and a new fishing industry sprang up, based in Walvis Bay, the only port of Namibia.
The similarities between Cannery Row and Walvis Bay didn’t end there. Steinbeck based his characters on real people: Doc, the marine biologist; Dora, the owner of the Bear Flag Restaurant, who also ran the local whorehouse; Mack, a drifter – but not a plankton of course; and Hazel, a petty thief and a young man who had the misfortune of being given a girl’s name, are some of the characters developed by Steinbeck.
I have to say that Walvis Bay when I arrived there at the end of 1954, was almost a clone of the real Monterey of the slightly earlier period. It was virtually a cowboy town in Africa. Many of the fishermen were wild men, to put it mildly. They came from largely dysfunctional backgrounds, lured by the big money they could earn from the incredibly tough task of trawler fishing.
Then there were the town-based people, whose livelihoods depended largely upon the free spending, hard-drinking and -fighting fishermen. There was the six-foot-five, 300-pound Tiny, the ex-wrestler who was the local taxi driver, who frequently “sorted out” fighting fishermen. The inevitable barman and local gossip, my friend Alan Louw, the diver who made a good living from disentangling fishing nets from the propellers of the trawlers or made underwater inspections of trawlers and ships visiting the port. There was even my father Bob Dresser who had bought a fishing trawler. He spoke the most impeccable “Queen’s English” and frequently wore a monocle. He had to survive a few fights in order to be accepted by the locals who had never seen anything like him before. He could never remember anyone’s name and so called them “old chap” until the fishermen began to call him the Afrikaans equivalent, which was “ou swaar.” My Dad felt that he had been accepted at that point.
Anyway, I want to dwell on two very different characters that I got to know during the year I spent in Walvis Bay. The first was an Irishman, Johnny McBride, who was my father’s trawler engineer. Johnny was to some a character, but to many he was a menace. Shortly after I arrived in town after leaving school, my father had set me up running a fish and chip shop. Johnny told my Dad that he would like to invite my parents and myself to lunch aboard the derelict trawler that he and my Dad’s trawler skipper, Henry Bouwer, were using as their home.
The trawler was still floating in the harbor, but it was in no condition to go out fishing. Somehow, Johnny and Henry had obtained permission to live aboard her. Johnny claimed to be a good cook, and indeed he was. We were treated to a remarkable feast consisting of huge fillet steaks, a variety of salads and roast potatoes washed down with excellent South African red wines, which are some of the best in the world. He also produced a delicious trifle, while Henry contributed by making a fine filter coffee. In short, these guys were living like kings. My Dad suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that they were earning too much from his trawler if they lived like that. Henry laughed and said that Johnny had ways and means of obtaining most of their food. After a few more drinks, Johnny openly admitted that he did not exactly acquire all the food and drinks through honest endeavour. My Dad shook his head in disbelief and warned them that if they ended up in jail, they shouldn’t expect him to bail them out.
Johnny then asked me if I had done any sailing. I replied that I had, and he offered to lend me his sailing dinghy as he didn’t have much time for sailing during the fishing season. I was delighted, as I wanted to gain more experience with sail. A few days later, Johnny took me to a small jetty outside the harbor where the dinghy was moored. It was very small but ideal for singlehanded sailing. Johnny made sure that I knew the basics of handling the craft and left me to it.
For the next couple of weeks, I enjoyed sailing the dinghy after I had closed the fish and chip shop. There was something very special about being alone in a small boat in the relatively calm waters of the bay. One evening after I came back to the jetty and was stowing the dinghy’s sails away, an elderly gentlemen approached me and asked if I had enjoyed my sail. I replied that I had.
His next words came as a shock: “I just wondered how you happen to be sailing in my boat?”
I stammered that I thought the boat belonged to Johnny McBride. He chuckled and nodded.
“I expected as much. He’s a devil, that fellow. He borrowed it from me once and I could never find it again, until now.”
I apologized profusely, but he waved it aside saying at least he now had the dinghy back and he hoped I had enjoyed my time in it.
After we had spent the day aboard his and Henry’s “home,” Johnny had handed me a pile of long playing gramophone records, saying that their gramophone was broken and he had no further use for them. I began to wonder where he had “acquired” them from. A few weeks later, my parents invited the owner of the Flamingo Hotel and his wife to dinner. While they were there, I had put some of the records on to play as a gentle background to the evening.
After dinner, the hotel owner asked whether perhaps Johnny McBride had lent the records to us. My Dad turned to me. I went cold. Johnny’s light fingers had been at work again.
“Er, why did you ask that?”
“Johnny worked for us as a barman for a couple of months. He was dipping into the till, so we fired him. After he left, we discovered that most of our records were missing. I thought the music was familiar, sooo…”
Johnny finally left Walvis Bay one step ahead of the police and disappeared. I was thoroughly embarrassed by the little Irishman’s so-called generosity.
The other person whom I have previously written about was John Benson Sidgwick an elegant Englishman who appeared with his beautiful girlfriend one day, looking for a job. I was fed up with the fish and chip shop and coming home stinking of fish at night, so I got a job at the local timber yard. John took over the running of the fish and chip shop and did surprisingly well considering he was recognized as one of the world’s leading amateur astronomers, having written a couple of authoritative books on astronomy which are still recognized today.
Incredibly, within a year of my arrival back in England, I met Johnny McBride in a London street. He was part of a banner-waving group of communists protesting at something or other. He tried unsuccessfully to recruit me to the cause but failed, of course. Then, a couple of months later, I was working as a stagehand for a touring South African Opera Company putting on a Menotti opera, “The Consul.” I appeared momentarily in the title role as a silhouette behind a glass window – no singing required! John came to see the show and I spotted him immediately in the foyer. We chatted and planned to meet again, but sadly he died a few months later in Paris at the age of 42.
Two very different but extraordinary characters passing through Walvis Bay and my life. I now sincerely believe that I have another major adventure ahead of me, as I work on the biography of another incredible character, Peter Warren, the founder and creator of ExoBrain. It is a computing system that would have changed the way in which people like John Sidgwick would have written his astronomy books and stored his knowledge into the infinite receptacle of the MotherExoBrain available for any enquiring mind.
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.