Saturday at the betting shop

The way I see it, and have seen it for some 35 years, is that an artist takes pen, pencil, paper - whatever - and if he or she sees something worth drawing, they draw it. This is art for art's sake, not for the sake of sales or galleries. Most of us can point a camera and take a relatively good photograph, especially in this digital age. But not many can sketch from life. This I have done continually since studying art in the mid-1970s, and on one occasion, we took ourselves to the Tattersalls betting shop in Station Street, East London, probably in the late 1970s.

Being a Saturday, I probably had a bit of a babelaas, but nonetheless managed to do three fairly good drawings of old men studying form ahead of placing bets on the horses. I think this one was particularly successful in capturing the character of the crusty old punter.

Aged people are fascinating to draw - especially when you're young. Today, as the impact of ageing starts to afflict me, I have far greater empathy for the aged. I also admire the resilience, especially, of the few men who manage to reach a ripe old age. For, generally, we seem to be the weaker sex in this regard.

Another old guy at that East London betting shop, makes his selection.

Politicians

There is no way this can be a totally chronological blogo-biography. Some issues, like politics, have pervaded my life from when I was very young. I started writing letters to the editor of the Daily Dispatch in my teens, attacking apartheid. And I drew many of the protagonists. During my years at art school (1975-9), I continued to do so, and kept up the practice in the army and later when I worked briefly for the liberal opposition to apartheid, the Progressive Federal Party. Anyway, here are some of the drawings I did over a period of about five years.



Steve Biko was killed by the Security Police in 1977, and in the Eastern Cape he was a well known figure by then, as head of the Black Consciousness movement. It was Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods who helped Biko publicise his ideas through his paper. One of the Prog stalwarts in East London was Joe Yazbek, a former mayor, who is the guy on the right.






Of course I was much aware of what was going on in the African countries around us, including Zambia. Here I did a drawing of its president, Kenneth Kaunda, like the others from a press photograph.





Who was this bloke? I've racked my brains but can't place him, except I suspect he was a member of the United Party.





No mistaking the grimace on this face. Die Groot Krokodil, PW Botha, was prime minister and later president of South Africa at the height of apartheid.





Some Nats were unhappy that PW sought to co-opt puppet leaders from the black urban townships and coloured and Indian communities into a new system of reformed apartheid. One was Andries Treurnicht. Here I have him sowing the seeds of segregation.





One of the coloured leaders who was co-opted was Labour Party leader Allan Hendrickse, who would later turn around and bite his master.





Here I had some fun with the stolid features of the Lion of the North, Treurnicht. The writing paper was from a time when I was briefly based at Kan Kemp Dorp in the northern Cape while doing two years' military conscription.





One of the brains behind the Progressive Federal Party's constitutional proposals, which included a national convention, was Dr Nic Olivier.





Nic was drawn on the back of this, which is a canvas card which were used in the PFP offices around SA for canvassing purposes.





This was another PFP stalwart, Ray Swart.





Another view of Labour Party leader Allan Hendrickse.





Van the Man. It was the dynamic Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who died earlier this year, who led the PFP to great heights around 1980 until he quit parliament in the mid-1980s.





Another view of the PFP leader, whom women were said to find attractive.





Profile of courage. Slabbert turned his back on his Afrikaner nationalist roots and saw a future non-racial SA as the only solution.





I did quick caricatures of various leaders. This is Slabbert.





My hero, growing up, was the courageous Daily Dispatch editor, Donald Woods, for whom I worked as a cub reporter just after school in 1975, before I went into art.






Zac de Beer gave up a lucrative career in industry to bolster the liberal PFP. He would later lead the party briefly as it joined with disenchanted Nats to form the Democratic Party in the mid- to late-1980s.



This is Nic Olivier again.



The power behind the PFP for many years was one-time leader Colin Eglin, who had a long and distinguished parliamentary career alongside the likes of Helen Suzman and Slabbert.





The Krok. PW Botha came across as belligerent and aggressive, but some say he had a sense of humour, though he kept it well hidden.





A close friend of Slabbert was Eastern Cape farmer Errol Moorcroft. I think they were at Oxford together. Moorcroft was the only PFP MP from the East London area, albeit that just a part of his Grahamstown constituency was located there, in a vain bid by the Nats to weaken the student vote.





After the United Party crumbled, one Vause Raw formed the New Republic Party, a muddle in the middle which soon became the Now Redundant Party.





Chairman of the PFP's federal executive for many years was Dr Alex Boraine. He would hire me as a party organiser in East London in late 1981, and fire me about three years later due to lack of finances to support two organisers in the city.





PW lent himself to parody, as did the parliament his party ran.





Homeland independence was the objective of grand apartheid. We had two next to us, the Transkei and the Ciskei. This is Ciskei leader Lennox Sebe. If I recall correctly, the flag pole really did topple during a ceremony to mark Ciskei's independence.





One of the PFP's many losing candidates in elections around 1980 was Errol Spring, who used the term, "ladies and gentlemen", a tad too often.




I'm note sure what this is all about, but it does seem to point to the nasty nature of politics.





I could almost believe the little oke on the left is me, looking on as the adults of the country bully and bash each other, and the oppressed masses, into submission.

Music

From the mid-1970s, as I began studying fine art at the East London Technical College under Jack Lugg, I became an avid follower of live folk music. My eldest brother had been at high school (an art matric at the Belgravia Art School) with Dave Tarr. We followed Dave's career from high school - and especially when he shot to stardom with the Silver Creek Mountain Band. Many was the time we'd go to watch the band play folk, bluegrass, rock, you name it. I did several sketches of Dave and other members of the band. These are some of them. Others will no doubt crop up as I explore my suitcases full of drawings.

Dave was a multi-instrumentalist who died tragically young about six years ago of skin cancer, having spent much of his life earning a living as a yacht skipper. But it was as a fiddle player that we best remember him.

Making up the Silver Creek Mountain Band alongside Dave was lead singer Denis Schultz, of whom I think this is a drawing, Roger Cummings, and the ebullient bass player Rod Dry.

Among the instruments Dave played was the penny-whistle. He introduced us to Irish traditional music, and in particular the Dubliners and Clancy Brothers.

This is Dave Tarr at work on another instrument, a mandolin. He also played the flute, sax, banjo and acoustic guitar, and was no mean singer either, his version of Streets of London being one of the finest I've heard.

Judging by the beard, and the pose, this is Denis Schultz again, this time playing banjo.

I rather like this shorthand sketch of Dave Tarr on his fiddle, captured in just a few lines.

Another, more detailed drawing of the virtuoso fiddle player.

Here I got up close and personal, taking in Dave's distinctive nose and thick beard.

It is not easy drawing people performing on stage, especially in pubs, after a few pints, when the light isn't always that good. But this, I think, captures again something of Dave's dynamic playing, which I think was modelled on the great Fairport Convention fiddler Dave Swarbrick.

After Silver Creek disbanded, following the tragic death of Roger Cummings, for a while Dave teamed up with Trevor Promnitz. They played at various gigs in East London, including for a time at the Hotel Osner, which is where I recall doing this drawing. Trevor played the acoustic guitar and sang lead vocals, while Dave did the embellishments with fiddle, mandolin, etc.

Often, Dave Tarr would play these incredibly complex fiddle solos, especially on their trademark Orange Blossom Special, and old Trevor would have to pound away on that guitar.

Trevor providing the rhythm, backed by a drum kit, during one of Dave Tarr's fiddle solos.

A fine vocalist in his own right, Trevor Promnitz also had a great sense of humour, such as the time, in the late 1970s, when a couple of us were thrown in the Cambridge police station jail overnight after objecting when we saw a drug squad oaf pushing a young girl Rhodes student around outside the Hobnob pub in Bonza Bay, mentioned in an earlier posting. Arrested on the Friday night, we only got out late on the Saturday, and when we entered the Hobnob where Dave and Trevor were playing, Trevor said: "We'd like to dedicate this next song to the Bentley brothers, it's called In On The Weekend." They then played Neil Young's classic, Out On the Weekend.

Fettered freedom

Liberation. In July, 1981, I experienced a brief period of bliss. I had completed two years of military conscription. I had no plans, a little money, and my widowed mother was able to continue supporting a 24-year-old son for a while longer as he pondered his future. Happily ensconced back at home in Bonza Bay, I set about readjusting to civilian life, always aware that within a year or so I could expect to be called up again for a "camp". I developed a phobia for any registered mail.

One of the places I took myself to was the local Bonza Bay Hotel pub, a men-only, whites-only place where mainly old toppies discussed endlessly the issues of the day over much alcohol. The Hobnob "ladies' bar" was another place people still frequented, and I did this imagined self-portrait of myself in one of the cubicles there. Unable to get the Adobe photomerge programme to work, the picture is presented in two parts, with the black guys behind the bar shown in the picture below.

One of the unforeseen paradoxes of having black people work in "whites-only" places of recreation like this under apartheid was that one got to chat to such people and to know them as human beings. One of the barmen, Richard Tshawe, became a good friend to all the Bentleys and their mates. We even took him on occasion to his ancestral home in Cofimvaba, of which more later. Sadly, due to scanner constraints, I won't be showing the remaining contents of two large drawing books I worked in at this time.

Being back in Bonza Bay meant I was able to while away time beside the river and sea. This seems to be a drawing, done around 1981, of two people pumping mud prawns.

Bonza Bay is marked by the high sand dunes which stretch from the usually blind river mouth east towards Gonubie and west towards Nahoon. This is a view from up one of the dunes towards Nahoon Reef, a world-famous surfing spot.

A delightful reeded corner of the Bonza Bay (Qhinerha) River was "reclaimed" for use as a parking area around the late 1970s, early 1980s. This is a drawing of an old toppie and his Citroen, which was parked on the at-the-time gravel parking area, which was subsequently expanded and tarred. The oke on the right I think is an old mate from my primary school days who I've not seen in donkeys - Julian Jackson, or JJ.

As I did in so many sketches from my army stint, shown on previous postings, in this you have a face somehow emerging alongside a pair of guys fishing on the Bonzies coastline. Other pictures from the drawing books I shan't be able to scan show old toppies on the Bonza Bay Bowling Club green and a couple of other atmospheric pencil drawings of the lagoon. Ah, the peacefulness of it all. Yet life, of course, never stays still for a moment.