Part 80
I think what has fascinated me most about meeting young people is discovering what they are planning to do with their lives. And then, best of all, discovering that they have achieved and sometimes exceeded their goals.
After working in television in Britain for three years, I returned to South Africa in late 1959. My parents traveled south from Walvis Bay (the only port of what was then known as South West Africa, now Namibia) to spend Christmas with me and discover what I planned to do.
My Dad bought me a fairly ancient but well-maintained Morris Minor with a top speed of about 55 miles per hour (but it was wheels!). I told them that I was hoping to make documentaries for a London-based film company and needed to go up to Johannesburg to organize this.
First, however, I wanted to spend some time in Cape Town, which I rate as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I also needed to get some driving time in the Morris. As already mentioned, I took my driving license in Britain but never drove until I drove Harry Robinson’s brand-new Citroën across London the previous year.
I drove along the coast and included the dramatic Chapman’s Peak Drive, a miracle of engineering clinging to the cliff face of the mountains behind Table Mountain with sheer drops of hundreds of feet into the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the road.
In contrast, I also visited the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens perched up against the back end of Table Mountain. It was formed in 1913 to preserve flora native to South Africa, a country that has a floral kingdom containing the greatest variety of species anywhere on the planet. As a schoolboy, I would climb up Skeleton Gorge rising up directly behind the Gardens and cross over to the front of Table Mountain overlooking the city of Cape Town.
There was also an excellent tea room and restaurant in Kirstenbosch. I was already testing my writing skills there, sitting with pen, paper and cup of coffee overlooking the unbelievable floral displays with the mountain as a dramatic backdrop. An attractive and vivacious young girl worked there and usually served me my refreshments. We got chatting. She was eager to know about my experiences in television in the UK. Her mother, Peggy Inglis, was an actress who had been very successful in theater and television in Britain before settling in South Africa.
She expressed an interest in acting but I sensed she was not really committed to following that path. I enjoyed hearing about her decision to study in Paris at the Sorbonne, ostensibly to study French. She also admitted to being fascinated by the food industry.
In 1960 this girl, Prue Leith, left Paris for London where she attended the Cordon Blue Cookery School. Meanwhile, I had coaxed my ancient Morris along the thousand miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg to further my own career. I never met Prue again but I often remembered her as a person intensely focused and wonderfully enthusiastic about life.
And what a life! I’ll just give a few highlights. She pioneered business lunches in Britain; then in 1969 she opened a Michelin-starred restaurant in London which she sold in 1995.
She married UK-based South African writer Rayne Kruger in 1974. He wrote a number of novels, but perhaps his best-known work was a non-fiction account of the Anglo-Boer War entitled Goodbye Dolly Gray. Sadly, he died in 2002.
She also opened the Leith School of Food and Wine, which trained both professional and amateur cooks. It had a turnover of £15 million when she sold it in 1993.
In 1997, she was the first woman to be appointed to the British Railways Board to improve their poor standard of catering at the time. Then, just in case she wasn’t busy enough, she was a food columnist for successive UK newspapers, the Daily Mail, Sunday Express, The Guardian and Daily Mirror. She has written twelve cookery books and (incredibly) seven novels – does she ever sleep?
Prue has appeared in numerous TV shows and has been a judge on various food programs, notably the “Great British Bake Off.” She was Chairperson of the School Food Trust which followed up on celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s exposé of the poor state of school lunches.
Prue married John Playfair, a retired clothing designer, in 2016.
She was even installed as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh the following year.
Her honors include:
- Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year 1990.
- 13 honorary degrees from British universities.
- Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) 1989.
- Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 2010.
- Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire 2021.
Looking back, could I have predicted such a future for the charming and articulate young lady I met in early 1960? Not really, although I sensed that she had some special qualities and expected that she would make a name for herself in some form or another. At 81 she seems to be as busy as ever. Good for her!
Talking of making a name for oneself, there’s a certain gentleman who survived a turbulent childhood to emerge as a unique creative and conceptual thinker. He still has to take the world by storm but he will, without doubt, achieve this and very soon.
His name, of course, is Peter Warren, the creator of ExoTech. What is so extraordinary about Peter is that he is not an IT (Information Technology) techie, but that he nevertheless could conceptualize and uncover the basic flaws in computing that have persisted from its very beginnings over 70 years ago. Having corrected those flaws, he sought the technical talents of people like Jeff Buhrt and Rick Harrison to implement his vision of how computing should really operate. The ExoTech brand, with its remarkable ExoBrain, is going to set the IT world alight when it is launched in the next several years.
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.