Recollections of my next two years at UCT – 1975 and 1976
At the end of the 1974 academic year several of my friends, including Dave Clark, Terry Weyer, and Peter Hofmeyr, moved out of Driekoppen. After that my circle of friends included several new students from other countries in southern Africa, among them Steve Moss from Botswana, Rich Kime from Malawi, and several from Zambia. A couple of the ones from Zambia were on my floor and were smokers. In those days there were no restrictions on smoking in buildings. What was particularly annoying is that they would smoke in the bathroom. The humid air in there seemed to make the smell worse, or maybe just hang around longer after they had left.
At the beginning of 1975 I was still trying to hedge my bets between Business Science and regular Science. As can be seen on my UCT ID card below, officially I was still registered for a BBusSc. I considered adding a major in Economics, which required doing Economics III. For that course one had to choose three (or maybe it was 4) modules. Two of the options were mathematical economics and econometrics. I went to ask the head of the department if I could take both of those. He said yes, BUT that each counted as just a half module, so together they would be just one of the modules I needed. If both had counted as full modules I might have taken Economics III. Another reason not to was that in talking to the department head he pointed out that I was confusing micro- and macro-economics. If after two years of doing economics I couldn’t get that straight, I was probably not cut out for the field. (He didn’t say that, but I was rather embarrassed about making such a mistake.)
I was interested in astronomy, but UCT didn’t offer an undergraduate major in the subject. There may have been a single course, probably on descriptive astronomy. (There is now an undergraduate major in astrophysics that has been offered since 2006.) I later discovered that academic astronomy is mostly a combination of applied math and physics. UCT may have offered an MSc and/or PhD in astronomy back in the day. If so, I think it required one to have majored in physics, math, and/or applied math at undergraduate level. One can currently do an MSc or PhD by thesis in astronomy or a BSc(Hons) or a coursework MSc in Astrophysics & Space Science.
Until looking at my end-of-year results I had forgotten that I had completed Introduction to Management Accounting (and managed a first class pass). That year was also the first time I took a statistics class. As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”, my friend Pat Wong Fung, who I had met on the train when heading to UCT the first time, was partly responsible for suggesting this class, and so put me on the track to becoming a statistician. Someone else who shares part of the blame is the instructor for that first class, John Affleck-Graves.
You may not have noticed, but I didn’t mention the names of any of my instructors from my first two years at UCT. That’s because I don’t remember any of their names or in fact anything else about them. I do remember those from the statistics classes, maybe in part because I had each of them for more than one class and also interacted with them later in my career. John was a great lecturer and will be mentioned again when I get to 1977. He later moved to the UCT School of Business (which is not related to the Department of Business Science) before emigrating to the US in 1986. He then, worked at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana until his retirement in 2019, by that stage having spent the previous 15 years as Executive Vice President of the university. I did manage to make contact with him several years ago and so was able to thank him for spurring my interest in statistics (but I didn’t follow him into the field of finance). https://news.nd.edu/news/executive-vice-president-john-affleck-graves-to-retire/
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| My UCT ID in 1975. The yellow background is for the Faculty of Commerce, because I was still a Business Science student at the beginning of that year. |
In the part “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10” I mentioned
that on turning 16 we had to get a government-issued ID card (see below).
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| Government-issued ID card after I turned 16. |
About 5 years later the ID cards were replaced by ID
documents. The document was referred to
as the “book of life” because it was supposed to incorporate all one’s official
documents, including one’s registered address, driver’s license(s), and (if
married) one’s marriage certificate.
With the new ID we were also issued new ID numbers. The numbers were in the format YYMMDD SSSS RR Z
where the YYMMDD is for the year, month, and day of one’s birth, SSSS is a sequential
number from 0000 to 4999 for females and from 5000 to 9999 for males, , the RR
indicates one’s race/tribal group (00 for White people), and the M is a
check-digit of some type. According to
the following Wikipedia page the first digit of the RR indicates whether one is
a citizen, permanent resident, or refugee.
I don’t think that was the case back in the day – race may have included
tribal affiliation for Black people, in which case more than a single digit
would have been needed for race/tribe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_identity_card.
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| Cover of the (then) new South African ID document. |
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| Table of contents of the ID document. Although the “Record of voting” was supposed to be on pages 48-49, as seen in the next photo a stamp indicating I had voted in a referendum in 1983 was on the page showing my particulars. |
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| Page of the ID document with my particulars. I had a haircut just before the photo was taken! |
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| Page of the ID document with my driver’s license. The original date of issue was soon after I turned 18 (the earliest one was allowed to have a driver’s license.) |
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| Page of the ID document with my marriage certificate. Riëtta has the same one in her ID document. All the other information was included at the time the ID was issued. This certificate was added later – I didn’t even meet Riëtta until 1981. More on that when I get to the 1980s. For now I’ll mention just that the wedding ceremony was in a language I didn’t understand, si I don’t know what I agree to. 😊 |
Although I wasn’t a Driekoppen sub-warden at the start of
1975, at some point in 1975 the Warden, Prof. Cumpsty, appointed me as one. I don’t recall why this happened part of the
way through the year. Maybe one of those
who had originally been appointed moved out of Driekoppen. At some point I also became one of the tutors
for Math I. Both of these roles came
with a small stipend (and perhaps also with a contribution towards tuition
and/or lodging). I continued as a
sub-warden until I left UCT at the end of 1977.
Around that time a few of us became wine snobs for a while. On several occasions we went wine-tasting on the Stellenbosch Wine Route. It looks like there are now several sub-routes, but I think there was just one back then. https://wineroute.co.za/ We usually returned with a good selection of wines. A highlight of each trip was stopping for the cheese lunch at Lanzerac https://lanzerac.co.za/. Lanzerac still exists, but its cheese lunch does not. As noted at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1775812375816033 “Lanzerac’s famous cheese lunches of the past are well remembered by guests who had visited the Estate over that time, with many stories reencountered with nostalgic enthusiasm.”
Although I had a car from either 1974 or 1975, I seldom drove anywhere, other than the long trips back home to Port Elizabeth. The only accident I have had to date was on one visit to the Stellenbosch Wine Route. I misjudged a turn at a traffic light and clipped another car very lightly. There was hardly a scratch and certainly nothing that needed repairing. So we didn’t get the police or insurance companies involved.
(About 4 years later I came close to having another accident in the same car. That was genuinely an (almost) accident rather than anyone’s fault. A car stopped very suddenly in front of me. I jammed my foot down on the brake pedal and … nothing happened. Complete brake failure. Fortunately I was going slowly, and I usually keep an appropriate following distance. By steering into the kerb (curb for Americans) I avoided hitting the other car. When I had a mechanic look at the car the next day, he said that there was a hole in the hydraulic brake line and that all the fluid had leaked out. He said it looked like there had been a rust spot and that the sudden pressure when I hit the brake pedal hard must have knocked the rust spot out. I was fortunate. I had just come down a steep hill with a T intersection at the bottom. If the brakes had failed there I could have ended up in the ocean.)
Earlier I mentioned that the new students in 1975 included Steve Moss and Rich Kime. Rich was from Malawi and was studying quantity surveying. Every afternoon he used to retire to his room to do some “thinking”, that is, to take a nap. After many years working as a quantity surveyor Rich retired to the small Karoo town of Prince Albert. Steve was British, but living in Botswana (where he also currently lives). He was very keen on motorcycles and had a Honda Gold Wing On one trip between Botswana and South Africa he went off the road and crashed. He was relatively unscathed, other than a badly broken leg. He spent a few months with that leg in plaster of Paris. The bike was a write-off, but he soon had a new one. On local rides in the Cape Town area, Rich was often a pillion passenger on Steve’s bike. (I never went on Steve’s bike.) Steve also subscribed to some motorcycle magazines, which I sometimes looked at. I remember Barry Sheene as being one of the top international motorbike racers of that era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sheene.
Steve, Rich, and I went hiking together a few times. One hike was nearby, walking from Driekoppen and then up the side of Table Mountain closest to UCT. Although there weren’t any technical parts, we did have to use our hands to climb up some sections. Near the top, one of us (I don’t recall who) put his hand in a small indentation and noticed that it had ice in it, presumably the remnants of a snowfall on the mountain. Although snow on the top of the mountain is not unusual, it is much rarer in the city. It does get a dusting occasionally, but not in the total of about 10 years that I lived there. Apart from the small handful on that hike, I didn’t touch snow until we moved to Seattle when I was 35. Our first winter there was the first time I saw snow falling. (It was exciting for a few hours and then a nuisance when the whole city was snowed in.)
Another hike was in the Jonkershoek mountain range near Stellenbosch, about 30 miles from Cape Town. That one may have involved camping overnight. I remember just one incident on that hike. We were walking single file along a narrow trail. Steve was in front and suddenly dived off the trail to his right. He had realized he was about to step on a puff adder. Puff adders are highly venomous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puff_adder. What makes them worse is they are very lazy – “sluggish” is how the Wikipedia entry puts it. Most snakes move away when they hear a person approaching. Not puff adders. They just lie there waiting to be stepped on. After Steve had picked himself up out of the bushes, the snake was still there. How close had he come? The impression of the heel of his hiking boot was visible and if he had put the front of his foot down it would have been on the snake! Steve took a photo to prove it. I recently asked him if he still had the photo. If he does, he hasn’t been able to locate it (yet).
A longer hike that we did that was further from Cape Town was the Otter Trail. Websites that I have looked at recently say it is a 5-day hike and give the distance as 42 or 45 kilometers (26-28 miles). It has become very popular, and it is hard to get a permit. Apparently only 12 hikers are allowed to start each day. There are now huts to sleep in overnight. https://www.sanparks.org/parks/garden-route/what-to-do/activities/otter-trail This video shows some of the spectacular scenery, including river crossings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-fgbP-OMI. Another website with photos and a short video: https://besthike.com/where-is-the-best-hike-in-africa/otter-trail/. When we hiked the trail in the mid 1970s either permits were not required, or we just did it without permits. Back then there weren’t huts. We did the whole trail in 3 days (2 nights). We should probably have gone slower and spent more time looking at the scenery.
Something more sedentary that we did together was to go to see/listen to Rod McKuen and Magna Carta (not “The” Magna Carta as written in the program below) at the 3 Arts Theatre in Cape Town. Rich was a Rod McKuen fan. I liked (and still like) Magna Carta and have a few of their vinyl albums, plus one in my iTunes library. The one in my iTunes library was from a live concert (in Bergen, Norway) in which they used electric guitars. In the concert we went to and on my vinyl albums, they played acoustic guitars. The version of The Bridge at Knaresborough Town that they played in Cape Town was particularly memorable and better than other versions I have heard, including this one on their Songs from Wasties Orchard album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eI740fnzXI&list=RD0eI740fnzXI&start_radio=1. I presume I drove us to the concert. If I’d been on my own, I would have left at the interval as I had no interest in listening to Rod McKuen.
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| Concert program, Magna Carta opening for Rod McKuen. |
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| Description of Magan Carta (not “The Magna Carta”) from the program. |
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| In this photo Steve Moss is in the middle and Rich Kime on the right. On the left is George Nowack – more on “Big George” below), |
George Nowack (pronounced Novack) was one of the students
from Zambia who started at UCT in 1975 (and in George’s case didn’t return the
next year). Geroge was a Character with
a capital “C” – maybe even the whole word needs to be capitalized. The article below is only a slight
exaggeration. Big George stopped going
to classes almost as soon as the academic year began. Regardless of whether he obtained a degree,
he apparently had a job lined up back in Zambia as race-course bookie working
with a family member. So he spent the
year at UCT socializing. The part in the
first sentence of the article about “running from notice to notice” was because
other students used to sign George up for any opportunity posted on a
Driekoppen noticeboard.
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| Who is Big George? Article from the 1977 edition of a Driekoppen magazine called Threads. |
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| Big George, continued. |
One evening several of us were sitting chatting in Steve
Moss’s room. Suddenly the door of the
room alongside opened and Hylton Hobbs, whose room it was, came rushing into
Steve’s room with blood streaming from his throat. He had cut himself in an apparent suicide
attempt. I rushed off to fetch the
assistant warden, who was a doctor, while the others tried to help Hylton. Fortunately the cut wasn’t very deep. As the sub-warden responsible for Hylton and
other students in Blue block, I was told later that the incident was more a cry
for help than a genuine suicide attempt.
I don’t recall what happened to Hylton directly after this but do know
that he was back in Driekoppen soon afterwards and was a sub-warden himself in
1977.. Hylton was studying law (and went
on to qualify as a lawyer). He was from
Uitenhage, the smaller city near Port Elizabeth where I spent the first few
years of my life (see “Ancyent blog19 Early life -- birth to about 6 years old”). Years later I saw in the in memoriam section
of UCT’s alumni magazine that Hylton passed away in 1992. No reason was given and there wasn’t an
obituary. As he would have been just 35
or 36, I have often wondered whether he had committed suicide.
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| Something that Hylton wrote about me. I don’t know whether it was before or after the above episode. |
I had forgotten about Hylton’s interest in heraldry until I
recently tried again to find some information his life after UCT. I thought I was getting somewhere when I
found this article on heraldry by a Robert A. Laing https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/historia/article/download/1746/1636. The article references one by Hylton:
H L Hobbs, “Lion, Lyon or Leeuw: a
Comparative Look at the Development of the Law of Heraldry in South Africa”, Responsa
Meridiana, 3, 4, August 1977 Reprinted in Arma, Nos 79-80, 1977
Robert Laing was a past President of the Heraldry Society of South Africa and in his article he states “I inherited Hobbs’ heraldic library and correspondence.” So I thought he might know what had happened to Hylton. I looked for contact information for him, without success and eventually found that he had passed away in 2007: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10228710863177412&set=p.10228710863177412&type=3. So the trail appears to have gone cold.
Occasionally, when we wanted to have a drink in a more upscale setting than student-oriented pubs, some of us took the suburban train to downtown Cape Town, to have a drink in the Van Donck Room, a lounge at the top of the Heerengracht Hotel. That hotel no longer appears to exist, or maybe it has been rebranded. It was one of the taller downtown buildings, so the lounge on the top floor offered a good view over the city and the harbor. (From something I found online, it looks like the lounge was on the 34th floor.) We usually went fairly late in the evening. Because it was quite expensive, we had just one or two beers, sometimes followed by an Irish coffee. The lounge had a dress code – jackets and ties were required. A bunch of us went there to celebrate my 21st birthday, which was in 1975. The photo below may have been from that occasion.
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| A group of us in the Van Donck Room. Clockwise around the table, from left: Steve Moss, Andy Hofmeyr (younger brother of Peter, who I mentioned a few times in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”), Yours Truly, Hylton Hobbs, Rich Kime, Mike Padgett, obscured is probably Rob Beare, George Nowack, and then someone whose name I have forgotten (maybe Malcolm Bruce). |
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| I think the Heerengracht Hotel was in the tall building in this photo (found somewhere on the Internet). |
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| Train on the suburban line from downtown Cape Town to Simon’s Town. This is the line we rode on to get to downtown, though not on the section that is next to the ocean. (Photo found somewhere on the Internet.) |
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| Not sure where this one was. Because we were wearing ties, if it wasn’t at the Van Donck Room it may have been a formal dinner at Driekoppen. Standing, from L to R, Andy Hofmeyr, Harry Campbell, Yours Truly. Mike Padgett in front. |
Harry Campbell, in the photo above, was a medical student
who had been in Driekoppen with me since we both arrived at UCT in 1973. In 1975 he and I (and sometimes one or two
others) used to go for a quiet drink at the Glendower Hotel. It was a residential hotel, that was later
acquired by UCT and turned into a student residence call. The Glendower had a lounge, with comfortable
chairs. They put bowls of peanuts out on
the tables, which is where I became addicted to eating peanuts when drinking
beer. More on that later. (At the Van Donck Room there were also bowls
of peanuts on the tables.) The lounge at
the Glendower was quiet. There were
mostly just a few elderly people, who may have been permanent residents, with very
few students. Although Harry was a
medical student, he smoked occasionally, mostly when drinking. He smoked Consulate cigarettes which were
sold in a tin rather than a cardboard or paper packet. Although I know that Harry qualified as a
doctor and then went on to specialize as a radiologist, I haven’t been able to
find contact information for him, despite several searches over the years.
Steve Moss and I often used to run together quite late at night. We didn’t go very far, maybe just 2-3 miles. I don’t remember the route, so can’t estimate the distance using Google Maps. When I was at home in Port Elizabeth during vacations, I also often ran late at night. On one such occasion a St. Bernard (dog) came up behind me and nipped me on the shoulder!
In those days I used to stay up late. Although I usually had early morning classes, I was never late for a class. But on weekends I did often sleep until well into the morning. On one occasion I woke so late that I missed lunch! A year or so later I started going to bed earlier and waking up early, which is something I have done ever since. In my remaining years in Driekoppen I used to like to read The Cape Times before the dining hall opened for breakfast. Driekoppen used to get 3 copies of the newspaper. For a while someone else was getting up early and removing one of the papers from the common room. A fellow sub-warden and I (Graeme Dacomb, who we will meet again later) managed to catch the culprit and get him to desist.
I don’t recall whose idea it was, but Steve and I both signed up for the 1975 Stellenbosch Marathon, which took place in September. I think the race was officially the South African Marathon Championships for that year because it was divided into two races. The “A” race was for those who had qualified for the championships and there was a “B” or citizen’s race for other runners. The two races were held in the afternoon on the same course, 6 laps through the picturesque college town of Stellenbosch, with each lap including a section on the synthetic track in the university’s Coetzenburg Athletics Stadium. The two races started at different times – I think the “B” race started 30 minutes after the main event. At that point in the Apartheid era White and Black athletes were allowed to compete against one another only in an “international” event. Mike Tagg of Britain was invited to make the race “international” and duly won the race in 2:19:47. (The next year South Africa was suspended from the IAAF and so international athletes could no longer be invited.)
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| Stellenbosch Marathon route. I’m not sure if this was the exact route used in 1975 or if this was from some other year. “Isotonic game” (the race sponsor) is a sports drink. |
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| 1975 Stellenbosch Marathon T-shirt. |
After 5 laps of the race I needed to make a “pit stop” in
the toilets deep inside the stadium somewhere.
That was already further than I had ever run and when I resumed after
sitting for several minutes my legs started cramping whenever I tried to break
into a run. So ,for the last lap I was
reduced to walking interspersed with short attempts at running. (That’s rather like the last several miles of
my most recent marathons.) I eventually
finished in about 3:27. I don’t think I
ever knew what my official time was.
Steve was a slower runner than I was, and he finished about 15 minutes
later in what must have been about 3:45.
He didn’t know what his time was because the time-keepers had packed up
the finish line and disappeared.
Time-keepers disappearing before 3:45 into a marathon that was the event
for the “slow” runners in the “B” race?
In most marathons these days well over half the field is still out on
the course at 3:45.
Why didn’t we take note of our own times? That was before the days of digital wrist watches and analog watches with a stopwatch function were rare. I don’t recall whether it was before or after that when my parents gave me the watch in the photo below. It has a stopwatch function, with the upper button starting and stopping the second hand, and the lower button being to reset it to 0. The small dial in the lower part of the face indicates the minutes – up to 30. Once I started doing long runs I had to keep track of how many multiples of 30 minutes had elapsed. I used that watch for several years, before getting my first digital watch in about 1979.
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| Seiko watch with stopwatch function. It still works, though one of the buttons doesn’t spring back out. I’m sure a watch repair shop could fix that easily. |
At that stage running was still something I did when not playing other sport, rather than being my primary sport. By 1975 I had stopped playing organized rugby and soccer, but several of us from Driekoppen often used to play touch rugby on the cricket overall in the afternoons.
In “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974 “ I mentioned the pram
(US: stroller) relay race from downtown Cape Town to the UCT campus that was
part of Rag Olympics. There I included a
photo taken at the start, with me in the front row. Below is a photo of Driekoppen’s whole team.
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| Driekoppen pram race team in 1975. In case it is not obvious, I am on the right in the front row, with a white sweatband around my neck. (Even now I still usually run with a sweatband, to keep the sweat out of my eyes.) |
Not a Rag event, but a more serious one, or at least one
that some teams took seriously, was a pedal car race. There was a university pedal car race series
to which several major universities sent teams with very sophisticated
cars. If I recall correctly, each event
lasted for 6 hours. I don’t remember how
many were on each team. It may have been
six. The report below doesn’t provide
information about either the duration or the number in a team. The top teams not only had good cars and very
fit drivers, they also had well trained pit crews. Their driver changes were slick operations –
the incumbent being dragged out of one side of the car while the next driver
hopped in from the other side. (I think
drivers had to change after each lap.)
The race at the University of Cape Town was around the university’s
administration building, Bremner Building, shown in one of the images
below. Several of us from Driekoppen
managed to get a hand-me-down car from one of the teams of engineering
students. In the race the car developed
various mechanical issues. For instance,
it had 10 bicycle-style gears but after an hour or two something failed and we
were stuck in one gear for the rest of the race.
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| A report on the pedal car race. |
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| Yours truly in action. “Playaway” was the name of our sponsor. |
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| View of the side of our car at rest, with some of the faster cars in the background. |
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| Bremner Building, University of Cape Town. (Image from Google Maps.) |
I think it was in 1975 that I was invited to Bryan Heine’s
wedding. I mentioned in “Ancyent blog19
Early life -- birth to about 6 years old” that Bryan and I were in nursery
school (pre-school) together. After that
we were at Grey from grade 1 through grade 12, but I hadn’t seen him since we
finished high school. His wedding is the
only one of either a school or college friend that I have attended. It must have been when I was at home during
one of UCT’s vacations because I definitely did not travel back to Port
Elizabeth just for his wedding. Most of
the few people at the wedding who I knew were either otherwise occupied (Bryan)
or were there with partners. There was
just one other high school friend who was there on his own, Allan Marshall
(sp?). Allan said he had just been
released from a tuberculosis sanitarium.
Allan and I chatted for a while and I drank four beers in double-quick
time and then drove home. Four beers
would probably have been enough to put me over the legal limit for
driving. (I don’t know if there was an
official limit at the time rather than just the judgement of a police
officer.) I drank the beers in such a
short interval and then left right afterwards, taking back roads for what was
probably just a two-mile drive home. So
I may have been home before most of the alcohol was absorbed. Nevertheless, that is an episode I
regret. It is now decades since I last
drove after having had even a single drink.
Bryan’s father later died in a fishing boat accident. At least I think it was at some time after the wedding, though all I am sure of is that it was before my parents moved from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria at the end of 1979.
I mentioned in a few previous episodes that South Africa didn’t have a television service before 1975. Maybe the government realized that TV is a wonderful propaganda tool. The state-controlled SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) launched test transmissions in 1975. I think these were initially for two hours each evening. In January 1976 the service was launched officially. There was a single channel, with programs in both English and Afrikaans. Half the broadcast time each day was in each language, with the one being first alternating from day to day. Because of the cost of producing TV shows, in order to have sufficient material for the Afrikaans part of the service, some imported programs were dubbed into Afrikaans, including ones from English-speaking countries. For the first couple of years there was no advertising, with the cost of the service funded through a license fee. Additional channels began service in the 1980s and towards the end of that decade the first channel that was not controlled by the government came into service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_South_Africa#Introduction_of_television.
In Driekoppen the common room became the television room. There was just one TV for the whole residence. During the 1976 Olympics the only coverage was a half-hour highlights package each evening. For that we all crowded into the common room.
My parents were opposed to TV. They thought it was a waste of time. When I was at home during vacations, I sometimes went next door to the Stirks, partly to see Sandy and partly to watch TV. I remember watching the men’s and women’s Wimbledon finals at least one year. As Wimbledon is during the northern summer it was during UCT’s winter break. I think the finals were the only matches that were shown in South Africa. (After my parents moved to Pretoria at the end of 1979 they bought a TV. Later my father became quite attached to some programs, such as the sitcom The Golden Girls.)
In the mid-year exam in Mathematics III I managed a stunning 7%. That kept my record intact of failing the mid-year exam in Math every year. We had been told that the mid-year grade would not count towards the final grade. Why put in any effort if it is not going to count for anything? Well, it turned out that it did count towards something – to earning a d.p. certificate to be allowed to write the final exam. I ended up having to do a special assignment, which I completed satisfactorily.
At the end of the year I managed first class passes for all the courses I finished that year including Mathematics III. That completed the requirements for a BSc degree. Having obtained a first class pass in Mathematics III, I was awarded a distinction in Math. If one achieved a distinction in all one’s majors the degree was also awarded with distinction, even if “all” was just a single major as in my case.
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| Results at the end of my third year, which earned me a BSc. Note that the date is in the format DD/MM/YY, rather than the US version MM/DD/YY. So the date is early in 1976, giving results at the end of 1975. |
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| Cover page of the graduation program. |
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| Order of the ceremony. “Die Stem” (literal translation “The Voice”) was the South African national anthem until the end of the Apartheid era. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Stem_van_Suid-Afrika Part of it is included in the current anthem which is a hybrid from a few sources and in a few languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_anthem_of_South_Africa. |
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| The page with the list of BSc graduates that includes my name. Among the others with distinction in Mathematics, I mentioned Helen Bradford in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”. Another is Marc Chimowitz, who was with me in Driekoppen, went on to medical school, then moved to the US, where he is now a highly respected professor of neurology. Although I haven’t worked with him, we have some mutual collaborators. (The asterisk * indicates the degree was conferred in absentia.) |
Because I didn’t attend graduation, my degree certificate
was mailed to me some time later. It was
mailed in a blue plastic tube (see photo below), where it has lived ever
since. I have never had any of my degree
certificates framed or put them on display, not even the one for my PhD.
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| The degree certificate for my BSc. The somewhat strange bands of color are because, having been rolled up for about 50 years, I struggled to get it to lie flat on the scanner, despite placing a heavy book on it. |
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| The tube in which some of my degree certificates have lived for several decades. |
Now I had a degree, but what next? I had identified several careers that held no
interest for me, including physician and math teacher. But I was still searching something I not
only could do but wanted to do. My next thought was to try electrical
engineering. UCT offered two electrical
engineering programs, one in light current and the other in heavy current. The light current one seemed interesting. I had already completed the required
first-year classes except for chemistry.
So in my first year in the program I signed up for Chemistry I,
Mathematical Statistics II (keeping my statistics option open) and some of the
second-year engineering classes.
Engineering students were required to spend 6 weeks working in an engineering workshop in the long summer break between the first and second years of the program. The workshop didn’t have to be of the same type as the program one was in. So in my case it didn’t have to be an electrical engineering workshop. Bill Stirk, our neighbor in Port Elizabeth, worked at Bus Bodies (later Busaf), which made buses used by public transport companies around the country. I think he was the company secretary. I know he didn’t work on the technical side. Nonetheless he was able to arrange a job of the right kind in the company’s tool-shop (the unit that produces the dies used for forming the various metal parts of the bodies of the buses).
Below is a photo of one of the buses in Port Elizabeth that
was assembled by Bus Bodies. The ones I
rode in primary school were of an older design that had the entrance at the
back, where there was just an open platform without a door that could be
closed. Those had a conductor who
collected fares. While the bus was
moving between stops the conductor would sometimes hang onto a pole at the
entrance and lean out over the road. By
the time I was in high school most of the busss were like the one in the photo,
with the door at the front. I don’t
recall whether by that stage the driver collected fares without needing a
conductor to do that. The “CB” at the
start of the license plate shows that this was in Port Elizabeth. Back then license numbers in the Cape
Province started with two or three letters followed by a variable number of
digits. The letters denoted the city or
town where the vehicle was registered.
“CA” was for Cape Town and “CB” for Port Elizabeth. (The car I took over from my mother was CB
93581.)
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| Double decker bus assembled by Bus Bodies. Photo found somewhere on the Internet. |
The 6 weeks I spent working in the tool-shop was the only
time in my life that I had to punch a time card. I spent the whole of the 6 weeks shadowing
one of the young apprentices (whose name I have long forgotten). I learned a lot in the 6 weeks – not much
about engineering but plenty about the kinds of people who work in jobs that
require them to punch time cards. It was
a worthwhile and positive experience. (A
few years later I learned a lot from working with professional engineers. More on that when I get to write about my 2
years as a conscript in the SA Navy.)
I knew that while working in the tool-shop I would be on my feet for long hours and so would probably be too tired to run, at least on weekdays. That may have been the motivation to go on a crash diet. For those six weeks I restricted myself to a few pieces of hard candy and a small evening meal each day. The 6 weeks were split into two sessions, interrupted by the Christmas / New Year holiday period. Even during that break I ate very little. I have no idea how much I weighed before I started the diet or how much weight I lost. Although I have report cards from primary school that record my height and weight, that information is not on my old report cards from high school. So I don’t have any record of what I weighed after I stopped growing (taller). An interesting thing I discovered after that diet was that my stomach seemed to have shrunk. Eating a normal size meal was uncomfortable for quite a while afterwards. That made me think that although anorexia nervosa may start out as being an entirely psychological condition, it may later become physically difficult to eat larger amounts. This was the only time in my life in which I have dieted.
By the time I returned to UCT at the start of the 1976 academic year I had lost most of the flab around my waist that I had been carrying since early childhood. For the first time I wasn’t embarrassed to be seen without a shirt! (I still don’t feel comfortable without a top though. Even when it was hot enough that most of my running partners ditched their tops, I still always wore at least a singlet.)
My brother Mick had finished high school at the end of 1975. He was also accepted at UCT, to study social work. Not only was he also at UCT with me in 1976, he was also in Driekoppen and even on the same floor of Blue block!
As I mentioned above, I registered for an engineering degree in 1976, including for some second-year classes. That didn’t last very long. One of the electrical engineering classes was called something like “Fundamentals of Electrical Measurements”. Within the first several days it became clear that the instructor assumed we had all being making electrical circuits through high school and were very familiar with the various measuring instruments. I hadn’t and wasn’t, so was completely lost. I suppose I should have buckled down and done the hard work to get up to speed. But I took the easy way out and decided to quit the engineering program. At least I was still registered for Mathematical Statistics II, which would enable me to do a BSc(Hons) degree in that subject the next year. I have not had any regrets about quitting the engineering program, but don’t know why I dropped the Chemistry class too.
Mathematical Statistics I, which I had taken in 1975, was taught by just one instructor, John Affleck-Graves. I think we had several instructors for different parts of Mathematical Statistics II. (A photo in” Ancyent blog28 UCT 1977” shows the students in our class that year plus the department’s instructors.) One of them was June Juritz, who was the first and only female instructor I had as an undergraduate. I hadn’t even had a female teacher in high school! June’s husband was a professor in the Physics department. I don’t recall which module she taught but something she told us has stuck with me. She was collaborating with researchers who studying domestic violence. She said that what they had found was that domestic violence occurred almost equally across most levels of society, from the very wealthy right on down, rather than being mostly an issue among those whose day-to-day life was a struggle. I have since heard something similar from other sources.
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| Photo of (some) 1976 Driekoppen residents. In case you don’t recognize me, I am 6th from the right in the front row. Norman Adami, mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” as later being CEO of SABMiller Americas, is 3rd from the right in the front row. Peter Leon, whose article complaining about the lack of political interest in Driekoppen I included in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” is 5th from the right in the front row, next to me. My brother Mick, who was in his first year, is 7th from the left in the second-last row. If not for the names given below the photo, I might not have recognized him! |
It may have been in 1975 but I think it was probably some time in 1976 that I started drinking on my own in my room in the evenings. Most evenings I had 4 beers and a large packet of salted peanuts. We had a fridge on our floor in Blue block, so I could keep beer cold. (I hate warm beer.) I used to read novels while drinking. Every few days I replenished my stocks of beer and visited the local public library for a fresh supply of books. I am sure I read every book by P. G. Wodehouse that was in was in that library (or our local one in Port Elizabeth). I continued drinking by myself most evenings for the rest of my time in Driekoppen (and beyond).
Belsen Beer Race
This was the first race I won (and the only race in which I have “cheated”).
Beer mile? A beer each lap for a single mile on a flat track? What kind of wimpish modern event is that? Back in the day it was 10 beers in 3 miles up and down monstrous hills. (It was at least 8 beers but something I saw recently said it was 10. Either way, it was a lot, even just in terms of volume. Using Google maps to approximate the length of the route puts it at about 2.85 miles / 4.60 km.)
I presume this race was held in each of the first three years that I was in Driekoppen, but I didn’t try to take part until the 1976 edition. (A friend who was a medical student and later qualified as a doctor won in one of the previous 3 years.) At that point I reckoned that I was probably a better drinker than most of the good runners and a better runner than most of the big drinkers and so would have a reasonable chance of winning the race.
On the Google Maps image below I have indicated the approximate route. S/F is where the race started and finished, at the front entrance to Driekoppen, and we went in a clockwise direction from there. The route didn’t go through any buildings – there has been some construction in the intervening 40+ years. The numbers 1, 2 and 3 show where we went over or under roads. The number 1 is a pedestrian bridge just outside Driekoppen, on the way to the main campus. Back in those days, when going to and from classes, probably fewer than 5% of students used the bridge rather than just walking across the road. I don’t recall whether we were required to use the bridge in the race. Number 2 is at a tunnel under a large road and number 3 is another pedestrian bridge over that road. We definitely went over that one (more about it later). The oval that I have drawn on a field quite close to number 2 is the site of the 1974 3,000m race that I dropped out of (see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”. Bright daylight in the image, unlike during that 3,000m race. 😊
Although a substantial number of students took part in the event, very few tried to run it, with the majority treating it as a social outing. I wasn’t the only one who took it more seriously though. The first of the photos below the image of the race route was at what was probably the site of the third or fourth beer, at which point I broke away from the competition. That was shortly before we went under the tunnel marked on the map with a 2. One cannot see it clearly in the photo, but the T-shirt I am wearing is from the 1974 Two Oceans Marathon (which I didn’t even start, see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”) and has a cartoon of a runner trying to hitch a ride from a passing whale. The guy in second place chugging on a beer was from Zambia and was one of the bigger drinkers. A little further on we passed what was the Groote Schuur Zoo (which I have marked on the map as “Zoo”).
Those of us who were competing were supposed to keep our beer down until we finished. But next to the base of the Rhodes Memorial – the point marked with an X on the map – the combination of at least 6 beers and trying to run fast became too much for my stomach and I involuntarily unloaded its contents into a bush. I was well clear of any other competitors and there were no helpers nearby to see. So I’m admitting here (but not for the first time) that I cheated. Just after the finish I fertilized another bush, this time in front of at least some witnesses. But as that bush was behind the finish line this was not grounds for disqualification.
Having emptied the contents of my stomach twice, not much alcohol made it into my bloodstream and so I was reasonably sober afterwards. The same could not be said of those who treated the event as a social outing. Because they had been walking, there had been plenty of time for the alcohol to get absorbed by the time they reached the pedestrian bridge marked with a 3. So, many of them were quite drunk. At least one emptied his bladder off the bridge. Unfortunately someone in a convertible with the top down happened to be driving under the bridge at just that moment. An official complaint was lodged, which is part of the reason the event was banned the following year and so I was unable to defend my title. Also, by dinner time that evening many of the students were very drunk and there were big food fights in the dining hall.
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| Map of the beer race route. |
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| Breaking away from the competition. Rob Beare was in second place at that stage. I don’t recall where he finished. |
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| This may have been the last beer stop. The guy holding two beer bottles is my brother Mick, who was a freshman and was helping with the event. |
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| The pedestrian bridge at the point marked 3 on the map. |
I sometimes say that the reason I started running longer
distances was so that I could drink more beer without putting on weight. But as I became fitter my tolerance for
alcohol decreased and so I ended up drinking less beer, though not less often.
The first entry in my running log book is for Monday, 5/31/1976. That it was May 31 is not a coincidence. May 31 was the traditional day of the Comrades Marathon back then. Comrades was the largest and most prestigious race in the country. Back then it was held on what was an annual public holiday that is no longer celebrated, Republic Day, that celebrated South Africa having become a republic on May 31, 1961. (A referendum about breaking ties with Britain had been held the previous year. Voting in the referendum was restricted to White people, with 52.3% voting to become a republic.) On that day I ran what I wrote down as 8 miles. I don’t have a record of the time (this was still before digital stop-watches, at least ones affordable by impecunious students), the route, or who I ran with (if anyone). Distances were all guesstimates, in those days before GPS. I always tried to estimate conservatively. Some runs were from the cross-country club-house at the cricket oval. Several routes from there had commonly accepted distances, for instance “Jack’s” that went up into the Newlands Forest was regarded as being 6 miles; and the out and back to the top of Constantia Neck was taken to be 13 miles. For 14 of the next 15 weeks leading up to the 1976 Stellenbosch Marathon, I managed 50 miles per week. For most weeks in that period, I recorded the distance I ran each day but for some weeks I recorded just the total. In order to reach 50 miles each week I sometimes did two short runs in a day. In that 15-week period, the only run of longer than 9 miles that I did was the 13 miles to Constantia Neck and back on one occasion.
(I inherited my father-in-law’s running log books. His first entry was for June 28, 1975. I don’t know how long he had been running before that. By that stage I had been running for about 5 years.)
The first entry in my logbook for a race was for the 1976 Stellenbosch Marathon, on 9/18/1976, As in 1975, the event had an “A” and a “B” race (this was the last time there were two separate races). Unlike in 1975 when both races used the same course but started at different times (see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” in 1976 the “B” race was banished to the early morning and an out-and-back route mainly on a road through the scrubby sand dunes that can be seen in the photo below. I finished in 19th position in 3:00:09, the other three in the photo managing to get under 3 hours.
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| Stellenbosch Marathon 1976. From left to right in this little group Tony Robertson, Trevor Thorold, Yours Truly, Stephen Granger (who recently reminded me that he and the other two finished in under 3 hours). Tony was several years older than the rest of us and was the unofficial leader of our informal training group. |
Back to academics. As I mentioned earlier, I had started the year registered for a degree in electrical engineering, but soon dropped those classes. I was left with just one course, Mathematical Statistics II. With such a light load I managed to be the top student in the class, earning the class medal. (I presume a class medal was awarded to the top student in each class.)
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| Result of the only class for which I remained registered in 1976. |
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| Class medal for Mathematical Statistics II in 1976, showing the cover of the box and the two sides of the medal. |
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