Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2018
1938–1939
Some time later I made a move to track down the Communist Party. It proved more difficult than I had expected. There were no addresses in telephone or street directories. I asked around among people who might know. Most of them were rather cagey.
Someone suggested that I try the People's Bookshop. A single small shop front window gave into a shop not much wider than a passage, immediately next door to the Kerk Street entrance of the Labour Party Club in central Johannesburg, which, in turn, adjoined the Trades Hall, HQ of the Trades and Labour Council. The shop window held a collection of sun-yellowed pamphlets with curling pages and faded copies of some of the ‘Little Lenin Library’ series. Inside, the shelves held Left Book Club publications, copies of Labour Monthly, China Today, Moscow News, works by Marx and Lenin in English, German and Russian … and not much else.
Its staff of young women regarded me with caution, as if I were there for dubious purposes. I made some small purchases and then broached the subject of the Communist Party. The woman I asked looked somewhat startled, but said she would try to get word to the district secretary. I left my phone number, and a man calling himself Jack Watts duly phoned and suggested we meet at the bookshop at closing time. He turned out to be perhaps a few years older than I, a recent arrival from Britain. We fenced. I wanted to know all about the party and he wanted to know all about me and why I wanted to know. I must have established my bona fides because he identified himself as the district secretary and agreed to pass on my application for membership.
I had expected the party secretary to be someone fairly well-known in Left circles, but none of my colleagues had ever heard of him. It was a long time before I discovered that Watts was a pseudonym, or ‘party name’, as I learnt to call it. His real name was Gathercole and, like most of the white party members at the time, he considered himself to be semi-underground – or, as the jargon had it, ‘concealed’.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.