An appreciation

A lovely man in all senses of the word

Glyn Williams pays a personal tribute to Donald Woods.

A LIGHT has gone out in many lives with the death of Donald Woods. He was a lovely man in all senses of the word -- friendly, humorous, generous and loyal, great to have at a dinner table.

In our 43 years of friendship he never let me down, never disappointed me.

I first met him on the sub-editors' table of the Western Mail, Cardiff, Wales. He thought it would be a good idea to combine visits to the Empire Games in Cardiff with a job on a local newspaper; South African athletes were still allowed to compete in 1958.

Editing came easy to him but he was too mercurial for the routines and disciplines of a subs' table. It was only when he wrote a series of articles on South Africa at the end of his stay with the Western Mail that he revealed his real forte, writing with fluency and flamboyance.

I heard from him three times after he left. One of these times, there was an invitation to his wedding to Wendy in Umtata, which arrived after the date of the event. Then there was a call to join him at the Daily Dispatch as night editor, which culminated in a 10-day stay at the family home in Tait Road, Baysville, and a decision to move to South Africa.

Donald was not a hands-on editor. He left the nuts and bolts to his assistants. He wrote the leaders, fulminated against apartheid, drummed up ideas, often quickly becoming bored with them, moving on to other matters.

There was also his love of golf, rugby, cricket and tennis --he was a talented player of the last two sports -- and he had a competitiveness that extended to poker and chess, redeemed by his amiability.

He would use any ally in his fight against racism. After his first visit to an all-white chess club in East London operating with broken tables, old sets and a dilapidated meeting place, he went to see the National Party mayor of East London, Robbie de Lange, and got from him permission to use excellent premises once a week behind the city hall, free of charge. De Lange also pledged no interference with a non-racial policy. Donald then conjured up new chess sets and tables from donors.

He was, in fact, a multi-talented man who had been known to earn his daily bread by playing the piano in his young and impecunious days in London. Music was another rich part of his life; there are not many editors who have written orchestral pieces and had them performed.

All these assets were allied to a winning personality. "He can be very persuasive," said Richard Branson when Donald was the subject of the BBC TV show This Is Your Life. Branson is known to have donated to several of Woods' projects, including the statue of Steve Biko erected outside the East London city hall.

In fact, the particular character of Donald Woods and the international effect he would have on apartheid South Africa was not appreciated by the South African government when he was given a banning order that led to his decision to leave the country.

But it was not lost on a South African diplomat who warned that Woods' credibility as a white anti-apartheid editor, forced out of his own land, allied to an articulate and winning personality, could influence Western democratic thinking on South Africa, to its detriment.

The stress of being a crusading anti-apartheid editor worsened in the 1970s and Donald became a more serious person -- especially after he had met Steve Biko, which he has acknowledged as a watershed in his political development.

He saw Biko as a future prime minister and the South African government as an irrelevance.

Although he felt the government would act against him personally in any clampdown, rather than the newspaper itself, he took considerable risk by publishing articles by Biko (who was banned and could not be quoted) under pseudonyms, and employing at least one covert member of the ANC.

There are many personal memories of Donald Woods, some indelible. After his banning, he was allowed to continue playing chess in the premises behind the city hall, but he could talk only to his opponent and his table was set apart from all the others.

It had a detrimental anti-government effect, angering his fellow chess players and stiffening their own resolve at the injustice of it.

The memory of the day he told me he was leaving South Africa reminds vivid. He asked me to walk with him in the garden of his home at 61 Chamberlain Road, fearing that the security police had placed listening devices inside the house.

We sat on a bench. Donald said he felt he had a duty to tell me he was going, and to advise me to think about returning to Britain with my family, as he had been instrumental in persuading me to join the Daily Dispatch 11 years previously.

I thanked him, and did not ask any of the obvious questions -- when and how was he going? The fewer people who knew, the better.

On New Year's Day, 1978, I received a telephone call from Hannes Strydom, then news editor of the Sunday Times, saying they had had a report that Donald Woods was in Lesotho.

"It's probably just a rumour," he said.

Telephone calls to the house had remained unanswered. I went to the house. It was silent, but for a forlorn, large black dog, Charlie, the family had had to leave behind, and a weeping house assistant.

Terry Briceland, managing director of the Daily Dispatch, arrived and showed me a note addressed to him by Donald, saying the family had decided to leave the country.

When interviewed recently on the BBC TV show Hard Talk, Donald gently corrected Tim Sebastian when he said he had "fled" South Africa. "I don't use the word fled, Tim, I say I escaped," he said.

It was, and is, a grand home, like roquefort to the common chalk of the house with hand-me-down furniture they shared not far from the Highbury tube station just after their arrival in London before they were able to move to Surbiton.

Those were tough years physically and mentally, but he and Wendy never lost their idealistic zeal.

He returned to East London with Wendy and two of his children, Dillon and Mary, in May this year for his last visit, to receive an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University, one of the few and belated honours bestowed in his own country on a man who had done so much to try to remove its injustices, and whose contribution has not yet been fully appreciated.

They spent a night in the old family home in Chamberlain Road, now a guest house, and I went there to meet them after he had attended early-morning Mass at his former Catholic church. The guest house is, incidentally, already a minor place of pilgrimage for overseas tourists who have seen Cry Freedom and read his books.

There have been changes naturally over the years but the house has not altered basically -- the large dining room, the living area where stood their baby grand piano, won in a defamation action against a National Party cabinet minister.

Donald showed me a window on the stairs facing Chamberlain Road with its crack and the hole made by a .25 bullet during the campaign of harassment against him and his family in the years before he escaped from South Africa. Graffiti had been painted on the walls of the house. There was the famous incident of the acid-powder impregnated T-shirt sent through the post, and put on by his youngest daughter Mary. The window pane, now of historic interest, will not be replaced.

In a cupboard of their former bedroom another item remains as a reminder of the strain under which the family lived immediately before they went to Britain. It was a rack with a quick release, made specially for a riot gun in case there was an attack on the house. Donald had worked out that if he was in the bedroom it would take him 28 seconds from the time of alarm to making the gun effective for defence. He felt that any physical attack would come not so much from state employees as renegades who would see it in patriotic terms.

Finally we walked in the garden where he had told me he was leaving South Africa. Wendy joined us, with bare feet. She had gone walking to nearby Nahoon beach, nostalgically, with a friend.

The bench where we had sat for those few sad moments back in 1977 was no longer there but it mattered not. The trees that Wendy had planted are giants now.

Dorothy Parker once famously said there are no happy endings, but to come home in honour and with accomplishment in good cause may have been sufficient enough.

In East London and elsewhere in South Africa he said his farewells to old friends with much laughter and a re-telling of the anecdotes for which he was famous.

He did achieve, for humanity, and the adulation he received internationally in his later years never altered his self-perception. There was never any side to him: he was far too intelligent for that.

He was certainly one of the most extraordinary people I have met. I am proud to have been a friend and a colleague.

*Glyn Williams worked with Donald Woods from 1966 to 1977. Williams was editor of the Daily Dispatch from 1987 to 1993.