And Justice For All. Stephen Ellmann
being wrongly called out in a cricket match – at which point Arthur started throwing the wickets about. The following year Arthur would say, at the Wits student meeting, that the question the students needed to consider was not one of tradition but rather ‘What is right and what is wrong?’ That commitment to justice, that fierce commitment to justice, seems to have been part of Arthur’s role at Vrededorp as well.
And yet the course the Torch Commando was following in the early 1950s did not become Arthur’s course. (The Torch Commando itself soon faded from view as well.) After his brother stopped asking him to go to the Torch Commando events, it seems, Arthur did not pursue the chance to take part. Instead, he focused on his studies and articles. Most strikingly, he seems never to have spoken about these events. Was that simply discretion? Or was it embarrassment about the impulsiveness of his acts? We do not know, but it does seem that Arthur turned away, in his own life, from politics of this violent sort.
Meanwhile, he was occupied with studies, and with many of the pleasures of life as a young man. He played football (soccer) for Wits and for a South African universities team. He also played tennis, along with many of his young Jewish friends who shared this interest. There were in fact at least two groups of young Jewish tennis players in Johannesburg at this time. One was made up of people on the left. Mendelsohn and Shain, in their book The Jews in South Africa, include a photo of nine men in tennis whites, all evidently Jewish, and all but one of whom ‘were later to become political prisoners’ – with the caption ‘Anyone for Revolution?’ Jewish Communists such as the advocate Joe Slovo (one of the pictured tennis players) did play an important role in anti-apartheid activism in the 1950s, though there were always many more Jews who were disposed to make their peace with the ruling pro-apartheid party.
The other group of tennis players, the one that Arthur became part of, seems to have been less political and perhaps more hedonistic. They also intersected with the group of LLB students who led the class of 1954 at Wits, though at least one player – Arthur’s cousin Aubrey Lunz – was not a law student. Not everyone taking an LLB at Wits played tennis, and the line between those who did and those who didn’t may have had something to do with class. The members of this group were not all wealthy, but Sir Mark Weinberg (who recalled he wasn’t one of the most dedicated players) said that they all were from comfortable Jewish homes.28 (In contrast, George Bizos told me, ‘I couldn’t afford a tennis racket.’29)
Joel Joffe, Arthur’s old friend, recalls that their group’s matches took place at tennis courts in the gardens of the homes of two of the members, Rusty Rostowsky and Arthur. (Arthur’s ‘smaller house’ had by now acquired a tennis court – and Arthur was still living there.) There was a vigorous competition between the two houses, Joel remembers, over the quality of the refreshments offered to the players. These were, of course, produced by the black cooks in each house, and were served by black servants in livery and sash.30 Arthur’s friend Sydney Lipworth recalled one occasion when two Communist tennis players joined the party and were discomforted by the liveried servants. Joel recalled that Arthur was quite fond of the cook at his house; he also mentioned that wives and girlfriends would come along for tea on these tennis days. These young people, no doubt with some degree of ambivalence, were enjoying the privileges that the South African racial hierarchy afforded them. And as Sydney Lipworth recalled, those in this group really didn’t have much contact with black people except their servants.31
Arthur and Sydney Lipworth played a weekly match against Joel Joffe and Denis Kuny – a competition that went on for years. Any doubt that Arthur had a competitive side is removed by Kuny’s account of these matches:
It was in this legendary highly competitive ongoing tennis match that Arthur developed what, I believe, was the technique which later became known as ‘sledging’ when used and refined later by the Australian cricket team. Arthur, when things weren’t going too well for him, and Syd (which was quite often as I like to recall it now) would very subtly make sly and very biting remarks about Joel’s and/or my game in order to upset us and put us off our winning strike. (I don’t think that it really worked but it didn’t deter Arthur from trying.)32
Arthur apparently continued to employ this technique even while he was engaged in defending Nelson Mandela in the Rivonia case!
Arthur and Sydney made a good pair, good enough, or almost good enough, to compete in tournaments. Once, Sydney told me, they were signed up for the South African Open together, playing doubles, and on the first day another team was utterly overwhelmed by one of South Africa’s best pairs.33 Their defeat was so total that a newspaper editorialised about the need for greater selectivity in tournament registration. Now Arthur and Sydney had to play, against another of the best pairs in the country. They decided on a strategy: they would hit every ball as hard as they could, with no recriminations. Fortunately for them, the result was as they’d hoped: they lost, but respectably (6–2, 6–3), and escaped the scrutiny of the newspapers. There is a certain link between this match and Arthur’s dramatic participation in the Torch Commando: in each case a young man is swinging away.
These young men also played cricket. Rusty Rostowsky recalls that they had an organised team called ‘County’.34 Sydney Lipworth was the captain; Arthur was the wicketkeeper. They were good enough to travel to Pietersburg on one occasion to play a couple of matches there.
After graduation from law school, Arthur and Sydney completed their articles of clerkship. They were now qualified to become attorneys, but they didn’t want to do that. Instead, this was the moment when they would switch from the attorneys’ profession to the Bar as advocates. To do that, however, required a six-month period of ‘cleansing’. The idea (such as it was) was that as former attorneys, or at least former articled clerks, they had links to the attorneys’ profession which might make it unfairly easy for them to elicit briefs from their former professional colleagues. Six months away from the attorneys’ profession was therefore required to cleanse them of this taint.
Forced into six months of professional absence, Arthur and Sydney went to Europe in early 1956. This was Arthur’s second European trip in the 1950s, and his third since his birth. On this trip, Arthur and Sydney struck up a friendship on the two-week ocean voyage with two other young South African men. In Europe, they were able to borrow a car, on top of which they piled their suitcases, and then drove through Germany and into Austria, intending to go skiing. Stopping in a small village, they struck up a conversation with the local policeman, and after a while he asked where they were going. ‘Innsbruck,’ was their answer. ‘No, you’re not,’ was his. Why not? For three reasons, the policeman explained: first, your bags are piled up on top of your car and it’s unstable. Second, you don’t have snow chains or snow tyres. And, third, you’re all drunk. At this point, the policeman took their car keys. You can’t do that, they said. I just did, he responded. The South Africans were obliged to make their way to the local hotel. And there Sydney Lipworth met for the first time the French woman whom he would soon marry, and with whom he would emigrate from South Africa to Europe in the early 1960s.35
It is nice to think of Arthur, at the age of 25, drunk and enjoying himself on a tour of Europe. In later years, at least in public contexts, he would seem sometimes austere, even forbidding: but the high-spirited young man was there inside too. And yet this trip may also have been a step in the emergence of the man Arthur would become. In Chapter Five we will describe the sudden and intense development of Arthur’s romantic life. Now, however, he didn’t meet a future love in the little town in Austria, though his good friend Sydney did. The other two men from their car left and went travelling on, while Arthur and Sydney stayed in the small town, and Arthur witnessed the birth of Sydney’s lifelong romance.
Another incident from this trip also illuminates Arthur’s character. At one point, Arthur and Sydney were in Florence, where Sydney said, ‘Let’s go to the shul,’ not for reasons of religious conviction but because it was in his guidebook as a ‘must-see’. In general Arthur was less intent on seeing all the must-sees than Sydney, but they went to the synagogue, and found themselves at a funeral service. It turned out that the new widow had too few people with her to make up a minyan (the required number