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Chapter 3

Boyhood years in the Karoo

Anthony Edward Rupert the second was never called by his baptismal names. In his boyhood he was known as Boetie (lit. ‘little brother’), and at university he became Anton. The oldest of three brothers, he was born on 4 October 1916. Jan (John Peter) was born in 1922, and Koos (Jacobus Albertus) in 1929. Both Rupert’s bothers would follow him to the Rembrandt Group. The three brothers in the tobacco industry have been compared to the three brothers Reemtsma in Germany and the three brothers Reynolds in the USA, who built up the biggest cigarette factories in their respective countries.

Their father, universally known as Oom (Uncle) John, was a respected community leader in Graaff-Reinet. In the hard times during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when the Cape Colony was subject to martial law and many Cape Afrikaners, although British subjects, were as poverty-stricken as their fellow Afrikaners and relatives in the war-torn northern republics, he had to go out to work at a young age. After the war he was able to complete his high-school education at the Graaff-Reinet College in 1909.

After serving articles at the local law firm of CH Maasdorp, John Rupert worked as an attorney in towns such as Kimberley, Mossel Bay and Prince Albert, which was booming in the heyday of the ostrich-feather industry. Here he was offered a partnership in a law firm but he smelled a rat and turned down the offer – wisely, as it turned out, since two of the partners were later prosecuted. It left him with a lasting mistrust of partnerships, in contrast to the philosophy of partnership his eldest son would implement so successfully.

John Rupert, who established his own law practice in Graaff-Reinet, took a keen interest in education and child welfare. The secretary of the local Child Welfare Society during his term of office as chairman was the town’s social worker, Tini Malan, who was to marry the later Prime Minister John Vorster. Another future prime minister who crossed his path was JG (Hans) Strijdom, whose uncle brought the young law graduate from nearby Willowmore to Rupert requesting that he employ him as an articled clerk. Rupert was of the view that Graaff-Reinet offered too little scope and advised him to try his luck in the Transvaal. Strijdom evidently heeded the advice and moved to Pretoria and then to Nylstroom, where he became known as the Lion of the North.

Years later, before Strijdom became prime minister, he visited Anton Rupert in Stellenbosch. Strijdom, Transvaal leader of the governing National Party in the 1950s, wanted to break away from the then Prime Minister DF Malan on account of differences about whether South Africa should become a republic. Rupert walked twice around the house with the agitated Strijdom and persuaded him to be patient; he would get his chance as leader. Strijdom did take over from Malan, but became ill and died in office.

John Rupert and his wife both served on the committee of the Dutch Literary and Drama Society in Graaff-Reinet. The deputy chairman was Dr Bennie Keet, eventually a theology lecturer at Stellenbosch who became known for his rejection of apartheid. The names of the Ruperts and Keet appear in a brochure about an exhibition of ‘antiques and curiosities’ held in Graaff-Reinet in 1918, for which several townspeople had contributed antique furniture and possessions of historical value. Anton Rupert’s later interest in antiques was probably stimulated at an early age.

John Rupert became involved in politics as the secretary of the first branch of the National Party established in the town after General JBM Hertzog’s sensational speech at De Wildt on 7 December 1912. Hertzog increasingly differed with the conciliation politics of Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts as well as their views on the language question, with Hertzog advocating language equality for Afrikaners. He declared himself a ‘definite opponent’ of imperialism where imperial interests clashed with national interests, and stated that he put South Africa first. As a result of his unshakable views Botha omitted him from the first Union cabinet and the Free State judge and war hero Hertzog formed a new party, the National Party (NP). In 1913 Hertzog, who was to become South Africa’s longest-serving prime minister, created a commotion at a Stellenbosch language festival when he read out a telegram from former Free State President MT Steyn, a giant figure in South African history, that contained the following quotation in Dutch: ‘In the mouths of the conquered, the language of the conqueror is the language of slaves.’

The NP grew into the strongest party in Graaff-Reinet as scores of supporters of Botha and Smuts’s South African Party (SAP) joined its ranks. John Rupert’s wife Hester chaired the women’s branch of the party, which would come to power in 1924 in coalition with the Labour Party.

John Rupert’s hobbies were writing and reading poetry and studying languages; he could read nine languages. At the age of 70 he took up French, and could soon read classic works in that language. But he was unable to avail himself of a bursary to the Netherlands in his student years and never travelled abroad.

In his legal career John Rupert appeared in several much-discussed court cases, some arising from the Rebellion of 1914 during the Second World War. He defended the editors of the Graaff-Reinet Onze Courant and the Aberdeen paper Nuwe Tijd when they were charged with the capital crime of sedition on account of reports on Gen. Manie Maritz’s treasonable act of joining the Germans with his troops during the Rebellion. The charges were withdrawn. On another occasion he defended the editor of Onze Courant when the paper was sued for reporting that the British airforce had bombed cities in a neutral country. The report turned out to be true, and again the charge was withdrawn.

At that time quite a number of coloured people, who then still had the vote in the Cape Province, lived in the town of Graaff-Reinet. In Cradock Street alone there were 25 houses belonging to coloured families. John Rupert did not hesitate to appear for coloured people, sometimes pro bono, at a time when such actions were viewed with scepticism by conservative white communities like Graaff-Reinet’s. Coloured townspeople referred to him as Groot Seur (Big Sir); later his son Anton was called Klein Seur (Little Sir). Anton Rupert was to consider the later removal of coloured people from the centres of towns such as Graaff-Reinet and Stellenbosch under the Group Areas Act of 1950 one of the great follies of the NP’s policies of rigorist racial separation.

John Rupert counted among his good friends and clients the local DR minister Ds Jozua Francois Naudé, and his wife, Mrs Ada Naudé. Ds JF Naudé was a co-founder and the first president of the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the secret organisation established to promote Afrikaner interests as a counterweight to the Freemasons and Sons of England. The couple were the parents of the later anti-apartheid activist Dr CFB (Beyers) Naudé, named after Christiaan Frederick Beyers, the Boer general under whom his father had fought in the Anglo-Boer War and who drowned in the Vaal River in the Rebellion of 1914.

Ds Naudé was also chairman of the governing body of the Hoër Volkskool in Graaff-Reinet, the first Afrikaans-medium secondary school in the Cape Province, where Anton Rupert was to matriculate. John Rupert was a co-founder and for 21 years honorary secretary of the governing body. At one stage he successfully waged a one-man campaign against the abolition of Latin, which he considered an essential basis for language instruction, as a subject at the school.

In 1922, a year before Boetie Rupert started school, the Hoër Volkskool – with its motto Ons Sal Handhaaf expressing a commitment to uphold the linguistic and cultural aspirations of Afrikaners – moved into the stately premises of the erstwhile Midlands Seminary. The principal Dr G von W Eybers, who had obtained his doctorate in London, was a firm believer in mother-tongue education. Already in 1919, six years before Afrikaans was recognised as an official language, he started teaching in Afrikaans instead of Dutch. This unleashed an educational language dispute in the town that resulted in the establishment of the Union High School, an English-medium boarding school.1

The language question also led to division in the DRC. In 1921 Ds Naudé, one of the six Bittereinders (bitter-enders) who at the end of the Anglo-Boer War had refused to sign the terms of surrender at Vereeniging, gave his inaugural sermon in Afrikaans. Aggrieved members of the congregation, many of whom considered Dutch the appropriate language for church services, protested vehemently against the use of ‘kitchen Dutch’ in the ‘Great Church’ of the Murrays. One Sunday the organist, Amy Asher (born Murray), even played ‘God Save the King’ after the service. It ended in schism when the ‘New Church’ seceded.

Anton Rupert’s wife Huberte recounted in an interview that her father-in-law had lost clients during a court case in which he acted for the wife of a friend. It offended some people that John Rupert had defended her – a portent of the loyalty principle that would count for so much in his son’s career.

When Anton’s father died in 1961, he thought he would ask Beyers to bury his father, Huberte said. Dr Beyers Naudé, then minister of the DR congregation of Aasvoëlkop in Johannesburg, related during the funeral service that as a child, he often had to take messages from his father to the deceased. He had been struck by John Rupert’s ‘sincere modesty, genuine love for his people, broadness of vision and sense of justice’.

John Rupert met his future wife Hester Adriana van Eeden, sister of a friend, on a train from Port Elizabeth to Klipplaat, a small railway siding near her father’s farm in the Jansenville district. They were married in December 1915 and a year later Anton was born in their stone house at 110 Cradock Street, Graaff-Reinet. The family later moved to 84 Cradock Street.

Anton Rupert was born two years after the outbreak of the First World War on 4 August 1914. In South Africa, Botha and Smuts’s decision to invade German South-West Africa (today Namibia) in support of the hated British Empire once again divided the country. A rebellion broke out after Gen. Manie Maritz had joined the German forces. Although the Rebellion of 1914 was quelled, resistance grew against the conciliation politics of Botha and Smuts aimed at national unity between Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans and cooperation within the Commonwealth, especially after Hertzog had proclaimed his policy of ‘South Africa First’. Smuts’s execution of the rebel leader Jopie Fourie also earned him bitter reproaches that would dog him for the rest of his life.

An important consequence of the Rebellion was the establishment of the Helpmekaarvereniging, a mutual-aid society to assist rebels with the payment of fines and compensation claims, at a time when the Poor White problem was worsening in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War. Following from the Helpmekaar movement’s first fundraising drive that yielded £250 000, a national congress was held at Graaff-Reinet’s neighbouring town of Cradock in 1916, the year of Anton’s birth, to investigate the problem of poverty. It turned out that there were 105 518 indigent whites, 39 021 of them in dire straits, and that a quarter of the country’s 280 000 white children were not attending any school.

Although the congress was unable to do much to stem the impoverishment, the Helpmekaar movement provided one of the most important launching pads for the economic independence of Afrikaners. The mustering of Afrikaner capital during the First World War led to the establishment of a number of big Afrikaner enterprises that became success stories, notably the media company Nasionale Pers (later Naspers) in 1915 and the insurance giants Sanlam and Santam as well as the Koöperatiewe Wijnbouwersvereniging van Zuid-Afrika Beperkt (Cooperative Wine Farmers Society of South Africa Ltd, the KWV) in 1918. Some of these enterprises were to play a role in Anton Rupert’s life, while he would also later become involved in the Helpmekaar educational fund.

A major driving force behind the Helpmekaar movement was Ds JD Kestell, who would later be a decisive influence in the young’s Rupert’s life. Kestell conducted the funeral service of former Pres. Steyn, who was buried at the foot of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein after having said in his last speech on the day of his death in 1916: ‘The Helpmekaar has been born from God.’

Anton Rupert’s mother Hester, one of ten children, was a caring, loving woman who ‘kept the family together’ and had a great influence on her eldest son. He often quoted moral guidelines she had given him, such as: ‘Of what use is it to conquer the world and lose one’s soul?’ And: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shall find it after many days.’ At her funeral in 1944 a coloured woman told her daughter-in-law Huberte Rupert that ‘she had given much to our people’.

After Dr DF Malan’s departure from Graaff-Reinet Mrs Hester Rupert became the secretary of the Jong Zuid-Afrika (Young South Africa) association. It had originally been called Zonen van Zuid-Afrika (Sons of South Africa) as a counterweight to the Sons of England, with the aim of promoting a common South African patriotism, supporting the Dutch language and advancing the material and spiritual interests of the Afrikaner people. In 1912 it was decided to admit women as well and the name was changed. In due course Jong Zuid-Afrika sided with Hertzog’s NP against Prime Minster Louis Botha.

Mrs Rupert’s father, Mr Jacobus Albertus (Oom Kootjie) van Eeden, a Cape Patriot and co-founder of JH Hofmeyr’s Afrikanerbond, South Africa’s first political party, also had a significant influence on his grandson Anton. Up to Oom Kootjie’s death at the age of 84, this successful farmer who had 500 morgen agricultural land under irrigation on his farm Gannavlakte often discussed national affairs with his grandson. Oom Kootjie was a descendant of one of the oldest Dutch families in South Africa – the first Van Eeden arrived at the Cape in 1662. On his mother’s side Anton Rupert is a ninth-generation South African.

Oom Kootjie had a chequered history. His father died when he was nine and he was indentured to a wealthy farmer, for whom he had to perform hard manual labour. After his mother’s remarriage she reclaimed him, but he was again put to menial work, this time as a goatherd on his stepfather’s farm. He ran away to fight in the frontier war. Wounded, he turned to transport riding and married Anna Gertruida Lötter, also an orphan, who bore him ten children. After some daring land speculation he bought Gannavlakte, which he developed into a prosperous farm. It boasted an orchard, vineyards, a smithy, a brandy distillery, a mill, flocks of sheep and ostriches, whose plumage was worth a fortune in those days.

Even though he had little formal education, Oom Kootjie was a prominent member of his community and district chairman of the Afrikanerbond for over 22 years. He often addressed the annual sports meetings on Union Day (31 May) on a farm in the Jansenville district, and wise words from this grandfather Anton Rupert learnt to respect were quoted in a newspaper report: ‘. . . the common fault on the sportsground, as well as in life, is to look at the man who is behind you. If we could keep the man in view who is ahead of us and make it our object to catch up with him the number of poor people would certainly decrease.’2

He was interned at Port Alfred for his pro-Boer sympathies in the latter days of the Anglo-Boer War, when Boer commandos were invading the Cape Colony and recruiting young Afrikaner rebels. Two of these were Oom Kootjie’s eldest sons, Frederick (Frik) and Francois (Soois), who joined up in 1901. After enduring hardship on commando they surrendered to British forces. As a Cape rebel and British subject Soois, aged seventeen, was found guilty of the capital offence of high treason by a military court in Graaff-Reinet. He was granted clemency by Lord Kitchener and received a prison sentence of one year, but benefited from the Peace of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 and only served six months.

Oom Kootjie’s youngest son, born in 1901 while his older brothers were on commando, was christened Smartryk − grief-stricken, sorrowful. In the aftermath of this war that would be regarded as the beginning of the end of British imperialism, the name expressed the emotions of thousands of Afrikaners, also in the Cape Colony, who had suffered and been pauperised as a result of the conflict. Many were on the brink of famine and the British government’s meagre compensation for war damage caused further bitterness. General Louis Botha, first prime minister after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, was offered £900 in settlement of his claim for £20 000. He returned the cheque.

A war story that made a profound impression on the young Boetie Rupert was that of the legendary scout and Scarlet Pimpernel of the Boer forces, Gideon Scheepers, executed at the age of 23 by the British after being convicted of 30 alleged war crimes. In Anton Rupert’s own view, the story of Scheepers as told to him by his father, who as a thirteen-year-old boy had been present at the verdict of the military court on Church Square in Graaff-Reinet, changed his life.

The prosecution of Scheepers was a show trial intended as a lesson to Cape republicans – while in Rudyard’s Kipling words, the war had been ‘no end of a lesson’ to Britain itself. On Major-General John French’s orders the execution was carried out in public. Blindfolded, sitting on a chair, the ill Scheepers faced the firing squad of the Coldstream Guards on his mother’s birthday, 17 January 1902. His body was put in a grave on the scene and covered with quicklime, but was probably removed that same night. His remains were never found.

Like the concentration camps where 28 000 women and children died and the ‘scorched earth’ policy of the British Commander-in-Chief Lord Kitchener in terms of which hundreds of farmhouses were burned down and herds of livestock destroyed, the show trials and executions of Cape rebels and Boer prisoners of war elicited bitter resentment. Scheepers, for instance, was not a Cape rebel but hailed from the Transvaal and was a commander of the Free State state artillery, therefore rather a prisoner of war than a disloyal British subject. Some 40 rebels were executed in the Cape Colony, with eight executions taking place in Graaff-Reinet. As elsewhere, the executions hardened the attitudes of republicans in the divided town.

The long search of Scheepers’s mother for his remains was never rewarded. On her hundredth birthday in 1956, she said she had not forgotten, but forgiven: ‘Let us rather live together in love and peace as an undivided people.’3 Scheepers became a legend in South Africa that also inspired Afrikaans poets. In his moving poem ‘Gebed om die gebeente’ (Prayer for the bones), Dirk Opperman reflects the plea of the grieving mother of Scheepers, an expert heliographer:

Bless, Lord, all the bleached bones of our struggle –

that we as one great nation in the tough terrain

with every scrap of roofing iron and every wheel

and, like tin foil behind clean glass, the white, the black, the brown,

may catch your sunlight, Lord, and signal each to all.4

Opperman, a close friend of the Ruperts, captures with his imagery the idea of partnership and coexistence that would run as a leitmotif throughout Anton Rupert’s career, after he had been inspired at a young age by the legend of Scheepers. At the Anglo-Boer War centenary in 1999 Rupert bought a priceless file on Gideon Scheepers, previously in the possession of British Intelligence, from a Cape Town bookseller. It contains Scheepers’s last letters and diary entries, as well as unique photographs of Scheepers and other Boer prisoners of war.

A monument to Scheepers and the others executed at Graaff-Reinet, unveiled in 1908, was erected on land donated by Jurie Laubscher, owner of the factory that manufactured the famous Graaff-Reinet Doll. The later fate of this doll-making factory with its seventy workers was something that made a lasting impression on the future industrialist Rupert. When the Pact Government of the National and Labour parties came to power in 1924 after the mineworkers’ strikes in Johannesburg, they introduced progressive labour laws with strict requirements for the physical layout of factories. ‘Oom Jurie Losper, as he was known, couldn’t meet those requirements – and Graaff-Reinet’s biggest factory had to close down,’ Rupert remembers.

In Boetie Rupert’s childhood days Graaff-Reinet, like most country towns, had no electricity, running water or tarred streets. Drinking water was collected from the runoff of rainwater from rooftops. Gardens were irrigated from furrows fed by Maggie’s Well, a perennial spring that produced two million gallons of fresh water daily on the site where the town reservoir is today. This water, boiled, was used for ablutions. Piped water did not come till the late 1920s. Lighting was provided by candles and paraffin lamps. When electricity finally arrived, it was expensive at a shilling a unit. In the early 1920s John Rupert drove a Model-T Ford, which was replaced with a Chevrolet in the mid-twenties. Later the vintage Chev was displayed in the Transport Museum at Heidelberg, Gauteng.

One of Boetie Rupert’s earliest memories was a visit to his great-grandmother Emma Susanna at an old-age home in Cape Road, Port Elizabeth, shortly before she died in 1919. His mother also showed him a letter to her from this Colchester-born ancestor, which ended with five crosses and a message in her native English: ‘And remember to give my love to Anthony.’

Port Elizabeth was where the Ruperts spent their holidays. Grandmother Rupert lived there from 1923 till her death in 1930. So did her daughter Florence, Aunt Florrie, a teacher who introduced Boetie to experiences that stimulated his early interest in industry and museums. He was taken to the snake park and the museum and, when he was old enough in the early 1920s, to various factories around Algoa Bay. Places they visited included the first assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, the Wool Exchange, the Pyotts biscuit factory and the Mobs shoe factory. Years later Anton Rupert told visitors at a Port Elizabeth show: ‘Coming from Graaff-Reinet where there were no industries, it was a dream and a magical world to me to see how “something” was manufactured.’5

South Africa’s transition from agriculture and mining to an industrial country left such a lasting impression that it influenced his choice of career. ‘Production has always fascinated me. Later at university I realised how important industry was as a source of employment opportunities,’ he said in a radio interview.6

In Port Elizabeth he also saw his first talkie, ‘The singing fool’, starring Al Jolson. Before that he had seen only silent films, like the cowboy films of Tom Mix. But he never became a film enthusiast and showed no particular interest in the cinema in later years.

In Anton Rupert’s boyhood years the most important people in South African country towns and villages were authority figures like the school principal, the magistrate and the minister of the local congregation. Sundays were strictly Calvinist in Graaff-Reinet, a town very much under the influence of the Murrays, who like other austere Scottish church fathers had become ministers of the South African DRC. Children had to attend church and Sunday school, sport on Sunday was considered sinful and even sewing was forbidden on the sabbath lest the needle pierce God’s watchful eye. John Rupert never went to church, but his wife Hester took the children while he went mountaineering. Although she did not flaunt her religion, she was devout. And whatever his religious convictions, her husband’s values were staunchly Calvinist: an ethos of hard work, integrity and sobriety governed Anton’s upbringing and indelibly stamped his character. So rigorous was John Rupert’s moral code that he never defended an accused who had confessed his or her guilt to him. Yet the absence of rigid orthodoxy on the part of his parents left the eldest son with a lasting distaste for niggling rules and regulations that curb innovativeness and individuality.

Boetie Rupert started school in 1923 at the age of six. Although there was no school uniform, the children had to wear shoes. On his first day at school Boetie was pushing his baby brother’s pram and ended up in a water furrow. His brand-new shoes and outfit were drenched and he had to go home to change into old clothes and shoes before venturing out on his school career. Boetie completed substandards A and B in one year. He was left-handed but, counter to the common practice in those days, he was not forced to write with his right hand. For that he could thank Dr Karl Bremer, their family doctor, who had recently qualified abroad and brought home some enlightened ideas. He lived across the road from the Ruperts and his daughter Elizabeth (Van der Merwe, a writer of children’s books) was a classmate and close friend of Boetie.

Initially his scholastic performance was mediocre: in Sub B he came ninth in his class. Then a rebuke by his teacher in front of the whole class shamed him into excelling. Soon he was top of his class, to the chagrin of Elizabeth Bremer, his inveterate rival. She remained at the Volkskool till they were in Standard 7; then her father became a member of parliament − later Minister of Health − and the Bremers moved to Cape Town.

Hester Rupert was much loved by the young, who shared many childhood joys and sorrows with her. She read books with Boetie, a voracious reader in his own right. Apart from the family’s collection of children’s books, he scoured the well-equipped town library for newspapers and magazines like Scientific American and Illustrated London News, besides any book that captured his lively curiosity. At night his mother sat up with him while he read and studied and brought him a hot drink at bedtime.

With his father he went for long walks across the veld, sometimes to the Valley of Desolation (the Ruperts called it the ‘mountain cathedral’). He loved this wide, arid landscape, so ancient a dinosaur footprint would cause no surprise, and considers it ‘an absolute privilege’ to have grown up in the Karoo. According to Anton Rupert’s brother Koos, their father preferred mountain climbing to going to church – in a poem he had written about the Valley of Desolation, he described it as ‘the church where I want to pray’. Years later Anton Rupert pointed out in a newspaper interview that many of the great faiths came from the desert − Moses, Jesus and Mohammed had all been desert dwellers. ‘That is where you get seven-year droughts, where the starry night skies make you aware of your puniness, and where you are forced to think.’ By contrast, he quipped, Karl Marx found the inspiration for the communists’ bible, Das Kapital, in the vaults of the British Museum.7

The young Anton spent time at his father’s office, learning about the legal profession. John Rupert impressed on him the importance of meticulous attention to detail, a virtue that Anton was to inculcate in his own children and employees in later life. He also taught him to be wary of praise: ‘Today they shout hosanna, tomorrow they crucify you.’ A compliment, he added, entailed responsibility: you had to live up to it. Among the values John Rupert imparted to his son was the importance of honesty and being true to one’s word.

Boetie Rupert’s introduction to radio was a crystal set broadcasting the 1929 election results. What impressed the twelve-year-old Boetie no less than the second victory of his hero Hertzog was the novelty of radio waves. He and a friend decided to build their own crystal radio. For an aerial they chose a length of galvanised wire, which they wanted to fasten to the roof of the house. While they were on the roof the aerial dropped onto the power lines, causing a short circuit that left the neighbourhood without power for hours. His father was furious.

It was at about the same time that Boetie and his friend Elizabeth stood watching a municipal vehicle procession one day when they saw a billboard advertising cigarettes. In what could have been a prophetic moment, the young Rupert told Elizabeth South Africa should not be importing such cigarettes: ‘We should be making them ourselves.’ He was expressing a sentiment that had been gaining ground among Afrikaners for quite some time. Already in 1880 Di Afrikaanse Patriot had referred to ‘foreign fortune seekers who are completely in control of commerce in our country’.8

In the late 1920s Japie Heese founded the Voortrekker movement for youths at the Hoër Volkskool. Boetie joined and wore the little green badge in his buttonhole. In 1931 it became a countrywide movement, an Afrikaans counterweight to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts. Boetie did not excel at sports, although he enjoyed a friendly game of tennis or rugby. Later in life when a journalist from the American magazine Fortune asked Rupert what his favourite forms of exercise were, he remarked: ‘I do mental gymnastics and I jump to conclusions!’

As a child he often played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with the other boys. On one occasion one of the town’s pranksters, Robey Leibbrandt, was involved. Leibbrandt, the Olympic boxer and Nazi sympathiser who would receive a death sentence for treason during the Second World War, had been born in 1913 and as a teenager went to school in Graaff-Reinet. His father, a Boer combatant described by Smuts as one of his bravest men when clemency was granted to Robey in 1948, was stationed at Graaff-Reinet as an officer in the permanent force from 1914 to 1924. One day during a game Robey and his brothers hanged the son of the school principal with a rope from a tree. Fortunately, his toes were touching the ground and some older men cut the rope to release him. The much younger Boetie, who had just started school, witnessed the incident.

In 1928 the school magazine included an essay by the twelve-year-old Boetie that gave an indication of his later interest in wildlife. Describing a visit to the Pretoria Zoo, he wrote: ‘The first thing which attracted my attention was the gorgeously coloured speaking-parrots. Then I came to the cage of the gorilla – a mighty big and strong animal. After a few minutes walking I came to the monkey cage from where I walked to the hippopotamus, a very large animal with the largest mouth I have ever seen.’ He concluded: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this well-spent and interesting afternoon.’

When Boetie was in Standard 6 he went on what was meant to be a one-day visit to his uncle Fred Knoetze, a printer at Somerset East who published the local newspaper. The driver who had given him a lift there forgot to pick him up and he spent a whole week with his uncle, who showed him everything at the printing works. ‘The whole printing process, the type faces, the colour samples absolutely fascinated me,’ he related later. This early interest in printing, colour and form would culminate in the scrupulous attention that Rupert as a master of marketing would give to each new product in the tobacco and liquor trade.

In Standard 8 he obtained four distinctions and was among the ten top students in the Cape Junior Certificate examination. In 1933, his final year at school, he was one of a class of 35, some of whom had started school in 1922, the year the Volkskool was founded, and had completed their entire school career there. At a reunion of eighteen of the surviving members of that class 50 years later Anton Rupert − by then an honorary citizen of Graaff-Reinet − on behalf of the three Rupert brothers presented the school with a Bill Davis sculpture entitled His Hands, inspired by a poem by the Afrikaans poet WEG Louw.

Anton matriculated in 1933 with three distinctions, for English (lower grade), Chemistry and Physics, and a remarkable 92% for Mathematics. His marks for Afrikaans (higher grade), Latin and History were slightly lower, but he averaged 78,9% and won a £10 prize for the best matriculant at Graaff-Reinet. By then he was finding schoolwork boring and was glad to put it behind him. He had just turned seventeen and was planning to study medicine.

That was not to be. By 1933 the Great Depression had hit South Africa. The Wall Street crash happened in 1929, when the Dow Jones index dropped from 312,76 to 230 points in five days. The slump continued for three years to a low of 40,56 points and American industrial shares fell by as much as 90%. The ripples spread around the globe, as far as South Africa. Here, meanwhile, rural poverty in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War had led to rapid urbanisation: between 1900 and 1926 the rate of urbanised Afrikaners rose from 10 to 41%. By 1933 the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry on the Poor White Question found that the number of desperately poor whites had grown from an estimated 106 000 in 1921 to 300 000, hence 30% of Afrikaners and seventeen percent of the white population as a whole. The Great Drought of 1933-1934 did not improve matters and many more farmers were forced to migrate to the cities, where they were largely dependent on welfare organisations and many women eked out a living for their families by running boarding houses.

The Hertzog government’s stubborn insistence on sticking to the gold standard exacerbated the situation. In 1931 England devalued its pound but South Africa, a gold-producing country, did not follow suit. Exports became uncompetitively expensive: South African wool cost 40% more than that of Australia. Currency speculation caused an outflow of capital and South African mining houses, which sold gold for sterling, hoarded their profits abroad.

The Ruperts did not escape the general hardship. John Rupert’s annual income dropped from £3 000 to £120. The family car stood idle in the garage for several years. At the age of sixteen young Anton had sufficient prescience to realise that South Africa would be compelled to leave the gold standard. His father, trusting Finance Minister Klasie Havenga to stick to his word, refused to believe him. This led to what was to be Anton’s first business deal. He had been begging his father to exchange his paper currency for gold. On 28 December 1932 Havenga announced that South Africa was abandoning the gold standard. John Rupert manfully admitted that his son had been right. He opened his safe, which contained seven gold pounds. ‘Take them, you deserve them,’ he said. Each pound was worth 27 shillings instead of 20 − a lucky windfall for a young man who had to make his way through university.

Nonetheless he had to review his plans for the future. The only two medical faculties at the time, at the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, were way beyond his means. For £100 a year he could do a BSc at the University of Pretoria. At the beginning of the 1934 academic year he enrolled.

Commenting on this life-changing decision in later life, he said: ‘I have often thanked Providence for things I didn’t get when I wanted them.’