Ad & Wal: Values, Duty, Sacrifice in Apartheid South Africa

Preface

Their first small steps later became large strides, their modest local actions led to national controversies.

Yet, when they were first asked to help, they gave no thought to where it might lead. Saying yes didn’t seem at all fateful. Adelaine and Walter Hain rather stumbled, oblivious, into it all. At the time, in 1953, it just seemed the right thing to do, in keeping with their values of caring, decency, fairness and, perhaps equally important, their sense of duty.

Staying true to such values, morals, principles was important to them – even if that meant sacrificing the comforts and certainties of job, lifestyle, family, friends, security and indeed country. Maintaining standards was fundamental to trying to live a life of integrity where principles mattered. They didn’t try to play the hero, they didn’t set out with a plan. One thing led to another and, once they had started, there was no way they felt they could walk away or let others down – even though, had the consequences been known at the beginning, they might’ve had cause to pause and reflect.

Ad & Wal is a story of struggle, of sacrifice, of pain – but ultimately of triumph: not for themselves, but for their cause. They were survivors – they came through war, penury, harassment, attacks and bitter loss, still looking on the bright side, chins up, keeping going, making the most of life, living happily at the centre of their close and growing family.

Theirs is indeed a story of their times, their era. Do their values endure? Or have they been lost in a world of personal gratification and celebrity? Could there ever be another Ad and Wal? Or are people simply not made like that anymore?

Not that they were saints – everyone has flaws. I have tried to tell it as I think it was for Ad and Wal, an ordinary couple who did extraordinary things under apartheid South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s – and gave up a great deal as a result. It is indeed the very fact that they were so much like their white peers and relatives – that in their own words they were ‘just an ordinary couple’ – which makes their story intriguing, and along the way raises questions about why they did what they did, why they were rebels, when the great mass of other whites – including all but one of their many close relatives – did not and were not.

If you, the reader, were in their situation, would you have done what they did or stayed quietly with the vast majority, ‘walking by on the other side’?

Of course being published doesn’t make their story more important than those of tens of thousands of other South Africans, including whites like them, who joined the struggle against apartheid. Ad and Wal were, and very much saw themselves as, foot soldiers rather than leaders. They always insisted that others suffered a great deal more and contributed much more, and that their own role was modest.

Above all this is a story: I have aimed at readability rather than deep political or indeed psychological analysis. Other whites also brought up by anti-apartheid parents in South Africa at much the same time have written memorable books. Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing is unsparingly, uncomfortably honest about the personal and the political underlying the leading roles in the African National Congress played by her parents, Joe Slovo and Ruth First. Lynn Carneson’s Red in the Rainbow is a moving tribute to the bravery and fortitude of her South African Communist Party and ANC parents, Fred and Sarah Carneson. Eleanor Sisulu’s Walter and Albertina Sisulu is captivating on her inspirational in-laws. There are also insightful biographies of those times, for instance on the leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, where similar themes – and values – arise.

But writing about your parents is not straightforward and I am grateful to both for their cooperation – despite their misgivings (including on my mother’s side considerable emotional stress) and even embarrassment that they should be singled out. My thanks to my brother Tom and sisters Jo-anne and Sally for their own, sometimes painful, memories, and to Elizabeth Haywood for both her love and invaluable edits. My good friend and wonderful South African historian, Andre Odendaal, gave me sensitively trenchant and detailed advice without which this would have been a lesser work. I am also grateful for their help and comments to Myrtle Berman, Vanessa Brown, Jill Chisholm, Annette Cockburn, Eddie Daniels, David Evans, David Geffen, Hugh Lewin, Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, Jo Stocks, Jill Wentzel, Ann Wolfe, David Wolfe, Duncan Woods, Jane Woods and Randolph Vigne (whose book Liberals Against Apartheid: a history of the Liberal Party of South Africa 1953–68 is an important source). Also to my agent Caroline Michel for her sympathetic wisdom on authorship; and to Sam Carter, Biteback’s editor, for his enthusiasm for this story. Finally to Joe Hemani for his unfailing support and generosity in friendship.

Above all to Mom and Dad – Ad and Wal – who will always be an inspiration to me and many, many others.

Peter Hain

Ynysygerwn, Neath

November 2013

Prologue

If the end was bitter, at the start they could not believe their good fortune.

It was morning on 21 October 1944 when two army radio operators, Walter Hain aged nineteen and Lanky Brasler aged eighteen, moved to Point 806 high on Monte Pezza in the Apennines. Among some trees they stumbled across a ‘slittie’ (slit trench) wide enough to take both of them.

It was the only one like that they’d ever discovered. Normally a slittie was a one-man trench, long and deep enough to protect a soldier lying in it from shell shrapnel and flying bullets. Sometimes they had to toil away in the hard, unyielding soil to dig out a suitable slittie.

They delightedly occupied this one. To make it more secure from overhead shell bursts, they gave it a roof of tree branches topped with a layer of soil, and a gap at one end for access. As Walter’s meticulous diary recorded, they ‘felt as safe as a house’.

Both were soldiers of the 6th South African Armoured Division, part of the British 8th Army which, with the American 5th Army, was driving the German forces occupying Italy northwards out of the country. One of its infantry battalions was the Royal Natal Carbineers (RNC), and they were in C Company.

That morning their C Company took over a frontline position from B Company and they were able to move straight into existing slitties. Although around ten o’clock German shells started coming over a hill to their left, Walter and Lanky ‘felt very safe and were trying to sleep’. But, two hours later, when shells began bursting nearby and shrapnel flying, they found the din ‘terrifying’.

The two were suddenly trapped in their ‘safe as houses trench’, the Germans pounding their lines. Then – shockingly – their worst fear: shrapnel tore through the access opening in the trench roof near their feet. It hit the top of Walter’s right thigh in the groin. ‘I quickly put my hand down to make sure the family jewels were intact – they were. Lanky shouted: I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit.’

‘So have I,’ Walter shouted and Lanky jumped out the opening of the slittie to call for help. ‘Then another shell arrived and Lanky grabbed his back and screamed Oh Mama, Mama, Mama.’

Pandemonium. Horror. Walter pulled a moaning Lanky back into the slittie and tried to prop him up; Lanky was badly hurt – very badly. The company medical orderly, Dutch, soon arrived and gave Lanky morphine; it seemed not to make any difference. Despite Walter’s desperate reassurances, Lanky ‘was sure he wasn’t going to make it’ and asked Walter to see his sister. ‘But I told him he’d be alright and the stretcher-bearers would soon be coming.’

Ignoring incoming fire, Coloured‡ stretcher-bearers soon rushed in to carry Lanky away to the regimental aid post nearby, in a large house, Casa Ruzzone. Limping to it later himself, in shock and in some pain from his injured thigh, Walter came across the stretcher-bearers having a breather. Lanky, they told him matter-of-fact, was dead. Surely not. He was stunned, with a dreadful sense of guilt that it was when Lanky had jumped out, calling for help for them both, that the second shell had killed him. Walter had been through some scrapes earlier since arriving in Italy, and counted himself lucky. But now he was overcome by a dulling, deadening despair.

Forty-one years later, in 1985, retracing his steps through the Apennines aided by his old wartime diary and with family members, he rounded a corner in the tiny village of Castiglione dei Pepoli. There, quite unexpectedly, was a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery for South African soldiers, set in a beautiful glade, a kaleidoscope of green shades with a sprinkling of brightly coloured flowers,

Both curious and eager, Walter’s hopes rose and the family stopped. In a small stone building they found a metal-encased ledger, and in it – yes – the location of Lanky’s grave. Elation but also deep melancholy: his emotions swirled as he walked down through rows and rows of white-grey headstones, stark, sombre and dignified. Finding Lanky’s, he knelt down on his knees to photograph it, conjuring an inescapable image of fate: had their positions in that slittie been reversed, it could well have been Lanky and his family visiting Walter’s gravestone. Instead, through friendships made in action in the Second World War, he lived to meet the love of his life.

Adelaine Hain was frantic. Somehow, anyhow, she had to save the life of a close friend and political comrade, John Harris. For five months after John was sentenced to death by hanging, the shadow of the noose hovered as she was involved in frenzied efforts to save him.

As a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM), Harris had confessed to placing a bomb on the main railway concourse at Johannesburg station in 1964. With Nelson Mandela in prison along with many other anti-apartheid activists, and internal resistance all but suppressed, Harris, along with his close colleague, fellow ARM and Liberal Party member John Lloyd, planned the bomb as a spectacular protest against apartheid.

Police testimony in court confirmed that he had indeed telephoned a warning to the railway police and urged them to clear the concourse, in order to avoid injuring anyone. But the authorities deliberately ignored that and an old lady tragically died, her twelve-year-old granddaughter maimed for life, others injured and burnt.

This would have carried a life sentence for manslaughter had John Lloyd not turned from co-conspirator to state witness and damningly insisted – against all other evidence – that the act was pre-meditated murder. The judge accepted Lloyd’s version with fatal consequences for Harris.

When his legal appeal on 1 March 1965 failed – because no additional evidence was forthcoming – Adelaine rushed about Pretoria helping organise clemency appeals. Repeated pleas to Lloyd, safe in England, to retract the damning part of his evidence were refused. John’s wife Ann and his father flew down to Cape Town to appeal to the Minister of Justice, John Vorster. But he was hostile and intransigent and, even worse, asked her questions seeking to entrap and implicate her in the bomb. Petitions from a range of public figures were presented and the matter was even raised in the British Parliament. But the state would not budge and a grim sense of foreboding enveloped them all while John Harris was being held on death row.

Then: a slim gleam of hope. John managed to convey a message to Ann that he had been approached by a warder who wanted to help him escape. At great personal risk, and from the outset highly suspicious of a set-up designed to trap them, Adelaine decided to help Ann, with Walter’s support. There were weeks of tense and contorted dealings with the warder. Then he was posted over 1,000 rand to pay for a car and expenses for the escape, Adelaine insisting that Ann had Elastoplasts stuck discreetly over her fingertips to cover her prints.

Beside themselves with worry, they waited for the elaborate arrangements the warder specified were needed to spring John. On the nominated day, two weeks before he was due to hang, he was to be sneaked out of his cell, and climb a rope over a wall.

Nevertheless, as Adelaine had feared all along, it had been a security police trap from the beginning. As John waited in his cell wearing a civilian suit given him by the warder, the door opened as arranged at 2 a.m. But instead of the expected warder it was apartheid’s chief spymaster, General H. J. van den Bergh, mocking him. (Together with John Vorster, ‘HJ’ was a former member of the paramilitary Ossewabrandwag, which conducted sabotage operations against the Allies in the Second World War; both were interned for pro-Nazi activities.) HJ tried to pressure Harris to reveal the identity of his co-conspirators outside. Despite being promised his life would be spared, Harris refused. It was just as well that Adelaine was obsessive both about secrecy and ensuring any evidence of her (criminal) collaboration was concealed.

But she remained distraught at being unable to save him. At 5 a.m. on 1 April 1965 John Harris ascended the fifty-two concrete steps to the pre-execution room next to the gallows at Pretoria Central Prison. Each step was six feet or so wide in a square spiral configuration; there were four landings with metal bars on a side wall all the way up. A Catholic priest, Father McGuinness, walked up the steps talking with him. (John had originally agreed to see a priest because it got him an extra visitor and they became good friends, though John’s firm atheism never wavered.) Inside the execution chamber, which had barred frosted glass windows along the top, the hangman waited. So did a medical doctor to certify his death, and a policeman to take a set of fingerprints and check his face against a photograph to confirm his identity. The death warrant was read to him and he was given the opportunity to say his last words.

Ready, he was now led forward by a warder into the large and brightly lit execution room, some forty feet long with white-painted walls, the gallows beam running its length. (Seven black prisoners could be – and often were – hanged simultaneously on this gallows.) It had a low ceiling with barred windows in the top of the wall. In the corner there was a table with a phone on it, in case a last-minute clemency was ever granted. There is no recorded instance of the phone ever having rung – and it certainly did not ring for John.

In the middle was the cruel hole, rectangular trap doors hinged along each edge. Alongside was a rail at waist height so that the warder holding John’s arms did not fall down the hole when the trap doors opened. Above the trap door was the machinery of the gallows. The ropes and fittings had been adjusted to match his height and weight.

The hangman began his grisly routine, tying John’s wrists behind his back and attaching a rope around his neck with the knot next to an ear. Then he fastened a hood over John’s face with a flap at the front left up until the last moment.

John had begun singing the freedom song ‘We Shall Overcome’ as the hangman turned down the hood flaps, checked all was ready and pulled the lever, plummeting him through the huge trap doors. In the gruesome medieval ritual the rope jerked with such force that it not only broke John’s neck but left a severe rope burn. Christiaan Barnard, South Africa’s pioneer heart surgeon, wrote years later:

The man’s spinal cord will rupture at the point where it enters the skull, electrochemical discharges will send his limbs flailing in a grotesque dance, eyes and tongue will start from the facial apertures under the assault of the rope and his bowels and bladder may simultaneously void themselves to soil the legs and drip onto the floor.

As to whether John would have felt any pain, Barnard added:

It may be quick. We do not know as none has survived to vouch for it. We make the assumption that the danse macabre is but a reflection of a disconnected nervous system … and the massive trauma of the neck tissues and spinal column does not register in that area of the human psyche where horror dwells.

In keeping with the custom of the Pretoria gallows John was left to hang for fifteen minutes. In the corner of the gallows chamber was a concrete staircase leading to a high-ceilinged room below. Set into its floor was a ‘blood pit’ about eighteen inches deep, lined with coloured tiles, a plug hole in the middle. To one side was a huge low wooden trolley, big enough to wheel over the whole pit. The doctor stood on it after John had been stripped to certify his death. Then his body was lowered onto the trolley and washed off with a hose, the water draining into the ‘blood pit’. A warder put a rope around John’s body which, with a pulley, was then lifted to allow the noose to be taken off. He was then lowered onto a metal stretcher and placed directly into his coffin.

Adelaine Hain had woken unusually early at dawn, waiting still and silent. At 5.30 a.m. the family phone rang and she picked it up, recognising the familiar voice of a security police officer who said scornfully, ‘Your John is dead.’

‡ Mixed-race, one of four racial groups, the others being whites, Africans (blacks) and Asians. Only whites in the South African army were permitted to carry arms. Soldiers from other racial groups, though often in danger, could only perform back-up roles.

1

Soldier

Although the name Hain means ‘small wood’ in German, Walter was from Scottish stock in Glasgow. Yet – even from a city renowned for its socialist activism – little in his background hinted at his later political radicalism.

His grandfather William, a toolmaker, hailed from the Fife town of Auchtermuchty. His father Walter (Senior) and mother Mary were brought up on opposite sides of the main park in their working-class Glasgow neighbourhood of Tollcross. They remained there when they married, living with his parents in a ‘wally close’ – an apartment with a tiled entrance leading off a communal staircase in a tenement block. The ceramic tiles were a distinctive pale cream with a raised ornamental band of green above denoting marginal superiority in a deprived community of similar apartment blocks typical of the city. (The Scots word ‘wally’ means pale ceramic.)

But after the 1914–18 World War, Walter Snr, a newly qualified structural engineer, could not find a job and, unwilling to accept his lot, they joined many others in similar predicaments and emigrated in 1920 to Natal, South Africa, his parents joining them as they made a new life. Walter Snr got a job at a steel construction firm in Durban, designing bridges, but for Grandfather William it was a sad move as he could not find work to continue in his proud role as an engineering toolmaker.

Walter was born on 29 December 1924 in Northdene, a satellite suburb to the north west of the Natal city of Durban, in a house that his father and grandfather had helped build. It was in Parkers Hill, a street located between the main railway line and (now) the M5 north to Pretoria. There were few houses nearby and the children had open fields in which to play, across which were Indian families who grew vegetables and fruit which they sold to the Hain family and other white households. His mother used to make sandwiches for lunch at school, containing special Virol malt extract, which he was told was very good for him. But he habitually swapped them with local black workers for the traditional fare of Zulu labourers, stave pap or putu – made from maize.

He had a carefree young life with his two elder brothers Bill and Tom, playing, swimming, fishing in local streams and enjoying sport, and was especially close to his grandfather, who spent time talking to the young boy. But then came a family crisis. In the great slump of 1929 his dad lost his job and, desperate to work, travelled back, first to Britain then to Canada, moving between various short-term jobs, none utilising his structural engineering skills. The global depression continuing, his dad eventually found work in Kenya with the Vacuum Oil Company and six-year-old Walter recalled being frightened that the passenger ship transporting the family to Kenya’s Mombasa port might sink.

After a year living in Mombasa, they moved back into their house in Northdene, his father rejoining his previous engineering employer in Durban, which now had a job available. Walter was then of school age and did well at Escombe Primary School in a settlement a few miles away, to which he walked daily. It was the only time he wore shoes – at home he and his older brothers were usually barefoot in the typical way of South African youngsters. Once, walking to school with white friends, he recalled coming up behind a group of Indian boys on their way to their school: ‘Get out of our way!’ the young whites shouted merrily at the young Indians; Walter and his mates were the masters. Except for the open-air South African lifestyle and the Indians with whom he came into contact, it was a very British colonial upbringing; most Northdene families had also recently emigrated from Britain.

It was not until his family (with grandparents) moved to Pretoria in 1935 that Walter encountered Afrikaans-speaking whites. He attended Arcadia Primary School and later, with his older brothers Bill and Tom, Pretoria Boys High, probably the best state school in the city, where everyone played rugby in winter and cricket in summer. (He had actually begun high school at another renowned state school, Parktown, when his parents moved briefly to Johannesburg in 1937–8.) Though an enthusiastic cricketer, he did not reach the standard of brother Bill, who had previously captained the first team at Boys High.

Walter was brought up with traditional manners and courtesies, his father strict and his teachers even more so, as he absorbed the prevailing family values of discipline, hard work, honesty and decency. At the same time he was instilled with a spirit of questioning everything, soon developing a vigorously anti-establishment temperament. Perhaps this – together with an instinctive and unusual empathy for the Africans he encountered – was the genesis of what much later became his anti-apartheid activism.

Yet his parents never discussed politics with him. Despite the fact that they had both been Labour Party members in their youth in Glasgow, they shunned the politics of their adoptive country. Like most British immigrants they turned a blind eye to the racism entrenched around them and went along with the status quo. Indeed, of working-class stock and therefore subordinate in Britain, they rather enjoyed being ‘superior’ in South Africa. Whether they knew or acknowledged this, they were an integral part of the institutionalised racism of South Africa, and their views were broadly part of a British colonial view of the world at the time, which even the British Labour Party, despite its emancipatory tradition, was affected by. Therefore, in common with his white school friends, the young Walter took it for granted that blacks were a servant class, both to white families like his and the white society in which they lived cordoned off from areas where blacks resided. Propitiously, however, he was brought up to treat black people with some civility and respect, unhappily not the norm among many whites.

Walter was just fourteen when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, triggering the outbreak of the Second World War. His father and two older brothers quickly enlisted and were involved in the military campaign to drive Hitler’s allies the Italians from Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1940–41. Meanwhile, with his mother Walter had moved back to Pretoria and to Boys High.

English-speaking teenage boys like him were keen as mustard to join up. However, unlike in Britain, there was no conscription as the South African Parliament had decided only narrowly (by thirteen votes) to support the Allies rather than the Nazis. The Second World War had divided South Africa’s white population, English descendants backing the Allies, Afrikaners siding heavily with the Nazis. Some of their leaders, including a future Prime Minister, John Vorster, were interned for pro-Nazi activity including sabotage of Allied troop trains. Ben Schoeman, later a Cabinet minister for twenty-six years, had said in 1940: ‘The whole future of Afrikanerdom is dependent on a German victory.’ A German U-boat submarine abortively landed a former Afrikaner South African boxing champion on the west coast, having trained him in sabotage – he was arrested and jailed.

But his dad insisted Walter continue with his studies and wouldn’t allow him to enlist until he turned eighteen at the end of 1942. He matriculated with a First Class Secondary School Certificate at the end of 1941, including a Distinction in art. His dad, struck by his artistic ability, had already encouraged him to train as an architect and Walter went from school to work as an architectural assistant for Pretoria municipality during the day, studying in the evening for the five-year degree in architecture for which he had been accepted at Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University.

A year later, now aged eighteen and enjoying his work and studying, he was still determined to serve in the war. Eager to realise his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he went early in 1943 to Waterkloof military airfield outside Pretoria. The normal tests began encouragingly well. Then, abruptly, his dream was shattered. A test found him unable to distinguish some colours – a form of colour blindness – which barred him