I Have Come a Long Way. John W. de Gruchy
on Jersey Island.
My father, Harold, went to the South African College (SACS) Junior and High Schools, as did some of my uncles and male cousins. After matriculation, Harold studied at the Technical College, and then became a telephone technician working for the government. He became an expert in setting up communications networks, and later pioneered the first telephone connection between South Africa and the United States. I was at the Cape Town telephone exchange on the night the first phone call was made between the two countries. But that was still some years away.
In his early twenties, Harold was transferred to Port Elizabeth where he met my mother, Mabel, the daughter of Herbert and Lily Hurd, both devout Methodists. Herbert came from London, and Lily’s parents had come to Port Elizabeth from Hull in Yorkshire. They were married in the St. John’s Methodist Church in Havelock Street in November 1896. Within ten years they had seven children, of whom my mother was the third eldest. They lived in Walmer, then a town separate from Port Elizabeth, in a rambling Victorian house I remember well.
By all accounts my grandparents Hurd were down-to-earth, generous people. On occasion they entertained visiting royalty when, during the First World War, Herbert became the mayor of Walmer. He was also the founder of the Methodist Church in Walmer. Much later, one of the high schools in Port Elizabeth was named after him.
Lily, a formidable, small woman who drove an Oldsmobile into her late eighties and sometimes drove the fear of hell into me in doing so, was also a founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I really liked her.
My mother, Mabel, was born in 1900. She often told me that at that time there were no motor cars in Port Elizabeth, the Anglo-Boer War was in its second year, Queen Victoria was on the throne, there was no South Africa, and the Wright brothers had yet to fly the first aeroplane. Mabel had the honour of switching on the electricity when it finally reached Walmer, but she had little schooling or opportunities to develop her innate abilities. Instead she helped bring up her siblings and served as a nurse aid during the great flu epidemic.
When Harold came courting, Mabel’s parents insisted that they could not marry until he had sufficient income and a house. So he set to, built a house in Walmer, and made all the furniture for it, too. I still have some of the tools he used for this task.
Harold and Mabel were married in St. John’s Methodist Church on 2 August 1928. Four years later my sister, Rozelle, was born. She was named after a small fishing village in Trinity Parish, Jersey.
In 1938 Harold was transferred to Pretoria, where I was born on 18 March 1939. My names, given at birth, were Cedric Walter, but shortly before my baptism they were changed. I only discovered this later when I got married and my parents sent me my birth certificate, accompanied by other documents that registered the change to John Wesley. The reasons for the change are a little unclear, but it seems Cedric Walter was not a name my Hurd grandparents thought I should be burdened with. And so I was baptised John Wesley in the Hatfield Methodist Church in Pretoria on 9 April 1939. Later in life, in order to avoid denominational confusion, I began to refer to myself as John W. de Gruchy – something that our son Steve would poke fun at, especially when George W. Bush was president of the United States.
By the time I was born, my parents were already touching forty and Rozelle was six years old. Her relationship with my parents was firmly established. I was a laatlammetjie (late lamb) as the Afrikaans has it – an unexpected arrival, if not a mistake. But I had no intention of taking the backseat. On the contrary, my earliest memory is of me, probably aged three, wandering away from our house in Hatfield and ending up on the railway station nearby, watching the trains go by. My mother was understandably frantic, but she found me talking happily to a stranger.
In 1942 my father was transferred back to Cape Town. He had not been called up for overseas service in the army, because his communications job was deemed essential for homeland security. So we all caught the train to the Mother City, and it was there that I grew up.
My life would have turned out very differently if we had stayed in Pretoria and I was known as Cedric Walter.
2
The soul of the child I was
When I was a boy and chirruping ten, a decade after the end of the Second World War, when I was Tarzan and Batman and could sing “Rainbow over the River” like Bobby Breen – in those red-white-and-blue days I remember especially the weekends …
(Richard Rive)4
We initially moved into a rented semi-detached house, number thirty-three Bellevue Street, at the top of Kloof Street and within walking distance of the lower cable station on Table Mountain. The house was small but adequate, and had a pocket-sized garden. My father had a tin shanty of a workshop in the backyard where I first learnt some carpentry. He also rented a garage for his 1936 Willys, a half a mile away down the steep hill. That did not make any sense to me, but I guess he had his reasons.
Even after the Second World War we had to live on food rations for some time. I remember the day when real chocolates and fizzy drinks appeared at the corner shop at the bottom of Bellevue Street. The shop was owned by a Muslim family – “Cape Malays” my parents called them. I can still smell the exotic spices in the large sacks that lined the floor and greeted me as I entered. Bellevue Street was very steep, so it was quite an effort to walk back home, but getting chocolates made it worthwhile.
During 1948 grandpa Hurd came to visit. With his financial help, my parents bought a bigger house – number forty-three in the same street, with a large garden and a garage big enough for the Willys and my father’s workshop. Grandpa also bought me my first bicycle, a BSA. It was heavy and without gears, but I manfully rode it around the steep roads in the neighbourhood.
The number four trackless tram’s journey from the city centre ended close to our house, and for two pence I could safely get to the Colosseum Bioscope within twenty minutes on a Saturday morning. That weekly ritual, with the bartering of comic books while we queued outside, and the pandemonium that broke out once we were inside watching cowboy movies we would later re-enact, remains a vivid memory.
Another weekly ritual was church. At first we attended the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Greenmarket Square, where my grandfather Abram had met and married my grandmother Mary. We soon moved to the Union Congregational Church in Kloof Street, about a mile and a half from our house, because it was within walking distance. I don’t think my parents had any idea about Congregationalism, but its worship and preaching was barely different from that of the Methodists, and they soon felt at home. My mother later became a leader in the Women’s Association, and my father a deacon. Rozelle and I sang in the junior choir. I even won medals for singing in the Cape Town Eisteddfod, until my voice embarrassingly broke while singing “Who is Sylvia?”. We attended Sunday school of course, and were confirmed in a perfunctory sort of way. Eventually, Rozelle rebelled and left the church, while I, negotiating those awkward years, stayed put.
Sometimes during church services, I read the large plaques on the sanctuary wall. One told me that the first minister of the congregation, when it was founded in 1820, was John Philip, superintendent of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement. Another told me that his wife, Jane, had pioneered schooling for the children of slaves. Their stories intrigued me long before I learnt their significance, or knew that Congregationalism came to South Africa at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of the LMS. Later I also learnt that Johannes van der Kemp, its first missionary, gained notoriety when he married a Khoi woman and opposed slavery on the Eastern Cape border. Basil Brown, our minister, was neither a Philip nor a Van Der Kemp, but he did on occasion speak out against injustice, and later became the general secretary of the Christian Council of South Africa (forerunner to the SACC). I was fortunate to grow up in what was, for those days, a reasonably liberal church environment.
At the age of five I started school at Tamboerskloof Primary, to which I walked every day in the company of Rozelle. At the end of my first year, then named sub-A, it was decided that I should skip sub-B and proceed to standard one (now grade three). This meant that, for the rest of my school and university life, I was a year younger than virtually everyone else in my class. In retrospect, that was not a good