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CHAPTER TWO

Preparing for Practice

The basic facts of Arthur’s legal education years can be stated simply. He was a young man, growing up in the company of other young Jewish men; he enjoyed sports and was very good at them; he was exploring the life ahead of him, travelling to Europe and accompanying a close friend as the friend met the love of his life; and when he found his courses interesting, he performed outstandingly in them. He was opposed to apartheid, but more in an impulsive than reflective manner. At the same time he showed signs of the fierce conviction for justice that would become so much part of him.

In 1949 he entered the University of the Witwatersrand as a BCom (Bachelor of Commerce) student. He finished this degree in 1951. After joining a European tour organised by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) at the end of the year in 1951, he returned to South Africa and started his LLB (Bachelor of Laws) in 1952. With his BCom in hand, he was qualified to become an articled clerk, and for the next three years he worked in that capacity at the firm of Deneys Reitz, Jacobson and Effune. Meanwhile, like many of his contemporaries, he took courses in the Law Faculty towards his LLB degree; in fact, Law Faculty courses were offered only in the late afternoons, precisely to enable students to work while earning their LLB. He took his degree in 1954. In 1955, he completed his articles of clerkship, and perhaps continued on for some time at his firm; then he and his friend Sydney Lipschitz (now Sir Sydney Lipworth) travelled together in Europe, and in the middle of 1956 Arthur came to the Bar.

Arthur was a good student in his BCom programme, but not a great one. Nor was he an enthralled one. He wasn’t intent on the degree for itself; instead, he told Adrian Friedman that his brother had done the same degree and had recommended that Arthur do likewise.¹ He followed his brother’s advice, but he didn’t particularly enjoy the course, except for the law subjects that were included, which he liked very much. Much of the programme was not law: it included three years of economics, three years of economic history; and three years of accounting – though Arthur acknowledged that economics and economic history were quite interesting, and mentioned that Helen Suzman, who would go on to an impressive and principled parliamentary career opposing apartheid, was his economic history teacher. Accounting in particular seems not to have grabbed his imagination; he and his friend Denis Kuny both flunked their third-year accounting course, and so – after travelling to Europe together on the NUSAS tour – they spent two weeks cramming on the boat back to retake the exam. (They had already missed the normal time for retaking exams, so the fact that they were allowed to retake this one, two days after they got back to South Africa, was a special arrangement made by their professor.) They passed, and so were able then to start their LLB studies.²

It wasn’t an accident that Arthur and Denis Kuny both went on the NUSAS tour. Arthur met Denis in the first year of their BCom studies, and Arthur became part of a larger group of friends of which Denis was also a part. These young people were friends during their university years, and many remained close for the rest of their lives. Arthur in particular formed several very long-lasting friendships here. To some extent the group grew out of a Reform Jewish summer camp, which three members – Joel Joffe, Mark Weinberg and Denis Kuny – had attended together. Sydney Lipschitz, not a camper, also became part of this group; he and Rusty Rostowsky, another member, had been friends since the age of six or seven. No doubt others were added through one connection or another – but, interestingly, all of them were Jewish.

At the time, Denis was still living at his family home in Springs, taking the train into Johannesburg to attend classes. Every now and then, Denis recalls, he would stay over at Arthur’s place rather than making his way home at night: the family were very hospitable.³ In addition, many of these young men played tennis, and their weekly tennis group seems to have become a strong bond among them. So it was not surprising that Denis and Arthur would share accommodation throughout the NUSAS trip to Europe, which featured a two-week ocean voyage, six weeks’ travelling around Europe, and a return boat trip, for a total of about three months. At least one other member of the group, Rusty Rostowsky, was part of this trip too. Though NUSAS would over time become an important site of political struggle around apartheid issues, most of that activity seems to have come in later years; Denis and Rusty recall this trip as entirely non-political.⁴

If the BCom programme did not grip Arthur, his LLB did and he was an outstanding student. Ellison Kahn would later describe the class of 1954 at Wits, when 27 people received their LLB, as a ‘year of all the talents’.⁵ It is worth pausing to picture Wits University at that time. Twenty-seven people received their LLB in 1954, the largest graduating class from the 1940s until 1966. The fact that so many graduated was probably itself evidence of these individuals’ talents; in those days, students (with the exception of military veterans) in the Faculty of Law who flunked a single course forfeited all their passing grades for the semester, and so it was easy not to succeed. At the same time, the fact that the graduating class consisted of just 27 people reminds us of just how small a legal world Arthur was part of. This was not a world of impersonal distance but of overlapping acquaintance – more like a village than a cosmopolis.

Arthur graduated with a very good degree, as he himself acknowledged in an interview with Adrian Friedman. Yet among the many strong students who graduated that year, Arthur’s very good friend Joel Joffe, later Lord Joffe, firmly declared that Arthur was not the best.⁶ A group of very talented Jewish young men – overlapping with the group of social friends we have already encountered – seems to have led the class. Among these men Arthur came in fourth, behind Mark Weinberg, Sydney Lipschitz and Claude Franks. All four, as well as another Jewish student named Douglas Ettlinger, graduated with distinction, no small achievement. Of the others besides Arthur, Mark Weinberg was later knighted in England where, in Ellison Kahn’s words, ‘with innovative brilliance [he] revolutionized the life-insurance industry of Britain’;⁷ Sydney Lipschitz, now Lipworth, was also later knighted in England and served as chairman of the UK’s Monopolies and Mergers Commission; Douglas Ettlinger had a successful career at the Bar; and Claude Franks died young in a motor car accident.

What made this group of young South African Jews as high-achieving as they were? Jewish observance does not seem to have been what drove them; Arthur, for example, as we’ve already seen, was not particularly observant. Nor does anti-Semitism seem to have been an acute part of their early experience. Perhaps some part was their shared sense of guilt for having escaped both the Holocaust (because of being in South Africa) and service in World War II (because of their youth), as Arthur’s good friend Sydney Lipworth suggested to me. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate their true abilities because they sensed how unfairly apartheid South Africa tipped the scales in their favour, as Sydney Lipworth also suggested. And, as he said, they certainly competed with each other, in class and in their tennis group.⁸

Arthur’s outstanding performance in the Wits LLB programme helped him to launch his career as an advocate. But what kind of experience was it for him? Were there transformative educational moments that shaped his future perspective on law and on apartheid? Perhaps. Joel Joffe does not recall Arthur being enthralled by any of the law school subjects, but Sydney Lipworth remembers that Arthur as a student loved the law, and that the two of them would study together in the library and argue points of doctrine. Arthur had decided he wanted to be a lawyer without knowing much about the profession; now, perhaps, he was finding that he was fascinated by the tools of the lawyer’s trade.

Whether the Wits faculty taught Arthur lessons about apartheid and the duties of lawyers in unjust legal systems is much less evident. The teachers of that era do not seem to have made it their business to critique the law that they taught. Adam Sitze has commented, ‘Academic jurisprudence in apartheid South Africa was composed of ostensibly opposed traditions, English common law and Roman-Dutch law, which together provided the state with the vocabulary for its self-justification and allowed it to insist on its adherence to the “rule of law”.’⁹ Wits in those days had four full-time faculty members in law. These included H.R. Hahlo, the Dean, whom Nelson Mandela recalls as ‘a strict, cerebral sort, who did not tolerate much independence on the part of his students. He held a curious view of the law when it came to women and Africans: neither group, he said, was meant to be lawyers.’¹⁰ Another faculty member was Ellison Kahn. George Bizos recalls that ‘Ellison Kahn, our professor of constitutional law, believed that Parliament had the power to deprive the coloured people of their vote with a mere simple majority’ – thus taking the pro-government position on a crucial issue of the day, the National Party’s attempt to deprive ‘Coloured’ South Africans of their franchise, despite its having been entrenched in the founding Act of the South African state. But it must be said that the government’s efforts provoked sharp legal and political controversy in South Africa, and Bizos and his first-year classmates ‘seized on a contrary article by Professor DV Cowen that argued against [Kahn’s] notion’.¹¹

It may be that there was some room for independent, and anti-apartheid, thought within the boundaries of the Wits classrooms – or that the faculty’s doctrinaire approach encouraged independence as a matter of sheer reaction. Sitze suggests that South Africa’s ‘fine radical lawyers … typically arrived at their sense of political responsibility despite their training in jurisprudence, not because of it’.¹² But this may not be right; perhaps there was simply pleasure and value for students like Arthur in learning how to reason within the complex coils of the law, and law school neither accelerated nor retarded their later decisions to use their deft legal reasoning skills to challenge the overall oppression that the law was working. Sydney Lipworth recalled their being particularly engaged by the class of a third faculty member, J.E. Scholtens, the professor of jurisprudence.

Whatever the impact of the classroom, the external world could hardly be ignored. Arthur’s years at Wits were the years when the National Party, elected to power in 1948, began its ruthless work of systematising South Africa’s already pervasive racial discrimination into the structure of apartheid. There is no indication that Arthur became friends with the few black students who were at Wits when he was, such as Nelson Mandela and Duma Nokwe (later a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile for many years) – in contrast to George Bizos, who encountered Mandela and became friends with Nokwe during his student days. But Arthur had formed, or came quickly to form, his views on apartheid; he would tell Adrian Friedman that by the time he came to the Bar he knew that apartheid was awful, and that he was more than willing to represent people in political cases involving apartheid.¹³ His friend Rusty Rostowsky recalls that their group were ‘all anti-government’.¹⁴ Perhaps, as was the case for his friend Denis Kuny (who went on to a distinguished career as an anti-apartheid advocate), there was no ‘dividing line’ in Arthur’s growing political awareness, but rather a gradual process of growing into an understanding of how unjust apartheid was.¹⁵ Perhaps, as Joel Joffe suggests, Arthur’s sense of justice was simply innate, and clear.¹⁶

One moment of Arthur’s engagement in law school politics does stand out. In 1953, George Bizos – then in the last year of his own Wits LLB degree – was a candidate for re-election to the Student Representative Council. By then Bizos was a veteran of student politics, and a sharp opponent of apartheid. In fact, two years earlier, in his first year, he had been involved in a clash with the Dean, H.R. Hahlo, over whether black students would be permitted to attend the Bar’s annual dinner, held at a hotel where liquor was served (and from which blacks were therefore barred). Bizos and his allies had prevailed on that occasion, but now, in 1953, at a candidates’ meeting in the Law Faculty, the issue came up again. Bizos recalled the event in his autobiography, when Arthur spoke out and asked, ‘What is right and what is wrong?’¹⁷

Arthur’s words convey a judgement not only about apartheid, but also about life. The question is not what is traditional – or what is politic or deferential. The question is, ‘What is right and what is wrong?’ George Bizos and Arthur Chaskalson would go on to become lifelong friends, though that bond did not form until they became part of the legal team defending Nelson Mandela and the other accused in the Rivonia trial in 1963–4. And Arthur would ask more than once ‘what is right and what is wrong’ as he shaped the commitments that governed his life. Indeed, George Bizos once said ‘throughout our friendship this has been the one question that Arthur Chaskalson always asked’.¹⁸

But most of what Arthur did in his law school years does not seem to have been political. While he studied, he apprenticed as an articled clerk, the way of entry to practice as an attorney. (South Africa, like Britain, had a divided legal profession: in South Africa the courtroom lawyers, barristers in Britain, were called ‘advocates’ and members of the Bar, while the non-courtroom lawyers, solicitors in Britain, were called ‘attorneys’ and members of the Side Bar.) He did not intend to become an attorney, and in one respect this seems to have showed: he was late registering for his articles, and in fact only got the registration accomplished after his supervisor, an attorney named Charlie Johnson, became very agitated and told Arthur he had to take care of this. (After completing his articles, Arthur would take the attorney admission exam, but he was never admitted to practice as an attorney in South Africa.) But Arthur nevertheless had an outstanding placement for his articles, at the firm of Deneys Reitz. How did he get such good articles? He told Adrian Friedman in 2009 that the answer was family connections: his mother knew one of the partners in the firm, and had made phone calls to set up interview appointments for Arthur. He recalled, not for the first time in his interview with Friedman, that his mother was a dominant figure; it was nothing to her to call people up to have them do something.¹⁹

Arthur was initially articled to the attorney Claude Michael Reitz, son of Deneys Reitz (the firm’s founder). Michael Reitz, however, was a pilot and died in an aerobatic display in 1952. After that Arthur went to work with Charlie Johnson. Johnson deeply impressed Arthur, who called him ‘exceptionally brilliant’, and the feeling evidently was mutual. Arthur would later describe Johnson as one of the smartest lawyers he had ever known, and remember with admiration Johnson’s ability to encounter a legal matter and immediately dictate a concise memo, or a draft contract, to resolve it. Once, Arthur recalled, Johnson asked him for his views on one of these new matters; Arthur ventured a response based on its ‘look[ing] to me like something I had seen in mercantile law contracts for the benefit of third parties – some insurance thing – and I said I thought it might be that’. Johnson at once embodied Arthur’s point in ‘A note to Mr Jacobson [another partner] from Mr Chaskalson’. Arthur said, ‘I was actually quite shattered by that.’²⁰ Johnson – besides teaching Arthur incisive, quick judgement – must have been impressed by what Arthur had offered. Later, Johnson invited Arthur to join the firm as a full-fledged attorney, but Arthur’s heart was set on coming to the Bar as an advocate. Along the way, however, Arthur had learned enough insurance law that he would be invited to write the annual chapter on developments in this field in the Annual Survey of South African Law when he was still a young advocate – and the Deneys Reitz firm would send cases (‘briefs’) to him, contributing to the rapid growth of his practice at the Bar.

A moment in Adrian Friedman’s discussion with Arthur about Charlie Johnson is perhaps more revealing about Arthur himself than about Johnson. Friedman thoughtfully asked Arthur why Johnson, whose capacity for fast and authoritative legal reasoning seemed to embody at least part of what advocates in South Africa pride themselves on, had not become an advocate. Arthur, who had already said that Johnson was ‘a very shy man’, first responded that ‘I don’t think he had the personality for that’. Adrian followed up by asking if Johnson was ‘too shy’, and then Arthur became unsure: ‘I don’t think – you know – I can’t tell you.’ Arthur’s first answer was clearly his intuitive judgement; why did he become so hesitant when asked to explain his view? One answer may be that Arthur was always more comfortable describing the work that was being done – he spoke at length about Johnson’s work style – than in analysing emotions. Another possibility is that he abhorred making negative judgements about others. Both of these may be part of the shyness and the politeness that Arthur showed over many years. But it’s clear Arthur was also fond of Johnson.

Two other moments from this period shed some light on Arthur’s developing political awareness. One comes directly from his articles. As he told Adrian Friedman, ‘there was an attempt to form an articled clerks’ association and there was a meeting. I went to the meeting and came back – it was obviously going to fail – articled clerks can’t really have an association because the turnover is too quick. You know, within a short time you are a boss.’ He had no wish to pursue a vain course of action. But it is interesting that he told Charlie Johnson about this meeting, and Johnson in turn indiscreetly told Jacobson, the senior partner. Jacobson ‘got very upset and sent for me. He says, I hear you are not satisfied with your position, and he went on at great length about articled clerks and about when he was young you had to pay to become a clerk and went on and on and then suddenly he said, well if you people say you don’t get enough work, come and look at this.’ Then he handed Arthur a 60-page debenture trust deed and said, ‘Go and look at that and see what you think of it!’ Arthur recalls: ‘I was, really I was, fairly taken aback by the whole incident, and Johnson was in the room at the time and was a little bit upset at what had happened and apologised to me because he had made a joke.’ Perhaps learning a lesson in discretion in the process, Arthur dealt with this problem by analysing the document ‘clause by clause’, and reflected that ‘In fact I had wonderful articles – really I wasn’t the messenger boy, I did terrific things.’²¹ The articled clerks’ life was not all work: Rusty Rostowsky recalls that the clerks used to get together every Thursday for lunch at Delmonico’s in downtown Johannesburg.²²

The other political moment was decidedly extracurricular. Arthur’s older brother Sydney recalls that he (Sydney) had become active in the Torch Commando, an organisation built around World War II veterans, which made it its mission to protect political meetings of the United Party, the opposition party of its day, against physical disruption by National Party toughs. Though Sydney had not been in the war, he had received military training to assist in Israel’s war of independence, which ended before he could go. This military involvement, Sydney felt, ‘qualified’ him to become part of the Torch Commando, and he went on to become one of its leaders.²³ Sydney invited Arthur to join him at Torch Commando events, three in all, probably in early 1952. Sydney recalled the details of the Vrededorp and Edenvale events in an email to Adrian Friedman:

I remember asking Arthur to join me and many others on a march from the City Hall to Vrededorp, to support Marais Steyn the U.P. Member speaking there.

I remember also our mother saying ‘Arthur can go, but you must look after him’.

My friend Harry Bowman couldn’t come but sent his young brother Alan, enjoining me to ‘look after Alan’.

Marching there we were pelted with stones from the nearby Brixton Cemetery.

This continued when we arrived at Vrededorp, and a contingent of police fixed bayonets and faced us so as that we could not get at the stone-throwers.

Marching back the hail of stones increased in size and ferocity, next to me, Alan Bowman was hit by a stone and broke his pelvis. I bent down to attend to him, and the next thing I saw was Arthur taking off, jumping the low cemetery wall and returning fire to the stone-throwers – so much for my chaperon duties.

On another occasion I asked Arthur to bring some friends to a march to Edenvale – he brought young Reitz. Arthur was articled to Deneys Reitz, Jacobson and Effune.

Young Reitz was hit on the head by a stone, badly hurt.

Afterwards I stopped asking Arthur for help.²⁴

With the exception of Arthur’s brother Sydney, no one whom I’ve asked about these events (including Arthur’s widow) has ever heard of Arthur’s role in them. But several striking details of what Sydney recounts are confirmed by contemporary news coverage. The Rand Daily Mail of 18 June 1952 carries an article called ‘Torchmen Angry over Scenes at Vrededorp’, accompanied by pictures of those injured, including Alan Bowman, whose broken pelvis is mentioned.²⁵ An article two days later on these events (one of many) is headlined ‘Nat. Gangs Started Stonethrowing before Meeting’.²⁶ The description Sydney gives of the events at Vrededorp is partially confirmed by Louis Kane-Berman, then national chairman of the Torch Commando. He writes:

Another meeting which was memorable was an open air meeting held at Vrededorp, a nationalist stronghold. About 3000 torchmen marched to the meeting place. The speakers stood on a hastily erected platform behind which was a derelict wall. Suddenly a hail of half bricks and stones were thrown from behind the wall which fortunately caused only a number of minor injuries, with the result that the meeting broke up. The assailants, of whom there were a great number, were roughly manhandled whereafter the men marched in good order back to the assembly area.²⁷

Arthur would have been 20 at the time of these events. He was, in other words, a young man. No doubt he was impulsive. No doubt he was well aware of his own athletic ability and strength. And, if Sydney’s recollection is correct, he was under physical attack. Moreover, he was brave. But it is still startling to see him engaged in ‘returning fire to the stone-throwers’. He was not, at this moment, non-violent. Nor was he, at this moment, precisely bound by the law; whatever the exact dimensions of self-defence in this setting, Arthur’s response seems to have been guided by anger rather than close calculation.

But Sydney’s reading was that Arthur was very much mindful of justice in that moment. Sydney connected Arthur’s role in the Torch Commando with his reaction as a boy of eight to 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 of male mourners) for the burial next day. Two Italian Jewish sailors agreed to come, and so did Arthur and Sydney. Sydney, like many others, was struck by Arthur’s kindness, and he saw this moment mainly as an instance of his good nature rather than of Jewish conviction.³⁶ A kind young man, free to chart his own course, capable of high spirits, and about to enter his lifetime career.