And Justice For All. Stephen Ellmann
so that Arthur could work with Berrangé on the cross-examination of the turncoat state witness Mtolo that Berrangé would soon undertake. While they were there, Lorraine became very ill with tonsillitis, and Berrangé’s wife Yolanda took care of her. After that, Arthur recalled, they became very good friends. After Yolanda died, they continued to see Vernon, and he visited them at their Johannesburg home.8 The Chaskalsons, including their sons, also visited the Berrangé farm; Matthew was terrified because he was told that there were a couple of crocodiles lurking there.9
George Bizos and Arthur had known each other since Arthur’s first year as a student at Wits. But they were quite different people, George outgoing while Arthur was reserved, and they did not become close friends until Rivonia bound them together. After the case was over, they went somewhat different ways: George continued to maintain a practice heavy in political cases, while Arthur resumed his mostly commercial practice. But the two men remained close friends – so close that George could hook Arthur into a major trial, the Delmas treason trial of the 1980s, by introducing him to the clients as the leader of the defence team (without having told Arthur in advance; Arthur glared but said nothing);10 and so close that Arthur would help launch George’s autobiography by saying at the launch party that ‘George has such an incredible memory for detail, that he even can remember things that never happened’.11 They would work together on some important cases over the years, and they would also speak out together when they saw the independence of the bench and the Bar jeopardised in the new South Africa.
Joel Joffe continued to handle political cases as an attorney, but decided to leave South Africa. As he and his wife Vanetta prepared to move to Australia in 1965, however, Arthur and Lorraine told them, ‘We’ve got a house in Cape Town for a month; why don’t you join us?’ The Joffes said yes, but at the end of that month the South African government seized Joel’s passport – apparently out of sheer spite. That meant that if and when Joel left South Africa he wouldn’t be able to go back to South Africa, and it also caused Australia to consider him undesirable. So he and his family wound up moving instead to England.12
Joel was leaving South Africa with little except his training and ability to enable him to get started in England. His family had promised him £2,500, but something went wrong and his father decided he couldn’t do it. Joel perhaps mentioned this to Arthur – and a few days before Joel was to leave, Arthur arrived with a cheque for the full amount and gave it to Joel. Then Arthur forgot about it, and never mentioned it again over the following decades – another instance of Arthur’s generosity.
Meanwhile, Joel landed on his feet in England. He had with him a letter of recommendation from Bram Fischer to a law firm that represented the Trades Union Congress in Britain; they offered him a job on the strength of this letter, but told him that they were a small firm and wanted to keep the profits for the present partners. So at that point he hesitantly went to see Mark Weinberg, another member of the circle of friends that Arthur and Joel had been part of at Wits, at the insurance company which Weinberg now managed. Weinberg hired him – because, Joel claims, he misunderstood the instructions on a psychological test he had to take and answered all the questions in the opposite way from what he was supposed to. Joffe, Weinberg and Sydney Lipschitz, another of Arthur’s friend from Wits, would go on to co-found the insurance company Hambro, which became a great success. It also became a place where a number of left-wing South Africans in exile found employment. For their achievements, both Weinberg and Lipschitz were knighted, and Joel, who had gone on to public service as the president of Oxfam, became Lord Joffe.
In 2010, Joffe told his interviewer Adrian Friedman that just a few years earlier he had reminded Arthur of the £2,500. Joffe had never spent it; instead, he had invested it, without Arthur’s knowledge. By this time, Arthur’s generous gift had grown to around £75,000 and Joel said, ‘Can I please give it back to you?’ Arthur refused – but eventually they did a deal in which Joel gave the money to charities that Arthur selected.
Joel did take one other thing with him when he emigrated: a trove of papers from the Rivonia trial and from Nelson Mandela, which he had acquired because of his role as the attorney in the trial. He consulted them as he wrote his book about the trial in 1965 (‘While looking for a job I had some free time,’ he explained.13) Then he handed the papers to a library, and asked that they hold on to the papers until freedom came. Then 1994 dawned. Joel explained in 2010 that it wasn’t entirely clear who owned these papers, Mandela or Joffe, but they arrived at a happy resolution. Mandela was to speak at a memorial lecture; Joel would present the papers to him, and he would present them in turn to the Legal Resources Centre (the public interest law organisation that Arthur co-founded in 1979), and specifically to the LRC’s director, Geoff Budlender. At the lecture, Mandela took the papers and handed them not to Geoff but to Arthur, who was also on the stage. When Arthur corrected him, Mandela said to the audience, ‘You now know why I appointed Arthur as President of the Constitutional Court, because he always gives me the right advice.’ When I talked with Joel in 2016, negotiations were almost complete that would enable the LRC to sell these papers for a very large sum of money, which in turn would go – as Joel had intended it should – to the LRC’s endowment.14
As Joel told me in 2016, he and Arthur were very close friends, even after Joel left the country, and even though they probably exchanged only six letters in all the years they were apart. Joel’s estimation was surely correct, however scanty their correspondence. When the Chaskalsons visited England in 1970, 1973 and 1976, they each time spent a few days at the Joffes’ home; Matthew largely based himself at their home when he came to England on his own in 1980.15 Arthur said that if Christ returned to earth, he would probably resemble Joel Joffe. Joel helped to found the fund-raising arm of the Legal Resources Centre in Britain, the Legal Assistance Trust, and remained a trustee in 2016.16 Joel and Arthur also went together in 1988 to the apartment of Stephen Clingman, to encourage him to write the biography of Bram Fischer – a hero to both Joel and Arthur. Clingman writes that ‘Both [Joel] and Arthur Chaskalson were in at the birth of this project, and I dare say without their encouragement I would never have begun it, let alone completed it.’17 Joel provided crucial financial support for that biography, as he has, more recently, for this biography of Arthur.
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Finally, Bram Fischer. Arthur and Bram had become even closer during the trial. Bram’s daughter Ilse said that Bram loved Arthur, though Bram wouldn’t have used that word, while his daughter Ruth said that the relationship between Bram, Arthur and Joel was especially close, perhaps a kind of love.18 The days and years that followed the Rivonia trial were anything but kind to Bram – but nothing that happened undercut the intense bond between Arthur and Bram, and indeed between Arthur and Bram’s family. Bram’s story is eloquently told by Stephen Clingman, whose account I rely on here; it’s important to tell Bram’s story, because it was a story that all those who cared for Bram, such as Arthur, lived as well.
With the Rivonia trial coming to an end on 12 June 1964, the Fischers left the following day on a vacation. Bram and his wife Molly and a family friend, Elizabeth Lewin, planned to drive from Johannesburg to Cape Town. As they travelled at twilight, Bram was forced to swerve to avoid a motorcyclist and a cow on the road. He lost control of the car and it left the road and fell into a ‘deep pool of water’ in the notoriously dry Free State. Fischer and Lewin got out; Molly, in the back seat, never emerged. Fischer’s desperate dives into the pond were unsuccessful. She was dead, one day after the end of the Rivonia trial.19
Back in Johannesburg the next day, family and friends gathered at the Fischers’ home. Bram somehow maintained self-control – until, as his biographer records, Lorraine Chaskalson arrived. Lorraine and Molly had become very close during the trial too; Lorraine, not on good terms with her own mother, had responded to Molly’s great warmth as a person.20 When Bram saw Lorraine that day, ‘he just wept on her shoulders’.21
Seven days after the Rivonia trial ended, Molly Fischer was buried. Nevertheless, Bram and Joel were the ones who went, shortly after the funeral, to Robben Island, and then to Pretoria Central, to discuss with their convicted clients whether or not they wished to appeal. (They didn’t; several of them had no ground for an appeal, and even those